Decolonizing Methodologies - Alison Kopit

Alison – Decolonizing Methodologies: The Issue of History(ies)

In Chapter Two of Decolonizing Methodologies (2012), Linda Tuhiwai Smith focuses on the issue of indigenous history, its relationship to the power of the colonizer, and the value in reclaiming indigenous history. I will be taking up the problem of “history” in this context, the problems it poses, some potential new ways for thinking about history, and the questions for discussion that this concept leaves unanswered. Tuhiwai Smith explains that history—and the illusion that there exists an objective and definitive history—has been (and continues to be) a tool of the patriarchy and domination. Thus, history is one of the “master’s tools,” as Audre Lorde would call it (and is mentioned in the epitaph of the chapter).

History is often described as a practice of truth-telling. We learn that knowing the “truth” will illuminate injustice and allow us to not repeat the same mistakes from the past. Tuhiwai Smith notes this fallacy, writing, “We believe that history is also about justice, that understanding history will enlighten our decisions about the future. Wrong. History is also about power. In fact history is mostly about power” (35). In the past and present, indigenous histories, as well as the histories of other marginalized people, have been overwritten, ignored, and erased. History systemically privileges hegemonic identities and stories—mainly those of men, of white people and colonizers, of non-disabled people—and marginalizes others.

In Disability Studies, scholars and activists such as Corbett O’Toole have written memoirs that seek to uncover the lesser-known stories and alternative histories. The Disability Rights and Independent Living movement oral history archive at the University of California, Berkeley serves a similar purpose of collecting and preserving stories of disabled people in the Disability Rights Movement and Independent Living Movement. I have come to understand this work as a process of reclaiming history, and as reframing the stories from the margins and the periphery as valid and important.

However, while reading Decolonizing Methodologies, I continued to think about the ways in which reclaiming is still dictated by the colonizer. Tuhiwai Smith describes the ways that indigenous stories have been extracted, fragmented, reappropriated, and warped in favor of the oppressor. Thus, to reclaim history, a community has to engage with its own history in its appropriated context. Reclaiming is a practice of engaging with the power the colonizer--drawing attention to abuse, oppression, and marginalization--and displacing it.

However, the reclaiming of history is not a one-for-one exchange. Reclaiming in the indigenous history context seems to me to be more of a reclaiming of histories—or insistence that history is not “universal” or “totalizing,” but is instead multi-faceted and subjective. To reclaim indigenous histories is to refuse to situate them in a clean, linear, chronological time, but to perceive them as connected to a genealogy and multi-generational trauma. It is to understand that histories are mechanisms of knowledge translation, and thus, of intellectual control. I perceive the practice of reclaiming indigenous history as not a writing of revisionist history or corrective that “rights the wrong,” but rather to acknowledge that “objective” does not exist in writing history.

In my own work as a disability activist and artist, I’m interested in reclaiming practices. I’m interested in the ways that many people in the disability community have found power in reclaiming the term “crip,” and how Sins Invalid, a performance collective that centers queer, disabled, people of color, have made it a part of their mission to reclaim notions of beauty. I have used aspects of reclaiming history in my work in disability studies and in my performance art practice. When I began looking at my own history through the lens of disability identity, I began uncovering alternative histories—ones that involved less shame and pathology and made space for community, pride, resistance. These were the histories that I started claiming for myself and places where I found expansiveness in developing my disability identity. Therefore, even in my (one)self, I found multiple histories overlapping with each other.

Reclaiming practices are a part of many marginalized communities, and seeing these connections may provide avenues toward forming coalition and doing intersectional work. However, I also see limits in the work of reclaiming, as it almost always invokes a referent (the oppressor). For example, each time we say, “We’re not this, we’re this,” we are still naming the oppressor, and often operating within the oppressor’s framework and producing a kind of binary (which is a tool of the patriarchy). In closing, I pose the following questions: does reclaiming simply continue to voice the oppressor’s name into existence? Is this necessary for refusing to forget generations of abuse and oppression? How much reclaiming is reactionary, and how much is internal? In my study of art and crip aesthetics, I call for there to be more work that is not simply reactionary and invoking a referent, but that comes directly from the lived experience of disability. Where might we find space to invoke our own histories that derive from our disabled bodyminds?

  

Works Cited

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. 2nd ed., Zedbooks, 2012.