About

What drives solidarity work with Indigenous struggles, and what models of such work exist? What does it demand of the settler and Indigenous partners, and what challenges such alliances face? What could we learn from such partnerships, both successful and failed?

Settler-states share ongoing agendas and practices as well as rich and versatile histories of Indigenous resistance and resilience. The growing movement of settler activists aspiring to become allies to decolonial struggles holds social and political significance, reflecting the cracks in the settler ethos and suggesting an alternative future. The attempt to step away from settler innocence suggests a specific, challenging position, functioning both as an extension of colonial power and as a potentially subversive element. The strategies solidarity settler activists have developed to organize within this tension is my project's core. I aim to analyze such models via two case studies that engage with land-based sovereignty: working against the exploitation of natural resources on the Navajo Nation in Southwestern U.S., and resisting transfer and dispossession in Masafer Yata, Palestine. In both cases, settler activists hold a direct settler stake / position and join the struggle with the Indigenous community's consent and invitation. Combining ethnographic and comparative participatory methods, I will utilize my particular position, experience and relationships I developed as a settler activist and a scholar, to address a gap in academic literature - an intersectional work that critically brings together anthropology, Indigenous and settler colonial scholarship with local activist knowledge as a transnational, holistic theoretical framework for articulating the meanings, formation processes, and dynamics of "alliance" for decolonization. Believing in the importance of academia-community relationship, this will also allow me to develop a knowledge-sharing website / database for solidarity activists across settler-states, that will enable mutual learning, support, and growth.