Indigenous Critique Research Articles

Dreaming Differently

Dreaming Differently

Indigenous, Settler, Animal; a Triadic Approach

In his Indigenous critique of the field of animal studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation) describes it as having an analytic blind spot when it comes to settler-colonialism, a blind spot that manifests through universalising claims and clumsy arguments about ‘shared’ oppressions, through assumptions that settler colonial political institutions can be a neutral part of the solution, and through a failure to engage with ‘Indigenous studies of other than human life’ (20). In the same article, he calls on decolonial projects to do more to include animality within their purview, to include critiques of animal agriculture and to incorporate critiques of anthropocentrism as ‘a key logic of white supremacy’. Belcourt’s critique of both Animal studies and decolonial projects on the basis of an unequal but mutual marginalisation is an important starting point for research projects like ours that hope to bring Animal studies and Indigenous studies approaches into dialogue about the cultural impacts of introduced animals. Our approach sets out to be ‘triadic’, always involving at least three sides; Settler- Coloniser, Indigene and Animal.

Toward an interstitial global critical theory

ABSTRACT By building on calls for a global critical theory, the article argues for a combination between the canon of critical theory, and the rich fields of post-, de-, and settler-colonial studies. It argues that an umbrella for such a project is to develop an interstitial global critical theory. By focusing on interstices, ‘heuristic interstitialism’ invites us to see and thus study the globe by looking simultaneously at the supra-, inter- and even infra-individual levels. As such, it avoids both methodological nationalism and a potentially Eurocentric methodological civilizationalism, that is, the idea that large cultural blocks exist and can be studied in separation from other units, and their components. Heuristic interstitialism is a practice that brings to the fore new creative concepts, revives marginalized and silenced acts of resistance, and thus incorporates gender, ecological, racial, indigenous and postcolonial critiques without retreating into mere particularism and the consequent loss of attention to the global sources of exploitation, inequalities, and alienation.

Knowledge versus Education in the Margins: An Indigenous and Feminist Critique of Education

This article highlights the perceptions and expectations of knowledge that many people, including educators and policy makers, take for granted. Our focus of understanding is Indigenous studies and gender studies. Our aim is to show how modern education undermines these fields of studies. We use an autoethnographic method, reflecting more than 75 years as pupils/students and more than 90 years as educators. We have carefully chosen narratives of exposure to knowledge outside the educational system, as well as narratives of limitations posed upon us by the educational system. This narrative approach makes it possible for us to investigate and discuss our grief about areas of knowledge that society cries for, but the educational system continuously finds ways to resist. Our conclusion is that crucial knowledge is located outside the educational system, where individuals, groups, and communities cherish, protect, and guard knowledge that the educational system marginalises or excludes. As this knowledge is fundamental for life, our message is that the educational system needs to re-evaluate its strategies to stay relevant.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Designing an Indigenous Voice that empowers: How constitutional recognition could strengthen First Nations sovereignty

This article considers how a First Nations Voice to Parliament, if carefully designed, could strengthen the land-based sovereignty and autonomy of First Peoples in Australia. It critiques the proposals presented in the Indigenous Voice Co-design Process' Interim Report released January 2021 for its emphasis on the role of government and existing structures. It responds to Indigenous critiques of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, while arguing for a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament that respects and defers to First Nations' Country-based authority.

Concrete Lessons: Policies and Practices Affecting the Impact of COVID-19 for Urban Indigenous Communities in the United States and Canada.

Throughout the Americas, most Indigenous people move through urban areas and make their homes in cities. Yet, the specific issues and concerns facing Indigenous people in cities, and the positive protective factors their vibrant urban communities generate are often overlooked and poorly understood. This has been particularly so under COVID-19 pandemic conditions. In the spring of 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples called for information on the impacts of COVID-19 for Indigenous peoples. We took that opportunity to provide a response focused on urban Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. Here, we expand on that response and Indigenous and human rights lens to review policies and practices impacting the experience of COVID-19 for urban Indigenous communities. Our analysis integrates a discussion of historical and ongoing settler colonialism, and the strengths of Indigenous community-building, as these shape the urban Indigenous experience with COVID-19. Mindful of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, we highlight the perspectives of Indigenous organizations which are the lifeline of urban Indigenous communities, focusing on challenges that miscounting poses to data collection and information sharing, and the exacerbation of intersectional discrimination and human rights infringements specific to the urban context. We include Indigenous critiques of the implications of structural oppressions exposed by COVID-19, and the resulting recommendations which have emerged from Indigenous urban adaptations to lockdown isolation, the provision of safety, and delivery of services grounded in Indigenous initiatives and traditional practices.

“To Make Discoveries in Those Latitudes”: Utopia and Settler Colonialism in Equality; or, a History of Lithconia

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the call for decolonial utopian work by examining one of the earliest utopian texts in the United States, Equality; or, A History of Lithconia. Using a close reading drawing on colonial context, the author argues that Equality criticizes management of the Euro-American settler state. The story's historical and philosophical content overwrites Indigenous bloodshed and critiques instead both Jeffersonian agrarian democracy and urbanized commerce. The junction between reason and religion in this Deist text displays its ideological commitment to terra nullis and a settler autarky that rearranges space for the betterment of a settler populace. Advocating an equal share of land and income among settlers, Lithconia's history praises an intelligent class that deploys reason and crafty social alliance to resolve Old World conflicts. Lithconia's universal income ultimately diverts the spoils of centuries of war against indigenous peoples, suggesting utopia and indigeneity occupy an incongruent relationship.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN BIOREGIONALISM AND THE NEED FOR A DECOLONIAL ETHICS OF PLACE

AbstractBioregionalism is an environmental movement that attempts to create decentralized, self‐determined communities connected to landscape and ecological features. Activists and scholars have used the phrase “becoming native” to describe the process of belonging to place. Despite its cultural appropriation, not only do bioregional writers still use the metaphor, but it has also been defended within religious studies. Instead of relying on these arguments to address ethical issues, claims to place need a decolonial framework. Looking at various voices within bioregionalism through Indigenous critiques displays both the movement’s issues as well as decolonial processes for local adaptation. Wendell Berry exemplifies the problems of bioregional ethics but also shows bioregionalism's capacity for decolonization.

G-Men, Green Men, and Red Land: Extraterrestrial Miscreants, Federal Jurisdiction, and Exceptional Space

In the 1970s a string of cattle mutilations grabbed national attention. Thousands of cows in twenty-one states were turning up dead under suspicious circumstances. The culprits left no tire tracks or footprints, only exsanguinated cows missing trademark body parts. Many members of the public suspected (and still suspect) aliens were responsible. This article analyzes FBI files on the mutilations and reveals the central role Indian land played in the FBI’s search for the cow killers. It then wields Indian land to launch an Indigenous critique of settler speculations about the alien.

Unsettling Frontiers: Property, Empire, and Race in Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams

ABSTRACT This article explores the “unsettling” qualities of American writer Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams. It explores the book’s engagement with environmental crises and indigenous cosmologies to show how the metaphysical insecurities, common to much of Johnson’s fiction, come in this context to challenge the very concept of American nationhood itself – or as the novella’s title parodies, the “American Dream.” Train Dreams unsettles what I call the narrative infrastructures undergirding the story of the American frontier-becoming-nation-state: the transcontinental railroads, and the colonial property regimes that those railroads both pursued and opened up. In three central sections, the article explores Johnson’s unsettling of notions of property, then empire, and finally race. Through these readings, it shows how the novella finds its way to an indigenous critique of America as a settler-colonial state. While previous critical discussions of the “unsettling” qualities of Johnson’s work have until now meant that word affectively, in this article my aim is therefore to emphasize its decolonizing momentum as well.

Indigenous Critique and the Eighteenth-Century English Stage

ABSTRACT Recent accounts of ‘noble savagery’ by historical anthropologists suggest the Indigenous critique voiced in such texts should not be seen as Western projection but as echoes of interlocution between Europeans and first nation peoples. This essay argues that French and English plays about the Spanish Conquest of Latin America produced in the 1730s, Voltaire’s Alzire and Aaron Hill’s Alzira, similarly re-articulate the voices of Incan protest (by women especially) recorded in The Royal Commentaries of Peru authored by the half Incan Garcilaso de la Vega. Later in the century, Irish playwrights Arthur Murphy and Henry Brooke then rework these ‘black legend’ texts to mount their own covert critiques of English colonial oppression in Ireland, finding the Indigenous perspectives voiced in these texts particularly apt to their own national circumstances.

Imagining a Maya Archaeology That Is Anthropological and Attuned to Indigenous Cultural Heritage

Taking an aspirational approach, this article imagines what Maya Archaeology would be like if it were truly anthropological and attuned to Indigenous heritage issues. In order to imagine such a future, the past of archaeology and anthropology is critically examined, including the emphasis on processual theory within archaeology and the Indigenous critique of socio-cultural anthropology. Archaeological field work comes under scrutiny, particularly the emphasis on the product of field research over the collaborative process of engaging local and descendant communities. Particular significance is given to the role of settler colonialism in maintaining unequal access to and authority over landscapes filled with remains of the past. Interrogation of the distinction between archaeology and heritage results in the recommendation that the two approaches to the past be recognized as distinct and in tension with each other. Past heritage programs imagined and implemented in the Maya region by the author and colleagues are examined reflexively.

Rights, interests and expectations: Indigenous perspectives on unrestricted access to genomic data.

Addressing Indigenous rights and interests in genetic resources has become increasingly challenging in an open science environment that promotes unrestricted access to genomic data. Although Indigenous experiences with genetic research have been shaped by a series of negative interactions, there is increasing recognition that equitable benefits can only be realized through greater participation of Indigenous communities. Issues of trust, accountability and equity underpin Indigenous critiques of genetic research and the sharing of genomic data. This Perspectives article highlights identified issues for Indigenous communities around the sharing of genomic data and suggests principles and actions that genomic researchers can adopt to recognize community rights and interests in data.

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Assessing context, process, and critiques

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada was a post-judicial exercise in truth telling after seven generations of residential schooling for Indigenous children. I outline some of the strengths and weaknesses of the process and engage with a range of critiques from settler and Indigenous academics and theorists. Section One covers the lengthy process of Survivors to seek redress for their experiences. Section Two covers the judicial processes that preceded the TRC. Section Three focuses on the TRC, and some of its strengths and weaknesses through three distinct but slightly overlapping lenses. I engage with settler critics who argue that the TRC was either too pro-Survivor, too anti-state, anti-school, and anti-church. I contrast this with Indigenous critiques from the resurgence school who saw the TRC as too close to government. I conclude with the transformative reconciliation school, advanced by Indigenous and settler academics working together to take the best aspects of the TRC and apply them.

Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler‐Colonialism

AbstractThe changes in regulation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands, wrought by the advent of native title in Australia, created an impression that the political economy of mining on Indigenous people's lands would be fundamentally transformed. In this paper we argue, in reality, a deeply seated settler‐colonial mentality endures in Australia within the institutions presiding over mineral governance, particularly in those States that are heavily dependent upon resource extraction. Focusing on the governance of mineral development in Queensland, Australia, we offer an analysis of the rationalities that inform the endurance of an inequitable architecture of extractive governance in that State. Our conceptual framework draws on a synthesis of the concepts of “accumulation by dispossession”, “settler colonialism”, and Indigenous critiques of the politics of recognition, to argue that liberal states remain deeply committed to the facilitation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands in direct contravention to international norms.

Black Hawk in Translation: Indigenous Critique and Liberal Guilt in the 1847 Dutch Edition of <em>Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak</em>

Black Hawk in TranslationIndigenous Critique and Liberal Guilt in the 1847 Dutch Edition of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak Frank Kelderman (bio) In 1846 Rinse Posthumus, a Protestant country pastor in the north of the Netherlands, received from a friend a copy of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-shekia-kiak, the as-told-to autobiography of the Sauk military leader Black Hawk. First published in Cincinnati in 1833, the Life was a best seller in the United States, but it was unfamiliar to Posthumus, who lived in a small village near the North Sea in the province of Friesland (Frisia). Over the course of the year, he studied Back Hawk’s life story and began a translation of the text for Dutch readers, which he published in the city of Leeuwarden in 1847 as Levensgeschiedenis van Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kiakiak, of Zwarte Havik. If Black Hawk can be regarded as the author of his autobiography, this makes Posthumus’s text the first foreign translation of a book-length work of Native American literature.1 Posthumus’s edition did not cause much of a stir. Years later, the Dutch anticolonial writer Eduard Douwes Dekker mentioned the book as an “important” work (Multatuli 50), but no subsequent editions of the translation were published, nor has there been any commentary on the text by literary historians. Nevertheless, Levensgeschiedenis van Zwarte Havik sheds new light on the role of Indigenous writing in a transatlantic print culture in which the representation of American Indians generated popular entertainment, theories of government, and philosophies of universal history. In Britain, the circulation of American Indian literature came on the heels of a wealth of writings about Indigenous people in periodicals and newspapers, as well as “anthropological studies, works of racial science, and missionary narratives” (Flint 3). There was a continental European dimension to this story as well, and since the early nineteenth century the representation of Indianer held a prominent place especially in the German cultural imagination [End Page 58] (Bolz; Zantop; Penny; King). But as a growing number of studies has shown, the role of Indigenous people in what Jace Weaver terms “the Red Atlantic” was not merely to provide symbolic representations of Native presence: their writings, performances, diplomacy, and protests inflected the very currents of modern political and intellectual thought (Weaver; Flint; Lyons). Extending these transatlantic dialogues to a Frisian-Dutch print culture, Rinse Posthumus’s translation of the Life not only catered to a widespread ethnological interest in Native American culture in Europe but also brought Black Hawk’s critique of settler expansion into political debates about state power that had local and transnational implications. This essay is about what happened to Black Hawk’s story in translation. Annotated by a rural pastor in the province of Friesland, Levensgeschiedenis connects Black Hawk’s account of Indian removal in the American Midwest to a region that has been marginal to the history of cultural exchange in the Atlantic world. In what follows, I consider Rinse Posthumus’s role as translator and editor, tracing how his theological commentary builds on Enlightenment assumptions about race and linguistic difference even as it carries out a universalism that validates Indigenous cultural traditions. But I also argue that his editorial work amplifies a critical current in Black Hawk’s text about the relation between settler colonialism and the role of government, which intersected with nineteenth-century debates about political liberalism and immigration to North America. Posthumus witnessed the economic decline in the northern Netherlands in the 1840s, and his edition of the Life resonates with concerns about agricultural crises in Europe and the population movements of the mid-nineteenth century. By annotating Black Hawk’s account of Sauk traditions and Indigenous dispossession, Posthumus gives voice to his political commitment to liberalism during a time of economic depression and revolutionary energy in the Netherlands. Since these pressures gave rise to a peak in Dutch immigration to the American Midwest—including the very lands that were opened up for settlement after the Black Hawk War (1832)—his commentary in Levensgeschiedenis negotiates a politics of liberal guilt over the intertwined histories of European migration and Sauk...

At the Intersections of Empire: <em>Ceremony</em>, Transnationalism, and American Indian–Filipino Exchange

At the Intersections of EmpireCeremony, Transnationalism, and American Indian–Filipino Exchange Alyssa A. Hunziker (bio) Native American and Indigenous studies has increasingly questioned how it might incorporate transnational analyses while adhering to calls for literary nationalism. Scholars including Shari M. Huhndorf, Jace Weaver, Chadwick Allen, and Steven Salaita have argued that transnational approaches to Indigenous literatures helpfully expand the territories of Indigenous critique while nonetheless highlighting nation-specific literatures. Building on this approach, this article uses a transnational framework to revisit Leslie Marmon Silko’s first novel, Ceremony (1977). The novel itself is both located and situated, as it recounts the postwar experience of Laguna Pueblo World War II veteran Tayo as he recovers from the traumas of war, the Bataan Death March, and his subsequent detention in a prisoner of war camp. However, as I argue, despite its located context, the novel is also inherently transnational, as the protagonist frequently contemplates his service as a US soldier in the Philippines. By focusing on the Philippine context of the novel, I argue that Silko reveals overlapping histories between Indigenous peoples in North America and other colonized peoples abroad. This framework allows for comparative studies between settler colonial and colonial contexts to better link US empire as it occurs globally and to highlight historic overlaps in differently colonized spaces. By reading Silko’s novel as inherently transnational, I hope not only to contribute to Silko scholarship as a whole but also to read across settler colonial, colonial, and what Allen has called trans-Indigenous, contexts in an effort to reassess Silko’s overlapping depiction of multiple forms of empire. Similarly, I suggest that Silko uses the memories of her Native World War II veterans, Tayo, Harley, Leroy, Pinkie, and Emo, as a means of [End Page 116] complicating previous narratives of war, colonial difference, national boundaries, and battle lines. Because of the historical realities of the Bataan Death March, readers can imagine that Native American soldiers would undoubtedly have had some exchange with the Filipino servicemen with whom they fought, despite the fact that we never see Filipino characters within the text itself.1 By situating Tayo at the intersections of multiple empires—both US and Japanese—in the midst of occupied territory in the Philippines, I suggest that his experience of settler colonialism in the United States and witnessing of colonialism in the Philippines lead to a flagrant rejection of colonial rule in all of its forms. Tayo, then, becomes an international, but no less traditional, figure who mirrors Silko’s later “tribal internationalists” in Almanac of the Dead (1991), whom scholars like Malini Johar Schueller and Channette Romero argue make up “cross-cultural spiritual coalitions . . . [that] provide a more powerful means of combating the social, political, and economic injustice faced by Native Americans (and many oppressed peoples around the world) than secular politics based on ethnicity and race alone” (Romero 623). I argue that Ceremony’s Filipino context prefigures the overtly transnational politics of Silko’s later novels, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes (2000). To frame my reading of Silko’s novel, I follow Salaita, Allen, and Weaver, who have argued for the importance of reading Native American and Indigenous literatures in a global context. Second, I follow settler colonial studies scholars Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe, who argue that settler colonial systems are explicitly different from colonial and imperial systems. This distinction helps to more accurately differentiate between settler colonialism in the continent and US colonialism in the Pacific. As Veracini explains, while settler colonialism and colonialism may produce similar conditions and use similar tactics, the two systems ultimately have different aims, as settler colonialism aims to erase and remove Indigenous populations, while colonialism aims to subjugate Indigenous populations as a source of labor. Put more succinctly, Wolfe writes that “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event” (388). The contexts for US occupation of Indigenous lands in North America and US colonialism in the Philippines are marked by difference even as they carry historical parallels and overlaps. Finally, I follow scholars like Jodi Byrd and Iyko Day, who have each discussed the [End Page 117] ways Asian American...

Theorizing Settler Colonialism: Alternative Indigenous Methodologies

Feminist Studies 45, no. 2/3. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 455 Jennifer McLerran Theorizing Settler Colonialism: Alternative Indigenous Methodologies In Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd asserts that US imperialism propagates itself, expanding into new territories through a “transferable ‘Indianness .’”1 Positioning those it wishes to dominate and whose land and resources it seeks to appropriate as “savage” facilitates its project. Building on the theories of Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe, Byrd asserts that this process continues into the present through settler colonialism .2 Byrd notes, “How we have come to know intimacy, kinship, and identity within an empire born out of settler colonialism is predicated upon discourses of indigenous displacements that remain with the present everydayness of settler colonialism, even if its constellations have been naturalized by hegemony.”3 Wolfe argues that settler colonialism, which is predicated on the disappearance of the Indigenous subject, is a structure, not an event; and, because it structures modern Western culture in seemingly intractable ways, it remains with us today. Byrd 1. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 5. 2. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Continuum International , 1999); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 102–132. 3. Byrd, xviii. 456 Jennifer McLerran Books Discussed in This Essay Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Edited by Joanne Barker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas series). By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. asserts, “Our contemporary challenge is to theorize alternative methodologies to address the problems imperialism continues to create” (xxvi). She explains, “The challenge facing indigenous studies in the academy is not just the need to negotiate the Western colonial biases that render indigenous peoples as precolonial ethnographic purveyors of cultural authenticity instead of scholars capable of research and insight, but also the need to respect the local specificities, histories and geographies that inform the concept of indigeneity” (xxix). The best Indigenous critical theory, Byrd asserts, is first grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and the specific beliefs and practices of the communitiesfromwhichtheyoriginateandwhichtheysustain.Founded on an Indigenous base, such theory may then be productively explored in relation to European cultural and legal systems. Byrd explains, “Indigenous critical theory could be said to exist in its best form when it centers itself within indigenous epistemologies and the specificities of the communities and cultures from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European philosophical, legal, and cultural traditions in order to build upon all the allied tools available . . . indigenous critical theory has the potential in this mode to offer a transformative accountability ” (xxx). Indigenous scholars have risen to this task, grounding Indigenous theory in local epistemologies, transforming the discourse, and opening Jennifer McLerran 457 new avenues of inquiry. Works by three innovative theorists, Lenape scholar Joanne Barker, Native Hawaiian J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson are reviewed here. Each explores Indigenous strategies of resistance to settler colonialism. Barker advocates for a heuristic based on a “polity of the Indigenous,” which she describes as “the unique governance, territory, and culture of Indigenous peoples in unique and related systems of (non)-human relationships and responsibilities to one another” (5). Positioning her arguments in the context of critical Indigenous, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, Barker stresses the importance of sovereignty and self-determination as well as critical exploration of the ways in which these values are represented, conceived, and exercised. Barker begins with a discussion of the terms and debates that comprise the intellectual genealogy of “critical Indigenous gender, sexuality, and feminist studies” (5). Her introduction and the essays comprising...

Ethics of Archaeology

Ethics has abandoned its niche status to become a shared concern across archaeology. The appraisal of the sociopolitical context of archaeological practice since the 1980s has forced the discipline to take issue with the expanding array of ethical questions raised by work with living people. Thus, the original foci on the archaeological record, conservation, and scientific standards, which are behind most deontological codes, have been largely transcended and even challenged. In this line, this review emphasizes philosophical and political aspects over practical ones and examines some pressing ethical concerns that are related to archaeology's greater involvement with contemporary communities, political controversies, and social demands; discussion includes ethical responses to the indigenous critique, the benefits and risks of applied archaeology, the responsibilities of archaeologists in conflict and postconflict situations, vernacular digging and collecting practices, development-led archaeology, heritage, and the ethics of things.