Attempting Decoloniality in a Youth Climate Campaign: Learning to Be in Right Relation and the Incommensurability of Making Indigenous Knowledges Legible

Abstract

This article examines how fossil fuel divestment organizers at the University of Toronto (UofT) attempted to be in right relation with Indigenous organizations and students on campus by integrating Indigenous knowledges around relationality and countering/contesting Eurowestern relational practices. By examining the dialog of a workshop where Fossil-Free UofT discussed their hopes, concerns, and strategies for practicing right relationality, we argue that while participants did important work to build relations rooted in decolonial approaches, they were limited by the perception that they constantly needed to attend to (and often capitulate to) whiteness. We argue that this tension limits the impact of moves to decolonize non-Indigenous spaces.

Introduction

How do non-Indigenous ¹ youth organizers navigate the tensions of experimenting with decoloniality within settler colonial contexts like the fossil fuel divestment campaign on university campuses? In this article, we examine how youth organizers in the fossil fuel divestment campaign at the University of Toronto (UofT) attempted to be in right relation with Indigenous organizations and students on campus by integrating Indigenous knowledges around relationality and by contesting and countering Eurowestern relational practices. By examining the dialog of an Equity Committee meeting where Fossil-Free UofT discussed their hopes, concerns, and strategies for practicing right relationality, ² we provide analysis into the struggles of youth environmentalists in attempting to live their values around climate justice and decoloniality.

For decades, the mainstream environmental movement has been understood by environmental justice activists as a white and Eurocentric space, where campaigns tend to prioritize the experiences and frames of dominant communities (Bullard, 1993; Taylor, 2000). The movement was so white that communities of color working on environmental issues that impacted them articulated their political struggle outside of environmentalism, framing their work as environmental justice and carving out a space where racial capitalism and coloniality were problematized at the heart of environmental degradation, and where Black, Indigenous, and Latinx leadership was centered and celebrated (Bullard, 1993; Taylor, 2000). These tensions around the space to attend to and prioritize racial justice and colonialism persist and seep into many dimensions of the environmental movement, including youth climate organizing (Curnow & Helferty, 2018). Because of the decades of environmental justice struggles and the visibility of racial justice struggles across North America, youth organizers increasingly are aware of the fraught racialized histories of environmentalist activism and have worked to expand the frames of climate activism to include climate justice, reframing the climate crisis toward a historicized, systemic understanding of the racialized, and colonial causes and impacts of those changes (Centre for Climate Justice, n.d.).

Increasingly, youth environmentalists are being invited into environmental activism through the lens of climate justice. While we see shifts toward climate justice in the messaging of national and international environmental nongovernmental organizations, the experience of these shifts in youth organizing demonstrates the ongoing struggle to make space for racial justice and decoloniality within mainstream environmentalist campaigns. To illustrate how these tensions unfold on the ground, we look at data from a multi-year participatory action research project with Fossil-Free UofT, a campus-based campaign to address climate change through divesting the UofT endowment from fossil fuel companies. In other work, we have explored the polarization and politicization of members which we theorize as a learning process co-constituted by shifts not only in the consciousness or political analysis of members cognitively but also shifts in identity development, practices and repertoires of tactics, and epistemological orientations (Curnow et al., 2020). Yet we notice in the data that while one subset of the group expressed a clear commitment to doing decolonial relational work, they struggled to get traction. Our analysis here started with trying to understand why those committed to decolonization as climate justice work did not make significant inroads and felt frustrated in their efforts to move the group (tactically, intellectually, ontologically) toward a more justice-centered approach. We use theorizations of decoloniality to account for the political cul-de-sac. We argue that while the Equity Committee did important work building relations rooted in decolonial approaches to relationality, the group was limited by the contradictions elicited when Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews “collided” (Little Bear, 2000). These contradictions stemmed from the perception among the youth activists who were attempting to be in right relationship with Indigenous people of constantly needing to attend to and be legible and through a Eurowestern worldview. Decolonial practices, then, were a source of tension and political struggle.

Contested Visions of Decoloniality

Decoloniality is having a moment within academia. In the geographical region now known as Canada, we see widespread uptake of engagement with ideas around decoloniality in academic literatures, in institutional initiatives, and in coursework, and yet we, like many others, note the wide variability in what decoloniality signals, what it desires, and for whom. These are not new debates, but the proliferation of diverse political projects framed as decoloniality requires we situate our work, and that of Fossil-Free UofT, within the broader discourses and political contestations around what decoloniality is and should be. Although theories of decoloniality span many disciplines, we focus on North American Indigenous scholarship, mostly from First Nations and Métis perspectives ³ because these approaches were so present in the context of Toronto’s environmental organizing scene.

Indigenous scholars take up decoloniality in different ways, ⁴ from recognition and inclusion to refusals and rejections of the colonial state and its structures. Mi’kmaw scholar Battiste (1998) has argued for a shift from scholarly focus on colonization to decoloniality as a move toward righting the wrongs of an education system centered on “cognitive imperialism,” or the prioritization of white, Eurocentric ways of knowing, by instead creating systems and structures that center on Indigenous epistemologies. Others have noted the “epistemologies of whiteness” (Moreton-Robinson, 2004) at the heart of colonial systems, and in response, many scholars and educators took up the call to include Indigenous perspectives and worldviews in a way that honors Indigenous knowledges and knowledge systems. At times this is presented as fitting Indigenous knowledges into Eurocentric spaces, or understanding both simultaneously, such as with the Mi’kmaw Etuaptmumk (or two-eyed seeing) approach, in which one can see both Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives concurrently and use the strengths of both approaches in their work (Bartlett et al., 2012). More recently, this has shifted to understand and interpret Eurocentric knowledge through Indigenous lenses via scholarship, and international Indigenous ontological and epistemological understandings of trans-systemic knowledge systems (Battiste & Henderson, 2021). The concept of trans-systemic knowledge systems acknowledges that Indigenous scholars in the academy have undertaken research with differing levels of engagement in Indigenous knowledges (and from different Nations), and that Indigenous knowledges can be used to understand and unpack Eurowestern knowledges. Trans-systemic knowledge systems speak to the need for ethical and responsible collaboration and co-creation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and the inherent value of Indigenous knowledges as a pathway toward decolonization.

Other Indigenous scholars center resurgence, arguing that inclusion in or recognition from colonial systems and structures is, at best, insufficient, and at worse, incommensurable with Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination (Coulthard, 2014). This move to center Indigenous governance, cultural practices, languages, and so on moves away from bids toward legibility for/by the settler state, and centers the ontological practices of nations as the way of embodying decoloniality. Yellowknives Dene scholar Coulthard (2014) argues that the “orientation to the reconciliation of Indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority” (p. 151), and that Indigenous peoples should instead engage in the work of decolonizing separate from colonial powers and structures. Coulthard pushes back against recognition politics which he explains are utilized (even weaponized) by the colonial state to legitimize continued domination of Indigenous peoples and shift dominant narratives into the nation state’s favor. Like Coulthard, Nishnaabe scholar activist Simpson (2011, 2017) argues that in decolonial work, a separation between Indigenous peoples and Eurowestern systems and structures is essential, and that Indigenous peoples must imagine and create resurgent systems based in Indigenous axiological understandings that center languages, places, and (hi)stories. Simpson (2017) pushes for a move to resurgence instead of inclusion: a “dismantling of settler colonial meta-manifestations and . . . reinvigoration of Indigenous systemic alternatives” (p. 49). Through this lens, resurgence must be political and radical, or it runs the risk of becoming another buzzword like reconciliation which speaks more to the colonial nation’s interests and priorities than those of Indigenous peoples (Simpson, 2017). Similarly, Tuck (Unangaxˆ) and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) demand an interruption to the centering of white and/or settler comfortability and belonging within Indigenous spaces arguing “what is needed is a discourse of refusal, refusing that new works in curriculum studies soothe settler anxieties” (p. 86). Refusals like these push us in our thinking about decoloniality and suggest that making Indigenous knowledge systems accessible to the settler is incommensurable with the project of resurgence.

Decoloniality, then, is an essential—though contested—conceptual tool for thinking about how we work within and against the settler state. Although Indigenous scholars’ work on decoloniality often attends first and foremost to conversations within and amongst Indigenous peoples and communities, we note a shift toward decolonial work under the banner of Settler Colonial Studies that attends to non-Indigenous spaces and practices, especially in the field of educational studies and higher education institutions. For some, decolonization has signaled moves to Indigenize from within settler institutions and make Indigenous ways of knowing and being accessible to non-Indigenous people. Others have argued this is a cooptation that guts nation-specific practices of their ontological, linguistic, and axiological core, making them consumable to non-Indigenous folks without unsettling the normative Eurowestern onto-epistemic foundations of racial capitalism. These two interrelated but separate, and at times contradictory, methods of enacting decoloniality arise repeatedly in this article and are reflected in other contradictions we note. Literatures around decoloniality help us center the incommensurability of Eurowestern ontologies and many Indigenous ontologies and focus on how the revising and making Indigenous knowledges legible for Eurowestern/white/masculinist ways of knowing required working against the relational, contextual, non-“objective” ideas that are often foregrounded in non-Indigenous/settler spaces. For our work here, focusing on the tensions between approaches to decoloniality and the onto-epistemic foundations of decoloniality brings us into conversation around one of the key contradictions arising from Fossil-Free UofT attempting decoloniality.

The contradiction we highlight is located within the settler/non-Indigenous approach to decoloniality, with the well-established guideline of addressing racism (and coloniality) within white/non-Indigenous communities. This solidarity principle is sometimes framed as doing our own work (Morrison, 2013), and signals the responsibility of people from the dominant group, most often white people, to deal with racism within dominant (again, usually white) communities. This ethic is a longstanding anti-racism commitment, with roots that go back at least as far as white anti-enslavement abolitionists (Allen, 1975), running through the civil rights movement and direction from Black youth that white youth needed to work in their own communities rather than in/on Black communities (SNCC Vine City Project, 1966), through critical whiteness studies and community-based racial justice work broadly. This approach to anti-racism has been criticized for centering whiteness, for the tendency to not be accountable to communities of color, and for its ineffectiveness at moving white people toward substantive action. However, calls by communities of color for white folks to educate themselves and do work to deal with racism in their communities persist as a common refrain.

Fossil-Free UofT

Fossil-Free UofT was a youth climate activist group that worked for over two years to get the UofT to withdraw its endowment’s holdings from the 200 fossil fuel companies with the largest fuel reserves. Globally, campaigns for fossil fuel divestment were coordinated internationally by 350.org, and climate justice was not central to the core messaging. Yet within the Canadian campaigns, much communication at conferences centered on the significance of Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and coloniality when it came to addressing climate change. These ideas influenced the Fossil-Free UofT, where significant tensions emerged among members of the group as they struggled to make sense of and enact decolonial approaches that served climate justice.

This campaign was coordinated by a group of undergraduate and graduate students who developed an extensive brief on divestment and climate change (Toronto350.org, 2015) and, from October 2014 to May 2016, met weekly throughout the school year to plan events and coordinate the divestment campaign on campus. Between 15 and 35 people attended regular planning meetings, and there was a core group of around 15 organizers.

Throughout the 2014 to 2015 academic year, Fossil-Free UofT had had intermittent debates about the relevance and importance of climate justice, including whether and how to focus on Indigenous solidarity, the extent to which climate change was a byproduct of colonialism, and how to attend to race, gender, and settler colonialism. By Fall 2015, the period of the excerpt we analyze, the group had begun to polarize around these questions. One group centered their energy on attending to climate justice centrally. Others rejected that focus as a distraction from the “real work,” which they saw more narrowly as the technocratic moves toward the Board of Governors approving divestment from fossil fuel holdings. To make space for justice-centered work which would focus on education internally and external collaboration, an Equity Committee was launched. The Equity Committee’s purpose was education and changing the group’s understandings of justice, and it created an alternative space (Curnow et al., 2020) outside the normative speaking dynamics of white masculine dominance where racial justice, feminism, and anti-coloniality were celebrated and experimented with.

For Fall of 2015, the Equity Committee planned to orient new members to the campaign through the lens of climate justice, to welcome the Deepening Knowledge project, ⁵ and to build relationships of solidarity with Indigenous and racialized communities. There had been recognition by the Equity Committee that participation of/collaboration with Indigenous groups on campus during the first year of the project had not been adequate, and over the summer members of the group had undertaken work of consciousness-raising and learning from Indigenous peoples, including visiting Unist’ot’en, working on land reclamation projects with Fort Chipewyan, participating in a Toxic Tour with Aamjiwnaang First Nation, and investing time in educating each other on Indigenous sovereignty and solidarity struggles. In the planning meeting right before the beginning of Fall 2015, a small group of Equity Committee members met to discuss how partnerships with Indigenous groups on campus and beyond should happen, and a significant portion of the conversation focused on plans to build a partnership with First Nations House. ⁶ We analyze the talk in the meeting to demonstrate, through the participants’ own words, aspirations, and conceptualizations of how to do climate justice. This analysis demonstrates the contestation within the larger group between what was understood as Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and normative Eurowestern ideas about relationship and what relationality should look like and how to demonstrate commitments to centering decoloniality in the fossil fuel divestment campaign.

Decolonial Methodological Aspirations

We situate this work within the realm of decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist approaches to research which share a commitment to embeddedness, relationality, and an explicit orientation to remaking the world. The overarching research project was an activist research project where co-participation was at the core. However, we also note Joe is not Indigenous and the context of fossil fuel divestment was not meaningfully Indigenous or decolonial, and so while the political and onto-epistemic commitments of decolonial research anchored the approach we took to research design, data collection, sensemaking, and knowledge creation, we are careful in not naming this research as decolonial, but as aligned with and indebted to decolonial research methodologists who have shaped our approach.

Methodologically we orient to ideas of relational accountability based in Indigenous research methodologies (Wilson, 2008) that focus on relationships, accountability, relevance, respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and community ownership. Relational accountability refers to the interconnectedness of the relationships a researcher engages in with ideas, source material, the community, respondents, readers, the environment, and other components of the research context. Responsibility, reciprocity, respect, and relevance must be imbued in each of the relationships for a researcher to establish deep accountability (Wilson, 2008). We also anchor our work in community-based, activist research stemming from feminist ontologies. In particular, militant ethnography (Scheper-Hughes, 1995), which argues it is inadequate for researchers to merely observe or accompany the political contestation that has significant consequences for research-subjects’ lives, but that they must also be engaged in their struggles.

Decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist methodologies require us, as authors, to be clear about our relationship to the questions, data, and community that this research is embedded within (Hampton, 1995). We (Joe and Lucy) are a collaborative writing team, but Joe is also deeply implicated in the learning and talk within the group as a participant and an activist researcher. Joe comes to this work as an activist scholar with professional experience as an international student campaign organizer, where questions of when and how young people became politicized around racial justice through campaigns that did not necessarily foreground racial justice emerged. She participated in this work as a researcher and as a UofT student earnestly engaged in the work of trying to move UofT and Fossil-Free UofT toward a justice-centered approach to environmentalism. Joe is a white woman whose heritage is British, Swiss, and Cuban. Lucy is a Métis Two-Spirit woman and a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation. Lucy joins this work as an outsider, having not participated in the research gathering itself, but brings her own experiences in community organizing within Indigenous and non-Indigenous led groups on several issues, including Indigenous sovereignty and climate justice. We collaborated on this analysis, benefitting both from Joe’s intimate knowledge of the data and Lucy’s fresh eyes and examination through Métis epistemologies and ontologies.

For this project, Joe worked with a core group of Fossil-Free UofT organizers, collaboratively creating the RadLab to analyze data from the project. The core team was actively engaged in developing the questions of the project, coding and synthesizing data, writing, presenting, and collaborating on knowledge mobilization. However, at this stage of the project the core team has largely moved on, and Joe continues to write up the analyses from collective work. The specific analysis the two of us put forward was done without day-to-day engagement from the RadLab activist researchers while building from the intellectual/theoretical scaffolds provided by the coding and analytic tools from RadLab. Participants’ real names are used with their consent to acknowledge their intellectual and political contributions.

Data Collection and Analysis

To address our larger set of questions about when and how youth involved in the fossil fuel divestment campaign became politicized around racial justice, the RadLab team conducted a multi-year video-based analysis. Through analysis of over 15,000 min of multi-camera video data (Heath et al., 2010) of large group meetings, actions, and the Women’s Caucus, we examined different practices that supported politicization (Curnow et al., 2020). After content-logging and preliminary coding (including colonialism/settler colonialism, race/racism, gender, solidarity, capitalism/class, conflict, etc.), the RadLab team collectively iteratively coded to make codes more specific (e.g., within gender we coded gendered turn-taking, gender coming up as content of talk, gendered use of space, gendered leadership recognition, etc.). We then coded video from the most contentious meetings which we identified through a collaboratively constructed and coded timeline, identified by focal participants as generative and politicizing, for instances of these codes (these processes are described more fully in Curnow et al., 2020).

For this specific analysis of how some Fossil-Free UofT members learned about and practiced decoloniality and relationality, we carved out a smaller data set based on the previously coded content-logs. We focused on incidents coded as “Indigenous solidarity,” which in precoding signaled every instance where solidarity came up explicitly: for example, solidarity with Indigenous environmental actions, discussions of Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and the responsibility to educate settlers, and, broadly in the content of talk around building relationships with Indigenous peoples, groups, Nations, and institutions. As we refined from the compiled pre-codes, we iteratively re-coded the data to develop more specific codes around what was meant by Indigenous solidarity and how members of Fossil-Free UofT signaled they were doing solidarity. From these repeated rounds of coding, we decided to focus on the video from one meeting which exemplifies many of the themes we identified, particularly in the second year of data collection.

The sections that follow illustrate a number of tensions that Fossil-Free UofT’s Equity Committee’s approach to doing decolonial climate justice work created and how those contradictions limited the efficacy of decoloniality. Our analysis focuses on excerpts from an Equity Committee planning meeting in September 2015, which included five people, including established Equity Committee members as well as members new to the committee and relatively new to Fossil-Free UofT. The meeting was video recorded, lasted 93 min, and was held the week before UofT’s Frosh Week orientation was scheduled. We selected this meeting and these excerpts for this discussion because they exemplify the tensions present throughout our data, wherein many in Fossil-Free UofT are becoming increasingly politicized around decolonial solidarity. As more experienced organizers, Joe and Amil were in a leading position on this initiative and their talk features centrally. We repeatedly watched and re-coded this, and selectively transcribed the talk we share below.

We coded individually and then collaboratively, clarifying the themes we identified, and developed codes including:

1. Right relationship, examining both:

2. (b) the practices Fossil-Free UofT could participate in.

• 2. Sovereignty, including:

• (b) talk about Indigenous peoples’ practices of sovereignty.

• (c) talk about the practices of non-Indigenous people that acknowledged and supported sovereignty.

• 3. Conflict and tension between members in Fossil-Free UofT related to how, when, and where to participate in Indigenous solidarity.

• 4. Varied understandings of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies.

We shared our draft analysis with the RadLab members who have graduated but remain in relationship with Joe and the project. They were invited to do member checks as a tool to support relational accountability and invite feedback. In some places, the member-check readers thought we were too generous in our analysis and should be more critical of the failures and limitations of the Equity Committee’s attempts at decoloniality. We have revised to note the gaps in our interpretation, not necessarily to bring the more judgmental lens to bear, but to anchor our argument in more specific examples from the text.

The Work of the Equity Committee

In the sections that follow, we analyze ways the Equity Committee attempted to integrate relational ontologies and make explicit the ways Indigenous approaches to relationship, reciprocity, and ceremony were central for remaking the campaign into a decolonial space of welcome. These bids to experiment with, explain, and try-on decolonial practices represented a move toward being in right relationship, and were incomplete but represented a serious attempt to center Indigenous ways of knowing and being and unsettle colonial/Eurowestern norms in the group.

In the first section, we analyze the worldbuilding attempts by Equity Committee members as they attempt to embody and integrate decoloniality in their practice through (a) centering reciprocity as a way of being in right relationship, and (b) integrating the ceremonial and governance practices of some Indigenous nations into their work. In the second section, we analyze the moves by non-Indigenous people in Fossil-Free UofT to mitigate the colonial ways of knowing and being that were often layered onto the conversations on being in right relationship. We see these constant interventions as an attempt at doing decoloniality, through attempting to prevent harm. We focus on the interventions Equity Committee members made to (a) prevent urgent demands being made on Indigenous people, (b) stop tokenizing requests, and (c) prevent domination in the interactions between non-Indigenous people and Indigenous people.

Rethinking Relationship: From Transactional to Relational

One key move we note in the Equity Committee’s decolonial efforts was to reorient Fossil-Free UofT away from transactional approaches to relationship and toward a more processual and relational approach. As Amil opened the Equity Committee planning meeting, he raised plans to engage in a purposeful process of relationship building with First Nations House, the Indigenous student safe space and hub of programming on UofT’s campus. In the previous year, Fossil-Free UofT had struggled to attract and retain Indigenous members and had previously relied on some members’ personal connections when in need of Indigenous speakers or co-organizers in the campaign. As the committee discussed what a potential meeting with students at First Nations House could look like, Amil offered a direction that was reflective of what he had learned over the past year about Indigenous perspectives and sovereignties:

The idea of doing a workshop with First Nations House is to build the groundwork for a substantive relationship going forward. And what we don’t want to do is go in there and be like “HEY, like, come do WORK!” (laughs) kinda thing . . . Because we are going into their space not, sorta like, take up a lot of space, but create a space where we can engage with different worldviews and learn about different worldviews. So it will be a learning opportunity as much as . . . much more than going and like talking to them for 60 minutes.

Amil saw engaging with students in First Nations House as primarily about building an ongoing relationship by having preliminary conversations about the work fossil fuel divestment did, but also by being learners in that space. Amil recognized the orientations and axiological motivations of members of Fossil-Free UofT likely differed from those of the students at First Nations House. He articulated this as an opportunity to engage from the place of learner, instead of assuming the students knew nothing about divestment and would inherently benefit from learning about it and the fossil fuel divestment campaign. In making this suggestion to do something other than lay demands, Amil also took into consideration the tendency of some members of Fossil-Free UofT to dominate conversation and take up space. In imagining the goal of a “substantive relationship going forward,” there was an implicit assessment that Fossil-Free UofT needed to move away from structures of normative whiteness and relationship built on requests for labor, and toward engagement through relationality.

Amil created an expectation that the Fossil-Free UofT members should engage with the intent to get to know First Nations House students and approach students with humility and the different cultural practices around space taking in mind. Joe expanded on this intention, saying it would be important to approach the relationship with curiosity by:

Coming in to like learn from each other, figure out if there are points of collaboration, and just get to know people so that if we are successful, later in the term we can have another meeting. And thinking of this as a long and slow process. But we want to go through a long process so there’s a good foundation.

Joe and Amil tried to move the group’s understanding of relationship with First Nations House from something focused on a tangible outcome within a particular time frame (like participation in an event or workshop) to an ongoing and authentic connection between the individuals in the groups. Joe was clear this was a “long process,” quite dissimilar to networking approaches that the group might be used to. This fundamental shift in approach from transactional to relational required thinking around and thinking through the idea of the relationship itself and what each group could offer each other. By reframing the focus of these meetings from trying to get buy-in from First Nations House’s students to sharing priorities and positions of interest with each other in hopes of finding points of collaboration, Joe and Amil asked the group to think of outreach as an opportunity to grow their circles and be in relationship with the students in First Nations House. This reflected a shift from viewing relationships with Indigenous peoples as transactional to instead imagining a decolonial framework of mutual benefit and collaborative organizing in right relationship with Indigenous peoples.

On Reciprocity

A key piece of the learning around what counted as being in right relationship with Indigenous people(s) was a reconfigured idea of reciprocity rooted in the teachings and instruction received from different Indigenous teachers, Elders, comrades, and colleagues. This focus on reciprocity and depth of relationship came clearly into focus during the Equity Committee meeting when one newer member asked about the purpose of reaching out to First Nations House. Was the goal to promote each other’s events? Or something more? One member, Lila, responded rapidly: “I think it’s more, it’s a deeper allyship we are looking for.” Lila clearly communicated the hope for something “deeper” and distinctive, and her tone and speed in responding expressed some discomfort with the idea that the relationship would be extractive or quid-pro-quo (which was prompted in part by the well-intentioned, earnest question, but also in response to the ongoing struggles around how extractive a relationship ought to be). Amil noted that he saw the First Nations House partnership as, “an opportunity to build relationship in a better way.” Each of the speakers signaled a move away from what had been acknowledged as ineffective and sometimes highly problematic approaches (which we explore more in later sections) of enrolling Indigenous people and organizations in the work of Fossil-Free UofT, and toward something that reflected their emerging politics of decolonial solidarity and were aligned with their understandings of Indigenous approaches to relationality. While the Fossil-Free UofT members were perhaps more comfortable with relationships forming through the process of asking for labor from others, this conversation showed an attempt to change their processes and work to establish right relationship first.

Making Space for Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being

One of the notable things in the Equity Committee’s discussion was a shift toward acknowledging, making space for, and sometimes purposefully centering Indigenous protocol, ceremony, and practices. This reflected a recently deepened engagement with several practices and situating the practices within broader frameworks of resurgence and sovereignty. For example, as the committee planned the workshop to facilitate outreach to First Nations House students, according to Amil the plan was to:

Have a ceremony part to introduce it, if they want to, and then do a few circle processes to kick off the workshop. So talk about who everyone in the room is and sort of like how they see the environment or their relationship with the environment and some pressing environmental issues that they are concerned about. We also have a quick and dirty on divestment and how we can center land rights issues and Indigenous sovereignty issues in our campaign and sort of like how we can collaborate.

We see that a ceremonial opening of the space might be welcome, though Amil expressed a lack of clarity on what would fit and a willingness to defer to the expertise of First Nations House (a smudge might be welcomed, or another process to be decided by students from First Nations House). Even if he was not entirely clear on what the protocols were, he said he wanted to create space where those protocols might be observed. Amil also extended the frame of climate action to include sovereignty and land rights and expressed a desire to ensure the campaign that Fossil-Free UofT ran with emerged from attention to those issues, instead of including Indigenous perspectives as an add-on later in the campaign.

We also note the attention to circle process, which Fossil-Free UofT used frequently as a move to center Indigenous practices with intentionality and to manage problematic turn-taking dynamics. When asked to explain what a circle process entailed, Lila said, “You sit in a circle, and you go around and make sure everyone has a chance to comment on what you’re saying.” Amil extended Lila’s explanation, situating it as a decolonial practice: “Like you give people time to talk, as much time as they need, and then you go around the circle and there’s another circle too, so you can comment and reflect and bring things back into the circle too.” Again, we can see Amil’s understanding of some Indigenous practices was attentive to both the process and the worldview that underpins them. Across this talk and the ongoing practice of using circle process to interrupt racialized and gendered dominance in the group, Amil demonstrated grounding in the ontological underpinnings of circle process interventions. He offered something of an invitation to Fossil-Free UofT to focus on learning and recognizing the spaces where worldviews might be divergent. This conversation continued with attention to the interventions being made in opposition to Eurowestern masculinist participation dynamics, which we analyze below.

Internal Interventions

Across the Equity Committee’s discussion of how to be in right relationship and build relations of solidarity rooted in decoloniality, we identified a pervasive theme of attending to and preventatively/proactively managing other non-Indigenous people in the group. Equity Committee members consistently anticipated that several members of Fossil-Free UofT would not behave in ways that aligned with the decolonial commitments they had laid out, and the committee members spent a lot of time and emotional energy strategizing about how to intervene.

Participating in Process

Continuing his discussion on circle process, we saw Amil speaking around a recurring issue in the group: the differing levels of understanding and buy-in to decolonial praxis when it came to participating in ceremony, protocol, and other Indigenous nations’ processes. After Lila’s explanation of what circle processes are, Amil offered a self-critical observation of Fossil-Free UofT’s usage, saying:

It’s when you’re . . . there’s a right way to do it, in keeping with Indigenous tradition and protocol, and then there’s the settler, like . . . hack way, which is mostly what we do (laughter from group), in terms of like, we go around and people jump in and interject when other people are talking. That’s not how it goes . . .

Amil explained the circle process as he had learned it from the Deepening Knowledge program, which he understood as also being practiced by other Indigenous nations. He also articulated the experience of being in circle with other members of the group who “jump in and interject.” Flagging his wariness about how Fossil-Free UofT members might respond, Amil said:

So even if there’s something you don’t agree with, you don’t like OOOF (scoffing sound) (laughter from group), you don’t, like, challenge people. Like, being mindful of that. And also, being mindful that there’s a possibility that people don’t share the same outlook that you do and it’s not shutting people’s idea out or challenging their worldview but like thinking and reflecting on it.

Amil reminded the others that the purpose was not to reach a consensus or to “shut out” or “challenge” others in the circle, but to acknowledge differing perspectives and “thinking and reflecting on it.” Amil used this as a teaching moment, to reference behavior (defensiveness and argumentative reaction to critiques) that had happened in the group and to suggest it was not very productive or appropriate within a decolonial set of practices. Through Amil’s explanation of circle process and how it had been employed in the group, we get a glimpse of how he and other Equity Committee members balanced the very different axiological orientations within Fossil-Free UofT. We can also trace their work to rearticulate circle processes into and back out of Indigenous perspectives for other non-Indigenous members of the group.

Dealing With Dominance

A consistent concern raised in the Equity Committee conversation was about how some colleagues in Fossil-Free UofT would behave in the context of decolonial practices. Part of the emergent strategy the Equity Committee discussed was how to prepare Fossil-Free UofT members to participate in the proposed workshop with First Nations House, and there was much discussion of mitigating harm. Joe said, “there’s a loooong history of white folks rolling in and being like—or, like, settler folks, not just white folks—rolling in and being like ‘This is it! This is what we are doing, everybody get on board’.” This was framed as a normalized phenomenon in white spaces but was also attuned to the behaviors in the group that had been noted frequently across the talk in the meeting. Running damage control to keep some Fossil-Free UofT members from making demands and taking up space was a pervasive consideration in the decolonial conversation.

To address the concern that divestment members might not demonstrate cultural humility, the committee planned on “doing a pre-meeting with our group . . . to talk about what it means to do anti-racism in spaces. And since we’re going into their [First Nations House’s] space, to be really aware of privilege and colonialism and really try to check ourselves as we’re doing that.” This kind of intentional work was aligned with the broader educational/consciousness-raising work the Equity Committee was engaged in, and signaled the anticipation that there would be a problem with some people not attending to the norms of an Indigenous space.

This discussion demonstrates some of the intentional moves to recognize, name, and stop Eurowestern practices of relationality that were not aligned with Indigenous practices and decolonial frameworks. This included emphasizing that Fossil-Free UofT stop entering relationships with short term requests (and sometimes demands), stop tokenizing individual Indigenous people and asking them to speak for all Indigenous people (or Nations beyond their own), and stop making decisions for and about Indigenous people being meaningfully involved in deciding the terms of discussion. These references to past practice marked the norms of Fossil-Free UofT as Eurocentric and unsuccessful at aligning with the decolonial ambitions of the Equity Committee. Yet even in these moments of trying to do better, speakers were still centering Fossil-Free UofT’s needs and desires and not articulating a vision of collaboration and relationship that would begin with what First Nations House was already doing, or with how the fossil fuel divestment campaign could collaborate with Indigenous-led land defense and environmental campaigns.

Discussion

The two intertwined strategies—of worldbuilding toward decoloniality and of colonial harm management—were in tension, in that they shifted the focus, the practice, and the onto-epistemic orientations of the group as they moved back and forth. In year one, members of Fossil-Free UofT did not have many substantial relationships with Indigenous community members and had differing levels of understanding about Indigenous worldviews and histories. The group had some training between years one and two, and there was a positive directional shift toward including Indigenous ontologies, but a limited understanding meant the teachings received from Nishnaabe, Cree, and Mi’kmaq, and other community members were often discussed as “Indigenous” practices more broadly. This conflation of one Nation’s practices with those of all Indigenous peoples is a common misstep for those beginning to learn about Indigenous ways of knowing and being, as is the simplification of cultural or ceremonial practices like circle process from a space where every member of the circle is heard without interruption, even if there is disagreement, to one where the participants sit in a circle and speak in turn. Trying to understand and relate to Indigenous ways of knowing and being by comparison to corresponding Eurowestern ways of knowing and being practices causes missteps, in that these attempts to actualize learnings about Indigenous ways of knowing and being, while done in good faith, were incomplete, and done within colonial spaces and outside of relationships of accountability.

We recognize the important work involved in trying to make moves against normative settler colonial institutions, practices, and knowledge systems—and there is an inherent tension in people from outside the community attempting to adopt those ways. There is an ongoing risk of appropriation, or flattening cultural practice, or performing saviorism inadvertently. When folks attempting to practice decolonial ways of knowing and being are not deeply rooted in and accountable to community, these moves to disrupt Eurowestern ways of being can be especially fraught.

The requirement to attend to the normative racist behavior in the group meant epistemologies of whiteness were consistently centered and appealed to as a pathway for doing decolonial work, which of course undermined the ability to actually do decolonial work. Large portions of the group’s capacity, time, and resources were depleted through the significant time dedicated to managing white people’s behavior and feelings, instead of utilized in active decolonial organizing. The constant yo-yoing between trying to be in right relation and practicing decolonial ways of relationality were in tension with the re-translating Indigenous ways of knowing and being for an assumed audience that was settler and white. We argue this re-articulation and revision of the work prevented the Equity Committee from being able to be in right relationship, it prevented them from the decolonial/onto-epistemic shift that was required, and it constantly pressured them to reframe their work for the white gaze.

Conclusion

In this article, we have situated our analysis within broad literatures around decoloniality. We highlight work that argues against bids for Indigenous knowledge systems to be made legible to the white settler gaze and highlight the incommensurability of decolonial work that re-centers whiteness and Eurowestern ways of knowing. Using data from a youth climate campaign, we have demonstrated attempts to do decolonial work to be in right relation that center Indigenous approaches to relationality, but we have also shown how the bids to insulate Indigenous partners from non-Indigenous group members who devalued Indigenous knowledges made the onto-epistemic differences highly visible, and ultimately incommensurable.

Our analysis demonstrates that this stance created a contradiction of decoloniality as it put worldviews into tension as it sought to make decoloniality legible to dominant groups. This politics of recognition, rather than refusal, reinforced the supremacy of Eurowestern ways of knowing and rearticulates Indigeneity through lenses that are legible for white/Eurowestern/settler audiences. This contradiction created insurmountable barriers to doing relational work in and across difference.

Given the discourse among resurgence scholars that orients toward refusing to bend to settler colonial pressures of recognition, we wonder if the Equity Committee’s bids toward decoloniality might have been more successful if paired with refusals to rearticulate relationality through dominant Eurowestern lenses. What space might have been made if the time and emotional energy put toward the negotiation and management of white people resisting had been invested in building alternatives? Of course, this is a counterfactual, an unknowable, but our data identify the tensions and frustrations of moving between axiological and ontological commitments, and thereby never fully investing in decolonial futures. For Fossil-Free UofT, the resulting ineffectiveness of decolonial practice was significant. It created space where decolonial ambitions stalled, relationships with Indigenous students were undeveloped, and relationships within the campaign became strained as fights over if and how decoloniality should be practiced became a focus of meetings.

For the broader fossil fuel divestment campaign, our analysis is consequential. Within the Canadian fossil fuel divestment campaign, early work was done at national conferences to make clear to youth organizers that the mainstream climate movement had to attend to settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the racialized, gendered, colonial, and classed impacts of climate change. And yet that framing and instruction were also implicated in translating Indigenous ways of knowing and being for a presumed audience of non-Indigenous young people. Our case suggests that without deeper engagement and relations of accountability with Indigenous communities it is possible, even likely, that the uptake of decolonial practice across the campaign will be superficial. Well-intentioned attempts at decoloniality may end up being read through settler colonial ways of knowing and being, and implemented in ways that are tokenistic, pan-Indigenous, or caricatures of sovereignty practices. We might also anticipate other campuses’ campaigns face similar struggles, where the legitimacy of decoloniality for the divestment campaign becomes a source of ontological and axiological conflict. Much more infrastructure, support, and attention to relationship is needed to sustain non-Indigenous people’s engagement in decolonial practice in a good way.

Where decoloniality is at the core of youth organizing our work points to the need to be in deeper relationship. But even more importantly, it points to the need to have a clear commitment to practicing decoloniality, rather than constantly litigating if it is useful, how to do it, and why. Our work shows that these recurrent debates (re)centered Eurowestern ways of knowing and the dominance of an assumed non-Indigenous (white) member base. As young activists across movements are being invited into decolonial ideologies and practices, we urge them to refuse to make decoloniality palatable and move from bids for recognition to enacting decolonial visions.