Indigenous Discourse Research Articles

Arab Indigenous Discourse

Orientalism and colonization have tainted indigenous discourses in the Arab region. This article aims to provide a discussion on the approach to (re)claim the Arab discourse. Historically the proposal was in supporting a unified Arab discourse as a response to colonizing discourses. However, this approach is not appropriate because it eliminates the diversity of ideas, cultures, and realities in the region. This does not pave the way to the use of decolonizing methodology because the region is suffering from colonization as well as political upheaval. To capture the diversity of Arab discourses, it is important to examine the social imaginary as an alternative methodology.

Los orígenes de la Organización Indígena-Campesina y el surgimiento de los discursos reaccionarios durante la Reforma Agraria en la Provincia de Cautín, Chile, 1967-1973

In 1973, Chile lived the most dramatic chapter of its recent history, the military coup. Ideological confrontation prior to that date, left an indelible imprint on society. In rural areas, the situation was no different, since, while groups such as the peasant revolutionary movement promoted the Elimination of the large estate, employer groups and the political right sought to destabilize the Government of Salvador Allende, through violence and sabotage. In this paper we analyze the origins of the peasant indigenous discourse and the reactionary rhetoric in Cautín province, in the South of Chile.

BECOMING ‘COSMO’: DISPLACEMENT, DEVELOPMENT AND DISGUISE IN ONGATA RONGAI

ABSTRACTOngata Rongai, a rapidly growing, ethnically heterogeneous community on Nairobi's urban periphery, has remained remarkably convivial in a country so frequently defined by conflicts over land and belonging. Bolstered by a distinct set of political logics and social practices, many of the site's multi-ethnic residents overtly reject the validity of ethnic violence and politics with reference to an explicitly articulated universalist inclusivity rarely seen in Kenya. Locally described as ‘being cosmo’, this distinct political rhetoric and emerging subjectivity has its roots in the mixed ethnic origins of its leaders, the history of land acquisition, and xenophobic persecution and displacements elsewhere in the country. More specifically, the evolution of this conviviality in the shadow of conflict has been driven by the interests of ‘half-caste’ political elites and increasingly established Kikuyu landowners. Together they draw on and reinforce a foundation myth of fair land transfers to promote peace and their own economic and electoral ambitions. The result is a vernacular and spatialized cosmopolitanism that fosters localized ethnic blindness. Its success depends on demonizing discourses of indigeneity while embracing ideas of ethnic homelands beyond the city. By acting as a foil to a growing literature on theethnicizationof land and space in Africa, this article demonstrates the need to understand spatially constructed subjectivities as responses to supra-local social and political practice.

A Māori approach to management: Contrasting traditional and modern Māori management practices in Aotearoa New Zealand

AbstractThis is a conceptual article located in the discourses of indigeneity, post-colonialism and critical management studies in which we seek to renew interest in Māori management as a distinctive form of management within Aotearoa New Zealand. We discuss defining Māori management and Māori organisations and their relevance for today's organsiations in New Zealand and internationally. We examine differences and similarities between Western and Māori management in terms of the four functions of management adapted from principles first proposed by Fayol in 1949. We propose a theoretical model of Māori management and discuss the implications of Māori management for management research, policy and practice.

The corregidor as dragon and the encomendero as lion

Abstract With his Primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (ca. 1535–post 1616), the best known Andean early-17th century author of indigenous descent, created a comprehensive and complex work about the indigenous past and the colonial present of his time. Colonial language data and information in an Amerindian language, interpreted from within the writer's framework as well as parting from Andean and European traditions, can be used to better understand the author's objectives for employing a certain text genre and language. This paper gives a sociolinguistic and ethno-historical analysis of Guaman Poma's work. Guaman Poma uses animal imagery of wild beasts in order to portray colonial society. Certain functionaries are likened to animals which threaten the indigenous people. The critical author presents these menaces in two sections of his work: in a critique of the administration which contains an illustration that links wild animals and functionaries directly and explicitly, and through prayers seeking protection from these same threats. Making use of symbolic language, textual and visual imagery, Guaman Poma associates uncivilized elements of nature with the barbaric behavior of the authorities. Nature and culture have always been closely linked in the Andes, and Guaman Poma makes extensive traditional and at the same time creative use of this connection. I argue that in doing so he creates a new colonial indigenous discourse and uses subversion in the repressive context of the time to call the attention of the reader to the social problems created by colonial rule, thereby making an innovative use of both his native language and Spanish traditions.

Plasticidade e pessoalidade no espiritismo crioulo cubano

Neste artigo defendo que as formas crioulas do espiritismo cubano propõem uma sofisticada cosmologia do Self, na qual a psique humana e seu universo circundante de espíritos protetores são incorporados em uma só relação de produção mútua. Estas teorizações subvertem leituras lineares de identidades (entidades) espirituais como fragmentos de imaginários nacionais, sugerindo em seu lugar a importância de um cosmos fluido, plástico, onde as formas espirituais dependem de repertórios culturais e pessoais, formas estas que também permanecem parcialmente "outras" para quem as apreende, retendo assim a sua capacidade transformadora. Estes temas são explorados por meio de uma justaposição de discursos antropológicos e indígenas sobre a psicologia das manifestações espirituais, e também através da observação de casos de mais amplo alcance de plasticidade ontológica no espiritismo e na religião afro-cubana.

Traditionalisation for Revitalisation: Tradition as a Concept and Practice in Contemporary Sámi Contexts

This article investigates the use of ‘tradition’ as a concept in indigenous discourses and as a label of practices within revitalisation processes, using the case of the Sami in Sweden as an exampl ...

The Emergence of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race and Culture in Native North America

In this essay, I review four recent publications on American Indian life in the United States, past and present, through the lens of indigeneity. While indigenous activism has been a central focus of recent work in anthropology and American Indian studies, Indigeneity is still emergent as a conceptual tool for historical and ethnographic work. This essay traces conceptual issues associated with more general discourses of indigeneity through the reviewed works in order to examine the relationship between the politics of indigeneity and the racialized structures of settler colonialism that still confront American Indian peoples in the United States.

Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (review)

Reviews NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 184 GINA STARBLANKET Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations by Mishuana Goeman University of Minnesota Press, 2013 INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S WRITINGS have received increased attention in recent years beyond the realm of literary studies for their important role in the deconstruction of gendered and colonial relations of power and for their contribution to Indigenous politics of self-determination. With her monograph Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, Tonowanda Seneca author ­ Mishuana Goeman offers a unique contribution to this emergent field through an examination of the spatial dimensions of decolonization that exist within the literary works of Indigenous women. With this book, Goeman draws out the ways that settler and Indigenous conceptions of space collide with one another to implicate Indigenous women. At the same time, she also brings to light the discursive techniques through which these tensions are exposed and challenged by Indigenous women’s narratives. Goeman’s analysis is deployed through four chapters that take up the writings of Indigenous women from across the United States and Canada, including E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), Esther Belin (Diné), Joy Harjo (Creek), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) and others. Her review of various literary works elucidates the range of methods and terms that each author uses to foreground Indigenous conceptions of space, relationship, and autonomy. In conducting this study, Goeman’s aim is to reveal the political underpinnings and potency of Indigenous women’s writings. She does so by emphasizing the ways that these narratives function to disrupt gendered settler geographies and boundaries with the particular objective of Indigenous liberation from colonizing orders. Throughout the book, Goeman focuses her vision on the process of writing as activism, the revolutionary power of relationships, and the possibilities of confronting spatialized injustice in ways that transcend colonial models of territory, jurisdiction, and race. Through careful review of each author ’s engagement with different temporal periods, spatialities, and colonial premises, Goeman paints a comprehensive picture of the violence inherent in settler conceptualizations of geography and space. Her analysis exposes the realities of oppression that occur as colonizing forces continuously attempt to narrate relationships to the land and one another by defining borders between human beings through narrow categories based on race, sexuality, gender, and nation. Goeman demonstrates how each of the authors have NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Reviews 185 produced alternative mappings to colonial classifications by remembering, articulating, and sharing Indigenous discourses that function to counter the monolithic histories erected by colonial forces. Goeman’s engagement with the contributions of each author is conducted against the backdrop of U.S. and Canadian law and policy while simultaneously , and seemingly effortlessly, illuminating its global context and applicability . While authors such as Harjo and others place themselves in local sites, invoking embodied geographies and places, their writings speak broadly to the colonial and gendered violence of globalization while illustrating the multiple spatial scales available to Indigenous writers. Goeman demonstrates how Harjo’s articulated strategies guide readers toward a discourse that locates each of us “within the world, not just engaging it from the periphery or margin” (120). While Goeman’s collective analysis primarily invokes the works of four authors, she constructs an analytical frame that is applicable to the literary works of any Indigenous speaker or writer and identifies techniques useful for anyone seeking to deconstruct the spatialized dimensions of colonialism. A particular strength of this book involves Goeman’s recognition of the value inherent in multiple perspectives on the concept of decolonization. While the author spends most time with writings that are not predicated on the terms established by colonizing systems, she also acknowledges the importance of approaches that choose to engage with those terms to expose their logic of oppression. An example of this can be seen in Goeman’s analysis of Johnson’s efforts to highlight the barriers that liberal discourses present for gender equity and Indigenous rights (44). Rather than seeking to unsettle the liberal nation-state, Johnson’s stories elucidate its ideology and engage in processes of remapping the national terrain through the main characters’ struggles to make space for gender equity and equal rights for Indigenous nations within it. This approach...

En nombre de los pueblos: primitivismos y poscolonialismos

This essay analyzes a certain populist inclination which can be observed in anthropology and post-colonial studies, an inclination which consists in the appropriation of a people’s image (the ethnic or the subaltern), idealizing it, portraying it as a pure and separated entity, abstracted from the flows that have influenced it throughout history, including those coming from the hegemonic classes. The spokespersons who speak in the name of these subjects (often anthropologists) intend to protect them and claim to reproduce the truth supposedly emanating from the people, constructing for instance indigenous discourses usually disconnected from the social realities of today’s communities. Here we are invited to reflect on those spokespersons, their discourses, and the way they benefit from their use of a people’s name. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X69

Performing the ‘wounded Indian’: a new platform of democracy and human rights in Bolivia’s autonomy movement

This article examines Right-wing political performances in the Bolivian Eastern lowlands where regional elites claim to be living under the authoritarian dictatorship of Left-leaning President Evo Morales. We analyse how regional elites advocate for political autonomy through embodied and spectacular performances linked to discourses of indigeneity, human rights and democracy. Right-wing leaders try to legitimise their claims for justice and territorial control by strategically aligning themselves with lowland ‘Indians’ – who are equally wounded by Morales’s plan to run a massive highway though their communities and territories. Through theatrical exhibits in the plaza and a spectacular assembly spotlighting an indigenous representative as an emblematic hero of TIPNIS, regional elites perform a shared history of marginalisation, while simultaneously presenting themselves as ‘saviors’. We argue, however, that there is a dark side to these performances, as they elide long histories of racialised labour and economic injustice in the region.

Discursive Representation and Pearson's Quest for a Radical Centre

Noel Pearson is one of Australia's most prominent and influential Indigenous intellectuals. This article examines a major idea in Pearson's writing, the ‘quest for a radical centre’. It examines this idea from the perspective of both its usefulness in understanding the deficiencies in public conversation about Indigenous affairs, and its persuasiveness in legitimating the role that Pearson has played nationally as a champion of the Indigenous responsibility discourse. The article argues that conceptualising public debate as a quest for a radical centre resonates strongly with the theory of deliberative democracy. Similar to Dryzek and Niemeyer's work on ‘discursive representation’, the idea of the radical centre reveals the legitimacy possessed by unelected champions of discourses.诺艾尔·皮尔森是澳大利亚最杰出的原住民知识分子。本文考察了皮尔森写作的一个主要思想，“探索激进的中心”。在作者看来，这思想有助于理解有关土著事务的公共对话的缺陷，它还让皮尔森在全国扮演的角色——土著人责任话语的捍卫者——富于说服力。将公共辩论理解为对激进中心的探索，这与商议民主的理论非常合拍。与德雷泽克和尼美耶论“话语代表性”的著作相类，激进中心的思想指出了未被选择的话语卫士的合理性。

“Time Immemorial” and Indigenous Rights: A Genealogy and Three Case Studies (Calder, Van der Peet, Tsilhqot'in) from British Columbia

Abstract“Time immemorial” has operated as a legal fiction in the discourse of colonization, performing a genealogical function in the construction of “antiquity” and “legal memory” in English law, and repurposed in Indigenous rights cases in Canada. Beginning with a genealogical outline, this paper analyzes “time immemorial” in relation to Settler and Indigenous discourses of time, memory and the land in Calder, Van der Peet, and Tsilhqot'in.

Polyvalent Metaphors in South-Central California Missionary Processes

AbstractThe Spanish missionary entrada (A.D. 1769 to 1833) along the California coast created a series of complex encounters between multiple cultural discourses. The Franciscan mission system directly brought colonial and indigenous cultural metaphorical understandings into play. Missionary and indigenous discourse interacted largely via the media of material culture, animals, embellished architecture, and landscape—media interpreted through preexisting cultural metaphors and understandings. Investigating how metaphors played a role in constituting colonial entanglements is important in understanding cultural interactions and change. Metaphors structured colonial interactions, simultaneously hindering and enabling missionary–indigenous relationships. These relationships created parameters for unforeseen transitory configurations: a process best theorized under the term polyvalence. By adopting polyvalence, the processes of colonialism can be approached without usage of ethnic or racialized terms such as creolization, hybridity, or amalgamation. In the case of indigenous south-central California, it is suggested here that widely different forms of evidence can be better appreciated without recourse to terms laden with racial or ethnic connotations. The evidence suggests that while missions may have failed to create entirely new ethnic groups, missionary endeavors did result in unanticipated outcomes, presenting problems and creative opportunities for indigenous groups living within immediate coastal and extended interior populations.

A emergência da medicina tradicional indígena no campo das políticas públicas

The article explores the emergence of traditional indigenous medicine as an object of discourse within the field of public policy and indigenous health. There are a gamut of meanings that inform the notion of traditional indigenous medicine in this field and they are steadily being revised and/or created in concrete dialogical situations, which endows them with an emergent nature. If official discourses use the power of naming to conceptualize traditional medicine, indigenous discourse designates knowledge and practices of self-attention rooted in specific local contexts. Public policy is appropriated and indigenized by indigenous peoples, gaining new meanings and influencing the sociocultural re-organization of health care.

Ash salts and bodily affects: Witoto environmental knowledge as sexual education

This letter addresses the indigenous discourse on a set of plant species used by the Witoto Indians of Northwest Amazonia to extract ash or vegetable salt, obtained from the combustion of the tissues of vegetable species, filtering of the ashes, and desiccation of the resulting brine. It aims to demonstrate how the study of the human condition is carried out through a reading of natural entities. The method employed is the indexical analysis of a discourse uttered by the elder Enokakuiodo in the Witoto language from 1995 to 1998, in a verbal genre called rafue, one of several genres of the ‘language of the yard of coca’. The species used to extract ash salt are conceived of as coming from the body of the Creator and as an image of the human body. The rafue of salt performs, in words and gestures, a narrative of human affects and capacities by reading ecological, biological, cultural and linguistic indices from a set of plant species. This discourse on plant species is a discourse on the control and management of bodily affects and capacities, represented as ash salts, that are lessons about sexual development which the Creator left for humanity as a guide—a ‘sexual education’.

Toward Transpacific Ecopoetics: Three Indigenous Texts

In this article, I employ "the Pacific" as a contact zone, method, and concept with which to examine the dynamic, shifting relationship between land and sea that allows indigenous literature in the transpacific context to engage all of its ecopoetic complexity. The Pacific is the largest oceanic divide on earth. In recent years, issues around global capitalism, national identity, community, and the ecology of the Pacific region have sparked intriguing and provoca- tive discussions. Research along these lines celebrates the networking and coalition activities of various groups of people in the Pacific, and highlights the circulation of ideas and cultures that I believe to be crucial to contem- porary ecological scholarship. It offers an oceanic perspective that serves as a counterweight to continental ways of thinking, and it supplements or challenges transnational approaches to imperialism, postcolonialism, indi- geneity, globalization, and ecology. 1 A recent special issue of the Contemporary Pacific titled "Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge" examines uncharted spaces of the Pacific Islands and historicizes indigenous discourses about making landfall, showing how they have contested the production of new transoceanic environments. The articles in this special issue "explore notions of Pacific indigeneity as they circulate through geographical, cultural, political, and historical flows of people(s), things, knowledge, power—between islands and continents." 2 As the United States and China battle over this geographical space, the message from the indigenous Pacific can be inspiring: neighboring communities have always exchanged ideas and products, often across vast oceanic distances. It was a large world in which indigenous people intermingled along numerous interconnecting routes, unhindered by the boundaries erected much later by imperial powers. Indeed, the recent wave of research on transnational

Beyond the Kariba Dam Induced Displacements: The Zimbabwean Tonga’s Struggles for Restitution, 1990s–2000s

The colonial Southern Rhodesian government displaced the minority Tonga people from the ecologically rich Zambezi River plains due to the construction of the World Bank funded hydroelectric power generating Kariba Dam in the late 1950s. The dislocated communities were resettled in the adjoining uplands of Binga District where they did not access the electricity and waters of the Kariba Dam as well as the wild animal resources in the safaris and national game parks abutting their new villages. This state regulated decoupling from the local natural resource asset base generated a politicised sense of entitlement to those resources spearheaded by a generational cohort of educated Tonga activists that emerged in the 1990s. Besides everyday realities of socio-economic marginalisation, these activists also drew inspiration from the prevailing global discourses of indigeneity and anti-dam politics to form organisations such as Binga Development Association, Binga Catholic Commission for Peace and Justice, and Basilwizi Trust that coordinated local assertions for increased access to resources in the uplands and around the Kariba waterscape. Through these emerging networks of solidarity, I argue, the Tonga activists constructed and deployed persuasive claims for the exigency of rehabilitating their embattled people’s deprived post-relocation livelihoods. These Tonga articulations and actions reveal how marginalised ethno-class categories within countries align their claims for increased access to local resources and general socio-economic empowerment to national and international activism and discourses.

Exploring discourses of indigeneity and rurality in Mikea Forest environmental governance

This article examines discourses of indigeneity and rurality that define and classify different categories of resource users in the context of Mikea Forest environmental governance. Many Malagasy peoples live in, have deep cultural ties with, and directly depend on the island’s forests, but Mikea people are the only to be legally recognized as ‘indigenous peoples’ as defined by Operational Directive 4.20 of the World Bank. In policy documents, scholarship, and media productions, Mikea people are represented as a small, culturally distinct population of primitive forest foragers. In contrast, other subsistence producers living in the region are represented as invasive and harmful to Mikea people and the Mikea Forest environment. However, there are significant incongruities between these representations and local history, cultural norms, and social - environmental realities. While the intent of international norms for indigenous rights in conservation and development contexts is to mitigate risk of harm and improve democratic participation among historically underrepresented peoples, this case highlights how imposed notions of indigeneity can in some cases actually increase local vulnerabilities. Mikea Forest environmental policies should be amended to mitigate risk of insecurities faced by a broad range of forest residents, Mikea and non - Mikea, due to socio - political exclusions, restricted livelihoods, and reduced territorial rights.RÉSUMÉL’objectif de cet article est d’examiner comment sont définies et classifiées les différentes catégories d’utilisateurs des ressources dans le cadre de la mise en place de politiques publiques à l’échelle de la forêt des Mikea et dans les discours sur l’indigénisme et la ruralité qui y sont associés. De nombreux Malgaches vivent, ont des attaches culturelles et dépendent directement des îlots forestiers pour leur subsistance ; néanmoins seuls les Mikea sont légalement reconnus comme des « peuples autochtones » tels que définis par la directive opérationnelle 4.20 de la Banque Mondiale et auraient dès lors des droits particuliers sur le territoire qu’ils occupent, y compris les forêts. Dans les textes des politiques environnementales ou dans les médias, les Mikea sont présentés comme membres d’un peuple autochtone doté d’une culture inédite et qui a adopté un mode de vie original alors que les populations voisines sont perçues comme des envahisseurs perturbant l’organisation sociale et les forêts des Mikea, Il existe toutefois des décalages importants entre ces représentations et les réalités du terrain : les fondements de l’identité locale ne correspondent pas aux définitions officielles de l’autochtonie présentée dans les documents du développement. Les Mikea et les populations voisines sont en fait largement interdépendants et tous pratiquent un éventail d’activités économiques qui varient en fonction des saisons, des compétences ou des demandes du marché. Contrairement aux représentations officielles présentant la culture des Mikea comme étant unique et autonome, les  Mikea appartiennent aux mêmes clans et partagent les mêmes pratiques que leurs voisins jugés illégitimes quant à la gestion des territoires. L’histoire montre en outre une longue participation des peuples Mikea aux échanges commerciaux régionaux et mondiaux et des échanges réguliers avec les missionnaires. L’objectif des normes internationales pour les droits des peuples autochtones est de réduire la vulnérabilité des peuples sous-représentés dans les instances officielles et d’améliorer leur participation démocratique au sein de ces instances ; notre recherche montre que les notions imposées d’autochtonie peuvent accentuer la vulnérabilité des peuples à l’échelle locale dans certaines situations. Les politiques environnementales concernant la forêt des Mikea devraient être améliorées pour prendre en compte l’insécurité que rencontre une grande partie des résidents de la forêt, Mikea et non Mikea. Les acteurs de la conservation et du développement pourraient mettre en place des politiques plus justes et plus démocratiques, et devraient chercher à atténuer les conséquences négatives des politiques déjà en place.

Conflicts Over Natural Resources and Activation of Indigenous Identity in Cusco, Peru

This study considers the activation of indigenous identity during episodes of collective action in Peru. There has been a sharp increase in social conflict in the country in recent years, particularly over natural resources which tend to be found in territories belonging to Peru's native peoples. Several recent studies have suggested that, in this context, both Amazon and Andean Indians self-identify as indigenous. Starting from the premise that identity is a social construction, we seek to answer the following research questions: do communities involved in conflicts over natural resources in the Peruvian Amazon and Andes self-identify as indigenous; do these discourses reflect an awareness of an external context or potential allies that are favourable to indigenous demands; and how are these claims to indigenous identity received and reflected by local opinion? To answer these three questions, we study conflicts over natural resources throughout the Department of Cusco in 2008, using original data from official declarations made by social organisations, in-depth interviews, and local press archives. Our analysis stresses the importance of a contextual understanding of political identities and the perception of a favourable Political Opportunity Structure in the activation of indigenous discourses in the Andes.