Indigenous Mobilization Research Articles

Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene, and their relationship to Pacific Islands climate activism. In a context where Indigenous peoples and perspectives are poorly represented in global climate politics, it is important to understand how Pacific people represent their own interests and imagine their own futures as pressures to move due to climate change take hold. We examine political action outside of formal governance spaces and processes, in order to understand how Indigenous people are challenging state-centric approaches to climate change adaptation. We do so by studying the works of Pacific activists and artists who engage with climate change. We find that *banua – an expansive concept, inclusive of people and their place, attentive to both mobility and immobility, and distributed across the Pacific Islands region – is essential for the existential security of Pacific people and central to contemporary climate activism. We find that Pacific activists/artists are challenging the status quo by invoking *banua. In doing so, they are politicising (im)mobility. These mobilisations are coalescing into an Oceanic cosmopolitanism that confronts two mutually reinforcing features of contemporary global climate politics: the subordination of Indigenous peoples, perspectives and worldviews; and the marginalisation of (im)mobility concerns within the global climate agenda.

Unsettling Territory: Indigenous Mobilizations, the Territorial Turn, and the Limits of Land Rights in the Paraguay-Brazil Borderlands

The territorial turn in Latin America has resulted in the restitution of more than 200 million hectares of land to Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities since the 1990s. While the territorial turn has provided a juridical solution to numerous Indigenous land claims by legally demarcating collective property rights, title does not necessarily resolve territorial disputes. Such is the case with the Kue Tuvy Aché community in the Paraguay-Brazil borderlands that successfully won collective title only to be continually confronted with (extra-)legal challenges to their hard-won land rights. Drawing from qualitative research with Kue Tuvy community members, secondary-source data, and scholarship on territorial epistemologies from Latin American and Anglophone scholars, I analyze the grounded effects of territorial turn politics with attention to struggles that precede the turn and the conflicts that follow issuance of title. The paper shows how the territorial turn plays out in place, not merely as the product of neoliberal political economic reforms but as Indigenous efforts to unsettle territory to create communal spaces for more just futures. I argue that territorial assemblages are never finished, just as struggles for Indigenous justice do not end with territorial restitution.

Unsettling territory: Indigenous mobilizations, the territorial turn, and the limits of land rights in the Paraguay-Brazil borderlands

The territorial turn in Latin America has resulted in the restitution of more than 200 million hectares of land to Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities since the 1990s. While the territorial turn has provided a juridical solution to numerous Indigenous land claims by legally demarcating collective property rights, title does not necessarily resolve territorial disputes. Such is the case with the Kue Tuvy Aché community in the Paraguay-Brazil borderlands that successfully won collective title only to be continually confronted with (extra-)legal challenges to their hard-won land rights. Drawing from qualitative research with Kue Tuvy community members, secondary- source data, and scholarship on territorial epistemologies from Latin American and Anglophone scholars, I analyze the grounded effects of territorial turn politics with attention to struggles that precede the turn and the conflicts that follow issuance of title. The paper shows how the territorial turn plays out in place, not merely as the product of neoliberal political economic reforms but as Indigenous efforts to unsettle territory to create communal spaces for more just futures. I argue that territorial assemblages are never finished, just as struggles for Indigenous justice do not end with territorial restitution.

“The system of compulsory education is failing”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which the mobility of indigenous people in Victoria during the 1960s enabled them to resist the policy of assimilation as evident in the structures of schooling. It argues that the ideology of assimilation was pervasive in the Education Department’s approach to Aboriginal education and inherent in the curriculum it produced for use in state schools. This is central to the construction of the state of Victoria as being devoid of Aboriginal people, which contributes to a particularly Victorian perspective of Australia’s national identity in relation to indigenous people and culture.Design/methodology/approachThis paper utilises the state school records of the Victorian Department of Education, as well as the curriculum documentation and resources the department produced. It also examines the records of the Aborigines Welfare Board.FindingsThe Victorian Education Department’s curriculum constructed a narrative of learning and schools which denied the presence of Aboriginal children in classrooms, and in the state of Victoria itself. These representations reflect the Department and the Victorian Government’s determination to deny the presence of Aboriginal children, a view more salient in Victoria than elsewhere in the nation due to the particularities of how Aboriginality was understood. Yet the mobility of Aboriginal students – illustrated in this paper through a case study – challenged both the representations of Aboriginal Victorians, and the school system itself.Originality/valueThis paper is inspired by the growing scholarship on Indigenous mobility in settler-colonial studies and offers a new perspective on assimilation in Victoria. It interrogates how curriculum intersected with the position of Aboriginal students in Victorian state schools, and how their position – which was often highly mobile – was influenced by the practices of assimilation, and by Aboriginal resistance and responses to assimilationist practices in their lives. This paper contributes to histories of assimilation, Aboriginal history and education in Victoria.

Participación política de mujeres indígenas en tiempos de la Revolución Ciudadana

The article analyzes the different ways in which indigenous women in Ecuador occupy decision-making positions. A journey of indigenous mobilization and new configurations of political participation of the indigenous women is presented during the period of the so-called Citizen’s Revolution, led by Rafael Correa (2007-2017), in a scenario characterized by neo-extractivist policies that jeopardize territories and identities, contradicting the progress and the recognition of the rights achieved in the Constitution of 2008.

‘A walk for our race’: colonial modernity, Indigenous mobility and the origins of the Young Māori Party

This article argues that concepts of colonial modernity, originally developed for India and East Asia, and attention to micro-mobilities can provide new understandings of the emergence of Indigenous modernity in settler societies. Using previously unexplored sources, it examines a (seemingly small and local) walking tour by three Māori schoolboys in 1892 to ‘save their race from extinction’. An exemplary expression of Māori modernity, this walk is frequently cited as marking the earliest origins of the Young Māori Party, one of the most significant Māori organisations of the early twentieth century. Prior work on this group has been almost entirely confined within New Zealand historiography where it has been the subject of significant critique as a force for assimilation. Connecting this ‘walking tour’ with colonial and Indigenous histories elsewhere provides new ways of conceiving its significance, both locally and in its wider implications, that avoid such tropes. It demonstrates the possibilities of keeping both the local and the global in view, and indeed how this can amplify the importance of local histories.

Micromobility, Space, and Indigenous Housing Schemes in Australia after World War II

This article examines state efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples through the spatial politics of housing design and the regulation of access to and use of houses, streets, and towns. Using two Australian case studies in the 1950s, Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve in Victoria and the Gap housing development in the Northern Territory, and inspired by recent scholarship on imperial networks and Indigenous mobilities, it explores Aboriginal people’s negotiation of those efforts through practices of both moving and staying put. We demonstrate the importance of micromobility—which we define as smallscale movements across short distances, in and out of buildings, along roads, and across townships—and argue that in order to fully appreciate the regulation of Indigenous mobility and Indigenous resistance to it, scholars must concentrate on the small, local, and seemingly insignificant as well as more drastic and permanent movement.

Canoes, Modernity, and the Colonial Imagining of Progress

This article, part photo-essay and part treatise, explores the interplays of history, photographic representation, and archival circulation at work in colonial imaginings of coastal canoes. Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, we analyze the archival photographic record in British Columbia to challenge narratives of progress; instead, we insist that Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious” provides a method for reading canoe photos against broader logics of representation and colonial modernity. Our empirical reading of the colonial archives produces a circumscribed account of the representation of the canoe as a persistent technology of Indigenous mobility, labor, and lifeways, but also as a technology, the “disappearance” of which was used to assert narratives of decline and colonial progress. We conclude by suggesting that this article could be read as part of an emerging convergence of critical visual methods within both human geographies of the sea and mobility studies. In this sense, we suggest that the photography-based methods taken here hold potential for growing geographical engagements in marine mobility studies.

Beyond School Walls: Indigenous Mobility at Sherman Institute

This article examines the centrality of mobility within student experiences at Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. Archival information and autobiographical accounts show that during the early twentieth century, students at Sherman moved between their campus and surrounding cities and towns to work odd jobs, take classes at local colleges and universities, and socialize. Narratives from beyond the walls of Sherman Institute join a growing chorus of scholarly voices that push back against popular and scholarly depictions of Indigenous people during the so called Reservation Era, which have often painted Native communities as isolated within the confines of boarding schools and reservations, frozen in time and space. I argue that Native people at Sherman Institute and elsewhere made mobility a central component of their lives and cultures as they faced head-on the challenges of life at a boarding school. Exploration of this student mobility reveals new layers of Indigenous agency within boarding school experiences and exposes yet-unexplored forms of neglect by administrators who failed to protect students from the dangers they experienced beyond the walls of Sherman Institute.

Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. By Raymond I. Orr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. 206p. $34.95 cloth. - Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley. By Sarah Marie Wiebe. Vancouver, British Colombia: University of British Colombia Press, 2016. 237 p. $99.00 cloth, $35.95 paper.

Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. By Raymond I. Orr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. 206p. $34.95 cloth. - Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley. By Sarah Marie Wiebe. Vancouver, British Colombia: University of British Colombia Press, 2016. 237 p. $99.00 cloth, $35.95 paper.

Beyond recognition: autonomy, the state, and the Mapuche Coordinadora Arauco Malleco

ABSTRACTThe initial resurgence of indigenous mobilization in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s was certainly driven by the framework of the ‘politics of recognition’. However, since then much has been altered in the politico-economic and cultural framework of Latin American societies. This paper examines a new strand of indigenous mobilization in the region today, what we call ‘revindicative autonomism’. Moving away from the language of ‘rights’ and statist autonomy arrangements, this is a struggle against the much-lauded regimes of multiculturalism and differentiated citizenship. Although officially formed back in the late 1990s, the Coordinadora Arauco Malleco (CAM) has more recently emerged as the central actor in what has been called the ‘New Arauco War’ in south-central Chile. This movement has put forward a sui generis project for autonomy that is contingent on the complete territorial recovery and the reconstruction of Wallmapu as a whole. To achieve that, CAM draws from the pre-colonial past and resuscitates the ontologies and epistemologies of the Mapuche nation.

Creating the Aboriginal Vagrant

This article considers how shifting programs of Aboriginal protection in nineteenth-century Australia responded to Indigenous mobility as a problem of colonial governance and how they contributed over time to creating an emergent discourse of the Aboriginal “vagrant.” There has been surprisingly little attention to how the legal charge of vagrancy became applied to Indigenous people in colonial Australia before the twentieth century, perhaps because the very notion of the Aboriginal vagrant was subject to ambivalence throughout much of the nineteenth century. When vagrancy laws were first introduced into Australia’s colonies, Aboriginal people were exempt from them as a group not yet subject to the ordinary regulatory codes of colonial society. Bringing them within the protective fold of colonial social order was one of the principal tasks of the office of ‘protection’ that was introduced into three Australian jurisdictions during the late 1830s. As the nineteenth century progressed and Aboriginal people became more susceptible to social order policing, a concept of Indigenous vagrancy hardened into place, and programs of protection became central to its management.

Tourism-induced mobilities and transformation of indigenous cultures: where is the Vedda community in Sri Lanka heading to?

ABSTRACTMobilities that encapsulate global- and local-level movement of people, capital, information, material and intangible heritage across boundaries influence distant socio-cultural structures and processes linking them to evolving global networks. Indigenous cultural tourism is a catalyst of mobilities that expose the habitats of distant spaces. This paper examines the Vedda community’s concurrent context and indigenous tourism-informed mobilities’ contributions to transforming their cultural character through anthropological approaches. Data were collected through a series of interviews, overt observation and review of documents. Findings indicate that the Vedda are susceptible to the influence of mobilities within and without the indigenous tourism practices. Enforced restructuring and governance push Vedda towards novel livelihoods, while automobilities, image, communication and geopolitical mobilities challenge Vedda heritage and temporalities. Vedda lead a hybrid life; real one being modern and the other being pseudo attributed for tourist attraction. Indigenous cultural tourism causes losing the inherited meaning of their cultural values. The Vedda, with their anatomically proven Mesolithic inheritance, have drawn world’s attention to preserving and recognizing them before their unique culture is subsumed by the modern world. Findings indicate that tourism planners should realize the significance of distinctive Vedda heritage parallel to commercial gains of tourism.

Roller, Heather F.Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2014. xx + 342 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

<b>Roller, Heather F</b>.<i>Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil</i>. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2014. xx + 342 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

State Projects and Indigenous Mobilization in Late Twentieth Century Mexico

Resenha de: MUÑOZ, María L.O. Stand Up and Fight: Participatory Indigenismo, Populism, and Mobilization in Mexico, 1970-1984. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.

THE TRAJECTORY OF INDIGENEITY POLITICS AGAINST LAND DISPOSSESSION IN INDONESIA

Under the New Order authoritarian regime, the state endorsed terra-nullification of the customary territories had been the basis for the stipulation of state forest (hutan negara).After the fall of the General Suharto led regime in 1998 generated a new phase for the struggles of the customary groups in different parts of the archipelago. This article examines the rise of indigeneity and counter-hegemonic indigenous legal maneuvering spearheaded by Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) against ongoing land dispossession in Indonesia since the fall of New Order authoritarian regime which includes the indigenous mobilizations (strategy, organization and tactics) in the post-authoritarian country, including the avenue of new types of legal activism when it comes to the creative destruction of global capitalism today. It focuses on two modes of policy advocacy and campaign against land dispossession: (a) the production of the Constitutional Court Ruling No. 35/PUU-X/2012, a new legal landmark that establishes the constitutional norm of the citizenship status of Indonesian indigenous peoples (masyarakat hukum adat) as rights bearing subjects, and the owners of their customary territory; and (b) the National Inquiry on Indigenous Peoples’ Rights held by the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM). The discussion describes The Colonialism of ‘State-Izing’ Customary Communities’ Territory, Contemporary Indigeneity Politics in Indonesia, Counter-Hegemonic Indigenous Legal Maneuvering, Judicial Review against The1999 Law No. 41on Forestry, National Inquiry on Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, and Connecting Counter-Hegemonic Indigenous Legal Maneuvering with the Grassroots Struggles which focuses on Mobilizing at Multiple Scales. It is concluded from this article that the efficacy of legal struggles is very much depend on the capacity to connect with the grassroots mobilization by continuously promulgating the resurgence of indigeneity politics against the destructive impacts of corporatized state under the servitude of global capitalism, the indigenous movement constituents in Indonesia

The making of the Amazonian subject: state formation and indigenous mobilization in lowland Peru

ABSTRACTThis article examines the links between state formation and indigenous mobilization in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon. Through an ethnographic and historical analysis, the article explores how processes of state formation in the Madre de Dios region have drawn indigenous people into complex interactions with outsiders. The article argues that these social relations, which are characterized not simply by resistance but also by subjugation, have shaped the Arakbut people’s struggles for land rights. Recent Arakbut engagements with a multinational oil corporation are informed by patron–client networks that work as a governmentality technique. By creating debt and exacerbating internal divisions, clientelism disciplines indigenous people, undermining their resistance to oil development and other forms of predatory state expansion into their territories.

Commuting for rights: Circular mobilities and regional identities of Palestinians in a Jewish-Israeli town

Mobilities in settler states have become a defining feature of indigenous spatiality. This is mainly due to the structural disadvantage of indigenous communities in relation to urban locations. In Israel, Palestinian citizens are relocating to Jewish cities because of systemic discrimination, primarily in the allocation of land and housing construction permits in Arab locales. Yet, as this paper shows, their movement is neither unidirectional nor an one-time event, but ongoing and circular. Able to enjoy only certain economic and social rights in indigenous spaces and other rights in settler spaces, Palestinian citizens continuously commute between the two. Utilizing a human rights based approach, the paper unpacks Palestinian mobility practices to illuminate a lacuna in the literature, which has overlooked the quest for rights as a driving force of indigenous mobilities. The paper further demonstrates that circular mobilities become a generative act that connects the settler city to neighboring localities in a way that undermines the separation between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Palestinian’ spaces, and collapses the distinction between the ‘urban’ and ‘regional.’ Rather than attempting to integrate within the city, Palestinians incorporate the city within their own ethno-regional topography, thereby asserting their presence and a claim to the city-space itself.

Contested Frontiers: Indigenous Mobilization and Control over Land and Natural Resources in Myanmar's Upland Areas

Over the past two decades, Myanmar’s upland areas have gradually turned into formally administered, legible, and governable state-territory. Following decades of armed conflict, a series of ceasefire agreements since the 1990s opened the door for the central state’s expansion of territorial control in the upland areas through the exploitation of natural resources and land concessions. New civil society coalitions are being formed inside Myanmar to resist the states strategy of accumulation by dispossession in conjunction with enclosures and the formation of state territory. This paper provides a brief outline of an ongoing research project which takes a socio-spatial perspective on state building processes and links the concept of the resource frontier with emerging discourses on indigenous rights in Myanmar.

A New Dawn? Indigenous Movements and Ethnic Inclusion in Latin America

This article investigates how indigenous movements in Latin America promote the political inclusion of historically marginalized indigenous groups. I argue that the social pressure produced by a strong movement promotes the inclusion of indigenous representatives in formal leadership positions. However, this effect depends on both the movement’s internal unity and the general responsiveness of the political system. I examine my claims using a mixed-methods design. I draw on a new group-level data set on ethnic parties and ethnic civil society organizations in Latin America between 1946 and 2009. My statistical analysis finds that indigenous groups with well-organized movements are more likely to achieve inclusion in executive positions of state power. The level of democratic freedom in a country greatly conditions this effect, while movement-internal factionalism undermines the political effectiveness of indigenous mobilization. I illuminate the causal mechanisms underlying these results in a case study of the rise and decline of indigenous mobilization in Ecuador.