Indigenous Movements Research Articles

Cultivar conocimientos, cosechar otra educación Experiencias desde la perspectiva indígena

Since the middle of the last century, some Latin American indigenous organizations have madeprogress in building their own education experiences. Focused on the educational praxis of theRegional Indigenous Council of Cauca, in this work I analyze the indigenous research processes thatare necessary to build intercultural curricula and intercultural practices. I am interested in releasingthree central questions: a) how the articulation between own education and research has beenproduced, b) the way in which this articulation forces to reconceptualize the work of investigating,and c) the elements that it offers to deepen the construction of alternative socio-educational praxis.Keywords: intercultural bilingual education, indigenous research, indigenous movement, socialmovements.

Mulheres Indígenas de Manaus: Construindo Políticas Afirmativas no SUS

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar problematizações entre a atenção diferenciada no SUS e políticas afirmativas conquistadas pela ação de mulheres indígenas na cidade de Manaus, Amazonas. Desde a década de 1970, identificamos na Amazônia Brasileira, região de fértil pluralidade étnica, uma rede de relações de gênero sendo tecida no interior do movimento indígena mais ampliado, criando um saldo organizativo de participação social em ações comunitárias que culminaram nas lutas e conquistas pela consolidação da saúde indígena no SUS. À luz da psicologia sócio-histórica e suas interfaces com a antropologia, história e saúde coletiva, buscamos revalorizar experiências de mulheres indígenas na cidade de Manaus, evidenciando suas contribuições à saúde diferenciada no SUS articuladas a outras políticas afirmativas conquistadas, como o direito à cidade, ao trabalho, direito à cultura e o direito à educação.

Challenging Convictions

Abstract This essay, with accompanying lesson plan, explores how race-radical Black and Indigenous feminists theorize and resist the carceral state violence of White settler nations of Canada and the United States. It focuses on the theoretical interventions driven by Indigenous and Black race-radical feminists and how this has placed these activists at the forefront of anti-violence movement-building. Such an intervention specifically upholds the tensions within and refuses to collapse political approaches of Indigenous movements for sovereignty and Black race-radical traditions. Its transnational, comparative focus helps us to not only identify but to create multiple strategies that dismantle the carceral state and the racialized gendered violence that it mobilizes and sustains. Proceeding from the argument that both prison abolitionist praxis and race-radical feminist praxis are inherently and primarily pedagogical, the lesson plan explores the ways we learn, teach, and organize in a manner that teaches against the grain of carceral common sense.

A constituição equatoriana de 2008 e a proteção a povos indígenas: avanços jurídicos e desafios de uma realidade discriminatória

Incluído no movimento do “novo constitucionalismo latino-americano”, o cenário jurídico-normativo do Equador aponta para a tentativa da interação entre os movimentos indígenas e as instituições políticas daquele país desde a Constituição de 2008. Contudo, o diálogo intercultural ainda não se apresenta efetivo, ensejando críticas profundas quanto ao tratamento conferido às populações vulneráveis, nos termos já analisados, inclusive, pela Corte Interamericana de Direitos Humanos. O método de análise é o indutivo, utilizando-se de pesquisa bibliográfica documental e de estudos de caso.

L’ecologia politica latinoamericana dei movimenti indigeni in Ecuador: il caso della CONAIE

This work is focused on the analysis of the interconnections between Latin American political ecology and socio-environmental movements in Ecuador. Specifically, through the practices of CONAIE (Confederación de las Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador), it will analyzed the importance of indigenous movements in the political dynamics of the Country and the socio-ecological theories and practices that the indigenous confederation has introduced into the national public debate.

Health reform and Indigenous health policy in Brazil: contexts, actors and discourses.

Given the challenges related to reducing socio-economic and health inequalities, building specific health system approaches for Indigenous peoples is critical. In Brazil, following constitutional reforms that led to the universalization of health care in the late 1980s, a specific health subsystem was created for Indigenous peoples in 1999. In this paper, we use a historical perspective to contextualize the creation of the Indigenous Health Subsystem in Brazil. This study is based on data from interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjects and document-based analysis. In the 1980s, during the post-dictatorship period in Brazil, the emergence of Indigenous movements in the country and the support for pro-Indigenous organizations helped establish a political agenda that emphasized a broad range of issues, including the right to a specific health policy. Indigenous leaders established alliances with participants of the Brazilian health reform movement, which resulted in broad debates about the specificities of Indigenous peoples, and the need for a specific health subsystem. We highlight three main points in our analysis: (1) the centrality of a holistic health perspective; (2) the emphasis on social participation; (3) the need for the reorganization of health care. These points proved to be convergent with the development of the Brazilian health reform and were expressed in documents of the Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI) and the Union of Indigenous Nations (UNI). They were also consolidated in the final report of the First National Conference on the Protection of Indigenous Health in 1986, becoming the cornerstone of the national Indigenous health policy declared in 1999. Our analysis reveals that Indigenous people and pro-Indigenous groups were key players in the development of the Indigenous Health Subsystem in Brazil.

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified resource conflicts and indigenous resistance in Brazil

Indigenous peoples in Brazil have suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic due to limited access to an already precarious public health system together with continued attacks on their cultures, their territories and their way of life. These attacks come as part of the government's attempts to further neoliberal development and undermine environmental and indigenous rights, taking advantage of what the Minister of Environment called 'a moment of calm while the press is focusing on the pandemic'. The pandemic has intensified environmental conflicts affecting indigenous peoples, both in amplifying conflicts but also in sparking new acts of resistance and self-protection of indigenous lives and territories. Based on case studies and monitoring of rapidly evolving social media and WhatsApp posts, we analyse these processes through a political ecology lens. We find confirmed cases and deaths amongst indigenous peoples centred around tourism hotspots, mining sites, and other development projects. Yet the presence of these risks, and long term conflicts related to land-grabbing and resource theft linked to said development, has in some cases strengthened community ties and increased capacity for active resistance. While some Mebengokrê (Kayapó) communities in the Amazon have fled further into the forest to maintain isolation, others have expelled gold-miners from their villages. Tupinambá and Pataxó communities in the Northeast have set up blockades to keep people, and the virus, out. The retomadas, or reclaiming of land, of the Tupinambá, Pataxó and Pataxó-Hãhãhai in Bahia State, are a case in point: the long-term struggle to reclaim their lands has strengthened community ties and capacity for active resistance. The recent road blockades of the Mebengokrê (Kayapó) incorporated demands for COVID-19 support into a long history of demands for compensation for the negative impacts suffered from mining and road construction in their territories. At the national level, indigenous movements, which have grown in strength and number in the fight against Bolsonaro's 'politics of extermination' and through engagement of a new cohort of indigenous youth who had access to higher education, were able to draw on social media and indigenous led court cases to help counteract the 'genocide by omission' that has been worsened by the pandemic.

The indigenisation of eco-theology: The case of the Lamba people of the Copperbelt in Zambia

This article shows how eco-theology could and should be indigenised in an African context using the Copperbelt in Zambia as a case study. The ecological crisis worldwide has given rise to the call for everyone to work together to start caring about our natural environment. In theology, the response to this call received the name eco-theology. By means of a literature review, ethnographic information and governmental legislation, the article tries to illustrate how eco-theology could and should be indigenised in an African context using the Copperbelt in Zambia as a case study. This article makes an attempt to contribute to the needed ecological renewal by reinterpreting two traditions that inform thinking on the Copperbelt: Christianity and African traditional religion. The supernatural belief of the Lamba people is no longer embodied in this creation, and it is not too late for the people to form any indigenous environmental protection movement to protect the sacredness of mother Earth from further contamination and exploitation by strengthening, maintaining and respecting the traditional teachings and the cultural laws. Obedience to God’s command to tend creation is a quest for continued creation by humans, so that value is added to what is already in existence. This is embodied making the place we live in more beautiful, appealing and peaceful. Fruitfulness with sustainability becomes core values for interdependence and earth keeping.Contribution: We wish to address the ecological situation of the mining industry in Zambia from a theological perspective by assessing the impact of the copper mining and processing industry on humans, their environment and nature and by showing how the traditions of African traditional religion (ATR) thought can be transformed into tools to oppose this ecological disaster.

Material Culture, Indigeneity, and Temporality: The Textile as Legal Subject

Anthropological and ethnographic scholarship examining textiles in Mesoamerica has traditionally focused on gender, cultural continuity, space/place, its semiotics, and its reproduction of the universe. Literary studies approaches interpret this corpus as another form of literacy, discourse, and ontologies. Recently in Indigenous movements, weaving and textiles have acquired a more politicized edge. In 2019, the question of textiles inspired a flurry of discussions around intellectual property, and, especially, copyrights. This article examines the epistemological divides between authorship and weaving, commons and community, temporality and ancestors and how decolonizing the tenets of intellectual property law may help protect indigenous weavings.

“Without Food there is No Resistance”: The impact of the Zapatista conflict on agrobiodiversity and seed sovereignty in Chiapas, Mexico

Violent conflicts are frequently associated with detrimental or neutral effects on economic, social, and environmental development; by extension, one might expect similar effects on agrobiodiversity. However, as this study suggests, the impacts of conflicts are not necessarily all negative or neutral. Indeed, conflicts may also create favorable political conditions for the implementation of community-driven agrobiodiversity management. Drawing on ethnographic research in the indigenous central region of Chiapas, Mexico, where the insurgent Zapatista movement (EZLN) has a strong influence, we examine the impact of the agrarian conflict between this indigenous movement and the Mexican government on the development of agrobiodiversity conservation initiatives. Two research questions guide this paper: (1) What has been the impact of the conflict on communities’ subsistence agriculture and seed sovereignty? and (2) To what extent has the local seed sovereignty movement—an outgrowth of the Zapatista conflict—influenced agrobiodiversity conservation? Our findings suggest that the conflict has led to the implementation of grassroots agroecology and food and seed sovereignty projects that could ultimately strengthen agrobiodiversity in the communities under the influence of the Zapatista movement. We suggest that these projects highlight two elements essential for long-term agrobiodiversity conservation: first, the strategic relationship between agrobiodiversity conservation and these communities’ food security and seed sovereignty, particularly in the context of conflict; and second, the central role that peasant communities play in the preservation, reproduction, and evolution of agrobiodiversity. We conclude that the overall long-term impact of the Zapatista conflict on local agrobiodiversity has in fact been positive.

State, forest and Adivasis at crossroads: Netarhat field firing range and contestations over rights

ABSTRACT Recent trend in researches within the global south focusses on indigenous movements and contestations over rights. In an era where the ideology of state-sponsored development often threatens indigenous rights and identity, and converts Adivasis into victims rather than beneficiaries, forested communities find it increasingly more difficult to come to terms with it. Reflection of this trend is felt in Netarhat, an area of Jharkhand. In 1990s, Netarhat became witness to contestation over rights over forest and landscape between the state and the Adivasis over converting the area into a field firing range by the army through a proposed pilot project. The paper sets the study on a historical backdrop which has its reverberations in the post-colonial protest movement and conversion of the area into a strong bastion of Naxalism (left wing extremism) in recent decades. The first section of this paper seeks to throw light on colonial and post-colonial policies and debates. The second part discusses the shifts in state policy from the ‘line of fire’ to the launching of grand projects of elephant corridor, tiger reserve and wolf sanctuary and finally to an eco-sensitive zone. It bases its narrative on the struggle by the indigenous groups against dehumanisation and violation of basic human rights.

Kateri’s Bones: Recovering an Indigenous Political Ecology of Healing along Kaniatarowanenneh, 1660–1701

The extraordinarily well-documented life of St. Kateri Tekakwitha and the “afterlives” of her physical remains are analyzed through the theoretical lens of a “political ecology of healing”—a framework emphasizing the interplay of ecosystems and decolonial praxis within historically colonized spaces. Investigating Indigenous political ecologies from the colonial archives of New France recovers the ways Native women maintained sovereign communities in their riverine homelands in an era of climate change, colonial invasion, and internecine violence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Placing Indigenous women, their kinship networks, and their relationship with their ancestral lands at the center of decolonial history shows how Native communities along Kaniatarowanenneh—the St. Lawrence River— represented sites of Native resilience and regeneration rather than decline and dependence. Native women established a syncretistic religion devoted to Kateri’s memory that mapped Catholic rituals on traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge and practices. This Indigenous spirituality remained distinct from the devotional cult European American colonizers erected around Kateri, and it persisted after settlers forgot her. After more than three centuries, Kateri’s bones remain at Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Territory as a testimony to an unbroken history of Indigenous power, presence, and care for the land. Contemporary Indigenous movements for sovereignty, self-determination, and environmental justice have their origins in the political ecology of healing embodied by Kateri’s bones.

Anarchism and the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala: A Tenuous Relation

While the indigenous peoples of Guatemala and its history of anarchist thought are seldom studied together but there is merit to exploring the differences and convergences between the anarchist movement's perspectives on class and ethnicity and those of better understood liberal, socialist and communist traditions. Anarchists in Guatemala made tentative efforts to reach out to rural workers and peasants in the period between 1928 to 1932, but these efforts were circumscribed and largely unsuccessful. They did so under the influence of more structured movements in Mexico and Argentina, which incorporated visions of collective emancipation that would appeal to autonomous indigenous movements; however their brief embrace of these issues, interrupted by fierce repression by the state, was curtailed by the overwhelming urban base from which they intervened in labour and social struggles. The reasons for this failure lay in the history of Guatemalan race relations and the structural divisions between urban and rural society that endured during the transition from colonial to republican society, and which anarchists tied to overcome.

Unsettling as agency: unsettling settler colonialism where you are

ABSTRACT A great deal of recent sociological scholarship in Canada has examined the ‘unsettling' process motivating non-Natives or ‘settlers' to act in solidarity with Indigenous movements and their experiences of becoming unsettled through such engagements. Informed by settler colonialism and Indigenous studies concerns, such conceptualizations of unsettling have focused primarily on individual trajectories', in conjunction with an overriding normative emphasis on settlers’ active support for, and accountability to, Indigenous leadership.While invaluable, these predominating conerns leave open questions about the scope of appropriate agency for non-Native people in challenging settler colonialism. Scholarship to date lacks an explicit affirmative model for settlers to interrupt the routine institutional reproduction of settler colonial understandings, discourses and practices, which also limits its applicability to the United States context. Drawing upon sociological concerns with the institutional and organizational reproduction of power, the article discusses and disentangles differing notions of unsettling and suggests that, under larger covering norms of following Indigenous leadership and relationality, settlers can actively destabilize the reproduction of settler colonial reality through a disruptive form of quotidian agency wherever they are.

The Organizational Voter: Support for New Parties in Young Democracies

AbstractHow do voters come to support new political parties? This article contends that new types of locally organized, participant‐based societal organizations—such as neighborhood associations, informal sector unions, and indigenous movements—can play a crucial mediating role in securing electoral support for new parties. Drawing on social identity and self‐categorization theory, I argue that endorsements of new parties by such organizations sway the vote preferences of organization members and people in their larger social networks. A discrete choice experiment, presenting voters in Bolivia with campaign posters, demonstrates that organizational endorsements are highly effective in mobilizing voters, especially when voters face a new party. Endorsements can even counteract policy and ethnic differences between candidates and voters. The findings suggest an important, understudied route to partisan support in new democracies and have important implications for research on political accountability.

Unpacking disavowals of indigeneity in Bolivia

ABSTRACT Beyond Indigeneity: Coca Growing and the Emergence of a New Middle Class in Bolivia . By Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2016. Deference Revisited: Andean Ritual in the Plurinational State. By Into Goudsmit. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2016.The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia. By Benjamin Dangl. AK Press, Edinburgh, 2019. Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia’s Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy. By Thomas Grisaffi. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2019.

Sacred Sites Protection and Indigenous Women’s Activism: Empowering Grassroots Social Movements to Influence Public Policy. A Look into the “Women of Standing Rock” and “Idle No More” Indigenous Movements

Religion and public policy are interconnected across a variety of issues. One aspect where this linkage has been understudied is religion and Indigenous sacred sites protection. This article aims to address this gap by analyzing how Indigenous women’s activism advances this cause. The focus is on how Indigenous Peoples, specifically women, use grassroots activism to provoke change on public policy in the context of the protection of Indigenous sacred sites. Two case studies are used to illustrate this concept: the American “Women of Standing Rock” and the Canadian “Idle No More” grassroots social movements. My analysis draws from interpretative methods. Interpretative research revolves around the concept of individuals as active producers of meaning. The women-led grassroots social movements at issue highlight a fundamental lack of awareness of the historical and current struggles of Indigenous Peoples, both in the US and Canada. Modern technologies and social media provide democratic means for grassroots social movements to be heard and empowered. The growing movement by Indigenous women to assert their rights, and their quest for self-determination in land use and sacred sites protection create a positive discourse that advances Indigenous women’s position in crossing the obstacles onto “institutional places of privilege,” hence influencing public policy.

Imazighen of France; articulations of an indigenous diaspora

ABSTRACT Indigenous diasporas are an emerging social and political phenomenon, and conceptually offer a productive avenue for critical research in the study of ethnicity and migration. The politics of Indigenous peoples in diaspora have not received enough scholarly attention, and this article seeks to respond by examining how indigeneity is articulated by the many Amazigh (non-Arab North African) cultural associations of France. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s articulation theory, this article contributes a nuanced approach to the relational concept of indigeneity, exploring four key ways in which disparate subjectivities are articulated with indigeneity in the discourse and practices of the diasporic Amazigh movement. Firstly, diaspora Imazighen articulate with the Global Indigenous Movement. Secondly, they position themselves and their homeland populations as colonised people. Thirdly, they perform cultural authenticity within their project of cultural and linguistic revitalisation. Lastly, they practice a village territoriality that articulates with indigeneity by privileging rurality and pre-colonial political institutions. These diaspora articulations are argued to produce a pro-indigenous, anti-essentialist discourse, which highlights the relational nature of indigeneity.

El mito de Claudio Becochi.

El texto a continuación presenta el “mito de Claudio Becochi” del resguardo indígena de La Laguna, Siberia, municipio de Caldono. El mito es expuesto como fue recogido y narrado por el antropólogo Ícaro Cuervo, en la década de 1980. Sobre esta narración, este texto reflexiona sobre las condiciones en que el mito fue contado desde las notas y diarios de campo del mismo antropólogo. Finalmente, este artículo analiza el mito en testimonios de indígenas que acompañaron el trabajo de campo de Ícaro Cuervo. El propósito de este texto es explorar las condiciones de trabajo antropológico en la región del Cauca en la década de 1980. A partir del mito, reflexiona sobre las condiciones históricas del trabajo antropológico y la posición política del investigador/a en la interacción entre las luchas indígenas por la tierra y la investigación antropológica. La información presentada fue recogida entre 1999 y 2000, durante una primera temporada de campo de seis meses, en el resguardo indígena de La Laguna Siberia, municipio de Caldono. Tal trabajo de campo hizo parte de una investigación orientada a entender la influencia de la antropología sobre el movimiento indígena y la influencia del movimiento indígena sobre la antropología. En los resultados de esa investigación, la reflexión presentada aquí fue excluida.