The lives of things: Native objects, human rights and ndn-indian relationality

Abstract

Vital non-human things are too easily severed from their human “owners” due, in part, to particular human rights logics that enact market logics of equivalence, multicultural investments in recognition, settler-colonial categories of life and death, and Westphalian notions of racial identity. Using the controversial sale of Native artifacts as our primary example, and borrowing from recent thought on temporality and liveliness in feminist physics, we consider how a rethinking (not just expansion) of the subject of human rights opens up possibilities beyond the rights to development, enshrined in the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and towards something like rights of relationality. We turn to the contemporary photoart of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew to explore sovereignty and solidarity across NDN/Indian divides.