Eve Tuck is an Unangax̂ scholar and associate professor at the University of Toronto (OISE). Her work has shaped conversations in Indigenous studies, education research, and decolonial theory, particularly through her insistence that decolonization has a specific, material meaning that cannot be reduced to metaphor.
Core ideas
- Decolonization is not a metaphor: with K. Wayne Yang (2012), Tuck argues that the adoption of “decolonize” as a general-purpose term for social justice empties it of its specific demand — the return of Indigenous land. This adoption is itself a settler move to innocence.
- Desire-based research: in “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” (2009), Tuck argues that research on marginalized communities has overwhelmingly been damage-centered — documenting pain, dysfunction, and deprivation to make arguments for policy reform. She calls for desire-based frameworks that attend to what communities want, create, and sustain, not only what has been done to them.
- Refusal: Tuck’s work models the practice of refusing to make Indigenous knowledge fully legible to settler academic institutions — withholding, redirecting, and declining to produce “data” that serves colonial knowledge systems.
Notable works
- “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012, with K. Wayne Yang)
- “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” (2009)