People & Culture
The educator and activist on decolonization, social justice and why water is at the heart of everything
This article originally appeared at biinaagami.org, a change-provoking initiative seeking to uplift the stories of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed.
At the end of a conspicuously canoe-shaped room on the McMaster University campus, professor emeritus Dawn Martin-Hill reflects on her academic career. A clothed table by her side holds reminders of her home in Ohswé:ken — Six Nations of the Grand River. While not distinctly Kanyen’kehà:ka, the beaded turkey feather and sticky remains of medicines-turned-ash in an abalone shell quietly nod to Martin-Hill’s advocacy for Indigenous students and their place at the university. She founded the Indigenous studies program as a graduate student in 1992 and has spent the three decades since researching, teaching and championing water security.
I’ve always been a social justice person. It’s in your DNA — where you just can’t stomach to see injustice towards anyone. When I started university, I would point out the erroneous assumptions that they [professors] were making, and I was very critical when I saw racism in the academy. They [academics at the university] had no idea they were projecting European social mores and values onto Indigenous people. But they said Indigenous knowledge was just mythology, and I could not use it [in my academic writing]. Everything was a fight. There was never a time I wasn’t at war with something or someone.
Eventually, I started seeing the value of education. But early on, I kept thinking I should be taking language. I should be learning our ways. I was very hard on myself. There was never a time that I thought, “this is great, having a PhD.” It was almost an embarrassment that you’ve got a PhD, but you’re not fluent. But then I realized that was a trauma response — to constantly feel inferior no matter what I had achieved. That’s part of colonization; it’s violence in our self-worth. So now I try to teach students not to feel inferior, whether it’s in western education or in your language and culture. The goal [of colonizers] is that you will continuously feel incompetent. So I try to broaden the experience of decolonization.
[When I began my career in academia] I was trying to figure out our traditional ways of knowing and how to write about our people in a way that isn’t demeaning or diminishing. I was also working on environmental issues with the Elders. And then they said to focus on water. And I said, “Okay, it’s water.” But it’s not just water. We know that. It’s everything. It’s about our relationships and our cultural survival, our sustenance from the land, including the water. That’s always been under threat through colonization. I wanted to make that wisdom accessible to a larger audience so they could gain the guidance that I’m privileged to have.
We talk about the parts of colonization: the invasion, and then death and destruction, and then the reshaping and renaming of our lands to be foreign to us. Colonization is the destruction and displacement of not only human beings but also the displacement of the waters. The bottom line is, without these things, we have no future.
When the dam for the Grand River Navigation Company was going up, our people were saying, “Do they understand this is where the fish are breeding?” “Do they understand putting a dam there is going to destroy every generation of fish afterwards?” They were in disbelief that people were so careless about that. I’ve heard these stories from a lot of Elders over the years, about their frustration and their feeling of helplessness.
I think the Earth is going to spit it all back at us — at least that’s what the Elders said. So, I’m going after avenues like decommissioning dams. Let her flow. If she could just flow freely, she’ll clean herself out. We all know that. So let’s start harassing these companies [that extract millions of litres of precious spring water for their operations]. If we don’t listen, Mother Earth will take those dams down. One swipe. So I’m not afraid of what they call climate change or crisis, because of the prophecies I’ve heard over the years. The Elders talked about it all the time, that this day is going to happen. She’s going to shake the fleas off her, and she’ll be fine because she’s done it before and she’s going to do it again.
The Elders talk about the world of ice — they’re going way back in history, and then they’re pulling it forward. Young people are scared. They think of the apocalypse and the end times, which is all they’ve been hearing in the last decade. Whereas these Elders just say, “We know what to do when these things happen. We know where to go. We know what our instructions are. We’ve survived the last Earth change. We will survive this one.” But you have to keep your head about you. You have to get your seeds, get your clean water, identify your medicines and know your land.
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