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Daniel Rivers and Karen J. Leong, members of the Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute Program Committee, organized this roundtable to address the absence of Indigenous feminisms from feminist discussions of the transnational, even though many Indigenous nations in the Americas are themselves traversed by settler colonial nation-states, and most American Indians and First Nations peoples are binational, being citizens of sovereign states as well as citizens of settler colonial nation-states. We invited scholars Hokulani K. Aikau (Kanaka 'Öiwi Hawai'i) from the University of Hawai'i at Mänoa, Maile Arvin (Kanaka Maoli) from uc Riverside, Mishuana Goeman (Tonowanda Band of Seneca) from ucla, and Scott Morgensen from Queens University in Kingston to be part of this conversation, with Daniel Rivers as facilitator.
Prior to the roundtable, the participants collectively generated questions for discussion: (1) What are the relationships that currently exist between transnational and Indigenous feminisms? Are there overlaps and disjunctures between them, and what can they contribute to one another? (2) Are considerations of Indigeneity frequently erased by transnational concerns, and in what way are these transnational concerns articulated through settler colonialist logics? (3) What convergences exist between Indigenous feminisms and transnational feminisms that can offer critiques of existing heteropatriarchies locally and globally? How might these open up the possibilities of Indigenous transnational alliances that force settler colonialists and nation-states to be responsible for land theft and the injustices that ensue therein?
HOKULANI K. AIKAU
Aloha, my name is Hokulani Aikau, and I acknowledge and honor the ancestors of the Shawnee Delaware, Wyandot, and Miami Nations who were removed from this territory. These are still sovereign lands, and I acknowledge that their descendants continue to live here unrecognized. But we recognize their lands and their ancestors. I ask them to be with us today and to let the knowledge of the ancestors, mind as well as spirit, guide us so we can see what needs to be seen and uncover the wisdom that is in the words wTe have to say.
I want to situate myself in relationship to my comments by recognizing that, even though I was born in Hawaii, in my homeland, my family moved to Turtle Island when I was a child. And it's the lands of the Navajo, the Shoshone, and the Ute...