present: shayla, lili, kaelie, cleve, maria, dave, nadia, andrea
Agenda: 1) QPIRG-McGill working group meeting reportback, 2) Readings
QPIRG meeting – room space is available at QPIRG. re: open letter attacking QPIRG – working groups could provide some support.
Indyclass email account – if anyone emails indyclass, it will be forwarded to the list.
Indyclass working group – includes this indyclass now, but will also help to set up other indyclasses at McGill in future semesters.
We have a budget! We can bring someone in to speak. We also have funds for photocopying, or for putting together a course pack from this class to print off.
It would be good to put emailed readings onto blogs for POSTERITY.
Readings
logistical question: are people choosing readings also coming up with discussion questions? We discussed this before, but didn’t come to a decision.
YES! we have decided – people choosing readings will come up with discussion questions.
Roxanne D.O. Reading
-Ortiz: creating a division amongst settler society
-education as a means to beginning organizing, broadening the base of organizing
-education happens through organizing itself: resistance is a learning process.
-organizing around un-forgeting history – re: canadian history as colonialism. Re: the generalization of whiteness through assimilation of settlers. Re: class. Learning about different histories of oppression can provide a basis for relations & connections.
Alfred
-strange ambivalence on violence/nonviolence issue in resisting colonialism
-questioning emphasis on education in Alfred – is persuasion an effective strategy?
-white people need to confront other white people
(-barriere lake: within rights-based approach. Alfred is critical of the rights-based approach – “abandon their autonomy to enter the legal and political framework of the state”.)
re: six nations and barriere lake – both are basing struggles around treaties . . .
keefer article
-crossing lines – gender, geography, class. You’re always crossing a line, OR you’re only organizing with people exactly like you. Even if working with people of different politics seems difficult, it’s better than boxing oneself into doing nothing (is this what you meant dave?)
-explicit refusal of identification with white middle-class values. Keefer: solidarity actions would be more effective if they were disrupting the white working-class counter action at caledonia. Not getting bogged down in white guilt, but instead acting against other white factions.
-value of discussion on an individual level across political lines?
-keefer emphasizes collective alliances with sympathetic factions of settler communities, other racialized communities, union factions (etc). Similarly, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz lauds the ANC’s alliances with settler factions against Apartheid. This model could work in Canada.
-caledonia: if the only organizing happening is coming from an anti-native perspective, people will ally themselves with them. Frustration at the town being caught in the middle of the government/six nations conflict is either funnelled into racist organizing/action, or is left in stasis.
-people need to see their own interest in a struggle. Comparisons between labour contracts and treaties. Situating struggles within systems of institutional class/race inequality.
(nym has a myspace page? Something about everybody becoming the youth – Cleve will send this myspace passage around)
*ASSE, other student groups could have an explicitly anti-colonial position
**a highschool workshop could be something coming out of this class. Kaelie has a friend in guelph doing a decolonization workshop, barriere lake is working on something similar. Nat is doing an anti-2010 workshop in vancouver . . .
