Indigenous Movements Research Articles

Livelihood interests, organizational discipline, and grassroots participation in Ecuadorian indigenous movement protests

ABSTRACTThe Ecuadorian indigenous movement has received much scholarly attention for its ability to mobilize large numbers of people in its protest campaigns. These mobilizations rely on the participation of rural indigenous community members who make up the organizational base of the movement. Yet, most scholarship on the movement focuses on national-level leadership. As such, little is known about the perspectives of indigenous community members and why they do or do not participate in these protests. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews with respondents in three rural indigenous communities in the highlands of Ecuador to see how participation varies within and between communities. I found that differing degrees of participation can be explained in part by livelihood interests and in part by organizational discipline. Certain themes cut across communities, such as being skeptical of careerism; feeling taken advantage of by movement leadership; and perceiving protest campaigns as going against the livelihood interests of those who make a living in the agro-export sector. These findings contribute to existing scholarship on the contradictions inherent within indigenous movement political discourse and alternative development ideologies more broadly.

Paulo Freire, Critical Literacy, and Indigenous Resistance

Using several case studies drawn from Freire’s cultural context and contemporary Canadian Indigenous resistance movements, this article questions whether a Freirean approach to critical literacy can work with Indigenous literacy needs without reproducing colonial power structures. It also seeks to examine current scholarship in the literacy education of Maritime Aboriginal people in Canada and to illustrate the need for critical pedagogies honoring multiple cultural literacies and ways of knowing among Indigenous youth.

Mulheres Indígenas em Movimentos: Possíveis Articulações entre Gênero e Política1

Resumo A partir de uma aproximação posicionada com determinados movimentos indígenas e com mulheres lideranças indígenas no Brasil tratamos sobre a possibilidade da emergência, no cenário macropolítico do país, do sujeito político mulheres indígenas e sobre as possíveis aproximações de suas pautas com as pautas feministas, em especial, o feminismo pós-colonial. Propomos reflexões sobre as intersecções entre raça/etnia e gênero, dialogando com discursos de diferentes lideranças indígenas que ocupam posição de protagonismo no movimento indígena e ocupam espaços políticos estratégicos como a própria Academia. Atentar-se para estas múltiplas narrativas se torna importante pois estas provocam tensionamentos múltiplos que envolvem não só campos de disputa política por direitos e visibilidade, mas também campos teóricos da antropologia e do feminismo.

Introduction

Introduction Sunaina Maira (bio) This forum features scholars and activists engaged in a transnational discussion about border violence and border protests in North America, South Asia, Palestine/Israel, Europe/Mediterranean Sea, and North/South Korea. It originated in a roundtable, "Border Protests and Transnational Solidarities," hosted by the Mellon Research Initiative in Comparative Border Studies at UC Davis in February 2018.1 This event brought together activists and scholars from around the world to explore the role played by borders, and the work they do, in different sites of struggle against militarization, nuclearization, nativism, displacement, partition, and colonization. As a response to border tensions and violence, protest cultures have produced new political imaginaries and transborder communities that have helped rethink borders and transnational solidarity. However, these cross-border and "No Borders" movements coexist with a retrenchment and fortification of ethnic and national boundaries. This forum addresses how migrant rights, antiwar, feminist, anticolonial, and indigenous movements in different sites have used cross-border affiliations, cultural production, and digital technologies to mobilize against and across borders, but have also faced repression, criminalization, and nativist backlash. The essays here explore the impact of border conflicts and enforcement on ordinary people, and the epistemologies of borders produced in daily life as well as in artistic and activist projects. Comparative Border Studies While border tensions have been subject to scholarly inquiry for years, contemporary global dynamics as well as the transnationalizing of American studies call for a renewed and comparative focus on the making, unmaking, and fortification of borders. Borders—whether national, colonial, regional, continental—are by definition a global and transregional issue. Yet American studies scholars have pointed to the ways in which the internationalizing currents in the field have sometimes recentered a US perspective and privileged the concerns of US academics.2 In the last several years, border studies scholars [End Page 1021] have called for more cross-regional, comparative, and inter-American studies research that decenters the US.3 It was this need for a critical transnational perspective that inspired the Mellon-funded initiative in comparative border studies from 2015 to 2018, co-directed by myself and Robert Irwin, a scholar of Mexican and Mexican American history. We conceived of this program as an intervention into urgent scholarly and political debates about borders that would bridge American studies, ethnic studies, and area studies and rethink paradigms in critical border studies through direct engagement with grassroots activists.4 The initiative focused on not only the Mexico/US border but also those adjoining Palestine/Israel, Europe/Mediterranean Sea, and Afghanistan/Pakistan. In American studies, border studies and border thinking have often focused on the US–Mexico borderlands, with the seminal critiques of Chicanx and feminist scholars who have engaged with issues of migration, hybridity, citizenship, (il)legality, gender, and resistance. Work on the southern border helped remap American studies in the 1990s by using the "field-imaginary" of the "borderlands" drawing on Chicana subaltern studies,5 analyzing the border as a space of transformation, hybridity, and resistance to US imperialism but also as a "shock culture, … a third country, a closed country" and a "war zone."6 However, the traditional critical tools of border studies do not adequately address the current moment, when xenophobic calls to close the borders are on the rise in the European Union as well as the US. Recent work, including by anthropologists, has challenged the "methodological nationalism" of US-based border studies that naturalized the notion of borders as territorial lines associated with national sovereignty7 and shifted attention to reconstitutions of and threats to national sovereignty and simultaneous processes of rebordering and debordering. The US has externalized its borders (as has the EU), mandating immigration checks inside Canada and Mexico, and also moved the border to the interior, far from the border with Mexico, underscoring that it is a fluid, racial, and not just territorial boundary.8 In their important intervention in critical border studies, Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson incisively critiqued the preoccupation with the border as wall,9 and thus a site only of exclusion. Viewing borders also as "devices of inclusion," and as temporal and not just spatial, Mezzadra and Neilson argue...

Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sɨ́nwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education

290 Feminist Studies 45, no. 2/3. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Michelle M. Jacob, Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sínwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education Native and Indigenous feminisms (hereafter Indigenous feminisms) have made important interventions into social theory as well as historic and contemporary activism. Although Indigenous feminisms should be viewed as plural “rather than a singular feminism,”1 Indigenous feminist scholarship has collectively addressed the need to attend to Indigenous women’s concerns and aspirations. Indigenous feminist analyses have challenged other feminist movements to take seriously Indigenous women’s concerns for “personal and Tribal sovereignty.”2 They have argued that Indigenous studies and Indigenous movements must account for Indigenous women’s gendered experiences with colonialism, thereby productively addressing both the erasure of white patriarchal colonialism within Eurocentric feminism and the erasure of gendered and sexual oppression within Indigenous theory.3 1. Reyna Ramirez, “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging,” Meridians 7, no. 2 (2007): 33. 2. Kate Stanley, “Thoughts on Indian Feminism,” in A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women, ed. Beth Brant (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988), 214. 3. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory: A Methodological Tool,” Australian Feminist Studies 28, no. 78: 331–47; Leilani Sabzalian, “Curricular Standpoints and Native Feminist Theories: Why Native Feminist Theories Should Matter to Curriculum Studies,” Curriculum Inquiry 48, no. 3 (2018): 359–382; Maile Arvin, Eve Jacob et al. 291 Informed by Indigenous feminist analysis and activism, this article complements such scholarship by situating Indigenous feminist education as countering Eurocentric policies and practices in Western education , and more specifically, within the university setting.4 Indigenous feminist education is comprised of practices of cultivating Indigenous language learning while simultaneously meeting community goals of enhancing self-determination, strengthening intergenerational relationships , foregrounding Indigenous knowledges, and instilling responsibility and connection to place rooted in Tribal Elder pedagogy,5 among and for the benefit of all students. Our focus on Indigenous language education advances understandings of Indigenous feminist praxis: “Indigenous languages are critical to the recovery and continuance of Indigenous Knowledge because their structure and composition is designed to articulate Indigenous worldviews, values, conceptualizations, and knowledge.”6 Our work has been to revitalize Ichishkíin, an Indigenous language of the Columbia River Plateau Tribes in the Pacific Northwest, at the University of Oregon. This effort seeks to demonstrate the resilience and healing potential of Indigenous language education, to strengthen a relational and place-based conception of sovereignty,7 specifically Tuck, and Angie Morrill. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 8–34. 4. Teresa L. McCarty, “Schools as Strategic Tools for Indigenous Language Revitalization: Lessons from Native America,” in Can Schools Save Indigenous Languages? Policy and Practice on Four Continents, ed. Nancy H. Hornberger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Teresa L. McCarty, Tamara Borgoiakova, Perry Gilmore, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, and Mary Eunice Romero, “Editors’ Introduction: Indigenous Epistemologies and Education —Self-Determination, Anthropology, and Human Rights,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2005): 1–7. 5. Amanda Holmes and Norma Gonzáles, “Finding Sustenance: An Indigenous Relational Pedagogy,” in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, ed. Django Paris and H. Samy Alim (New York: Teachers College Press, 2017): 207–224. 6. Leanne R. Simpson, “Anticolonial Strategies for the Recovery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge,” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 3–4 (2004): 377. 7. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “The Place Where We All Live and Work Together: A Gendered Analysis of ‘Sovereignty,’” in Native Studies Keywords , ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2015): 18–24. 292 Jacob et al. for Ichishkíin Tribal peoples, and to illustrate a place- and community -based model that provides all students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, an opportunity to value and learn from Indigenous languages and knowledges that honor the traditions and teachings of our Tribal Elders.8 We also argue for the benefits of Indigenous language education as a generative form of feminist...

“I had never been at home in the world”1: A case for Black-Indigenism

In this article, I argue that the Black experience in the United States settler colony is one primarily based in a systematic erasure of indigeneity from the enslaved African. Understanding the Black condition as a manifestation of White America’s historical response to indigeneity, I consider the marginalized perspectives of Black decolonization work that has pushed and continues to push back against the centuries-long history of settler colonialism in the region known as North America. Placing Black and Indigenous decolonizing histories and practices in conversation with each other is part of what I call Black-Indigenism and is inspired by the work of Sylvia Wynter. Wynter and others recognize Blackness as an integral factor in the argument for Indigenism that informs and furthers the aims of Indigenist and Indigenous decolonization educative work and movements.

Growing intergenerational resilience for Indigenous food sovereignty through home gardening.

As a community-based participatory research project designed to promote health and wellbeing, Growing Resilience supports home gardens for 96 primarily Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho families in the Wind River Reservation, located in Wyoming. Through analysis of data from two years of qualitative fieldwork, including stories told by 53 gardeners and members of the project’s community advisory board in talking circles and through our novel sovereign storytelling method, we investigated if and how these participants employ relationships, knowledge, and practices across generations through home gardening. We find that participants describe home gardening within present, past, future, and cross-generational frames, rooted in family relationships and knowledge shared across generations. Our analysis of these themes suggests that gardening provides families a means to transmit resilience across generations or, as we call it here, intergenerational resilience. We conclude by discussing intergenerational resilience as a culturally specific mechanism of social-ecological community resilience that may be particularly relevant in Indigenous movements for food sovereignty.

El movimiento indígena colombiano y su relación con el giro decolonial en América Latina

La compleja realidad asociada a las violencias en Colombia ha sido un gran campo de análisis y reflexión sociopolítica en los últimos tiempos, marcada por la fuerte presencia de un conflicto armado de larga duración, las prácticas de violencias múltiples de los grupos hegemónicos en el poder político, de las organizaciones políticomilitares antisistémicas, de los carteles de la droga y de los grupos paramilitares de viejo y nuevo tipo. No obstante, la praxis liberadora que emerge al interior/exterior del movimiento indígena colombiano, enfocado en la defensa de la tierra, el territorio, la vida y la cultura, responde a una amplia articulación con la cosmovisión y pensamiento crítico, horizontal y decolonial en las ciencias sociales de la región. Las acciones políticas desarrolladas por las comunidades y organizaciones indígenas representan un contenido de aspectos/componentes propios del pensamiento desde abajo, con la tierra y la izquierda (Abya Yala), enfocado a repensar sus propias dinámicas y también las ciencias sociales, por medio de experiencias que establezcan un peso teórico, conceptual y metodológico más allá del colonialismo-epistémico del momento. La metodología que se utilizó en el desarrollo del artículo responde a los siguientes procesos: 1) revisión teórica sobre los estudios decoloniales, el movimiento indígena y su vinculación con el pensamiento crítico latinoamericano; 2) el análisis de los procesos/movilizaciones del movimiento indígena colombiano y 3) la interrelación conceptual y metodológica entre el giro decolonial y la praxis del movimiento indígena como sujeto-colectivo en el escenario de la sociedad civil. El aspecto más sustancial encontrado fue el campo de oportunidad vigente en el estudio de los movimientos indígenas como sujetos sentipensantes, colectivos y comunales. A su vez, la oportunidad epistémica que constituye la decolonialidad como una forma de pensar alternativamente y desde abajo la realidad emergente del movimiento indígena, con respecto a la dinámica política interna de las instituciones y los sectores hegemónicos en Colombia.

Una mirada Crítica sobre el proceso político del movimiento indígena boliviano y su apuesta en la refundación del estado

La Constitución de la República boliviana tomó un “giro-radical” a partir de la fuerza, capacidad y demanda de las organizaciones indígenas por refundar e intentar pensar otras formas de concebir la política, la cultura, la nación, el Estado y, en concreto, la experiencia de reconstrucción comunal del proceso político en América Latina, propuesta que se hace necesario leer y comprender en el contexto global actual. La finalidad del presente artículo de investigación consiste en problematizar la dinámica sociocultural e identitaria del movimiento indígena boliviano y su apuesta por refundar el Estado nación. La metodología usada fue el análisis crítico del discurso, desde la perspectiva de los estudios decoloniales, para lograr comprender la praxis del sujeto indígena en su territorio. Un resultado encontrado es la importancia de repensar los modelos y diseños del Estado moderno/colonialista más allá de la lógica liberal procedimental, tal como lo vienen realizando los pueblos indígenas bolivianos desde la praxis comunitaria y subalterna en su territorio.

El buen vivir como alternativa a un modelo civilizador en crisis.

The idea of Good Living according to the indigenous movements of Latin America (Abya Yala) is an ancestral worldview of life that has its origin in traditional knowledge and practices. It refers to living in harmony with human beings and nature, from a non-egocentric or anthropocentric view, which recognizes our interdependence and eco-dependence. This notion has re-emerged with force in the last decades as an alternative to the capitalist system, to the myth of development and economic growth, playing an important role in social movements and governmental initiatives of several Latin American States.

The dark side of the affectedness-paradigm: lessons from the Indigenous peoples’ movement at the United Nations

ABSTRACTThe paper discusses two possible readings of the participation of affected populations in global governance and contrasts these readings with a case study on the Indigenous movement in the United Nations (UN). On the one hand, the inclusion of affected populations can be understood as a crucial step in creating a democratic global society. While NGOs originally played a pivotal role in this process, they were increasingly criticised for a lack of democratic credentials and are now being replaced by affected actors with higher moral authority. On the other hand, the inclusion of affected populations can be read as a strategy of major powers to confine the influence of NGOs who have challenged their dominance. The case study on the Indigenous movement will show how the movement successfully struggled for recognition in the UN. However, states prevented Indigenous peoples (IPs) from gaining substantial political influence. Moreover, the inclusion of IPs puts high pressure on their representatives to professionalise, while many of them lack the resources that NGOs dispose of. Ironically, giving affected populations a voice might in the end re-empower states. To counterbalance this trend, we suggest that movements representing affected populations should strengthen existing links with traditional NGOs.

Proceso organizativo del canal TVMICC durante los años 2008-2010: Análisis y Proyección

Esta investigación presenta el proceso del Movimiento Indígena Campesino del Cotopaxi (MICC) en la organización del primer canal indígena en el Ecuador: TVMICC-47 en los años 2008-2010. Con este propósito se compilaron los procesos sociales, la gestión administrativa y programática desarrollada por sus exdirigentes, evidenciándose la destacada participación de mujeres. El estudio es guiado por el método vivencial simbólico incorporado en el CCRISAC, cuyos momentos principales fueron: Vivienciado y Experienciando (trabajo de campo); Recuperando y Reencantando, (sistematización y reflexión); Significando y Resignificando, (sistematización detallada) e; Involucrándonos y Comprometiéndonos, (propuesta de programa). El estudio concluye que la participación del Movimiento Indígena Campesino de Cotopaxi, en las luchas forjadas por la CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador) a partir de 1990, por demandas en torno a la tenencia de la tierra, la existencia de un modelo educativo intercultural bilingüe, y un Estado Plurinacional, reconocido en la Constitución de 1998. Sin embargo, Ecuador sigue esperando que estos derechos se hagan efectivos en los hechos.

La comunicación online como herramienta para el fortalecimiento de la ECUARUNARI

En la historia ecuatoriana los movimientos sociales desde siempre han jugado un papel determinante en la vida política y social del país, sin embargo, su lucha y contribución han quedado invisibilizadas en las agendas de los medios de comunicación comerciales, violentando así el derecho constitucional de los pueblos originarios a una comunicación legítimamente incluyente. De allí, que este estudio tenga como propósito evidenciar el estado actual de la comunicación que se articula desde la Confederación de Pueblos de la Nacionalidad Kichwa del Ecuador – ECUARUNARI, como pilar fundamental del movimiento indígena ecuatoriano, en aras de fortalecer desde iniciativas propias, procesos de comunicación interculturales. Los resultados del estudio tienen como fuente importante un diagnóstico que profundizó en la manera que se configura la comunicación institucional e intervienen los públicos internos y externos, como parte constitutiva de una estrategia que sostiene el derecho que tienen los movimientos sociales del Ecuador a ejercer la comunicación en condiciones de igualdad y horizontalidad.

“Puutx We'Wnxi Uma Kiwe” comunicación desde la Madre Tierra: Una mirada de la comunicación propia, desde la práctica comunitaria como un camino de vida

El presente artículo comparte desde el pensamiento y la práctica de vida; cómo el pueblo Nasa del norte del Cauca en Colombia, interpreta y camina “Puutx We’wnxi Uma Kiwe”, la comunicación desde la madre tierra, entendida como una relación espiritual y natural que transmite mensajes de vida y nos convoca a todos los seres, como sus hijos e hijas a cuidarla, defenderla y liberarla. Hace énfasis en las formas ancestrales mediante las cuales, el pueblo Nasa se comunica naturalmente con la Madre Tierra “Uma Kiwe” y nos convoca con urgencia al cuidado del territorio “la casa grande de todos los seres”. Es la perspectiva del espacio que no puede ser considerado mercancía, ni sometido a las políticas económicas de explotación y saqueo por poner en grave riesgo la vida misma. Finalmente, discute las experiencias de articulación que se producen entre los medios, formas y espacios de la comunicación propia, con las herramientas y técnicas de información, como estrategia política de organización y de lucha del movimiento indígena, y para la visibilización, concientización y movilización para el cuidado y protección del territorio en un contextol en el que Uma Kiwe, nos convoca a entender sus mensajes y liberarla, para que sus hijos vivamos en libertad y dignidad.

Shifting Indigenous Australian Realities: Dispersal, Damage, and Resurgence: Introduction

ABSTRACTThe new millennium has seen the landscape of Australian Indigenous politics and policy rapidly transformed. This overview essay explores these transformations, highlighting the rise of incorporation and intervention as preferred modes of governance in this period. The essay argues for a need for anthropological attention to grapple with settler colonial legacies as well as higher level processes at work in the contemporary circumstances of Aboriginal people's lives. It offers three terms through which these circumstances might be approached: Dispersal refers to the uneven and unpredictable distribution of policy and ecological effects, the advent of more dispersed and pervasive technologies of governmental surveillance, and new patterns of and reasons for Indigenous movement. Damage glosses questions of suffering, harm, poverty, and also a broader condition: the ecological wreckage colonial capitalist developments often leave in their wake. Resurgence addresses the variety of creative responses made by Indigenous people as they endure and attempt to transcend this intensified governance of their lives.

The indigenous movement in Ecuador: resource access and Rafael Correa’s citizens’ revolution

ABSTRACTThe indigenous movement in Ecuador notoriously lost its political influence during Rafael Correa’s government, which is counterintuitive, as both actors – in theory – shared a similar political agenda. To explain this phenomenon, the extant academic literature has posed several hypotheses, all primarily based on the study of Ecuador’s political juncture. In an alternative, but complementary, manner, and based on the Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT), the main aim of this article is to analyze how the exchange relationship between resource types and resource access mechanisms of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement were affected under Rafael Correa’s administration. The results indicate that the exchange relationship between cooptation and appropriation employed by Correa’s regime altered the indigenous movement’s resource access during 2007–2017, resulting in the movement’s loss of influence and legitimacy within the Ecuadorian political arena. In addition, this article discusses the potential impact of resource access mechanisms on the empowerment and development of social movements; a relevant factor to understand their failure or success.

Unsettling the Land

This article examines different ontologies of land in settler colonialism and Indigenous movements for decolonization and environmental justice. Settler ontologies of land operate by occluding other modes of perceiving, representing, and experiencing land. Indigenous ontologies of land are commonly oriented around relationality and reciprocal obligations among humans and the other-than-human. Drawing together scholarship from literatures in political economy, political ecology, Indigenous studies, and post-humanism, we synthesize an approach to thinking with land to understand structures of dispossession and the possibilities for Indigenous revitalization through ontological hybridity. Using two different case studies—plantation development in Indonesia and land revitalization in the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Nation—we further develop how settler and Indigenous ontologies operate on the ground, illuminating the coexistence of multiple ontologies of land. Given the centrality of land in settler colonialism, hybrid ontologies are important to Indigenous movements seeking to simultaneously strengthen sovereignty over territory and revitalize land-based practices.

Emergencia indígena en Michoacán. Ejercicio de derechos de facto y de jure

This article analyzes the diversity that characterizes the indigenous movement in the Meseta P’urhépecha, in Michoacán, Mexico, based on documental research and ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the past three decades. Progressively, it traces the –primarily political– processes that explain this indigenous revival, and discusses the de facto and de jure pathways that led to the construction of these indigenous communities and the demand that their right to autonomy to be respected. Also, the existing tensions and contradictions and the political status of the Supreme Indigenous Council of Michoacán (CSIM), which brings together over thirty communities, are discussed. Finally, this article presents a critical review of the juridical achievements of various legislative initiatives regarding indigenous affairs, before concluding with reflections about the challenges these communities face to consolidate their processes of autonomy.

Terra, Luta e Trans(formação) no Movimento Indígena de Roraima

Neste artigo busca-se discutir a relação entre as lutas por demarcação de terras indígenas no estado de Roraima, extremo Norte do Brasil, que contou com a participação ativa de indígenas em lugares até então inéditos, e a construção das principais organizações indígenas de Roraima, assim como o recente investimento daqueles povos indígenas (sobretudo os Macuxi e Wapichana) na construção de espaços de educação específica e diferenciada e no ingresso nas universidades. A luta por direitos permanece após a demarcação da Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol, e a educação formal entra na pauta das reivindicações do movimento indígena, assim como é por este utilizada para fortalecer e consolidar sua “agencialidade” e seu poder de mobilização.

Rewriting the Narrative: American Indian Artists in California, 1960s–1980s

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.