Indigenous Articulations Research Articles

From roots to reefs: metaphors for relational praxis from the diasporas of Abya Yala and Moana Nui

Contending against colonial and liberal explanations of racialized identity, the authors offer new articulations of race and Indigeneity as a journey from roots to reefs. This work is inspired by the author’s relationships as communities born from Moana Nui (the Pacific Ocean) and Abya Yala (Latin America). The article begins with the theoretical genealogies of trans-Indigeneity as conceptualized by Chadwick Allen and the Tongan (Indigenous people of Tonga) Tā-Vā (time–space) theory of reality. Drawing and applying trans-Indigenous scholarship allows them to use art or poetry to demonstrate pathways of inter-connections among both communities with tā-vā as a conceptual lens to identify relational moments in time and space. Their work is informed by a K’iche’ Maya (the largest group of Mayan peoples currently living in Central America) scholar with Pacific Islander relationships as a relational praxis that is possible among both communities.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Multispecies security and personhood

AbstractThe contributions to this Special Issue examine multispecies perspectives on the political dynamics of international life. Building on this theme, I consider the complex and manifold ways in which the subject of security can be understood in terms of more-than-human personhood. First, by thinking of more-than-human animals as phenomenally conscious persons, we might better appreciate the multispecies complexity of security as an agentic and affective experience. Second, attending to the spiritual character of certain indigenous articulations of personhood presses us to decipher how spiritual claims might inform moral and legal dimensions of multispecies security-seeking behaviour. To illustrate the significance of these moves, I first draw on more-than-human experiences of war, pathogenic viruses, and the global factory farm. I then explore conceptions of spiritual personhood in the context of Ojibwe responsibilities to protect wolves. These perspectives on personhood demonstrate possibilities for cultivating greater interest in the multispecies experience of security.

What Tradition Affords

Over the past three decades, non-Indigenous peoples have repeatedly positioned Indigenous peoples as the bearers of redemptive environmental knowledge, particularly in relation to climate change and natural hazards. In southeast Australia, recent widespread interest in Aboriginal peoples’ fire management practices has been bolstered by these international trends but more directly driven by a succession of severe bushfire seasons as well as popular accounts suggesting that such practices might “save” the fire-prone nation. This situation is one of both continuity and novelty. While the ways Aboriginal peoples burn landscapes have been previously (re)discovered by bushfire managers and scientists, contemporary Aboriginal “cultural burning” initiatives also represent new contact zones of encounter and recognition, offering paradoxical affordances for individuals and groups able to perform different articulations of Indigeneity. As non-Indigenous people search for Indigenous solutions, in Australia and elsewhere, they raise expectations and fuel emerging tensions, with potentially incendiary results.

(Un)Tethering Indigeneity: The Colonized, Settlerized, Nationalized, and Something Else

Abstract The term indigenous has been used as a contextual reference to Armenians in relation to Asia Minor. In the ruins produced by the conjoined interests of various ruling classes and global capitalism, how does one come to understand (collective) Armenian indigeneity beyond an experience of ongoing loss? In this article, I propose divesting from exclusionary and abstracted nationalist articulations of indigeneity. I draw on a queer feminist reinterpretation of an Armenian fairy tale, as an opening for healing Armenian necrophilic indigeneity and orienting toward the preciousness of life.

‘Welcome to a Coronavirus production’:Beyond Bows and Arrows’ Indigenous on-air community-building during lockdown

This article examines intertribal community-building in Indigenous-produced radio show Beyond Bows and Arrows, broadcast since 1983 in Dallas, Texas, and explores ways in which on-air Indigenous articulations function as acts of resurgence in turn reinforcing an Indigenous internationalism. In this critical exploration, I draw on Beyond Bows and Arrows ( BBAA) content broadcast between April and June 2020. I analyse components of the radio sound text such as in-studio talk; discussion topics; music selection and verbal segues; and station-produced informational Public Service Announcements (PSAs); and identify recurring preoccupations over three months of weekly programming during the pandemic's first lockdown. In particular, I consider BBAA's foregrounding of pandemic protocols, calls for Census 2020 participation and Black Lives Matter solidarity at the start of the unsettled yet generative 2020 summer and examine how these articulations coalesce into an on-air structure of feeling which in turn embodies the show's ongoing decolonizing project.

Khoisan Consciousness: Articulating Indigeneity in Post-Apartheid Cape Town

Abstract The Khoisan were decimated, dispossessed and assimilated into the mixed-race “Coloured” group during colonialism and apartheid, spawning the notion of their supposed extinction. However, Cape Town, where colonial history runs deepest, became the epicentre of “Khoisan revivalism” after apartheid. Khoisan revivalists reject Coloured identity and campaign for cultural development, historical justice and indigenous rights. Many also claim land and traditional leadership titles. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Khoisan revivalists, my PhD dissertation scrutinises Khoisan revivalism’s origins, appeal and political aspirations. It focuses on the various ways that historical events, figures and practices inform diverse articulations of indigeneity. Khoisan revivalists are primarily seeking a relatable connection with the past and select sources, mediums and content accordingly. Moreover, in simultaneously replicating, disregarding and appropriating colonial representations, they produce a “subversive authenticity”. While empowering to many, Khoisan revivalism has also emboldened some to mobilise a racialised identity politics based on prior occupancy, which today extends beyond the movement.

Indigenous articulations of social media and digital assemblages of care

Studies show that, in times of need, Indigenous people across the continent now referred to as ‘Australia’ tend to rely more on the ‘informal’ connections of support, care and trust made with family, friends and community—connections which are increasingly mediated through digital technologies. Australian researchers have recently begun attending to the possibilities social media offers in sustaining networks of support ‘outside’ settler geographies of institutionalised health. This burgeoning digital health research, however, has tended to frame Indigenous people only as recipients of care; and it has mostly focused on the narrow remit of connecting Indigenous social media users with formal sources of health information and support. In this paper, we instead explore the already-existing ‘informal’ care practices of and between Indigenous social media users. We draw on recent developments in cultural and health geography, which have sought to understand care, health and wellbeing through Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) notion of ‘assemblage’, to chart the geographies of care that digital media makes possible. We show that Indigenous social media users are engaged in the production of distinct territorial arrangements of care. In identifying people in their networks who appear in need of help, they actively and creatively work to establish a suitable working arrangement to meet that need, which participants variously described through expressions of intimacy, networks, formality and atmosphere. These Indigenous articulations of digital media, we argue, are reterritorialising new spaces of care, safety and strength, against and outside the settler geographies that lead to widespread health disparities, and they challenge dominant narratives about Indigenous digital life.

Diverse Articulations of Urban Indigeneity among Lowland Indigenous Groups in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

This article contrasts politico‐legal understandings of indigeneity to the lived experiences of urban residents in Santa Cruz (Bolivia) who belong to distinct lowland indigenous groups and whose specific demands are often not addressed by government authorities. It also critically examines power relations and patterns of exclusion within urban indigenous communities. The findings offer insights on the multiple, and at times conflicting, experiences of distinct urban indigenous residents. They also highlight the need to consider alternative indigenous struggles which confront unjust government practices that reproduce social exclusion and coloniality, but also problematise patriarchal relations and gerontocracy among urban indigenous groups.

The Metaphysics of Decolonization

Decolonization is synonymous with liberation. It is invoked in multiple overlapping geopolitical projects that demand both the undoing of imperial-colonial structures and the amelioration of their effects. In his essay “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/ Building Decolonial Options,” Walter Mignolo describes decoloniality as a double-faced concept. Decolonization is a geopolitical project while decoloniality is an epistemological, political, and ethical process that enables decolonial futures (Mignolo 2011, 20). In this way, decoloniality is an analytical that critiques coloniality but also a generative utopian project that relies on decolonial epistemologies to materialize these futures. Like settler colonialism, coloniality is a structure that exceeds colonization and capitalism, expressing itself as modernity. It is the epistemic and hermeneutical processes of decoloniality that reveal ways of living and being—what Mignolo calls “living in harmony and reciprocity”—that ultimately build a nonimperial, noncapitalist world (Mignolo 2011, 25). In this article I put decolonial theory in conversation with Indigenous articulations of decolonization and religious life to illustrate what Indigenous decolonial futures may look like. I argue that reclamations of Indigenous metaphysical life regenerate Indigenous ontologies (intersubjective personhood) in ways that not only secure decolonial futures but also heal historical trauma, which can be understood as ontological dispossession.

Bound by Sovereignty

Abstract Recently scholars have called for an Indigenous turn in medieval studies that challenges the historical assumptions of the field by actively engaging in a decolonial and anticolonial praxis. This essay argues that this turn must confront the problem of reciprocity that arises from distinct Indigenous and medieval articulations of sovereignty, which reveal the potential of this tenuous intersection despite the possibility of irreconcilable antagonisms. Tracing sovereignty—specifically through a “politics of recognition” as proposed by the Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard—in Dante’s Monarchia (and Paradiso) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony provides an analytic example of this comparative framework, since both authors challenge readers to question the imposition of authority and the logics that legitimate and justify dominant forms of governance. Yet Dante and Silko also draw on distinct articulations of sovereignty that suggest the limitations of decolonial and anticolonial praxis within a field bound to a Western episteme that underwrites colonial and imperial authority.

A right to remoteness? A missing bridge and articulations of indigeneity along an East Siberian railroad.

The Soviet Union and its successor states have been avid supporters of a modernisation paradigm aimed at ‘overcoming remoteness’ and ‘bringing civilisation’ to the periphery and its ‘backward’ indigenous people. The Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad, built as a much‐hyped prestige project of late socialism, is a good example of that. The BAM has affected indigenous communities and reconfigured the geographic and social space of East Siberia. Our case study, an Evenki village located fairly close to the BAM, is (in)famous today for its supposed refusal to get connected via a bridge to the nearby railroad town. Some actors portray this disconnection as a sign of backwardness, while others celebrate it as the main reason for native language retention and cultural preservation. Focusing on discourses linking the notions of remoteness and cultural revitalisation, the article argues for conceptualising the story of the missing bridge not as the result of political resistance but rather as an articulation of indigeneity, which foregrounds cultural rights over more contentious political claims. Thus, the article explores constellations of remoteness and indigeneity, posing the question whether there might be a moral right to remoteness to be claimed by those who view spatial distance as a potential resource.

James Clifford’s ‘Indigenous Articulations’ as Travelling Theory? The Search for Sustainability in Theorising Taiwan’s Indigenous and Han Populations

In 2000, the noted scholar James Clifford delivered an address entitled ‘Indigenous Articulations’ in which he challenged dichotomies of authenticity/inauthenticity that plague theories of indigeneity in the Pacific region. Today, ‘Indigenous Articulations’ has travelled far beyond its original audience, and some Taiwanese scholars who analyse the literature/culture of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples have adopted this work. Yet, in contrast to Clifford, these scholars have used ‘Indigenous Articulations’ to simultaneously explain indigenous and Han Taiwanese populations, positing Han-indigenous creolisation as preferable to indigenous self-determination. In this paper, I adopt travelling theory to examine ‘Indigenous Articulations’ and its movement to Taiwan studies. I then consider the works of Kuei-fen Chiu and Hueichu Chu to show how they use ‘Indigenous Articulations’ to support a creolised existence for Han and indigenous populations on Taiwan. Finally, I explore tensions between theoretical and ethical sustainability in Taiwan studies and possibilities for recognising indigenous rights in this field.

Ireland and Irishness: The Contextuality of Postcolonial Identity

The porous boundaries of postcolonial studies are put to the test in examining the Irish question and its position in postcolonial studies. Scholars have explored Ireland through the themes of decolonization, diaspora, and religion, but we propose indigenous studies as a way forward to push the boundaries and apply an appropriate context to view the 1916 Commemorations, a likely focus of Irish studies for years to come. To set the stage for Ireland, we explore the existing literature on postcolonialism and Ireland’s place within it first by reexamining the historical narrative, moving into a postcolonial critique of indigenous articulations presented in the context of the 1916 Commemorations. We ultimately look to embrace a discussion about indigenous studies and its offerings to the Irish question. By analyzing the 1916 Commemorations as a celebration of indigenous culture in a postcolonial state, the tensions of reclaiming within certain geopolitical realities reveal an unexplored space for the Irish question. These tensions are smoothed over by a reclaiming of the diaspora, uniting the mobile indigenous to their homeland as part of the ongoing reimaging of the Irish postcolonial identity. Key Words: decolonization, diaspora, Easter Rising 1916, indigeneity, residuality.

Movilización transnacional indígena en la cuenca amazónica: Democracia, nuevos movimientos sociales y comunidades epistémicas

La creciente discusión sobre los movimientos sociales en el contexto hegemónico de las democracias liberales, así como la expansión en el número de grupos movilizados por diversas causas, plantea el cuestionamiento de los aparatos de mantenimiento democrático de los Estados nacionales. Este trabajo pretende discutir el surgimiento de movimientos sociales en el contexto de la transnacionalidad y de comunidades epistémicas. Así, se abordan teorías acerca de la democracia y los movimientos sociales. Se observan, además, los motivos por los cuales estos grupos sociales se articulan, con énfasis en las articulaciones indígenas, incluso en la categoría de nuevos movimientos sociales transnacionales, y se conceptualiza a estos grupos como redes transnacionales y comunidades epistémicas, a partir de las discusiones del constructivismo crítico.

“My Home Is on Both Sides”: Indigenous Communities and the US-Canadian Border on the Columbia Plateau, 1880s–1910s

Abstract For indigenous groups inhabiting the interior Pacific Northwest’s Columbia Plateau, issues of native group identity took on a transnational dimension with the imposition of the US-Canadian border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article examines how the Okanagan, Sinixt, and Ktunaxa peoples, whose homelands and communities were bifurcated by the forty-ninth parallel, negotiated and complicated Canada’s and the United States’ enforcement of the international boundary. These partitioned indigenous communities endeavored to maintain cultural connections to each other across the line while also engaging their recognized political status within the bounds of either nation-state. Focusing on the activities of Native Plateau peoples in the borderlands reestablishes the persistence of indigenous articulations of territory and nationhood that transcended the US-Canadian border.

Modern singing sons of the Pharaohs

In 2009, the U.S. Library of Congress officially launched the Ragheb Moftah Collection, an online exhibit that presented the largest music archive of Coptic liturgical recordings and music transcriptions outside of Egypt. Moftah, an amateur Egyptian collector, had commissioned an English composer, Ernest Newlandsmith, to notate and record the entire Orthodox hymnody. They both believed that, as the last connection to a Pharaonic and pre-Islamic past, the ancient melodies lay unchanged, “buried under a debris of Arabic and other ornamentation.” Drawing on Wendy Cheng’s notion of strategic orientalism (2013) and Timothy Mitchell’s staging modernity (2000), I explore contemporary discursive politics of sound archives in the Coptic community. Specifically, I investigate the role of Coptic music archives in articulations of community legitimacy, indigeneity, and agency as a religious and political minority in a Muslim majority nation. How have today’s cantors and activists rendered western transcriptions as sound objects which to negotiate authenticity as Egypt’s last remaining “modern sons of the pharaohs,” even without being able to read them? As the principal curator of the site, I explore how Western scholarly encounters have not only entangled Coptic music discourses in a western-centered teleology of modernity and progress, but in emulating the West, also infused them with orientalist critiques that equated heterophony and embellishments to “Arab debris” that marked signs of backwardness.

Negotiating Indigenous knowledge at the science-policy interface: Insights from the Xáxli’p Community Forest

Despite increasing interest in learning from Indigenous communities, efforts to involve Indigenous knowledge in environmental policy-making are often fraught with contestations over knowledge, values, and interests. Using the co-production of knowledge and social order (Jasanoff, 2004), this case study seeks to understand how some Indigenous communities are engaging in science-policy negotiations by linking traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), western science, and other knowledge systems. The analysis follows twenty years of Indigenous forest management negotiations between the Xáxli’p community and the Ministry of Forests in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada, which resulted in the Xáxli’p Community Forest (XCF). The XCF is an eco-cultural restoration initiative that established an exclusive forest tenure for Xáxli’p over the majority of their aboriginal territory—a political shift that was co-produced with new articulations of Xáxli’p knowledge. This research seeks to understand knowledge co-production with Indigenous communities, and suggests that existing knowledge integration concepts are insufficient to address ongoing challenges with power asymmetries and Indigenous knowledge. Rather, this work proposes interpreting XCF knowledge production strategies through the framework of “Indigenous articulations,” where Indigenous peoples self-determine representations of their identities and interests in a contemporary socio-political context. This work has broader implications for considering how Indigenous knowledge is shaping science-policy negotiations, and vice versa.

Palawa Kaniand the Value of Language in Aboriginal Tasmania

Over the past forty years the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, long marked as an iconic case of extinction, have revitalized many elements of their ‘lost’ culture. Palawa kani, the constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language, is an example of such efforts. The construction and utilization of palawa kani is one element of a broader Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural politics working to strengthen the Indigenous status, authenticity, and presence in Tasmania specifically and Australia more generally. In this article I recount the historical documentation of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages and analyze the process through which multiple historical languages were utilized in the construction and consecration of a single ‘official’ Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Rather than existing strictly as a tool for communication, I argue palawa kani is a cultural artifact that, like an emblem, works to distinguish the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, one that lacks many of the stereotypical components of Australian Aboriginality, within Tasmanian society. As such, it is best understood in relation to Clifford's ‘indigenous articulations’ (2001) and Cowlishaw's mythopoeia of Aboriginality in Australia (2010, 2011). I examine what palawa kani does for, and what it represents to, the larger Tasmanian Aboriginal community.

The constraints of an ‘ironic scholar’: Negotiating critical engagement with indigeneity and nature conservation

This paper examines how contemporary articulations of indigeneity as bound to nature are treated by critical scholarship. I suggest that critical scholarship has done much to interrogate problematic understandings and restrictive positionings of indigeneity but has also lead to a contemporary position of irony, explored here as academic detachment and as a corrective form. I argue that this ironic position can lead to a lack of recognition for the ways that some groups are currently articulating indigeneity as bound to nature - in ways that, in Latin America, are currently opening up new political spaces, across scales, to debate how nature is valued, protected and lived with. In this paper, I firstly outline how past critiques from critical geography and anthropology can create an ironic treatment of indigeneity and nature conservation. Secondly, I adopt a political ecology approach to consider how past histories and experiences of (shifting) indigenous discourse can help to make sense of the claims that groups make on nature in the contemporary period, revealing how shifting identity politics, discursive regimes, policy frameworks and articulations of nature have been co-produced. Thirdly, I draw on examples from contemporary Bolivian indigenous politics and suggest their relevance to contemporary conservation debates.

Plant Provocations: Botanical Indigeneity and (De)colonial Imaginations

Abstract: This paper examines the possibilities and limitations of an emergent global discourse of indigeneity to offer an oppositional praxis in the face of the depredations of settler colonialism in post-apartheid South Africa. Self-conscious articulations of indigeneity, we argue, reveal the fraught relationship between increasingly hegemonic and narrow understandings of the indigenous and the carceral logic of apartheid. We examine this by focusing on the meanings and attachments forged through indigenous plants in two realms: the world of indigenous gardening practised by white suburban dwellers and that of subsistence farming undertaken by rural black women. This juxtaposition reveals that in contrast to the pervasive resurrection of colonial time that defines metropolitan indigenous gardening, the social relations of a subsistence cultivator challenge the confines of colonial temporality, revealing a creative mode of dissent structured around dreams, ancestral knowledge, and the commons. Our exploration of struggles around botanical indigeneity suggests that anticolonial modes of indigeneity do not necessarily inhere in recognisable forms and that studies of the indigenous need to proceed beyond those that bear familial resemblance to emergent global understandings.