Envisioning Asian immigrant mothering in the context of land acknowledgement and reconciliation in Canada


Lan Vu, Carleton University

Immigrant mothering in Canada is deemed as either the enforcement of the systems political will through all child-rearing and parenting regulations and manuals as well as the practice of citizenship. Or it is the continuity and carriage of local social and cultural capital in the global era with the critique of the dominant mainstreaming system that oppresses the minority and marginal groups and communities. The effort, labor, and capital that immigrant mothers use in remaking new homes and the sense of belonging in Canada have not been visibly recognized in the public realm. This othering process detaches the engagement of Asian immigrant mothering from the Canadian land acknowledgment and reconciliation context, leading to the estrangement of all Asian diasporic mothers agency from the political and social process of Canada, which is primarily rooted in the country’s social reproduction. Many indigenous advocacy organizations have emphasized that land acknowledgment should be beyond just a statement of gratitude or appreciation. It is the process that requires time and care that leads to the return of the relationship to the land of Indigenous people in this country. In this paper, I will explain how the approach of design anthropology/sociology can contribute to the framework for creating collective imaginaries of immigrant mothering and indigenous learning and teaching which embraces land acknowledgment and contributes towards the reconciliation process as well as building the solidarity between indigenous people and immigrants to decolonize the colonial legacy in Canada. I will use the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ of Avery Gordon not only as the framework but also as a new sociology, one that can better "write the history of the present" by attempting to "imagine beyond the limits of what is already understandable" (p.195) to present an imaginary of mothering that involves indigenous teaching of the land and telling how to acknowledge their land in cooperation with immigrant mothering practices of connecting their appreciation and accountable engagement to the new homeland. As newcomers to Canada, immigrants and especially their children should be told and taught how to acknowledge and develop the relationship to the land by indigenous people, who were the most connected and from this land, not by the white-settler government or people. By envisioning the present and future context of Asian immigrant mothering in the context of reconciliation in Canada, I argue that engaging Asian immigrants as the new members of this country in the land acknowledgment and the reconciliation process is the way to recognize and re-enforce the situated relationship to the land of Indigenous people and to express the genuine land acknowledgment of immigrants to the land, to the indigenous people of the land as well as fostering Asian immigrants’ belonging in Canada. The encompassed agency and creativity of Asian immigrant mothering in the everyday activities of being-in-place can be engaged with indigenous practices of land acknowledgment to build a future relationship with the land in Canada. The paper will try to answer the question How can Asian immigrant mothering and indigenous practices of land acknowledgment be cooperatively imagined to build a future relationship to the land in Canada? and to conclude with a possibility of imaginaries of Asian immigrant mothering and land acknowledgment as the imagined path to move forward. Therefore, this paper will contribute to the discussion of the session ‘Towards Decolonial Solidarity from the Perspective of Asian Diasporas’ from the situated knowledge of an Asian researcher, an immigrant mother who truly acknowledges the land she decided to migrate to.

This paper will be presented at the following session: