Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Volunteered - Oral Presentation Session

Transnational Statelessness: Kurdish Refugees and Indigenous People in Canada

Indigeneity, Immigration, Social Movements

Presenter(s)

• OO

  Omer Ozcan

  Visiting Professor
  York University

This paper investigates the future of global indigeneity under conditions of rapid travel, communication, access to information, and democratic and ecological movements among the marginalized stateless peoples across the globe. It traces the transnational connections among the Kurdish right struggles in the Middle East and various indigenous movements in Canada. In addition to examining how these geographically distant struggles inform and influence each other in political and discursive level, this paper is particularly interested in exploring how these exchanges in discursive level translate into everyday interactions in a settler colonial context among the diasporic Kurdish community and Indigenous people and movements in Canada. While being stateless and waging a similar struggle back in their homeland politically situate Kurds in proximity with Indigenous peoples, being newcomers in Canada puts them in the same pool with all other settlers. How these tensions are negotiated and mediated in daily interactions, what kind of solidarity networks are in practice, and what these tensions and interactions illuminate about day-to-day experiences of statelessness, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. Situated in the literature of settler colonialism, social movements, and human rights, this paper engages with multidisciplinary debates on sovereignty, indigeneity, statelessness, immigration, and social justice.