Indigenous Mobilization Research Articles

The Negative Impact of Shining Path on Indigenous Mobilization in Peru: An Approach from Political Opportunity and New Social Movements Theories

The rise of Shining Path in the rural areas of Peru and its revolutionary war between 1980 and 1992 contributed significantly to the weakening of indigenous mobilization in that country. From the perspective of a combination of political opportunity and new social movements theories, Shining Path took advantage of a history of rural isolation and a political vacuum to take control of rural areas and impose extreme repression of counterrevolutionary mobilization. It systematically pressured the indigenous communities to collaborate with it and embrace a materialist-based peasant identity. At the same time, the erratic and disproportionate response of the government negatively affected the indigenous communities. Merging the two theories allows a better understanding of this situation.El ascenso de Sendero Luminoso en las zonas rurales del Perú y su guerra revolucionaria entre 1980 y 1992 contribuyeron significativamente al debilitamiento de la movilización indígena en dicho país. Desde la perspectiva combinada de la teoría oportunidades políticas y nuevas teorías de movimientos sociales, Sendero Luminoso aprovechó una historia de aislamiento rural y un vacío político para tomar el control de las zonas rurales y llevar a cabo una represión extrema de la movilización contrarrevolucionaria. Presionó sistemáticamente a las comunidades indígenas para que colaboraran y adoptaran una identidad campesina de base materialista. Al mismo tiempo, la respuesta errática y desproporcionada del gobierno también afectó negativamente a las comunidades indígenas. La fusión de las dos teorías permite una mejor comprensión de esta situación.

Back to the Roots: Indigenous Resurgence and Decolonization

In recent decades, we have witnessed increasing global Indigenous mobilization against extractivism. At the same time, we have witnessed efforts of Indigenous peoples aimed at cultural resurgence. In this paper, using a post-colonial lens, we analyze a case of resurgence in Canada. Colonization in Canada, as elsewhere, deprived Indigenous Peoples of their access to traditional land and resources, attempted to incorporate them into the capitalist economy, and in the process established their dependent relationship in a welfare state. We argue that resurgence efforts of T’Sou-ke First Nation to build a program aimed at recovering independence and based in renewable energy, domestic food production and cultural revitalization are the basis for decolonization. The resurgence initiatives in this Indigenous nation enlarges our understanding of the dynamics of colonialism in a settler society.

Contested mobilities in the maritory: Implications of boundary formation in a nomadic space

The mobility of nomadic Indigenous people has been systematically constrained over time by states seeking control over peripheral spaces and people. This is evident in the case of the Kawésqar nomadic ‘people of the sea’ who have been subject to a century of attempts by the Chilean state to spatially fix their movements over both their terrestrial territories and marine ‘maritories’. In this paper, we show how Indigenous groups like the Kawésqar can challenge and even regain partial control over their maritory by using spatial instruments of the state. We argue that by using these instruments to remobilise, the Kawésqar have been empowered to demobilise other groups and marine related sectors, such as aquaculture. These findings can reorient public policy to be more sensitive to Indigenous space and mobility. Instead of focusing exclusively on the establishment of spatial boundaries to exclude Indigenous communities, they can be used as a means of empowering these communities to exert control over actors and sectors seeking to limit their mobility.

Racism and oral health inequities among Indigenous Australians.

Racial discrimination, which can be structural, interpersonal and intrapersonal, has causal links with oral health morbidity (dental caries, periodontal disease) and mortality (tooth loss). Racism impacts on oral health in three main ways: (1) institutional racism creates differential access to oral health services; (2) cultural racism, which is structurally pervasive, results in poorer psychological and physiological wellbeing of those discriminated against and; (3) interpersonal racism undermines important dental health service provider-patient relationships. Indigenous Australians have experienced sustained racial discrimination since European colonisation in the 1780s. This includes Government policies of land and custom theft, assimilation, child removal and restrictions on Indigenous people's civil rights, residence, mobility and employment. Australia failed to enumerate Indigenous people in the Census until 1967, with the 'White Australia' policy only ending in 1973. In our paper we posit that all minority groups experience racial discrimination that impacts oral health, but that this is amplified among Indigenous groups in Australia because of ongoing legacies of colonialism, institutional racism and intergenerational trauma.

Your “Eyesore,” My History?

In this article we visit a car junkyard in the small Arnhem Land outstation of Nalawan in the top end of Australia’s Northern Territory. Using both a mobilities paradigm and recent theorizing of waste from the global south, we will argue through our ethnographic observations that the wrecked cars become mobile, reassembled, and reconceptualized in a range of surprising ways. Though now immobile, the stories they encapsulate continue to circulate and reverberate with the complexities and tensions of Indigenous mobilities.

Tongan Collective Mobilities: Familial Intergenerational Connections Before, During, and Post COVID‐19

Tongan Collective Mobilities: Familial Intergenerational Connections Before, During, and Post <scp>COVID</scp>‐19

Analytical model of electric field assisted ion diffusion into glass containing two indigenous mobile species, with application to poling

An analytical model of electric field assisted diffusion of ions into glass is extended to include two indigenous mobile ion species that are initially uniformly distributed within the glass. A quasi-stationary state solution that includes diffusion effects and is applicable when the invasive ions have a lower mobility than the two indigenous species is presented. It is relevant to the electrical poling of soda-lime and borosilicate glasses with concentrations of mobile ions (Na+, K+) that are processed with a non-blocking anode where hydrogen ion injection occurs. The model is compared with numerical solutions based on the drift-diffusion equations and Poisson's equation and shows good agreement. The increase in the concentration of the indigenous species with the lower mobility (K+) below the poled layer within a pile-up region is accurately modelled.

“The Ocean in Us”: Navigating the Blue Humanities and Diasporic Chamoru Poetry

This essay will explore the complex relationship between Pacific Islander Literature and the “Blue Humanities,” navigation traditions and canoe aesthetics, and Chamoru migration and diaspora. First, I will chart the history, theory, and praxis of Pacific voyaging traditions; the colonial history of restricting indigenous mobilities; and the decolonial acts of seafaring revitalization in the Pacific (with a specific focus on Guam). Then, I will examine the representation of seafaring and the ocean-going vessel (the canoe) as powerful symbols of Pacific migration and diasporic cultural identity in the context of what Elizabeth DeLoughrey termed, “narrative maritime legacies” (2007). Lastly, I will conduct a close-reading of the avant-garde poetry collection, A Bell Made of Stones (2013), by Chamoru writer Lehua Taitano. As I will show, Taitano writes about the ocean and navigation in order to address the history and traumas of Chamoru migration and diaspora. In terms of poetic form, I will argue that Taitano’s experimentation with typography and visual poetry embodies Chamoru outrigger design aesthetics and navigational techniques. In the end, I will show how a “Blue Humanities” approach to reading Pacific Islander literature highlights how the “New Oceania” is a profound space of Pacific migration and diasporic identity.

Divergent identities: competing indigenous political currents in 21st-century Bolivia

ABSTRACTWhile Bolivia grabbed global attention at the turn of the new millennium for militant indigenous mobilizations, the second decade of the 21st century witnessed the deepening of conflicts between different indigenous sectors. In addition to provoking heated debates on what it means to be indigenous, this has raised questions on the utility of the concept of indigeneity as it has been understood thus far to analyze the new political dynamics. In response to these processes and the analytical challenges they present, this article maps out the existing currents in Bolivian indigenous politics, their mutual disagreements, the meanings they give to indigeneity, and their impact on the politics of the Morales government and its critics. It argues that there are two distinct indigenous visions with different political agendas and priorities: a ‘revivalist’current that focuses on the restoration of ancestral cosmovisions and represents the dominant canon, and an ‘expansionist’ current that prioritizes the struggle against structural racism and gives expression to a new tendency in Latin American indigenous politics. The article is based on nearly two years of ethnographic research in the city of El Alto.

Reading Māori and Aboriginal Mobilities and Encounters in Newcastle, 1853

In February 1853 a group of Māori crew on the ship William Hyde docked in Newcastle, where they met Awabakal people dancing and responded with a haka. When the William Hyde returned to New Zealand, four Aboriginal men joined the crew. In this article, by developing an analysis that moves beyond histories of Indigenous peoples as individuals to contemplate histories of Indigenous community responses to colonisation, I attempt to understand this encounter and connection which leaves only a trace in the colonial archive. Drawing on recent historiography of Indigenous mobilities, I explore the possibilities of mutual recognition of sovereignties and shared experiences of colonisation and reassess ‘traditional’ representations of Indigenous travellers.

Aboriginal Mobility and the Search for a Home and a Job in Postwar Victoria

Following World War II, the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board sought to house and employ Aboriginal Victorians as part of its assimilation policy. Crucial to these efforts was controlling Aboriginal mobility, which the Board saw as problematic, being unsettling in its disregard of state borders and its refusal to conform to settler-capitalist ideologies of private property, wealth accumulation and individualism. This is an attitude that permeates descriptions of Aboriginal people's movement in the settler-colonial archive. This article investigates discussions of housing and employment in the Board's papers, drawing together the disparate references that pepper the manuscripts to suggest an alternative interpretation of archival descriptions of Aboriginal mobility. That interpretation centres Aboriginal decision-making and comprehends the unbroken nature of Aboriginal movement to, within and across ancestral lands – a continuation of pre-invasion Indigenous mobility that involved adapting to and incorporating the pressures of the settler-capitalist economy.

A Moving Female Frontier: Aboriginal Exemption and Domestic Service in Queensland, 1897–1914

Inspired by new histories of Indigenous mobility that emphasise how movement was an important feature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experience, this article examines how mobility enables us to better understand the legal status of exemption. It shows the way non-Indigenous families seized on exemption in Queensland between 1897 and 1914 as a way to maintain control over the movement of the women and girls who worked for them as domestic servants. It also examines how those women and girls negotiated, refused and embraced the policy of exemption and used it to gain freedom to move around Queensland, driven by their family connections, ambitions and cultural and community ties. These two different uses of exemption show that even though the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act made the movement of Indigenous people fraught, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continued their efforts to be mobile.

¿Acción política populista en movimiento? Las demandas sociales de la Conaie y las feministas en Ecuador (2007–2019)

Las movilizaciones de octubre de 2019 en Ecuador, invitan a estudiar la relación entre el populismo y la sociedad civil organizada. En este artículo exploramos la construcción de la movilización social indígena y feminista en Ecuador desde las demandas sociales construidas en el discurso de sus miembros, en el periodo de 2007–2019. Empleando un enfoque de investigación cualitativa, por medio de entrevistas a profundidad a miembros/líderes de estos movimientos, examinamos la construcción de la acción política desde la teoría populista. Los resultados de esta investigación permiten argumentar elementos distintivos del populismo en el discurso de los miembros de los movimientos sociales, que proveen insumos para una explicación preliminar sobre la movilización social desde esta lógica política.

Indigenous Mobilities: Across the Antipodes and Beyond

Fittingly published on the eve of Tuia 250, Indigenous Mobilities urges us to think harder and with much more depth about the precise nature of colonial contact with Indigenous peoples and settlement on Indigenous land in the antipodes. Given our geographic proximity, the 200 or so year history of Māori in Australia and our entwined if equally divergent political history, it is surprising that scholarship taking in both the Australian and New Zealand contexts does not appear more frequently. Indeed, it is notable how often Aboriginal Australia is not brought into conversation with New Zealand Māori histories, experiences and aspirations. A welcome addition to scholarship which actively seeks Indigenous–Indigenous connection and recognition of our shared region, Indigenous Mobilities asks what happens when we read Māori and Aboriginal mobility alongside each other. The picture that emerges is a richly hued canvas of lives fully lived and places fully inhabited against a backdrop of colonial oppression.

“Moved on”? An exploratory study of the Cashless Debit Card and Indigenous mobility

AbstractWhat is the relationship between the first two trials of the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) and Indigenous mobility? In Ceduna, Vincent conducted ethnographic research into lived experiences of the first CDC trial. In the East Kimberley, Klein conducted 51 structured interviews with people on the card and 37 semi‐structured interviews with key informants. Markham used regression analysis of net migration rates at the Statistical Area 2 level to determine whether the CDC trial sites were associated with greater net population loss in 2016 census data than comparable locations. Our exploratory study finds significant local talk of displacement arising from the introduction of the CDC, as well as discussion of short‐term trips away from the trial sites being made more difficult. The regression analysis found that the net migration rate was 9.3 per cent points (95% CI: 2.0, 16.5) lower in Ceduna, Wyndham and Kununurra when compared with a group of comparable towns, and 5.2 per cent points (95% CI: 0.9, 9.5) lower when compared with Australia as a whole, meaning that the populations of these towns declined faster than those of comparable towns. Policy effects on mobility should be taken seriously by researchers and policymakers when considering place‐based welfare policy.

Borders, Development, and Territory in Argentina: Indigenous Mobilization in the Central Chaco

One of the bases for the mobilization of indigenous peoples in Argentina in recent years has been access to, use of, and ownership of the natural resources contained in the territory they occupy or claim. Political mobilization among the Qom of Potae Napocna Navogoh in the central Chaco is a response to the modalities of intervention for development and territory configurations involved in capital accumulation that have threatened the possibility of their reproduction, and it involves conflict with both private capital and the state for territory rather than for land. Una de las bases para la movilización de los pueblos indígenas en Argentina en los últimos años ha sido el acceso, uso y propiedad de los recursos naturales contenidos en el territorio que ocupan o reclaman. La movilización política entre los Qom de Potae Napocna Navogoh en el Chaco central es una respuesta a las modalidades de intervención para el desarrollo y las configuraciones territoriales involucradas en la acumulación de capital que han amenazado la posibilidad de su reproducción, e involucra conflictos con el capital privado y el estado por el territorio antes que por la tierra.

Rethinking Indigenous Politics: The Unnoticed Struggle for Self‐Determination in Peru

Most scholars characterise Peru as a country with weak indigenous movements, whose demands would have no influence in regional and national policies, even though its socio‐economic structures are similar to those of Bolivia and Ecuador, where indigenous movements are stronger. Based on fieldwork in the northern Peruvian Amazon and Lima between 2012–2013 and 2016–2018, this article argues that pro‐indigenous legislation enacted as a response to strong indigenous mobilisation as well as the creation of indigenous autonomous governments in the Amazon express an unnoticed struggle for indigenous self‐determination. These social phenomena also raise questions about the common assessment of the strength or weakness of indigenous movements.

Revisiting Bolivian Studies: Reflections on Theory, Scholarship, and Activism since 1980

As both a focus and locus of vibrant scholarly work, the field of Bolivian studies burst onto the international scene, carving a distinctive niche for itself within the larger fields of Andean and Latin American studies over the past twenty-five years. Bolivia went from being the hemisphere’s “least studied” country, according to a 1984LASA Forumsurvey, to becoming a beacon of intercultural dialogue, vanguard scholarship, and postcolonial debate. This essay traces Bolivian studies’ coming of age. Plotting the field’s developments and dialogues across history, anthropology, and ethnohistory, it argues that a dual process of academic decentering and epistemic reinvention unfolded in Bolivia at the height of its indigenous and popular mobilizations during the 1990s and early 2000s. The article closes by identifying five thematic clusters of recent research and briefly reflects on the place of Bolivian scholarship in the wider purview of Andean studies.

Extra-activism: counter-mapping and data justice

ABSTRACTNeither big data, nor data justice are particularly new. Data collection, in the form of land surveys and mapping, was key to successive projects of European imperialist and then capitalist extraction of natural resources. Geo-spatial instruments have been used since the fifteenth century to highlight potential sites of mineral, oil, and gas extraction, and inscribe European economic, cultural and political control across indigenous territories. Although indigenous groups consistently challenged maintained their territorial sovereignty, and resisted corporate and state surveillance practices, they were largely unable to withstand the combined onslaught of surveyors, armed personnel, missionaries and government bureaucrats. This article examines the use of counter-mapping by indigenous nations in Canada, one of the globe’s hubs of extractivism, as part of the exercise of indigenous territorial sovereignty. After a brief review of the colonial period, I then compare the use of counter-mapping during two cycles of indigenous mobilization. During the 1970s, counter-mapping projects were part of a larger repertoire of negotiations with the state over land claims, and served to re-inscribe first nation’s long-standing history of economic, social and cultural relations in their territories, and contribute to new collective imaginaries and identities. In the current cycle of contests over extractivism and indigenous sovereignty, the use, scope and geographic scale of counter-mapping has shifted; maps are used as part of larger trans-media campaigns of Indigenous sovereignty. During both cycles, counter-mapping as data justice required fusion within larger projects of redistributive, transformative and restorative justice.

Indigenous mobility traditions, colonialism, and the anthropocene

ABSTRACTThe anthropocene is often discussed as an era of ‘new’ environmental changes that require unprecedented forms of societal adaptation, one example being climate-induced resettlement. Yet discussions of the anthropocene can also be better contextualized in terms of their featuring certain phenomena as ‘new’ that are really much more longstanding phenomena. For example, many Indigenous peoples have ancient traditions of environmental ‘mobility.’ This essay reviews some of the history of Indigenous philosophies, especially Anishinaabe, of mobility, migration, and resettlement. Often these philosophies focus on fluid and transformative relationships as constituting the fabric of resilient societies. Indigenous traditions of mobility are critically relevant for climate justice. They put into relief how colonial power can operate as a containment strategy that works to curtail mobility. In this way, looking at Indigenous mobility in the anthropocene involves unraveling layers of colonialism where containment has been widely imposed. This claim can be used to signal some of the dangers of centering the causal role of climate change in certain cases societal movement. To further support our claims, the essay concludes with a brief analysis of some of the literature and testimonies on resettlement in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.