Indigenous Politics Research Articles

On Inclusion and Resurgence: The State of North American Indigenous Theatre and Performance Scholarship

Abstract: This article follows the structure of a pop song—verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus—to put into relationship scholarship on North American Indigenous theatre and performance, the current state of academia, the politics of Indigeneity, and critiques of recognition and inclusion from Indigenous Studies. Historicizing Indigenous theatre scholarship and production alongside Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick’s participatory karaoke performance, “Love Songs to End Colonization,” models disciplinary inclusion and how Indigenous performance challenges it. This essay turns to Glen Coulthard’s call for Indigenous resurgence and Dylan Robinson’s demonstration of disciplinary redress to explicate why Indigenous performance can be aesthetically and politically powerful. In singing these disparate ideas together, this essay considers the benefits and pitfalls of inclusion for Indigenous theatre into North American theatre production, scholarship, and higher education as well as issue a warning against complacent inclusion and mere celebrations of diversity. Indigenous performance asks more than theatre and performance studies often acknowledges; to engage with it robustly and productively, the field must be open to singing a song it is just beginning to learn.

The Ductch Colonial Policies on Religion and Education in the Dutch Indies (1889-1942)

This study aims to examine the inlandsch polietiek (indigenous politics) implemented by the Dutch Colonial Government during the colonial period in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century. This study focuses on analyzing the religious and educational practices conducted by the Dutch Colonial Government throughout its rule. Utilizing historical research methods, this study found that the Colonial-Dutch Government adopted a fluctuating political strategy between neutrality and security to maintain its power. In the religious context, the Colonial Government tended to support Islam in its pure religious aspect, yet strived to prevent Islamic intervention in state administration affairs. Islamic education was compelled to follow an independent path, free from political influences. This conclusion is supported by the Besluit dated March 5, 1860, No. 10 f issued by the Dutch Colonial Government, and an analysis of Aqib Suminto's book, "Islamic Politics in the Dutch East Indies," which illustrates efforts to diminish the influence of Islam. Consequently, Islamic education received less attention and was forced to conform to the educational framework established by the Colonial Government.

The Influence of the Native Quota in the Organization of Local and Regional Indigenous Political Movements

This research, set in a Latin American context, aimed to delve into the political participation of ethnic minorities, particularly indigenous peoples, and its relationship with democracy, political systems, and parties. Using a comprehensive review of literature from various databases including Scopus, Web of Sciences, Wiley, and EBSCO, and employing the PRISMA method, it sought to understand the political perceptions and preferences of these minorities within society. The study underscored the critical role of ethnic minority participation, especially of indigenous peoples, in guaranteeing representation in the democratic framework. Notable differences emerged in how these minorities view democracy compared to the broader populace. Recognizing ethnic minorities in political roles not only acknowledges their unique challenges but also aids their integration into the political fabric. The overarching conclusion emphasized the indispensable nature of their participation for a just and genuinely democratic society, highlighting the significance of indigenous perspectives on democracy and the pressing need to respect their cultural norms. Political parties also play a pivotal role in influencing perceptions about ethnic diversity. What sets this study apart is its holistic examination of the political engagement of ethnic minorities, shedding light on their views and preferences in relation to democracy and the wider political system, and stressing the role of political parties in fostering a more inclusive political landscape.

Colonialism and the Changing Nature of Indigenous Political Organisations: The Okun-Yoruba and the Igbo in Comparative Perspectives

The study carries out a comparative analysis of the nature and characters of indigenous politics and leadership among the Okun-Yoruba and the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria. The paper extends the analysis to the changing nature of the political organisation of both societies as a result of external influence. For the Okun-Yoruba, the paper explores the political organisations and nature of intergroup relations before the Nupe invasion in the mid-nineteenth century and the subsequent imposition of British colonial rule in Nigeria around 1900. The indigenous political organisation of the Igbo is subjected to a comparative analysis with the Okun-Yoruba. The study also examines the impact of British colonialism on both the Igbo and Okun-Yoruba. It is noted that both the Okun and Igbo societies shared similar indigenous political and social structures that were characterised by small-scale political units. These colonial arrangements had far-reaching consequences on inter-group relations as well as the political organisation of both Okunland and Igboland. British colonial arrangement applied a new system of administration that was fashioned in line with the indirect rule system which was antithetical to the pre-colonial situation. The British imperialism in Nigeria did not only alter the political landscape but they also changed the nature of intergroup relations for both Okun Yoruba and the Igbo.

On Indigenous Politics and Political Revolution in Mexico and Beyond

On Indigenous Politics and Political Revolution in Mexico and Beyond

We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California

We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California

We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California by Martin Rizzo-Martinez (review)

We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California by Martin Rizzo-Martinez (review)

We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California by Martin Rizzo-Martinez (review)

We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California by Martin Rizzo-Martinez (review)

Co-producing autonomy? Forest monitoring programs, territorial ontologies, and Indigenous politics in Amazonia

Forest monitoring programs have become widespread in Amazon Basin countries. Using GPS artifacts, smartphones, drones, and other technologies, international environmental non-government organizations (IENGOs) propose these programs as tools to control and stop deforestation events—and thus of climate change mitigation. These also seem like ideal initiatives for IENGOs to collaborate with Indigenous organizations, responding to calls to include their knowledge in climate governance. I analyze forest/territorial monitoring programs created by the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) and its member organizations in Ecuador and Peru. Scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and digital geographies has demonstrated how digital environmental technologies and environmental relations and politics can co-produce and shape one another. It has also referred to the historically exploitative relationships that technoscientific projects have enforced towards Indigenous peoples, and the potential of digital tools for emancipatory goals. I argue that forest monitoring programs and technologies co-produce forms of climate and territorial politics in Amazonia. Through forest monitoring programs, Indigenous leaders and organizations imagine and enact territorial defense, or a politics founded on integral territorial ontologies. That is, they see the programs as tools to strengthen their autonomy, to build the capacities of leaders at all scales of political organization, and to support their claims for territorial rights. For them, technologies can make Indigenous cosmovisions or ancestral knowledges visible. However, these programs can also reinforce a politics (of IENGOs) where territories are spaces with strict boundaries and exclusive rights, and which encourages open-access information, thus potentially threatening Indigenous autonomy. Thus, I discuss the intrinsically contradictory impact of monitoring technologies, as the conceptions of territories as lifeworlds, and the embeddedness of ancestral knowledges in them, further exceed their possibilities. Conclusions highlight the importance of attending to Indigenous territorial defense to understand how (new) technologies and society shape each other, and the many implications of climate change responses to justice issues.

The Míkmaw Concordat: Rethinking Treaty Making between Indigenous Peoples and Settlers

AbstractIn 1610, the Míkmaq formed a treaty with French representatives of the Holy See. James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson argues inThe Míkmaw Concordat(1997) that through this treaty the Míkmaq enfolded settlers into their existing international political order by extending to settlers their concept of sacred kinship. In the more than 25 years since the publication ofThe Míkmaw Concordat, it has received no attention from scholars of political science. This omission is unsurprising as political science struggles to account for Indigenous politics because of its traditional focus on the “Westphalian state.” This framework excludes many aspects of Indigenous political traditions, particularly their approaches to international politics, which are not reducible to state‐centric frameworks. The Concordat, as a treaty between two nonstate entities, is an example of Indigenous treaty making that can illuminate both the history of settler colonialism and how contemporary social movements are resisting the settler state.

Indigeneity and Indigenous Politics: Ground-breaking Resources

The purpose of this article is to relate the very important question of the autonomy of indigenous peoples to freely make decisions about their life with the notion of indigeneity, reconceptualised as a socially constructed and deeply contested resource. Resources are more than mere static assets or quantities of matter waiting to be measured, explored or protected. Something becomes a resource through joint processes of quantification, valuation, and normalisation. Along these lines, indigeneity is not just the ascertainment of something or someone in relation to ‘somewhat else’, but a nexus of indigenous peoples’ self-realisation and political intervention. To be indigenous is to exist politically in space and in relation to antagonist forces and processes that constantly downgrade their ethnic and social condition. Indigeneity is, thus, a resource that presupposes the value and the fight for their rights and for other (so-called) indigenous resources found in their lands. The main contribution here is the claim that indigeneity is a ground-breaking resource and a reaction formulated in the interstices of the old and new machineries of market-oriented coloniality. Indigeneity is reinterpreted as a special, highly politicised resource that directly and indirectly opposes processes of world grabbing and the appropriation of other territorialised resources from indigenous areas. It is concluded that indigeneity, as a resourceful resource, has become a key factor in the process of external and internal recognition, which galvanises political mobilisation and instigates novel forms of interaction. What makes indigenous peoples more and more unique is also what makes them share a socio-political struggle with allied, subaltern social groups.

Indigenous Political Representation in Canada

AbstractDespite long-standing academic interest in Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, there has been little study of Indigenous elected officials as representational actors. We ask: What are the distinctively Indigenous forms of representation practised by Indigenous elected officials in Canada? And how does clarifying the role of Indigenous elected officials as representatives both contribute to and enhance our overall understanding of Indigenous politics, governance and sovereignty? We draw on the existing literatures on substantive representation as well as original interviews conducted with current and former Indigenous elected officials to develop an original conceptualization of Indigenous representation. These actors differ in their perceptions of themselves and their roles as representatives, the representational behaviours they engage in and the outcomes they seek. Our conceptualization of Indigenous representation engages with four themes: Indigenous perspective, Indigenous advocacy, balance with other imperatives including constituency representation and party discipline, and Indigenous nationhood.

Decolonizing Patagonia: Mapuche Peoples and State Formation in Argentina

Lucas Savino's Decolonizing Patagonia: Mapuche Peoples and State Formation in Argentina traces the development of Mapuche activism in the province of Neuquén (in southern Argentina) from the 1970s through the present day. The book considers Indigenous political identity formation in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism—defined as “a selective recognition of Indigenous rights” intended to make such rights compatible with “a broader neoliberal order of capitalist accumulation” (p. 9). Savino argues that neoliberal multiculturalism has at times opened up new spaces for Indigenous political participation in Argentina, a country long mythologized as homogenously white. At the same time, Argentina's embrace of neoliberal multiculturalism has allowed state institutions to absorb, contain, and stifle radical movements for Indigenous sovereignty.Savino's study is situated within a broader theoretical literature on Indigenous politics in Latin America. As such, it brings Argentina and the Mapuche into a scholarly conversation from which they have been largely absent. However, Savino is also attentive to the particularities of the Argentine case. The demographic minority of Argentina's Indigenous population (who comprise only 2.4 percent of the overall population) and the country's unique history of provincial political autonomy set the stage for Savino's discussion (p. 6).Chapters 1 and 2 provide a broad historical overview. Chapter 1 tackles the historiography of race, citizenship, and neoliberalism in Latin America, while chapter 2 delves into the history of Argentine state formation. Savino helpfully positions Latin American concepts like indigenismo and mestizaje as precursors to multicultural neoliberalism, tracing how dominant narratives about racial belonging have conditioned Indigenous peoples' access to citizenship and political belonging. Chapter 2 displays a strong command of the scholarly literature on Argentine state formation. However, the actions and agency of Indigenous peoples remain largely absent, giving the impression that state formation was something that happened to Indigenous people—not something that they shaped and participated in. Considering this book's focus on Indigenous politics, Savino could have strengthened his analysis by engaging more deeply with the historical and anthropological literature on Indigenous diplomacy and multiethnic frontier governance in the Pampas and Patagonia.Chapters 3 through 5 move into the present day, examining the complicated relationship between neoliberal multiculturalism, Mapuche political participation, and collective identity. Chapter 4 is particularly effective in this regard. In this chapter, Savino uses a series of case studies to highlight how the politics of neoliberal multiculturalism have invited Indigenous activism to an extent but also placed stark limitations on activist endeavors. For example, Savino highlights a recent push for Mapuche comanagement of national parks. Under a neoliberal multiculturalist regime, state institutions have come to see the Mapuche as having a “special relationship of respect” with nature and therefore as crucial to national park administration (p. 128). However, more radical demands for territorial autonomy and direct administrative control have been denied and, in some cases, have led to the end of comanagement altogether. Clear, engaging, and informative, this chapter would serve as a fantastic introduction to the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism and its real-world impacts for undergraduates or graduate students. Taken together, chapters 3 through 5 show how the shared goal of territorial autonomy has informed the development of a collective Mapuche political identity. Because these calls for territorial autonomy go beyond the bounds of acceptable Indigenous activism under neoliberal multiculturalism, the rise of this new political identity has corresponded with a rise in state violence and repression.One key contribution is Savino's decision to study Mapuche activism at a provincial scale. Savino convincingly argues that a national scope is inadequate for the Argentine case and more generally for Indigenous minority contexts. Because Argentina has no nationwide Indigenous organization, Savino argues, national-level studies tend to reproduce scholarly blind spots and reinforce a narrative of Indigenous absence. Savino instead employs a combination of documentary evidence and participant observation to provide a window into local-level neuquino politics. The scope of the archival research is impressive and provides Savino with an on-the-ground vision of Mapuche activism over the past 50 years. While personal interviews with Mapuche leaders clearly informed the study, the voices of Savino's interlocutors are only occasionally present in the text. The few direct quotations drawn from interviews add incredible dimension to Savino's work; more such quotations would have been a welcome addition.Although Decolonizing Patagonia is not strictly speaking a history book, historians of modern Latin America will find much to admire about it. Those who study race, state violence, and the formation of collective identities—either in historical perspective or in the present day—will appreciate this book's clear, readable analysis of Indigenous politics and state responses. This book is a welcome contribution to the small but rapidly growing English-language scholarship on Indigenous politics in the Southern Cone. Savino's clear prose and helpful signposting make this a strong choice for undergraduate and graduate courses in Latin American history and politics.

Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez Martin Rizzo-Martinez. We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 536 pp. Illustrations. Hardcover $80.00. Natale Zappia Natale Zappia NATALE ZAPPIA is associate professor of history and director of the Institute for Sustainability at California State University, Northridge. His works include The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis: A Collection of Portraits and Stories from Native North America (with Steadman Upham, 2006); Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin (2014); and Rez Metal (film and book, 2020). Zappia is also the associate project director of the Early California Cultural Atlas. He currently works with local tribal communities in Southern California on the Los Angeles Landscape History Mapping Project. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 126–128. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.126 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Natale Zappia; Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 126–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.126 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search We Are Not Animals is a monumental volume exploring the Indigenous contours that shaped the colonial, Mexican, and American periods of Alta California. Hyperfocused on the intricate and continuous lineages, traditional ecological knowledge, and cultures of multiple communities within and around Santa Cruz (home of Mission Santa Cruz), Martin Rizzo nonetheless offers history on an epic scale. His study is enmeshed in deep time, ecologies, and practices, as well as meticulously engaged with underutilized or overlooked archival sources—particularly those originating from Indigenous archives. Weighing in at nearly five hundred pages and with close to fifty tables, maps, and figures, Rizzo’s work provides the most comprehensive and detailed account to date of the Ohlone experience in what is now the Santa Cruz coastline and mountain range. Although California is home to tech titans with global reach, Native Californians and their histories remain hidden in plain sight. Rizzo’s goal is to cast... You do not currently have access to this content.

‘We Will Teach India Democracy’: Indigenous Voices in Constitution Making

ABSTRACT The framing of the Indian Constitution (1946-50) was a pivotal moment in the history of indigenous communities (colloquially adivasis, officially scheduled tribes) and their relationship with the state. This essay makes three interventions. First, I contest the prevailing emphasis in Indian history and sociology on seeing indigenous politics as primarily in opposition to state institutions and laws. Instead, drawing on representations from indigenous organisations to the Constituent Assembly (CA), I highlight an earlier trajectory of engagement with law-making and state institutions. Second, I show how tribes saw the making of the constitution as an opportunity to be recognised as both equal citizens and distinct communities and offered real alternatives in constitutional design and ideas of democracy. What is particularly interesting is how, despite the different constitutional histories of countries with indigenous populations, there is common core to the demand for ‘constitutional recognition’ involving cultural, political and resource autonomy. Third, through a close reading of CA and committee deliberations, I show how personalities, processes and contingencies and not abstract rational deliberations alone shaped constitutional design. Here, I add to the literature locating the ‘force of law’ in the procedural movement of files.

Working Through the Politics of Indigeneity: Decolonising Psychology by Way of a Dialectical Approach

Our particular concern here is with how decolonising psychology is interpreted (or misinterpreted) as well as its implications for making our discipline a truly liberating enterprise. We make three related arguments here: first, colonialism was a joint project between the colonisers and the colonised instead of being a one-way imposition of the worldviews of just the colonisers. Second, the constellation of the values of the colonised societies (before their colonisation) that facilitated the fruition of colonialism continues to be a part of the culture of these societies even after their freedom from colonial rule. Third, a version of indigenous psychology that is based on simplistic binaries such as Indigenous vs Western, Local vs Global, or Self vs Other is bound to fail in achieving the goal of substantive decolonisation. Moreover, there is a politics of indigeneity too as Edward Said in his classic Orientalism (1978) has argued that the concept of the orient itself was a construction of the West for an ideological purpose. Therefore, it is ultimately argued that the project of true or substantive decolonisation can be accomplished only by attaining a proper understanding of self and culture and this goal can be achieved by collaborating with others. Further, the culture of a society may be viewed as a set of disparate, often contradictory values which help to keep a check on the excesses of certain cultural tendencies by offering an internal critique of it. This way of looking at culture calls for viewing it as a dynamic process and necessitates a dialectical approach to examine the nature of the relationship between contradictory values of a culture. In this effort, the methodology of critical cultural psychoanalysis helps us to recognise the dialectical relation between the conscious and the unconscious/repressed aspect of the culture of the societies of the coloniser and the colonised and work through them to expand their consciousness by recovering/owning the repressed/disavowed aspect of their self. Finally, it is argued that like colonisation, substantive decolonisation will also involve a collaborative process between the colonisers and the colonised whereby they can recognise and own their selves in entirety.

Elemental Documentary: Fire, Forensics and Pyro-Epistemologies

Abstract This article examines the interconnections between fire and Indigenous politics, geographies and epistemologies. More precisely, the article focuses on how different modes of emergent nonfiction media practice are engaging with the pyrological and interrogating its entanglements with Indigenous forms of existence and ecological-political struggle in a moment of escalating climate catastrophe and capitalist settler-colonial exploitation and extraction. The article explores how the pyrological and the ecological are framed and taken up in markedly contrasting discursive, visual and formal ways across these modes of nonfiction media practice. At a broader conceptual level, I examine these divergent engagements with pyro-ecologies to map out how countervailing currents in contemporary documentary practice differently approach conceptualisations of both the evidentiary and the epistemological in relation to Indigenous politics and ontologies. I argue that these engagements manifest differently across these works depending upon the degree to which they remain attentive to – and engaged with – Indigenous modes of ecologically-conscious land-based knowledge, pedagogy and evidence.

We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California. By Martin Rizzo-Martinez

We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California. By Martin Rizzo-Martinez

From Reconciliation to ‘Idle No More’: ‘Articulation’ and Indigenous Struggle in Canada

How do different discourses lead to changes in understandings of the world, identity, meaning and practice in Indigenous politics in Canada? This article introduces the poststructuralist theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to Canadian Indigenous studies and demonstrates that it is a unique and effective theory for understanding this question. It finds that in the last few decades, two principal discourses regarding Indigenous peoples and colonialism have circulated in the Canadian body politic—namely, (1) “reconciliation” and (2) “Idle No More.” These discourses shape the identities of both Indigenous peoples and settlers, construct understandings of the world, and determine the meaning of related political struggle, leading to real world practice and politics. The reconciliation discourse has at times been effective at becoming a dominant discourse and has often been able to constitute the meaning of important terms such as ‘decolonization.’ It serves to pacify Indigenous resistance to colonialism. Counter-hegemonic discourses on reconciliation such as ‘Idle No More’ have been able to challenge that discourse. Academic literature, newspaper articles, YouTube videos, podcasts developed by Indigenous scholars, public letters and speeches delivered by Canadian politicians are analyzed to examine the utterances and enunciations of the two discourses.

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility