Migrant Care as Resisting Nation-States and Being in Good Kinship with Indigenous Communities
摘要
We—the co-authors—are Black (Eritrean), Indigenous (Anishinaabe), and Asian (Filipina) women, friends, colleagues, and organizers committed to and engaged in cross-communal, cross-cultural, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) solidarity work towards decolonial and liberated futures. Here, we discuss communities of care in migration by drawing on our lived experiences organizing in colonially called Canada. More specifically, we map communities of care in the context of Canada, with a focus on care across migrants of color and Indigenous communities. We take a multifaceted approach by analyzing how governments—ranging from the Eritrean, Philippine, and Canadian governments—conceptualize and exploit migrant care in harmful and extractive ways. We then push against this framing of care to center a conceptualization of care that is mindful of migrant positioning in Indigenous lands and that is rooted in and emerges from community, love, and solidarity through feminist and queer Black (Crenshaw, 1989; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 2007), Indigenous (Simpson, 2017), and Asian (Rodriguez, Kasamahal, Kasamahan: Love and dissident friendship as pinay radical scholar-activist praxis. Pinay Power II, McGill University, Keynote, 2019) lenses. As scholars in critical race, diaspora, anti-colonial, and critical immigration studies have ongoingly emphasized, migration is a necessity for survival for many peoples of color—including Eritrean and Filipino communities—whose lands and lives are ongoingly impacted by colonialism, imperialism, globalization, resource extraction, political conflicts, and other systemic factors. Yet, as scholars in critical race, diaspora, anti-colonial, and critical immigration studies have also persistently asserted, even as refugees and migrants must leave their homelands due to these forces of oppression, they continue to maintain care networks that are deeply rooted in their homelands (Francisco-Menchavez, The labor of care: Filipina migrants and transnational families in the digital age. University of Illinois Press, 2018). We critically reflect on how these care networks, which are frequently gendered, often become entangled in exploitative and harmful labor practices by multiple institutional and governmental forces, both in the homelands and in Canada, which co-opt refugee and migrant care towards their own capitalistic agendas. Even as care is exploited in harmful ways by institutions and states of power, we firmly believe that migrant care can be [and is] a radical form of love and solidarity. In this light, we argue that another urgent dimension of care for migrants to consider when arriving in the lands colonially occupied by Canada is how they can address their complicities in participating in processes of settler colonialism and Indigenous displacement. Thus, migrant communities of care settling in Canada must also contend with and include migrant/refugee care for and solidarity with Indigenous lands, life, and sovereignty. We assert that migrant care must resist exploitative practices by nation-states and be in good kinship with Indigenous communities and lands that we now share.