Month: November 2013

Marike Reid-Gaudet

 

La surveillance de l’éducation par les gouvernements est un des moyens dont  ils se servent pour influencer l’opinion.
– William Godwin, 1756 – 1836

Je m’intéresse au unschooling, à la non-scolarisation, car c’est une philosophie de vie appliquée plutôt qu’une méthode pédagogique comme telle. Cette philosophie, qui est celle des écoles-libres, peut se vivre également dans le cadre de l’éducation à domicile. À mon avis, cette philosophie favorise chez l’enfant l’autonomie, la confiance en soi et le plaisir de s’instruire. L’éducation prend tout son sens en permettant à l’enfant d’apprendre à se connaître lui-même et ne se réduit pas à une simple accumulation de savoir comme dans le système scolaire traditionnel.

Une des plus anciennes école-libre encore active aujourd’hui est Summerhill en Angleterre qui fête cette année ses 92 ans. A.S. Neill1 fonde Summerhill en 1921, les principes de bases de l’école sont la liberté et l’autogestion. Le rôle de l’expert est remis en question: les profs sont d’avantages des facilitateurs. L’enfant est maître de son temps et responsable de son éducation. Neill croyait que les enfants n’apprennent vraiment que lorsqu’ils le souhaitent, que la motivation est intrinsèque, et que apprendre est un mouvement qui part de soi, alors qu’à l’école traditionnelle l’apprentissage est passif : le professeur possède le savoir et le déverse sur l’enfant qui doit essentiellement mémoriser l’information.

Pourtant on n’apprend pas à un enfant à marcher…

Neill postulait que l’école traditionnelle fabrique des individus plus facilement manipulables afin de répondre aux besoins d’une société de consommation.

Ivan Illich2, génial auteur et critique de nos sociétés industrielles s’intéresse aux liens entre l’école et la société capitaliste. En 1961, il crée au Mexique un laboratoire où plusieurs centaines de personnes sont venues réfléchir ensemble sur les meilleures façons pour changer la société. Illich trouvait nécessaire une déscolarisation de la société et chercha des solutions pour séparer l’école et l’État. Ces ateliers prirent fin en 1976, mais ils furent des incubateurs de plusieurs révolutionnaires, tels que l’anarchiste Paul Goodman, le pédagogue brésilien Paulo Freire et le pédagogue américain John Holt.

John Holt3, qui fut amèrement déçu par les réformes, quitta le système traditionnel pour devenir un ardent défenseur de l’éducation à domicile dans les années 70. C’est d’ailleurs lui qui inventa le néologisme unschooling.

Le terme unschooling définit la façon dont vivent les familles en dehors du système d’éducation traditionnel et de son curriculum compulsif. Holt n’excluait pas, pour les enfants, la possibilité d’utiliser une approche traditionnelle ou des manuels scolaires, mais avec pour différence que ce soit l’enfant qui choisit ce qu’il veut apprendre et comment il va l’apprendre. L’enfant contrôle ainsi son apprentissage. Apprendre ne devrait pas être inféodé à un corpus de savoir et de connaissances qui répond à une demande sociétale.

Le rôle des parents dans le unschooling ainsi que des adultes dans l’école libre est d’encourager la curiosité des enfants et de les assister dans leurs recherches et expérimentations. L’enfant est amené à se poser des questions, suivre ses intérêts, lire des textes, initier des projets.

Notre système d’éducation est construit sur un modèle industriel: la journée commence avec une cloche qui sonne, les pupitres sont ordonnés en rangée et les enfants sont séparés en différentes classes, comme par année de fabrication. Ce modèle, né avec le début de l’industrialisation, existe pour reproduire le type de travailleur et de consommateur du système capitaliste. Parce que la philosophie du unschooling postule que l’enfant est un apprenant naturel qui devrait être en charge de son éducation, il s’agit d’un changement radical de paradigme où le but poursuivi n’est plus la reproduction du système mais le plein épanouissement d’un individu, l’enfant.

Ce n’est pas le savoir qui doit être inculqué, c’est la personnalité qui doit parvenir à son propre épanouissement.
 – Max Stirner4, 1842

Créer des alternatives concrètes à l’endoctrinement du système d’éducation institutionnel a toujours été une priorité pour les anarchistes. Que ce soit dans le domaine de la réflexion comme chez Godwin ou Stirner, ou dans le domaine de l’expérimentation comme chez Sébastien Faure et Francisco Ferrer.

L’anarchiste français Sébastien Faure5 créa La Ruche en 1904. Cette école-libre ne dépendait ni de l’État, ni du domaine privé, et elle était auto-suffisante. Il s’agissait tout d’abord d’une école, mais elle était aussi d’une coopérative de travail à laquelle tous participaient pour s’autofinancer. Établis à la campagne, les participants y produisaient du miel, du lait et des légumes et les enfants y étaient autonomes. On y trouvait des ateliers pratiques sans aucun classement, les filles y avaient le même statut que les garçons (ce qui était rare à cette époque), et on n’y enseignait pas la religion. En 1917, suite à la première guerre mondiale, La Ruche ferma ses portes.

Francisco Ferrer anarchiste espagnol créa l’Escuela Moderna en 1901. Ferrer fut emprisonné et exécuté en 1909 par Franco qui a grandement été encouragé par l’église catholique. La mise à mort de Ferrer scandalisa l’opinion publique et donna naissance à plusieurs écoles-libres inspirées de la sienne. Il y a eu en Suisse, en Hollande, en Allemagne et même aux États-Unis.

Qu’en est-il du Québec?

L’éducation au Canada relève de la juridiction des provinces. Au Québec, l’éducation à domicile est légale6, enchâssée dans la loi sur l’instruction publique (article 15.4). Par contre, les écoles-libres sont présentement illégales au Québec. Il existe pourtant des écoles-libres qui ont fait leur preuves en Ontario, en Colombie Britannique, à Albany (à peine deux heures de Montréal).

L’École-Libre Radicale de Mtl Rad School est un groupe d’adultes et d’enfants dévoués à la liberté et à la démocratie en éducation. Le groupe milite pour la création d’une première école-libre au Québec. Ils ont depuis quelques années expérimenté le fonctionnement d’une école-libre avec un petit groupe d’enfants se concentrant sur: les cercles démocratiques, la création collective d’un curriculum organique, etc… La première année, ils ont travaillé sur l’éducation des enfants et l’année suivante sur celle des adolescents. En ce moment, ils souhaitent plutôt concentrer leurs énergies à présenter un projet pilote au gouvernement. Si vous êtes intéressé-e-s à vous joindre au collectif et à participer à leur projets, n’hésitez surtout pas à les contacter!

montreal@ecolelibre-freeschool.org
@EcoleLibreMtl

 

1 Neill A.S. Libres enfants de Summerhill, La découverte, 2004.

2 Illich I. Une société sans école, Seuil 1971.

3 Holt J. Teach Your Own, Perseus, 2003.

4 Stirner M. L’unique et sa propriété ed. Poche, Paris, 2000.

5 Faure S., Propos subversifs Tops Eds H.trinquier, 2012.

6 Association québécoise pour l’éducation à domicile:
http://www.aqed.qc.ca/fr/lois/la-loi

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Untitled

Artist: Shannon Willmott

Medium: Mixed media on paper

Description: This painting is about history and the weight of the legacy we are struggling under. We cannot escape the atrocities that have happened on this earth – to the land, to the animals and to each other. It is a terrible and ongoing weight. The feelings that motivated the making of this painting asks me, how will you continue? How will you intervene? What can be done?

Allison Jones

 

This paper explores my personal experience of burnout1. This is not a topic I intended to write about, but one that grabbed me and demanded attention. Here, I explore the meanings and roots of activist burnout, and what social movement theory might offer to understand this experience. I will argue that burnout is both a public and private issue, and offer constructive suggestions of ways that burnout in social movements can be prevented and addressed.

 

The Impetus

This paper was born out of a group project for the course ‘Contemporary Social Movements’. For the project we were asked to organize a number of actions around an issue at our university, and engage in ‘learning-by-doing’ by executing our ideas and incorporating the social movement theories we had learned in class into our planning. Initially, I was overjoyed at the opportunity to engage in activism as part of my coursework; unfortunately, this enthusiasm was short-lived. Our group organized two actions, both focused on critical pedagogy at McGill. While I expected the project to be fun and interesting, I instead found that I was disengaged, frustrated, and cynical about the project, our actions, and our results.

My ongoing pessimistic and disinterested attitude prompted me to begin wondering why my enthusiasm was so low, and, after linking this to other events and recent experiences, to wonder whether I was ‘burning out’. These questions lead me to research the phenomenon of activist burnout, and reflect on my own experiences of it.

 

Involvement in Activism

It is important to understand that this project was not my first involvement in social action. I have been involved in organizing in a variety of capacities for a number of years, but in the past year found myself increasingly invested in high-cost activism2. During the student strike, I attended numerous demonstrations, helped with mobilization efforts at McGill, participated in nightly casseroles, and became highly engaged in popular education groups throughout the city. A large  portion of my time was devoted to these activities. Simultaneously, I was a member of a number of environmental and political groups on campus, particularly through QPIRG and CKUT. This year, I continued to participate in quite a few of these groups, while also working three part-time jobs and studying full-time. These experiences encouraged me to take this social movements course, and also played a significant role in my reflections on activist burnout.

 

Biographical Availability

The reasons for this high level of involvement are many, including previous experience, ideological affinity, social networks, and structural availability. In particular, I could be involved in high-cost activism because of my biographical availability, “defined as the absence of personal constraints that may increase the costs and risks of movement participation” (McAdam 1986, 70). This includes my being a student (with a flexible schedule), unmarried and with no children, a Canadian citizen, and new to Montreal (thereby lacking other major commitments). A shift in my biographical availability recently, which I perceive as linked to my burnout, was to go from being unemployed during the last school year to working this year.

 

Niche Overlap

Another way of understanding my involvement in a variety of SMOs3 is to refer to Popielarz and McPherson’s (1995) description of niches in social space. Social space is arranged by sociodemographic characteristics on multiple axes. Since people tend to associate with others who have similar sociodemographic characteristics as themselves, those people are also close to them in social space (701). While there are a number of components to this proposition, that which concerns my argument is the concept of niche overlap. Niche overlaps are areas in social space where multiple groups recruit members. This causes members whose identity falls into a niche overlap to “run out of the resources necessary for membership” (715) because of the pressure to participate in many groups. I propose that SMOs, which require members to have certain social networks, value systems, and structural availabilities, often draw on the same individuals for membership, and that these members have increased turnover and burnout.

As a student activist who believes in free education, during the Quebec Student Movement I lay in the niche overlap of many SMOs recruiting members. Additionally, as a queer woman interested in and studying migrant justice, sustainability, and First Nations rights, my identity and interests also made me a potential member for other SMOs and activist causes. This resulted in me “quickly run[ning] out of the time, money, and attention important for voluntary association participation” (Popielarz and McPherson 1995, 704).

 

Burnout

Not only did my biographical availability allow me to become involved in high-cost activism, as McAdam (1986) proposes, my social location also positioned me in a niche overlap, where I was pulled in many directions at once by varied SMOs whose ‘profile’ I fit. After the decrease in my biographical availability when I began working, I continued to be involved in most of the SMOs I had previously participated in, spreading myself very thin. Despite attempts to withdraw myself from a number of commitments, I was unable to do so for a variety of reasons: I needed to finish hiring new coordinators for one of my jobs before I could leave; a friend relied on me for babysitting her son while she worked; two organizations that I could have more easily left were those that I enjoyed most and with which I wanted to stay involved.

This led to a slow process of burnout, characterized by disengagement, disinterest, exhaustion, and cynicism. I withdrew from organizations that I had been very involved in, considering this retreat to be partially based on my exhaustion, but also due to structural problems in organizations with which I was highly involved. For example, I increasingly found that the Alternative University Project (AltU) was overly focused on building institutional structure to formalize its existence; The Plant (a collectively-run art cooperative and living space) was dominated by a few individuals, all male, and left little room for new members or actions; and QPIRG (an organization focused on environmental and social justice research, action, and popular education) was not welcoming enough, and thus only attracted the same small group of students to all events. I almost stopped participating entirely in events such as meetings, demonstrations, workshops, and actions. Additionally, I found my emotional state to be much less consistent than in the past, and began experiencing sudden and very powerful mood swings.

I consider these experiences to fulfil the description of burnout given above, and think that being burned out led to my disinterested participation in our group project for the course. I felt critical of the project and found it emotionally straining on my pre-existing relationships with group members. Seemingly small things, like the fact that much of our organizing was done via e-mail, became very frustrating for me; I felt our organizing process was not well-done, the actions would fail, the project would be worthless, and so what was the point in trying, anyway.

 

Individual Model

Much literature characterizes burnout as an individual problem. This can be seen, for example, “in the occupational medical setting of some European countries…[where] burnout is an established medical diagnosis” (Schaufeli, Leiter, and Maslach 2008, 205). When categorized as such, burnout is ascribed to a particular individual, based on their symptoms. It is also treated individually and, as Arches (1997, 52) describes, “proposals for what can be done focus primarily on the individual and adaptation, with counselling and self-healing the interventions of choice”.

Yet, I found while working through my own burnout, that changes focused solely on myself were not effective in overcoming the roots of the burnout. Giving up commitments made those I had organized with disappointed at my disengagement, and I felt frustrated at no longer participating in what I had considered to be meaningful organizing. I also found that when discussing burnout with friends, many could relate to my experience. I realized that this was a much broader problem—many SMOs were systematically not able to support members and prevent widespread burnout. Based on these experiences, I do not feel that an individually focused understanding of or response to burnout is appropriate; therefore, I will instead outline a social analysis of burnout.

 

Social Analysis

Schaufeli, Leiter, and Maslach (2008) argue that burnout in the workplace is due to two factors: a lack of resources for human services work, and a lack of alignment between the values of companies and their workers. They push towards a social understanding of burnout by acknowledging these common trends in organizations, but I think that the work of Arches (1997) is more thorough and useful for this analysis. Arches suggests that burnout is a public issue, created “by tensions between bureaucratization, individualization and professionalization” (1997, 52) in the workplace. Drawing parallels between her analysis and my experience, I will compare the SMOs that I was involved in with the social work workplace that is central to her research.

The commitments with which I felt the strongest frustration and burnout were those that had the least collective components and the most individual, bureaucratic work. A major part of my declining energy was because a number of groups I was involved in decreased the number of meetings, actions and activities focused on hope and building alternatives to mainstream institutions, in order to focus on logistically moving projects forward. This meant a rise in organizing via email, and that meetings became brief, tense, and goal-centred.

I also felt that towards the end of the Quebec Student Movement, some groups, such as AltU and the Popular Education Network, became very focused on creating institutional structures and that all our efforts went into this, rather than organizing workshops, teach-ins, public discussions, skill-shares, and other forms of popular education as we had originally done. Thus, the organizing I was participating in was becoming less process-centred, creative, and dynamic, and more structured and goal-focused. This process in SMOs mirrors the process of professionalization and bureaucratization in social work, where these trends are often seen as significantly contributing to worker isolation, exhaustion, and loss of autonomy (Arches 1991).

In addition to these factors, I believe that the Quebec Student Movement perhaps led to a collective experience of burnout by many activists in the past year in Montreal, which played a key part in the decline of the movement. This is based on my own experience and on trends I have noticed in friends, in organizing, and in the public presence of the movement in Montreal. It is possibly due to the fact that many students, although biographically available to participate in high-cost activism during the strike, became positioned within niche overlaps, causing them to engage and disengage in varied groups and actions with a high turnover rate. When the strike ended, students’ biographical availability decreased (as they returned to class), and after months of protests, meetings, actions, and organizing, many were too exhausted—emotionally, physically, and mentally—to continue being involved in activism to the same extent.

 

Strategies

I will now address potential strategies for dealing with burnout, moving from individual to social responses, exploring the balance between these methods and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

As described above, the most common mode of individual response to burnout is counselling or the development and practice of self-care methods. These techniques are used both to address burnout once it is occurring and as preventative measures. Schaufeli, Leiter, and Maslach suggest that “preventing burnout is not enough, it is necessary to go further to foster work engagement” (2008, 216). They point to a shift towards positive psychology in the field of burnout that encourages psychologists to consider strengths rather than weaknesses, and look for energy, involvement, efficacy, vigour, dedication, and absorption of workers in their practice. Yet, looking for these characteristics without realizing that they are highly influenced by work conditions again misses the crucial social factors of burnout.

Downton and Wehr (2000), in a study of persistent peace activists in Colorado, find a middle ground between individual and collective responses to burnout. They describe how “persisters were creative in designing their lives so they could be available” (538) as a preventative measure against burnout through over-extending themselves. By this they mean that individuals intentionally maximized their biographical availability. They further argue that organizations have a significant influence on cultivating ‘commitment sustaining factors’ to “influence the depth of persisters’ involvement and their ability to stay active over the long term” (536). Commitment sustaining factors both prevent and respond to burnout. They include developing strong ties to SMOs, balancing between different aspects of their lives, personally benefiting from activism (materially as well as emotionally), and having space for creativity and innovation in activism. Thus, individuals and the groups they are involved with co-create conditions that foster long-term involvement and preclude disengagement.

Valocchi (2010) also offers a balance between individual and collective responses to burnout in his book Social Movements and Activism in the USA, based on a series of interviews with activists in Hartford, CT. He describes how almost all of the activists he interviewed framed their burnout as an individual issue, but argues that it is important to put their individual stories in dialogue with social theory. He critiques their individual focus on burnout but social focus on other issues, writing, “they fail to turn their progressive values onto themselves and ask themselves how communities of activists should take care of one another” (138). The solution he offers is that activists should “spend as much time fashioning plausibility structures4 and other forms of internal support for themselves and others as they do engaging in the more externally directed battles for social change” (130).

A number of authors in the field of social work offer structural solutions to burnout. Dreikosen puts this bluntly: “an empowered group of social workers, working together to change a system that is oppressive and flawed, is a great deal more productive than several isolated workers blaming themselves for burning out” (2009, 108), and advocates for coalitions of social workers to create systemic change in their profession. Arches (1997) makes a similar argument, and gives more concrete suggestions on how to create this systemic change. She suggests that burnout can be prevented and addressed through forming political support groups of social workers; forming coalitions with the communities in which social workers work; publicizing successes; lobbying the government to change working conditions; participating in public and community education about resource constraints and opportunities; and developing an awareness of alternative, more community-based structures (such as feminist and Africentric models).

Based on these different author’s work and research, I wish to take forward with me a few key ideas about burnout prevention and response. The first is that individual actions, while possible, can only go so far. Counselling and self-care respond to the symptoms of a widespread problem, rather than its roots. I can act individually by trying to increase my biographical availability, for example by reducing other commitments, but doing so does not address the fact that there are many others in similar situations and that this is a systemic problem.

A second lesson is that organizations can play an important role in addressing and slowing burnout. A number of the organizations that I have been involved with could have worked more collaboratively, instead of separately working on the same issues and causing members to burnout faster because of the creation and exploitation of niche overlaps. We could have also focused less on institutional strength, as based in bureaucratic models of organizations, and instead embraced more community-centric models like those Arches (1997) advocates.

Third, the qualitative studies I read about activist commitment and burnout (Downton and Wehr, 2000; Valocchi, 2010) focus on the fact that although burnout can be prevented by SMOs developing strong support and commitment sustaining factors, in reality activists are often forced to create their own strategies, as organizations do not make this a priority. This makes me want to work to ensure the organizations with which I work in the future prioritize strategies that support activists from varied backgrounds. It also signals to me that, to a certain extent, my life must be constructed around my involvement in activism. I am implementing small steps towards this, for example by shifting my employment to be more directly linked to my activism, by changing my academic program to study activism and topics of interest to me, and by learning more about burnout and how to address it.

 

Conclusion

Writing this paper has been a significant part of my process of dealing with my burnout this year. It has helped me understand that my experience of burnout was not isolated or individual, but was linked to structural factors and social patterns. As members of activist communities, we need to find ways to support one another and ensure that the groups we are a part of are actively combating wide-spread and persistent activist burnout. To address this problem, we must begin to explore, together, how to foster long-term, sustainable commitment.

 

1 In this paper, burnout is defined as “a cluster of physical, emotional and interactional problems stemming from emotional exhaustion, perceived lack of accomplishment, and depersonalization related to job stress” (Arches 1997, 51). In this case, ‘job’ is understood broadly as my activism, following Fillieule’s (2010) discussion of the notion of the ‘activist career’.

2 High-cost activism refers to participation requiring significant expenditure of time, money, and energy (McAdam 1986). I typify my activist involvement as such because of the high time and energy it requires. The risk level of my involvement varies depending on specific actions.

3 An SMO is “a complex, or formal, organization which identifies its goals with the preferences of a social movement or a countermovement and attempts to implement those goals” (McCarthy and Zald 1977, 1218).

4 ‘Plausibility structures’ are cited by Valocchi as a concept developed by Sharon Erickson Nepstad, and defined as “a set of practices, networks, and relations that provide material, cognitive, and emotional supports for activists doing demanding work” (Valocchi, 2010, 129).

 

References

Arches, Joan L. 1991. “Social Strucure, Burnout, and Job Satisfaction.” Social Work 36(3): 202-206.

Arches, Joan L. 1997. “Burnout and Social Action.” Journal of Progressive Human Services 8(2): 51-62.

Downton, James, Jr. and Paul Wehr. 2000. “Persistent Pacifism: How Activist Commitment is Developed and Sustained.” Peace Research Abstracts 37(1): 531-550.

Dreikosen, Denise. 2009. “Radical Social Work: A Call to Link Arms.” Journal of Progressive Human Services 20(2): 107-109.

Fillieule, Olivier. 2010. “Some Elements of an Interactionist Approach to Political Disengagement.” Social Movement Studies 9(1): 1-15.

McAdam, Doug. 1986. “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer.” American Journal of Sociology 92(1): 64-90.

McCarthy, John D. and Mayer N. Zald. 1977. “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory.” The American Journal of Sociology 82(6): 1212-1241.

Schaufeli, Wilmar B., Michael P. Leiter, and Christina Maslach. 2008. “Burnout: 35 Years of Research and Practice.” Career Development International 14(3): 204-220.

Valocchi, Stephen. 2010. Social Movements and Activism in the USA. London: Routledge.

Myriam Abdelhak

In collaboration with Sandra Sjollema, Director, L’Anneau Poétique

 

“What is in a Word / À l’intérieur des mots” is a project that started in February 2013, initiated by L’Anneau Poétique, in collaboration with the Community University Research Exchange (CURE) at QPIRG Concordia. The aim of the project was to gather information on community-based creative writing groups in Montreal for research purposes, and to make it easier for the different groups in the city to communicate with each other, organize collaborative events, share knowledge, and build solidarity. L’Anneau Poétique holds monthly poetry sessions, open mics, and teams up with activist groups and grassroots writing groups from across Canada to organize events in its home base of Côte des Neiges as well as in other parts of Montreal.

For this project, I gathered information on the following groups: Jeunesse 2000, Café Grafitti, the Saint James Drop-in Centre, Forward House, Les Impatients, Culture X, L’Injecteur and BUMP. This article aims to provide an overview of the research done as of July 2013, as well as underlying the major ideas I gathered through this project.

Overview: A plurality of voices and purposes

The different creative writing groups I contacted throughout the project encompass a lot of different voices from varied communities and experiences. These include people with mental illnesses and disorders, people who consume street drugs (UDI- Utilisateurs de Drogues par Injection et Inhalation), disaffected youth from different neighbourhoods, homeless people, young pregnant women and many others whose voices are rarely heard. The aims of these creative writing activities are also diverse as they range from fostering creative expression to providing therapeutic outlet to fighting for social integration and action. Groups also produce publications that sometimes have a strong social and political commitment.

The groups’ sizes range from 2-3 to 10-12 participants. The groups that are part of the project are all attached to community organizations that fund these writing activities, and in turn, get their funding from the Quebec Government, the City of Montreal, banks, or from other donors. Café Grafitti, however, is a self-funding organization that funds its project by selling Reflets de Société, a magazine on current social issues.

Spaces of free expression

The groups offer safe and inclusive environments to their members and in doing so, they create spaces of free expression where creativity can be fostered in an independent and organic way. The studio activities carried out by these organizations seek to provide equipment and recording material for their members. For example, Jeunesse 2000, a drop-in centre in NDG for youth aged 12 to 17 allows members to sing, slam, rap, and write poetry. The Studio has been running since 2005, and is participatory in nature. It seeks to foster the youths’ creative selves but is also dedicated to social action and community building. Similarly, West Haven in NDG and Youth in Motion in Little Burgundy also offer studio activities and spaces of expression for the youth of these neighbourhoods. On the eastern side of Montreal, Café Grafitti in Hochelaga is a space of creative expression for youth as well as young adults for members can remain part of the collective until they believe they are autonomous and independent to leave. The group describes itself as a “milieu de vie” where members can attend a variety of workshops including creative writing and graffiti.

In other cases, spaces can take the form of a blank page left for anyone to fill in. After being hit by a fire in 2012 and being forced to relocate, the Saint-James Drop-in Centre – a downtown Montreal group dedicated to offering a safe space to marginalized people suffering from homelessness, addiction or mental illness – left 5 journals to be filled in by its members to express themselves throughout the transition and relocation. What came out of this project was Idéambule, a journal launched by the Centre in May 2013 and that contains drawings, written pieces and poetry that reflect the lived experiences of a community at the margins of society.

Community building and social integration through culture

Another important aspect I found in all the groups is their emphasis on using creative cultural tools and creative writing for social integration, through fostering the members’ social skills and confidence. Forward House, a community-based mental health service organization located in NDG, holds creative writing workshops that are also dedicated to the preparation of their bi-annual publication, the BUOY journal. The workshops aim to allow members of Forward House to develop better social and interpersonal relationship skills through the writing and sharing of their texts. Similarly, Café Graffitti offers participatory creative writing workshops that have an emphasis on social integration. Raymond Viger, its founder, describes the workshop as leading to personal progression towards autonomy and reintegration into society while at the same time fostering a sense of belonging in its members.

Culture X, located in Montreal-Nord, and as part of a greater program of “intégration socio-professionelle,” also seeks to create solidarity and social inclusion. Culture X is a community organization functioning under the Commission Scolaire de la Pointe de L’Île, dedicated to social and professional integration through the arts, including writing workshops for young people who have dropped out of school. Their activities, although primarily targeting youth, are open to everyone. The writing workshop, which occurs on a weekly basis for seven months, focuses on songwriting and performance. Thus, the workshop allows the participants to build a solid experience in writing and performing, while at the same time fostering solidarity between the participants inside the group.  On a larger scale it seeks to demystify the prejudices about Montréal-Nord by encouraging everyone in other parts of the city to attend.

Community building and beyond: networks of solidarity & positive effects on neighbourhoods

An important feature of some of the groups studied here is their outreach efforts to their local neighbourhoods and beyond, to other parts of Montreal and even Quebec, and the rest of Canada. Although writing is an individual experience, a number of the groups help foster a sense of belonging to a broader community by building solidarity networks, while positively affecting their neighbourhoods at the local level. Journals published by some groups are distributed to several different community organizations, thus reaching a broader readership and creating links between different communities.

For example, Forward House’s BUOY journal is distributed to many other community organizations such as UP House, L’Abri en Ville, and Ami Québec – organizations also dedicated to people with mental illness – as well as to public libraries and coffee shops in NDG and other neighbourhoods. Les Impatients, a community organization in Ville-Marie, dedicated to people with mental illnesses, publishes an anthology of love letters written by their members and other voluntary participants. The anthology, Milles Mots d’Amour, is sold in many bookstores all around Québec. L’AQPSUD (L’Association Québécoise pour la Promotion de la Santé des Personnes Utilisatrices de Drogues), a community organization dedicated to and run by people consuming street drugs also produces a publication, L’Injecteur, that aims to promote health and create better living conditions. It is distributed at the local, regional, provincial and national levels, but also in several countries in Europe. Therefore, the distribution of these journals originating at the local level helps build much broader networks of solidarity beyond their specific locations.

Creative writing workshops can also have a positive impact on their neighbourhoods at a very local level. For example, BUMP, the Burgundy Urban Mediation Project in Little Burgundy, hosted regular creative writing workshops from 2009 to 2012 for the youth in Little Burgundy, with the specific goal of helping to reduce violence in the neighbourhood through creative expression. It was also a way to help the participants to do better in school with the ultimate goal of creating a better social environment for people in Little Burgundy by using writing and education.

Fighting prejudice and empowering communities

Finally, the last important aspect of those creative writing groups and their publications is their role in empowering marginalized communities that often face prejudices. This is accomplished by presenting knowledge and stories via a creative writing process which originates from the communities themselves and allows them to fight prejudices through self-representation. Forward House’s journal and writing workshops, along with its social integration and community building purpose, also has social action as a goal. Indeed, it aims to empower the community of mentally ill people, and seeks to defeat the stigma put forth by society regarding mental illness. Similarly, Les Impatient’s anthology seeks to demystify mental illness for the public.

L’Injecteur, the AQPSUD publication, is another good example of empowerment and social action through writing. Only those who are drug users and who are part of this community, called the Infomans, write in this journal. The same can be said about its twin organization, l’ADDICQ (Association pour la Défense des Droits et l’Inclusion des personnes qui Consomment de la drogue au Québec), where only people that are themselves drug users are allowed to have a say and vote in the functioning of the organization. Thus, the knowledge and stories originate from them. By doing this, they seek to get rid of paternalist and moralizing attitudes, but also to contribute to the empowerment of this community of drug users that is comprised of a variety of people who suffer greatly from marginalization, as sharing personal stories will genuinely speak to other people in the same situation and create links.

Conclusion

The research project shows that the aim of community-based writing groups can go beyond their initial creative purpose. By creating inclusive environments, they encourage people to express themselves freely and communicate. Thus, each group in their own way contributes to the social integration of their members and to building a local, empowered community. In addition, it also shows that everyone can be a writer and a poet, and thus challenges the traditional views of poetry and creative literature as an elite art.

The detailed information gathered throughout the project will be shared on the Anneau Poétique website at http://anneaupoetique.wordpress.com/

Keara Yim

 

Indigenous feminist Andrea Smith writes that the crucial lens Native feminist theory brings to feminist politics is a “questioning [of]…the nation-state as the appropriate form of governance” (2005:128). Given that white settler nation-states are predicated on the genocide and colonization of Indigenous peoples, it is impossible to reconcile an understanding of colonialism with an acceptance of white settler nation-states. In full support of Smith’s position, this paper is a substantiation of her call to question nation-states  beyond a context of the white settler state generally, at the intersection of migrant justice and Indigenous sovereignty, prompted by my own inability to distinguish between exclusive nationalisms and Indigenous sovereignty movements. As sovereignty movements of colonized peoples in the global south have actualized as nation-states, as Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island struggle for sovereignty, how does Smith’s call to question nation-states apply? More precisely, how do Indigenous notions of nationhood differ from, and how can they be realized in terms other than what I will discuss to be the problematic ideology harnessed by nation-states?

Importantly, as a non-Native person thinking about Indigenous sovereignty it is not my place to tell first peoples what I think sovereignty should look like. The point of this investigation, rather a weighing in on internal politics of Native communities, is an exercise directed towards myself, meant to determine whose leadership within Indigenous communities I wish to follow, how I wish to ally myself.

Beginning with examining the fetishization of nation-states, state control over a population relies on generating the common-sense idea that the state, despite being an elite white capitalist institution, rules for us. This perception is conjured through nationalist ideologies that imagine the diverse peoples within state borders as a unified homogenous community, a family. Anderson emphasizes that this community, because it is utterly imagined, is an ideological construct; as he writes, “members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or ever hear of them” (1983:6). Facilitated by the exclusive belonging of nationalism, the state, with its power naturalized in the image of a father’s authority over the family, then plays the role of “uphold[ing] and defend[ing] the space occupied by the nation” against the threat of foreign Others, patrolling on our behalf (Sharma 2006:143).

The imagined community of the nation can only be defined in relation to an Other; belonging and Othering are mutually reinforcing as subjects’ allegiance to the national community in turn naturalizes the differential treatment of foreign Others through the denial of rights of citizenship. At first glimpse it may seem as though the nation-state acts as a container for the rights and privileges of its “proper subjects”, however geographer Ed Soja explains that “space is not merely a ‘container’ for society or only a ‘context’ in which it exists but is, instead, a social structure created out of extant power relations” (in Sharma 2006:140). As such, the territorialisation of rights upheld by the current nation-state system creates zones of freedom for citizens, but also actively creates zones of unfreedom for foreigners, pathologizing movement and naturalizing a denial of rights to foreign Others which is central to maintaining capitalist forms of social relations. While in popular discourse the space of the nation-state belongs only to those with citizenship, border control practices are clearly ideological as it was never possible that every person would remain within their allocated container, especially while ongoing processes of imperial dispossession, military aggression, and exploitation constantly cause people to move. Indeed, international migration has increased at unprecedented rates in the past thirty years with the U.N. Population Fund estimating that 175 million people cross national borders each year (2003). Most of these cross-border migrants are non-whites and from the global South (Sharma 2006).

As such, state borders do less to physically control the movement of people and in reality play a more important function of naturalizing the denial of rights, critical to maintaining an available and compliant unfree labour force; in Canada this is composed of undocumented migrants and the indentured labour of temporary workers in its Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Program. Thus the rights afforded to citizens by the nation-state must simultaneously be understood as legislated unfreedom that facilitates the exploitation of non-citizens/foreign Others. The unfreedom of any worker is ultimately detrimental to all as the relative cheapness of any group of workers contributes to the vulnerability of all groups (Sharma 2006). A freedom that is compartmentalized will thus always be inadequate, yet rather than struggle for global commons, we have been rendered complacent by being allocated rights within certain spaces. Nationalizing freedom with citizenship therefore has had the powerful effect of (mis)aligning our allegiances with a fictive community, a contemporary reformulation of processes previously accomplished through race. Much as Du Bois describes the relative privilege afforded to white labourers as a “psychological wage” (in Croatoan 2012:6) which ensured their loyalty to a white elite in spite of their own low wages, the same formulations of logic operate today through nationalism. It is a subtle shift in the determining factor from skin to space, from bloodlines to place of birth.

Following this migrant-centered critique that traces links between state power and nationalist discourses, I am interested in examining the possibilities that Indigenous epistemologies offer for sovereignty movements to avoid actualization as simply another piece in a global puzzle of nation-states. While Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination is often equated with Western conceptions of sovereignty as absolute power (Smith 2005) and self-government, “decolonization” that occurs in the image of the very states that emerged from colonization, “the kind of self-government where we are merely granted the authority of administering our own misery” ( Monture-Angus 1995:262), is utterly inadequate.

Andrea Smith explains that white supremacy targets communities of colour through differing logics (slavery, colonialism, Orientalism) which overlap in often contradictory ways. As such, rather than trying to organize around a common oppression, we should be aiming to build “strategic alliances based on where each one of us is situated in the political economy” (Smith 2010). By considering how migrants who have been displaced by similar processes of capitalist imperialism are positioned in relation to Indigenous sovereignty movements, the goal is to develop considerations for decolonization. Following the preceding problematization of nationalism’s Othering function, I now turn to the thought of Indigenous scholars on alternate foundations of identity to ground our political communities.

Attending to how the Indigenous identity of a sovereignty movement  is constructed, a sovereignty that posits only those who can claim Indigenous identity as its proper subjects and disregards migratory experiences of colonialism is destined to reproduce the hierarchical and exclusionary forms of belonging exhibited by nation-state forms of governance. A “proper subject” of citizenship can only be actualized in the form of a patriarchal state that assumes the right to control its borders and determines who it governs. Such ethnic nationalist movements do not consider that Indigenous identity as a category was itself a primary means of colonial domination – as Fanon writes, “it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence” (Fanon 1963:79). Indigenous identity drew a line between settlers who “become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies” (Tuck 2012:6) and those denied self-determination.

The monolithic politico-legal definition of identity is problematic as it is based on an understanding of history “a meta-narrative of timeless cultural continuity” (Altamirano-Jiminéz 2011:113); these rigid definitions are vast oversimplifications that ignore that cultures are multifaceted and constantly shifting. Attempts to establish essentialized identity categories reproduce existing inequalities; as Altamirano-Jiménez writes, “who gets to tell stories about Indigeneity, what stories are remembered, in what forums they are told, and for what purposes – all of these abilities are linked to memory and power” (2010:114).

Furthermore, embedded in a state’s patriarchal authority to control who are proper subjects via border control of a territory is the Western understanding of land as property, as a commodity to be controlled and owned. Indigenous sovereignty is not based on control, but responsibility for the land. (Monture-Angus 1999) As Smith explains, “once land is not seen as property, then nationhood does not have to be based on exclusive control over territory. If sovereignty is more about being responsible for land, then nationhood can engage all those who fulfill responsibilities for land” (2011:60). Unfortunately Indigenous peoples  seem forced to engage in a “politics of recognition” (Coulthard 2007:437) in attempts to resist the settler state: to defend land and to be recognized by the dominant legal system, Indigenous peoples must argue that the land is “theirs”. This limited form of politics is utterly inadequate, as Indigenous peoples are unable to question a cultural relationship between peoples and land that is taken for granted as universal in the dominant legal system (Smith 2011). Glen Coulthard notes that in the last 30 years the dominant discourse of self-determination efforts of Indigenous peoples throughout Canada has been cast in the language of “recognition” (2007:437). Coulthard defines a “politics of recognition” as the now expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to reconcile Indigenous claims to nationhood with Crown sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identities in some form of renewed relationship with the Canadian state. (Coulthard 2007:438)

A Native sovereignty movement that seeks recognition from the surrounding settler states will only be actualized in the colonizer’s terms, as only Western understanding of sovereignty are legible to the state. As the terms of recognition will always be the property of those in power (Coulthard 2007:449), while recognition can facilitate the incorporation and elevation, of Indigenous identities into liberal pluralism, the actual structures of colonial power will remain unchallenged. As Fanon writes, the best the colonized can achieve within this politics is “white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by [their] masters” (in Coulthard 2007:449), thereby reproducing the very colonial power structures that Indigenous peoples have long sought to destroy. Indeed, to remain at the level of identity politics, “reaffirming their identities within existing hierarchies of power, is to work within a rigged zero-sum game for the liberation of a particular oppressed identity at the expense of others” (Croatoan 2012:12). Included in this “politics of recognition” are self-determination efforts through economic development that has created a new Aboriginal capitalist elite, self-government based on colonial models, and land claims processes grounded in notions of property (Coulthard 2007:452). Struggles for self-determination must not be predetermined by a need for recognition, rather bell hooks writes that we should be “recognizing ourselves and then seeking to make contact with all who would engage us in a constructive manner” (1990:22).

Returning to the preceding meditation on identity, rather than exclusionary forms of belonging that require patrolling of borders, many argue for an Indigenous identity that is not reified through apolitical legal biological definitions, but understands Indigeneity as a social process (Altamirano-Jiménez 2010, Sharma 2006, Smith 2011, Alfred 2005, Finley 2011). Alfred and other Indigenous scholars advocate for an Indigeneity that recreates relations between themselves and their landbase (Alfred 2004, Finley 2011). This is an inclusive vision that calls for, rather than rights upheld by the nation-state, a non-normative nationhood which recognizes our interrelatedness and is constituted by mutual responsibility between all beings, human and nonhuman (Smith 2011:58). This is a rejection of “transcendent” ideas of nationalism that create an imagined community and misdirect our solidarities, in favour of “imminent” relationships based in practices (Sharma 2006:153). Rather than a reified identity which rules out distinctions between colonizers and those forced to leave due to colonial oppression, this participatory form of belonging has the potential for solidarity between Indigenous peoples and migrants exploited by ongoing processes of capitalist imperialism. This exemplifies Patricia Monture-Angus’s understanding of sovereignty as a Mohawk woman – as she writes, “self-government is really very simple to maintain. All it really requires is living your responsibilities to your relations” (1999:161).

This problematization of nationalist state discourses seems to be necessary and basic groundwork for a comprehensive struggle against empire – here is a very particular historical mode of relations that to many appears to be universal and eternal. As such, the jagged lines of national borders etched across continents must be recognized as crucial technologies of power in capitalist modernity, eclipsing solidarities borne of shared experience and struggle with an insubstantial fictive community. While we have witnessed many colonized populations’ struggles for independence actualized in the form of nation-states, leading to what Fanon refers to as “the curse of [national] independence” (in Coulthard 2005:455), there are Native sovereignty struggles that reject rather than rely on logics of colonialism. Believing that Indigenous notions of self-determination can or must be equated to nation-state structures privileging Western ways of knowing, constitutes a form of epistemic violence that blinds us of other possibilities. This paper has followed Fanon’s imperative when he writes that, “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments…if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering, and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized” (1963:80). It is thus not only where the lines of force have been drawn that continues to bind us today, but the act of drawing the line itself that is the ultimate colonial act.

 

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