Join CMES on Wednesday, March 23, 2022, 1:30-3:00 p.m. for this panel with Ruba Salih, Miriyam Aouragh, and Loubna Qutami. On October 12th 2016, Sky Bird Black Owl gave birth to Mni Wiconi (water is life), at Standing Rock, in the camp erected to protest against the Dakota access pipeline project, considered to violate Indigenous sovereignty and to endanger the region’s water resources. In media portraits Mni Wiconi appears wrapped in traditional Native American patterned cloths, yet also highly visible in the portrait is a Palestinian Kuffyah draped around the cot.

This frame is highly evocative of the central repositioning of Palestine in global justice struggles. Firstly, the black-white checkered Kuffyah acts as a signifier of how Palestine is more than a national liberation project, operating today as ‘analytic’ (Qutami, 2014) of contemporary manifestations of the coloniality of power. Besides continuing to inspire and be inspired by anti-colonial struggles- actualising the legacy of internationalism- Palestine also operates as a lens to detect racialised systems of exploitation, dispossession and surveillance effected today through a global regime. Secondly- and from within a decolonial understanding of power as a system of production of colonial differences- this snapshot is a vivid illustration of temporal epistemologies of resistance that Angela Davis and Cornel West (2016) described in terms of ‘the ‘constant struggle’: the convergence of movements (anti-colonial, Black, Indigenous and abolitionist movements) and peoples whose grievances are similarly rooted in the structural violence of Western colonial modernity.