Conversations at the Crossroads: Indigenous and Black Writers Talk

Editor's Note: In the fall of 2018, I was teaching an upper-year undergraduate course, "At the Crossroads: Indigenous and Black Writing in Canada," at Simon Fraser University, which is located on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh Nations in Vancouver, British Columbia. The aim of the course was to uncover the shared histories of resistance in the work of Indigenous and Black writers, to reckon with each of our own roles in the ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands, to build alliances across differences, and to practice what settler historian Paige Raibmon calls "transformative listening."¹ As part of the course, Deanna Reder and I co-organized a day-long symposium, inviting some of the most dynamic and thoughtful Indigenous and Black writers and scholars in the city. Each of the writers who agreed to participate reckoned, in very different ways, with intersectional histories and the silences around them. They pushed back against restrictive labels, rejected rigid identity scripts imposed by others, and insisted upon the power of their own embodied, singular, yet collective ways of knowing. A striking feature of the following conversations is how the writers draw attention to the points of connection between Indigenous decolonization and Black social justice movements. At the same time, they warn us not to assume that the problems and solutions that have been offered in these very different debates are transferrable across communities. This is because conversations about place, belonging, and embodiment have unfolded very differently in Black and Indigenous studies to date. Building viable critical frameworks that compare histories of occupation and resistance remains a challenging yet urgent project.

As the following conversations demonstrate, for both Indigenous and Black writers, postcolonial comparative frameworks are a contested site of power and legitimacy. The reason for this ongoing struggle is that postcolonial approaches in the past often have normalized—in ways that linger still—the idea of "writing back" to European philosophies, theories, and politics. These conversations emerge from genuine efforts to build connections across disciplines, histories, and legacies of erasure and appropriation in order to rediscover common ground that has been obscured. These dialogues between Indigenous and Black writers have the potential to benefit postcolonial studies in demonstrating possibilities for critical discussions around decolonization, cultural identity,...