Indigenous refugees: Eman Ghanayem, ‘Being Indigenous and Refugee: The Duality of Palestinian and American Indian Narratives’, in Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Vinh Nguyen (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, Routledge, 2023, pp. 381-392 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous refugees: Eman Ghanayem, ‘Being Indigenous and Refugee: The Duality of Palestinian and American Indian Narratives’, in Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Vinh Nguyen (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, Routledge, 2023, pp. 381-392

12Feb23

Excerpt: This chapter understands rigid boundaries between Indigenous and refugee as enforcing a social invisibility akin to colonial erasure. In fact, the overlap between an Indigenous person and a refugee, and their connection to colonial dispossession, is most illuminated in the example of Indigenous populations displaced by what is known as settler colonialism. A particular but representative type of colonialism, settler colonialism is defined by a drive to settle on an already inhabited land, replace an Indigenous population violently, create a national origin story that erases Indigenous presence, and build institutions (legal, cultural, academic, etc.) to disseminate its false narrative and uphold the process of settlement. This chapter argues that displacement caused by settler colonialism demands troubling the boundaries between refugee and Indigenous narratives, precisely because many refugees were and remain Indigenous despite this colonial displacement. It also invites us to read literature in an intersectional and relational way that observes overlaps in displacement and understands settler colonialism as a global phenomenon constructive of comparable realities. Major examples that speak to these demands are found in Palestinian and American Indian writings.

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