Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin) @DeondreSmiles Twitter profile

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 months

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Here's how you decolonize missionary work--you stop doing it.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

Remember folks, as recently as 42 years ago, Native people in the U.S. couldn’t legally practice many religious beliefs that date back generations. Fast forward to 2020, where Karen uses “religious freedom” to not wear a mask in the middle of a goddamned pandemic.

Benjamin Young Savage (ᐱᓐᒋᐱᓐ) 

@benjancewicz

4 years

Not wearing a mask is now a religion

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

What I find really frustrating is the racist assumption that Indigenous knowledge hasn’t come about through observations and applying knowledge generated through said observations, which is actually the exact definition of what science is.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

Officially became a permanent resident of Canada this morning.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Y’know what really puts a damper on mental health? Being forced to be in situations where the risk of COVID exposure is high.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

Data is not anti-racist. Data sets are not just cold, empirical facts.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Land back ≠ ethnonationalism. It’s about resurgence of Indigenous relationships to land, and the upholding of treaty rights/inherent sovereignty. The ethnonationalism argument is intellectually lazy and a case of settler projection—they did genocide so they think we will too.

Apocaloptimist

@Apocaloptimist5

2 years

The way white people think Land Back means they all get ethnically cleansed from the land is a fascinating case of projection.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

Pretty much all of Native Twitter: “Lakotaman1 is problematic” Random white liberal settler account: “But who are you to say who’s a fraud and who’s not?” Like, if we’re ALL agreeing on this, you know it’s pretty much 100 percent legit.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Settler colonialism is stealing Indigenous land, remaking it into spaces of “conservation” and then tasing an Indigenous man trying to pray in a sacred site in said space.

VIDEO: Park Ranger Tases Native Man Visiting Sacred Site at Petroglyph National Monument

A park ranger Tased a Native man multiple times while investigating him for walking off a designated path in a national monument.

abq.news

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

9 months

Found out the other day that I can’t mask in the classroom due to needing to keep my mouth visible for accessibility needs. This is tough, I want to be accessible for my students but I’m very nervous about being in a large classroom unmasked. Not sure what to do here.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

A revolution that doesn’t respect Indigenous sovereignty or liberation is just settler colonialism with hammer and sickle decorations.

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@mediumproof

1 year

leftists what’s your leftist opinion that will have leftists leftisting at you like this lefistly on the leftist compound?

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

On this day in 1862, 38 Dakota men were hung in Mankato, MN, in the largest execution in the history of the U.S, following the conclusion of the Dakota Uprising of 1862. After the men were buried, doctors descended upon the place where they were buried, digging up their bodies.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

The trope that Indigenous peoples just rely on spiritualism and mysticism to generate scientific knowledge is intellectually lazy and again, quite racist.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

The narrative about residential school graves not being mass graves but rather “unmarked graves” comes right out of logics that if a cemetery is not marked with Judeo-Christian monuments or markers, it loses legitimacy as a burial site.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

11 months

I think one of the biggest reasons non-Indigenous folks, particularly on the left, grapple with the concept of Land Back is because they think about it as a monolithic idea, rather than a complex network of relations to land that are specific to nation/community.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

Reminded that today is the 160th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US history when 38 Dakota warriors were hanged at Mankato, MN. Some of their remains were robbed from their graves and held and misused for decades, including by the founder of the Mayo Clinic.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

I feel like I’m obligated by Twitter rules to mention that this tweet is going viral. I feel like I’m also obligated to say that I have nothing to promote but I want to say that settler colonialism is a failed project and I hope you are all having wonderful days :-)

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

Settlers post the goofiest things on Facebook

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Simply co-opting Indigenous knowledge in trying to grapple with this climate crisis that we’re barreling into without involving Indigenous peoples or communities who have generated the knowledge is just another form of colonization.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

I am pleased to announce that I will be joining the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria as an Assistant Professor, starting in July 2021. I am excited for the opportunity to join a strong department of wonderful colleagues and talented students!

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

The FBI telling the Red Lake Nation that swastikas being spray painted on their signs isn’t a hate crime is a perfect example of there being no damn justice for Indigenous people in this goddamned settler colony.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

This settler colony has always been built around the ability of (white) men to control bodies and the Supreme Court just reinforced that today.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

So apparently I missed something because this morning I’m seeing people standing up for Indigenous ways of knowing, and Western ‘scientists’ responding by going full, masks off anti-Indigenous racist about that.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

We are seeing gaslighting on a structural level right now with this pandemic. People are literally being vilified by structures of power for simply asking for safe measures for themselves and their families.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Black Indigenous folks are Indigenous.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

So I’ve been struggling to keep the good news under wraps but I think I can share it now: After I’ve defended my doctoral dissertation later this year (likely late summer), I will be staying at Ohio State as a post-doctoral fellow in History (with support from Geography!)

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Let’s use soil science for example. There is irrefutable proof that Indigenous nations in what is now the U.S. had complex and successful systems of agriculture and land tenure. That can only come about through a thorough understanding of soil and crop rotation.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 months

Nothing gets the racists in academic Twitter all revved up, or in academia more broadly, quite like asserting that Indigenous knowledges have a place in science. It never fails.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

10 months

Say it with me: Settler capitalism is a fucking abomination.

Keoni #ProtectPololūValley🔻🇳🇨🇳🇨

@Keoni_DiFranco

10 months

If you are from Lāhainā & are receiving phone calls from realtors asking to purchase your property following the fire, please record their name, company & home address for us & post it.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

Settlers will literally build entire economies based around rapid depletion of fish in lakes but then will turn around and verbally/physically threaten Indigenous people exercising their treaty rights because “They’ll take up all the fish”.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

How does anyone in academia get any work done right now in an era of constant heartbreak?

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

Besides James Cameron being anti-Native, Avatar is just a really crappy movie in general. I am still shocked it is/was the highest grossing movie of all time because it’s the cinematic equivalent of Fruit Stripe gum.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

It’s so frustrating to look and see the ways that Indigenous knowledge was viewed as “inferior” and “too subjective for academic inquiry” until non-Indigenous scholars realized how much money and fame and clout they could extract from it.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

The discourse around “Native tribes should open abortion clinics on their lands” has a really interesting connection to the ongoing narrative that settler colonialism’s salvation and maintenance is found via the use of Indigenous land.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Unfortunately, this trope gets invoked time and time again to sideline Indigenous knowledge and communities in the name of extractive forms of knowledge production and gatekeeping of Indigenous peoples out of scientific/academic structures.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Folks on the settler left will just go after Indigenous peoples for no reason at all and then wonder why there’s folks in Indigenous communities who side eye them when they talk about building class solidarity

sid 🌹🌱🔆

@lilbabygandhi

2 years

Vegans are very based for calling out indigenous people for eating meat. If an indigenous person is living in an urban center, it is unethical for them to eat meat just as much as it is for everyone else. No amount of "it's a cultural practice" changes that.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Are there any Indigenous peoples quoted or interviewed in this NYT story at all? It's frustrating that things that are spoken about in origin stories and well-documented Indigenous histories become legitimate only when settler science says so.

Ancient Footprints Push Back Date of Human Arrival in the Americas (Published 2021)

Human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, a study reported, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted.

www.nytimes.com

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Me reading a thread on r/Professors about how “disability accommodations are too intrusive”. We love to see casual ableism in the morning. If you think disability accommodations are too “intrusive”, imagine having a disability. I’d imagine that’s pretty intrusive for students.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

The settler colonial state is literally built upon the bones of Indigenous peoples. We cannot forget this.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Very interesting style of teaching piano, I’d say.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Final project submission from a student in my Indigenous geographies course—a beautiful quilt depicting Turtle Island. I was almost in tears when they presented this in class today. What an amazing experience with amazing students.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

Got my annual review letter for last year and seeing my chair tell me that I am already at a pace to meet and exceed standards for tenure is the massive boost to start 2023 that I really badly needed. Grateful this morning.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

These farms and agricultural plots were so well tended and successful that when settlers came, they brutally snatched the land away—Wolfe writes about settler farmers following US army troops in eviction actions during the Trail of Tears, stealing farms.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

And let’s focus on the obsession with empirics as a magic bullet upholding superiority of Western science over Indigenous knowledge/science. Empirics is based off of observation. It does not take into account the personal biases or structures of power that surround the observer.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Anyways, science is not neutral. The meaning of science and the definitions of what counts as science shift all the time, no matter what a bunch of racist trolls on Twitter might tell you. The base definition of science inherently means there’s many ways to get from point A to B.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

10 months

Indigenous communities wouldn’t need to be “resilient” if we didn’t keep getting pushed to the brink by capitalism and colonialism.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

I think I’m going to be the first Native grad student to graduate from my department and that’s really exciting to me. Hopefully I can be an inspiration to the next Ojibwe person who decides they want to live dangerously and get a graduate degree in geography 🤪

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

I can only imagine the firepower that would be deployed right now if it were Black or Indigenous protestors that were trying to besiege the Capitol.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

It seems Christian Twitter found my tweet about decolonizing mission work and are now trying to do a series of gotchas about how many missionaries are now from the Global South. I wish they’d read some Fanon and learn that colonial systems seek to use the colonized within them.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

Land acknowledgements are hollow if you don’t follow that up with actual praxis supporting Indigenous people and Indigenous students.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

People are really determined to die on the hill of supporting an outdated, racist syrup name and logo because it’s ‘erasing history’? Who knew that so many people got their history from statues, butter labels and bottles of syrup?

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Settler academics—if your ideas/projects of decolonization and social justice can’t function without you at the head or centre of them, they are neither decolonial or socially just.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

“That halftime show was terrible!”

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

I’m going to say it until I’m blue in the face—if “decolonial theory” does not center Indigenous and other marginalized voices, it isn’t decolonial. Call it what it actually is, neoliberal multiculturalism.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

18 days

I am well aware that as a pretenured Indigenous scholar, I am putting my career at risk by standing up for the students in the encampment, some of whom are my own students. That thought has stuck with me every day. But if my students can show up, so can I.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Settler colonialism is a hell of a drug.

Jason S. Campbell

@JasonSCampbell

3 years

CNN's Rick Santorum: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture"

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Okay, idea: If I offered a free, truncated version of my Indigenous Environmental Activism course this spring/summer via zoom, would there be people interested in taking it?

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

There were folks who made “observations” that led credence to eugenics and other forms of race science, for example. Doctors routinely made “observations” on the mental capacities of racialized women that led to widespread sterilization in the U.S. and Canada.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

I assume settlers have now lost interest in opening up abortion clinics on tribal lands now that the Supreme Court has ripped away major parts of tribal sovereignty, judging by the lack of outrage by said settlers over this. That, or they didn’t like the pushback they got.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

I’m curious how many of these academics yelling about how Indigenous science isn’t science will be hitting up Indigenous academics about 2-4 months from now, asking them to be on their NSF/NSERC grants?

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

Gotta admit, a bunch of white liberal accounts calling me stupid and unhinged for calling Cameron out for his weird fetishization of Indigenous grief and trauma is par for the course—these folks will get racist as hell as soon as we don’t live by their definitions of Indigeneity.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

18 days

Yesterday, I and a group of concerned faculty went and attempted to deliver a letter to our University administration, signed by over 10 percent of UVic faculty, asking them to meet in good faith with student members of the encampment on campus. (1/)

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

I used these maps to demonstrate settler colonial ecological damage until very recently, and then some Indigenous colleagues gently called me in and reminded me that the term virgin forest is erasure of Indigenous forest management and now I’ll be using new maps

professional hog groomer

@bidetmarxman

2 years

While forest cover has changed dramatically in the past several hundred years, the change in the forest makeup has arguably been more stark. Since european settlers arrived in the US, 90% of the virgin forests that once covered much of the lower 48 states no longer exist.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Empirics can be subjective. Let’s say I come into a room and pick my cat up. She bites me suddenly. In my empirical observation, she’s a naughty cat. To my wife, who has been sitting with the cat before I came in, she has been crabby for a bit so of course I’d get bitten.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

If you’re a settler and you’re using a piece by Keeler to weigh in on Indigenous issues, how about you not do that.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Indigenous students should not be the ones tasked with “decolonizing” departments. They’re here to learn and to do work that benefits them and often times, their communities. Putting additional weight on them makes it so difficult for them to do the work they’re at college to do.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Dr. Deondre Smiles! I passed my dissertation defense today—many thanks to my committee and to all of my friends and colleagues who showed up, especially my Twitter friends! This fall, I will join the OSU History department as a postdoc!

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

It’s amazing how many settlers in Canada (and the US) have never set foot on a reserve or interacted with Native people even in urban spaces, yet are suddenly developing analyses about the inherent “violence” and “criminality” of Indigenous communities in the last day.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

One such man was William W. Mayo, who would found what would become the Mayo Clinic. He used the bones of one Dakota man to teach his sons and frontier doctors about anatomy. It took 138 years for those bones to be returned to the deceased’s family.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Me, a geographer, finding common cause with a bunch of badass archaeologists:

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Non-Indigenous scholars like to “listen” and “learn” but sometimes, there isn’t a lot of “doing” that comes out of all that listening and learning. Action is the third, and most necessary part of being better.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

First time seeing this painting up close. Sobering, even though I’ve seen it a thousand times by now. Some students ask me what I mean when I refer to Canada as a settler state built on genocide in my classes—Kent Monkman’s work says it all.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

9 months

Thanks for the suggestions folks! Going to probably just hide the snarky remarks and unhelpful suggestions. It is okay to engage in a convo without being a pinecone.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

I’m a little concerned about the implications that a 35-interview minimum for a qualitative journal article based on interviews will have on slow scholarship and the need to build ethical and non-extractive relationships with research participants.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

There’s a reason why every goofy right wing troll resorts to the “Native people fought each other/killed each other” argument when challenged about colonialism. It’s intellectually lazy yet gives the user a veneer of knowing what they’re talking about.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

Defending Mt. Rushmore with “Well, tribes stole land and went to war with other tribes” is not doing the work that settlers think it’s doing.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Just got the extremely exciting news that I’ve been invited to join the editorial board of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal for a 4 year term. I’m really honored and excited to get to work!

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

It gets really frustrating to see a settler academic get accolades for saying things that Indigenous scholars and community members in the same place have been saying (and subsequently getting ignored) for a long time.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

7 months

Our sweet Winry, aka Land Orca, crossed the rainbow bridge today after a short yet valiant fight against cancer. She’s accompanied us across our travels and adventures, from Minnesota, to Ohio, and finally, up to Canada. I’m heartbroken but I know she is no longer in pain.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

I notice no one ever harasses that Native actress who is openly reconnecting and has hundreds of thousands of followers about her community or who claims her. But plenty of Black Natives get those questions and nasty terms applied to them. Thinking about that a lot this morning.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Stereotypical Native American art really is just a barrel of laughs. It says so much about the artist and their asinine idea about Native people more than it actually says anything about Native people 😂😂😂

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

How data is collected, how it is disseminated, how it is classified, represented, stored, these are all potential avenues of racist, (settler) colonial harm.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

1 year

Folks on Native Twitter: Black Natives aren’t Native Me: Excuse me, the glorious man named George Bonga is my kinsman and he is abso-fucking-lutely Anishinaabe:

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

I don’t really dig academics using the word “Shamanism” to refer to Indigenous American epistemologies.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

I love it when settler academics characterize Indigenous knowledge as “backwards” or “antiquated” because it seems to me that in many cases, Indigenous knowledge is about a generation or two (or far more) ahead of settler knowledge production.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

This is what Keeler has unleashed. An entire army of people, many who are not Native, who feel empowered to talk at/over Native people about the harms that are being caused. To see someone who works at the bell hooks center behave like this towards Black Natives is very alarming.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Eliz*beth W*iss is just the latest iteration in a long line of settler academics who think the bodies and remains of our ancestors are a playground through which they can produce academic knowledge. Views like hers are centuries old, and have been weaponized at will.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Consuming Indigenous knowledge and content on here is not allyship.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Settler colonialism is a necropolitical structure. It literally thrives on Indigenous death, whether it’s physically or discursively.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

When we say that settler colonialism is on going, we mean it.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

One of the Dakota leaders in the uprising, Little Crow, was assassinated several months later—part of his remains were displayed by the Minnesota Historical Society for many years, not being repatriated until the early 1970s.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

A reminder on this #IndigenousPeoplesDay that Indigenous relationships to space and place have never gone away, no matter how hard settler colonialism tried to erase these ties. #LandBack

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Listening to this Haudenosaunee elder give an absolute masterclass of a talk on the contradictions of capitalism and the ways that it interferes with Indigenous life ways and being in good relation with the Earth and I’m just in awe.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

4 years

My course on Indigenous Environmental Activism has been approved and will be offered as both a Geography course and a History course next spring!!!! Course flyer to come! I’m so excited for the chance to teach my very own, self-developed course!

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

10 months

The narrative that Indigenous peoples did not write things down or did not have scientific ways of doing things is such a tired argument and a sign that the person uttering it has done zero critical thinking.

Karlie Alinta Noon

@karlie_moon_

10 months

Last night I was abused by a racist lady at a science week event. She was yelling at me that nothing was ever written down about Aboriginal people so they aren't scientists & also 'always was always will be' can't be proven. I'm still in shock.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

As an Indigenous geographer, I can safely say Keeler knows jack-all about cross-border relationships within the Indigenous nations. That would be like saying that Nish folks north of the U.S.-Canadian border stop being Nish just because they are not recognized by the U.S. gov’t.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

Y’know, I do notice that the people who hold up countries like the Nordic countries, New Zealand, Canada, and other countries as unproblematic alternatives to the United States, are often middle to upper class white folks who don’t have to contend with xenophobia in these places.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

3 years

Not paying an Indigenous, Black, or another marginalized scholar for a guest talk bc “that’s how we’ve always done it” or “the exposure is payment enough” needs to be abolished. It’s colonial as hell. I can understand not having the budget. I cannot understand ego and hubris.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

At some point we’ll need to talk about the sort of pseudo-self-Indigenization that happens in academia where settler academics use any sort of connection or relationship with an Indigenous community as license to gatekeep, even towards Indigenous scholars.

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Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (he/they/wiin)

@DeondreSmiles

2 years

I think there’s a decent number of folks who are pursuing ‘decolonization’ in academia with the idea of creating a wider pool of Indigenous academics and communities to extract from, and that’s not really how that sort of thing works.

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