Indigenous Politics Research Articles

Book Review: Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders

Book Review: Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders

Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martínez

Reviewed by: Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martínez Gregory D. Smithers (bio) Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martínez University of Nebraska Press, 2019 FOR MANY OF US working in the fields of Native American and Indigenous studies, the moment we first read Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins was transformative. I first read Deloria's 1969 classic as a teenager in the late 1980s. Reading Custer proved exhilarating; it sparked new insights and fresh questions. Deloria's style had me hooked. Anthropologists did not write like he did; historians certainly didn't. Since my teenage encounter with Custer, I've returned to Deloria's work regularly. Each time I learn something new. David Martínez's brilliant Life of the Indigenous Mind taught me even more about Deloria. Written in clear prose and thoroughly researched, Martínez organizes his analysis around Custer; We Talk, You Listen (1970); God Is Red (1973); and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974)—four key books in Deloria's influential career. Over ten chapters, Martínez covers issues ranging from tribal self-determination to Indigenous epistemologies. Today, most humanists and social scientists incorporate these themes into their work as a matter of course. But when Deloria began writing about self-determination and Indigenous knowledge as vital to the well-being of Native people—first in his role as head of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and later in his books and essays—he blazed a trail that continues to provide intellectual and political clarity on issues that still resonate across Indian Country. Martínez explains that Deloria made no pretense to the phony objectivity that characterized white scholarship. He wrote as an Indigenous person, specifically as a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and directed his message to "us"—other Native Americans (5). As Martínez explains in chapter 1, Deloria urged Indigenous people to work from within to resist American colonialism by advocating for a tribal court system that would buttress the self-determination of Native nations. Indigenous self-determination, or what Deloria referred to as "tribalism," required bold leadership at the tribal level (65). As Martínez explains in chapters 2 and 3, this meant Indigenous [End Page 162] leaders needed to rise to the challenge of reconnecting communities to the land and throwing off the shackles of termination policy. Indeed, the United States government must fulfill its treaty obligations by recognizing the sovereignty of Indian nations and restoring the nation-to-nation relationship enshrined in hundreds of treaties. Deloria recognized that achieving this new political reality would require a radical shift in how Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) bureaucrats "managed" Indian affairs (105). It would also necessitate creative new thinking out of Indian Country. Overturning what Deloria called the "atrocity" of termination would not be easy (109). However, Martínez notes that Deloria was not alone in championing tribal government, with Indigenous leaders and writers like D'Arcy McNickle also devoting themselves to the cause of self-determination in the decades after World War II. As Martínez argues in chapters 5 and 6, Deloria understood that Indigenous self-determination meant changing how Native people saw themselves and how settlers saw Indigenous people. This is where Deloria offered what, for his time, were stunning insights about the importance of political and cultural self-determination. Native Americans were not individual "others," something that made liberal civil rights discourse ill-suited to Indigenous politics. By taking the term "tribalism" away from anthropologists, Indigenous people could begin to undo stereotypes imposed on them over centuries by Christian missionaries, anthropologists, and politicians. To do so, Deloria insisted that Native people must come together if they hoped to protect their own rights, advance the cause of sovereignty, and articulate their own stories. Martínez has produced a rich and rewarding book. He is balanced in his critiques of Deloria's writings and careful to contextualize Deloria's political motives for self-determination. For those hoping to read a biography of Deloria that...

Disentangling the Vernacular in Bolivia and Decolonising the Law

Abstract This piece critically engages with the spaces of encounter between indigenous peoples and the (Bolivian) State by exploring indigenous subordination and inequalities in a socio-legal sense. It explores ‘epistemological oppression’ and ‘epistemological hesitance’ as it arises and is being responded to in i) the vernacular, in empirical realities, ii) in constitutional law and its principles, iii) and in international legal orders including indigenous peoples’ rights regimes. In a first step, indigenous knowledge is conceptualised and contextualised, understanding said encounters in the light of Bolivian constitutionalism and recent regressive indigenous politics under the intermittent right-wing government. Empirical, grassroots perspectives provide further insights into power dynamics and internalised asymmetries which become relevant to understand the knowledge-law nexus. In turn, we disentangle the constitutive elements of neo-colonial subordination, drawing on concepts of sovereignty, self-determination, citizenship and collective rights, and political recognition. Finally, hope is placed in the decolonising function of the law, international law in particular in the way it may reposition indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the State. A dedicated focus is placed on indigenous knowledge and its consideration in current jurisprudential developments. Constitutional law – Andean developments in particular – too is taken as a legal starting point for contextualising indigenous-State encounters, seen with decolonising lenses. In that sense, contemporary State architectures serve as unavoidable spaces of articulation that may reinforce neo-colonial tendencies through classical Western constitutionalism or create ambitious venues for indigenous rights to be recognised in a plural legal landscape.

The power of numbers: how majority/minority status affects media coverage and framing of Indigenous contentious politics in Canada

ABSTRACT News media perform an important role in shaping how Canadian society views Indigenous peoples and issues. They are rarely passive, neutral bystanders, as media routinely employ a particular set of frames (e.g., criminality, economic burden, threats to unity, promotion of social justice) when covering Indigenous stories. We explore how the use of such frames is influenced by dynamics of power as they relate to majority/minority linguistic differences. Through a controlled comparison, we examine the 2008–2019 media coverage of Indigenous responses to Ontario’s Far North Act and Québec’s Plan Nord – both of which concerned resource development on or near Indigenous territory. We find that where media serve the linguistic majority, they are much more likely to frame Indigenous responses to development plans as a threat to national unity. In contrast, where media serve the linguistic minority, they are significantly more likely to frame Indigenous responses in terms of social justice. Our findings suggest that traditional understandings of the differences between mainstream and ethnic or minority media fail to capture the complex dynamics at work in multilingual states. The paper addresses this gap in the literature and provides a broader understanding of how media and power dynamics shape the representation of Indigenous contentious politics.

Contested Indigeneities: “Adivasi” Politics Historically and in Contemporary Times

This article focuses on the development and transformations of adivasi political identity and its articulations with indigenous consciousness in India since the advent of colonial capitalism. The apogee of adivasi politics and the “politics of indigeneity” since the 1970s has coincided with the networking among indigenous groups within the United Nations. The history of such politics will be traced in order to illustrate the forms in which social identities appear over a long historical process. In other words, the changing character of the antagonistic contradictions between the hegemon and different sections of the oppressed will be illustrated, including the articulation of “indigeneity” and “ adivasi” consciousness. Methodologically, the article promotes a dialectical interpretation of the phenomenon and counters a metaphysical analysis of identity politics.

Movement and Indigenous Religions: A Reconsideration of Mobile Ways of Knowing and Being

This special issue brings together leading scholars in the field of Indigenous religions working with Indigenous Peoples from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe on the topics of movement, mobility, pilgrimage, and walking as they intersect with issues of religion and spirituality. Anthropologists and scholars of religion working with various Indigenous Peoples have tended to theorize Indigeneity as denoting a cultural and historic connection to a particular land-base, yet they have not always attended to the full complexity of Indigenous Peoples’ mobile lived realities. We contend that a critical re-examination and revaluing of Indigenous mobile ways of knowing and being serves as one of several steps needed to decolonize the study of religion. Throughout this issue contributors examine various Indigenous discourses, practices, and politics of movement in order to highlight the historic and ongoing importance of mobility for cultivating personhood, maintaining networks of affinity and belonging, fostering political alliances and solidarities, and generating religious meaning.

Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution by Mark R. Anderson

Reviewed by: Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution by Mark R. Anderson Loren Michael Mortimer (bio) Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution mark r. anderson University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 306 pp. At the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, the Continental Army prepared to invade Canada, and the British military government took concurrent measures to defend the province. Patriot and Loyalist leaders alike recognized the strategic importance of the Indigenous confederation known as the Seven Nations of Canada. Composed of eight sovereign Native American towns along the upper St. Lawrence River, these multiethnic communities guarded key river confluences connecting Canada to the rebellious Anglo-American settler colonies to the south. In the military contest for Canada, the Seven Nations could tip the balance of power in favor of the Patriots or the Crown. Likewise, the Seven Nations feared the despoliation of their lands amid the crossfire of a civil [End Page 599] war within the British Empire. As historian Mark R. Anderson shows in Down the Warpath to the Cedars, the Seven Nations proved decisive in the defeat of the Continental Army at the Battle of the Cedars in late May 1776. Although historians on both sides of the US-Canada border have largely overlooked or intentionally disremembered the significance of the Cedars, Anderson offers a timely intervention recovering histories of Indigenous autonomy and racialized violence during the American Revolution, as well as the affair's aftermaths in Native American council houses, Patriot assemblies, and imperial corridors of power. In the summer of 1775, the Seven Nations of Canada had thrived in proximity to European settler population centers along the St. Lawrence River for more than a century. Although the Seven Nations had intimately entangled connections of trade and kinship with the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois, it remained a politically autonomous Indigenous polity. The Seven Nations traced their origins to Catholic converts who relocated to Francophone mission communities during the late seventeenth century. Between 1701 and 1754, these mission towns gradually coalesced into a confederation rooted in shared connections to the St. Lawrence River, Catholicism, extended family networks, and mutual defense. Although steadfast allies to the French before 1759, each constituent community maintained their sovereignty and distinctive cultures. The Seven Nations Council convened at Kahnawake, the largest town with a decidedly Mohawk-Iroquois demographic composition. But this diverse confederation included Hurons from Wendake, the Wabanaki peoples from Odanak and Wolinâk, Mohawks and Nipissings from Kanesatake, Mohawks from Akwesasne, and Oneidas and Onondagas from Oswegatchie. With careful attention to multidimensional Indigenous politics at the confederation, village, and factional levels, Anderson argues that Native Americans created a "strategic environment" at the Battle of the Cedars that aligns with Ojibwe historian Michael Witgen's concept of an "infinity of nations" (1). Indeed, the framework of an "infinity of nations" proves apposite for this study, particularly as political affiliations remained fluid for colonists and Indigenous peoples alike during the early phases of the conflict. Despite the military invasion of their homelands during the American Revolution, the Seven Nations of Canada largely avoided the internecine warfare and dispossession endured by larger and better-known Indigenous polities like the Six Nations Haudenosaunee. Yet the author notes that in "contrast to the reasonably well developed Six Nations Revolutionary War [End Page 600] narrative, the Seven Nations of Canada lack significant historical treatment for the era. The Cedars and its 1775 precedents clearly reveal the complexity of Laurentian Indian politics" (155). While Anderson observed that the Seven Nations "were far from a unified polity" (4), Native American emphasis on local autonomy and factional consensus within councils rendered their confederation no more or less united than the Six Nations or the ad hoc Patriot delegations at the Continental Congress during the summer of 1775. Given Patriot sentiments among Anglo-American colonists in Montreal as well as disaffection with British rule by factions within the Seven Nations, Canada's participation in the rebellion remained an open political question for British officials, Loyalists, Patriots, and Native Americans alike. To make sense of an ethnic and political milieu that defied nationality or a strictly Patriot vs...

“They are almost humans like us”: indigenous politics and policy dismantling under Bolsonaro’s government

This paper argues that three ongoing dismantling processes target the Brazilian indigenist policy under Bolsonaro’s government: (1) the dismantling of the land claims recognition policy and institutions; (2) the dismantling of the protection of indigenous lives due to the increasing violence against indigenous peoples and the COVID-19 pandemic; and (3) the dismantling of the integrity of traditional territories related to government plans to open indigenous lands to large-scale agricultural and mining operations. On the other hand, we point out that Brazilian indigenous movements’ contemporary strategies are developing to fight back against the dismantling of indigenist policy. We use primary and secondary data to investigate those topics, discussing them in depth using the policy-dismantling theoretical framework. We conclude by pointing to the fact that the ongoing dismantling may contribute to the genocide of Brazilian indigenous peoples.

Unsettling emotions: settler innocence in Australia Day debates

ABSTRACT Contestation over the date of Australia Day is waged yearly as a passionate culture war between conservatives who wish to ‘save the date’ and progressives arguing to ‘change the date’. This article argues that despite clear ideological differences, settler engagements with both movements reflect a common emotional commitment to preserving a positive self-understanding as innocent and benevolent political actors. Both movements are therefore similarly invested in the maintenance and justification of settler authority, though by way of very different strategies. It follows that broader relations between settlers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are at least partially constituted by dynamics of collective settler emotion that are felt deeply in relation to disputed qualities of Australian nationhood, sovereignty and culture. This analysis further reveals the pressing need to move beyond the narrow boundaries of ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ settler identity in which discussions of Indigenous politics are all too often trapped.

Yielding Memories of Nubian bodies

The proposed text is a collection of memories; they tell visceral politics stories in a Nubian displacement village. The stories are my attempt to understand the effect of different power institutions on our bodies as Nubian women. I position myself, my Cairo education, and my presuppositions concerning the spaces of our village of Qustul, one of the state-built displacement settlements that fell victim to the high dam and its reservoir in the 60s. I recall three scenes of tension between myself, women of my kin, and the built environment’s flesh to inspect the buildings’ complicity in the struggle of Nubian womanhood. The three scenes are located in a Nubian house, a state-built dwelling, the school, and the state-built community centre. Through these scenes, I try to make sense of our experiences after 50 years of displacement and capture the struggle of state, religion, and indigenous politics while they take place on Nubian women’s bodies.

Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs

In this scrupulously researched study of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), Sarah A. Nickel challenges dominant historical narratives of Indigenous politics in British Columbia. Most significantly, she brings a gendered analysis to the narrative that is long overdue. The depth of her method drives the book, pairing dense archival research with detailed community narratives based on seven years of oral history work. Bolstered by Indigenous critical theory, she weaves two intricately related threads throughout the book: the challenge of pan-Indigenous unity, and the location of Indigenous women within it.Assembling Unity traces UBCIC’s constant negotiation between pan-Indigenous unity and the local autonomy of its constituent communities. Nickel navigates this artfully, negotiating this tension with impressive frankness and nuance. Crucially, she does not try to resolve it. The book shows that unity does not necessarily mean unanimity and builds a methodical argument against racist expectations of Indigenous uniformity that are all too common to Canadian politics (169). It further situates the problem of unity within the political moment of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the rise of Red Power, and the concurrent radicalization and bureaucratization of Indigenous politics through this period. In this context, UBCIC is constantly revising its position vis-à-vis the settler state.Here a second tension arises, between recognition and refusal. At different times UBCIC strategically engages with state process, refuses it outright, or does both at once. This comes to a head in the final chapter on the Constitution Express—a movement that constructed Indigenous sovereignty both in relation to Canadian federalism and outside it. While I sometimes wished for more on this point, and the nuances between refusal and resistance, I really appreciated Nickel’s ability to embrace the complexity of these decisions for UBCIC. By demonstrating that refusals “are not simply all or nothing” but “exist on a spectrum and can overlap and compete” (93), the book complicates the engagement/disengagement dichotomy that dominates social movement scholarship. It also shows these phenomena are not exclusive to Indigenous peoples’ relations with the state by featuring dynamics of recognition and refusal within and against UBCIC itself.Where this is most present is in the organization’s fraught relationship with Indigenous women. Women’s movements unfold not as a subplot to UBCIC’s political dynamics but as central to them. The book captures the way the masculinist sociopolitical structures of the settler state reproduce themselves in Indigenous politics, from watershed moments of women’s exclusion to quotidian moments of misogyny. Yet it does so in a way that is both critical and generative. Women both build and challenge unity within UBCIC, and their disruptions prove to be as important to its development as their support. Women’s perspectives weave throughout the book, particularly through the stories of the BC Indian Homemakers Association and BC Native Women’s Society. It is an analysis of Indigenous feminism that moves beyond its contrast to white feminism, contextualized instead within the movement for sovereignty and nationhood.Indeed, Nickel is exceedingly careful to avoid “settler-centric” narratives of Indigenous political action (19). Countering the popular perception that the modern Indigenous movement was born in reaction to the federal government’s 1969 White Paper, she instead traces its rise through a century of pan-Indigenous organizing in British Columbia. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I especially appreciated this insight as a caution against the lure of “myopic moments” which “collapse Indigenous politics” (8) with colonial plot points.Assembling Unity captures a great deal of complexity without undermining the achievements of UBCIC. Rather, it redefines the terrain of success as one that is fraught, nuanced, negotiated, and nonlinear. Historians and nonhistorians alike will appreciate its breadth of analysis and significant contributions to settler colonial studies, Indigenous feminist thought, political anthropology, and geography.

A Reconciled Nation? Mabo and the Reimagining of Australia's National History

ABSTRACT The High Court's 1992 decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) is widely regarded as a seminal moment in Australia's legal and political history. The decision established a legal right to native title and placed Indigenous history and politics at the forefront of public debate. As this historiographical survey will demonstrate, the decision, and the public debate that followed it, also spurred significant discussion in the discipline of Indigenous history about how to write and represent Indigenous history, and the place of Indigenous history in national historical narratives. For some, Mabo encouraged an emphasis on negotiation and reconciling Indigenous and settler experiences to create new narratives about Australia's history and nationhood. For others, Mabo and the politics of reconciliation constituted a further appropriation of Indigeneity by settler Australians, underscoring the historical continuity of invasion and the need to transform the discipline of history to recognise Indigenous epistemologies and history-making.

Review: Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist, by Terri A. Castaneda

Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist, by Terri A. Castaneda Terri A. Castaneda. Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. 367 pp. Hardcover $45.00. Martin Rizzo-Martinez Martin Rizzo-Martinez Martin Rizzo-Martinez is the California State Park Historian for the Santa Cruz District. He earned his PhD in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2016, and has published articles in the Western Historical Quarterly and NAISA. His book We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in fall 2021. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2021) 98 (3): 138–140. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2021.98.3.138 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Martin Rizzo-Martinez; Review: Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian Activist, by Terri A. Castaneda. California History 1 August 2021; 98 (3): 138–140. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2021.98.3.138 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 This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Ainu and Indigenous politics in Japan: negotiating agency, institutional stability, and change

AbstractIn April 2019, the Japanese government officially legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people. Building on an institutionalist framework, the paper suggests that a phenomenon of institutional layering has taken place, resulting in tensions between the desire to preserve the legitimacy of old institutions and the pressure to develop more progressive policies. To explain this process, policy legacies, and institutional opportunities are relevant. First, the narrative that equality can be attained through assimilation, and the political construction of the “Ainu problem” as a regional one tied to Hokkaido pervade political imaginaries and institutions. Second, institutional opportunities have mediated the ways activists have sought to make their voices heard in the political arena. A focus on key historical segments illuminates the difficulty for activists to penetrate high-level political arenas while indicating the importance of agency, ties and interests in explaining major reforms and their limitations. The ambiguity that characterizes current policy framework points to the potential leverage that this policy configuration represents for the Ainu. At the same time, historical and institutional legacies that have shaped Indigenous politics continue to constrain, to a great extent, the possibilities for meaningful and transformative developments for the Ainu.

“Spots of Time” – Michael Wessels and the Imaginative Reinterpretation of Identity

For Linzi, Akira and Tao While much of Michael Wessels’s work on reading San oral literature, the politics of indigeneity and ecocriticism was acknowledged during his life, there is another dimension to his research that has been overlooked. Michael Wessels always had a deep love of poetry, and toward the end of his life, he had begun to focus more on his writing and to publish. In this article, I explore Wessels’s key long poem published as “Cannibal Time,” but subsequently changed to “Spots of Time” (as I will refer to it), in which he constructs an imaginative autobiography that includes travel writing, short prose and poetry. Drawing upon Wordsworth’s The Prelude, I employ both a critical and creative methodology to argue that the subject of Wessels’s poem is less ‘my life’ in a factual and historical sense, and rather more ‘the making of a poet’.

Victory for all, administration for some: an examination of differences in the impact of Indigenous jurisdictional expansion in Oklahoma

Indigenous polities often face the consequences of decisions that emerge from processes outside of their control. The U.S. Supreme Court decision on McGirt v. Oklahoma in 2020, which recognized nearly a third of the state of Oklahoma as potentially within the jurisdiction of five Native American tribes, is one such example. The lawsuit generating this decision was a legal appeal by an individual – not a tribe – and may have implications that include recognizing tribal jurisdiction in civil and criminal matters throughout much of the state. The decision was celebrated by tribes and those advocating for greater recognition of their territorial authority. Yet, for tribal leaders and other practitioners of Indigenous self-determination, the decision potentially shifts major administrative burdens to resource-limited tribes. In an attempt to mitigate the significant costs of administering this territory, these tribes have initiated negotiations with the state of Oklahoma and local municipalities to clarify jurisdiction and coordinate administrative responsibilities. Outrage over these negotiations came from mostly academics and activists who perceived negotiations as a rejection of greater jurisdictional sovereignty. This paper uses the McGirt decision as a point of entry to explore differences in how practitioners and academics grounded in Indigenous politics understand the impact of policy shifts even when they further mutually desired commitments.

Unearthing neoliberal multiculturalism in news discourse: politics of indigeneity & ethnic identity in Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast

ABSTRACT This study examines how Nicaraguan print media discursively construct Indigeneity in the midst of land encroachment and new movements for self-determination in order to explore the nuanced modes through which neoliberal multiculturalist governance operates. Based on a critical discourse analysis of 133 news articles reporting on the five main Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Indigenous-Kriol (Creole) joint communities of the Autonomous Regions of the North and South Caribbean Coast, as well as on the Council of Elders of the Moskitian Nation, this study found that news discourse constructed communities as entities to be understood through state, nongovernmental and supranational logic; pitted “good” against “bad” ways of enacting ethnicity; constructed communities as incapable of self-government and in need of state wardship; and emphasized culture and nature as the valuable aspects of their identity, discarding the materiality of their demands. These findings stimulate discussion around the ways in which the media subtly reproduce neoliberal multiculturalist ideology in the context of plurinational governance in Latin America.

‘Sámi in the Heart’: Kinship, Culture, and Community as Foundations for Indigenous Sámi Identity in Norway

The article demonstrates broad variation regarding what is considered to be at the ‘core’ of Sámi ethnicity by different people. The differences are here typologized as kinship-, culture- or community-based ‘foundations’ for Sámi ethnicity. Ideas about individual Sámi ethnicity tended to focus on individual traits more than individuals’ social relationships. This may be influenced by non-Sámi authorities’ focus on individual descendancy, but also by certain aspects of modern Indigenous politics. The article discusses the distinction between relational and individual foundations for ethnicity, pointing to their interconnectedness. It also discusses the difference between genetics and kinship, and potential consequences of a genetics-focused definition of Sáminess.

MCGIRT V. OKLAHOMA: ENFORCING INDIAN TREATIES AND COLLECTIVE TITLES TO INDIAN LANDS

One of the most important modern United States’ Supreme Court cases involving indigenous politics centers on the problem of defining criminal jurisdiction. The Supreme Court’s decision in McGirt v Oklahoma advanced the principle that both U.S. state and federal governments must abide by longstanding treaty agreements with tribal nations, strengthening —tangentially— the collective titles to Indian lands. If an Indian reservation is to be suppressed, it must come via an explicit act of Congress, not the will of state or local governments. The immediate consequences of this decision are a renewed sense of legal duty toward treaty obligations for the United States and the reinvigoration of Muscogee (Creek) Nation jurisdiction over tribal lands, including over non-indigenous people. In the long run, this case stands to open doors for other tribal nations to challenge state absorption of tribal jurisdictions.

Gentes igual que tú y que yo: los textos de Rosario Castellanos en los contrasentidos ideológicos de la política lingüística indigenista

In this article we analyze documents written by Rosario Castellanos during the years that she worked as a scriptwriter for the puppet plays in the Highlands of Chiapas. These plays were part of educational campaigns aimed at the Tsotsil and Tseltal Maya population. We show that the discourses circulating during the years in which indigenous politics was being constructed were permeated by opposing and contradictory ideological tensions, tensions that were reflected in the proposal and use of categories of identification of the population and their languages, in the theoretical objectives and ideals and in the participants’ personal and collective stories.