Photo courtesy of Ted Eytan via Wikimedia Commons.
By Kiera McLaughlin ’26
Global Editor
Content warning: This article discusses colonial violence and gender violence.
As the war in Gaza continues, discussions around the future and impact of the war have developed to center feminist movements within Palestine and solidarity from around the world.
On Friday, April 12, 2024, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, otherwise known as CENTRO, hosted a virtual symposium featuring Indigenous voices in a conversation about colonialism.
There were three panels at the “Edge of Each Other’s Battles: P.R., Palestine, Black, & Indigenous Futures” symposium. The first panel focused on settler colonialism and shared experiences of displacements, dispossession and resistance and how this has continued into the modern day.
The panel, “Beyond Borders: Traversing Settler Colonial Logics,” spotlighted the past and present experiences of colonialism in Palestine, while the other two panels in the symposium focused on the future of decolonization and story-telling.
The moderator of the first panel was Dr. Eman Ghanayem, a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. She organized the panel to not only focus on colonialism and decolonization, but to also examine them within the context of gender violence and the feminist work done in and outside Palestine.
Dr. Ghanayem opened the event, welcoming the audience and thanking the organizers and panelists for creating a space for this conversation, which she described as being “intimate, honest [and] very candid.”
With about 200 people watching and audience members sending emoji hearts and comments of solidarity into the chat, she opened the floor for the panelists to introduce themselves.
Each panelist brought their own personal and academic experience to the discussion. The four panelists were Dr. Sarah Ihmoud, assistant professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department in Peace and Conflict Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, Dr. Melanie Yazzie, professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and one of the hosts of The Red Nation podcast, Leslie Priscilla, founder of family education organization Latinx Parenting and Dr. Sara Awartani, LSA Collegiate Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The discussion then centered around three main questions. The first one presented the panelists with the opportunity to explain how they observe colonialism in the context of genocide in Gaza and global colonial history.
Dr. Awartani started the conversation with her experience on the historical comparisons between Palestinians and Puerto Ricans. She later expanded on the importance of this connection in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. “The long history of Puerto Rican solidarities with Palestine reminds us that what is happening in Gaza today is part of a long history of settler colonialism,” Awartani said.
The conversation continued with Dr. Yazzie, who shared her observations based on her experience as an Indigenous person in the United States and her research in North America. She explained that the genocide in Gaza has presented a “new type of global understanding of colonial history.”
Yazzie explained that those who were absolved from recognizing neocolonialism and colonial histories now have to “confront and contend with the very fact that their presence and their [contemporary existence] itself [is] dependent on and a result of colonial violence.”
Dr. Awartani told MHN that there are multiple lessons to learn from this student-led movement based on her research on Puerto Rican students at the University of Illinois in Chicago in the 1980s. She stressed the “importance of documenting and building archives of student activism on campus, especially since organizational memory is so short, as students graduate every four years.”
Dr. Ihmoud had a different response and brought up resistance. Her points were established in her own personal connections as a Palestinian Mexican American. “[T]he opposite of violence is creation, and as we witness the utter devastation that our people in Gaza are living through and feel that devastation in our bones…we are also in the process of honoring and celebrating and continuing our history,” Ihmoud said during the panel.
This sentiment propelled the conversation into the next question that Dr. Ghanayem presented about centering the discussion around gender violence in the context of colonialism in Palestine and around the globe.
Dr. Ihmoud and Dr. Yazzie both commented on the symbolism that Indigenous women take on in “the colonial project” and what they represent as reproductive providers of the next generation.
Dr. Yazzie claimed that Indigenous women are representative of the “alternative order” that colonizers want to control and snuff out. The speakers described both the threats women face and the power they have in these contexts. Returning to the discussion around the specifics of the genocide in Gaza, Dr. Yazzie stressed the importance of listening to Palestinian feminists.
Dr. Ihmoud also described what she called “the cunning of gender violence,” used by colonizers to actively silence Indigenous women. She referenced the call for Palestinian feminists to condemn the acts of sexual violence on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Iin this logic of Zionism, refusal to admit that mass rape occurred on Oct. 7 becomes a form of further incrimination,” Ihmoud said. “Even as the Zionist regime actively rapes and pillages our bodies in our lands. So, these attempts of the Zionist movement to discipline, to criminalize and terrorize Palestinian women and feminists … sits at the very core of the colonial project.”
Dr. Ihmoud called for the audience and feminists to reject what she termed the violent “cunning of gender violence” as a feminist’s responsibility. She also asked the audience to reject the practices of settler colonial gender violence while “honoring the living, embodied memories of those who continue to survive.”
The final question centered around repression and the social initiatives that have pushed people to resist and fight against oppression and colonialism.
Priscilla talked about her anger at the state of the world and the violence taken out against Indigenous people, including her ancestral tribe in Mexico. She referenced her experiences with “tone police” — those who tell you to be more calm or quiet. She stressed that this is not the way activism and anti-colonialism work can be done. “Resistance needs to look like resistance needs to look in order for us to reach a point of liberation.”
Dr. Yazzie ended the panel discussion by clarifying that the colonizers are the minority and that “beautiful humble people of the earth are the majority.”
She reiterated the idea that the global population is recognizing and confronting global settler colonialism in a more expansive way. “We are officially in an era of decolonization where there is a global reckoning with colonialism that frankly did not exist before October the seventh,” Yazzie said.