The BIPOC/ACCUTE First Person Interviews series is adapted from the CBC First Person series. It captures the stories and perspectives of “BIPOC” members of ACCUTE from different parts of Canada at different stages of their teaching, research, or graduate student careers. The interviews are presented in dialogue style to enable us to present participants’ stories and experiences in their own voices. We hope to encourage other BIPOC members of ACCUTE and future members to join the conversation. Please reach out to cezenwa@mun.ca or info.accute@gmail.com if you are interested in joining the First Person BIPOC/ACCUTE series. We hope you enjoy reading our members’ stories and we look forward to hearing from you.  — Chinelo Ezenwa, Member-at-large, BIPOC Caucus

Chinelo Ezenwa: 
Hi Krista. Thank you so much for joining us today on the BIPOC ACCUTE First Person Conversation Series. I usually start with an introduction, so I would appreciate if you could tell us about yourself. 

Krista Collier-Jarvis: 
My name is Krista Collier-Jarvis. I’m a member of the Mi’kmaw First Nation. I am tuning in from Kjipuktuk / Halifax, which is part of Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaw. I’m also an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Mount Saint Vincent University. I’m in my second year there so still really learning the ropes. Luckily, I didn’t have to relocate for work because I did my undergrad at Mount Saint Vincent and my grad work at Dalhousie. So, I’ve never really left Halifax, which is wonderful because I know the institutions, and I really understand the demographic of students we get, their individual needs, and what they’re looking for when they come to this city, which is wonderful. Primarily, I work in American and Indigenous literatures and focus on things like horror, Gothic, climate fiction, and pop culture.

Chinelo:
Thanks for sharing your profile with us, Krista. You indicated that you wanted to talk about our second question (your biggest concerns about academia and English studies and as they relate to the term BIPOC), so we’ll start from there. But I’m also curious about what you think about the term BIPOC. I designed the conversation with it as a starting point because that’s the term we are using within ACCUTE, but I am also aware that it can be a contentious umbrella term for describing various many peoples. 

Krista:
I didn’t want to get too much into the nitty gritty of the term BIPOC and what that means, mostly because a lot of wonderful things have already been said in ACCUTE from our members, and it’s not something I officially identify as because it’s such a catch all term for anyone that’s not white. That’s kind of why it’s a contentious term and why it’s hard to define. I mean, I don’t walk around going, hey, I’m BIPOC. I walk around going, hey, I’m Indigenous or Ma’kmaw. I also didn’t want to get too much into the nitty gritty of what that term means to me because it’s such a difficult term to pin down. I really want to talk maybe more broadly about my concerns in terms of academia and English studies because academia has always been concerned with identity politics. But when it comes to working in academia, we’re asked to simultaneously separate our identity from our work and at the same time to be tokenized. Tokenization is one of the biggest problems I personally have encountered in my experiences, and I think part of that stems from this rush to diversify the institution and, and in doing so, they’ve committed almost more harm than good in a lot of ways. I’m not saying we shouldn’t diversify, because we absolutely should. We need more BIPOC faculty and students and staff, but we haven’t been doing it well. I’m saying this mostly based on lived experiences, but also from witnessing damage that’s been done to friends and colleagues inside the institution as well. 

Initially when I went into grad studies, for example, I didn’t want to study Indigenous literatures. I love horror and Gothic, so I really wanted to study monsters and talk about zombies. But what happened was that I was told I was essentially more fundable as an Indigenous scholar studying Indigenous works, which I’ve seen happen to a lot of folks in academia, so it’s not unique to me. But, I didn’t want to do something just because of my identity. I wanted to do something that interested me, that I could actually contribute to the field. So, what happened was that I did end up blending the two. I study Indigenous horror, and that’s really fun, and I love what I’m doing, but it almost came out of a way of surviving academia more so than something I wanted to pursue. That becomes an early form of tokenizing that we place on students when we find out that they are Indigenous. We’re like, you have to study this because that’s who you are. I’ve been really lucky to have mentors and a great supervisor who have helped me work through navigating identity politics and my own guilt about not really wanting to study Indigenous stuff, but then ultimately falling in love with it. But initially, it was not by choice. 

Now I find as a faculty member, I’m experiencing very similar things. And again, I know I’m not alone; we’re all kind of going through that, which means tokenization continues to be a problem. I get asked to do a ton of things in my work that have nothing to do with my merit or my expertise or my interests, right? Specifically, because I’m Indigenous, I’m asked to sit on a committee and people would often be like, “do you know someone in community that does this?” And I’m like, “no, I don’t know everybody who’s Mi’kmaw in the entire territory?” I don’t understand what they’re asking me to do. It is emotionally draining in that respect that all of a sudden I’m supposed to know all the Indigenous people that specialize in different things and be able to bring that expertise to the table just because I’m Indigenous. Which is really bizarre because we wouldn’t ask anyone else to do this. We only ask this of BIPOC people.

What we need to do is to really think about our colleagues. Firstly, why are you considering that particular person for a committee or a project? Is there something about their work or experience or their interests that speak to it rather than just the fact that we need this particular body on this or that project? And then, also to think meaningfully about each other’s health and well-being and whether or not that person has the capacity to do the work that you’re asking them to do. Finally, when you go in and you’re asking your colleagues to do things, you should also be considering what ways you can support them while they do that work. You might be asking them because they’re better prepared for that work, but you should also be a support person to them. We have to take care of each other in this process. 

When I first started, a lot of my mentors were like, you know, you’re going to get asked to do a lot of things because you’re Indigenous, and I didn’t realise just how true that is. They also told me I’d have to learn to say no, and I thought, I have issues with that advice because why is the onus placed on me to say no. The person asking me also has to take responsibility in this process. One of my elders who also recently addressed this topic in a talk questions, what if she doesn’t want to say no. That’s another part to it. I think we just need to be more meaningful about what we ask of our of each other.

Chinelo:
So much of what you said resonates with me. I have heard a lot about graduate students’ struggles with identity and choices, trying to decide what they wanted, having someone help them decide and ending up in spaces where they are not sure they want to be. I’ve also thought that the type of racialization you spoke about may have to do with the problem of having universal ideas about what it means to be from this or that group. For instance, each of my kids is Black in a different way and in ways that I am not always able to understand. So, I am constantly struggling not to and not always succeeding in not imposing my own ideas of being and racial challenges to them. 

The other thing you said that really struck me is about how people can be supported. And I think we can talk some more about it by relating it to our second question about ACCUTE contributions. 

Krista:
When I think about support from ACCUTE or its contributions, the BIPOC Caucus is one of the first things that comes to mind. I’ve been a member of ACCUTE for five years now and I’ve been president, president-elect, and VP of the graduate student caucus, and I’ve sat on the Board of Directors. I’ve listened to you speak as well in those capacities in person as well as online. From my experience, what I’ve witnessed in those few years is that the biggest contribution they’ve made is listening and making space for us to even talk about issues that concern different groups of people. That’s huge because I mean, to allow us to even critique our own organization is a very vulnerable position for both us and the organization and to make space for that conversation to happen is amazing. So, what I love about ACCUTE is that I do feel comfortable sharing. I felt that way as a grad student, and I continue to feel that way as a faculty member. That’s why I’ve stuck with ACCUTE. I foresee myself being part of ACCUTE for a very long time. And, just in the few short years that we’ve had the BIPOC Caucus, I’ve watched things grow and a shift in different conversations happening. ACCUTE is very strong in that it reflects on itself, and it makes space for us to have these conversations, however hard they might be. 

One way in which I think ACCUTE could do better is to explore more decolonial approaches to knowledge sharing. This isn’t specific to ACCUTE but to academic organizations more broadly because knowledge sharing is ultimately what we do each year when we get together at Congress. When I think about decolonial, I’m really just thinking about how we challenge the westernized approaches to knowledge sharing. I love traditional panels, and I love keynotes, and I love Q&A’s. I’m a big fan of conferences and how they’ve operated. I also think we should keep all those things, but I think we need to also start including other ways in which we think about knowledge sharing that isn’t just that. Whenever I go to a gathering or conference, I’m constantly looking out for ways that folks are challenging or shaking up the way they share their knowledge, the way they engage with knowledge and things like that. I have a couple of examples actually that I could share. I have a few friends in one of the organizations that I’m with who are really good at responding in real time during Q&A. Even though they’ve prepared their ten-page talk and their PowerPoint, they somehow shift in real time to respond to what happened that morning or what happened during coffee in a conversation, and that to me is a really open, decolonial approach to knowledge sharing because it feels like this person is listening to what’s happening around them and to what conversations are being had. Even though they came prepared to present this topic, somehow, they made their work engage with conversations that are happening in real time. I’ve also listened to a speaker who talked about how our Q&A process is largely a colonial conversation between the person that’s sitting in the audience and the person who’s presenting a paper. They say the Q&A is colonial because it’s not an open conversation for everyone in the room. The very way in which we just talk and ask each other questions needs to be decolonized and turned into a conversation, which becomes a further form of knowledge because then everyone in the room becomes participants and not passive listeners. 

Because of these experiences, I have been trying to think a lot about attendees at a conference, not as passive listeners or people that fill a room, but as active participants. If they are active participants, they’re not just coming up with a question on the fly so that they look like they’re included, but they’re part of a larger ongoing conversation. This means that when we spill those conversations into coffee breaks, the hallways, and over snacks, it doesn’t feel like a break between things, it feels like there is an ongoing conversation throughout the day and everybody is a participant and so-called expert on the topic. I am hoping we can start to see more of that moving forward. And, I think we’re really in this crucial moment in English studies where we have the ability to really pick up that tension and make some changes. 

Chinelo:
I really love that example you gave about how to decolonize Q&A sessions, and I’ll come back to it. As you were speaking, I was also thinking about publications because I’ve found that a lot of what we do, and not just in English studies, boils down to how many things we’ve published. Every time I think about it, it worries me because it’s labour intensive, both for the person writing and the ones reviewing or editing. Sometimes it takes over a year even to get just one article out. In the past, I thought I was just lazy about responding to peer reviewers, but I recently realized that I am not quick to respond because in some cases, the things that I was asked to do would make a significant shift in the objective of the paper and my worldview. Also, I don’t even know who is reading and if there are other ways of sharing knowledge that can encourage people to engage with what we have to say. I would really love to know what you think about that mode of knowledge sharing. 

Krista:
I have an example that is not directly related to publications, but it has to do with the idea of having an overarching literature review at the beginning of an article. This is something that is also really common in our field and in publications more broadly. The idea there is that as a researcher, you have to know all the so-called experts, and what they’ve said about the topic before you’re allowed to have a voice. I have problems with this approach because it feels very colonial and very much like an unequal power dynamic. I remember when I started my research for my doctorate and had to do the lit. review process where I was trying to look up everything in the field; the process made me start to hate my research and topic. In the middle of this struggle, my supervisor totally shifted my way of thinking about myself and my voice in a really wonderful way. 

He said to me, “you know, Krista, you work better when you don’t read other people first. You work better when you look at something and come up with your own opinion and your own ideas. You write everything you can think about on a topic straight from your own brain and your own perspective first and then you go look at the literature. That’s how you function, and that’s how you need to do this.” I thought, he’s right because my voice needs to come first; that’s how I think about the world. But I have a fellow Indigenous friend, and her supervisor took the opposite approach with her, and I could tell that she was crushed and defeated during her entire doctorate because her supervisor was like, “no, you have to read all these people before you form an opinion.” I thought, what a way to crush your voice under all the white men who have already worked on this topic. So, publications do that. When we ask people to do a lit. review at the beginning of an article that encompasses the entire history of the topic, we are asking them to suppress their own voice behind all the other voices that have spoken. That’s not what academia should be about. Academia and publication should be about, here’s this new person writing on this topic; let’s hear what they have to say and then place them in the conversation. So, we’re thinking backwards in our publications. Which is why, like you, I don’t want to do that work. I want to talk about the topic my way.

Chinelo:
That was why I proposed our forthcoming EDI panel – to allow us to actually hear each other about EDI and how it can support academic excellence. Not so long ago, I was in a position to do EDI work, and someone wrote me an otherwise kind email and offered to teach me about EDI. And I remember that it really annoyed me because I felt that they did not only disregard my person, experiences, but also the education that does say that I was qualified to do the job. In short, they just looked at me or heard my name and decided that I couldn’t possibly have anything to say about EDI. I think the offer was from a place of kindness, but I also think that it’s because of the way that EDI or the work of decolonization is sometimes thought of as a package, a set of things that one learns or does to help them to become decolonized. The purpose of our EDI panel is sort of to move away from that idea of EDI as set of tools and to turn it into a human conversation. Hopefully, people attending can be part of the conversation in the way you mentioned. 

Your chosen fourth question, the most fun or most critically relevant BIPOC movie or book you have read or seen recently, has been a popular question and I am always excited to hear what colleagues have to say. 

Krista:
I love this question because it’s so hard for us who study this to have one favourite; you have so many favourites and you’re constantly engaging with something new and exciting. Given my work, I’m always on the hunt for Indigenous works that could be considered horror / Gothic. Lucky for me, there’s a huge wealth of it coming out this year and the next.

In a recent conversation with a friend of mine, she brought up a 2019 short film that I had never seen called Zombies and Indians. I went searching for this film, and it’s so good. It’s by Indigenous director and writer Keith Lawrence. It’s won a couple of local awards in Alberta where it was made. It’s about two Indigenous survivors in a post apocalyptic zombie infested world, and they’re just standing at the gate to the rez with their guns, defending the gates. While standing there, they have an ongoing banter that is funny when all of a sudden, this unlikely older Indigenous survivor shows up at the gates speaking an Indigenous language. But the “gate keepers” don’t understand what he’s saying because they don’t speak the language anymore. So, there’s a lack of communication and he’s just banging on the gates. The film is only 12 minutes long, and in that time, the gate keepers are debating about whether or not to let him in. And the zombies are getting closer and closer. I don’t want to spoil what happens, but it ends up being this really beautiful blending of the comedy that comes with zombie stuff and a commentary on the importance of staying connected to our ancestors and our traditional ways. It’s also about how we don’t get rid of those things in light of all the contemporary problems we face, so that when you do have zombies banging on the door, you don’t forget your teachings.

A lot of our post apocalyptic survivalist stuff really focuses on what we do to survive, right? They focus on hoarding and who kills the other and how you only protect your core family and forget about the rest of the world and things like that. That’s really the kinds of things that have driven the Western zombie cannon and post apocalyptic survivalist stuff more broadly. And then, we have these Indigenous storytellers coming in and they’re shaking up the cannon and going like, you idiot, hoarding toilet paper is not how you survive the apocalypse. You need to reconnect with your ancestors. You need to tell stories; you need to hold on to the values of community and protect one another rather than killing everybody and locking yourself in the basement in the bunker. They’re really shaking up our ideas of what we would do to survive in ways that perpetuate really good values that we need to be holding on to and teaching one another. I think that’s why I’m really drawn to these stories. I do recommend Zombies and Indians. It is on YouTube for anyone that wants to check it out. 

Chinelo:
Thanks for sharing that with us, Krista. My favourite type of movie is horror because there’s something about them that makes me want to label them as romance. Maybe it’s Patrick Wilson in The Conjuring. But somehow, I’ve never been able to do zombie movies. I think the ones I tried to watch when I was younger were probably like those Western styled ones that you mentioned. There was always too much gore and then everyone would perish living one survivor, which was sad. I don’t know that they ever made sense to me. But the one you just described has an added layer there, right? But I did want to ask who the zombies are.

Krista:
You don’t get a close enough image of who the zombies are in Zombies and Indians. However, a lot of the ones I’ve been looking at, like Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum and Roderick Pocowatchit’s The Dead Can’t Dance position whiteness as the zombie. This one doesn’t make an overt commentary on who is the monster, but you can see that there are always residues of those who really uphold colonial ways of consumption and extraction and things like that. 

Chinelo:
I will try to watch with one eye closed just in case. 

Before we go, I wonder if you could take one final question. And that’s if you have any words of wisdom for grad students or emerging scholars.

Krista:
I think the main thing would be basically trusting your own voice. We’re often, especially as grad students and early career researchers, constantly looking to those who have been more established in academia for a long time to see whether or not we’re going in the right direction, whether we’re thinking the right way, or talking the right way. But, going back to what I was saying earlier about how that literature review process feels almost backwards to me, we need to trust our voices first and really be okay sitting with that, even if it’s not in keeping with how academia is teaching us. We should not necessarily think in line with how the institution is telling us we should think because that’s the only way that we’re going to initiate changes. That’s the only way that we’re going to unsettle some of these things and that is by first trusting how we’re thinking and then feeling okay to reach out and talk to other people in our communities about it.

In ACCUTE, we already have a great group of researchers who are doing this work who are open to have these conversations. So, that’s a great place to start. For grad students, I always recommend the graduate student caucus. And then with BIPOC students, I would recommend starting with that Caucus as well. Those are spaces where you can have smaller conversations but then pull them out into the larger ACCUTE body. We’re not alone and our voices and our opinions and our ideas are powerful and important, even if they’re not the standardized way of doing things.

Chinelo:
Thank you so much for that, Krista. I found that really encouraging. I’ve been trying to think about ways of increasing our presence within ACCUTE. The thing I struggle with is that I can’t impose an identity on anyone. So, I’m always hesitant to write to someone directly and say, do you want to join? Because as soon as I say that it means I’m telling them you’re BIPOC. From speaking with friends and colleagues, I know that the present label is problematic, but like you, I think it is still an important way to come together. We can only bring change when we are present, right? I am shamelessly advertising our group at this point, but I would like to say that the last real BIPOC meeting we had at the ACCUTE conference of 2023 was a defining moment for me. And it wasn’t even just that feeling of being able to breathe and laugh but it was the people that I met, and the fact that they shared the same types of experiences I’d been having. And it made me think that it was okay to be me. Like you said, we have to be there to be able to make those connections. So, thank you again for sharing your wisdom, knowledge, and time with us. I really appreciate your responding to our open call. 

Krista:
This was a great talk and I’m really excited to finally meet you in person and chat with you at the coming conference. Thank you and take care.