Reclaiming Being: Applying a Decolonial Lens to Gendered Violence, Indigenous Motherhood, and Community Wellbeing
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsI found this concept paper to be an engaging and important contribution to the ongoing inquiry and refinement of how we conceptualize gender violence, the implications of our language, and the 'hidden' ideological structures embedded in our frameworks, treatments and discourse surrounding violence against indigenous women. I don't have as much of a sense about how to move forward with ameliorative alternatives, although that problem is admittedly much harder to tackle. This paper nevertheless highlights important issues.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe author addresses an extraordinarily important issue and approaches it with an apt and powerful analytical lens. The article would be further strengthened by fuller explanation of that analytical lens, and in particular the meaning of such expressions as the coloniality of violence and the coloniality of being. On this matter, the author includes a good reference to Maldonaldo-Torres. This could also be supplemented for example with reference to Cariño. In any case it would certainly be helpful to have fuller and clearer explanation of key analytical terminology, in accessible language, depending on the intended audience. Even after reading this manuscript several times, and with prior familiarity of relevant decolonial literature the following sentence in the abstract (repeated at lines 83-84 and 411-412) remains opaque:“It is revealed how Indigenous women’s bodies became the site of the coloniality of violence and instigated a coloniality of being for Indigenous peoples; a coloniality of being integral to intergenerational trauma.” Is the point that the specifically gendered (sexual?) violence directed at Indigenous women, and thus at relational ontology, is central to coloniality of being experienced by Indigenous people (and by settler colonials)? This seems right, but I am unsure if I have correctly understood the author’s central claim.
The author’s argument would be further strengthened by more fully described examples of the manifestation of the violent gendered coloniality of being, or even just further references to the extensive Indigenous women’s/Indigenous feminist literature that addresses these manifestations.
The author, unintentionally I assume, in their analysis of gendered violence, to some extent reproduces colonial gender binaries. This is problematic insofar as it can obscure the significance of violence against two spirit and gender queer Indigeneity and diverse constructions of gender among diverse Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The reproduction of colonial gender binaries can also contribute to the potential minimization of systematic violence against Indigenous men—from youths to elders—again I assume this is unintended. Such violence is also shaped by the specific ways in which racialized men are gendered by coloniality, not simply as threats to Indigenous and white women, but also as insufficiently manly to defend their land, women, and children and as such are discursively constructed as violable and disposable (see e.g. Razack, 2015). This point is intended as consistent with rather than a critique of what I take to be the author’s central claim about the gendered coloniality of violence and coloniality of being.
At the same time, the author’s discussion of the patriarchal dimension of coloniality would benefit from greater emphasis on its specifically white supremacist aspects. The importance of this point is to help make sense of the motivation that white settler women have had to contribute to discourses of purity and impurity in service of white settler women’s claims to the rights and other spoils of settler coloniality, from early white women settler’s backlash against “country wives,” (see e.g., Van Kirk ) the literary contributions of such white settler-women as Catharine Parr Traill (see e.g., Lander) as well as such white Canadian feminists as the eugenicist and advocate for white settler women’s rights as Emily Murphy (a.k.a. Janey Canuck; see e.g. Carter), through to white Canadian women’s participation in the 60s and millennial scoop, and the racist dimensions of the Canadian women’s anti-violence against women movement of the 80s onward (to which the author alludes) some of the problematic strands of which have resurfaced in the discourses related to protecting communities from prostitution as well as the neoliberal dimensions of sex worker rights activism over the past 10+ years. There are countless examples of white Canadian women’s complicity with white supremacist patriarchal colonial violence and its naturalization. One instance that is hard to forget is the judgement of the eight woman and three-man all-white jury that found Pamela George’s killers guilty of manslaughter rather than murder (Razack 2000; and the Globe and Mail Dec 21,1996.)
While the author cites Indigenous feminist and two-spirit activists, writers and cultural producers who have provided trenchant criticisms of the contributions to coloniality made by white feminists, e.g. K. Anderson and E. Moreton Robinson, these are somewhat overshadowed by some of the quotations from the work of Andrea Smith. In particular the observation that the “demonization of Indian women as a strategy of white men to maintain control over white women” (and further comments at lines 227 to 242) provides (no doubt unintentional) cover for white women’s flight to innocence and obscures their/our active participation in white supremacist patriarchal colonial projects and the access to some of the spoils of those projects that this enables.
The citation of Smith may be worth a second thought for an additional reason. While Smith has provided influential scholarship and powerful argumentation about the centrality of gendered violence in coloniality, her interventions are also highly controversial in light of her contested claims to Cherokee identity (see e.g. Pierce). As a non-Indigenous citizen of a settler colonial state, it is not my place to judge Smith on this issue. I simply advise giving further thought to these citations if this has not already been undertaken by the author. There are also other excellent sources on the importance of women in Indigenous nations (as at line 219) particularly within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (e.g. Jacobs; Mann)
Regarding the terminological debate between “domestic violence” versus “family violence” (page 2 lines 63-76) I suggest reference to “lateral violence” as used by Lee Maracle in I am Woman.
The author’s points regarding the violence inherent in the normativity of the nuclear family (e.g. line 113) are important. This is further supported by TallBear’s critique of the colonial violence of monogamy and the nuclear family.
I am interested to know who is being quoted at lines 158-159?
I do not think that this manuscript requires major revisions to be worthy of publication. It contributes to an extremely important discussion. My comments are intended as friendly suggestions that the author might use in the process of making final revisions if they find them helpful.
References (with apologies for inconsistent citation styles)
Carter, Sarah. “Emily Murphy and Indigenous Peoples of Western Canada: ‘On the Road to Extinction’.” At the Forks: 63-76Where Indigenous and Human Rights Intersect., August 16, 2021 Volume 1 Journal site: https://ojs.lib.umanitoba.ca/index.php/forks
Cariño, Carmen, and Alejandro Montelongo González. “Coloniality of Power and Coloniality of Gender: Sentipensar the Struggles of Indigenous Women in Abya Yala from Worlds in Relation.” Hypatia, vol. 37, no. 3, 2022, pp. 544–58.
Globe and Mail, December 21, 1996. “Pair to be sentenced Jan 3 in manslaughter.” https://news.umanitoba.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MMIW.pdf
Jacobs, Renee. (1991). Iroquois Great Law of Peace and the United States Constitution: How the Founding Fathers Ignored the Clan Mothers. American Indian Law Review, 16(2), 497–531
Lander, D. (2022). ReReading Catharine Parr Traill : stranging the familiar. Harp Publishing.
Mann, Barbara A. “The Lynx in Time: Haudenosaunee Women’s Traditions and History”, American Indian Quarterly, 21:3 (Summer, 1997), 423-449.
Maracle, L. (1996). I am woman : a native perspective on sociology and feminism (Second edition.). Press Gang Publishers.
Pierce, Joseph M. “Andrea Smith Redux Redux.” Indigiqueer Confidential. Aug 22, 2023. https://josephmpierce.substack.com/p/andrea-smith-redux-redux
Razack, S. (2000). Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder Pamela George. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 15(2), 91–130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0829320100006384
Razack, S. (2015). Dying from improvement : inquests and inquiries into Indigenous deaths in custody. University of Toronto Press.
TallBear, Kim. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family” in Clarke, A. E., & Haraway, D. J. (Eds.). (2018). Making kin not population. Prickly Paradigm Press.
Van Kirk, S. (1980). “Many tender ties” : women in fur-trade society in Western Canada, 1670-1870. Watson & Dwyer Publishing Ltd.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageThe MS contains a few minor errors of grammar and syntax or maybe typos, easily addressed by careful proofreading.
Some that I noticed:
line 7 article number agreement
line 102 Holmes for Homes
line 204 delete with
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
