Abstract
Background: While many settler allies are eager to help towards the goal of disrupting racism, a clearer understanding of how best to harness this eagerness is required within the field of Indigenous health, a field currently comprised mainly non-Indigenous scholars, researchers and educators. Purpose: Responding to this challenge, this article aims to identify ways of working towards disrupting settler colonialism and addressing racism in all of its manifestations by building settler allyship and adopting an anti-racist lens within the field of Indigenous health. The article describes how to approach building settler allyship by implementing anti-racist acts. Method: By using anti-racist scholarship and showcasing recent public examples of anti-Indigenous racism, the author describes how settler allies can approach developing unsettled, critical and anti-racist conversations with one another and in respectful ways with Indigenous peoples. As many Indigenous peoples continue to identify ongoing racism, there is a need for informed, unsettled, anti-racist allies willing to challenge their own complicity to then take action when anti-Indigenous racism occurs. Actions include critical self-reflection, confronting white supremacy and implementing demonstrably anti-racist acts. Conclusion: Findings provide the basis for amplifying unsettling conversations between engaged settler allies to develop anti-racist ways of fostering and extending relationships with Indigenous people and scholars.
Highlights
In Canada, anti-Indigenous racism discussion in academia is gaining momentum with recent reconciliation efforts, indigenisation processes1 and more Indigenous faculty appointments (Canada Research Chairs, Government of Canada, 2018; Gaudry and Lorenz, 2018; Newhouse, 2016)
To deepen the contextualisation of racism in settler-colonial institutions, I present a discussion of settler colonialism, microaggression and three poignant examples of how anti-Indigenous racism occurs in academic institutions
Applied in many global locations, settler colonialism is a theory used to understand the logics of erasure that are enforced upon Indigenous peoples to justify the theft of Indigenous territories (Wolfe, 2006)
Summary
In Canada, anti-Indigenous racism discussion in academia is gaining momentum with recent reconciliation efforts, indigenisation processes and more Indigenous faculty appointments (Canada Research Chairs, Government of Canada, 2018; Gaudry and Lorenz, 2018; Newhouse, 2016). While Indigenous faculty continue to be hired and foster indigenisation processes, we need informed settler allies who disrupt anti-Indigenous racism to help support indigenisation efforts. More research is needed to better understand the complexities of anti-Indigenous racism and colonialism in the field of Indigenous health (Allan and Smylie, 2015) While it is the position of this article that settler allies need to work towards disrupting settler colonialism and addressing racism in all of its manifestations, more detail of the specifics of how to approach building such allyship and taking up an anti-racist lens is needed. As an Anishinaabe health and well-being researcher, I chose to write this article to inform non-Indigenous researchers and educators in the field of Indigenous health about creating unsettling allyship and to add to the growing conversation of what being an anti-racist settler ally entails. I describe a series of demonstrable acts of anti-racist allyship
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