Land, Love, & Willful Refusals: Disrupting Settler Colonization from Turtle Island to Palestine
Kim Tallbear and Lara Sheehi
January 10th, 1:00 – 2:30 MT
Register in advance for this meeting.
The J-Series is pleased to join Kim Tallbear and Lara Sheehi in conversation as they interrupt contemporary settler logics and center Indigenous refusals across two, seemingly geopolitically disparate, yet interconnected sites. Tallbear examines American and Canadian settler states wielding of “private property” – a mechanism used to disrupt and replace Indigenous relations with settler forms of nation, kin, sex, and identity. Sheehi amplifies the inner worlds of Palestinian people through the psychoanalytic clinic, willfully “insist[ing] on the power of livability” against erasure, victimization, and state benevolence. Together, they intervene against the psychic and material life of occupation by contesting normalized settler-colonial modes of relating and healing.
Enacting Sumud: Willful Subjects and the Politics of Refusal Lara Sheehi, George Washington University This talk will use material from my co-authored book with Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). I will discuss how a decolonial feminist approach was necessary for us to work alongside our Palestinian colleagues, not as they are and were interpolated by and through settler colonial logics, or “civilizational feminism” (Verghese), but rather, as what Sara Ahmed terms “willful subjects”. Here, we are invited into a world where Palestinian clinicians, comrades and colleagues assert themselves daily as defiant, unassimilatable “problems”, engaging in acts of refusal and willful self-affirmation of material reality, individually and communally, when they, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian says, “speak life”, “speak Palestine”, and insist on the power of livability. The talk will use a clinical example to highlight how this willful subjectivity and politics of refusal are at the heart of sumud.
I will further offer thoughts on how Palestine and indigenous Palestinian clinicians provide us with an in-vivo invitation to the revolutionary implications for a psychoanalytic praxis that disrupts settler colonial logics.
Land, Love, and Relatives as Properties Kim TallBear, University of Alberta This talk links settler-colonial demarcations and rendering into private property of collectively-held Indigenous lands; disruptions to Indigenous practices of intimacy and relating, and their replacement with compulsory monogamy, state-sanctioned marriage, nuclear family; and disruptions to Indigenous Peoplehoods and their replacement by racial and populational categories worked first through blood and then by DNA politics. I examine how US and Canadian settler state doctrines, laws, and policies consistently disrupt and attempt to replace Indigenous Peoples and relations with settler forms of nation, kin, sex, and so-called “identity” all predicated on private property.
This talk expands on my earlier forays into these topics by engaging anthropological and other disciplinary theories of property to understand genocidal settler-colonial disruptions to Indigenous relations. For example, both genomics and settler social forms of sexuality and family deploy concepts of property and properties. In genome research and politics, property claims have been made over Indigenous bones, blood, and ancestral lineages to support claims to biological properties, e.g. inherited genetic markers that, in turn, support claims to Indigenous material and cultural property. In the case of settler-colonial family, property claims are made over lovers and partners within a system that uses compulsory monogamy and state-sanctioned marriage to uphold settler property claims to land and resources.
Finally, I bring into critical conversation Indigenous Studies and critical race scholarship to understand white supremacist appropriation in the US and Canada of all forms of Indigenous relations.
About the Speakers
Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) (she/her) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast, Media Indigena. You can follow her research group at https://indigenoussts.com/. She tweets @KimTallBear. You can also follow her monthly posts on her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization.
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which has been shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award by the Middle East Monitor. Lara is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the Chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.