Pacific Peoples’ Partnership Good Allyship GUIDING VALUES:
- Listen to the Indigenous people you have come to support.
- Learn Cultural Protocols of the Indigenous nations on whose territories you are living and working. You are a visitor; respect the territories you are visiting as you would someone’s home.
- Learn the Names of the Places you are visiting. Learn the history of the lands and waters you are engaging with. Learn through the stories, place names, and experiences of the Indigenous nations to whom those territories belong.
- Take Responsibility for your actions and choices. How will you move towards decolonization in your own life and practice?
- Build and Nurture Good Relationships with those you wish to support.
- Always Respect the Indigenous Peoples on whose territories you are present.
- Be Humble: don’t centre yourself, don’t make it about you, don’t impose.
- Be Present and Abundant: offer the skills that you have to the movement you want to support; make yourself useful.
- Make space: create openings for Indigenous resurgence to emerge through breaking down colonial systems, institutions, relationships and mindsets in all of the space you inhabit and engage with.
- Embody your Allyship in all aspects of your living, in all of the spaces you live within (not just temporary, selective).
- Don’t Appropriate Indigenous symbols, signs, songs, struggles as your own.
- Don’t Compare your experiences to those you seek to align yourself with. For example, don’t use being a person of colour (or your own history) to avoid talking about privilege, or being a woman to avoid talking about race and class privilege. Take an intersectional approach and remember that while we share some of our struggles, there are others that we do not, which we must always consciously navigate and account for.
- Strive to Leave a Place better than you found it (without playing the saviour). Indigenous movements for justice are land-based struggles. Care of the environments that sustain you and form the basis of Indigenous nationhood.
- Be ready to be Unsettled. Be Ready to have uncomfortable conversations. Questioning ourselves, our positions, our privileges, engaging our histories, our complicities can be emotionally difficult, but is a process that will always open infinite possibilities for re-orienting ourselves, giving us the power to choose the paths we walk, and who we walk alongside in respect and solidarity.