Indigenous Feminisms Roundtable

Abstract

Daniel Rivers and Karen J. Leong, members of the Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute Program Committee, organized this roundtable to address the absence of Indigenous feminisms from feminist discussions of the transnational, even though many Indigenous nations in the Americas are themselves traversed by settler colonial nationstates, and most American Indians and First Nations peoples are binational, being citizens of sovereign states as well as citizens of settler colonial nationstates. We invited scholars Hokulani K. Aikau (Kanaka ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi) from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Maile Arvin (Kanaka Maoli) from uc Riverside, Mishuana Goeman (Tonowanda Band of Seneca) from ucla, and Scott Morgensen from Queen’s University in Kingston to be part of this conversation, with Daniel Rivers as facilitator. Prior to the roundtable, the participants collectively generated questions for discussion: (1) What are the relationships that currently exist between transnational and Indigenous feminisms? Are there overlaps and disjunctures between them, and what can they contribute to one another? (2) Are considerations of Indigeneity frequently erased by transnational concerns, and in what way are these transnational concerns articulated through settler colonialist logics? (3) What convergences exist between Indigenous feminisms and transnational feminisms that can off er critiques of existing heteropatriarchies locally and globally? How might these open up the possibilities of Indigenous transnational alliances that force settler colonialists and nationstates to be responsible for land theft and the injustices that ensue therein?