Navigating “Hospitality” on Unceded and Ancestral First Nations Land and Water in So-Called British Columbia Among the Filipinx Diaspora

Abstract

Across a range of rural/urban spaces and sites of Indigenous-Filipinx encounters in so-called British Columbia, Filipinx settlers negotiate contingent relations of tension, solidarity, and world-making with multiple Indigenous nations. While most Filipinx-Canadian discourse remains focused on invisible labour and the experiences of caregivers in Canada (Coloma et al. 2012), our dialogue opens conversations about navigating settler colonialism as Filipinx community members living on the unceded and ancestral territories of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit by concretely considering how Filipinx settlers across “British Columbia” navigate relations and embodied practices of hospitality. The latter idiom offers a living, relational analytic that orients and troubles Filipinx diasporic presences and arrivals on unceded Indigenous territories. At the same time, navigating the intimacies, authorities, and reciprocal moral ties of Indigenous hospitality remains tethered to the everyday work of Filipinx-Indigenous relation- and place-making. By thinking about both place-based and inter/national analytics of “hospitality,” the stories we tell of our academic interests, critical geographies, relationalities, community organizing, and ongoing dialogue offer a tentative start to rethinking relations as two distinctly situated Filipinx community members grappling with positions of solidarity as world-making.