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99 EPISTEMOLOGIES OF RESPECT A Poetics of Asian/Indigenous Relation Larissa Lai I would like to begin this essay by acknowledging the Coast Salish people, on whose unceded territory I live and work. I make this acknowledgment for two reasons. First of all, I understand it as a protocol and a gesture of respect within the living practice of Coast Salish tradition. As an outsider to that tradition, however, I also make the gesture from the place of a personal ethicsunder -construction, one that acknowledges my condition as a participant in settler culture, who benefits from that culture by virtue of having entered Canada with papers that the Canadian government considers legitimate. That personal ethics also includes a sense of responsibility to participate in the remaking of contemporary culture and an imagining of the nation to address the injustices of the past and present, in order to produce the future differently. Anti-racist work of the past few decades constantly puts both First Nations people and people of colour in conversation with European settler cultures, but not with each other. This has been the case even though, as Henry Yu has noted, Asian and Aboriginal peoples were living, trading, and interacting with each other on the West Coast of the geographic space we now call Canada for a long time before the concept of “White Canada Forever” took hold on the West Coast, with ongoing repurcussions. But because that history is sparsely documented in text, those of us who were educated in the Western system tend to forget it. In an essay titled “Decolonizasian,” Rita Wong writes that the relationship between those marked as Asian Canadian and those marked as Indigenous is tainted with the problems of immigrant complicity in the colonization of the land, but remains nonetheless rich with possibilities for anti-colonial alliances. 100 Larissa Lai Furthermore, as Sunera Thobani has recently remarked, when those designated as “people of colour” gain business advantage under official multiculturalism they reinforce the marginality of Aboriginal peoples (162). This is not to deny that immigrants of colour have suffered injustice in racialized terms at the hands of the Canadian state. I acknowledge here such historical facts as black slavery in Canada, the Komagata Maru incident, the internment of Japanese Canadians, and the Chinese Head Tax. However, even as people of colour struggle for rights, freedoms, and voice in the Canadian context, that very struggle supports the Western colonial project by reinforcing the legitimacy of the Canadian state while perpetuating the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. I note these things not to pass judgment, but rather to acknowledge the historical and political conditions under which I write. Possibilities for alliance thus do exist at the level of anti-racist work, but are fraught at the level of relation to and identification with the state. It is in this tension that the possibility for what the Caribbean critic Édouard Glissant calls a “poetics of relation” arises, but such a poetics requires commitment, imagination, a willingness—in the face of unbreachable historically constituted difference—to not-know, and an acceptance of the fact that the route to alliances between Indigenous peoples and people of colour may be neither direct nor easy. If land, language, and interdependence are what is at stake, then my initial desire is to backtrack so that the relationship can begin on the right footing , instead of after the fact of European colonization and Asian Canadians’ acceptance of—and, indeed, struggles to enter into—the existing structures in the name of belonging to the nation. Yu’s work, which recognizes Asian/ Indigenous relations prior to the Canadian state, offers possibilities for such a footing, already historically grounded. However, I fear that even as we do recuperative work to insist on our own presence here, we do not always recognize how our actions reinforce the (relatively recent) state and capital in ways that deepen their colonial and neo-colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples. What’s worse, it appears that backtracking is not possible. The colonial moment is still with us in the present. There is no romantic return. As the bearer of both US and Canadian citizenship, educated in an English valued through three generations of British colonial presence in Hong Kong, I am complicit even as I am colonized. What I want to ask, then, is how a poetics and a politics of relation between Asians like myself and the Indigenous peoples of the land we call Canada can be enacted, at this...

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