All places are fish places
Patty I come across the coolest people on Twitter. And one of those cool people is Zoe Todd, who is the fish philosopher, and I love that. And another thing that I love I was going through, we have a questionnaire because you know, of course we do. And one of the things that Zoe mentions in the questionnaire because I asked, you know, what kind of books do you know she would? Or would you like to recommend because I am obsessed with books. And and you mentioned, Aimeé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, among other things. And I love that essay, so very much. It's I, a friend of mine recommended it to me, I'd never been exposed to it before. I don't know why. And I live tweeted my reading of it because it was just like, it's just like phrase after phrase of just this gorgeous language, completely dismembering, you know, white settler ideas of colonialism. And it's just, it's just an it's just an it's just an extraordinary essay. Kerry Interesting, it's been brought, I haven't read it yet, but it is on my I just … Patty It’s a quick read, what maybe an hour because it's but it's just absolutely brilliant. I feel like and then Fanon, you mentioned him to and everybody I read mentions Fanon and I think it's inevitable I'm gonna have to .. Is he really dense and hard to read? Because that's … Zoe It depends which things you read, I think, so I've gone back and started rereading, Wretched of the Earth just to sort of, because it's really focuses on, you know, how to decolonize. And but I think, yeah, that's where I'm going back to, but I mean, obviously, so much of his work has shaped a lot of the current scholarship, especially in the US and around critical race theory and thinking through anti Black racism. And so, yeah, I felt like, I needed to go back and, and re-engage with him, especially now that I have more grasp on sort of, like, the issues that he's talking about. And, you know, I tried reading him in my PhD, and I brought him into my thesis. But yeah, that was like seven years ago. So I have, you know, different questions now, and different things that I want to be responsible to. So yeah, yeah. Patty So what are those things? Because you, you’ve been through a lot like you've been pretty open about it on Twitter, about, you know, kind of your, your hopes when you went into graduate school, and then your experiences in the academy. So how, what are you bringing to, you know to Cesaire and Fanon, which really isn't going to be the focus? I'm just curious. Yeah, you know, because we reread things, and they're different when we come back to them because we're different. Zoe Yeah. So I came to both of their, you know, like scholarship, at the end of my PhD, when I went to defend my thesis, and it was, it was a very difficult experience, because the work I was doing wasn't really in line with the kind of anthropology that was being done in that space in the UK at the time. But I did have a sympathetic internal examiner. And she said, you wrote a thesis of, like, you wrote an ethnography of colonialism. And so what if we just reorganize this and you open with all the decolonial theory? And I was like, okay, and that gave me the okay to then go and bring in these decolonial scholars, and just sort of unapologetically center that, because otherwise, you know, they were trying to take me down the path of, at the time in the early 2010s. Like, it was really, you know, multispecies ethnography, and like, these, like environmental anthropology, sort of discourses were happening that were, like, potentially useful, but they weren't attending to like racism within the academy. They weren't attending to Indigenous people as theorists in our own right. And so like my work was not fitting into what they thought anthropology was. And so that was how I came around. And really, it's the work of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and her work on post humanism, and sort of rejecting how that's been framed by white scholars. That was what brought me in. So I really have to credit her writing. And she's also how I came to start reading Sylvia Winter, like, all, you know, I didn't find very much useful in my training in the UK, but it was the work I started to encounter after, when I started to say like, well, how can I actually be accountable, and then it started reading like Black feminist scholars, and then then everything started to open up. And I also that was when I started engaging with Indigenous legal scholars in Canada as well. And then that was what shifted me. So, anthropology was a hard experience to do a PhD in, but I'm still, you know, it shaped me like, it's, it has undoubtedly, like, set me on the path I'm on. So I'm not like a, I think I'm at peace with how hard it was. But I'm also so grateful that I got, it's almost like I got to do a postdoc afterwards, just reading all the people that I should have been reading in my PhD, but that they weren't teaching. Because I remember at one point in my PhD saying, like, Well, why aren't we reading Fanon? Someone? I'm laughing out of the discomfort of it, someone was like, “Oh, that stuff's really dated.” And, you know, until that just shows you where white scholars worse, you're go, like, 2013. But I'll tell you, so many of them are now saying like, they're decolonizing anthropology. So. So you know, it all comes, you know, back into sort of, you know, relationship. But yeah, so I'm very grateful like that, … friends. And I'm not pretending that I that I have read all of their work or, but I'm trying really hard to be accountable to their work, and then how their work is, like so many people now really brilliant people are in conversation with their work. So I want to be accountable to those spaces Patty you had talked about, and this is this is making me think of something you had talked about before Sara Ahmed, who talks about citation or relationship. And we have talked with, and I'm spacing on her name right now, but a Māori academic [note: we are referring to Hana Burgess]. Remember, the one about doing a PhD without quoting any white men? ZoeThat’s awesome! PattyI found her on Twitter, like she had thrown out this tweet about how she was going to do a PhD, without quoting any white men, and we're like, what? We need to talk to you! And then she kind of introduced me to Sara Ahmed and Sarah's work on citational relationship, which in my own book, I think a lot about because I'm mentioning like, you know, this book and that book and how these authors, and thinking carefully about who I'm citing, you know, because two people say the same similar things. But do I really want to cite the white guy who said it? Or do I want to cite the Indigenous women who say it but a little bit differently? In a different context? Kerry So then that can tie in bias when we are doing that? Have you? How, how, how have you been grappling with that, you know what I mean? Even even that piece of it, because of what we are told in society we should be putting down and who should be valued as the ones to be cited? Zoe Well, in my own work, I'm, like Sara Ahmed, she wouldn't know this, but she kind of saved my life because she was another one of those people whose work I encountered kind of near the end of that process. And and when I realized, like, I don't have to cite all these miserable old white men, like she was modeling it, you know, and, and that was a real, like, it was the fall of 2014 was a real turning point for me, because I kind of wrote this blog post that went viral about this kind of turn in, in anthropology. And and then it started to get attention. And you know, and some people were really unhappy with it and telling me like, I didn't understand the literature and blah, blah, blah, but somehow I connected with Sarah Ahmed on Twitter in that period. And, and she, you know, like, I don't know her personally, but she kind of gave me the confidence to sort of go back and cite Indigenous people, you know, and like, so I quit trying to impress all these like old white anthropologists and, and that has, like, continued to grow. And I remember at my thesis defense, like, this is, you know, this is 2016 they leaned in close and they were like, Why would you come all the way over here to like a world class environmental anthropology program, and almost none of the people here show up in your thesis. And I received that like this, like, you know, like, it was like a blow and I remember I like gathered just gathered myself. And you know, everything that led up. Some of it was just so hard and I remember I just like gathered myself and like steadied myself against the table. And I, I kind of leaned in and I spoke very softly. So they had to lean in. And I said, because the experience of working here was so hard. And I came here in good faith, you know, as an Indigenous woman, to work with people who work on, you know, similar topics and with our communities. And it wasn't a good experience. And I didn't see people working with, like, with kindness and reciprocity. And so I resolved that the only way I could honor the stories that my friends and interlocutors shared with me when I was working in their community, in the western Arctic, was to tell those stories in connection with Indigenous thinkers and with Black feminist thinkers. And, and, and I went on and on and on, and they finally were like, okay, okay, okay, we get it. *laughter* But they really, like I really had to say it, you know, like that, you know, I wasn't there to just reproduce that program. And like, I, you know, and I don't want to harp on, you know, programs are programs, they reproduce themselves. And you know, and like, it's not like people were malicious, per se, it was just, they were like, fulfilling a role that they thought they had to fulfill, which was like to discipline me and mold me in a certain way. And I wasn't molding in the way they wanted. And I was, you know, troubl
