Indigenous Politics Research Articles

Time zones

In this response to the forum, I argue that if we think of zones not so much as spatial zones but as time zones, a new way of understanding the pixelated decentralization of politics comes into view. By explicit intention, the zone is designed to punch people out of a shared horizon or a space of capture in the quintessentially modern metrics of per capita growth or standard of living. While offering peculiar usable pasts often related to creative not to say anachronistic understandings of indigenous politics, the zone is also a better iconic scale for the end of history in the grand sense than the nation or even the world in its sloughing off the injunctions of mass politics and popular sovereignty.

Bifurcated Bolivia: Indigenous Governance and Land Struggles in the Eastern Lowlands

This paper analyzes Indigenous politics in Bolivia, the 2019 coup against President Evo Morales, and the return of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement for Socialism, MAS) with the inauguration of Luis Arce in 2020. Drawing on interviews with Indigenous community members in the lowlands of the Bolivian Amazon, this piece theoretically situates Indigenous autonomy struggles within world systems theory and insights from Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of institutional isomorphism to argue that political tensions in Bolivian Indigenous communities can be understood within a context of (1) increasingly strained relations between the MAS and civil society organizations; (2) Indigenous-NGO coalition efforts to protect Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (Native Community Lands) and; (3) the development of competing parallel leadership organizations within Native communities that threaten democratic processes and cohesive responses to extractivism.

Indigenous Politics of Emancipatory Education in Bolivia: The Role of the Escuela-Ayllu of Warisata

This article analyzes how the Escuela-Ayllu of Warisata in Bolivia challenged the feudal system known as gamonalismo in the 1930s-1940s within the broader context of Indigenous struggle. It demonstrates that distinct currents of Indigenous education, including indigenismo, Caciques-Apoderados’ Centro Educativo de Aborígenes “Bartolomé de las Casas,” and Alcaldes Mayores Particulares’ escuelas particulares, informed the Escuela-Ayllu’s community-led education. It argues that Warisata’s community members turned the Escuela-Ayllu into a political space of communal democracy that undermined the rural order structured by internal colonialism.

"Insurgent Indigeneity": A New Threshold of Indigenous Politics

Abstract: Celebrating Indigenous zones and movements of revival and "resurgence" has become a dominant frame of sorts for Indigenous political theory. Emergent Indigenous political praxis in Hawai'i, led by certain grassroots groups and organizers, leads me to theorize a qualitatively and quantitatively different modality of Indigenous politics—what I offer as "insurgent Indigeneity." This essay traces a genealogy of resurgence paradigms, presenting a set of philosophical presuppositions that entail circumscriptions on Indigenous political horizons and praxis: namely, an inward focus and a dyadic politics of a friend-enemy distinction. Drawing from the emergent practices of Hawaiian insurgent Indigeneity, and the political schema of expanding hegemony in Antonio Gramsci's The Modern Prince , I theorize how actors build upon resurgence to strategically proliferate outward, building mass power in a complex field of forces and actors to pursue a wider horizon of change.

Becoming Hoa: Indigenous Political Thought and the Question of Settler Aloha 'Āina in Hawai'i

Abstract: How is Indigenous-settler solidarity to protect interconnected social ecologies urgent yet altogether precarious? The essay stews on this question in the context of Hawai'i and, through immanent critique of theories about settler aloha 'āina, demonstrates that becoming hoa provides a necessary alternative practice and dialectic process of binding relations together to aloha 'āina. First, I elaborate on Kanaka Maoli conceptualizations of aloha 'āina to foreground the investigation in Indigenous political thought and therein launch an immanent critique of settler aloha 'āina. Second, I examine the question of settler aloha 'āina to explore what it means, and its political and ethical implications concerning solidarity. I contend that the "settler" of settler aloha 'āina undermines Indigenous political thought by obscuring aloha 'āina. Third, I argue that becoming hoa is an alternative mode of solidarity to being settler aloha 'āina. Beyond contributing to critical interdisciplinary scholarship on Hawai'i, the analysis is useful for researching other contexts wherein non-Indigenous theorists, discourses, and movements deploy "settler" as a qualified additive to Indigenous worldviews and practices toward cultivating solidarity with Indigenous peoples on their territories. Settler liberal humanism's attachment to Indigenous worldviews and practices should be reconsidered even as it clings tightly to the language of solidarity.

Decoy politics: How settler states deflect Indigenous threats

Anglo settler states like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States were built through the dispossession of Indigenous lands and through the disruption of Indigenous political, social and economic systems. Over time, however, Indigenous nations have challenged the unjust foundations of these states, forcing settler states to respond with repression but also with accommodation, especially in the face of successful Indigenous mobilization. Yet even during these moments, state actors have resisted changes to state sovereignty, sometimes by creating new institutions that seem responsive, but which simply reinforce the status quo. To make sense of these moments, we introduce the concept of “decoy politics” and develop a theory for why states might turn to decoy politics, with a particular focus on Canada. Our findings suggest decoy politics may help explain why reconciliation with Indigenous nations remains difficult despite seemingly genuine attempts at meaningful institutional and policy change.

Mapping Trends and Challenges in Political Science Research in Indigenous Policy and Politics (2019-2023)

What are the trends and challenges for political science research on Indigenous policy and politics? The present paper aims to answer this question through a critical reading of articles published in specialized journals between 2019 and 2023. The study highlights four main axes of research on Indigenous politics: 1) The relationship between Indigenous peoples and nation-states; 2) Indigenous activism and struggles for territorial, cultural, and environmental rights; 3) The impact of large construction sites on Indigenous territories; and 4) Critical engagement with Western political theory. Conclusions point to epistemic avenues for interested researchers to explore in-depth in future studies: 1) The importance of broadening the scope of sources for more fruitful comparative analyses; 2) The urgency to decolonize political theory; and 3) The imperative of methodological diversification and rigor.

Indigenous Sovereignty and Political Science: Building an Indigenous Politics Subfield

Scholarship from the nascent subfield of Indigenous politics illuminates an enduring tension between Indigenous politics and political science. Settler colonialism continues to configure the contemporary politics of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in profound ways that political science has been slow to grapple with. In a related concern, political science has little ability to engage in Indigenous knowledge production. This article reviews the structural exclusion of Indigenous knowledge despite increased inclusion of Indigenous scholarship and argues that Indigenous understandings of settler colonialism, sovereignty, and authority hold the potential to reconfigure political science's approach to Indigenous politics in research and teaching. This reconfiguration will not only impact the development of the Indigenous politics subfield but also expand the analytic potential of political science more broadly.

Settler colonial studies: a historical analysis

ABSTRACT This text is a historical analysis of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). Partly because most SCS scholars in principle only see those polities as settler colonies whose settlers eventually became a majority and gained independence—i.e. principally the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand—some historians have critiqued it. At the same time, historians have used it to revisit their research. Throughout, though, they have engaged SCS in area- and period-specific journals, without bundling their insights. This historical analysis of SCS addresses that issue. It has two parts. As shorter first part unpacks the historical-political background for SCS’s Anglo-bias: the similar and linked domestic political trajectories of Canada, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia’s indigenous peoples from the 1950s and their centrality in the internationalization of indigenous politics from the late 1960s to the 1990s. A longer second part analyzes three issues both central to SCS and relevant to historians: structuralism, colonialism versus settler colonialism, and the settler-native binary.

Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought

Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought

Meet the 2023 Diversity & Inclusion Advancing Research Grants for Indigenous Politics Recipients

Meet the 2023 Diversity & Inclusion Advancing Research Grants for Indigenous Politics Recipients

Empowering the Traditional Indigenous Politics through Education: An Agent of Political Socialization

Empowering the Traditional Indigenous Politics through Education: An Agent of Political Socialization

Territorial Conflicts and Soybeans: Kanhgág Politics and Their Struggle for Land Rights in Southern Brazil

Today, Kanhgág people live mainly in small Terras Indígenas (Indigenous Lands) in southern Brazil. Those lands are the outcome of a history of equivocal alliances and conflicts between indigenous peoples and European colonisers. Presenting aspects of these relations in both historical and contemporary settings, this article traces continuities and transformations in indigenous politics and cosmology, focusing on the struggles over territory and resources now playing out around soy cultivation. Avoiding simplistic presentations of colonial impositions, it draws on kanhgág people's dualist cosmology, factional sociality and the fecundity of alterity to consider those territorial struggles within indigenous autonomy and alliances.

Indigeneity, land and labour in Paraguay

This article is focused on the politics of indigeneity, which is an increasingly important concept and a central area of dispute in a globalised world. Indigeneity encapsulates the friction between ethnicity and class identities, which cannot be understood without a full consideration of differences and relationships between landowners, other economic sectors, non-indigenous workers and indigenous people. The text specifically deals with the circumstances of Paraguay, whose process of nation building is directly related to longitudinal attacks on its indigenous peoples and the unresolved problems of land, labour and rights. The case study investigates the long-term tendencies of Paraguayan society, in particular, the ongoing expansion of agribusiness and land grabbing in the northeast of the country that tragically affect the Paĩ Tavyterã indigenous people. The discussion is based on qualitative, engaged research over several years, which considered the indigenous population as co-investigators and active socio-political players. The conclusion is that, despite the fact that Paraguay is a major exporter of primary commodities, the prevailing geographical force is the accumulation of multiple forms of social, ecological and even economic degradation. Against those perverse trends, the important reaction of the Paĩ Tavyterã, as well as of other indigenous peoples, and their struggle to recover their land and socio-ecological relations greatly complicate national politics and challenge the hegemony of export-oriented agribusiness.

The politics of indigeneity: decolonizing historical memory and education in Colombia

ABSTRACT This article explores how the Misak (Guambianos) from the Colombian southwest are revitalising their collective memory and militant politics in a nation that has historically prioritised its Spanish heritage. Through the analysis of twenty-month collaborative research conducted by three Misak University (MU) students and the article’s author (a non-Indigenous Colombian affiliated with a university from the Global North), the article claims that political engagement results from this community’s autonomous educational institutions and pedagogical practices. The MU is one of these Misak autonomous efforts engaging with non-traditional pedagogies, such as caminar el territorio, to promote a ‘militant indigenous identity’ committed to their cultural differentiation. These educational practices evolved from other methods for memory reproduction embraced by the Misak since colonial times. As the tearing down of the statues of Spanish conquistadores in 2020 shows, the Misak’s educational efforts have cultivated a new indigenous generation that seeks to make a political and cultural impact beyond their territory.

‘Sovereignty is still the name of the game’: Indigenous theorising and strategic entanglement in Māori political discourses

Abstract In recent decades, sovereignty has come under increased academic scrutiny for being a Eurocentric notion antithetical to emancipatory politics, leading critical theory scholars to call for an overcoming or even abandonment of the concept. Paradoxical as it may seem, it nonetheless remains an appealing ideal for many colonised peoples. Indigenous activists and scholars have actively re-appropriated the language of sovereignty to encapsulate and advance Indigenous political aspirations. This paper discusses how Māori, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Indigenous people, navigate their relations to the concept in their contemporary political discourses pursuing self-governance. Building on interviews with Māori leaders, scholars, and activists, it offers empirical insights into Indigenous political thought’s engagement with the idea of sovereignty. It highlights an ambivalence oscillating between rejection and rearticulation present both in Indigenous theorising and Māori politics. From an analysis of Māori contemporary conceptual strategies, this paper suggests that Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of ‘strategic entanglement’ offers a productive account to comprehend the approached Māori actors’ deployment of the sovereignty concept, and possibly that of Indigenous peoples beyond Aotearoa. This paper thus highlights the continued relevance of the sovereignty framework, both analytically and politically, to meaningfully engage with contemporary Indigenous politics.

Indigenous Voices and Votes: Assessing the Dynamics of Indigenous Politics in Chile’s Constitutional Referendum of 2022

Many analysts have tried to discern the reasons behind the Chilean Constitutional Convention’s draft failure in the 2022 plebiscite. A significant explanation is the draft’s inclusion of indigenous rights and its plurinationality principle (Bargsted and González 2022). Despite Chile being unique in Latin America in its lack of constitutional recognition for its indigenous population (Acevedo 2021), most voters in indigenous areas appeared to have opposed the draft (Pairican 2022).1

Cultures of power and politics: Two cases of the limits of anti‐essentialism in the political anthropology of lowland South America

AbstractPost‐structuralism's focus on hegemonic power, subjection, and political opportunity remains pre‐eminent in political anthropology, but its appropriateness for the post‐neoliberal conjuncture is up for question. While the arrival of neoliberal multiculturalism brought contingent identities and strategic deployment of culture‐as‐product into focus, questions remain about how and why some groups mobilize to claim cultural rights while others decline to do so. For this reason, this article returns to an earlier concern in Latin American political anthropology with cultural differences in the conceptualization and execution of political organization and power. This argument is based on two ethnographic case studies—from the Venezuelan Pume and the Ecuadorian Shuar—that demonstrate the contemporary significance for indigenous politics of evolving autochthonous notions of power and their expression in conventional forms of social organization. These politico‐cultural qualities are already constituting the form and objectives of indigenous political action prior to their expression in the public fora whose terms and opportunities are often presented as driving indigenous people's politics. Such an approach is important for understanding the dilemmas of solidarity as indigenous groups become more empowered and diverse in their political orientations.

Does Curriculum Fail Indigenous Political Aspirations? Sovereignty and Australian History and Social Studies Curriculum

Through analysis of curricular materials (syllabus documents and supplementary readers) from the late-nineteenth century to the present, this article explores the role of school curriculum in shaping understandings of Indigenous political aspirations in the Australian context. It juxtaposes curricular materials with significant occasions of Indigenous political activism in Australia since the late-nineteenth century: the Coranderrk campaign of the 1870-80s, the Wave Hill Walk Off in 1966, the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972, and the Bicentenary protests of 1988. From this analysis, five narrative sub-themes were developed—Invisibility, Benevolence, Obfuscation, Innocence, and Acknowledgement—which captured the ways that Indigenous sovereignty, nationhood, and political legitimacy had been represented. In drawing out some continuities and changes to curricular representations of First Nations’ and settler sovereignty, nationhood, and political legitimacy over a one hundred year period, this article highlights the uneven ways that curriculum has, and continues to, represent political possibilities on the Australian continent. This article offers insights for Nordic contexts where there are also contests about legacies of colonialism in the public sphere, including in education.

“A Program of Pacification”?: Federal Funding and Indigenous Political Organizing in Canada, 1968–71

This article explores the founding and financing of national Indigenous organizations during the shift in Canadian politics towards the ideal of participatory democracy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It investigates the emergence of two separate organizations, the National Indian Brotherhood (nib) for “status Indians” and the Native Council of Canada (ncc) for “non-status Indians” and Métis, following the collapse of the pan-Indigenous National Indian Council (nic) in 1968. It highlights the key role that funding played in the structuring of national-level Indigenous politics but argues that accepting federal funding did not simply equate to government control. Instead, both the nib and ncc successfully resisted and – in limited ways – shaped federal policies towards Indigenous peoples. The issue of federal funding opened questions regarding Indigenous rights and self-determination, concepts that were employed in differing ways by the leaders of these organizations and federal officials. While marking a stark shift away from the earlier suppression of Indigenous political movements, federal funding was used to integrate different Indigenous groups as citizens into the Canadian settler state. Nevertheless, federal funding served not only to limit, but also to expand, the practical possibilities of Indigenous organizing, with political leaders recasting government money as the right of Indigenous peoples and a tool for self-determination.