Indigenous Resistance Research Articles

Aproximación al conocimiento de las estructuras de almacenaje en el asentamiento semiurbano de la Antigua Ciudad de Quilmes (Tucumán-Argentina)

The role of storage strategies throughout history is unquestionable. The old city of Quilmes offers features that indicate a possible emphasis placed on the construction of structures oriented to that end. The objectives of this research are: (1) to carry out the first systematic survey of the semi-urban system of the Old City of Quilmes; (2) differentiate between structures of diverse function through morphological clues; (3) identify and record structures traditionally associated with storage; and (4) estimate the area occupied by the aforementioned structures and their volumetric capacity. For this, a non-invasive geoarchaeological approach is proposed through the use of remote sensors and digital models, accompanied by statistical analysis. The set of information has made it possible to establish that the structures similar to storage use would cover a total area estimated at 26,146 m2 with an estimated volume of 43,761 m3 and probably contributed to improving food security during the period of indigenous resistance (1535-1667). This constitutes the first systematic approach to this subject.

Clashing cartographies in indigenous refugees’ sheltering practices: the embodiment of an alternative sense of spatiality and temporality in an indigenous shelter demobilisation in the north of Brazil

In the present article, we examine the situation of indigenous refugees in Roraima, Brazil, and reflect on the way sheltering practices affect their subjectivity. We analyse the demobilisation of the Pintolândia shelter, focusing particularly on the refusal of its residents to relocate, as to present refugee sheltering as a practice that infringes individuals of subjectivity, whilst being an embodied space that represents a yet unrealised possibility. Through this examination, we reflect about the way their agency, politics, and subjectivity challenge the spatial dynamics established by the powerful structures that manage refugee shelters. As to do so, this article is divided into three sections. The first provides a contextual narrative of the housing practices for the indigenous migrant population in Roraima, mapping the evolution of sheltering strategies over the years. The second section addresses the complexities and contradictions of sheltering indigenous refugees within a framework designed for the general refugee population, examining the impact on their specific rights as indigenous peoples. The final section focuses on the demobilization of the Pintolândia shelter, presenting the moving strategy as a governmentality mechanism and interpreting indigenous resistance to relocation as an expression of alternative spatiality and temporality.

Narratives, Symbols, and Rituals: Oral Tradition in Indigenous Resistance to Development Structuralism in West Papua, Indonesia

Development projects that disregard Indigenous rights often provoke resistance, particularly in West Papua, Indonesia, where the Indigenous Kaimana people uniquely employ covert resistance through oral traditions to safeguard their rights. This study aims to understand how the Kaimana Indigenous community utilizes orality as a form of resistance against developmental structuralism. Employing a realist ethnographic method, this research directly observes the daily lives of the Indigenous community and documents forms of hidden resistance embedded in their oral traditions. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs), observation, and documentary analysis of symbolic resistance activities. The findings reveal that Kaimana's Indigenous resistance is conveyed through three principal elements: storytelling, symbolism, and ritual. First, storytelling serves as a medium of resistance by recounting their spiritual connection to nature as a way of upholding ancestral rights. Second, symbols such as bamboo and sago leaves are used in road blockades, representing life and resistance. Third, traditional rituals involving everyday symbols are believed to possess mystical power and are used to protect Indigenous lands. These three elements illustrate that while the Kaimana community does not wholly oppose development, they demand that their customary rights be respected throughout the process. Pembangunan yang mengabaikan hak-hak masyarakat adat sering kali memicu resistensi, terutama di wilayah Papua Barat, Indonesia, di mana masyarakat adat Kaimana memiliki cara unik dalam mempertahankan hak mereka melalui resistensi tertutup berbasis Oral Traditions. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk memahami bagaimana masyarakat adat Kaimana menggunakan kelisanan sebagai bentuk perlawanan terhadap strukturalisme pembangunan. Dengan menggunakan metode etnografi realis, penelitian ini mengamati langsung kehidupan sehari-hari masyarakat adat dan mendokumentasikan bentuk-bentuk perlawanan yang tersembunyi dalam tradisi lisan. Data dikumpulkan melalui wawancara mendalam, diskusi kelompok terfokus (FGD), observasi, dan studi dokumentasi terkait aksi perlawanan simbolis. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa resistensi masyarakat adat Kaimana dilakukan melalui tiga elemen utama: cerita, simbol, dan ritual. Pertama, cerita menjadi sarana perlawanan dengan mengisahkan hubungan spiritual mereka dengan alam sebagai cara mempertahankan hak leluhur. Kedua, simbol-simbol seperti bambu dan daun sagu digunakan dalam aksi pemalangan sebagai lambang kehidupan dan perlawanan. Ketiga, ritual adat yang melibatkan simbol-simbol sehari-hari dianggap memiliki kekuatan magis dan digunakan untuk melindungi wilayah adat. Ketiga elemen ini memperlihatkan bahwa masyarakat adat Kaimana tidak sepenuhnya menolak pembangunan, namun menuntut agar hak-hak adat mereka dihormati dalam proses tersebut.

Searching for Justice: Indigenous Self-Determination over the Landfill Search as a Matter of Justice for MMIWG2S

“Search the Landfill” is an Indigenous-led movement for justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S) which originated through Indigenous resistance to police racism in Winnipeg, Canada. The movement calls upon all levels of government to support and execute the search of the Prairie Green Landfill, just north of the City of Winnipeg, to recover the bodies of at least two of four First Nations women who were murdered in early 2022 at the hands of a white male serial killer. Through an analysis of the news articles, press releases, and reports, this paper explores the way in which Indigenous leaders resisted and rewrote the discourses that surrounded the search. By at once condemning the Winnipeg Police Service’s refusal to search the landfill and rejecting police authority and control over the decision-making process, Indigenous women who became the leaders of this movement crafted the space to articulate for themselves how and why the search must be done as a matter of Indigenous rights. This paper explores how Indigenous leadership offers glimpses of what a decolonizing approach to justice may look like in cases of MMIWG2S and which, in turn, invites further opportunities to problematize, subvert, and move beyond the Western legal norms and traditions.

From Indigenous Resistance to the Contemporary Argentine Contempt for Authority

The political stability of a modern democracy, excluding environmental or external causes, is determined by multiple factors, all influenced by human behaviour. One indicator of political stability that takes the human factor into account is the time in office of a ruler. The stability of a ruler can be directly affected, for example, if they are killed, or indirectly, if the laws issued by the ruler are not followed. Non-compliance is dependent on the level of contempt for authority among citizens. A post-hoc hypothesis from a previous publication suggests that indigenous contempt for the authority of the white conqueror and coloniser is seen as a primary causal factor of political instability in Argentina. In this work, indigenous contempt has been shown to have originated from the mistreatment of indigenous peoples by the conqueror and coloniser, and it is expressed in practice by laws and norms being violated as a covert form of resistance. This behaviour has been spread throughout Argentine society due to extensive genetic mixing between Amerindian and Eurasian peoples, initially encouraged by the Spanish Crown. It is observed that these behaviours persist in the 21st century, partly because mistreatment and discrimination against indigenous peoples continue, and partly because pigmentocracy exists, a social system where wealth and status depend on skin colour. It is therefore crucial to understand that a large part of the causes of Argentina's political instability can be traced to the non-compliance with laws and regulations, which originated as forms of indigenous resistance to the Spanish conqueror and coloniser. Public policies aimed at improving compliance should be designed to integrate indigenous cultures into Argentine identity, ensuring that all citizens wish to comply with the laws because they now see them as their own.

Indigenous peoples’ geographies I: Indigenous spatialities beyond place through relational, mobile and hemispheric & global approaches

This first of three progress reports on Indigenous peoples’ geographies offers an overview of scholarship on Indigenous spatialities. The report examines research led by a growing community of Indigenous geographers who conceive of Indigenous spatial thought and practice through analyses of colonial violence, and of Indigenous resistance and life-making practices. The report is organized along the thematic areas of Indigenous place-making, relationalities, mobilities and hemispheric and global approaches to colonial conquest and Indigenous liberation.

Ecological Imperialism and Indigenous Resistance: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Analysis of Selected Indian English Novels

This paper examines the representation of environmental degradation and critique of postcolonial development paradigms in two contemporary Indian English novels: Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007). Employing a postcolonial ecocritical framework, the study analyzes how these works articulate the environmental consequences of development in India, challenge Western models of progress, and highlight indigenous environmental perspectives. The research reveals that both novels effectively portray multi-faceted environmental issues, from biodiversity loss in the Sundarbans to long-term impacts of industrial pollution in urban areas. They offer pointed critiques of anthropocentric development models while presenting indigenous knowledge as a valuable alternative for sustainable human-nature relationships. The study contributes to postcolonial ecocriticism by demonstrating how Indian English literature engages with and critiques the environmental costs of postcolonial development. It underscores the potential of literature to provide nuanced, culturally-specific insights into complex environmental issues, challenging dominant narratives and proposing alternative visions of progress.

“If We Wait, It Is We That Will Be Burned”: Exploring Decolonial Violence in Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest

Abstract What does speculative fiction from the 1970s have to do with contemporary Indigenous and decolonial feminisms? This essay explores what such literature imagines as possible options for and limits to Indigenous resistance to gendered, racialized, and colonial violence. I offer an interpretation of Ursula Le Guin’s novella The Word for World Is Forest (1972) that uses the Indigenous feminist concept of “spatial in/justice.” Many scholars who have critically engaged with the text, throughout the last five decades, have not meaningfully included interconnected violence within their analyses, thus ignoring Indigenous and decolonial feminist considerations. I attempt to rethink violence, resistance, and the problematics of how decolonial violence is constructed through a “politics of respectability” in The Word for World Is Forest and beyond.

Queering solidarity: trans-sectional feminism from ‘babe theory’ to trans-masculine protest

ABSTRACT Women and revolutions have always had a thorny relationship. Women’s mere presence in the revolutionary public sphere and within protest culture has been the site of much controversy. More recently, from the Occupy Movement to the Women’s Marches, from Black Lives Matter to Femen, women protests have turned to performative practices to bring to light the material conditions of resistance within a framework informed by queer and trans. theories, transnational feminism, Indigenous resistance, and eco-critical struggles. This article looks at these performative and queering strategies within progressive revolutions today. It also analyses how decolonising solidarity amplifies or deepens our understanding of intersectional feminism.

Indigenous education and (re)existence through self-writing - for a pedagogy of sensibilities: dialogue between Paulo Freire and Maria Amélia Pinho Pereira

Based on decolonial thinking that originated in the late 20th century, we will discuss the importance of indigenous resistance practices promoted through “ taking the floor ,” a term coined by philosopher Michel de Certeau and appropriated in this research to refer to the development of research and literary productions carried out by indigenous researchers and writers in order to confront and resignify colonizing narratives about these peoples, indicating how these productions contribute to thinking about decolonial education, such as the school model proposed by pedagogue Maria AP Pereira and her Education of Sensitivity. Based on Catherine Walsh, Paulo Freire, Márcia Kambeba, Daniel Munduruku, and Albert Memmi, we understand that the colonizer finds in scientific-intellectual knowledge devices of knowledge-power that underpin oppressive Eurocentric structures to justify exploitation, violence, inequality, inferiority, and discrimination, bases that still exert a strong influence on the various sectors of contemporary society. It is identified in the contributions of the aforementioned researchers that an educational model critical of scientism and the hierarchy of knowledge is possible based on an educational praxis and that dialogues with the diversity of knowledge and cultures, where education is liberating, promoting the overcoming of the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy as proposed by Freire, and is applied in the Education of Sensitivity promoted by the pedagogue Maria AP Pereira.

‘We will continue to fight for our lands … it is Mother Nature that we value’: Idle No More, the Rights of Nature social movement frame, and Anti-Capitalist Ecologist Discourse

ABSTRACT Organizing to oppose an omnibus budget bill threatening First Nations in Canada, the Idle No More (INM) movement is embedded in a legacy of Indigenous resistance to colonialism and environmental degradation. INM activists challenged Western nature perceptions to advocate for the protection of nature through the lens of First and Indigenous Peoples’ traditions and cultures. We build upon existing Indigenous Environmental Justice movement, framing, and Rights of Nature (RoN) literature to understand the role of the RoN social movement frame and Anti-Capitalist Ecologist Discourse as orienting frameworks for INM movement mobilization. We explore the emergence period of INM, analysing the first 6 months of posts and comments on the movement’s Facebook page. We argue that INM activists employed an RoN frame to establish central claims and appeal to a range of potential supporters connecting the local and the global through broad Anti-Capitalist Ecologist Discourse narratives.

Fighting erasure and dispossession in the San Francisco Bay Area: putting archaeology to work for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has long been involved in the archaeology and stewardship of their ancestral homelands, both through their own cultural resource management (CRM) firm and though collaborations with academic and CRM archaeologists. In this article, we build on the past 40 years of archaeological collaborations in the southern San Francisco Bay region and offer examples of how archaeologists can support tribal heritage and environmental stewardship by using the traditional purview of material culture in combination with a broader array of evidence and concerns. As presented in our brief case studies, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and scholars are working together to reclaim tribal heritage and promote Native stewardship in a cultural landscape that has been marred by more than 250 years of dispossession. We examine this work in the context of the renaming of ancestral sites, the public interpretation of Native heritage associated with Mission Santa Clara de Asís, archival research into the history of Indigenous resistance, as well as collaborative efforts to awaken traditional ecological knowledge in service of the Tribe's stewardship and land management goals.

Creating power from failure: policing stock theft in colonial East Africa

In Dr. Keebet Benda-Beckmann’s scholarship that has transformed the field of legal pluralism, she highlights the importance of understanding how colonization impacted systems of power. This article extends Benda-Beckmann’s forum shopping framework to analyze colonial Tanganyika’s thwarted attempts to establish law and order, particularly when it came to cattle. Laws criminalizing stock theft were among the first imposed in British East Africa, and disputes rose to the surface of four decades of annual police and prison reports, in anxious correspondence between police commissioners and European settler farmers, in reports from the governor to London, and in meetings of farmers’ associations. In line with other case studies of legal pluralism, stock theft in this context of indirect rule shows how law-making and law-enforcing were not solely the domain of the state and police, but largely shaped by settler famers—and indigenous resistance to their theft of land and resources. Stock theft and attempts to stop it constituted state power and expanded the capitalist state and policing strategies, many of which traveled to other parts of the British Empire and outlived formal colonial rule. The colonial police gained their power not despite their failure to stop stock theft but because of it.

Indigenous People Struggle for Damage Repair: Assessing Shadow Networks Resistance and Pursuit of Resilience in the Context of an Industrial Disaster

This study aims to understand the emergence of bottom-up social practices in shadow networks in the context of an industrial disaster. The empirical focus involves the Guarani and Tupinikim indigenous people, victims of the Fundão tailing dam rupture, one of the world’s greatest socio-environmental disasters. We adopted a qualitative approach to identify the indigenous shadow network’s agency, resistance mechanisms, and resilience activation. We interpret indigenous resistance as a way of fighting for their existence, with mechanisms crafted by collective deliberation and community mobilization. We identified the mining industry’s efforts to divide resistance and how the indigenous shadow network rebuilt resistance mechanisms through activating resilience based on indigenous values, interconnected leaderships, and social memory from their ancestral land. We thereby advance in understanding the indigenous shadow network’s agency that allows managers to intervene with on-ground actions to maintain or enhance resistance and resilience in the context of organizational studies.

Actualizing decolonization: a case for anticolonizing and Indigenizing the curriculum

Abstract Calls to decolonize education systems cannot be removed from broader social struggles. Scholars have engaged in theoretical discussions on what decolonization entails, emphasizing the need for transforming thoughts, beliefs, and practices. However, the lack of sustained engagement and widespread resistance to decolonizing the curriculum remain evident, underscoring the urgency to envision new futures and explore relationalities between educators and students. In this article, we delve into the evolving terminologies surrounding decolonization, anticolonization, and Indigenization, emphasizing their pivotal roles in the broader project of educational decolonization. We argue that a reassertion of Indigenous resistance and futurity in higher education forms the cornerstone of this transformative process. Through an examination and understanding of these terminologies, we aim to contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding educational decolonization and envision inclusive, equitable, and anticolonial learning environments that centre on Indigenous knowledge and perspectives.

Making “settler time”: how mineral exploration finance circumscribes Indigenous resistance

This essay considers the relationship between exploration finance and the reproduction and maintenance of colonial land relations in Canada. Drawing on research examining the capitalization of exploration across Anishinaabe, Anishini, and Cree homelands in Ontario’s far north, I consider the significance of “flow-though” and royalty-financing techniques as essential to the sector’s liquidity. These techniques circumscribe Indigenous resistance in order to protect investor capital and contribute to a system of securities regulation that operationalizes certainty.

The Thin Green Line: Coast Salish and Indigenous Resistance to Energy Transmission Projects

ABSTRACT Indigenous alliances have been central in stopping the export and transmission of fossil fuel products from Alberta through the west coast. This article compares two pipeline projects, the Enbridge Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines, to examine the ways that Indigenous activism works to counter the settler colonial state. The Trans Mountain case objected to by many Coast Salish nations on both sides of the international border is a unique case because the Coast Salish assert a unified nationality as a part of their environmental activism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Coast Salish nations, this article argues that the Coast Salish reject the structures of a settler colonial state despite continuing to encounter obstacles. While the Enbridge pipeline was defeated, the Trans Mountain project is ongoing and uncertain. Both cases show the impacts of Indigenous and non-native alliance making. The Coast Salish case adds an important transnational component to theorizing alliance making that shows innovative strategies used by Indigenous nations to confront the settler colonial state.

Rehumanizing Ainu

Abstract This article argues that many contemporary female Ainu performance-activists from the Ainu community of Japan, including a performance scene led by Ainu huci (female elders) at an Ainu cultural education center in Sapporo, Japan, engage in performance of desubjectification, which emphasizes the sameness of their humanity with the dominant Japanese rather than arguing for Ainu ethnic difference or their colonial history. At first glance, their performance and iterations seem detached from the discourse of Indigenous resistance. However, this article demonstrates how such iteration of singularity—sameness—derives from a particular Ainu colonial history and argues that their performance critically eschews colonial and imperial ideas of authenticity, ethnic difference, and the universal human. In doing so, the Ainu performance scene in this article presents itself as a theoretical performance activism against the Western (and Japanese imperial) notion of Indigenous peoples as less-than-human. By using bodies, sound, and sensations, these performers define Ainu Indigeneity in their own terms, and achieve an Ainu Indigenous critique of the “human,” the concept that is built on exclusion and marginalization of ethnic minorities and colonized subjects.

The political ecologies of fire: Recasting fire geographies in British Columbia, Canada

How fires burn across British Columbia (BC), Canada is shaped by settler coloniality, timber capitalism, state forestry regimes, criminalization of burning, and Indigenous resistance. Despite the urgency of confronting the fire suppression paradox embedded in settler colonial fire management laws and practices, approaches to studying fire in Canada that foreground Indigenous law and de-center settler colonial governance is scarce. As political ecologists and geographers working and living in the context of unceded and ancestral lək̓ʷəŋən, W̱SÁNEĆ, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ, and syilx territories, we engage with Indigenous feminist scholarship to expose how coloniality and gender intersect in attempts to erase Indigenous sovereignty to structure and naturalize provincial fire policy and its emplaced impacts on Indigenous legal orders. Our analysis contextualizes settler-colonial provincial fire management policy in the purview of Indigenous legal orders to foreground how racial-colonial and gendered politics are obscured when colonial fire and wildfire practices are naturalized. Revisiting key moments in the political development of fire suppression across so-called BC, we contend that the suppression paradox is embedded in and reproduces a colonial logic that widens existing social and economic gaps. These gaps are uniquely gendered, as settler coloniality operates upon patriarchal lines that have actively attempted to erase Indigenous women and Two-Spirit peoples, including the laws and legal authorities that they possess and practice. Considering the 1910 Fulton Commission, we highlight an example of how women and Indigenous people were excluded from the political decision-making structures that shaped colonial fire management practices in BC. These gendered and racialized exclusions bear directly on the exclusion of Indigenous women and gender-diverse folx, and Indigenous legal orders guided by matriarchal lines of fire knowledge.

A Critical Analyses on the History of Indigenous Resistance Movements: Lessons for Contemporary Struggles

The research paper, " A Critical Analyses on the History of Indigenous Resistance Movements: Lessons for Contemporary Struggles," comprehensively examines Indigenous resistance movements globally. The primary objectives of this study are to unearth historical narratives of Indigenous resistance, analyse their characteristics, and extract lessons applicable to contemporary struggles for Indigenous rights and social justice. The research employs a multi-faceted methodology to achieve these objectives, encompassing extensive literature review, archival research, and qualitative analysis of selected case studies. Ethical considerations in Indigenous research guide our data collection and analysis process. The key findings of this research illuminate a rich tapestry of Indigenous resistance movements spanning diverse regions and periods. These movements exhibit remarkable resilience, adaptability, and a commitment to cultural preservation in the face of colonial oppression. The study identifies commonalities in their strategies, including grassroots organising, cultural revitalisation, and alliances with sympathetic non-Indigenous groups. The implications of our research are profound. By revisiting the history of Indigenous resistance, we provide contemporary Indigenous communities and activists with valuable insights and inspiration. These historical lessons can inform present-day strategies, contribute to preserving Indigenous cultures, and bolster the pursuit of justice, equity, and self-determination for Indigenous peoples globally. In conclusion, this research underscores the enduring legacy of Indigenous resistance movements and their relevance in addressing the pressing challenges Indigenous communities face today. By mapping this history and distilling its lessons, we aim to promote a deeper understanding of Indigenous struggles and foster solidarity in pursuing a more just and inclusive world.