“Filipino-Indigenous World-Building Beyond Colonial Canada: Honoring Settler of Color Responsibilities, Indigenous Sovereignties, and Cross-Cultural Solidarities” at the Mid-Atlantic and New England Council for Canadian Studies Biennial Conference | November 8-10, 2024
Presenters: Ashley Caranto Morford (Weber State)
Often, when settler colonial and Indigenous studies scholars discuss settler-Indigenous encounters in Canada, analyses and conceptualizations of settler positioning center white settlers and a white/Indigenous binary. However, given that settler colonialism is not a mere historical event but an ongoing process and structure (Wolfe 1999) fuelling Canada’s existence and expansion, the positioning of settler cannot be reduced to the historical event of white European colonizers arriving in Canada. Indeed, settler is a continuously unfolding position that various communities of color are indoctrinated into and participate in when becoming part of the Canadian nation-state. As a Filipina-Canadian, I study Filipino-Indigenous encounters in Canada to: 1) understand how Filipinos simultaneously face colonial violences in/through Canada whilst also participating in the settler colonial displacement of Indigenous peoples; 2) work through how settler Filipinos in Canada can be better kin and relations to Indigenous lands and life; and 3) witness and imagine anti-colonial world-building that occurs in/through Filipino-Indigenous solidarity processes. Towards this understanding, in this paper, I close read processes of Filipino-Indigenous relationality within the novel Scarborough (2017) by Filipina-Canadian artist Catherine Hernandez. In my close reading, I center the childhood friendship that the Filipino character Bing and the Mi’kmaq character Sylvie share. Through their friendship, I discuss how Scarborough imagines and calls for Filipino-Indigenous solidarity processes that honor everyday lateral love, support, co-creation, and daily practices of care.
“Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Anti-colonial Digital Humanities Critiques and Praxis” course at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute | June 10-14, 2024
Instructors: Kush Patel (Srishti Manipal), Ashley Caranto Morford, Arun Jacob (Toronto)
What is our ethical imperative as teachers and scholars in the digital and public humanities? How might we identify and address the colonial histories, legacies, and discursive practices pervading the contemporary technoscape and our departmental curricula? How might we hone our individual and collective capacities to sustain communities of care and transform oppressive structures of knowledge-making in the neoliberal academy? Through engaging with and reflecting on these critical questions, this weeklong course invites scholars, creative practitioners, and off-campus community members to develop collective strategies for refusing the damaging colonialities of teaching, learning, and research practices. As co-participants, we will foreground an ethic of care and community building in identifying tactics that we can share and act upon to challenge and transform colonial ideologies and systems embedded within the increasingly interdisciplinary practices of digital humanities. Building upon Paulo Freire’s writings on the pedagogy of the oppressed and aligning with Global South, Indigenous, Black, and women of colour feminist, queer, and crip justice work, we will imagine and continue the ongoing process of bringing into being the anti-colonial possibilities of classroom teaching for a bolder and more affirming environment for digital humanists inside and outside the academy.
“Marked Resistance: On Anticolonial & Antiracist Struggle” at Storying the Land on Our Bodies: A Symposium on Tattoos, Healing, and Health Justice with the CHSA Lab | April 18, 2024
Presenters: Ashley Caranto Morford (PAFA) & Jo Billows (OISE)
Join us for an incredible event, Storying Land on Our Bodies, which seeks to foster conversation at the intersections of tattooing, healing, and health justice. As an interdisciplinary gathering, the symposium weaves Indigenous, Black, and other racialized studies of health, education, social and political thought, arts, and resistance, with tattooing. Engaging with meaningful making of and making meaning with Tattoos, Tatau, Tā moko, Tunniit, Asasowin, Azhaasowin, and Batok (among many other words for these practices), our goal is to delve into the underlying social, political, and cultural foundations that supports healing and health justice. By centering discussion on how tattoos inscribe stories of land on the body, we aim to theorize material practices of sovereignty, anticolonial and antiracist liberation, to commemorate histories of struggle, and to promote liveability amidst and beyond the racial, capitalist, and settler-colonial violence of our times. The program is designed to stimulate dialogue and kindle exchange that melds the intimate with the political, centres the creative in social action, and nurtures international solidarity for health justice.
“Challenging Solidarity as Transaction and Working towards Decolonial Futures through a Praxis of Radical Love” at American Studies Association 2023 Gathering – Solidarity: What Love Looks Like in Public | November 2-5, 2023
Presenters: Sewsen Igbu (Toronto), Ashley Caranto Morford (PAFA), Shanna Peltier (Toronto)
We — the co-authors of this paper — are Black (Eritrean), Indigenous (Anishinaabe), and Asian (Filipina) women, friends, colleagues, and organizers committed to and engaged in cross-communal, cross-cultural, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) solidarity work towards decolonial and liberated futures. In this paper, we discuss, unpack, and critique how mainstream conceptualizations of love are all too often capitalistic. Drawing on our lived experiences organizing in the part of the so-called Americas currently colonially occupied by Canada, we reflect on how such capitalistic understandings of love ongoingly seep into solidarity processes, rendering acts of solidarity transactional, gestural, performative, and individualistic and risking the perpetuation of capitalism and colonialism within solidarity movements purported to be for justice and liberation. Dialoguing with feminist and queer Black (Crenshaw; hooks; Lorde), Indigenous (Krawec; Simpson; Whitehead), and Asian (Rodriguez; Thom) ways of knowing, we introduce and conceptualize the process of radical love — an intersectional approach to love that centers BIPOC knowledges and honors differences and incommensurabilities, holding ourselves and others accountable so that everyone is cared for. We suggest that radical love offers a balm and pathway against capitalist-colonial processes of solidarity. We then illustrate and envision how radical love can guide organizers towards a solidarity process that is anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and ultimately decolonial. As we emphasize and imagine, radical love is collective. Thus, the praxis of radical love is key to ethical solidarity and freedom, for such a praxis goes beyond the individual self to address the material and political systems that (re)produce white heteropatriarchal settler colonial ideologies and structures, including complicities and participation within these structures by BIPOC communities and initiatives.
“Diasporic Filipinx Kinship Care: Refusing Asian Settler Colonialism in Canada and Honoring Indigenous Life” at the National Women’s Studies Association 2023 Gathering – A Luta Continua/The Struggle Continues: Resistance, Resilience, Resurgence | October 26-29, 2023
Presenters: Ashley Caranto Morford (PAFA)
Filipinx/a/os experience immense harm at the hands of the Canadian regime, but also participate in the displacement of Indigenous peoples as we settle within the Indigenous lands claimed by Canada. In this paper, I study how Filipinx/a/os have both participated in and refused processes of Asian settler colonialism in Canada. First, I analyse Canadian policies that fuel Asian settler colonialism to understand Filipinx/a/o complicity in this structure. Then I study literary representations of Asian-Indigenous solidarities to reflect on how settler Filipinx/a/os can work to refuse processes of settler colonialism and be better kin to Indigenous lands and life within Canada.
Ashley Caranto Morford 