Encircling Pedagogies of Peace: Faculty for a Free Palestine

Ki’en Debicki

 
In Tkaronto, on the evening of Saturday, April 27, 2024, I attended the screening of the documentary film Yintah as part of the Hot Docs film “festival.” Before the film began, several Wet’suwet’en land defenders took to the stage to denounce the main funders of the festival:

“While we are grateful for the opportunity to show this film, we refuse to allow this venue to whitewash Scotiabank’s reputation at home and abroad.”

The documentary, ten years in the making, follows an intergenerational narrative of Wet’suwet’en resistance to the ongoing theft and invasion of their territories—Yintah—by the Canadian government and its corporate bedfellows, Coastal GasLink, who have, through terror and the violation of their own laws, invaded Wet’suwet’en lands to build an oil and gas pipeline.

In remarks before the film, Wet’suwet’en land defenders, mostly women, declared their refusal to support corporations currently funding the genocide of Palestinians. The audience was here for it, calls of “Free, Free Palestine!” resounding throughout the auditorium.

As a Kanien’keha:ka audience member, I was moved to tears throughout the screening; not only because the film confronts histories of genocide of onkwehonwe (real, original people), but also because of the strength and solidarity I was witnessing, which can sometimes feel deeply lacking in the world of the settler colony.

I am an Assistant Professor at McMaster University, and this past fall was my first time teaching “Introduction to Indigenous Studies,” a first-year class with 250 undergraduates. After the Israeli government used the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, to justify a campaign of mass destruction in the Gaza Strip, and scenes of the genocide of Palestinians began to circulate globally, I took my responsibility as an instructor of Indigenous Studies seriously and created space in my classroom for learning through discussion how these real-time events connected directly to the course content. I admitted to being a learner myself in the particularities of South West Asia and its histories, but I identified for students what are undeniably acts of genocide against Indigenous peoples and the ongoing project of settler colonialism that incites, and depends on, such violence. 

I held myself emotionally open with my students, sharing the resonances I felt in my body and relating the actions of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to the ongoing violence enacted here at home by settler colonial police forces like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). We were bearing witness, I told them, to the material execution of what anticolonial scholar Patrick Wolfe called the “logic of elimination.” Palestinians, like the Indigenous nations of Turtle Island, are being eliminated so that land and its resources can be exploited, commodified, and bled through extraction. I painted a cognitive map, a geopolitical web, of how the invasions of Wet’suwet’en, Oceti Sakowin, Haudenosaunee, and Palestinian territories are motivated by the same thing: supremacist, colonial profit.

“Greed has no conscience,” the land defenders at the Yintah screening reminded us.

We Are The Circle

These connections I drew for my students made sense to me because these global acts of invasion, occupation, theft, and state-sanctioned violence are not disconnected from one another; they are manifestations of the same colonial-capitalist death drive.

We know that this death drive—a greed for domination, control, and hoarded wealth—has a long human history. For my people, the Haudenosaunee, we were recently given a reminder of the dangers of forgetting to actively keep the peace through the total eclipse of the sun that occurred here in Anonwarore’tsherakayon:ne (Hamilton, ON) on April 8, 2024. 

A total eclipse of this kind also occurred on August 31, 1142, in what is now upper New York State, the traditional territories of my people. It was at that time that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was ratified into being, united under the Kayanereko:wa, the Great Law of Peace, or more accurately, the footprints for the Great Good.

The Kayanereko:wa, the Great Law of Peace, first established the Confederacy Council of my people, the Haudenosaunee (“we build the house together”). The wampum that marks the formation of the Confederacy is the Teiotiokwaonháston (“it circles the people”; Circle Wampum), which dates back to the twelfth century. It is a large circular wampum with a perimeter made of two wampum strings wrapped together (representing the Great Peace established among the nations) and attached to this circle are 50 strings, representing each of the original fifty chiefs belonging to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Each strand within the circle represents the name of a confederacy leader, and each leader is selected by a clan mother, who has the power to “raise up” men of the good or “dehorn” any chief who no longer acts for the good of the people.

The spatial arrangement of the wampum also reflects the responsibility of our leaders to understand themselves as “trees of equal height,” meaning no one is superior to another. They are bound together by the intertwining strands that make up the circle, representing the unity of Kayanereko:wa. Within the circle are the things we hold sacred: our languages, culture, beliefs, and rights. The people within the circle are to be of one mind and one heart.

In the centre of the Circle Wampum is Tsioneratasekowa, the Great White Pine Tree of Peace, under which the Peacemaker had all five nations of the newly founded Haudenosaunee bury their weapons of war in a final confirmation of their unity beneath the boughs of everlasting peace. As Sakokwenionkwas (Tom Porter) narrates:

And then the Peacemaker told them to hold hands together in a symbolic way: lock their arms together. ‘And in a big circle the fifty Chiefs will be and,’ he said, ‘in the middle of that circle where the Chiefs are holding hands, I will plant the Great Tree of Peace. And it will be so tall that it will pierce the sky. And it will be the symbol of sharing, the symbol of brotherhood and the symbol of peace in the world. And the roots will be so big and they will be white, one to the north, the east, the south, and the west. And they will carry peace to the world. And those roots are white, so they can be noticed by all. And when people see the white roots, if they want peace, they can follow them. And they can make their minds known where the Tree of Peace was planted.

And there they will seek to sit in peace, in the shade of the tree, with all of us Iroquois nations. He said, ‘But you must hold tightly in there. For inside of that circle are your people, your territory, your clans, your language. Everything that you have is in there and is protected by the fifty leaders.’ And he said, ‘But I want you to know that in the coming years, there will be a people coming here that you’ve never seen before. And they will carry an axe with them. And they will sneak under the arms of the leaders that are in the circle surrounding the tree, when they are not looking or paying attention. And they will come in there, trying not to be seen, and they will try to destroy the Tree of Peace. And they will take the axe and they will hack the roots, the four roots, because they want the tree and what it stands for to fall. They want to kill it.’ And he said, ‘When that has been done, the tree will begin to die, because it’ll be getting no more nourishment from its roots in Mother Earth. When it dies, it will begin to fall, and all that it stands for will begin to fall. But because those fifty leaders are holding hands together around it, it will fall on their clasped arms. And therefore it won’t hit the ground. But it will hit a blow to them, because it’s so big and heavy. And now they must hold it on their arms, whereas before it was upright.’ (307-8)

Finally, Sakokweniónkwas relates that our prophecies tell of a time when the chiefs’ strength will give out, and they will no longer be able to keep the tree from falling. As it begins to fall, from each of the cardinal directions, great-great-onkwehonwe grandchildren will come running, and, by the hundreds, they will grab the tree before it falls and stand it upright once again (309).

This is what is happening now. The colonial-capitalist death drive that is perfectly willing to commit genocide against Palestinian people has taken an axe to the Tree of Peace. The student protests we are seeing on college and university campuses across Turtle Island are the hundreds and hundreds of the next generations grabbing the tree before it falls.

We Choose Love, Not Fear

By speaking the truth of North American Indigenous and Palestinian struggle to my students in “Introduction to Indigenous Studies,” I insisted upon the relationality of global Indigenous peoples, of the colonized, of the enslaved, of the dehumanized, and of the wretched of the earth. I insisted that land back on Turtle Island is also land back in Palestine. This was also the message that the Wet’suwet’en land defenders expressed at the screening of Yintah. Yintah—a film that demonstrates the incredible power of international Indigenous resistance and solidarity.

Because here’s the thing: this colonial-capitalist system objectifies everything—land, water, plants, animals, and humans. It commodifies the sacred and hoards wealth, power, resources, and safety. Then, to keep us isolated and to break apart any form of unification that might pose a threat to white supremacy, hegemonic power tells us lies about our inherent separation:

Lies we tell of some inherent difference between us we call race, about ranking and taxonomy of human beings based on skin color and tone, gender, culture, religion, ability, and class. The lie is not that variation exists, but that variation can be organized into worthiness. These lies we tell create division instead of connection. We tear apart our fabric of relationship and deny one another instead of using our connection to build what we all need. (Hemphill 76-7, emphasis mine)

Settler colonial capitalism turns everything into an object, ranks all objects into a hierarchy of worth, and then tells us that if we want our basic needs met, we must compete with everyone else. It predicates our survival, safety, and ease of living upon the suffering of others. It encourages us to believe that some in this world deserve to suffer. This unjust system requires self-abandonment and self-violation because it tells us that, in order for us to have what we need, others must be deprived. We swallow that lie, that we are deserving and others are not, in order to justify what we have. This world order breeds distrust and isolation, holding out individualism as the only pathway to safety and freedom. In this constructed environment, isolation seems safer than connection. And when we refuse? When we refuse to buy into the sadistic fiction of racial capitalism and austerity, when we refuse to violate the sacredness of life and turn everything into an exploitable resource, we are faced with militarized force and violent suppression.

We are currently bearing witness to a revolutionary refusal of colonial fear. When students refuse to give in to the fear tactics of massively over-resourced police departments, and when the Wet’suwet’en land defenders refuse to give in to the terror of the RCMP invading their lands with sniper rifles, attack dogs, and riot gear, it reveals how weak the colonial system really is.

Our power, true power, is not stolen or manufactured; it comes from our relationships with spirit, earth, and each other. Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have practiced rituals against fear, and we are still here. When we sing and drum on our territories, we insist upon our rights, upon the power and jurisdiction of Indigenous and natural law. 

This is why I stand with students around the globe who are bravely asserting their right to be in solidarity with Indigenous struggles against colonial-capitalist power and deprivation. When students across the settler colonies of Canada and the United States chant: “we are not afraid of you!” to police forces called in by university presidents to remove them, they rely upon communal strength to insist upon their right to a world, a future, built on love rather than fear. 

When we insist on the power we hold in relating to one another, in showing up for each other, and in collective care as human beings rather than as units of profit to be channeled through the capitalist-colonial pipeline, we are refusing the version of reality that colonial-capitalism wants us to believe is the only way to survive.

These young people who are demanding their institutions divest from war profiteering and weapons manufacturers are insisting that we bury the weapons of war beneath the Tree of Peace. This is a refusal of the forces that deprive people of home and aliveness. It is a refusal to let fear direct our choices. And it is an insistence upon a future of abundance and joy grounded in relationships to one another and to the land.

We are united in our struggle. This is why the Five Nations Longhouse Confederacy at Kahnawake has issued a statement in solidarity with students protesting across university campuses:

We are happy to see that students within universities and colleges are occupying their campuses in solidarity with the massacred Palestinian children, women and men, to force their campus administration to divest from Israel’s genocide. Institutions of higher learning must not be invested in or connected to any genocide, war or military action, as they are supposed to engage students in higher levels of thought conducive to human evolution.

Institutions like McMaster University, which refuse to divest from war profiteering, belie their mission statements about dedication to teaching and learning. Senior administrators at McMaster who label student protestors as “violent” for refusing to be made complicit in genocide have also suspended the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights student group. When administrators and the board of governors make decisions to oppress their Palestinian students, and all those who stand in solidarity with them, they reveal that they are more committed to promoting war and genocide than to fostering “the higher levels of thought” that make peace possible.

Over the past two years, we have witnessed the New York Police Department and other police forces brutalize students peacefully protesting genocide. University presidents, bestowing upon themselves the fascist authority to call in violence against the very community they are supposed to protect, are in violation not only of settler law (including university by-laws which require faculty approval for police presence on campus) but also of Indigenous sovereignty: they do not have the authority to charge students with trespassing because this is not their land! Columbia University and CUNY are squatting illegally on Lenni-Lenape territory. The administrators of these universities are the ones trespassing.

The Kahnawake Confederacy is clear: student protestors are welcome on our lands. So, when administrators and trustees—those aiding and abetting genocide—unilaterally institute persona non grata policies (as they have at McMaster University) and other means of declaring trespass and evicting members of their communities without accountability, they are not only unauthorized to do so, but they are also announcing themselves as enemies of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

We Plant Pedagogies That Exceed, Seed, & Cede

The Tree of Peace has become endangered; its roots and trunk have been axed by those whose minds have become twisted in pursuit of money and false power. The Tree of Peace has fallen onto the clasped arms of our leaders; not the leaders of the nation-state, who condone, enable, encourage, and celebrate this violence, but the arms of true leaders, those trees of equal height, who seek to protect the peace at all costs. 

It is my contention that within the context of student protests across campuses, it is the faculty who must encircle students and hold up the Tree of Peace until the students, those young people from the next generations, can stand the tree upright once again. This is not only a matter of political conscience but one of pedagogy. 

This is an encircling pedagogy that exceeds the bounds of the classroom, of settler time, and of professionalization in order to seed a future in which each one of the students we protect and teach becomes a Tree of Peace out in the world. 

It is imperative that we, as faculty, are aware of the dynamics we bring with us to this struggle. It is imperative that we recognize our positioning within the institutional system of power so that we do not risk demobilizing student refusal and resistance. It is not up to us to direct or control what happens next. Our job is to hold. Our job is to brace while young people realize their vision for sustainable, livable, peaceful futures for all. 

This is not an abstract obligation; it means, for example, that we must not project our middle-class fears onto these students. So many of us have been trained into thinking of compliance as the way towards peace. But compliance is harmful when it takes us out of alignment with our values; this is self-abandonment. 

Instead, let us grapple with how we might wish to be defiant if defiance “means to act in accordance with your values when there is pressure to do otherwise” (Sunita Sah). As faculty and administrators, I encourage us to cultivate self-awareness about where we might be allowing our own discomfort to impinge on our students’ right to be ungovernable. Rather than letting our fear drive our interactions with students, let us hold space for them so we lessen the blow of colonial retribution that is aimed at them. At the very least, let us protect them from colonial retribution that takes the form of suspensions, expulsions, withheld grades, intimidation, and persona non grata policies.

We see one example of this at CUNY, where faculty encircled their protesting students, arms clasped, chanting: “you have to get through us to get to our students!”

This is what it means to embody the circle wampum. To stand with our strong, hard backs to the colonizer and its brutes, to take the blows of that violence, while we give our softness, our gentleness, our love to those within the circle, those younger generations trying desperately to stand the Tree of Peace upright. To them we must mirror the possibility of a collective resistance that celebrates and fosters joy. It is joy that will stand in the face of fear.

We have seen students transform campuses into encampments enlivened by singing, dancing, food sharing, ceremony, reading, conversation, and intergenerational care. These students refuse to sacrifice their humanity to the death cult of global capitalism. They refuse to seek the recognition of the university or the state, which promise middle-class rewards for compliance with and complicity in atrocity. They refuse the hypocrisy of an institution of higher learning which tells them to think critically while asking them to keep their mouths shut. They are insisting, instead, upon their right to create home, joy, and livable futures. Within the context of the Kayanerekowa, this is an insistence upon following the white roots of peace and extending the rafters of the longhouse. 

As a professor of Indigenous Studies and English and Cultural Studies, I have spent over a decade teaching students how to analyze and think critically about oppressive power structures and the narratives that fuel them. I have encouraged them to apply these teachings to their own lives. I have modeled for them how important it is to wear the teachings. 

Now, when our students establish their own ethical spaces to engage and grapple with the power structures that oppress them and the world they wish to create free from colonialism, supremacy, and racial capitalism, our pedagogies must exceed the classroom. We must show them that this is our shared struggle and that we, as professors, will embody the humility of being trees of equal height by positioning ourselves carefully as part of a student-led movement. This means offering our knowledge, experience, and resources, while also ceding control. If there are elements of the struggle we don’t understand, we need to support students while we learn from them. From this position, we have something to give and something to receive. This is holding up the Tree of Peace: now that it has fallen, it is not ours to stand, it is up to the youth.

Our job is not to protect the institution, its timelines, profits, or myths of impartiality. In contrast, our job is to be strong for our students and protect them so that they can realize their own visions of peace and liberation for Palestine. 

As you go to class today, remember this: there are no universities left in Gaza.
 
Works Cited

Hemphill, Prentiss. What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. Random House, 2024.

“How to say ‘no’: The power of defiance, with Sunita Sah, PhD.” Speaking of Psychology, for the American Psychological Association, Episode 319, 2025 https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/power-defiance#:~:text=And%20so%20my%20definition%20of,positive%20prosocial%20force%20for%20society.

Sakokweniónkwas (Tom Porter). And Grandma Said… Iroquois Teachings as Passed Down Through the Oral Tradition. Edited by Lesley Forrester, Xlibrus Corporation, 2008.