Maya Mikdashi: As a teacher, I struggle with ways to recognize and engage deeply with US settler colonialism—not only in ways that segregate its lessons to the week of Thanksgiving and not only in ways that confine the analysis to a comparative framework with Israel or colonial projects that included settlers, such as French Algeria (although these connections are vitally important). For example, it is important to continue to underscore the ties between the birth of liberalism and capitalist understandings of land ownership on the one hand, and the settling of North and South America and its attendant genocides on the other. Robert A. Williams’ work has been instructive on this point. This is not to somehow write off liberalism and capitalism as ontologially racist and built on dispossession (which clearly they are) but rather to understand and sit (perhaps uncomfortably) with how what we call “civilization,” and the ways that our very grounded and quotidian attachment to liberal modernity, is built upon and sustained through barbarity towards others.
[…] it is crucial to continue to underscore the fact that the United States is today actively engaged in settling and colonizing native lands and people. Patrick Wolfe’s formulation concerning the temporality of settler colonialism: [that] invasion is a structure not an event, is instructive. As he and others have suggested, settler colonialism is ongoing—and it is precisely the definition of settlement as temporally bounded that enables it to continue with ease in the United States, as Scott Morgensen recently argued. Once relegated to the past, the catastrophe of settlement is tamed and we appear helpless before it. In this framework the settlement of the United States is not our problem, and it is we who inherit this past and must then distance ourselves from its gross inequalities and violences.
[…] The ongoing catastrophic destruction of indigenous life worlds in the United States makes us, even the progressives among us, radically uncomfortable—perhaps because we realize that we are complicit in this ongoing Nakba. Thinking critically about our implications in settler colonialism can seem paralyzing. But as in all alliance based political action, we – critical settlers – should take our cues from indigenous peoples’ ongoing activism. It is not our place to determine what these politics should be; rather we should stand in solidarity with indigenous peoples in the United States, just as we stand in solidarity with Palestinians against the colonial machinations of Israel.
[…] As someone who lives and teaches in the United States and is both Arab and white and Native American, this time of year causes much anxiety. As someone deeply committed to anti-colonial struggle and de-colonial pedagogy, this time of year is loaded with potential; it could be an opportunity to think about the daily ways in which we practice and teach the twinned technologies of presence and erasure, of nation and of genocide, of law and violence, self and other, and of celebration and mourning. It could be a day where we unpack and dismantle the origin story of this holiday. Instead of canceling class, we could screen (and demand that our universities buy such critical documentaries) or listen to documentaries and interviews that reconstruct US nationalism, this time from the standpoint of its victims, to paraphrase Edward Said.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be a day of thanks, but rather than being thankful for the successes of settler colonialism (successes that make our lives as US citizens and residents possible), I am thankful for the continued anti-colonial struggles waged on this land (the US) and on others. I desire to be thankful for the ways that being attentive to American settler colonialism has given me strength, perspective and humility while teaching the Middle East from New York City. My desire to be thankful for new and emerging pedagogical frameworks is active, because there will always be more questions than there are answers and because teaching and learning, at their core, can be ethical practices that build and rebuild notions of the self and of community. More here.