April 2025

Part 1: Incompatibility

Upon further reflection, I’m not sure I can write this series. At least not how I proposed it earlier.

When I wrote Part 0: a priori, I didn’t find it particularly useful. It felt like old thoughts and old ideas. It was writing for the sake of writing. It was writing for a cause I don’t believe in anymore. Even when I was asked to read, write, and reflect on positionality, I felt that something was off. That positionality isn’t how I think about the university or my work anymore. That positionality isn’t for people like me. But, it used to be, so how can this be?

It reminds me of an anecdote Kim TallBear told in a podcast. She was talking about feminisms and how Native students often have a hard time reconciling western feminisms as something they should relate to and internalize. Yes, feminisms are a net good in critiquing and building better futures, but. Her response was striking.

She said to speak it in your language. Theorize feminism in your language. Don’t throw it out, make it ours.

That prickly feeling when speaking feminism out loud is that it’s not sitting on our tongue right. It has no place to go, so it evaporates and returns to the ether instead of coming back to the ground, feeding the seeds beneath the soil.

I think I’m having this struggle with positionality. It’s feeding something I don’t want to have grown.

So I return to its definition, “”.

There has been too much work to cite for a mere blog post, but it’s clear that the intention, practice, and politics of positionality vary greatly. The side-effect of becoming a buzz word. I want to focus on what engaging in positionality as a practice does. How it signals your politics. I think there plenty of people who engage in good faith and whose self-making and work benefit greatly, yet why does it feel so little has changed?

In Gani and Khan’s (2024) critique of positionality as colonial, they refer to how stating your positionality paradoxically re-centers whiteness. It is a fundamentally narcissistic practice. It hearkens to the early days of compulsory pronoun disclosure – which I am sure is still alive and well in many academic spaces. I always felt profoundly unsafe and under a microscope in these rote, procedural pronoun disclosures, which often happened in a circle. I could see how the predominantly white, cis women would puff up their chests as they proudly stated their pronouns. Virtue effectively signaled. I would refuse disclosure. I didn’t want them to have my pronouns.

From this article, I am reinforced in my observations: positionality is by and large for them. Those who find their homes and identity within academia. Their sense of self-worth. When faced with the dissonance and contradictions of value and work, positionality allows an escape from that tension.

Positionality is an appeal. It’s a fairly rare practice that few disciplines and even fewer academics engage in. I say as someone who has written positionality statements and actively advocated for my colleagues to do so. Some use positionality to establish and validate what once was marginalized, silent, erased. Others, it is a way to recognize and place on full display the privileges that have both enabled and biased their work. To apologize. To recognize. Yet, like land acknowledgements that followed, without commitment or accountability to the words espoused. These changes would have radically shifted the academe.

Regardless, I don’t want to do any of these things. I’m not invested in following through on the promise of positionality.

I don’t want to appeal nor do I seek the approval or affirmation of my peers or institution. I don’t want to make the university better or more livable. I personally don’t seek to be known, understood, or categorizable by the university. I say this not because I am at peace with the status quo of the university, certainly not in 2025, but because there is no home to be built for Indigenous people in the American university.

Your grants are not land.

Your DEI is not land.

Your tenure is not land.

Your departments and majors aren’t land.

Your strings attached will first bind us to your ways of being and eventually find their way around our necks. Sometimes by our own hands.

Our ways of knowing and being cannot be done piecemeal. They are not like your atoms or particles. They cannot be isolated and interrogated. There is no point of beginning or end. We cannot start with a program and “find” our relations later. Indigenous people will never belong in academia unless it us our own making in service of our lands and done in our ways.

I know this is a lofty goal and I still am going on the job market in a few months. I hope to be employed by an American university.

This then begs the question, what are Indigenous academics to do within an institution that is diametrically opposed to your existence? What are you to do knowing you will never belong and that attempts to assure you of your belongingness are mere sutures.

This profoundly common question is then the work of this series. For those of us who are running at full speed, with eyes wide open, into the American university, how do we make sense of our kuleana (obligation) within the suffocating walls of the American university.