Indigenous Writers Research Articles

Developing a researcher identity of relevance for remote Indigenous language education

PurposeThe study is an elaboration on how a graduate student discursively navigates a research identity through lived experiences as an Indigenous Sámi and writings on Indigenous, as well as other suitable research paradigms informing research on digital technologies in education. The guiding question is how a strategy of inquiry to be used in a PhD study on remote 1–9 Sámi language education can be informed by an Indigenous research paradigm. What philosophical guidelines are needed in navigating a sensitive field of investigation shaped by historical atrocities, discrimination and racist assumptions towards the Sámi people and other Indigenous, marginalised groups?Design/methodology/approachA dialogical approach has been used between readings of mainly Indigenous scholars' writings on the topic and anecdotes illustrating personal experiences from a lived life as Sámi.FindingsThrough this process, a researcher identity has developed, informed by the views from an Indigenous research paradigm that humans are ontologically equal to other entities, and epistemologically knowledge constitutes of relationships between different entities. This makes relationality a central feature of an Indigenous epistemology –not only between people but also including, for example, ideas, history, ancestors, future, artefacts and spirituality – which links epistemology to ontology. The axiological issue of accountability works holistically as “glue”.Originality/valueElucidating underlying arguments and motives behind both an Indigenous research paradigm and the development of researcher identity when designing and planning research is rarely done, which provides the originality of the present contribution.

“The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity

AbstractIn the Western cultural archive from James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘noble savages’ to Gore Verbinsky’s 2013 reincarnation of The Lone Ranger, Indigenous American cultures have, for the longest time, been relegated to the past and framed in representations that either displace them into nostalgic folklore or declare them conveniently vanished. While non-Native cultural products such as literary texts, photographs, and paintings, as well as museum exhibitions have coded Indigenous identities as static opposites to modernity, and thus deprived them of a future in Western culture, contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, and curators use these same cultural channels to contest the semiotics of absence, to assert cultural sovereignty, and to empower alternative modes of knowledge. This article considers tribal museums as interventional archives of knowing – in Derrida’s sense of both “assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve” and of “consigning through gathering together signs” (1995/1996: 3; original emphasis). With examples from a Pueblo cultural context, including an exhibition at Disneyworld, Florida; the Sky City Cultural Center and Haak’u Museum in Acoma, New Mexico; as well as the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I trace the ways in which Native American museums strategically undermine what Mark Rifkin has termed “settler time” (2017: 9) and claim instead presence, sovereignty, inclusion, modernity, and futurity. In their specific outlines, these exhibits serve simultaneously as archives of Pueblo cultural heritage and as construction sites of temporality itself.1

Seven Poems on Migration

Seven Poems on Migration Wendy Call (bio) and Irma Pineda (bio) Translator’s Introduction IRMA PINEDA (BINNIZÁ) has published nine books of poetry. Naxiña’ rului’ladxe’ / Rojo deseo (Red desire), published by Pluralia Ediciones in 2018, won Mexico’s Caballo Verde prize for best book of poetry. She currently serves as senior advisor for science, education, and culture for the MORENA Party in the Mexican National Congress. She is the only woman to have been president of Mexico’s National Association of Writers in Indigenous Languages (ELIAC) and was a 2013–15 member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In January 2020, she began a three-year term as one of two representatives of Latin American Indigenous peoples at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Pineda writes bilingual poems in Spanish and in Diidxazá (also known as Isthmus Zapotec). Diidxazá has probably 75,000 speakers and is part of the family of languages known collectively as Zapotec, which has approximately 460,000 speakers (Sistema de Información Cultural [SIC] Mexico 2020). Pineda creates what she calls “parallel poems,” one version in Diidxazá and another in Spanish, reflecting her lived experience: a constant flow between two languages, two cultures, two cosmovisions. Educated in Spanish-only public schools in her hometown of Juchitán, Pineda learned to write in Isthmus Zapotec by looking up words one by one in books she borrowed from her neighbors’ bookshelves. At that time, there was no proper Isthmus Zapotec dictionary. Years later, Pineda’s mother, Cándida Santiago Pineda, founded the first (and still the only) library in her family’s neighborhood in Juchitán, in Mexico’s southeastern state of Oaxaca (Pineda 2012). Fewer and fewer children in Juchitán grow up speaking fluent Diidxazá. [End Page 145] Meanwhile, Diidxazá vocabulary shrinks under the relentless pressure of Spanish. Irma Pineda and other bilingual Indigenous writers in Mexico describe their literary work as “language rescue,” as well as artistic expression. That dual intent is often unappreciated by Mexico’s wider literary community, which long excluded them. Until recently, Mexican bookstores would shelve Indigenous writers’ fiction, poetry, essays, and drama under “Anthropology” rather than “Mexican Literature.” In a 2008 essay, Irma Pineda explained, “Indigenous Mexican cultures are developing a literature that recovers the cosmovisions and aesthetic values of our own cultures, strengthens our languages by reincorporating archaic words and creating neologisms, and also integrates the concerns of a globalized world with local community reflection” (Pineda 2008, 1). The poems published here are drawn from Pineda’s 2007 poetry collection, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ / La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos (Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like River Water), published by Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas (ELIAC), a national Mexican association of Indigenous-language authors. ELIAC began its own publishing house because traditional Mexican publishing houses did not take their members’ literatures seriously (Pineda 2012). Like many of Pineda’s poetry collections, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ has a strong narrative arc; each poem serves as a microchapter in a highly compressed story in poems. It is a collection of persona poems told in two fictional voices from Pineda’s hometown: a person who has immigrated to the United States as an undocumented worker and that person’s partner, who has stayed at home. Pineda’s home community, Juchitán, has experienced heavy outmigration as people leave for jobs in Mexican cities, along the U.S.-Mexico border region, or in the United States. The current migration crisis in the United States—government officials separating families; government officials refusing to allow political, economic, and ecological refugees to apply for asylum; and children housed in cages—makes the poems of Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ urgently important. These persona poems weave a narrative about the physical and emotional challenges of migration under less dire conditions than those we are currently seeing. In the dozen years since these poems were first published in Mexico City, the situation for Pineda’s friends and neighbors who migrate to the United States has grown more awful than we could have imagined. Pineda...

Indigenous Art and Sovereignty Inspiring Change against Environmental Degradation

This special issue on “Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity: In(ter)ventions, Recycling, Sovereignty" constitutes a body of creative contributions and academic articles addressing numerous forms of artistic practices of the Pacific Islands, Australia, French Guiana, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Inspired by Indigenous artists and writers whose practices and creativity help reimagine sustainable ways to inhabit the world, this introduction and our special issue interrogate contemporary environmental issues and the legacy of colonisation. They examine how Indigenous artists and writers, and artists working with Indigenous artists and communities, have for decades raised awareness about environmental issues, and encouraged people to regain their agency to struggle against environmental degradation and further destruction of Indigenous people’s societies and health. This introduction contextualises the concepts and Indigenous terms used by artists to express their vision of what a respectful relationship with the environment would be. It also offers readings of the beautiful literary and artistic creative contributions included in this issue. Environmental themes such as waste recycling, health issues, pollutants (mercury, POPs), and agricultural technics are discussed here in light of human and non-human life and agency. This issue also features a significant range of calls for action to better protect and restore ecosystems.

Recategorising an Arctic Hero

This article discusses the claims of entitlement and processes of rendering a story tellable in early twentieth-century Soviet Union through a case study of the play Vavlyo Nyenyangg. The play was co-authored by Ivan Nogo and linguist Grigori Verbov in the context of the creation of a cultural and political intelligentsia, as well as a literature and other modern institutions, for Nenets, an indigenous community living in northern Russia and Western Siberia. In analysing the manuscripts of the play, the alterations made to it and its final, published version, the article argues that Nenets writers collaborated with their Russian assistants by combining two different fields, the vernacular Nenets and the institutionalised socialist models, to create original textual products that both followed the socialist requirements and alluded to the Nenets oral narration. Shared knowledge, called either ‘folklore’ or ‘oral history’, was used as an entitlement for the indigenous writers to tell stories that were rendered tellable in the socialist context through choices in vocabulary and plot structure. These choices produced stories that erased some local contents, structures and interpretations but simultaneously produced new ones.

Island Fictions, Intellectual Fictions: Dramas of Pacific Isolation in Stevenson, Wells, and Conrad

“Consider the Island,” Deryck Scarr invites us in his history of the Pacific: “the idea of the island.”1 That idea, which Westerners brought to and imposed upon the insular Pacific, is of serious antiquity, in existence well before Magellan’s entry to it in 1521. “Those of us involved in Pacific studies,” Kerry Howe writes,2 “have been too impressed with the apparent novelty of the eighteenth-century Pacific dream island. But that Tahitian mirage was at the end of a very long imaginative tradition, one that long predated the Enlightenment, and even the Renaissance. Indeed it goes back to the very beginnings of Western civilization”—in Greek myth, Plato’s Atlantis, the Bible, and stories like the supremely imaginative “The Shipwrecked Sailor” from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Rousseauesque dream and mirage faded rapidly enough in Western thought after first contact with Tahiti in the 1760s, as stories of Polynesian infanticide and homosexuality were eagerly circulated by the fourth estate in an atmosphere of religious revival in late eighteenth-century England. (John Hawkesworth’s editorial compendium of 1773, An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of his present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, was an important early revelation in that process.) But a myth inverted need lose little of its power and influence. That which was once utopian became dystopian, and the noble savage became ignoble, but the precedent myth of island isolation, augmented as it had been by accounts of Magellan’s travels by Antonio Pigafetta and others, accompanied and intensified almost every aspect of the West’s imaginative involvement with the “South Sea.” It does so still, though indigenous writers and historians have long since cast doubt upon it. The most important revisionary intervention in that respect is probably Epeli Hau’ofa’s essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” which does a good deal of myth-inversion of its own as regards Western views (political, economic, and cultural) of the islands of the Pacific as “tiny, confined spaces” at immense distances from both each other and the cosmopolitan epicentres of the First World. The peoples of Oceania, Hau’ofa argued, “did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions”:

Irihapeti Ramsden: The Public Narrative on Cultural Safety

The magnificent voices of Indigenous women who want to restore, preserve and extend the beauty of Indigenous culture must be relocated and honoured as the last best hope of escaping the tragic impacts of colonization. This paper started as an exploration of New Zealand Indigenous scholar Irihapeti Ramsden’s extraordinary efforts to imbed Cultural Safety as a foundation for nursing training and unity of purpose for all community helpers to alter the trajectory of colonization and its tragic impacts on Indigenous peoples. It morphed into a celebration of the powerful ‘reflective topical auto-biographies’ or meta-narratives of adaptability and resilience all Indigenous people need to share as we recover and heal from intergenerational traumas inflicted in the name of civilization and racial supremacy. Transformative change starts with self discovery as Irihapeti Ramsden taught her student nurses. Women and children are the most poignant victims of that foolish colonial project and their survival stories can lead all humanity back to respectful and loving sustainability. Indigenous women’s resilience stories need a special space in academic literature. Their enduring women-spirit has always guided this First Nations to be better first as an Indigenous man and more importantly as a human being. Irihapeti Ramsden’s journey to put Cultural Safety out there in mainstream academia began with a powerful reflective inner healing journey. Her life and work was a remarkable gift to all. The title of this paper derives from Section Three of her PhD thesis. It must be shared throughout all the worlds’ spaces in need of decolonization. Her ultimately political meta-narrative to alter ignorance and arrogance within education, government and society is one all Indigenous writers and scholars must study and articulate across often culturally unsafe places and spaces within Canada’s colleges and universities.

Multiethnicity and Multilingualism in the Minor Literature of Manchukuo

Although claimed as a nation-state, with a government, a territory, and citizenry, Manchukuo (1932–1945) is a colony of the Empire of Japan, appropriated from Northeast China. As such, Manchukuo’s literary identity complicates the relationship between nationalism and literature, inviting us to rethink the history of Chinese literature in specific and East Asian literary history in general. This article tackles the thorny problem of Manchukuo literary formation by going through Shuimei Shih’s concept of sinophone and Chen Pingyuan’s notion of the multiethnic, only to conclude via a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration of Kafka that Manchukuo’s corpus is best approached as a minor literature of its own. The very colonial and local complexity of Manchukuo’s minor literature lies in its multiethnicity and multilingualism. A close reading of Mei’niang, Yokoda Fumiko, and Arsenii Nesmelov, through their deterritorialized Chinese, Japanese, and Russian stories, demonstrates the range of indigenous and exiled writers in their diverse imagination of Manchukuo’s ambiguous sovereignty.

Community-University Engagement: From Chasm to Chiasm

This paper addresses the problem of the legacy of Western philosophical thought for community-engaged learning. Binaries between subject and object, and between theory and practice, present challenges to developing a coherent vision of the transformative potential of community-engaged learning or service learning. Some Western thinkers, however, have challenged such binaries. This reflective essay draws on phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, and psychologist Lev Vygotsky respectively to address questions about perception and relationality in community-engaged learning, the ethical dimensions of such learning in marginalized communities, and the role of instructors in structuring connective experiences for students. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body provides a useful counterpoint to binaries between subject and object, self and world. His radical relationality is tempered by Levinas, who reminds us that difference is often marked as disruptive and dangerous, and that ethical relationships require openness to the Other. In complement, Vygotsky’s work inspires us to think more deeply about what a non-binary, dialectical relationship between theory and practice implies for pedagogy, foregrounding the importance of the instructor in such connective, integrative approaches. Together, these writers’ ideas open spaces for a productive dialog about epistemology—for example, with Indigenous writers—and a vision for ethical community-engaged learning for human development and social change.

The New Animism and Its Challenges to the Study of Religion

Abstract In the last decades, the worldview(s) of so-called Indigenous religions have regained academic interest. Scholars of religion, anthropologists, and Indigenous writers engage in a new research field called new animism characterized by a diversity of insider and outsider positions. The field contains immense potential for inspiring general debates in the study of religion because it touches on fundamental questions about hermeneutics, epistemology, epistemic goals, disciplinary identities, and the influence of Western ontology on scientific and academic research. This article aims to draw the attention of scholars of religion to the new animism by contextualizing the field within disciplinary and cultural history, presenting its core theories, analyzing its methodological and epistemological positions, and identifying the central players ands its politically highly charged social contexts with asymmetrical power relations. Finally, it discusses how the new animism challenges general debates within the study of religion and may provocatively stimulate them.

When Rivers Were Trails: cultural expression in an indigenous video game

ABSTRACT When Rivers Were Trails is a 2D adventure game wherein The Oregon Trail meets Where the Water Tastes Like Wine through an Indigenous lens. The game depicts a myriad of cultures during the player’s journey from Minnesota to California amidst the impact of land allotment in the 1890s. Initiated by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, the game was developed in collaboration with the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab at Michigan State University thanks to support from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and the many Indigenous creatives who contributed design, art, music, and writing. Uniquely, When Rivers Were Trails is a sovereign game, meaning that it was directed and informed by Indigenous creatives who maintained the role of final decisions during development. Merging design research and close reading methods, this study sets out to describe the game’s design, development process in regards to the game writing, and the resulting themes which emerged as a result of engaging Indigenous writers in self-determined representations.

The “leftovers of empire”: Commonwealth writers and the Booker Prize

ABSTRACT“International” novel prizes in English not only exclude the majority of Commonwealth writers: they perpetuate a colonial narrative of cultural superiority and authority. Local and regional book prizes are devalued in favour of “international” recognition, but too little is understood of the politics and business of the English-speaking book world, of the continued market domination of publishing in London and New York, and the cultural implications of valuing non-Indigenous narratives and diasporic literature over local anglophone publishing. Barriers to entry for Commonwealth writers – particularly Indigenous writers – include rights sales to the UK and therefore eligibility for “international” prizes. The recent backlash against admitting US writers to the Booker reveals the perception of Commonwealth writers – both by British publishers and by writers – as a distant third in anglophone writing, easily forgotten and excluded from publishing lists, prize contention, and judging panels.

Re-Framing, De-Framing, and Shattering the Frames: Indigenous Writers and Artists on Representing Residential School Narratives

Re-Framing, De-Framing, and Shattering the Frames: Indigenous Writers and Artists on Representing Residential School Narratives

On Critical Humility

On Critical Humility Warren Cariou (bio) Tawnshay. Sit down, my friend; have some tea. This is not the usual kind of discussion we have around here, but it's something I hope you'll find useful. It's not an article exactly, but rather a meditation on the state of things in our discipline and the future we will make for it. I've taught Indigenous literatures for quite a few years now, yet sometimes I still think of myself as a beginner, especially when I visit with the Elders, the storytellers, the knowledge-keepers. I'm going to tell you about something I've learned from their examples, something I should have understood long ago, but I didn't pay close enough attention. I guess I was in too much of hurry to become an expert. Somewhere along the way, I forgot or didn't notice the most important things. I'll start with a common story, one that has repeated itself so often in the last few years that you have likely heard a version of it, or witnessed something like it yourself. In fact it has happened so many times that I'm going to tell a composite version of it, built out of several such incidents, and with names changed to avoid embarrassing anyone. It began at a gathering—a literary and academic gathering, held at a university that was taking its first steps toward what it called Indigenization. Many prominent Indigenous writers had been invited, along with publishers and scholars who were interested in their work. It was the opening reception for a week-long series of meetings, and excitement was in the air. People were mingling, recognizing names and publishing houses, trying to make a good impression. But in the midst of the laughter and the somewhat nervous conversation, I noticed a small, white-haired man sitting by himself, looking relatively uninterested in what was going on. I felt bad that he was alone, so I sat down and introduced myself and asked how he was doing. "Not bad," he said, and he told me his name was Dan. I asked Dan where he was from, and he said he had lived near one of the neighboring cities for a few years, but he had traveled quite a lot for his work. He didn't mention what his work was. But we [End Page 1] talked about travel, and it turned out that he had visited my hometown a few times, and we made the usual attempts to figure out whether we knew some of the same people. Gradually I learned that Dan had "done some teaching" for a while, and that he had also worked in counseling. He never did mention why he was there at the gathering, and I felt like it might be rude to ask. He didn't seem to like talking about himself. Nonetheless, we had plenty to talk about for the next hour or so, and by the time the reception was winding down, I felt like I was getting to know this Dan, and I was thankful to have a chance to talk with him. "Hope to meet you again," I said when it was time to leave. He smiled and said, "You just might." The next morning, we assembled for the beginning of the sessions and we received the official greeting from one of the figureheads of the institution where we were located. And as such people are wont to do, this figurehead spent a lot of time talking about how great the institution was, and how accomplished the faculty were, and how this was the beginning of a very important relationship. And finally when everyone was nearly asleep, this figurehead person said, "Oh, and we have an Elder here and he has a few words to say as well. Dan? By the way, Dan, we're running a bit late so we don't have much time." And then this figurehead excused himself and left the room before the Elder could speak. The room was dead silent for a few seconds after the door closed behind the fleeing administrator. But eventually, there was the sound...

Burhan SönmezLabyrinth by Ümit Hussein

lips, leaving everything else to the imagination . Similarly, the story focuses on the lovers’ passion, evoking in a few sentences the entire life of a once-famous man now defeated, tormented, unrecognizable to his close friends, and a stranger to himself. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers Ed. Elissa Washuta & Theresa Warburton. Seattle. University of Washington Press. 2019. 266 pages. THE BEST ASPECT of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers is its intrinsic anthological quality. This anthology of indigenous writers features one or multiple pieces from twenty-seven Canadian and US authors, a veritable feast of First Nations and Native American writers that readers may otherwise never have discovered. This is not a collection of instantly recognizable literary rock star names—Joseph Boyden, Joy Harjo, David Treuer, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Linda LeGarde, Natalie Diaz, and the newest addition to the canon of bright Native writers, Tommy Orange, are conspicuously absent—which leaves this fan of Native literature curious. Still, this book serves up plenty of new discoveries. Consider Stephen Graham Jones’s essay, “Letter to a Just-Starting-out Indian Writer —and Maybe to Myself.” This essay could serve as a summary for this book’s intent and of expectations of indigenous literature overall. This piece asks heavy questions: What topics should we expect to find in an anthology of Native writers? How should we expect them to write? The publishing industry will package Native writers as “exotic,” Jones warns. He Books in Review Burhan Sönmez Labyrinth Trans. Ümit Hussein. New York. Other Press. 2019. 192 pages. COMPACT, thought-provoking, and gently exquisite, Labyrinth, the fourth novel by Turkish author Burhan Sönmez, quietly establishes him as one of Europe’s great contemporary authors. From page one, we are drawn into the immediacy of the main character, Boratin, a youngish jazz musician who has lost his memory following a suicidal leap into Istanbul’s Bosphorus strait. Moved home from the hospital, we follow his studied reimmersion with once-familiar objects and with the family, friends, and social mores that have formed the trappings of his life until then. Largely shut out from this previously ingrained reality, Boratin progresses through clouds of impressions, reflection, reasoning, and evaluation, seizing each new-old thing he meets—propelling the narrative with an etched clarity that sends out sparks at every turn. The effect of the book’s simple clauses, infused with a continual stream of sensual description, is hypnotic. Sönmez has a knack for finding just the right offhand detail to throw a scene or stream of thought into perfect philosophical relief—akin perhaps to Don DeLillo’s prose, yet tempered here with a sort of European humility. In place of DeLillo’s hard irony, a brilliantly earned sensuality restores a sense of narrative wholeness in how we experience this novel’s unfolding: They had heard that in the beginning was the Word, now they can hear from the book dealer’s voice that in the end too there will only be the Word. Life is comprehending the word. And when the book dealer’s slow-moving lips eventually say that death too consists of words, the young pair raise their heads and BURHAN SÖNMEZ 100 WLT WINTER 2020 also instructs: “Don’t let people shame you about not being an expert on your own culture,” and “You don’t have to be able to define what an Indian is in order to write ‘Indian.’ Putting a definition on us, that’s playing their game.” These authors ask when exactly is it okay to stop talking about the fact that their people suffered genocide at the hands of whites for hundreds of years and that Western corporations continue to desecrate the land and rights of indigenous people today from Canada to Chile. They talk about trying to hold onto their traditions yet simultaneously progress. They are not writing for the acceptance of a white audience but for all the judging of and by each other and the lack of identity they sometimes feel as individuals. Deborah A. Miranda’s “Tuolume” is a grueling, haunting personal narrative...

Returning Water Data to Communities in Ndola, Zambia: A Case Study in Decolonising Environmental Science

Many scientific research projects carried out in developing countries gather data and fail to return any summary of the findings to the community that provided the data. Residents from communities experiencing water issues are therefore deprived of effective participation in the use of findings, since communities might be seen as only a source of data. Indigenous writers have revealed the injustice of this reality and have suggested that this is typical of colonial or ‘colonising’ research methods. It is concerning because accessing research knowledge encourages communities to examine their issues and empowers them to formulate solutions. Inspired by decolonising methodologies, we explored different ‘decolonising’ approaches to returning research findings to participant communities using the results of a recent water research project conducted in Ndola, Copperbelt Province, Zambia. In this case study, we describe participant communities experience regarding access to research findings and conclude that face-to-face discussion is the preferred approach to returning water research findings in Ndola.

CORPOREALITY IN NATIVE AMERICAN NOVELS

The paper analyzes various options for interpreting the concept of in the works by prominent Native American writers, in particular, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ignatia Broker and Jordan Wheeler. The essence of the corporeality concept is revealed, scholarly discussions of this problem are analyzed. Gender relations and colonialism is not a new issue in modern literary criticism, since the conquered territories are often represented by a of a conquered woman in the minds of the conquerors. The institutionalization of the patriarchy as a system of social control and social order in colonial studies is transformed from a low level of a family to the highest levels of society and is reflected in the whole system of social relations. Indian as a rather exotic form of plays an important part in this case. Having studied the specifics of the concept use in the novels by these writers, it can be argued that this concept is divided into two components – the body itself as a physical object in space, and the perception of this body, which is a manifestation of the universal corporeality factoring in gender roles and sexuality in the context of the Indian cultural tradition. Usually a description of the body's condition is the equivalent of human feelings in the novel tradition of indigenous writers.

White Womans Burden: A Critique of White Womens Portrayal in Selected Postcolonial Fiction

Image of white women occur frequently in postcolonial writings. This paper attempts to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the white womens portrayals in the selected Pakistani postcolonial fiction to determine the comparative discrepancy between the assumptions and reality about the role of white women in the colonies. The white women being the part of civilizing mission of the white man, are seen with a particular light by the indigenous people because in comparison to the white man, white womes role has been that of a benevolent mother. This problematizes the situation and hence calls for the investigation into the portrayals and the roles of the white women as projected by the indigenous writers. The study delimits to Forster, Sidhwa, and Hamid and analyses the selected chunks of the text under the lens of theoretical frame work proposed by Jayawardena within the postcolonial context.

The inter-Indigenous encounter

There exists an extensive amount of research in the fields of anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy driven by settler-oriented comparisons between Indigenous nations that verified the representation of Indigenous peoples as Other. Meanwhile, the amount of scholarly works on comparative Indigenous literary encounters in the last decade is worthy of note as indicative of the emergence of a planetary decolonial consciousness. To present an argument as to the need to think of the planetary agency of Indigenous writers, I will closely examine the variety of poetic strategies utilized by Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann of South Australia, and Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty of Southern Queensland, in their writing towards other Indigenous peoples from Gaelic Ireland, and the Pacific. This serves two crucial interventions, puncturing through the deficit discourse that essentializes the poethical contribution of Aboriginal writers, and developing comparative strategies for future Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounters.

Reflexões sobre possibilidades de uma antropologia guarani e kaiowá – ou o que de antropologia indígena tem no que os índios escrevem?

Este artigo esboça um breve panorama sobre uma parcela dos trabalhos indígenas produzidos pelos Kaiowá e Guarani no Mato Grosso do Sul ou em regimes de colaboração com pesquisadores não indígenas procurando identificar em que medida eles nos trazem a percepção de uma antropologia indígena. A ideia da colaboração, iluminada pela de “pacto etnográfico” protagonizado de modo exemplar por Davi Kopenawa e Bruce Albert (2015), nos faz refletir sobre o que caracteriza a colaboração e como ela pode ser percebida nos diálogos e traduções estabelecidos em torno dos escritos indígenas. Discutimos, ainda, como recurso de contraponto, pesquisas realizadas por indígenas de outras etnias, sem a pretensão de dar conta de toda antropologia indígena no Brasil, mas buscando articulações com a produção de algumas pesquisas realizadas por kaiowá e guarani. Trata-se antes, de uma provocação às múltiplas possibilidades de percepções sobre a vida e as relações implicadas com multiversos, nos quais o pensamento indígena se exercita nos escritos indígenas a partir de articulações com o pensamento antropológico. Isto nos leva à questão central do presente texto: o que de antropologia indígena tem no que os índios escrevem? Na parte final do artigo inserimos uma reflexão sobre o viés de gênero, discutindo algumas pesquisas realizadas por mulheres kaiowá e guarani, e nos esforçamos para identificar diferenças nos temas e enfoques por elas adotados.