Indigenous Academia 101, privileges, supressed voices and random ramblings
The journal article I’m currently reading is emphasising a bone I have to pick with post-colonialism and indigenous studies; written by two indigenous women on the issue of racism towards indigenous people within academia and submitted to one of the most influential journals in the States, it was initially rejected with no real explanation as to why, though the following answer was given when the writers pressed the editor for an explanation;
We have published many […] pieces about racism […] and related topics as they apply to higher education [in the past]. Although your essay looked through the lens of Native studies, what it looked at would not seem new to our readers.
In short, two indigenous women write about racism and how indigenous voices are suppressed in academia while the floor always remains open to non-indigenous scholars and what happens, the piece ends up being rejected, thereby proving the very hypothesis of the article in itself.
And this is a real, tangible problem in modern academia - as someone who looks white and is a man, my voice will always be heard, while my fellow indigenous scholars’ voices, especially indigenous female scholars’ voices and the voices of indigenous people who cannot pass as white will be silenced before they’ve even been given the chance to open their mouths.
The subaltern cannot speak, yes Spivak, I know, but it pisses me off.
It is incredibly frustrating to turn to journals in order to find other scholars works on indigenous issues, the overwhelming majority of these pieces are written by white, non-native men with a fancy vocabulary and no real understanding of the problem they’re writing about.
Even I am not a fit mouthpiece for certain indigenous issues, which is why I rather would others wrote about certain issues where I don’t have the personal experience or background needed to talk about it in a way that doesn’t become ‘ethnographic’ - when you look white you don’t have to face racism on a daily basis and your words are automatically taken to be valid - but because I am a man and could work extra as a ginger posterboy of whiteness, people are always and sadly going to be more likely to listen to someone like me when I call out cultural appropriation or indigenous rights abuses than when a) a woman or b) someone who looks stereotypically indigenous does the very same thing.
And those who claim that this is a non-issue, either by claiming that they don’t see gender or colour are hereby cordially invited to shut up. It is exactly by not seeing people as they are that their voices can be dismissed.
In 2007 a friend of mine directed and starred in a film on cultural appropriation called Spirits for Sale - while the film in itself gives voice to indigenous people from all over the States, I am more or less convinced that its success, it won several international film awards, boils down to my friend’s whiteness.
Because she was white, she was allowed to address the issue, whereas the same film, without a white director and head character would have most likely been dismissed as yet another example of ‘indigenous moaning’. Now, the entire film is done in a way where Native Americans get to talk and Annika, my friend, stays silent more or less all of the time, but the fact that a white presence is needed to spearhead the project in order for a work on indigenous issues to be heard is frustrating.
I guess I personally try to use my own privilege to be able to address issues that are otherwise ignored, but I feel the need to hit something or someone when my fellow indigenous or minority scholars are dismissed because they don’t fit the norm of what an academic looks like.
