by Katherine Blouin
cover picture: Bust of Alexander of Macedon, Toronto’s Greektown (credit. K.Blouin)
Disclaimer
What I share in this paper is the result of my own journey of (un)learning about Indigeneities and the Classics. I have hugely benefited from the work and teachings of many colleagues and knowledge keepers, whose names are on the slide below. My work on these questions started in 2018, so it is very much a recent work-in-progress, and I do not claim to have figured things out. Rather, I have lots of questions. A word on my positioning: I am doing this work through my perspective as a French settler from Québec currently living and working in Toronto. I consider myself an uninvited guest on Indigenous Land. I am also an ancient Historian with a BA in Classical Studies and graduate degrees in History, whose work focuses on ancient Egypt. I am currently appointed in a graduate department of Classics, but, as Dr Lyra D. Monteiro confessed at the recent Raceb4Race conference, I am “not invested in the project of Classics”. By this I mean that I am more interested in what I do, and how I do so, than in defending or sustaining a disciplinary tag called ‘Classics’ at all costs. I hope that this short post can foster constructive discomfort and, maybe too, contribute to a lessening of and accounting for Classics’ complicity with settler colonialism through a responsible, Land-based centering of ancient and modern Indigenous ontologies.

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Classics is not a neutral discipline.
To be a Classicist on Indigenous Land is not a neutral thing.

Most of us Classicists who work in Canada have at best a very superficial understanding of where, and on whose Land, we are. In a way, it makes sense: We more often than not work in (and on) a Land that is different from the one we were born in; we tend to study in and travel to hegemonic centres of knowledge production (that is big cities in the USA and Europe, as well as foreign schools); we often like to reproduce a so-called cosmopolitan habitus; and many of us “get away” from our adoptive homes as soon as term, or our active career, is over. More importantly still, we are able to live, move through, and work on this Land despite not knowing much about it; and we do so while remaining for the most part unbothered by the depth of our ignorance.
This phenomenon corresponds to what Ann Laura Stoler calls “colonial aphasia”. As Stoler writes, colonial aphasia is the “capacity to know and not know simultaneously” that “renders the space between ignorance and ignoring not an etymological exercise but a concerted political and personal one. “Self-deception” does not do justice to the ways we each find to turn away”. In other words, colonial aphasia is a colonial product that soothes settlers – and I would argue scholarly fields like Classics – through a fantasy of well-intentioned ‘innocence’ that ultimately legitimizes and reinforces the status quo.
The discipline called ‘Classics’ has been doing historically very well in North America, including Canada. Its import coincides with the arrival on the continent of European colonizers, and notably the Jesuits, who had the propensity to interpret the “New World’s” Lands and Peoples through a Classically-infused gaze. Yet, while conversations about the white supremacist, anti-Black, and colonial entanglements of Classics have been taking centre stage (especially in North America) over the past few years, Classicists have only very recently started to reckon with the entailments of teaching and researching so-called ‘Classical Antiquity’ on Indigenous Lands. In Canada, this development mostly coincides with the successive publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada on residential schools (2015) and the National Inquiry’s Final Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019). The number of scholars who have produced (public-facing) scholarship on these questions remains overall small. I’m thinking notably of Aven McMaster, David Meban, Kevin Solez, Emily Varto, Zachary Yuzwa in Canada, as well as of Maya Feile Tomes, Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Craig Williams in the United States and UK. To all these scholars: Thank you.

Just like Classicists remain to a large extent in a state of ‘innocent’ ignorance about the deep, ongoing Stories and Histories of the Indigenous Lands we teach on, so are we, in many ways, disconnected from the Lands whose ancient remains we study. Indeed, Classics as a field relies on a self-servingly curated (or myopic) understanding of what – and who – the ‘Classical’ world was actually about. This is best expressed by three of the traditional preconceptions based on which Classics’ curricula are commonly built:
- The (quasi) exclusive focus on (Attic) Greek and (Imperial) Latin sources;
- Concomitantly, the authoritative weight given to the literary Classical ‘canon’;
- The assumption that some things (i.e. Homer, Tacitus, Philology, 19th c. German scholarship) are ‘hard’ and thus essential, while others are ‘easy’/’easier’ (i.e. koine Greek, History, Archaeology, reception studies) or ‘peripheral’ thus optional (i.e. Persian history, ethics of provenance, early Islam, Punic, modern Greek History).
These (linguistic, chronological, geographical and disciplinary) preconceptions are neither objective nor neutral. Instead, they amount to political, occluding acts and as such, they say more about the modern genealogy of Classics than about the ancient Lands and Beings whose voices it purports to centre (see Dan-el Padilla Peralta 2019).

That being said, as today’s panel and the one on Indigenizing the Classics that took place at the 2019 CAC-SCEC meeting show, there is within our community a growing number of individuals interested and committed to (un)learn. This is certainly encouraging. But we also need to acknowledge that when it comes to departmental curricula and structural institutional changes, resistance and pushback remain common. I want to suggest that these pushbacks amount to what Janet Mawhinney and, later, Eve Tuck and Andrew Yang call “settler moves to innocence”, whose primary function is to prevent the discomfort that comes with the acknowledgment of one’s complicity with settler colonialism. The same could be said of ‘Indigenization’ and ‘anti-racist’ university initiatives put forward throughout the Canadian academy these past years in the name of “inclusion” and “diversity”. As the current censure imposed on UofT by CAUT shows, such performative commitments most often than not serve the status quo.
Most of us here today are settlers and are part of a field that has historically been used to legitimize and fuel settler colonialism and White supremacy. How does accepting responsibility look like in practice for Classicists? And, crucially, what price are we willing to pay in the process?
In their 2019 essay on “Solidarity as a Settler Move to Innocence“, BrownU students Miranda Grundy, Jessica Jiang, and May Niiya offer a way forward by urging us to ask ourselves “how our scholarship … as well as our academic access, might be used strategically to unsettle innocence and remind our communities of their present responsibilities towards Indigenous peoples“. This agrees with Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s invitation to center situated knowledge and slow down, and with Sara Ahmed’s call to “question what we have received as inheritance” through a willingness “to be there, and aware, and a tear, for as long as it takes”.
Unsettling pedagogical strategies
In that spirit, here are 5 ‘unsettling’ and inductive strategies I have been implementing these past few years in my undergraduate and graduate teaching. I am focusing on the classroom because at the moment, this is where I feel like I have the power to make the most substantial contribution. I humbly owe what follows to Indigenous and Black knowledge keepers and colleagues (incl. bell hooks, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Lee Maracle, Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Karina Vernon). I have also embedded some videos from teachers whose voices have unsettled and taught my students and me.
1. Center the Land, Decenter the Human
– Situate ancient and modern sources within the Land they were produced in
– Approach non-Human Beings as historical actors, kins, and relations
– Think about what made it possible and what it means to learn about xyz on the particular Land I teach on
– Ask why it is possible to learn about/research/exhibit (objects and bodies) ‘Classical Antiquity’ on the Land your University/College is on
2. Expose Occluded Histories
– Address the histories and ethical entailments of the course’s topics/discipline
– Expose students to variety of ancient and modern Indigenous ontologies
– Expose students to an intersectional spectrum of ancient voices, incl. those (of the ‘locals’, conquered, ‘Barbarians’, ‘Others’) that are commonly lost or sidelined from mainstream narratives
– Teach decolonially-minded citational practices as well as the dangers of tokenistic, recolonizing, (White) savioury knowledge production
3. Make Space for Stories, Orality and Oracy
– Acknowledge the centrality of orality, oracy, stories, and listening in ancient-to-modern Indigenous societies
– Ask students to reflect on what happens when we approach some ‘myths’, stories, and literary texts as Indigenous stories (and so knowledge, incl. theory)
– Explore the epistemological underpinnings of Classics’ overemphasis on (literary) written words
4. Learn from what Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall calls ‘Etuapmumk’ aka Two-Eyed Seeing
– Disrupt the Eurocentric ‘knower’s chair’ pedagogical model
– As much as it is possible, and with giving due credits, include Land-Based pedagogy (talking circle, learning from the outdoor)
– Assign contemporary Indigenous (written, oral, visual) work and invite (and offer an honorarium to) Indigenous guest speakers/teachers
– Acknowledge and teach ancient non ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ voices, languages, and ontologies
5. Embrace Discomfort as a Pedagogical Tool
– Challenge the Enlightened fantasy of ‘rational objectivity’
– Highlight the importance of (ancient and modern) positionality and situated knowledge
– Make space for silence, and for everyone to sit with their discomfort, guilt, and anger
– Teach and (un)learn with the head, the heart and the body
Must Watch (and Listen to)
Here are a few clips by knowledge keepers and colleagues who taught me (and my students!) a lot. With gratitude to them:
More Everyday Orientalism content on Indigeneity X Classics:
- Indigenizing the Classics
- Classicists in Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation
- #EOTalks 11: Adopting an Antiquity: Native Writers of North America on Greco-Roman Antiquity by CRAIG WILLIAMS
- Teaching Indigeneity and the Classics: A Syllabus
- Teaching Indigeneity and the Classics through Art Practice: A Virtual Exhibit
- Teaching Ancient Egypt Here and Now: A Syllabus
- Civilization: What’s Up with That?
- Classics, Antiquity and the Anthropocene: Some Thoughts
- Alexandria, Delta, et cetera: On (Re)naming the Land

3 thoughts on “Doing Classics on Indigenous Land”