NDN I told you so

I was on a panel a while back that focused on decolonization and environmental studies. I felt very much ou

t of place there, but I wanted to be on the panel specifically to be someone not from the environmental sciences (or social sciences), and to speak from a grounded space, which I did.

It’s not like I don’t care about environmental studies—but I think that more often than not, it lacks an understanding of settler colonialism, coloniality, and the perpetuation of settler ontologies. The environmental turn is so funny to me, as if the method of imagining the environment as such were not already compromised beyond all usefulness for Indigenous people. For whom is such an environmentalist paradigm, after all?

At some point during the panel I scoffed at the “newness” of Indigenous ontologies for white people. I scoffed at the settler invention of the “Anthropocene”. And in my scoffing, I heard myself thinking “we told you so”. It was one of those moments when you are trying not to say the thing you are thinking, because perhaps it is not appropriate, but these days I often lean into a kind of performative gruffness, especially in the Q&A, so I said it out loud. WE TOLD YOU SO.

And almost immediately I felt I needed to qualify this phrase. It was as if I wanted people not to be left with the taste of self-righteousness as they departed. So I tried to explain what I meant. Something like: it isn’t so much that we told you, but that you have no way of understanding what we have been telling you, until you let go of the methodologies—the ways of asking questions—that got us here in the first place.

(LOL, this is what came up when I searched for “environment” on Substack images)

I’ve been thinking about this moment, this self-correction, and it occurs to me that an NDN I told you so can only take us so far. I mean that my first reaction was to act from a place of redress, yes, but that in that redress, I wasn’t actually navigating the question so much as pointing out the impossibility of answering it. To be sure, we don’t always have to answer such questions (ahem, refusal), but in this instance, I wasn’t really intending to refuse anything so much as expressing a kind of frustration, a pent up sense of indignation about the invitation to speak in the first place. Now that I think about it, I probably should have declined the invitation. I don’t want to be someone who speaks on such things from a place of frustration. (Again, I love negative affect, but I honestly want to be somehow constructive here).

What is an NDN I told you so? Perhaps I should give it a chance. Perhaps the sense of redress, or being constructive, or wanting to provide solutions is so ingrained in me that when I speak from the place of vulnerability (we told you so, but you wouldn’t listen, you couldn’t hear) I find myself less empowered. Less able to think about how to sit with the reality of the environmental catastrophe of modern capitalism and extractive economies. I find myself farther away from being able to respond.

But why is that? Why is it that I feel less empowered by pointing out the failures of white people to listen? They never listen. They never listen.

They never listen.

Perhaps this is the reason: I don’t actually gain anything from pointing out the fact of white people’s failures. Perhaps I should, but I don’t feel like I do. Maybe I’m just tired of it. Maybe the last 500 years have worn me down. Perhaps, though the high of righteous indignation may carry me for a second, in the end, I am thinking now, it is a poor substitute for just living my gay ass NDN life in peace. To be frank.

I don’t know. I realize I have contradicted myself repeatedly here, but I don’t have this worked out. I don’t know whether my world is made better by pointing out how white people don’t listen, can’t, won’t, fail to, again and again, as opposed to simply moving on and doing the work that I care about with the people I care about.

At first I wanted to theorize the NDN I told you so as some sort of clever methodology for dealing with white fuckery, but as I’ve been thinking this through, maybe I’ve landed on the notion that, while sometimes useful and necessary, it is not a long term solution to the colonial reality. Or perhaps we just have to not worry about what environmental theories white people are cooking up and keep living in good relations, as we have always done (Leanne Simpson would say).