Indigenous Struggles Research Articles

Itineraries of Conflict in Arundhati Roy’sWalking with the Comrades

AbstractThis article studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay “Walking with the Comrades” (2010). Roy’s narrative of her journey across the dense forests of Bastar in east-central India re-articulates the significance of this contested environmental space from the perspective of the region’s indigenous minorities. Traveling with a troop of indigenous rebels hailing from the Gond, Halba, and Muria communities for more than two weeks, Roy describes their armed struggle to a global English audience. Exploring Roy’s role both as an itinerant narrator and a global cultural mediator, the author argues that descriptive accounts of travel through contested zones of extraction can foster a vocabulary of resistance that the author calls an itinerary of conflict. Drawing from Michel de Certeau’s conception of the tour as a descriptive approach to space, the author posits the itinerary of conflict as a spatial trope produced in Roy’s essay when the writer’s embodied travel narrative is inflected by indigenous journeys and spatial practices, such as marches across contested zones and ritual processions to sacred sites. Itineraries of conflict enact a semiotic and political resistance to resource grabs conducted by state agencies and powerful corporations, exemplified by the usurpation of tribal lands rich in iron ore, coal, and other minerals in Chhattisgarh state. Further, itineraries of conflict emphasize the embodied presence of indigenous communities and their activists in areas demarcated for the extraction of minerals, timber, and other resources in the face of continued armed conflict or toxic pollution. More broadly, the author suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.

Recognising Indigenous Land: Analysing the Success of Native Title and Land Rights Campaigns

Historically, the Indigenous struggle for land rights has been contingent upon the interventions and negotiations of the government. However, the past displacement engendered by colonisation has made proving continuous connection to land difficult, thus rendering native title a frequently problematic avenue towards recognition. This essay argues that grassroots land rights campaigns have had more tangible successes, visible through the physical acquisition of land rather than symbolic ‘recognition’. KeywordsMabo decision; native title; land rights; activism

COMUNICACIÓN POPULAR Y COMUNITARIA EN EL LEVANTAMIENTO INDÍGENA DE 1990: ESCUELAS RADIOFÓNICAS POPULARES DEL ECUADOR EN LA DISPUTA DEL SENTIDO POLÍTICO Y COMUNICACIONAL

El presente artículo relata un acontecimiento histórico importante en el Ecuador: el levantamiento Indígena de junio de 1990. Un episodio que ha sido contado desde distintos enfoques de las ciencias sociales y que, en el presente, lo ubicamos desde los procesos de comunicación desplegados mientras iban sucediéndose los hechos. El trabajo empírico incorpora la mirada, el relato y el lugar de enunciación de los propios protagonistas, de aquellos que organizaron la ebullición nacional que emergió en la provincia de Chimborazo. Relatamos el día a día de cómo se fue configurando este proceso de lucha y organización indígena en Escuelas Radiofónicas Populares del Ecuador (ERPE), primera radio popular y comunitaria del país, fundada en Riobamba en 1962. Los dirigentes indígenas se tomaron las instalaciones de la radio, no sólo como un medio de comunicación y de mera transmisión de información, sino además como espacio de articulación entre actores y organización de lucha indígena. Estos hechos marcaron un antes y un después en la configuración social de nuestro país y región.

The Solidarity Movement : Mediation and Collaboration for Palestine Online in the UK and Ireland

This paper examines the concept of online mediation in relation to representation of Palestine through examining the UK and Ireland based solidarity movement’s contemporary collective action. Contemporary mediation of Palestine both as a location where the displacement and control of an entire people is taking place and as a symbol of an indigenous struggle that global activists relate to are prominent in the discourse of the solidarity groups, mainly in contents of their social media accounts. The paper highlights the solidarity movement’s online activism methods in relation to networking, advocacy and lobbying, and discusses the varied modes of collaboration among the diverse solidarity groups that takes place partially via online interactive platforms. It argues for the significance of the Internet as a venue for expression, for mediating messages and as a mobilising tool, as used by solidarity groups involved in the advocacy for the Palestinian cause. Through studying how online media platforms are shaping the dynamics of the movement’s communication, the text provides an understanding of the ways in which Internet platforms are contributing to the dissemination of favourable narratives. In that, the paper examines contemporary mediation of Palestine throughout social media platforms.

Worlding the Study of Global Environmental Politics in the Anthropocene: Indigenous Voices from the Amazon

Many socioenvironmental struggles around the globe involve trying to protect the disappearance of other “worlds.” Along with biological diversity, human languages, traditions, understandings, and the intimate relationships between peoples and their lands are under attack through various forms of colonization, capital expansion, or simply the globalization of lifeways. Scholars of international relations have recently come to appreciate that the world is made up of many worlds, and that great pressures threaten to reduce its diversity. This work has been essential for understanding the struggle of maintaining many worlds on a single Earth. Such scholarship has yet to penetrate fully studies of global environmental politics (GEP). This article extends such sensitivity and scholarly effort to GEP by dialoguing with Indigenous ways of knowing. It argues that Indigenous struggles are struggles for the survival of many worlds on one planet and that we could learn from this. The intention is not to generalize Indigenous knowledge but rather to make a call for engagement. Through Creative Listening and Speaking, a worldist methodology, the article focuses on the Yanomami’s forest-world and presents a few perspectives to illustrate how relational ontologies, stories of nonhierarchical and dialogical divinities, make ways of knowing and being from which we could learn how to relate to the Earth as equals.

Indigenous radio and digital media: Tautoko FM’s national and transnational audiences

Abstract In this article, we posit that Māori radio as it is structured in Aotearoa/New Zealand is at the same time national, international and transnational. Based on a research project that we carried out with the radio station Tautoko FM, we show that this station caters for national Ngāpuhi audiences, that it engages in international networking with other iwi-based radio stations and that it has invested in transnational connections with diasporic audiences. As a result, it has constructed a public sphere for both national and transnational indigenous audiences. This is facilitated by the changing nature of radio as a medium, which is evolving into a multimedia experience incorporating broadcasting, live streaming, websites and social media. Māori radio in Aotearoa/New Zealand is one example of a global trend in which indigenous communities have adapted new media technologies to re-centre notions of national identity. The digital media landscape allows them to form indigenous media networks, to narrate indigenous experiences in new ways and to acquire attention for indigenous struggles.

Fighting Invasive Infrastructures

In the settler colonial context of so-called Canada, oil and gas projects are contemporary infrastructures of invasion. This article tracks how the state discourse of “critical infrastructure” naturalizes the environmental destruction wrought by the oil and gas industry while criminalizing Indigenous resistance. I review anthropological work to analyze the applicability of the concept of infrastructure to Indigenous struggles against resource extraction. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Indigenous land defense movements against pipeline construction, I argue for an alternative approach to infrastructure that strengthens and supports the networks of human and other-than-human relations that continue to make survival possible for Indigenous peoples.

Transborder Indigenous Education: Survivance and Border Thinking in the Professional Development and Practice of Maestros Indigenas

This study examines the experiences of Indigenous Mexican educators following their participation in a transborder professional development initiative aimed at strengthening Indigenous Mexican education. Using qualitative and ethnographic methodologies, this article is guided by the following research questions: How do former participants in Transformación Docente, a U.S.-based and funded professional development program, conceptualize and enact culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogy in their practice? And how have their perceptions of pedagogy been impacted by their participation in Transformatión Docente? The findings challenge the hegemony of development agendas through multi-sited critique of top-down Intercultural-Bilingual Education policy and analyze on-the-ground enactments of Indigenous education. Findings reveal transborder professional development supported opportunities for Indigenous educators to: 1) legitimize Indigenous identities, 2) further Indigenous language agendas, and 3) rethink inclusion and relationality in teaching. This article highlights Indigenous teachers as strategic border negotiators, and narrators of counterhegemonic practices within institutional spaces. The study’s implications further discussions of Indigenous survivance, and demonstrate the significance of transborder Indigenous dialogues to advance Indigenous struggles for self-determination.

Violence against People, Violence against Nature

The environmental history of Latin America, like its political history, is one of conquest and domination. Over the years, NACLA has been committed to covering Indigenous struggles over land and na...

Indigenous Women and Social Movements - Multiple Injustices: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America. By R. Aída Hernández Castillo. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 330. $55.00 cloth.

Indigenous Women and Social Movements - Multiple Injustices: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America. By R. Aída Hernández Castillo. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 330. $55.00 cloth.

Revisitar la soberanía indígena: los desafíos de una reivindicación excluida

El 14 de septiembre de 2017 se cumplieron 10 años de la Declaración de Naciones Unidas sobre los Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas (UNDRIP). Considerado a menudo como una importante victoria para los pueblos indígenas, el presente artículo aborda sin embargo un punto ausente en la UNDRIP pero central en numerosas luchas indígenas: la cuestión de la soberanía. Empieza explorando la evolución histórica del concepto de soberanía en la teoría política y las relaciones internacionales, antes de estudiar la conceptualización indígena del término. Posteriormente, analiza reivindicaciones y prácticas de soberanía y autogobierno indígenas en tres de los cuatro países que votaron en contra de UNDRIP en 2007: Nueva Zelanda, Australia y Canadá. Este análisis permite examinar diferentes modelos soberanos posibles para el reconocimiento de la soberanía indígena y esbozar sus respectivas configuraciones político-espaciales. A lo largo de este artículo se intenta poner constantemente a prueba la clásica y supuestamente inquebrantable relación entre soberanía, autoridad absoluta y territorialidad indiscutida. Finalmente, se concluye señalando la necesidad de una mirada transdisciplinar para entender la reivindicación de soberanía indígena, y llamando a la transformación de las relaciones internacionales, la política doméstica y el derecho internacional para avanzar hacia su reconocimiento y realización.

Acceso y participación de los pueblos indígenas en el sistema de medios de Argentina

La Ley de Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual, sancionada en Argentina en 2009, reconoce el derecho a la comunicación de los pueblos originarios. Sin embargo, las luchas indígenas en torno a su participación en el sistema de medios se remontan a mucho antes, ya que tienen más de tres décadas y se inscriben en modalidades históricas de ‘inclusión’ de los indígenas en la nación. Aquí proponemos analizar los antecedentes de la presencia indígena en la Ley de SCA: las trayectorias de sus luchas por derechos a la comunicación y las políticas públicas que, antes de la sanción de la ley, promovieron la participación indígena en los medios. Luego, nos detenemos en la modalidad de inclusión de los pueblos originarios en la ley y los debates en torno a ello, recuperando principalmente la perspectiva indígena. Analizamos las principales transformaciones que ocurrieron a partir de la sanción de la ley en lo que refiere al acceso y participación indígena en el sistema de medios. Y, finalmente, señalamos algunos desafíos que enfrentan las comunidades que gestionan medios de comunicación, a partir de las transformaciones políticas que tienen lugar desde diciembre de 2015 por el cambio de gobierno en Argentina.

Curricular standpoints and native feminist theories: Why native feminist theories should matter to curriculum studies

In this article I provide a brief overview of feminist standpoint theories, as well as how Native feminist theories complicate and enrich this political and epistemic tradition. Following this overview, I introduce Wayne Au’s conception of curricular standpoint theory as a contemporary and productive use of feminist standpoint theory to address the politics of curriculum. After outlining the affordances and enactments of curricular standpoint theory, I illustrate how curricular standpoint theory loses sight of its feminist genealogy and commitments. I argue that in order for curricular standpoint theorizing to be politically and pedagogically effective, it must remain accountable to both its feminist roots as well as Native feminist critiques. To gesture toward the generative analyses and practices Native feminist theorizing offers curricular standpoint theory and the field of curriculum theory, I outline several Native feminist theories of curriculum that demonstrate how curricular knowledge production can remain accountable to Indigenous peoples, lands, and decolonial struggles. Attending to Native feminist theories is epistemically and politically advantageous, as well as an ethical imperative for theorizing within settler nation-states on Indigenous lands. Beyond contributing to more vigorous and just modes of inquiry and knowledge production, I offer that Native feminist theories can also generate new ways of being and doing that counter colonial logics and further decolonial futures.

Fourth World Approaches to International Law (FWAIL) and Asia's Indigenous Struggles and Quests for Recognition under International Law

AbstractThe indigenous and Fourth World communities in multiple Asian regions are again making noises. As the incoming ALSA president, I wish to offer a new perspective called the Fourth World Approaches to International Law (FWAIL) to understand the nature of pandemic indigenous people’s struggles for independence in Asia, to examine sociopolitical and historical roots of regional conflicts around many Asian peripheries, and to explore the contour of the social and political path for the recognition of indigenous rights for political sovereignty and independence under international law. Further, FWAIL is offered to give an active voice to indigenous people who have been victimized by predatory policies of the state system and international law, and to build a culture of collective resistance and opposition to hegemonic Western domination in the region. FWAIL also provides the framework to seek self-determination through activism, organizing, and negotiations with the state, in addition to the use of domestic law and international law. Furthermore, FWAIL is offered to give an alternative vision for the preservation of biodiversity and natural environment necessary for the survival of the human race in the coming generations in Asia.

SIMPÓSIO DE INTERCULTURALIDADE E A DIVERSIDADE CULTURAL INDÍGENA: CONTRIBUINDO COM AS AÇÕES AFIRMATIVAS

The need to recognize the diversity of the student comunity and the actions to the acceptance and permanence of indigenous students in Federal University of Sao Carlos (UFSCar) culminate with the First Symposium on Interculturality, an extension activity held on May 2015. Thus, this study aims to describe the results of this experience, highlighting the performance of the indigenous and non-indigenous students during the event organization, and to unfold it to the university community. The main results include the dissemination of the theme, the relation between society and universiity, the integration between indigenous and non-indigenous students, the establishment of a Nucleus of Indigenous Studies, and the beginning of the Cycle of Indigenous Actions and Struggles. The event strengthened the current Affirmative Action Policies of UFSCar as an instrument to promote diversity in the university environment.

The Andean Catch-22: ethnicity, class and resource governance in Bolivia and Ecuador

ABSTRACTThis study deals with the tensions and contradictions between resource governance, welfare policies, and the constitutionally recognized rights of nature and the indigenous peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador. We have identified a certain reductionism in current debates on these issues and propose a more systematic analytical focus on class and the class-ethnicity duality, as expressed in historical and contemporary indigenous struggles, and also confirmed via our ethnographic material. Drawing on the double bind as expressed in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 wherein the protagonists face situations in which they do not have any choice to achieve a net gain, this article centres on how national governments have to choose between the protections of rights – in this case ethnic and environmental rights – and welfare provision financed by extractive revenues. From the perspective of ecologically concerned indigenous actors, the Catch-22 is articulated in the choice or compromise between universal welfarism on the one hand, and ethno-environmental concerns on the other hand. The article draws primarily on ecosocialist arguments and on indigenous-culturalist perspectives on Good Life (Sumak Kawsay or Vivir Bien). A central finding is the existence of awareness among involved actors – oppositional movements and government authorities – that the Catch-22 quandary and joint class-ethnic concerns are unavoidable ingredients in their discourses, struggles, and understandings of Good Life.

Water, History, and Sovereignty in Simon J. Ortiz's “Our Homeland, a National Sacrifice Area”

Water, History, and Sovereignty in Simon J. Ortiz’s “Our Homeland, a National Sacrifice Area” Robin Riley Fast (bio) As Native peoples face contemporary threats to land, water, and life, Simon Ortiz’s 1981 memoir-essay “Our Homeland, a National Sacrifice Area” (Woven Stone 337–63) still has a great deal to teach us about the impacts of colonialist depredations and the importance of resistance. Ortiz focuses on the damage caused by a history of exploitation that has exacerbated drought and contributed to other “sacrifice area” conditions. How he tells the story is also instructive, as it demonstrates the kind of creative resistance that he identified in “The Historical Matrix”: using the colonizers’ languages and cultures for Indians’ “own purposes” (8, 10). “Our Homeland” exemplifies resistance and claims sovereignty in both political and literary terms. At the same time, parallels to other struggles signal the work’s continuing relevance for contemporary issues and resistance movements. “Our Homeland” enacts its concerns and commitments simultaneously on numerous planes. Every word of the title evokes conflicts and ironies. Thematically, Ortiz’s account of a personal pilgrimage is inseparable from a multilayered history of his people’s identity with the land and their experiences of colonization and resistance. These intertwined stories are linked by persistent references to the depletion and degradation of life-sustaining water, damage associated with exploitative industrialization, beginning with the railroads and including, most prominently, uranium mining and processing. Because uranium is involved, the story Ortiz tells will inevitably be “current” indefinitely into the future. But the story of exploitation and destruction of Indigenous lands and water continues in many places, so the message of “Our Homeland” also encompasses contemporary struggles such as those surrounding the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines; the Athabasca-Chipewyan [End Page 36] First Nation’s struggles related to tarsands extraction in Alberta; Navajo and Hopi concerns about coal mining on Black Mesa; and the campaign to defend the Bears Ears National Monument. The stories of “Our Homeland” prompt a reaffirmation of sovereignty and a call for resistance. Water is a major element of Ortiz’s sovereignty claim; given water’s centrality to life and culture, the claim is all-encompassing. As he has said elsewhere, a water-dependent “farming way of life and economic self-sufficiency is the basis of culture and community for the Pueblo Indian people. . . . [W]ater defines our culture” (quoted in Adamson and Stein 21). Water is thus part of community. Accordingly, references to water—its presence, absence, and history and people’s relationship to it—run through “Our Homeland.” The core story of “Our Homeland” focuses on the Acoma people’s experiences of life in a “national sacrifice area,” in “lands [that] have suffered . . . severe and prolonged environmental degradation . . . purported[ly in the interests of] the collective [US national] good” (Hooks and Smith 562). Scholars Gregory Hooks and Chad Smith focus on the “severe and prolonged environmental degradation” resulting specifically from “military activities” (562), which would certainly include uranium mining and processing.1 They quote a 2001 Department of Defense document that confirms the contemporary currency of “Our Homeland” as it describes effects of uranium mining and milling on Native lands in the US Southwest: “Evidence . . . remains: hazardous materials, . . . abandoned equipment, unsafe buildings, and debris. This contamination degrades the natural environment,” including, of course, water, “and threatens tribal economic, social and cultural welfare” (562). The designation of a national sacrifice area, with the concomitant implication or explicit determination that the damage is too severe for meaningful repair, “implies a government policy that involves the sacrifice of the native peoples and cultures who live there” (Tarter 108), based on the assumption that “[t]he land, and the people living on the land were better left ignored. That is, neither was worth saving” (Kuletz, Tainted 27). This combination of exploitation, destruction, and abandonment, which in the case of uranium occurs preponderantly on or near Indigenous lands, clearly constitutes environmental racism.2 Such actions and policies are responsible for the depletion and pollution of water that is a major focus in “Our Homeland,” as well as in other sites of Indigenous struggle: the people of Standing Rock have resisted the Dakota Access [End...

Indígenas en ciudades “pares” en la Amazonia, entre la invisibilidad y la territorialidad urbana: Una mirada retrospectiva

Baseado numa revisão retrospectiva e focalizando um amplo diálogo com a antropologia, este artigo apresenta o processo de invisibilização e posterior revitalização étnica, sociocultural e política dos povos indígenas que têm habitado, e habitam, espaços urbanos tidos como cidades ou assentamentos “pares” em áreas fronteiriças e transfronteiriças da Amazônia. Examina especialmente o caso dos indígenas das cidades de Letícia e Tabatinga na tríplice fronteira do Brasil, Colômbia e Peru no contexto da dissolução dos estabelecimentos imperiais, a reconstituição desses assentamentos no século XX até hoje, com ênfase nos processos de recuperação étnica, da luta pelo reconhecimento dos direitos territoriais em espaço urbanos e fronteiriços, além da organização social e política expressa na constituição de cabildos indígenas urbanos.

Hernández Castillo, R. Aída (2016), Multiple InJustices: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America

Multiple InJustices draws on research conducted with indigenous women in the past 25 years especially in Mexico, but also in Guatemala and Colombia. The struggles of indigenous women facing multiple forms of violence and injustice, particularly State violence, are analyzed from a decolonial feminist perspective on women’s rights within the contexts of legal pluralism, neoliberal multiculturalism, and criminalization of poverty and social movements. Both the methodology and the theoretical app...

Hutan Adat dan Kelas Menengah: Titik Balik Reforma Agraria di Indonesia?

The turning point of the agrarian reform of the customary forest arena after the Constitutional Court's Decision 35/PUU-X/2012 can not be based on state domination (government) through the agenda of territorialization of the forest and not on AMAN as representation of indigenous struggle from the paradox of interest. Bringing the alternative of a critical new middle class, as well as running a deliberation democracy through representational politics that combine extra parliamentary and intra-parliamentary struggles simultaneously in organizational form, capable of realizing sustainable agrarian reform. The new middle class struggle is a synthesis of the dialectic of forest recognition and the existence of indigenous peoples undergoing involution.