BY JUDY ROHRER
This past Fourth of July weekend was one of the hottest in history, not just because of climate catastrophe but also the white-hot imperialist racism “born in the U.S.A.” The scorching weekend started with the Supreme Court’s denial of historical and ongoing US settler-colonial and racial structural violence in its decision to strike down affirmative action policies in higher ed. After President Biden said, “We cannot let this decision be the last word,” I held my breath waiting for my university president to issue a statement. I knew it was going to be disappointing in its neoliberal framing, but I was not prepared for the incomprehensible lack of understanding or compassion (note: ours is one of the regional state institutions with plummeting enrollment that has also been performatively posturing toward becoming a Hispanic-serving institution for years).
The following day our president responded with two short paragraphs that effectively said, “Don’t worry, this decision doesn’t impact our university. Washington state already requires us to ignore the structures of racial oppression many of our prospective students experience.” Jaw-dropping. Nationally, fallout only got worse that weekend as commentators dug into Justice Clarence Thomas’s personal attack on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for her scathing dissent calling out the inanity of the decision.
I was ruminating on all of this as I journeyed to the fiftieth anniversary Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, which had the goal of centering histories of Indigenous peoples of “Oceans, Islands, and Continents” (the conference title). Uninterrupted racism from a white woman founding member of the Berkshires during a main plenary and an unreflective response from main conference organizers caused the conference to implode. These actions—particularly in the wake of the devastating Supreme Court decision—rubbed salt in the reopened wound and disrespected BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) scholars, many of whom were attending the Berkshires for the first time. The incidents reaffirmed the space as one built for and actively reproducing itself to comfort white women academics (in other words, people like me who have attended previous conferences). Members of the Berkshires leadership scrambled to apologize and have committed to structural change within the association. While these are important next steps, deep harm was done, and as a result many will likely not return to this conference.
However, because of practices of Indigenous relationality, all was not lost for some of the Pacific Islanders who traveled to the Bay Area for the conference. Corrina Gould (Lisjan Ohlone) welcomed them, myself, and a few others to share food, stories, solidarity, laughter, knowledge, and community at Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in east Oakland on Sunday after the conference. Organized by Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar Maile Arvin, the gathering included folks from Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Hawai’i, and Guåhaun (Guam).
The Sogorea Té urban Indigenous women–led land trust has become a model for, among other things, its Shuumi Land Tax, which is a voluntary contribution from non-Indigenous people living in Lisjan territory. It’s a way for non-Indigenous people to affirm the responsibility we have to affirmatively pay it backward and forward simultaneously. In this way, the land tax is tied to affirmative action policies that recognize that the only way toward repair is structural accounting for the cumulative impacts of institutional settler colonial and racist violence.
Indigenous resilience, resurgence, and rematriation fuel Indigenous collective survivance as inseparable from the earth’s survivance—an important principle to be reminded of in the wake of the decision that hot Sunday afternoon. If the Supreme Court, white academic leadership, and non-Indigenous people generally would stop with the denial, stop with justifications of the status quo, stop with the claims to white innocence (especially white women’s tearful fragility), we might find ways to not just get out of the way, but to affirmatively participate in the social transformation needed for our survival.
Judy Rohrer grew up as a haole (white person) in Hawai’i and has written previously about settler colonialism and racialization. Her scholarship is linked off her website at https://judyrohrer.mystrikingly.com.
