(IND2) Sinews of Solidarity: Learning From Long-term Indigenous-Settler Alliances
Since 2018, our multidisciplinary research team, including Indigenous and settler scholars, has worked collaboratively to study the dynamics of long-term Indigenous-settler alliance-building unfolding in the Canadian context. Our focus has been on exploring how such alliances develop, endure, and change over time. Using interviews, sharing circles, and document review, and drawing upon Indigenous methodologies and anti-colonial research principles, we investigated three case studies which provide the ground of our analyses: (1) The Right to Belong: Indigenous women’s organizing and the struggle to eliminate gender discrimination in the Indian Act (led by Dawn Lavell-Harvard and Lynne Davis); (2) Shoal Lake 40 First Nation’s Freedom Road campaign to end a century of state-imposed geographic isolation and to secure access to safe drinking water (led by Jeff Denis); and (3) the alliance-building and solidarity activism of the inter-church social justice organization KAIROS Canada (led by Chris Hiller). This panel will include brief presentations on each case, as well as a cross-case analysis that brings forward key findings that come from the convergences of the three case studies. We emphasize the connective tissue that forms and sustains alliance relationships over time. We also highlight the dynamics of Indigenous and settler leadership, strategic planning, (un)learning, and the breaking and healing of alliance relationships. We introduce two analytic tools that can be used to understand Indigenous-settler alliance building: the conceptual tool of relationality and spectral analysis. We conclude by commenting on the implications of these findings for imagining future directions of Indigenous-settler alliance building.
