Settlement Sisters: Pretendians, Whiteness, and Indigenous Identities.

The podcast hosts, Ashley and Kaylee, discuss their exploration of indigeneity and white-seeming privilege. They acknowledge the traditional land of the Cree, Blackfoot, and Métis peoples and the harm caused by colonization and systemic oppression. They share their personal experiences with identity and the challenges of reconciling their indigeneity with their whiteness. They also discuss the importance of building relationships, using the two-eyed seeing approach, and practicing ethical space in order to honor and respect both Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. They reflect on the impact of identity invalidation and the need to recognize and support those who connect with Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Hello, and welcome to the Settlement Sisters podcast. My name is Ashley. And my name is Kaylee. And we're here to explore the topic, exploring our indigeneity and white-seeming privilege. Woo-hoo! So, first we're going to start with the land acknowledgement. I acknowledge that the Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, Canada is the traditional land of the Cree, Blackfoot, and Métis peoples. They have lived on and cared for this land for generations, and their deep connection to the natural world and their culture remains strong. I recognize the ongoing harm and trauma caused by colonization, residential schools, and other forms of systemic oppression that have impacted Indigenous peoples in Canada. As a woman of both Métis and Settler roots, I am committed to listening to and learning from Indigenous voices, respecting the sovereignty and autonomy, and actively learning towards reconciliation and healing. I also acknowledge that the Treaty 6 territory is home to many other Indigenous nations, including the Dene, Saulténais, and Nakota Sioux, who each have their own unique histories, cultures, and relationships with the land. May we all strive to honour and uphold the rights, perspectives, and wisdoms of the Indigenous peoples who have long called this land their home before us. Why we chose this topic. I know Kayleigh and I want to connect themes of guilt and shame, identity loss, privilege with different academic themes such as healing-centred engagement, ethical space, and the two-eyed scene approach. Mm-hmm. All right, so why we chose this topic. On my end, I know that I've been feeling pretty confused with my identity and just trying to really reconcile my indigeneity with my whiteness. I know that I am status Métis, but I've always felt a stronger connection to the Mi'kmaq side of my family, which is my father's side. And this has been a pretty enlightening experience, doing the research and really trying to, again, reconcile what's authentic, what is something that I've been conditioned to perhaps feel, and really reconnect with my spirituality in a way that feels authentic and genuine. Mm-hmm. So one of my main concerns has always been that I don't want to be labelled a pretendian. And I know there has been a lot of tension around people self-identifying as Mi'kmaq, just given the unceded territory and the history of that land. And then being Métis as well, where I didn't know that I actually had Métis lineage on my mom's side until very recently. And the way that came about kind of gives me the ick. That's a really good way to put it. Yeah, just being honest. So it's been a really great opportunity for me to understand my identity in a deeper way and be authentic in that way. How about you, Kaylee? Yeah. So I've been really learning that I have a lot of white-seeming privilege. And that's not something that's new to me. It's something that came to light when I was a child. And I realized that my family was a little bit different than other Indigenous peoples. My mom is very outwardly presenting as Indigenous with darker features, darker complexion. And I'm just kind of the white sheep of the family, I guess. That's the only way I can put it. I like that. Yeah. So I noticed that I wasn't the traditional Indigenous person or Indigenous child when I was going to ceremonies or spending a lot of time at friendship centers as a kid. And my grandma was quite the jigger back in her day. Rest in peace, Grandma. Love you so much. Her name is Métis Rose. But as I got older, I realized I grew up with a lot of privilege. I also grew up with a lot of privilege. And I still have a lot of privilege. I think that's clear in some of the resources that I'm able to easily access or even just the way that I can look at my Indigeneity. So I want to be able to use this opportunity as a tool to look at identity more safely, both from a personal and professional context. And for me, I'm hoping to bring to light the displacement of Métis peoples' history in residential schools, the Millennial scoop, the 60s scoop. It's been known that a lot of Métis people have very white features and whiter skin and whiter hair and nails. And it's long rooted in a bit of a Western approach. It's just a bit oppressive to be able to think that way. And I think that it's too much of a focus on the blood quantum and the percentages of what Indigenous peoples are, rather than the relationships that we build with one another. I completely agree. I feel that this ties into my experience with the research process. And, again, just feeling that some of the resources that I was exploring were invalidating while I've had professors and peers be extremely validating and reducing my pretending fears. The academic research that I found had the opposite effect. I've got to be honest, I was extremely impacted by this. And it had me questioning whether it speaks to the conditioning and entitlement associated with my whiteness and my privilege, or if it speaks to the success of Canada's goal to eliminate the Indian problem. Wow, very well said. So before we dive into the academic resources side of things, we do just want to acknowledge that the reason that we have this privilege is because our families were able to break some cycles through assimilation. How does that make you feel, Shaylee? It just makes me feel about how, in order to survive, our ancestors had to completely disconnect from our culture and assimilate into these Western systems. I think that that ties into the notion of ethical space, a term coined by Willie Irvine. And that really just leans into the space between Indigenous and Western worldviews. It really requires us to be mindful and respectful of both, and teaches us the importance of relationship building. So in practice, this requires a social worker to honour an Indigenous person, family, or community, and really begin to build those meaningful and authentic relationships in order to strengthen that relational approach. And a way that we can do that is through using the two-by-seeing approach. So this was created by Mi'kmaq elder Albert Marshall. And he says that ethical space cannot be cultivated without the two-by-seeing, which is the practice of learning to see using two knowledge systems, drawing on both to guide discovery and problem solving. And it is within this ethical space that all collaboration, mutual support, and multidirectional knowledge sharing occurs. So essentially, it's learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing, and using the other eye to see the strengths of Western knowledge and ways of knowing, and using both of these eyes together for the benefit of all. And I found this approach to be quite healing as somebody who feels like a chronic pretendian. You know, I entered the space at that practicum working with adult Indigenous women, and no idea of how to integrate myself into that circle. And using this approach really felt like it was a mindful way of acknowledging, hey, you exist, and you're here, but you're identifying as Indigenous, and there's, you know, we honour that. We honour that, and we see that, unless we embrace both perspectives. My experience has been somewhat different. Right now in my practicum, one of my learning goals is to actually explore healing through Indigeneity, and I've been working pretty hard with that. I know that my professors, my supervisor, everybody has been incredibly supportive, but doing the research for this project took me back a couple steps. I know that there is an article by Godrie M. LaRue that suggests New Métis, which is the title that is used for folks like Hayley and I, but New Métis identities are essentialized in ways that capitalize on settler puzzlement over forms of Indigeneity based on kinship and belonging, and replace these forms with an imagined past of racial mixedness, leading to supposed societal unification. To me, that doesn't really honour a two-eyed seeing approach or ethical state. To me, that is really just kind of hurtful, if I'm being honest. It goes on to say that the proliferation of self-identified Indigenous people represents a new wave of colonialism. How do you feel about that, Hayley? I feel like that's some BS right there. I couldn't agree more. I didn't feel that it was BS for a few days. I know I really had to question my own identity and take a step back, but through the use of these different techniques that we're discovering or discussing, in addition to using healing centered engagement, I was able to kind of reconcile these things and understand there's merit in what these researchers are saying and the information that they're producing, but that doesn't invalidate my experience or my connection to my Indigenous spirituality. Yeah, and I personally feel like, if anything, Indigenous spirituality has been my biggest connector back to my sense of self. Word. Word. It reminds me of that Indigenous versus non-Indigenous spectrum that Jeremy Albert brought up in our class. So for me, I use some tools in my daily life, like smudging and just mindfulness and gratitude. I find that is Indigenous, and even though I'm not outwardly, I feel like I am on the inside. I completely agree. I think that it's important to recognize the impact of identity invalidation, really leaning into the personal identity versus professional identity in practice, and how the personal is political. I think you and I are not the only people experiencing this, obviously, and understanding the difference between a pretendian, so to speak, and white-seeming Indigenous folks, or even those who are just leaning into Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Indigenous spirituality and not condemning them for that is so important. I look at Corey Winnis, who you've met a couple times now, Kaylee. Yes. The incredible work that Corey has done with Chu Project, and now here at Pride Center. That was done because Corey really integrates Indigenous knowledge into Western practice. Corey is very much a white dude. A white dude doing great things. Yes, absolutely. That really just shows to me that there's too much of an emphasis on the blood quantum of being Indigenous. Why does it matter, my percentage? That's quite a Western assessment of your Indigeneity. I think it's interesting to tie in some research from one of the authors I spoke about earlier, LaRue. One of the important concepts that LaRue explores is kinship and how this differs from genealogy. He suggests that a lot of settlers claiming Indigenous ties do so from a distant genealogy claim in order to secure certain rights. He goes on to say that race-shifting ignores kinship, instead focusing on blood. That echoes the notion of blood quantum, a well-known problematic way to delineate who is and who isn't Indigenous. That's a little messed up. I agree. He goes on to say, though, at the same time, that race-shifting allows these settlers an exemption from accepting any blame for colonialism and its violences. To me, that means because you and I have done the work of accepting blame for colonialism, recognizing our privilege and how we benefit from the system, and actively working towards dismantling the system in a way and really integrating Indigenous knowledge. We're able to create our own kinship systems in that way. That difference between blood quantum and kinship, to me, really stands out. I know, for example, working again with Corey, we really embrace the notion of chosen family. With the notion of our chosen family, we're hoping to be able to explore more about our personal experiences that have been shaped by Indigenous spirituality, and that really helps our healing journey so far. I know, on my end, I am actively working to heal personal traumas through Indigenous spirituality. It's no secret that I lost my little brother a few years back to suicide, and that impacted me in every way. I've been pretty open about coming from a lived experience background. I might just share a little bit about that quickly. I was in active substance use before my brother passed away. I was involved in sex work. I was doing all of the criminal things that one could possibly be doing. Before my brother passed away, I made an effort to get clean, make some lifestyle changes, and go down a different path because I wanted to be a better role model to him. He and I were able to work together on different treatment options, and he had shared with me that his higher power in treatment was actually his ancestors. I kind of said, what the hell? What are you talking about? I had no idea. He shared a little bit about our background and some of the work that he'd been doing in exploring our heritage and Indigenous spirituality. One way that I've been honoring him is to further explore that by helping others and trying to take a more holistic lens instead of focusing on myself. That has been incremental in my growth and my healing. Just hearing you open up reminds me of my grandpa's experiences in an Indian day school where he was first taught religion and nothing else. That religion trickled down into the rest of our family, and we practiced Catholicism, but not to the extent where we're going to church every single weekend, but more the values of it. As I got older, I realized it never really aligned. I felt like I was praying to a god that literally was not answering me because trauma after trauma after trauma began to happen to me. It really felt like faith wasn't doing anything. I lost my father to suicide on May 26, 2021. The subsequent year, I lost my grandma, May T. Rose, as she goes by in Lackawish, to cancer. Last year, 2023, I lost my grandpa to cancer as well. My own experience throughout this and having those support systems, it could have went way, way worse. I could have spiraled. I could have went down the same path, but I never did that, and that's where I feel like a lot of my privilege just comes from. First of all, thank you so much for sharing that, Kaylee. That's heavy, and I appreciate you being open and vulnerable with that. I completely relate to a couple different points that you're speaking to, to be honest. I know off the last point, my brother and I used to discuss in our active substance use days how the only difference between ourselves and the folks that we would see outside of Hope Mission downtown was the support system that we had with our family and that level of privilege. Really being able to unpack that is important and have that level of awareness. I know religion has been pretty focal in my life as well. Probably two weeks before my little brother passed away, my great grandma passed away as well. She was the key family member tying my ancestry to my immediate family, but she was pretty openly racist towards indigenous folks. She used to use words like those little Indians and be pretty critical and cruel. I recognize that it's because she didn't know better in a way, but I had always kind of had a connection between that hatred and her very strong religious upbringing that she had tried to bestow on my brother and I. It's just, I guess, maybe a sensitive subject for me. I still carry bias towards religion into practice and my personal life daily. When I think about my bias when it comes to religion and how that affects practice, I look at the way that I work with agencies like Hope Mission, whose mandate is rooted in faith-based policy and the impact that that has on clients and on myself. I recognize that there are some barriers there that I need to work through professionally. Some of these techniques that we've been speaking to would definitely help that, but one thing that I really value, or I think would hold value, I should say, is perhaps integrating a healing-centered engagement model. Healing-centered engagement is an approach to trauma that uses resource orientation to really center repair and resilience rather than pathologizing damage. Now, that's just a very academic way of looking at it, but healing-centered engagement is moving beyond trauma-informed practice and using culture and community to really heal. So we can use this perspective to really reframe the way that we think about indigeneity and connect social work with indigenous ways of knowing and being. So Dr. Sean Ginwright is a well-known psychologist who's really coined healing-centered engagement, and he is transitioning from a clinical-based treatment model of trauma and healing to more of this indigenous worldview approach to healing. So there's four key points with healing-centered engagement. One is that healing-centered engagement is explicitly political rather than clinical. Two, healing-centered engagement is culturally grounded and views healing as the restoration of identity. Three, healing-centered engagement is asset-driven and focuses on the well-being that we want rather than symptoms that we want to suppress. And four, healing-centered engagement supports adult providers with their own healing. And the reason that Dr. Ginwright speaks to that is because this framework was created to support youth initially, but right now they're looking at how to integrate that into models of care for adults. And it's funny because I was speaking about this with my supervisors and how we're using healing-centered engagement here at the Pride Center and kind of giggling, because to me it already is indigenous ways of knowing and being. It's connecting with community and culture, which is front and foremost of an indigenous approach to healing. What are some ways that the Pride Center does that? Well, we really look beyond trauma-informed practice and strength-based care, and we hand over the reins to some of our clients to have that autonomy in what programming should look like, how culture should shape the different activities or services that they need, really bringing together different demographics into one big group. And we don't ask about people's trauma. If they share, we listen. We want to know about their dreams. We want to know about their goals and how we can support them to get there. So we're not really looking at the blood quantum that makes up all the communities that are coming and joining the Pride Center, right? No. We are bringing everybody together. So whether it's our indigenous Two-Spirit crew, whether it's our rainbow refugees from Africa, everybody is just working towards a common place of feeling safe and secure and loved. So really a healing-centered approach to addressing trauma, it requires a different question that moves beyond what happened to you and really hones in on what's right with you. And it views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being rather than just victims of traumatic events. So I guess in a way to sort of wrap this all up with a bow, I look at my experience with the trauma of losing my brother as an example. I am so much more than that experience. I am building something that I'm quite proud of with the Josh Brown Wellness Resource Center here at the Pride Center and trying to include community and build a safe space for people to come and connect. I have found healing through my indigenous spirituality more than focusing on whether or not I am indigenous enough. And I think for me, I just want to continue practicing from a place of being intentional, being transparent. I find that any time I bring up my insecurity, my shame or guilt surrounding my heritage, I'm always welcomed with love and respect and just appreciation, you know? Yes, so much yes. And my outcome supervisor, Lee Sheldon, she's very white passing as well, and she always said, you just need a beautiful pair of beaded earrings and nobody's going to question you. Thank you.