Jessie Loyer keynote on open education and Land Back: transcript

Key points

• Loyer says she believes in openness, but theft has marked Indigenous relationships with their own intellectual property.
• She draws on Leanne Simpson to describe sovereignty as relational: healthy, respectful relationships with all relations rather than a document.
• Land Back is a simple call to give the land back, and it is not anti-Black or anti-refugee; it argues that Indigenous jurisdiction can help with biodiversity loss and the climate crisis.
• Examples of openness in Indigenous projects include archival collections, the Indigenous Canada MOOC, the Global Indigenous Data Alliance and an open-access journal.
• She warns against tech solutionism and says learning about settler colonialism is not the same as doing the work.
• Métis in Space bought 160 acres through a land trust, funded by settler contributions, as an example of Land Back in practice.

Chapters

1. 0:11Openness, theft and Indigenous intellectual property
2. 2:37Indigenous sovereignty as relationship
3. 6:12What Land Back means
4. 9:15Openness in archives, MOOCs, data and journals
5. 13:41Tech solutionism and refusal
6. 16:59From learning to action: Indigenous futurisms
7. 20:04Métis in Space land trust and closing invitation

Full transcript

0:11So I'll start with saying that I believe really strongly in openness, but I enter this space from the perspective of being an Indigenous person. And for us, theft has marked most of our relationships with our own intellectual property. We can look at that as theft by outsiders, kind of historically as theft by missionaries and anthropologists, but even modern times by tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, fashion designers, musicians. Now, for some positionality, I'm Cree Métis and I'm a member of Michelle First Nation.

0:46I grew up in Kalahoo here in my own traditional territory up in Treaty 6, so just outside of Edmonton, Alberta. This is what it looks like right now. It's pretty snowy and cold and we're entering winter, the time when we can tell stories again. now i gave a talk last year for open access week the thought about how open access and res dogs are kind of dealt with in the same way by outsiders for both of these things people look in and see an issue and want to fix it and for res dogs that means seeing a bunch of dogs running around and wanting to save them and rehome them, send them to nice new families.

1:26And for open access centers, that means that push to openness means that we miss some cultural contexts where something shouldn't be open. And so I saw them as kind of similar and related. But I also want to say that I don't think that openness is antithetical to Indigenous ideas about information. In the same way that we need solutions for dealing with res dogs and organizations like Save Res Dogs, which is Indigenous created, approaches it differently, seeing dogs as extended kin, and thinking thoughtfully about how we rehome dogs like this.

2:00We also need Indigenous consultation when we're talking about open access. I'm just so grateful to go after Dr. Mishlamaya because I think the failures of open education in understanding justice and liberation really ground what I'm talking about here too. So I'm gonna think a little bit about how can we consider open education as a tool to serve the needs of Indigenous sovereignty and more specifically the land back movement. Now let's talk a little bit about Indigenous sovereignty. So it's a complicated thing.

2:37In the context of a nation state, we often think about positioning sovereignty in this way. And in Canada and the US, we can see the different ways that this manifests. And one of the biggest problems about it is that first part of it, the Indigenous part of it, because as a group of people, as a sovereign nation, as sovereign nations, a lot of people in the mainstream are just unfamiliar with indigeneity. and so I have two screenshots here one of them is from an Angus Reid poll that was done in Canada that asked people if they had ever spent any time on a reserve and 38 percent so the majority had said no they had never been to one and other most other people had maybe drove through or had spent a little bit of time but most people were just simply unfamiliar with Indigenous people The other one is more recent. It's from the last US election, where a polling showed Native Americans as something else, which the internet took and ran with it. We now have beaded patches

3:39that say, hello, I am something else. But it really just also speaks to the blind spots that most kind of Western nations have around the Indigenous people on whose lands they live. The other side of it is that when we consider sovereignty, we often think about it in a Western jurisprudence kind of way. And so instead, I like to think about sovereignty in a much more expansive and relational way. And so I'm going to turn to Leanne Simpson's discussion of sovereignty and it's from her chapter called The Place Where We All Live and Work Together in the book Native Studies Keywords.

4:19and so what she did in this chapter is she asked an elder um in anishinaabemowin what the word for nation sovereignty or self-determination might be and he thought for a while and then he told her that he remembered old people saying which was understood to mean the place where we all live and work together and so that seems like a really simple answer description of sovereignty and nationhood that is at its core about relationships with each other and with plant and animal nations, lands, waters, the spiritual world broadly. She also goes on to say in the chapter, this quote that's on the screen right now, for Indigenous people sovereignty is not something that takes place in an old stone building in a city full of old white straight able-bodied and minded rich men.

5:09And that is guarded and vigorously defended by the military. Sovereignty is something that is embodied, visioned and lived both individually and collectively by our peoples, from the smallest baby to the oldest grandparents. Our sovereignty does not come from a document. Our sovereignty comes from an abundance of healthy, responsible, respectful relationships with all of our relations. And what's interesting about it is this conception of sovereignty is actually echoed by other Indigenous people around the world. It's not kind of a specifically Anishinaabemowin perspective. And so Paliku writer Ambalin Kwe Molina has a poem in the book Living on Stolen Land that says Indigenous sovereignties are narrative sovereignties that begin and continue in story the tales of the ancestors that tell the story of a world that is alive so this appeal to biodiversity of positioning people within a much broader sense of themselves rather than mastery of nature is something that i think grounds our discussion of sovereignty so when we get

6:12overwhelmed with what do we mean by sovereignty you know how does a separate judicial system work and how does money work or even more practically how do we get more indigenous people in our disciplines, what if we turn then to a much simpler call to action? The call for land back. So land back has a simple tenant. Give us the land back. And so what it isn't is kicking everyone except for indigenous people off the land. It's not anti black, it's not anti refugee, it understands the specific ways that people are brought to land is outside of their control.

6:48but what it does do is kind of position it in really specific ways kind of these complicated questions we've created for us at the core of it is land now the red paper uh from yellow from the yellowhead institute which is an indigenous think tank based out of ryerson university in toronto looks at this concept of land back and it starts with the reality that most grievances that Indigenous people have are over land and so it's looking at it from kind of a policy perspective but thinking about things like how is consent for land theft negotiated ignored coerced kind of historically what does that look like it also looks at the specific strategies that are deployed to dispossess Indigenous people of the land so treaty making is one way that that has happened script there's lots of different ways that that happens and then the limited ways that industry and the Crown in Canada allow us to manage what little land we have jurisdiction over.

7:49So if people want to put a pipeline through a reserve. What are the limited strategies that we are able to enact in that space? They also highlight a couple of case studies of what land back can look like. And in these case studies, all of them are connected by having community-based strategies of consent-based jurisdiction. So why is this important? They kind of talk about it and say, the matter of land back is not merely a matter of justice, rights or reconciliation.

8:19Like the United Nations, we believe that indigenous jurisdiction can indeed help mitigate the loss of biodiversity and climate crisis. So we're thinking about it from a much bigger process. It's not simply about restitution, but it's much more kind of foundational than that. I'm also really interested in how other people are thinking about it, even outside of policy. So Briarpatch Magazine recently ran an issue that they called the land back issue. It's well worth your time to have a look at it, but in the editor's note, the editors Nikita Longman, Emily Riddle, Alex Wilson, and Simon Desai say, and I'll just put it in front of us, land back is the demand to rightfully return colonized land like that in so-called Canada to Indigenous peoples. But when we say land back, we aren't asking for just the ground or a piece of paper that allows us to tear up and pollute the earth.

9:15We want the system that is land to be alive so it can perpetuate itself and perpetuate us as an extension of itself. That's what we want back, our place in keeping land alive and spiritually connected. Basically, Land Back says land is important. Land theft has happened, things are bad with people and the environment. so what if we let indigenous people decide what happens on their land gave them the jurisdiction back that was stolen it strips it strips back all the complicatedness that often characterizes reconciliation talks and asks that simple question what if we let indigenous people decide what happens on their land and in this way we can also ask what happens if we let indigenous people decide what happens to their information so there's a number of openness that we see in Indigenous projects. I'm going to just quickly go through a couple of them. One of them is thinking about who owns what in terms of archival collections, what's held in cultural memory

10:19institutions. Now it's no accident that Indigenous materials are held in archives and other collections geographically distant from their originating communities and held in spaces that often require gatekeeping. And so much of our ideas around archival care center around preservation rather than access for many good reasons but approaching our collections with a question as simple as Do the originating communities know what we have changes how we relate to our collections, whether that is historical items, genealogy or research data.

10:56That's something that we're generally been quite bad at doing in libraries and archives. We can also consider the way that MOOCs as an element of open education might change, sort of address some of the gaps that exist. The Indigenous Canada MOOC at the University of Alberta kind of has become sort of notorious recently as Dan Levy of Schitt's Creek fame is starting to take this class blogging about it and facilitating group discussions and so it's an example of the ways that basic information that theoretically should have been taught in school can be remedied by open ed so filling those gaps that exist. The Global Indigenous Data Alliance embraces open access for its publications but it also holds a pretty nuanced version of openness when it comes to data. It's thinking about how cultural perspectives and controls are needed in order for Indigenous communities to retain control over their data and so it looks at things like you know how do we encourage

12:00Indigenous State of Sovereignty. How do we assert rights and self-interest in data? How do we think about the way that open data can help self-determined well-being of Indigenous peoples? And it also thinks about the way that a worldview might shape how we look at data. We also have things like an open journal, right? Decolonization from the start has been open. It uses a Creative Commons attribution license. and it's not as though the work that is published there is any less that's the published publisher of eve tuck and k wayne yang's really kind of foundational article decolonization is not a metaphor which has been cited extensively so we know that something that is built from the start to be open can actually create amazing work and can help us liberate that kind of extractive research that has often been so closely held by the ivory tower Now, in these examples, we just have to pause and ask, are we asking the right questions

13:02in these projects? Are we asking is it easier for poor people to access this information? Who can access this? Easier for racialized people, for Indigenous people? For most Indigenous people, the oldest published materials about our knowledges are not held by us. They're rather enclosed stacks in museums, libraries, and archives. And this is a simplified truth, but it really highlights that idea that our histories, our published ones, are not held by us. Now, openness is a good critique of industry in the ivory tower and kind of highlights the greed and miserliness of these industries.

13:41But, and in the same way, indigenous assertions of control of data are not antithetical to open access, but emerge from a similar impulse the idea that something is being held from us. so where our ideas differ is that that theft that is a key feature of that history changes our relationship to it and also turns us to more control rather than kind of the broad open access with no with no cultural context and too often we tend to slide into what we can call tech solutionism let's picture my dad learning vr for the first time but too often our tools fall into tech solutionism which is the idea that there is a technological solution for all social problems the thing is this approach too often mirrors neocolonialism i'll fix it for you i'll do it for you without ever thinking about how you think about the problem or how you perceive the

14:44solutions, or even if you think that this is a problem to be solved. Now, Mutale and Conde of AI for the People recently gave an amazing keynote at the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group at UC Berkeley's Refusal Conference. So easier to find if you just search for Refusal Conference. And in it, she says something really powerful. She says, refuse the techno solutionist frame. Reimagine technology as a tool of liberation.

15:18she goes on to say because her work looks at automated anti-blackness in this refusal of a world that does not serve everybody we should not be looking at technology as the enemy nor should we be looking at it as our trusted friend but it's a tool and she goes on to pose some really exciting questions you know what if we invested in community rather than police and that investment could be scalable in the way that AI is scalable. She also asks really interesting questions like what if facial recognition tech was used to recognize oceanic life to preserve it?

15:57What if we used these types of pattern recognition technologies to figure out what trees we have left as California burns. So recall how Leanne Simpson is talking about sovereignty as being connected to so much more than just the human world. She's thinking about that too. How can we use tools of liberation to liberate not only humans, but also all the other things that we are related to. So if we do this, if we turn our attention to justice and liberation, one of the things that we have to keep in mind that Eve Tuck and K. Wen Yang say in that article that I mentioned before is that the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful that it can feel like it is indeed making change but until stolen land is relinquished critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism so paraphrased learning about the work

16:59isn't doing the work even though it feels great so feeling good we're even the work that we're doing this week at this conference can be so transformational can feel really transformational can feel emancipatory but it's not the work itself right it's that first step We still have to go on and actually do some stuff. We have to translate this into action. Now, this is a page from a book that I wrote when I was a very little girl, and so it's a picture of my brothers in space, and I use it to illustrate thinking about how Indigenous futurisms might help us take that next step.

17:41Now, this helps us kind of frame where we want that next step to be, how we can use openness to really think about liberation. Now, Indigenous Futurism draws from Afrofuturism, which is a rejection of the white utopias that we are often served. It was coined by Mark Derry and it embraces themes of reclamation and Black liberation. So think Wakanda or Alicia B. Wormsley's artwork, which is on billboards that read simply, there are Black people in the future. That's Afrofuturism. Now the The language of Indigenous futurisms, which was coined by Grace Dillon as an homage to Afrofuturism, thinks about how Indigenous people, after surviving genocides and continued never-ending trauma, already live in the dystopian now.

18:32The term NDN has seen a resurgence in the last few years, popping up in places like Billy Ray Belkert's book, Indian Coping Mechanisms, and it's both a throwback to chat room shorthand and a desire to see Indigenous people in the future too. We are Indians, not dead natives. So things like Saniasu's paintings, which add West Coast formline aliens over colonial landscapes of Haida villages, that's Indigenous futurisms. A Tribe Called Red, Indigenous Futurisms.

19:07And what's interesting about thinking about this next step of action as emerging from Indigenous futurisms is that it positions technology as coming from our worldviews rather than existing outside of them. so open access when utilized for liberation and justice can be powerful we have really good examples of that this whole week we have good great examples of students who can now pay their rent and feed themselves rather than paying for textbooks i mean half of the sessions here are literally dreaming these new worlds of possibility but it's so common for us to be drawn into the false promise of technological solutionism we can fix the world instead of imagining a world emerging from indigenous possibilities and that's a world in which sometimes we just have to step back and say, yes, land back.

20:04So I'll end my time with telling you a quick land backstory that I think is really kind of highlights how this can work together. Métis in Space is a podcast where two Métis women, shown here, Molly Swain and Chelsea Bell, along with Chelsea's cute baby, they watch sci-fi and then they talk about it. And so they talk about often how Indigenous people show up in sci-fi. now they launched a land back project titled back to the land to land to furious that would allow them to purchase land in their ancestral homeland to be held as a land trust and the way they did it was they asked settlers to contribute financially to this project as a direct means of supporting land back their gofundme is still live as they do need to continue to have fundraising but they were able to purchase 160 acres of land in Lac-Saint-Anne County which is right outside of Edmonton.

21:07Now what's exciting about this is that this kind of biodiversity that they now have access to kind of enables them to do so many exciting things. Prairie biome rewilding, water revitalization research, traditional food systems work, ceremony language camps, and they're outlining other possibilities in their article Back to the Land, To Land, Too Furious, which is also part of Briarpatch's special land back issue. Now, one of the things that they've said about this project is that we recognize that access to land, free from the state and settler monitoring and constraints, is a huge barrier to cultural engagement and knowledge generation for many low-income urban folks.

21:54And so that brings for me to mind the idea that the barriers of education are so similar to the barriers of land for Indigenous folks and reframing it through Indigenous futurisms helps us see how this could be different. Let's dream of a world in which we use Indigenous futurisms and where those tools of open education emerging from an indigenous worldview can be used for liberation and justice and they can contribute to those kinds of things like indigenous sovereignty and land back.

22:30I think that both of these approaches, both open education and land back, are kind of our means for moving forward to breaking down the systems that have held us back in so many different ways. So this is really an invitation for us to do this work together and to dream the ways that open education might contribute to Indigenous sovereignty and land back. Thank you, everyone. Like I say.

Source and licence

Recording: File:-OpenEd20 Keynote- Jessie Loyer.webm by Open Education Conference (2021-02-25), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.