Rewriting Refuge
It has been very striking to see the field of Refugee History grow in depth and breadth and in many different directions in recent years. This includes greater geographic, temporal, epistemological and methodological diversity, reflecting in part what Lauren Banko, Katarzyna Nowak and Peter Gatrell have identified as its rather “piecemeal” development.
One of the notable things about this fluid evolution is how there are visible fault lines in the scholarship being undertaken. Some of these fault lines are epistemological, perhaps most apparent between the research undertaken in Critical Refugee Studies, spearheaded by scholars at the University of California and with parallel initiatives in Canada and elsewhere. Others are geographic, where histories of place, national frameworks, settler colonialism and imperialism variously shape the kinds of questions being asked of refugee movements in the past and present. In this instance, there are stark divides between the research being undertaken in Africa, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and North America. Some of these differences are rooted in the nature of movements historically but in many instances they are animated by concerns about what is occurring in the present; around the persecution of the Uyghur people in the People’s Republic of China, the plight of Rohingya refuges, the continued displacement of Palestinian refugees, hostile asylum policies in the United Kingdom in Europe, migration across the Mediterranean, and distinct, histories of refuge in Latin American countries such as Chile (evoked in history and literature as evidenced in Isabel Allende’s Long Petal of the Sea).
In the North American context, emerging scholarship around settler colonialism and migration is having a deep impact on the work of historians engaged in histories of diaspora, refugeehood and displacement. Conventional studies of refugeehood focused on North America emphasize the entangled politics of welcome or exclusion. There continues to be important work in this vein. Increasingly, however, scholarship is also being shaped by work in Indigenous Studies. In a widely cited intervention in 2018 historian Elizabeth Ellis insisted on the need to
“challenge the fundamental framework” that undergirds many immigration debates in the US (and elsewhere), in order to take “Indigenous sovereignty and land claims seriously” and therefore “completely reorient…relationships to migration, the lands, and the obligation to share resources.”
It is important to understand that the US government is not the “only entity that is entitled to claim control of these spaces” nor that it is its inherent right “to welcome some migrants while restricting and placing quotas on others.” Ellis’ call to action means thinking differently about questions of power and sovereignty that so-often undergird studies of migration and mobility. In a similar vein, Tyla Betke also insists on a fundamental rethinking of the power of borders by pointing to the longstanding community and kinship relations that supported Indigenous peoples displaced during the formal expansion of the Canadian state westward. Crucially, Betke’s research interrogates the notion of diaspora in this context, asking whether the term can apply to people displaced across traditional land. The answer, it seems, is not really. The conventional scholarship on diaspora has no language or conceptual space to consider histories of Indigenous displacement. In some ways, Refugee History also lacks this vocabulary.
Considering histories of Indigenous mobility, displacement and community formations requires a fundamental shift in the traditional frameworks and categories of analysis used by scholars working on refugee history. As cultural studies scholar Y-Dang Troeung noted in Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the War in Cambodia there is an “uneasy slippage between the “unsettled” refugee subject and the “refugee as settler”.
The introduction of settler colonialism as a dominant paradigm in studies of US and Canadian history radically transforms the question of refugee reception and how we think about and research refuge. It has meant considering the implications of refugee resettlement and movement in new veins given the question of unceded and unsurrendered lands in Canada. It has also meant attending to the Indigeneity of refugees. And it has further required deeper considerations of when and how Indigenous communities have offered refuge or solidarity. In 2016, Nick Estes and Melanie Yazzie coined the term “No Ban on Stolen Land” to oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to exclude Muslim migrants. Similarly, in 2012, Leo Shetush (described as the Grand Chief of the Algonquin Federation) “symbolically adopted” the Haitian community on the traditional territory of the Kitigan Zibi Anishnabek First Nation in present-day Ottawa, Canada as a way of expressing solidarity for the migrants’ unsettled situation (many were displaced following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti). This was the same year when the Idle No More movement, which called for greater sovereignty for First Nations, Inuit and Métis, gained momentum in Canada, and so the symbolism was significant, and contested, on multiple levels.
Crucially, the imperatives now shaping research around refugee history in North America are different from the ones taking place elsewhere. This is resulting in critical differences in dialogue depending on geographic contexts, a negative counterpoint to the Banko, Nowak and Gatrell’s idea of a “pluralizing geography”. It is important to recognize and understand these differences for there is much to be gained in bringing scholarship on imperialism, European colonialism, and settler colonialism into deeper dialogue.
Fostering just such a dialogue is one of the goals of the “Rewriting Refuge”, a hybrid lecture series being organized this fall at Carleton University, located on the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation. Knowing that there are in Canada, as in other countries, many stories about refuge, this series seeks to explore the history of sanctuary with a view both to the particularities of refugee history in North America and broader geographic, epistemological and methodological implications.
The series launches on 16 October 2023 with a roundtable discussion on “Refugees and the Right to Research” by editors Kate Reed and Marcia Schenck and contributor Gerawork Teffera to The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers and Christina Clark-Kazak, author of Research Across Borders: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary, Cross-Cultural Methodology. Readers of Refugee History will no doubt recognize Reed, Schenck and Teffera who recently wrote about their important work here.
This roundtable event launches the “Rewriting Refuge” series. It is a series that foregrounds Indigenous histories of mobility, the creation of borders and borderlands, and in-between spaces of fugitivity and resilience. These questions are crucial to understanding the history of refuge in North America in the past and present and are intended to contribute to the evolving field of Refugee History more generally.
Suggested Reading
Banko, Lauren and Katarzyna Nowak and Peter Gatrell , “What is refugee history, now?” Journal of Global History (2022), 17: 1, 1, https://doi:10.1017/S1740022821000243.
Ellis, Elizabeth. “The Border(s) Crossed Us Too: The Intersections of Native American and Immigrant Fights for Justice,” Emisférica 14(1)(2018): https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-14-1-expulsion/14-1-essays/the-border-s-crossed-us-too-the-intersections-of-native-american-and-immigrant-fights-for-justice-2.html.
Troeung, Y-Dang. Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022).
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To register for the five-part “Rewriting Refuge” lecture series, including the launch on 16 October 2023, please visit: https://carleton.ca/history/news/shannon-lectures-fall-2023/. Other speakers in the series include Dr. Benjamin Hoy, Dr. Jean-François Lozier, Dr. Aimee Villarreal and Dr. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey.
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Header Image: Canada. Department of Transport. Nova Scotia Archives 1973-56 vol. 2 no. 87. The Woods Harbour, NS, lighthouse, c.1973. This was the guiding light for Charlesville, NS, where there was an irregular arrival of Sikh refugees in July 1987.
