Indigenous Peoples Face Research Articles

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life Will Clark (bio) When TOMMY PICO, a queer poet from the Viejas Reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation in Southern California, won the 2018 Whiting Award for poetry, the selection committee praised the "inventiveness" of his "contemporary epics." Framing PICO'S book-length poems through a Western genre, the judges describe PICO'S work as a "forceful … interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self" that is novel for connecting sexual exploration to histories of Indigenous dispossession.1 In celebrating PICO through the veil of a Western genre system, however, the committee obscures the Indigenous genealogies and queer Indigenous poetry that inform PICO'S composition. Yet, the very coloniality of the Whiting Award committee's evaluation unwittingly illustrates a crucial analytic for the way Indigenous writers exist athwart colonial spaces. [End Page 523] That is through what Indigenous critic GERALD VIZENOR calls a "fugitive pose": an Indigenous strategy for hiding in plain sight to combat either outright erasure or the tokenization of Indigenous life in U.S. culture, politics, and history.2 As VIZENOR explains, U.S. narratives have long obscured the "real" experience of Native life behind a "cultural pageantry" that obfuscates the present-day lived experience of Native peoples.3 In this environment, as MARK RIFKIN elaborates, longstanding presumptions of extinction have relegated Native peoples into a "static" past, maintaining the dispossession of Native peoples from land, political power, and cultural visibility.4 In the face of ongoing dispossession, the fugitive pose fosters Native cultural practices that are purposefully "elusive" to the settler imaginary.5 Moreover, as VIZENOR argues, this latent agency is critical for an Indigenous practice of "survivance" that combines survival and resistance to renounce "dominance, tragedy, and victimry."6 PICO'S work deploys such a pose: it enacts a survivance that remains fugitive to the gatekeepers of mainstream poetry who value novelty to the Western tradition more than Indigenous genealogies. The modes of resistance afforded by the fugitive pose for queer Indigenous people, however, remain obscure. Examining his recent book-length poems, Nature Poem (2016) and Junk (2017), I show that Pico presents a sustained argument insisting that fugitivity and Indigenous queerness are deeply interconnected phenomena. In this, Pico answers a call by scholars of queer Indigenous history Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, who suggest that queer Indigenous subjects experience a dual fugitivity that needs further articulation in both queer studies and Indigenous scholarship. On the one hand, although the "diversity [of queer Indigenous knowledge] has been cited as an inspiration for GLBTQ identities," queer critique tends to ignore the "dissent lines that activists, artists, and scholars have already built," leaving Indigenous experience an asterisk.7 At the same time, Driskill and their [End Page 524] coauthors attest to an unmet need for Indigenous scholarship to uncover how the diversity of queer Indigenous sexualities offers distinct, if understudied, knowledge by which to decolonize scholarship and public life alike.8 Because of the ongoing obfuscation of queer indigeneity, contemporary Driftpile Cree Nation poet and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt calls for a more declarative presence than that offered by a fugitive pose. As Belcourt explains, queer and trans Indigenous peoples face the most "acute and world-shattering" violence and require active demands for knowledge that "queers and indigenizes freedom" itself.9 Not only is attention to queer Indigenous experience necessary for the decolonization of Native life, but what Belcourt describes as the "non-sovereignty of the sexual" offers a method to construct a world for queer Indigenous people that moves beyond cultural and political forms that propagate Western domination.10 This undertheorized conjunction of queer and Indigenous fugitivity is what Pico's poetics embody, creating an evasive space to envision the present and future of queer Indigenous life. But Pico's poetry does more than merely testify to queer Indigenous conditions—it broadcasts that experience into the public sphere through a form attuned to the contradictions of literary history and twenty-first-century media, with a goal of reshaping the horizons of modern poetics through the image of queer indigeneity. As such, Pico's approach to contemporary queer indigenousness...

Volume 17 Issue 2 Editorial


 
 
 As a global population, Indigenous Peoples face multiple health barriers related to poverty, access to service, literacy weaknesses, racism and discrimination, language, geography, colonization, addictions and mental health, and the intergenerational trauma of colonial assaults and aggressions. To address these problems, and to attempt to answer the above question, the IJIH seeks to provide a voice in the academic publishing world to community-driven research and re- searchers who work, as much as possible, in western colonial academic systems, based in Indigenous paradigms.
 
 

Drivers of Livelihood Strategies: Evidence from Mexico’s Indigenous Rural Households

Mexico has the largest Indigenous population in the Americas and the most native languages in the region. These Indigenous peoples face a similar set of structural barriers to achieving more sustainable livelihoods, including criminal violence and huge hurdles to accumulating assets, in addition to their poverty. The purpose of this paper is to identify the main drivers of sustainable livelihood strategies in Indigenous households in rural Mexico. Using cluster analysis and a multinomial logit model based on a mixed approach that employs a traditional perspective of development alongside the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA), our results suggest that a significant proportion of Indigenous households engage in livelihoods linked to the environment and nature, while only a small segment of households has been able to accumulate assets and adopt more profitable non-farming livelihoods. Our findings also reveal how the creation of human capital, the provision of basic services, and support to mitigate the effects of extreme weather all contribute to reducing risk for Indigenous households. The findings suggest that public policies must target these specific issues in order to solve structural problems that limit the efficacy with which Indigenous households use their family assets.

We're Here

We're Here

Stand Up for Indigenous Health: A Simulation to Educate Residents About the Social Determinants of Health Faced by Indigenous Peoples in Canada.

In Canada, Indigenous peoples face significant health disparities. To improve health outcomes of and provide culturally safe care to Indigenous patients, medical learners must receive training on the social determinants of health (SDOH) driving these health inequities. The authors developed Stand Up for Indigenous Health (SU4IH), an immersive 2-hour simulation where participants navigate a series of scenarios as an Indigenous person. The objective of this pilot study was to assess whether SU4IH promotes intercultural empathy and enhances medical learners' knowledge of Indigenous SDOH. The authors partnered with 4 Indigenous communities in Ontario, Canada, from urban, rural, and remote settings to develop the scenarios for SU4IH between June 2015 and March 2016. During each SU4IH simulation, learners experience 14 scenarios using the Stand Up for Health mobile app, which automatically calculates each individual's financial balance and stress levels as the simulation unfolds. The authors conducted a pre-post intervention study of SU4IH in January 2019 with family medicine residents recruited from 2 training sites in Ontario (n = 29). Residents completed pre- and postsurveys assessing change in empathy toward Indigenous patients (primary outcome), knowledge of Indigenous SDOH (secondary outcome), and motivation to engage with Indigenous patients in a culturally safe manner (secondary outcome). Residents' empathy scores significantly increased after participating in SU4IH (P < .001), as did residents' knowledge of Indigenous SDOH (P < .001) and motivation to engage with Indigenous patients in a culturally safe manner (P = .031). The authors are working to expand their capacity to implement this learning tool across Canada, which has involved relationship building with medical learners and faculty outside of Ontario who will need to partner with Indigenous communities in their region to develop region-specific scenarios. SU4IH is also being redesigned for small-group and virtual formats to facilitate its expansion.

Barriers and facilitators for Indigenous students and staff in health and human services educational programs.

Indigenous Peoples are underrepresented in many of the Health and Human Services Educational Programs (HHSEP, e.g.: Nursing, Social Work). As various studies have reported the benefits of diversifying HHSEP, the barriers and facilitators of increasing the number of Indigenous Peoples in these professions must be identified. The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify and understand the barriers and facilitators Indigenous Peoples face when entering, learning or working in HHSEP. A narrative approach was used in the facilitation of culturally safe sharing circles with Indigenous students and staff to collect perspectives based on their individual experiences in HHSEP. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify emerging themes in participant experiences and the impact of those experiences on participation in learning and working at the university in these educational programs. Results from this exploratory study identified current academic structures and ideologies rooted in colonialism, that act as barriers for engagement and inclusion of Indigenous students, staff, and clinical and academic faculty. These findings shaped the main themes of this study including negotiation of identity in different spaces, negotiating colonial structures in HHSEP, and negotiating changes and transitions in HHSEP. We anticipate these preliminary results will act as a catalyst for uncovering further changes to be made regarding attitudes, procedures, and practices present in an academic environment that limit the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in HHSEP.

Mental health of indigenous people: is Bangladesh paying enough attention?

Indigenous people face numerous challenges to their mental health across the world. We consider the situation in Bangladesh, where those living in the remote hill tracts areas of Eastern Bangladesh experience widespread difficulties. Few seek attention for their problems from professional services, in part because of stigma or a lack of awareness that help could be made available, but also because in these remote areas few resources are available. We make recommendations to improve this situation, which could be implemented with the assistance of primary healthcare services and traditional healers.

Rematriation: Ts'msyen Law, Rights of Relationality, and Protocols of Return

What do Indigenous peoples mean when we mobilize the term rematriation? Approached from a decolonial analysis of rematriation discourse and activism, rematriation is an Indigenous feminist paradigm, an embodied praxis of recovery and return, and a sociopolitical mode of resurgence and refusal. Indigenous laws and protocols are foundational to rematriation paradigms. Drawing from auto-ethnographic and community-based research with, by, and for Ts'msyen from Lax Kw'alaams, British Columbia, Canada, I focus on the nuances and active qualities of Ts'msyen rematriation. Analysis of examples of Ts'msyen feasting laws, rights frameworks in the Lax Kxeen Ts'msyen dance group, and protocols in return ceremonies between Indigenous nations on the northwest coast of British Columbia, Canada, illustrates what rematriation is, what it wants, what it takes, and what it does. A case study of a Ts'msyen song collection now held by Columbia University demonstrates that rematriation is the antithesis of repatriation. Considering the legal obstacles Indigenous peoples face when seeking redress for prior thefts from settler states, subjects, and institutions, new legal paradigms for reparation and return are essential.

Hydro Power Plants as Disputed Infrastructures in Latin America

Non-violent methods can strongly support achieving the 2030 Agenda of sustainable development goals, increasing energy efficiency and access in the poorest countries. However, hydroelectric power stations are disputed strategic elements in any region of the world. This paper analyzes, firstly, the role of hydroelectric power stations as elements that have been generating conflicts in Latin America in the period 1982–2018 and, secondly, the conflicts themselves. The results show that indigenous peoples face the most significant risks from constructing dams and, consequently, they are the primary opponents of hydroelectric projects.

Coproduction mechanisms to weave Indigenous knowledge, artificial intelligence, and technical data to enable Indigenous-led adaptive decision making: lessons from Australia’s joint managed Kakadu National Park

Most of the planet’s vital ecosystems are managed on lands owned by Indigenous peoples. Indigenous people face many challenges in managing these lands, including rapidly growing threats causing species extinctions and ecosystem losses. In response, many Indigenous groups are looking for ethical ways to use digital technology and data analytical tools to support their existing knowledge practices to solve complex environmental management problems. We draw on an action co-research project to show how a range of knowledge coproduction mechanisms were developed and applied to weave Indigenous knowledge, artificial intelligence (AI), and technical sources to monitor the health of Nardab, a culturally significant and Ramsar-listed wetland in Australia's World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. The coproduction mechanisms included: holistic assessments of the health of indicators; a dynamic and creative decision-support tool to adaptively manage a complex system; ongoing monitoring and testing of knowledge used for collaborative action; and Indigenous-led governance of research activities and impact at local and regional scales. It was important for local Bininj traditional owners to determine where and how multiple sources of evidence could or should be used and applied to direct and assess on-the-ground actions as part of this collaborative and cross-cultural knowledge sharing and coproduction process. At Nardab, this required negotiating the evidence from qualitative Indigenous-led assessments of significant sites and quantitative ecological information collected and analyzed from cameras and drone surveys. The coproduction mechanisms developed provided a practical and ethical means of empowering different sources of knowledge for adaptive decision making while respecting and protecting differences in how knowledge is generated, interpreted, and applied.

A Collaborative Multi-Method Approach to Evaluating Indigenous Land-Based Learning With Men

In Canada, a vast majority of urban Indigenous people face distinct challenges accessing and connecting to Indigenous cultural practices. Research has found that colonial policies and practices continue to disrupt and fracture traditional methods of passing down cultural teachings, including dispossession from traditional lands in which cultural practices are rooted. This disruption continues to affect the availability of educational programming by and with Indigenous people and in Indigenous languages. This research involves a multi-method approach to observe and engage with a land-based traditional drum-making program for Indigenous men in an urban center in Southwestern Manitoba. By participating, watching, and listening to the men within the workshops through unstructured observation, Sharing Circles, individual interviews, and photovoice, we aim to understand the impacts of land-based learning on Indigenous men’s well-being. The study is designed in accordance with University and Tri-Agency ethical guidelines, integrating ownership, control, access and possession (OCAP), as well as the principles of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility within all phases of the research. The research is co-created by the university researchers, community collaborators, and other relevant stakeholders.

Indigenous Methodologies for Culturally Safe Telediabetes/Obesity Care (I'M T' CARE)

Urban (off-reserve) Indigenous peoples face disproportionately poorer diabetes/obesity outcomes and care due to ongoing colonialism, racism, discrimination and geographic barriers. Provision of culturally safe and relevant telediabetes/obesity care can reduce barriers and improve outcomes. We outline the Two-Eyed Seeing approach and the process of co-creating culturally safe, community-led diabetes/obesity telehealth clinics with urban/rural Indigenous communities in British Columbia’s interior.

P.188 Neurotrauma in Indigenous populations of Canada: challenges and future directions: A Scoping Review

Background: Neurotrauma accounts for over 24 000 hospitalizations annually in Canada. Among those affected, Indigenous peoples are disproportionately impacted. The goal of this scoping review is to identify factors underlying these disparities. Methods: A scoping review was conducted to collect papers pertaining to neurotrauma in Indigenous populations of Canada. Using MEDLINE, 676 articles were screened with MeSH terms including ‘Indigenous’, ‘spinal cord injuries’, ‘brain injuries, traumatic’ and ‘Canada’ as of April 2021. Results: Studies report over twice the incidence of traumatic brain injury and traumatic spinal cord injury in Indigenous populations compared to non-Indigenous populations. The burden of neurotrauma is attributable to infrastructure disparities in rural communities and reserves, elevated rates of substance use and violence, and inequities in treatment and rehabilitation following injury. These issues are deeply rooted in the trauma endured by Indigenous peoples through the course of Canadian history, owing to government policies that severely impacted their socioeconomic conditions, culture, and access to healthcare services. Conclusions: Systems-level interventions guided by Indigenous community members will help to address the disparities that Indigenous peoples face in the care and rehabilitation of neurotrauma. This study will inform further research of culturally appropriate approaches to reduce neurotrauma burden among Indigenous peoples.

Wabishki Bizhiko Skaanj: a learning pathway to foster better Indigenous cultural competence in Canadian health research

ObjectiveIn Canada, Indigenous people experience racism across diverse settings, including within the health sector. This has negatively impacted both the quality of care that Indigenous people receive as well as how research related to Indigenous populations is conducted. Therefore, an Indigenous-led council at a kidney research network, in partnership with other key stakeholders, sought to create a learning pathway that aims to distill the racism that Indigenous people face, and build cultural competence, within the health sector.ParticipantsThe learning pathway was designed for researchers, health care providers, patient partners and administrators.SettingVarious components of the pathway are established trainings in healthcare and research settings at provincial and national levels. Provincially, some components are implemented in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.InterventionThe pathway, called Wabishki Bizhiko Skaanj (meaning “White Horse” in Anishinaabemowin), involves six key steps: a culturally tailored blanket exercise that walks participants through the history of local Indigenous Nations/peoples; a more detailed online training program (San’yas); a series of webinars on Indigenous research ethics and protocols; an educational booklet about engaging Knowledge Keepers in research, as well as sharing details about their traditional knowledge and culture; two certification programs about Indigenous ownership of data; and a “book club,” wherein the conversation of racism—and the goal for finding solutions—is continually discussed.OutcomesWabishki Bizhiko Skaanj is working to build cultural competence in the Canadian health sector.ImplicationsThis learning pathway has the potential to address racial disparities across the country and improve health outcomes for Indigenous peoples.

Spirit Colonists in New Guinea Minds

ABSTRACT Just as people require territory to live and to develop traditions, spirit beings require human minds that can represent them as real in order to exist and develop distinctive characteristics. Both human beings and spirit beings tend to gather in mutual support groups, bound by cultural compatibilities to secure their needs. Like human societies, culturally different spirit groups can come into conflict over the same resources. In central New Guinea in the 1970s, Telefolmin Baptist missionaries introduced the Christian triune god, angels, and devil to the neighbouring Asabano people. As converts accepted this exogenous group of spirit beings as real, the native sprites, object spirits, witches, dual souls, and culture heroes of the pre-Christian tradition were displaced, distorted, or destroyed. In this case, the competition between established and incoming spirit beings for the same minds produced outcomes for spirit beings that are reminiscent of what happens to human beings in colonialism, when indigenous peoples face powerful settlers who challenge their sovereignty.

SWAT everywhere? A response to Jenkins, Semple, Bennell, and Huey

This paper is a response to an article on public police special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams written by Jenkins and colleagues (2020). Jenkins and colleagues are responding to a study showing that tactical units and members are being used more in Canadian policing. For Jenkins and colleagues, not only are SWAT teams being used properly, but drawing from interviews with tactical members they suggest SWAT teams should be used more in the future. This response focuses on conceptual, methodological, and empirical deficiencies in the work of Jenkins and colleagues. This response shows that Jenkins and colleagues ignore social theory, ignore relevant contrary data, are ignorant of the harms of policing, and are ignorant of the violence that Black and Indigenous peoples face from Canadian police. Relatedly, this response offers a criticism of what is called evidence-based policing scholarship. Using the work of Jenkins and colleagues as an example, the argument here is that evidence-based policing scholars are in a conflict of interest because of how closely they work with police and due to the funding they receive from police agencies and justice ministries. This conflict of interest decreases the credibility and trustworthiness of the claims of evidence-based policing scholars. Overall, this response draws attention not only to the harms of public policing and criminalization, but also to how evidence-based policing scholarship is supporting the expansion of violent, harmful, and regressive forms of social control.

TERRAS INDÍGENAS:

Este artigo enfoca na problemática da demarcação do território indígena no Brasil, identificando todo o processo histórico, desde a colonização até os dias atuais. Utilizando de uma pesquisa bibliográfica e apresentando dados e fatos que fundamentam todo o entrave que os indígenas passam desde a chegada dos portugueses, foi possível identificar toda problemática em torno do direito territorial indígena. Além disso, foi realizada uma pesquisa descritiva, feita a partir de um questionário com o intuito de aproximar o apresentado com a opinião pública e esclarecer qual a posição dos aborígenos perante a sociedade em geral, na atualidade. Ademais, as perguntas feitas ao povo, ratificou o pensamento de que, ao longo dos anos, os índios têm perdido mais que ganhado, o que não se trata só de riqueza, mas de cultura, história e legitimidade como o povo nativo desse Estado. Portanto, tem-se que os malefícios da colonização refletem até hoje na vida dos indígenas, que se antes eram os “donos” das terras, hoje precisam lutar pelos seus direitos para garantir a sobrevivência e as poucas demarcações que lhes restam.

Explaining Indigenous Peoples’ Success in State Supreme Courts: Party Capability, Judicial Selection, and Representation

AbstractThe struggles Indigenous Peoples face are unique from other minority groups living in the United States because they exist in an odd, semisovereign status. While the US Constitution outlines that First Nations are sovereign entities, current federal law and policies hold that tribes are simultaneously sovereign and not sovereign. Using an original data set consisting of all cases involving Indigenous Peoples before state supreme courts from 1995 to 2010, we find Indigenous Peoples are more likely to receive positive judicial outcomes when the judiciary is elected and the indigenous population of the state is relatively high.

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry, environment, extraction, and the health geographies of rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in British Columbia.

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.

Indigenous populations: left behind in the COVID-19 response

Scholar Annie Belcourt described Native American populations in the USA as having lives that are “challenging and short”. Globally, across countries and populations, Indigenous peoples face a greater burden of disease than non-Indigenous peoples, including cardiovascular disease and HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, and have higher infant and maternal mortality and lower life expectancy. Their health is impacted by epigenetic stressors of generational oppression and violence, including disproportionate numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women, lower educational attainment, and persistent poverty.