Presidential Comments to Introduce the 2020 NAISA Business Meeting

Abstract

Presidential Comments to Introduce the 2020 NAISA Business Meeting Shannon Speed (bio) editors' note: NAISA, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, is the professional association responsible for publishing this journal. The 2020 annual meeting of the association was scheduled to be hosted by the University of Toronto in early May; however, in mid-March, facing the spreading COVID-19 pandemic, the NAISA Council made the difficult decision to cancel the in-person meeting in Toronto. The annual business meeting of the association was held via webinar on June 18, 2020. Given the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic and its ongoing consequences, the editors invited President Speed to share her remarks from the business meeting in this issue of NAIS. Chinchokma'ni sabanna. In recent days, it has become a standard opening to begin all messages with, "I hope you and your family are well in these [fill in the blank] times." What goes in the blank varies in response to ongoing events and with our moods, which for most of us are fluctuating through a range of emotions. Indeed, the times are in many ways unprecedented, troubling, stressful, and infuriating but then randomly hopeful and sometimes downright surreal. In an astoundingly short period of time, the coronavirus laid waste to our plans and our activities, cut us off from friends and relatives, and, for so many, took away their jobs and their educations. Of course, it did not do so equally. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has quickly laid bare the dramatic inequality our communities have long been experiencing both through the disproportionate impact of the virus itself and through the disproportionate economic impacts. Then, as we grappled with this new reality, the racially motivated killing of African Americans—Amhaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, among others—has equally exposed—yet again—the ongoing presence of a lethal racism in the United States, a lethal racism that finds echo in settler societies everywhere. It is painful, it is outrage producing, it has brought us to the brink of chaos. But the chaos is perhaps needed in the sense that in many ways these events are not, in fact, "unprecedented." They have ample precedent in the inequality produced underlying conditions that marked our communities for death in this pandemic and in the nightmarish endless replay loop of Black deaths, particularly, though [End Page 17] not exclusively, at the hands of police. As the cumulative pain became too much, we poured into the streets in record numbers, day after day after day, to say, "Ya basta, enough is enough." It is time for change. That change is bigger than reforming or abolishing policing, although we need that. Racial justice will necessarily entail the dismantling of the white supremacy that has underpinned Native dispossession and Black enslavement since European colonialism began. Gender justice will entail dismantling its corollary logic of patriarchy. In other words, the structuring logics of settler capitalism—indeed, settler capitalism itself—are long overdue for a reckoning. Another message brought by this pandemic was environmental. For a brief time, with industry halted, planes grounded, people at home, and petroleum prices through the floor, we watched in awe as the environment and our more than human relatives made a comeback. In many places, smog cleared from the sky, rivers began to lose their cloudy hue, and animals retook their territories long invaded by human activity. Change will need to include living in the world in a different way. Of course, Indigenous people have been down this road. We have faced apocalyptic devastation of our worlds and genocide of our peoples. And iilhakóffi—we survived. Indigenous peoples have a critical contribution to make in the conversation about how to create a more just, less colonized, less exploitative world as peoples who have struggled for five hundred plus years to maintain lifeways that are distinct. Without falling into overgeneralization or essentializing, I can say that these lifeways are mostly more collective, less hierarchical, and more sustainable. They are inherently anti-colonial. While Indigenous peoples have devastatingly borne the brunt of these crises, being disproportionately affected by everything from wildfires to unemployment to COVID, we also are uniquely positioned to...