How can you be a good guest in indigenous communities, and a strong ally for marginalized communities centering their knowledge online? How can we use our relative power and privilege in service of others?
“How to Ally and Be a Good Guest” is the fourth and final part in the “Our Stories, Our Knowledges” Resource Series.
Based on the experiences of members of Native American communities of the Kumeyaay and Shoshone, Dalit feminist communities from India and the diaspora, LGBTIQA communities from Bosnia Herzegovina, and Whose Knowledge?, this guide shares recommendations for how to be a respectful guest and supportive co-conspirator with marginalized communities. As you will learn, to ally is a verb and not a status. Allyship requires constant work and many trial and error situations. Along with the never-ending cycle of messy practices, we will share a wishlist and some do’s and don’ts when it comes to supporting those with less power and privilege, both online and on the ground.
We hope that what we’ve shared will motivate you to have the courage to engage, to make mistakes and keep learning as you do the hard work of allyship. Better allies and guests in the world means that more women, people of color, LGBTQIA communities, indigenous peoples and others from the global South will have the support they deserve to continue their own fight to have their stories and knowledges recognized and valued. The more we stand in solidarity with each other, the more we can all accomplish.
You can learn more about this resource series by reading our previous posts: Decolonizing Our Stories and Knowledges, Transformative Practice for Building Community Knowledges and Adding our Knowledge to Wikipedia.
This ends the Our Stories, Our Knowledge series. We hope you will be inspired and motivated to bring what you’ve learned from these resources into your own practices – share, reuse, remix, adapt! And please let us know what else you’d like to add or learn.