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Being a genuine ally involves a lot of self-reflection … We have to change our own behaviours and be mindful that we are not contributing to keeping that system going.

Amnesty International, 2022

In this special issue, the editors have asked authors to examine the concept of allyship in terms of its relevance and complexities in social work. A number of resources exist that detail how to be a good ally (see Amnesty International, 2022; Swiftwolfe, 2019) and the responsibilities that such a person holds (see Gehl, 2012), and yet the concept continues to develop and is likely context-dependent, as each community will have their own definitions of what it means to be an ally (Heaslip, 2014). In the context of Indigenous struggle and resistance, the term ‘ally’ refers to those who have been recognized as such by Indigenous Peoples and communities (Croteau et al., in press); an ally cannot self-declare their status (Gehl, 2012; McGuire-Adams, 2021). Allies actively support and assist with Indigenous-led efforts and aims (Swiftwolfe, 2019).

While attempting to define the term, however, it is important to be aware that, for some, the concept of allyship holds neither meaning nor validity for a number of reasons. These reasons include that it can be performative, that it remains imbued with a desire to ‘save’ and the belief that the ally is automatically in a position to do so, and because, at the end of the day, allies can return to their lives and choose to show up when it is easy or convenient for them (Bourke, 2020). There is a responsibility to regularly face one’s own discomfort in the process of becoming an effective and responsible ally (Joplin, 2020).

Allyship has also been both conceptualized and critiqued as part of reconciliation. In this vein, allies are considered to be non-Indigenous people who work towards reconciliation, or the establishment of a “new and respectful relationship” with Indigenous Peoples (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, p. 6). While relationship-building is important, Indigenous scholars have highlighted that scholarship on reconciliation tends to centre non-Indigenous voices and generate a problematic “assumption that space must be shared equally between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars” (Stark, 2023, p. 3). In terms of a relationship with Canada, Corey Snelgrove and Matthew Wildcat (2023) emphasize that reconciliation emerges from the political struggle of Indigenous Peoples and not from a ‘progressive’ Canada. Taiaiake Alfred (2023) clarifies that the “reconciliation framework is something that tries to overwhelm the ideas of resistance, overwhelm the idea of land-based culture, overwhelm the idea that you can be a separate but distinct Nation; it wants to overwhelm all these kinds of things in favor of the amenable vision of Indigeneity” (p. 155). In other words, within a reconciliation framework, settler allies might choose to support reconciliation because it is apolitical, forming relationships mainly (or only) with Indigenous Peoples who are thought to fulfill a settler vision of indigeneity that suits the needs of settler society (Alfred, 2023: p. 154).

In the context of social work, some non-Indigenous researchers have developed social work knowledge and practice with an intention of allying — or, at least, attempting to align — with Indigenous Peoples (see Guay et al., 2022; Fortier & Wong, 2019), as well as to live within Indigenous sovereignty as non-Indigenous peoples (see Carlson-Manathara & Rowe, 2021). To share the heavy load of decolonization, which is work that is normally carried by and placed on the shoulders of Indigenous Peoples, some settler scholars are dedicated to going beyond simply theorizing differently to being and doing things differently (Craft et al., 2021). This article modestly takes up this call for settler scholars to be and to do things differently in the context of social work research and education, while reflecting on the notion of allyship, by critically examining the place of reflexivity in our work.

As emphasized in the quotation that opens this piece, allyship requires a strong degree of self-reflection and self-awareness, as well as a willingness to change behaviours based on that reflection and awareness (Amnesty International, 2022). For this special issue, I wish to pick up on this responsibility to develop self-awareness as part of one’s role as an ally and to expand on this aspect in the context of academia in general and social work in particular. For settlers who work within the university setting as researchers and educators, what role, if any, does allyship play on issues that affect the lives of Indigenous Peoples? As this paper will discuss, settler academics have an important role to play in decolonial and anti-colonial approaches towards changing academy (Simpson, 2004), but that role must involve a commitment to ongoing self-reflection, self-awareness, and change. Settler engagement with critical self-reflection is necessary to be able to grapple with difficult emotions such as shame, guilt, and indignation, which will come up when involved in any form of allied work (Davis et al., 2020) — but settlers’ critical self-reflection must go beyond mere emotions.

Largely conceptualized as a Euro-Western practice of critical self-reflection that is used within qualitative research approaches, reflexivity is a process that calls on researchers to question how their present identity and social location might shape and affect the research and relationships within it. Likewise, in the context of Indigenous research and methodologies, reflexivity involves critical self-reflection; however, in contrast to traditionally Euro-Western qualitative approaches, an Indigenist research paradigm involving critical self-reflection can include processes such as ceremonies and discussions with Elders to achieve greater insight (Hart, 2010). As Anishinaabekwe Tricia McGuire-Adams (2020) emphasizes, Indigenous research methodologies necessarily include self-reflexivity to examine systems of oppression and to determine which values and experiences might be impacting the research (p. 36). This approach is crucial work for Indigenous academics, as she notes that “academia can test your limits and make you question if you can endure, because as an Anishinaabe in a predominantly non-Indigenous institution steeped in settler normativity, it can feel like an intellectual battleground” (McGuire-Adams, 2020). How might reflexivity be developed and practiced by settler scholars, while keeping in mind the intellectual battleground described by McGuire-Adams (2020)?

By deeply exploring Lynn Gehl’s (2012) assertion that allies have a responsibility to be “fully grounded in their ancestral history and culture” (para. 3), and McGuire-Adams’ (2021) point that critical self-reflection is ongoing and necessary work for settlers to engage in if they are to be allies to Indigenous Peoples, I argue that reflexivity, as practiced by settler academics, requires something more than locating ourselves within the present moment and examining the effects of our social location on our research and practice. Moving beyond a kind of reflexivity that is understood as a means to an end (i.e., as merely a step or process in a research project), and towards developing ongoing and deeper awareness of the self that spans past and present, individual and ancestors, this paper advances and elucidates the concept of “anti-colonial reflexivity.”

Anti-colonial reflexivity goes beyond what is normally expected of settler academics’ reflexive practices. This process involves connecting oneself to the settler colonial past by tracing one’s genealogy, at the same time as working critically to unsettle and resocialize oneself in the settler colonial present. Linking these two processes will connect settlers to their ancestry, their past and present relation to the land, and the settler colonization of that land in a deeper sense than would be obtained otherwise.

The paper begins with reflection on a contrast that I have observed between Indigenous and settler ways and reasons for self-locating in research. In so doing, I identify that settlers often offer very little of ourselves in terms of who we are, our ancestry, and the relation of these to our research in comparison and in reciprocity to Indigenous academics. The next section then introduces and defines anti-colonial reflexivity as a process with which settler academics can engage to address the gap between these differences, imbalances and disconnections. The paper goes on to describe the purpose of anti-colonial reflexivity by explaining how it is meant to address certain facets of settler ignorance and to re-personalize — rather than continue to de-personalize — the settler colonial past and present. Finally, I illustrate what anti-colonial reflexivity can look like. I do this by locating myself within this work, identifying myself as a mixed-race Japanese Canadian settler, and by explaining both the impacts this has had on my own life and research, and on my understanding of Canada and being a Canadian.

Reflecting on Different Reflexive Approaches: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Ways of Self-Locating

While there are certainly non-Indigenous researchers who already incorporate active reflection on their ancestry and relation to the land in their work (Carlson, 2016; 2017; Carlson-Manathara & Rowe, 2021; Crean, 2009; Francis, 2011) as well as the role and impacts of whiteness on the profession (Khan & Absolon, 2021), these relationships and roles have not yet been expressly articulated in detail within broader methodological discussions in social work that focus on reflexivity as such. Nor has reflexivity been elaborated on in anti-colonial research frameworks that are conducted by non-Indigenous scholars with this explicit, in-depth reflection on ancestry and its relation to land. In this section, I contrast the kind of reflexivity that is demonstrated by Indigenous academics with the reflexivity that I have been trained to practice as a settler academic.

Within various Indigenous worldviews, practices of self-reflection, self-location, and introduction serve important purposes. Taima Moeke-Pickering and Cheryle Partridge (2014) indicate that, in Maori and Anishinaabe worldviews, respectively, it is important that they locate and present themselves in terms of “who we are and where we come from” (p. 150). This kind of self-location could include “who they are, where they come from, and the places, and persons to whom they are related” (Abosolon and Willett referenced in Carlson, 2017, p. 15). Locating and introducing oneself can help to build familiarity and a sense of knowing in terms of both ancestry and place (Fee & Russell, 2007).

Leanne Betamosake Simpson (2011) asserts that it is also a deeply political act of resistance for Anishinaabeg to assert their presence in spaces in which they would normally be invisible, like the university. Echoing a similar sentiment, Kathleen Absolon (2022) clarifies that, for her, “Indigenous re-search methodology has been a process […] whereby I make the invisible — visible. Colonization has attempted to make our realities invisible and has tried to turn us into a disappearing race” (p. 22). It is not only customary for Indigenous academics to situate themselves in relation to their work (Kovach & Montgomery, 2010), then, but an imperative for survival. In each of these Indigenous perspectives, making visible one’s connections to ancestry, place, and colonization are crucial, not just as a form of reflexive self-location and introduction, but as a political act of resisting processes of erasure that are characteristic of settler colonialism.

As Anishinaabe scholar Renee Linklater (2014) emphasizes, Indigenous research requires the researcher to locate themselves within their work. She writes, “First, we write our own stories and share our position in the world before we write about the world. This is a big task because first we have to come to terms with who we are and how we come to do the work that we do” (p. 11). She locates her belonging to Otter Clan and shares where she was born, words about her adoptive parents, and a bit about her ancestral lineage. These aspects of her life, and more, are all woven together in a personal narrative that motivates and anchors the knowledge and experience explored and developed through her scholarship and as relayed in her writing.

Coming “to terms with who we are,” as Linklater (2014, p. 11) discusses, includes looking to and placing oneself in relation to the past. Raven Sinclair (Sinclair et al., 2009) teaches that knowledge cannot be produced about the present without an understanding of the past. She describes self-understanding as encompassing personal history and culture, as well as knowledge of the past and of colonization, each of which are vital aspects of self-understanding as it relates to research, education, and practice for Indigenous social workers (Sinclair et al., 2009).

In stark contrast, as a racialized settler academic, I have noted how very little, over the years, I have been expected and tended to offer of myself in comparison or in reciprocity to the kind of deep self-reflection and awareness that Indigenous scholars bring to their work. In the context of conference presentations, for example, all I could and would offer about myself for many years was to simply introduce myself as a racialized settler. In the beginning, I would do so because I felt it was expected of me, having witnessed others do it, and I had very little to no knowledge about who I was as a settler, how it was that I was a settler, and what that actually meant for me personally. Nor was I aware at the time that, as McGuire-Adams (2021) emphasizes, referring to oneself as a settler “ignites responsibilities that call attention to the decentering of whiteness, the disruption of privilege and the enactment of anti-racist relationships with Indigenous peoples, communities and territories” (p. 763). I was never trained to practice a kind of reflexivity that encouraged me, as a racialized settler academic, to self-locate and be able to identify myself in a way that could attend to the intergenerational realities of who I am and my privilege, and that would be reciprocal to the kind of breadth, depth, vulnerability, and humility that I have witnessed Indigenous scholars offer in their research and at the beginning of their presentations and publications. I wanted to be able to meet Indigenous academics and social workers halfway by being able to let them know who I am, its relation to my work, and what I bring to the table as a settler.

Meeting Indigenous forms of self-location and reflection halfway — or attempting to align in parallel with Indigenous scholars in the pursuit of resisting and dismantling settler colonialism within the academy and beyond — asks that non-Indigenous academics begin to critically learn about personal, familial, ancestral, and community histories as part of reflexive work and bring that learning to bear in research and self-understanding on occupied lands. As Gehl (2012) emphasizes, settlers who wish to be allies — whether academics or not — must take responsibility for doing what is necessary to be grounded in our ancestral histories and cultures, as well as be able to do so with “confidence and pride” (para. 3). Accessing such pride is challenging, however, as settlers can get bound up in shame, which can stall action and limit their possibilities for contributing to justice (Kizuk, 2020). Further, those whose families have been here for many generations often have little to no knowledge of their ancestors.

Victoria Freeman (2002) identifies this lack of ancestral knowledge in her reflections, noting that most settlers of English, Irish, or Scottish descent have no knowledge of their families beyond their grandparents. She writes,

I began to notice that many people I knew [in North America] who were of English, Irish, or Scottish descent like me talked as if they had no connection to their own history. It seemed that most of us were ignorant about how and why our families had ended up on this continent … our family memories often went back only as far as our grandparents. They marked the vanishing point of remembered ancestry for most of us.

Freeman, 2002, p. xvii

Freeman identifies here that settlers do not generally have a strong understanding of their ancestors and the socio-political influences that inspired their movement to and establishment on Turtle Island. There exists a deep disconnection between settlers’ self-understanding and connection to ancestry and to place. Is it possible to — without grasping our own intimate, personal and historical relation to colonization — be truly reflexive and effective allies who understand the impacts of colonization and who contribute to futures that no longer operate under and through it? I contend that it is an unavoidable piece of work to connect personally with the colonial past and present if our work is to be truly transformative.

Introducing Anti-Colonial Reflexivity

Anti-colonial reflexivity responds to these personal and ancestral disconnections by developing knowledge about one’s ancestors — or, put another way, one’s genealogy — and its relation to settler colonialism. Genealogy is a process of locating ancestors across generations and tracing lines of connection between them, resulting in a map of all the different lives that came together to culminate in oneself, here, today. Genealogies develop connections with ancestral pasts through which we might find personal healing and a better understanding of our identity, belonging, and sense of self (Moore, 2022). Susan Moore (2022) has argued that “ancestor research has become a sacred practice in a secular age,” noting that “the inheritance of sacred stories and objects of familial significance; acts of pilgrimage to ancestrally significant places; and participation in ritual gatherings, either with extended family or with others who share similar genealogical interests” can provide or contribute to feelings of “spiritual comfort and life meaning” (p. 4). I am interested in connecting these spiritual and felt possibilities offered by genealogy with reflexive practice.

Since Euro-Western collective memory is predominantly preserved in written form and has been documented, archived, and now often digitized somewhere, working on one’s genealogy will necessarily involve “technology as a research partner” (Hershkovitz & Hardof-Jaffe, 2017). Learning about and connecting with ancestors will likely involve searching numerous databases such as ancestry.ca, ancestry.com, familysearch, or other government and non-profit databases that contain archival documents on land holdings, census records, and other records. Public libraries and archives at the national level, as well as at the much smaller municipal or town levels, often contain their own genealogy sections with librarians who can help to guide this process. I have personally located documents that are relevant to my genealogy from all of these sources. Once I have found an ancestor, I learn about the historical and socio-cultural realities in which they lived and consider this in relation to Canadian settler colonialism to better understand the context in which they lived.

Finding my ancestors has not only involved head-based work, such as database searching and locating documents and records, however; working on my genealogy has also involved heart-based work that has connected me with family members — some of whom I had never met or spoken with before — to learn about the stories they carry in order to breathe life into the bare names and dates that form my genealogy. These moments of connection and storytelling have given me a deep sense of connectedness to my family and to my ancestors, their traditions and cultures, and the lands from which we came originally.

My genealogical practice was originally influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. Rather than referring to a process of researching and developing one’s family tree, Foucault (1977) referred to genealogy as a methodology for unsettling the self-evidence of those things that are taken for granted as normal, natural, or as unquestionable. Genealogies, in his sense of the word, are histories of the present that seek to connect and reveal contexts and conflicts that have been sidelined by dominant accounts (Garland, 2014; Walters, 2012). Genealogies develop counter-histories and counter-memories, which expose forms of knowledge that have been marginalized (Medina, 2011). One way that genealogies unsettle the present is by challenging the familiar. As William Walters (2012) notes, “genealogy enhances the prospects of doing research that does unsettle its objects and defamiliarize the intellectual and political landscapes that thoughts act upon” (p. 114).

Genealogy, as discussed in this paper, takes on this double-meaning of both the uncritical work of reconnecting with and situating our ancestors in our family tree, and the critical work of “unsettling ourselves” (Regan, 2010, p. 11), developing counter-memories and narratives (Freeman, 2002; Medina 2011), as well as revealing our attachments to the great myths that naturalize Canada as “our home and native land.” As I learn about my own ancestors and the larger historical and geopolitical influences that were at play in their lives, I begin to understand and relate to my family tree as a micro-site of Canadian national history itself.

The Purpose of Anti-Colonial Reflexivity: Re-Personalizing Settler Colonialism and Combatting Settler Ignorance

Connecting knowledge of our ancestors through genealogy to our simultaneous attempts to resist and dismantle settler colonialism is crucial anti-colonial reflexive work. It is crucial because, at the same time that settler colonialism attempts to erase Indigenous Peoples or to “eradicate every aspect of who [they] are” (Absolon, 2011, p. 19), it is also maintained by, and relies upon, settlers forgetting where we came from, and as a result, having a sense of natural belonging on Indigenous lands as our original home. This false sense of natural belonging is the inverse of settler colonial erasure in which Indigeneity is violently erased and eradicated from desired lands to achieve domination, while settlers live with collective amnesia and generally ignore our own ancestral origins.

Borrowing from what Anna Cook (2018) refers to as “settler ignorance,” the lack of memory here is “not accidental but is a structural feature of settler colonialism” (p. 21–22) — that is, forgetting our ancestors is a structural feature of settler colonialism. Within this dynamic of settler colonial erasure, “[i]gnorance is more than just the prejudicial blind spots according to one’s group identity,” emphasizes Cook (2018); “[i]gnorance is structural, such that dominant groups not only ‘have less interest’ in criticizing the status quo, but they ‘have a positive interest in seeing the world wrongly’” (p. 14). Settler ignorance not only energizes the denial of colonialism: it also naturalizes settlers as being from here, and Canadian sovereignty as “obvious and natural” (Cook 2018, p. 17). Settler ignorance also strips settlers of an opportunity for deep knowledge about and connection with those who came before us. Anti-colonial reflexivity encourages researchers and practitioners to deeply question, research, and connect with our own ancestry and present placement in our family tree by being curious and critical about why exactly it is that we are generally so disconnected from our ancestors once arrived on this land.

As Susan Crean (2009) emphasizes, the

de-personalization of history is one way to forget it. Psychologically, you can construct a moat around the nasty bits, declare immunity through distance: It didn’t concern me; it was someone else’s fault; it happened way too long ago to matter now … we need to go deeper than just recognizing that Aboriginal peoples were betrayed and victimized.

p. 62, emphasis in original

Anti-colonial reflexivity is a response to this de-personalization of the past by bridging the distance, turning the mirror towards ourselves to understand how colonization does concern us.

Bridging the distance between what happened in the past and what is occurring today while turning the mirror towards ourselves also helps to resist the temptation of what Murray-Lichtman and Elkassem (2021)refer to as “academic voyeurism” in social work (p. 179). Academic voyeurism refers to white settlers’ tendency to extract the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people without simultaneous calls for self-examination (Murray-Lichtman & Elkassem, 2021). We must re-personalize, rather than continue to de-personalize, the settler colonial past and present. Anti-colonial reflexivity asks non-Indigenous people to resist the “consumptive and appropriative tendencies of wanting to ‘learn about’ Indigenous cultures” (Bell et al., 2021, p. 8) without simultaneous and critical self-reflection and awareness. Since appropriation is a key practice of Indigenous erasure under settler colonialism, “maintaining the boundary between Indigenous and settler worlds and knowledges is crucial” (Bell et al., 2021, p. 8). For non-Indigenous people, knowing ourselves, our ancestors, and our histories in relation to settler colonialism strengthens that important boundary.

Learning about settler colonialism — without locating and understanding ourselves firmly within that reality — leaves the self out of the self-reflexive picture and places awareness of our related privileges at surface level. In contrast, anti-colonial reflexivity works to locate our ancestors in whose lives we are each rooted, and from which we have emerged, in a tandem process of locating, remembering, and connecting with our ancestors to deepen our historical and self-understanding (see Matsunaga, 2020), while unsettling ourselves or reflecting critically on how we have been shaped through and continue to shape national myths about Canada and Indigenous Peoples (Regan, 2010). These reflexive learning processes are the foundation of anti-colonial reflexivity, which aims to process and understand colonialism from a connected, embodied, and felt place.

This kind of reconnective reflexive work is crucial to understanding and remembering our places within settler colonialism. Change lies first in educating ourselves and our own people (Huygens, 2011) while remaining meaningfully engaged with Indigenous peoples (Davis et al., 2020). Similarly, Paulette Regan (2010) calls on settlers to “unsettle ourselves to name and then transform the settler — the colonizer who lurks within — not just in words but by our actions” (p. 11). Regan (2010) continues: “the significant challenge that lies before [settlers] is to turn the mirror back upon ourselves and to answer the provocative question posed by historian Roger Epp regarding reconciliation in Canada: How do we solve the settler problem?” (p. 11). In other words, while it is important to learn about Indigenous cultures and practices, to be able to engage appropriately with Indigenous Peoples and communities (Bell et al., 2021), it is equally as important to turn the mirror towards ourselves and our personal, familial, and ancestral histories in order to re-personalize settler colonial history and root our knowledge of colonialism in a balance between “reason and emotion — head and heart” (Regan, 2010, p. 11).

Locating Myself: An Anti-Colonial Reflection

I will illustrate what anti-colonial reflexivity can look like, in its ability to both reconnect and disrupt, by introducing and situating myself within this work. I am a mixed-race Japanese Canadian and, through exploring my own family history, I have learned and can tell many stories about Canada and Canadian history. For example, through my genealogical research over roughly the last ten years, I have learned that my sixth great-grandfather on my maternal side, for his service in the British Imperial Army during the Napoleonic wars, was granted Anishinabek, Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee land occupied by Britain. As was the expectation at the time, he had a number of years to work the land he was granted into a successful farm and homestead, otherwise the land would be returned to the government and granted to someone else[1].

When I learned about this ancestor, I could have ignored what his story offered to teach me and chosen to believe the pervasive myth that Canada is a non-colonial power (Midzain-Gobin & Smith, 2020). I could have continued to find it difficult to see how my life is immersed in settler colonialism (McGuire-Adams, 2021) and distanced myself from this part of reality. Far from being a distant, unknown, and disconnected ancestor, though, I learned that the grave of this ancestor is located only an hour or so away from where I currently reside. Through finding and learning about this great-grandfather alone, I learned about settler colonial invasion and erasure in intimate relation to myself. By learning about the Act that granted my sixth great-grandfather land, I learned about what Alfred (2023) reminds us has been the project regarding Indigenous Peoples from the beginning: “Removing us from our land” (p. 77). He clarifies that dispossession is not simply to be understood or considered in legal terms, but in terms of how differently life is lived and experienced once that land has been taken away (Alfred, 2023).

Another branch of the family on my maternal side arrived in the early 1900s as part of the population of farmers and farm labourers who came from the Scottish Lowlands. This group comprised the majority of immigrants that would contribute to the growth of a population of over one million Scottish settlers in western Canada (Library and Archives Canada, 2013). Once here, their lives became rooted and lived out through their farms. My great-grandparents farmed on Metis, Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene land for 46 years.

Through learning about these great-grandparents, and having met one of them when I was a child (I am named after her, in fact), I could begin to see and feel with nuance and detail what McGuire-Adams (2020) identifies as the ways that settlers distance themselves from colonial homelands: “by establishing settler governance, settler identity and practices, and settler futurity” (p. 13). My great-grandma took great pride in being a Canadian. Despite having immigrated here from Scotland, she readily took up life on these foreign lands as her own to identify with, cultivate, and work, according to her own desires and visions for herself and her children. Her settler identity as a Canadian, her farming practices, her work to ensure a future for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, while living within established — and developing new — settler governance structures, all produced distance from Scottish homelands.

As noted above, in the beginning of my education, I had neither a real understanding of nor a personal connection with identifying myself as a settler. Had I not begun taking the time and effort to work on my family tree, I would still be there. Before this work, I did begin to understand that I was complicit in settler colonization, because that is what I was taught, but I could not articulate with any depth of insight how I was implicated. The more that I located and reconnected with my ancestors while piecing together their stories, the more that the words that I had read in texts about settler colonialism began to come to life within me.

Like my maternal line, the Japanese side of the family arrived as labourers, but did not experience the same kind of rootedness that my maternal side enjoyed. Throughout the 1940s, my family — along with some 22,000 other Japanese Canadians — were targeted by the Canadian government in several ways. Known commonly as the internment of Japanese Canadians, the period from 1942 to 1949 stripped once-vibrant communities and people of dignity, rights, property, belongings, and livelihoods, and forcibly relocated and incarcerated them in isolated and poorly built camps on Indigenous lands in what is colonially known as the British Columbia interior for years beyond the war’s end (Oikawa, 2012).

My family spent months living in horse stalls at a containment site called Hastings Park in Vancouver while waiting to be transferred by train to a camp named Tashme. Policed around the clock by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Tashme was one of the largest internment camps. My family lived in shack number 64. Made of two-by-fours and tar paper, and virtually uninsulated, the conditions were very difficult for my family, especially in winter. My father survived this period in Canadian history, as did my grandparents and great-grandmother. My great-grandfather died while in the camp.

Delving deeply into my paternal side of the family history caused me to reflect on settler colonialism in a somewhat different way than my maternal side. Whereas I learned complicity and about the origins and motivations of settler colonialism through my maternal line, through my paternal line, I first learned about standing in solidarity against the injustices that can be and have been perpetrated by the Canadian government. I saw and felt parallels between the racist strategies and goals of assimilation that were used by the Canadian government to eliminate Japanese Canadians from B.C., and some of the strategies that have been used in attempts to eliminate Indigenous Peoples altogether. As Oikawa (2012) emphasizes, the internment of Japanese Canadians must be considered in relation to settler colonialism. We must take seriously how Asian and Indigenous communities have been “subject to processes of colonial conflation by the settler state” in Canada and the United States (Day, 2018, p. 9).

This is, however, not to claim innocence or to suggest that what Japanese Canadians experienced is one and the same with colonization, or that we have not participated or do not also participate in settler colonialism. Focusing on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians, Nicole Yakashiro (2021) emphasizes that, while it was a site of incredible loss for individuals, families and community, we must also keep in mind that the notion of private property, itself, is a settler colonial concept and that “the dispossession of Nikkei settlers” — referring to the Japanese word for the Japanese diaspora — “reinforced a property regime built on white possession and Indigenous dispossession” (p. 9). Japanese Canadians have also been active in what Iyko Day (2018) refers to as “claiming Canada” through at least the foundations of asserting our “Canadianness” as a site of resistance against racialization when seeking justice from the Canadian government over the internment period. As Roy Miki (2010) identifies, “one way to resist outright racialization was to default to ‘Canadian,’ a term that declared membership in a citizenry” (p. 14).

With this complexity in mind, I have taken a critical approach that is “attuned to reckoning with colonial complicity, exploring the ethics of responsibility, indebtedness, and solidarity with Indigenous communities” (Day, 2018, p. 1). Connecting as I have with my family’s past, stories, and ancestors — on both sides of my family — leaves within me an overwhelming sense of responsibility to be a source of change in my generational lines and to enter into the “politics of decolonization and anti-colonialism” that Simpson describes (2004, p. 381). Now from a place, as Gehl (2012) calls for, that is increasingly and critically grounded in my ancestral history and culture, my role as an ally, as an educator, and as a researcher is to take this ongoing learning and use it as fuel for settler colonial refusal, resistance, and change.

Conclusion

The editors of this special issue asked authors to examine the concept of allyship in terms of its relevance and complexities in social work. This paper took a step back from the concept of allyship itself in order to examine reflexivity. I understand reflexivity to be an important aspect of being both an effective ally to Indigenous Peoples, and also an ethical academic and researcher in social work and beyond. When settlers are working with Indigenous Peoples, however, it is a crucial that critical self-reflection be able to incorporate the past, colonization, and an understanding of ancestral connections — or what Gehl (2012) emphasizes as being “fully grounded in ancestral history and culture” (para. 3). Attending to the amnesia that marks the connections that settlers have to our own ancestors, anti-colonial reflexivity calls for the re-personalization of settler colonial history in order to understand it more deeply in the present. The goal is to then ally with Indigenous Peoples, who call for the support of non-Indigenous allies, by bringing ourselves more fully into that relationship.

Since Indigenous researchers, educators, and practitioners have long been calling for broad anti- and decolonial change within the discipline of social work as well as for settler individuals to be and to do things differently (Craft et al., 2021), anti-colonial reflexivity is one aspect of being and doing differently. Carlson (2017) emphasizes that settler scholars require clear, practical, appropriate, and accountable research methodologies that are distinct from but aligned with Indigenous anti-colonial and decolonial research. To this end, anti-colonial reflexivity is a process of developing a deep, embodied, and ancestral relation-oriented kind of reflexivity that works to realize connections to our own ancestors and the past as well as their relation to the present. This work must be done while remaining meaningfully engaged with Indigenous peoples.

In the present times of vigilance against “pretendianism,” as white settlers are increasingly self-identifying as Indigenous based on a distant ancestor, I would be remiss to not attend to the work of Darryl Leroux (2019) in this paper, which involves and encourages non-Indigenous peoples to look into their genealogies to deepen reflexive practice. It might be that someone who decides to delve into their genealogy as part of their reflexive practice as an ally finds a distant relative who was Indigenous. Future work on anti-colonial reflexivity should engage with the possibility of finding an Indigenous ancestor in order to develop the proper clarification and boundaries to which I referred earlier in this piece. That is, anti-colonial reflexivity should always strengthen the important boundary between Indigenous and settler worlds and knowledges through deepening self-awareness and rootedness in our ancestries. As Leroux’s work highlights, false claims to Indigeneity serve to expand the boundaries of whiteness and “are used politically to oppose actual, living Indigenous peoples” (p. 3).

I have not proposed a step-by-step method in this paper, because everyone’s process will be different based on where their ancestors originated. Rather, I have introduced the concept, its rationale, and some guiding principles. The work involved in anti-colonial reflexivity is in taking time to look to into our genealogies, not simply to locate the names of ancestors in a family tree, but to attempt to unsettle ourselves (Regan, 2010) by looking critically towards the socio-political worlds in which they lived so that we can map out or trace our own lineages in relation to settler colonization. Such mapping is obviously neither work that is done quickly nor as a matter of methodological obligation for a research project; rather, this is slow and ongoing, deeply personal work. Anti-colonial reflexivity is a kind of reflexivity that is ongoing, is foundational, and challenges the bricks and mortar of our histories, beliefs, and experiences. The goal then, is to become the end point in our generational lines of those who ignorantly uphold and reproduce settler colonialism and to bring truer versions of ourselves to the table when allying with Indigenous Peoples.

With this understanding in mind, anti-colonial reflexive work resists the liberal notion that I am an individual, and my social background, assumptions, positioning, and behaviour concern that which is within the bounds of my experiences from the day I was born until now. Rather, anti-colonial reflexivity proposes that we consider and root reflexive efforts and research in the knowledge that we are not simply a set of individual experiences, privileges, and oppressions that exist at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the present; we are also a set of intersecting relations that span back through generations of ancestors, each passing down knowledge (for better and for worse), and each having an impact on the next. Anti-colonial reflexivity seeks to re-personalize settler colonial history and present through this imminent, felt, deeply personal and necessarily unsettling — but nevertheless reconnecting — generational work.