Using Indigenous Feminist Land Ethics to Queer the Korean Missionary Position in Canada

Abstract

This essay reflects on my practice of building solidarity with Indigenous peoples in a research project on diasporic Korean Christian missionary involvement with Indigenous communities in British Columbia. I incorporate an Indigenous feminist land ethic of relationality to queer my investigation of Korean missionary relationships with Indigenous peoples in Canada. I bring queer, woman of colour and Indigenous feminist perspectives into conversation with Asian Canadian studies to examine how the relationships between Korean diasporic and Indigenous subjects are structured by the normative logics of settler colonialism and late global capitalism. Korean Canadians occupy a conflicted position as marginalized citizens in a settler nation with global economic aspirations. Yet, in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism, they can also be complicit in white settler colonial and capitalist projects, which encourage Koreans to perform and be recognized as respectable, upwardly mobile citizens. By theorizing personal memoir and lived experience, my aim is to present a self-reflexive research methodology and explore how Indigenous feminist perspectives offer non-normative epistemologies that can transform institutions in radically queer ways.