Eve Tuck

Eve Tuck (Unangax̂, enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska) is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work develops Indigenous research methodologies, theorizes refusal as ethical and methodological practice, and articulates decolonial education through Indigenous, Black, and Brown frameworks. With K. Wayne Yang, she co-edits Critical Ethnic Studies and runs the Tahltan-affiliated press DASH.

¶Core ideas

• Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization, in the settler-colonial frame, has a specific material referent — the repatriation of Indigenous land and life — and is not satisfied by metaphorical extensions to other liberatory projects. Treating decolonization as figure of speech (“decolonize the curriculum,” “decolonize the mind”) risks obscuring the specific land-and-life claims that the term properly names. The 2012 essay with K. Wayne Yang has become foundational across critical decolonial scholarship.
• Refusal as method. Audra Simpson’s refusal extended into research methodology: research with Indigenous communities should be willing to refuse access, refuse settler-academic frames, refuse to contribute to the apparatus that has historically extracted from those communities. Refusing certain research is itself a research-ethical commitment.
• Damage-centered vs. desire-based research. Damage-centered research (the documentation of trauma, deficit, woundedness) reproduces the very damage it documents while serving institutional purposes. Desire-based research foregrounds the complexity, contradiction, and self-determination of Indigenous communities — what they want, build, plan, hope, refuse.
• Suspending damage. The methodological commitment to refusing the damage-centered research model and developing alternatives that do not require Indigenous suffering as research substrate.

¶Key works

• “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” (Harvard Educational Review, 2009)
• “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (with K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1), 2012)
• Urban Youth and School Pushout: Gateways, Get-Aways, and the GED (2012)
• Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change (with Yang, ed., 2014)
• Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education (with Yang, ed., 2018)
• Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education (with Linda Tuhiwai Smith, ed., 2019)

¶Where her work figures in this library

Tuck and Yang’s “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” is foundational for settlerism, the settlerism-and-the-cybernetic-subject text, and the industrial-intellectualism critique. Her work is also upstream of decolonial pedagogical thought in the pedagogy subdomain.