The Gender, Sexuality, and Society Program cordially invites you to "Disrupting the Discourse of Savagery: Feminisms, Critical Masculinities, and Indigenous Freedom"
Throughout the process of colonization from Europe to the Americas, narratives of Indigenous people and communities as "savage" are central to the legitimization of settler state sovereignty. Casting “the Indian” man and woman as primitive, inferior, and otherwise abnormal serves as justification for the expansion of Western legal orders and the decimation of Indigenous law. Savage narratives endure centuries after the imposition of this alien legal system and continues to frame Indigenous men, women, and Two-Spirit people as objects stuck in time. The result is a violence: a legal architecture of purported enlightenment that suffocates Indigenous lives and requires uncharted extraction of our lands and bodies. Dreaming of kin beyond the borders of colonial gender relations, Indigenous resistance to ongoing colonialism requires a counter-hegemonic articulation of Indigenous masculinities. Our resistance is rooted in this reclamation of radical love and law in the form of sovereign Indigenous futures.
Hayden King is a frequent contributor to the public discussion on Indigenous politics in Canada. He is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and is a member of the Beausoleil Chippewa Nation.
Erica Violet Lee is a Nêhiyaw writer and Indigenous community organizer at the University of Saskatchewan, of Thunderchild First Nation.