On the heels of recent revelations of past and ongoing injustices, reconciliation and solidarity by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is even more urgent. But it is a complex endeavour.
In The Solidarity Encounter, Carol Lynne D'Arcangelis links interviews with activists and her own self-reflections to current scholarship to take readers into the fraught terrain of solidarity organizing. Multi-issue coalitions such as Idle No More, #NoDAPL, MMIWG2SQ, Black Lives Matter, and Fridays for Future all depend on the collaboration of diverse communities and on avoiding harmful detours into historically derived helping behaviours. D'Arcangelis grapples with this key tension: colonizing behaviours that result when white women centre their own goals and frameworks as they participate in activism with Indigenous women and groups.
The Solidarity Encounter concludes by offering strategies for respecting boundaries between self and other, providing a constructive framework for non-colonizing solidarity that can be applied in any context of unequal power.
Carol Lynne D'Arcangelis is an associate professor of gender studies at Memorial University, where she received a 2019 Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Since 2005, she has been a white settler member of No More Silence, a Toronto-based grassroots network dedicated to raising awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people. She has published on Indigenous–non-Indigenous solidarity, white settler feminism, and decolonial feminism in journals that include Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal, Canadian Woman Studies, and the German journal Peripherie.