Indigenous Theory Research Articles

Health promotion interventions supporting Indigenous healthy ageing: a scoping review

ABSTRACT Aging well is a priority in Canada and globally, particularly for older Indigenous adults experiencing an increased risk of chronic conditions. Little is known about health promotion interventions for older Indigenous adults and most literature is framed within Eurocentric paradigms that are not always relevant to Indigenous populations. This scoping review, guided by Arksey and O’Malley’s framework and the PRISMA-ScR Checklist, explores the literature on Indigenous health promoting interventions across the lifespan, with specific attention to Indigenous worldview and the role of older Indigenous adults within these interventions. To ensure respectful and meaningful engagement of Indigenous peoples, articles were included in the Collaborate or Shared Leadership categories on the Continuum of Engagement. Fifteen articles used Indigenous theories and frameworks in the study design. Several articles highlighted engaging Elders as advisors in the design and/or delivery of programs however only five indicated Elders were active participants. In this scoping review, we suggest integrating a high level of community engagement and augmenting intergenerational approaches are essential to promoting health among Indigenous populations and communities. Indigenous older adults are keepers of essential knowledge and must be engaged (as advisors and participants) in intergenerational health promotion interventions to support the health of all generations.

Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black

Reviewed by: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black Jennifer L Jenkins Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960. By Liza Black. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. 327. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, filmography, index.) Picturing Indians examines twenty years of U.S. film history, post-Stagecoach, in the so-called Golden Age of the Western. Distinct from many film histories of the period and of Native representation in the period and beyond, Picturing Indians examines the economics of what might be called settler-colonial lenses. By disaggregating the production processes from the film narratives, Black exposes the embedded structures within Hollywood's studio system that did much to reify racist views of indigeneity from behind, around, and in the margins of the scenes. Chapters deal with script issues, labor of Native and non-Native actors, the role and race of extras, and the construction of "Movie Indians" upon both Native and non-Native bodies through makeup, costume, and the iconography associated with both. The focus on the labor dynamics of the industry is a clever choice, for it foregrounds typically unseen labor (even now)—doubly unseen when done behind the scenes and by people of color. Every chapter merits careful reading and rereading, but I found the chapter on Indigenous performativity, "'Not Desired by you for Photographing: the Labor of American Indian (and Non-Indian) Extras," particularly resonant and thought-provoking. Black is adept at weaving together close readings of film narratives, granular details about productions, details from Native-produced revisionist documentaries such as Reel Injuns (Diamond, 2009), and firsthand responses from Native viewers to fully deconstruct—and I mean that in the strictest Derridean, not colloquial, [End Page 98] sense—Hollywood's construction of Indianness. Her reportage of coeval and latter-day resistance to such "picturing" is a model of critical storytelling practice as well as of applied decolonizing methodologies. This is film history as activism. As Black argues, this is a project dedicated to Native sovereignty. It is interlaced with critical Indigenous theory, and draws heavily upon Native scholarship, including her wide—and not deferential—reading in Euro-American film studies. Indeed, the literature review should be (and will be in my courses) required reading and a model for how to decolonize academic research. The volume includes an extremely useful filmography in two parts: Hollywood fiction films containing Indian characters from 1941 to 1960 and a broader list of global films with Native characters, many Native-directed or -produced, from 1914 to 2019. Numerous needed courses in film history and theory, economic history, American Indian Studies, regional studies and beyond could be built from these two lists. Liza Black frames this history of "the hyperreality of filmic Indians" (xi) from Cherokee positionality. Black explains that her identity is grounded in Cherokee history but that she presents as White and grew up off-reservation in Southern California. In most cases an author's biography would be irrelevant to an academic study, but American Indian personhood is central to this work. Life details here are an authorizing impulse as well as a respectful means of introducing one's storytelling position. As her final chapter's subtitle indicates, "The Search for Authenticity" is ongoing and urgent. In both method and content, this book charts a new movement in Indigenous film studies in particular and film studies in general. It is welcome, indeed. Jennifer L Jenkins University of Arizona Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Towards Decolonising Poetry in Education: The ZAPP Project

This article concerns ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), which is a community of poets, scholars (including the authors), teachers and students, established in 2013 to promote, in educational systems, the work of contemporary South African poets. For the past three years (2017–2019), we have attempted through outreach and research to contribute to decolonising South African education by paying attention to indigenous poetic traditions and practices. Our research has focused on content, pedagogy and institutional practice. The article outlines and attempts to assess three interrelated components of ZAPP’s research into the decolonisation of poetry and education: our research into the transformation of teaching and learning in EFAL (English First Additional Language) poetry classrooms, our ongoing research into what constitutes indigenous South African poetry today, and our research into institutional practices concerning the production and dissemination of knowledge about poetry. We draw on various conceptual frameworks to explore ZAPP’s research, namely, South African poetry scholarship, decolonial theory, theories of indigeneity, theories of multimodality, posthumanism and new materialisms. The article shows both the achievements and challenges of our research efforts in the three areas of content, pedagogy and institutional practice. Its final claim is that these three areas are crucial sites of intervention in attempts at decolonising poetry in existing disciplines in research and education.

Decolonizing the Anthropocene: ‘Slow Violence’ and Indigenous Resistance in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Through a reading of Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves, a survival story set in a futuristic Canada destroyed by global warming, this article explores the conceptualization and reimagination of the Anthropocene in contemporary postcolonial and Indigenous theory and fiction. Firstly, I will argue that literary representations of climate change can be complicit in producing hegemonic strands of Anthropocene discourse that consider human destructiveness and vulnerability at undifferentiated species level. Secondly, I will suggest that the novel’s apocalypse reveals the processes of colonial violence and dispossession that have culminated in the eruptive event of environmental catastrophe, rather than portraying a story of universal and disembodied human threat that conceals oppression against Indigenous people.

Introductory Remarks on Georg Langer’s “On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll” from 1928

Abstract Batsheva Goldman-Ida, art historian and museum curator, introduces the article by Jiří Mordechai Georgo Langer (1894, Prague–1943, Tel Aviv): “On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll,” presented for the first time in English translation, and originally written for the Freud journal Imago in 1928. Langer, a Hebrew poet and teacher of Jewish studies was a friend of Franz Kafka. Langer joined the Belz Hasidism from 1913–16 and was one of the people who introduced Kafka to Hasidism. Langer suggests an explanatory model for Jewish religious artifacts such as the Mezuzah and Phylacteries in the context of compulsion neuroses, referencing the rites of indigenous people and totem theory. The introduction provides background material on the author and details of his other books and endeavors, as well as a framework to better appreciate his poetry and scholarly work. Langer sought a revival of “comrade love” whose homerotic bias is of interest today. His essay on the Mezuzah opens up a range of questions on Jewish artifacts, psychoanalysis, and the origins of Jewish rites. Long left unnoticed, it challenges the current field of Jewish scholarship to rethink its methodology.

Earthing the Laboratory

For all the discussion of training in theatre and performance studies, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which future researchers are trained. In this essay I begin from the premise that, for performance studies, the arena of training most crucial to theorize and transform is that of the doctorate. This essay reconsiders the form and structure of PhD programmes in theatre and performance from the perspective of artistic research and its decolonial potential. What are we training in these programmes? How might the form of the PhD programme respond to the intensifying neoliberalization of academia, the increasing digital networking of the globe and the growing pressure of liberal and radical movements for social and ecological justice? What possibilities exist for reimagining the doctoral programme as a utopian or heterotopian space? Could the doctorate itself become a leverage point from which to shift the discipline of theatre and performance studies, the practice of the humanities, and even the university itself as a social-epistemic institution? Drawing on contemporary practice research debates, social epistemology, and indigenous theories of grounded normativity, it argues that we have not yet begun to imagine what an artistic doctorate could be.

Colonial Continuum

The Fort York National Historic Site was chosen as the site of research to examine how tourist attractions are constructed through the use of certain images and narratives, which reflect existing socio-political power dynamics through the processes of selecting and excluding what is represented. Research into media representations of Fort York was first conducted on the websites of Fort York and the City of Toronto on May 15th and May 16th, 2018. Field observations were subsequently conducted at the Fort York National Historic Site on May 20th, 2018, from 3–5 p.m.; May 30th, 2018, from 2–4 p.m.; and June 2nd, 2018, from 3–5 p.m. The analysis illustrates how the social, cultural, and historical constructions of Fort York render Canada and Canadians as conceptually White spaces and bodies, thus reflecting how the Canadian settler state continues to normalize the erasure of Indigenous peoples, communities, identities, and cultures within the contemporary Canadian landscape. Application of queer Indigenous theories then helps to concep­tualize how multiple uninterrupted strands of settler colonialism intersect to form a cohesive but variegated colonial continuum, or the tangible inertia of settler colonialism that self-perpetuates colonial heteronormativity. Queer Indigenous theories are thus argued to provide the framework through which colonized peoples can collectively dismantle the colonial continuum.

Consorting with Stone

AbstractThis essay places Marie de France’s lai “Yonec” (ca. 1150–1200) and the anonymous Middle English romance King Horn (ca. 1250–1300) in conversation with critical Indigenous theories of relational, land-based sovereignty and resurgence. At first, “Yonec” and King Horn appear to reinscribe a Western form of sovereignty based on exclusive territorial control. Both works offer alternative models of sovereignty and self-determination, however, in their depictions of cooperative, lithic alliance between stone and female consorts. Adopting the term lithic sovereignty to describe the works’ relation-based sovereign imaginaries, this essay first follows the King Horn narrator’s depiction of Godhild’s hermetic retreat into stone when Saracens conquer her husband’s realm. Then it turns to the nameless lady of “Yonec” and her implausible escape from her jealous husband’s tower, facilitated by the very stone that had seemed to entrap her. Drawing on critical Indigenous studies, legal studies, and ecomaterialism, this essay concludes that both King Horn and “Yonec” offer a medieval British imaginary of lithic relational sovereignty that runs counter to teleological, naturalizing narratives of Euro-Western origins.

Theories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous wellbeing in Australian health policies

Governments in Australia and internationally show growing interest in wellbeing as a policy goal; however, such interests raise questions about the theories or definitions of wellbeing they will apply. Choices about how wellbeing is defined for policy purposes are likely to delimit the strategies applied. Wholly individualized conceptualizations of wellbeing may lead to policy focused narrowly on 'improving' individuals rather than on creating favourable social conditions. Also, Indigenous theories of wellbeing may have much to offer policy for public wellbeing, but little research has examined whether this potential is considered in contemporary health policy. We report on research examining Indigenous and non-Indigenous theories of wellbeing in a representative sample of current Australian health policy documents. We examine what theories or definitions of wellbeing are present, whether policies recognize social determinants of health; if 'lifestyle drift' is present; how Indigenous and non-Indigenous theories of wellbeing are positioned; and whether policies propose strategies consistent with their definitions of wellbeing. We discuss implications of current approaches for effective policy to promote Indigenous and non-Indigenous wellbeing.

Educator perceptions on teaching Indigenous health: Racism, privilege and self-reflexivity.

General practitioners (GPs) and family medicine clinicians should respond to Indigenous peoples' health needs. However, medical graduates feel underprepared for this work. The foundational elements of racism, white privilege and cultural self-reflexivity remain conspicuously absent from medical education in general practice programmes, despite inclusion in curriculum frameworks. This study explored the perception and experiences of Australian GP educators in teaching this content. We undertook a qualitative study that gathered data through semi-structured interviews with GP educators (n=12) at a medical school in Victoria, Australia. We utilised the Reflection learning domain of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Curriculum Framework to shape interview questions on racism, white privilege and cultural self-reflexivity. Data were analysed from constructivist and Critical Indigenous Theory paradigms to formulate key themes. General practitioner educators were challenged by Reflection content, struggled to articulate a refined pedagogy for provision of anti-racist, self-reflexive learning and felt poorly qualified to teach Indigenous health, articulating preference for delegation of teaching to Indigenous peoples. They simultaneously stated the importance of inclusion of Reflection teaching in general practice, alongside expressing beliefs that appeared to devalue its perceived relevance. Students were perceived as being either disinterested or incapable of Reflection learning, or conversely, more engaged than previous generations with these topics. The results call into question how skilled are GP educators to teach elements of Indigenous health education such as racism, white privilege and cultural self-reflexivity. Unskilled educators can reinforce colonialism in curricula, including through minimisation of content. Stronger anti-racist pedagogy is urgently required in medical education. Vital to this is active research on educator preparedness, evidence-based teaching models and accountable curriculum accreditation.

8Discourses of the Haunted: An Intersubjective Approach to Archaeology at the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School

ABSTRACTThis chapter explores “haunting” as a way to conceptualize and engage with the traumatic events of the United States Federal Indian Boarding School era. The goal is to create an intersectional and intersubjective approach that does not seek singular explanations, but leaves room for diversity of memory—a core principle in feminist indigenous theory. Bringing together archaeological, archival, and oral data, we tell three stories of perseverance that have come to light from community‐based heritage work. In this manner, archaeology has the power to facilitate community healing and decolonize women's experiences at the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School.

Transcorporeal becoming: the temporalities of Searles and the nonhuman

As critical theories center on co-emergent interspecies relationalities, psychoanalysis continues to reproduce a fantasy of narcissistic omnipotence and exceptionalism. But theories of interspecies becoming have failed to adequately address human ambivalence and conflicts of interest that are inherent in their ideals of dispersive agencies and unfolding potentialities/uncertainties. There is still a need for a theory of subjectivity that can explore the ongoing processes of human disavowals and dissociations that reify the human exceptionalism motivating planetary destruction. Psychoanalysis remains one of the only theories of subjectivity that creates space for ambivalence, conflict, and unconscious motivations. This paper melds psychoanalytic theories of the non-human with critical and indigenous theories of interspecies emergence, to create a space where dispersive agencies, unconscious ambivalences, and the potentialities of multiple temporalities can be held.

The urban commons: a keyword essay

ABSTRACT This essay considers the urban commons as a keyword for urban geography, examining the changing meanings and usages of the term over time. We situate the increase in the term’s circulation – and its contested uses – in a broader historical conjuncture, focusing on its articulation with emerging social relationships and different visions for social justice. We trace some of the key ways that urban geographers and urban studies scholars are theorizing the urban commons and join an emerging call for greater attention to race, gender, and colonization in these analyses. We argue for disrupting singular histories of the commons that identify the enclosure of the British commons as the origin and paradigmatic case of primitive accumulation and consider how insights from Indigenous studies, Black studies, and decolonial theory render alternative genealogies of the commons legible, reveal the complexity of contemporary urban enclosures, and inform the actions needed to resist them.

Trust in the system: an introduction to the #AoIR2019 special issue

ABSTRACT This special issue of Information, Communication and Society reflects on the generative work presented at the 2019 annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (#AoIR2019). The conference attracted approximately 380 people from 35 countries to work through the theme, Trust in the System. Delegates analysed developments on the internet, in social media and through data management, including those grounded in Indigenous perspectives and varied communities, resiliencies and collective voices. Plenary provocations prompted discussions about our various relationships with “trust”, “system” and “the”, while research sites included webtoons and webnovels, fans and games, chemsex and porn, the rise of digital assistants and evolving digital practices in politics, health, education, environment and the media. Creative industries, automation and platformization figured broadly. Ethics, methods and theory ranged from science and technology studies (STS) to queer and indigenous theory to algorithmic approaches, digital ethnography, creative methods, and emergent work in bot detection across social media. The resulting articles curated for this collection are offered by emerging to established scholars, from around the world.

Advancing theory in marketing: insights from conversations in other disciplines

Over the years, marketing scholars have voiced concerns regarding the dearth of indigenous theory development in marketing, reliance on theories developed in other disciplines, and the downward trend in conceptual articles published in marketing journals. Advancing marketing theory encompasses developing organic marketing theories, refining and extending theories developed in other disciplines used to explain and predict marketing phenomena, evaluating theories currently in vogue in the field and discarding flawed theories, and developing overarching theories that in addition to explaining marketing phenomena also explain a broader range of phenomena that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Along the lines of the demonstrated potential of theories developed in other disciplines to shed light into marketing phenomena, the potential of organic marketing theories to shed light into phenomena that are the focus of research in other disciplines also merit exploration. Against this backdrop, drawing on theory insights from marketing literature and other disciplines, this commentary focuses on issues relating to development of new theories, extensions and revisions of theories in vogue, and discarding of flawed theories.

Governing the Philippine Public: The National College of Public Administration and Governance and the Crisis of Leadership without Identity

Governing the Philippine Public: The National College of Public Administration and Governance and the Crisis of Leadership without Identity

Indigenous theory development in marketing: the foundational premises approach

Marketing’s intellectual health requires indigenous theory development. However, marketing is a discipline that, almost exclusively, imports its concepts and theories from other disciplines and applies them to marketing issues. Articles that either develop indigenous marketing theory or use such theory as a foundation for empirical research are notably absent from marketing journals. A major reason for the absence of indigenous marketing theory is the lack of well-developed procedures and approaches for developing theories and writing conceptual articles. This article proposes, explicates, and illustrates with a concrete example (i.e., service-dominant (S-D) logic) an approach to theory development in marketing that is labeled the “foundational premises, inductive realist approach.” Although this approach is not an algorithmic procedure for theory development, it can provide a valuable conceptual framework for furthering the development of indigenous marketing theory.

“People give and take a lot in order to participate in things:” Youth talk back – making a case for non-participation

Common typologies frame youth participation as something that exists at different hierarchical, or linear, levels or stages. In these models, non-participation is positioned as something negative or not addressed at all. Scholars have critiqued these typologies for ignoring contextual specificities and complexities, nuances, and power dynamics inherent in participatory processes. In this article, I draw from narratives of young people to productively theorize what non-participation might engender for thinking about and enacting participatory processes. In this study, I asked stakeholders at a youth-led HIV prevention and harm reduction peer-education program to take and discuss photographs that reflected their ideas about youth engagement. I provide a thematic analysis of how young people understood and navigated their participation in complex and self-determined ways. I put their narratives in dialogue with critical scholars’ writing on settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, and willfulness to tease apart why and how young people’s comments on non-participation offer a sophisticated counter-hegemonic understanding of the “call to participation” and its discursive and material effects. Last, drawing on the work of Indigenous theorists who advocate for a politics of refusal, I argue that young people’s refusal to participate (or to participate on their own terms) may be an act of resistance – especially for young people whose bodies are regulated on a daily basis. I conclude by making a case for non-participation as a conceptual tool to disrupt and refuse hegemonic, linear theories of change and invite practitioners working with young people to do the same.

Epistemic Colonialism: Is it Possible to Decolonize Archaeology?

In the fourteen years since the publication of Sonya Atalay's groundbreaking special issue of American Indian Quarterly, "Decolonizing Archaeology" (2006)—and the call for a more equitable and ethical, or decolonized, archaeology—we raise the question: Is it possible to decolonize archaeology? Of late, archaeologies of colonialism seek to counteract Western views of the plight of Indigenous populations and the systematic erasure of peoples, sites, and cultures from the land, from public memory, and the conventional writing of history. For archaeologists, countering narratives of Indigenous loss or absence requires gathering evidence—excavation in the soil and archives—to demonstrate resiliency, even as many present-day Indigenous communities doubt the very premise of that loss and the idea that their histories and cultures are missing or obscured. In this article, we acknowledge the colonial nature of evidence (epistemology) in archaeology. Introducing this special issue, we consider how archaeology has performed as a structure of settler colonialism, and how a close engagement with critical Indigenous theory can reorient us. We argue that a more equitable form of practice is evolving, but that decolonizing archaeology will require a kind of "undisciplining," changing larger institutional structures in universities and heritage protection law. We thus consider the potentials or impossibilities for decolonizing archaeology by centering our questions in the scholarship on settler colonial studies and critical Indigenous theory.

Miskâsowin: Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society

Indigeneity has been a site of relationally produced knowledge deemed scientific and political. In this article, I offer an experimental description of Miskâsowin—an Ininiw/Cree theory of science, technology, and society. This methodological piece is part of an overall project that seeks to understand how changes in technoscience often correlate with changes in the relationships and biotechnologies that colonial nation-states and their citizenries, scientific fields and their researchers, and bioeconomies and their consumers use to form themselves through, in spite of, and (sometimes) as Indigenous peoples. Creating Indigenous theories of the technosciences that affect them is disruptive of colonial ontologies of knowledge and sovereignty. Miskâsowin is part of an emergent subfield of Indigenous Studies: Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (I-STS). I use this framework to map partial connections whereby Cree concepts of tapwewin (truth-telling), miskâsowin (finding one’s core), and misewa (all that exists) resonate with relational academic theoretical frameworks including that of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson. I do so in ways that are uniquely adapted to my (the researcher’s) relationships (and the genealogies that they are routed through) with genomic knowledge and indigeneity; with the scientific and policy fields in Canada (and beyond); and with my own research/er integrity.