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Image description: Prairie Indigenous Relationality Nework members visit Alcatraz Island on Ramaytush Ohlone territory while at the 2024 meeting of the International Studies Association (left to right: Daniel Voth, Shalene Jobin, Gina Starblanket, Kaia Lamothe)
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As a non-Indigenous Political Scientist, a year into a post-doc in Medicine, I’ve encountered Indigenous relationality in the theories and methods of distinct disciplines, each casting a different light on the other.
In the Health Sciences, an individual’s healing journey tends to be the focus. From appointments to case files, diagnoses and consent, structurally, health systems are built around individuals. In patient-centred settings, it’s easy for relationality to be reduced to individuals and their relationships, losing sight of Indigenous collectivities and relationality as Indigenous law and governance.
As Gina Starblanket, co-Director of the Prairie Indigenous Relationality Network, writes in a recent forum, non-interference is a relational Cree legal and governance principle evident in Indigenous contexts such as treaty-making on the Canadian prairies. Non-interference affirms Indigenous self-determination as a political concept, but according to Starblanket, must be understood as part of a broader context of Indigenous social and political life built on reciprocal responsibility towards other living beings and the earth.
"In Indigenous contexts prior to contact, individuals embodied the worldview and attendant teachings that informed a relational orientation. In other words, individuals carried what might be perceived as law and governance within their bodies, hearts, and minds, because these emerged from the ground up and were transmitted to future generations through our everyday practices, our words and actions… We are simply not in the same context…questions of Indigenous self-determination in a neoliberal era have shifted the focus of political transformation onto individual Indigenous bodies and largely individual-level behaviours, taking attention away from our collective responsibilities for health and wellness" (Starblanket in Kuokkanen et al, 2025, p. 17).
While Indigenous law continues to be collective and embodied, the imposition of settler colonial structures, dispossession and economic exploitation of Indigenous lands, ongoing violations of treaty obligations and other forms of colonial violence continue to systematically undermine Indigenous governing relationships.
Efforts to transform systems of care can’t ignore the intersecting systems of oppression that “Indigenous people are expected to somehow, individually and automatically, heal from even as they remain intact” (Starblanket in Kuokkanen et al, 2025, p. 19). If relational care just focuses on an individual’s relationships, we miss the point being made by Indigenous feminists about the coloniality of health systems. Relationality is about relational ways of living and transforming colonial structures of care that actively undermine relationality. The collective aspects of both care and accountability are needed for relational healing.
The tendency to individualize relationality in health is contrasted by lofty abstract engagement with Indigenous relationality in Political Science that I’ve seen vis-à-vis the way relationality emerged in a forum like the International Studies Association (ISA).
Last April, in a brief foray from early spring on the Prairies, a small group from the Prairie Indigenous Relationality Network (PIRN) attended ISA’s annual meeting in San Francisco (Ramaytush Ohlone territory) keen to learn how people engage with relationality around the world, as promised by the conference theme: “Putting Relationality at the Centre of International Studies.” The vast scale of ISA—around 5000 attendees and hundreds of panels at any given time—means the conference evades summation.
In the sessions I attended, I was surprised to find that IR’s rich tradition of feminist relational ontologies of care were not more prominent. War relations once again captured ISA audiences on panel after panel, and as PIRN co-Director Daniel Voth observed, a wealth of panels on war employed Indigenous peoples’ ideas about self-determination and identity, but noticeably not any specific practices of relationships. Relationality was presented abstractly as a salve for a hurting international system and a warming planet. While frequently acknowledged as an Indigenous ontology, the engagement with Indigenous relational thought was about as deep as a puddle in a heat dome. Despite IR’s nominal emergence from relations, it was as though the mainstream discipline of International Relations (IR) had just discovered relationships, as one person in our little envoy put it.
But what is the mainstream of International Relations I’m referring to? Some point to defining journals and associations, but I was compelled by the way Mark Franke described IR on a Friday morning panel. IR is an orientation. It is, says Franke, a “will to know beyond one’s own experience,” and an expectation that peoples and regions around the globe “will comply” with one’s knowing. By extension, the uncomfortable implication is that Indigenous relational knowledges could be objectified by International Studies and become another locus of colonial knowledge production.
Indictments of IR’s will to imperialism are contrasted by other notions of encounter that grounded the dialogue at ISA in a world of relationships. PIRN Director Shalene Jobin located her talk within a Cree ontology and Cree relationality as reflected in the wildrose and teachings around restoring, establishing, opposing and maintaining relationships. A theme in the conversations I was part of was the significance of Indigenous diplomacy, inter-Indigenous relations as International Relations (Sara Maddison and Liam Midzain-Gobin), and the historical importance of Indigenous peoples’ collaboration to survival in the face of settler colonialism –– from pacts made in South America (Cristina Rojas) to Cree and Blackfoot peacemaking on the Prairies (PIRN co-Director Matthew Wildcat).
I come to my understandings of relationality through collaborative research on Indigenous law and governance, and participation in the PIRN network since 2017. At present, I’m part of a project supported by PIRN’s Critical Approaches to Indigenous Relationality (CAIR) initiative that is working towards a decolonial network of care among Indigenous People Who Use/Have Used Drugs (PWUD) on Treaty Six territory. Led by an Indigenous team of Directors, CAIR is a decentralized network of projects focused on Indigenous place-based theories and practices of relationality. The growth of the network through CAIR extends a foundation of work on prairie-specific modes of Indigenous relationality, in different registers, from the interpersonal to the political.
The relationship-driven inquiry of the Prairie Indigenous Philosophy Project (PIPP) involved partnering with Maria Campbell and Leroy Little Bear to engage with their contributions to prairie Indigenous philosophy (Cree-Métis, and Blackfoot, respectively) through their published and unpublished works, and crucially, through relationship and visiting. Campbell identified the Cree and Métis concept kîhokêwin (visiting) as key to these partnerships. At a PIPP symposium in 2017, members of the network co-created a kîhokêwin (Visiting) Declaration that powerfully centers visiting “as a prairie Indigenous form of knowledge transfer.” The key tenets of the declaration became the basis of the collaboration agreement that guides the new CAIR initiative.
Returning to ISA in 2024, at a Saturday morning roundtable, Ruana Kuokkanen named a tension I’d been feeling throughout the conference when she highlighted the opulence of the conference and hotel where we gathered and the stark visibility of profound poverty and homelessness where we were situated at the edge of the Tenderloin. Kuokkanen asked, what does this say about how we are engaging relationality? In contrast, the kîhokêwin (Visiting) Declaration commits signers to “offering and receiving hospitality, sharing tea and food, being both a good host and a good guest.” What responsibilities might a commitment to kîhokêwin entail in building a network of decolonial care in the inner city as we are in our CAIR project?
To highlight another dissonant space of encounter on our ISA trip, a few of us from PIRN took a night tour of Alcatraz. We noted the more than icky feeling of the horrible things that had happened on that island while taking in the power of the ocean that kept people imprisoned there and the legacy of the 19-month Red Power occupation of the abandoned Alcatraz penitentiary (November 1969-June 1971). The illustrious occupation is now embraced by the National Park Service, which runs a dozen daily tours of the island (still not governed by Indigenous peoples and now US President Donald Trump is threatening to reopen the prison as “the ultimate symbol of law and order”). An exhibit and documentary about the occupation explain the demands of the Red Power movement, which claimed the island, citing commitments in the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) to return unused federal lands to Indigenous people. The original occupiers and their families were invited to repaint graffiti on the water tower and buildings, such that the tour boat is greeted by large spray-painted messages of liberation on Indigenous land.
These powerful assertions of Indigenous sovereignty co-exist with ongoing colonialism––a tension as relevant on Ramaytush Ohlone territory as it is at home on Treaty Six territory. The intersecting forms of oppression that undermine Indigenous relationality can’t be boiled down to individual conditions. Commitments to co-creating decolonial forms of care, including ideas about what it means to visit and to host, stress the importance of collective networks of care and accountability.
