The Solidarity Encounter

Book excerpt: On the heels of recent revelations of past and ongoing injustices, reconciliation and solidarity by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is even more urgent. But it is a complex endeavour. In The Solidarity Encounter, Carol Lynne D’Arcangelis links interviews with activists and her own self-reflections to current scholarship to take readers into the fraught terrain of solidarity organizing. Multi-issue coalitions such as Idle No More, #NoDAPL, MMIWG2SQ, Black Lives Matter, and Fridays for Future all depend on the collaboration of diverse communities and on avoiding harmful detours into historically derived helping behaviours. D’Arcangelis grapples with this key tension: colonizing behaviours that result when white women centre their own goals and frameworks as they participate in activism with Indigenous women and groups. The Solidarity Encounter concludes by offering strategies for respecting boundaries between self and other, providing a constructive framework for non-colonizing solidarity that can be applied in any context of unequal power.