IN SOLIDARITY

We publish Living Hyphen and gather on the sacred territorial land of the Nishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee people and also of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River.

 We acknowledge that this territory as the subject of the One Dish, One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. Many know this land under its colonial name of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

We at Living Hyphen are a community made up of people from diasporas from all around the world, as well as Indigenous people from many nations.

For those of us who are part of a diasporic community, we recognize our place as settlers – regardless of when we or our ancestors arrived – who have benefitted and continue to benefit from colonial violence on this land. We remind ourselves how urgently current this history is; colonization is an ongoing process that continues to inflict violence on Indigenous lands, cultures, and bodies.

We also want to acknowledge that in addition to being a publication and community on stolen land, what is now known as Canada and the US was built by Black people who were stolen from their own homelands and who continue to be beaten and murdered under an oppressive white supremacist system.

Finally, we acknowledge that many of us and our ancestors are from places around the world whose histories are bound up in colonization, imperialism, military occupations, and racist immigration policies. 

We sit with all of these complex and entangled truths every day and in all the work that we do. We commit to continuously (un)learning our role and responsibility in the genocide, displacement, and theft of land from the Indigenous peoples across the land known as Canada, as well as dismantling the mentality of white supremacy that exists as a result of this colonization and that continues to oppress Black and communities of colour.

Living Hyphen strives to work in solidarity with the struggles of Indigenous nations for sovereignty, land, and freedom. We strive to work in solidarity across racial lines to dismantle white supremacy and towards our shared liberation.

True reconciliation and anti-racism require all of us to move beyond words and towards action. As Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum writes, “I sometimes visualize the ongoing cycle of racism as a moving walkway at the airport. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt… Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. Some of the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racists ahead of them, and choose to turn around… But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt, unless they are actively anti-racist, they will find themselves carried along with the others.”

To move us along our journey in (un)learning and to walk actively in the opposite direction of anti-racism and colonial violence, we have created dedicated resources that we hope will be an ongoing work-in-progress and that we create together in community. Click below to access our resources.

INDIGENOUS ALLYSHIp resources

ANTI-RACISm resources

If you have any resources or tips to add, please drop us a line at hello@livinghyphen.ca.

We appreciate your labour in doing so and your commitment to this struggle for liberation for all peoples.