Standing Rock Research Articles

Native North America in Motion

Two Indigenous long-distance walking performances, by the Mother Earth Water Walkers and by the Standing Rock Youth Runners, employ walking as a performance of Indigenous sovereignty, generating tribal knowledge, resistance, and cultural resurgence. What can these acts of long-distance walking tell us about the ways in which Indigenous people create, embody, and perform cultural sovereignty in North America?

“The Indians Complain, and with Good Cause”: Allotting Standing Rock—U.S. Policy Meets a Tribe’s Assertion of Rights

Land allotment was embraced by the U.S. Government in the late 1800s and early 1900s as part of a solution to the “Indian problem”, the goal of which was assimilation into the Euro-American cultural and economic system. As a progressivist program, it was imposed with enthusiasm and confidence, dividing reservations into rectangular land parcels (allotments) in the belief that the allotment recipients would become yeoman farmers of the Jeffersonian mold. Tribes were unable to thwart the imposition of allotment, despite their best efforts, and its devastating long-term effects are now well known. Much less is understood, however, about the efforts of various tribes, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to obtain modifications to the terms of allotment imposed on them. We describe how the people of the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota successfully advocated for modifications which worked to their significant advantage. We draw heavily from the outgoing correspondence and allotment records of the Special Allotting Agent, Carl Gunderson, along with contemporaneous records of legislative proceedings and other documents. The successful efforts of the people of Standing Rock resulted not only in equitable access to scarce timber, but in allotments to numerous individuals who otherwise would have been ineligible. The net impact was the additional allotment of nearly 400,000 acres (160,000 ha) to over 1800 individuals who otherwise would have received nothing.

Characterization of seepage in an earthfill dam by the integration of geophysical surveys and geotechnical data

Seepage is a common phenomenon in earthfill dams, and one that typically warrants episodic assessment and monitoring by regulatory agencies. Geophysical surveys provide a convenient, cost-effective, and convenient means for assessing seepage, but only if they are applied in effective combinations and if the data are analyzed properly. In the present study, a self-potential survey of streaming potential and a 2D electrical resistivity tomography survey were notably successful in detecting seepage under the embankment of the nearly 90-year-old Standing Rock Dam No. 1 in South Dakota, USA. Self-potential (SP) measurements show a localized negative anomaly of up to 27 mV on the upstream side of the dam, which we interpret to be the inlet or recharge zone for seepage, and a positive anomaly of up to 20 mV on the downstream side, which we interpret to be the outlet or discharge zone. The spatial correlation between our resistivity models, SP data, and topography was excellent. Water-saturated, conductive deposits in the dam's embankment match a negative SP amplitude in the inlet or recharge area. Similarly, water-saturated electrically conductive sediments are characterized by a positive SP amplitude in the discharge area where surface seepage occurs in a topographic low. Six years of water-level measurements in the existing piezometers interpreted relative to the properties and spatial distribution of coarser-grained alluvium (sand and gravel) underneath the dam's embankment fill, suggest that most seepage occurs under the dam. Our approach to assessing seepage in this project should be widely applicable to earthfill dams worldwide, and our modeled results constitute a valuable case study.

Kyrie Irving, vaccine hesitancy, and the politics of rugged individualism

ABSTRACT NBA superstar Kyrie Irving has a well-earned reputation for both his elite talent and his unpredictable public commentary. Such expressions have included references to the Earth being flat, advocacy for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and reluctance to proceed with the 2020 basketball season in the midst of a pandemic and resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. He has become most notorious, however, for his refusal to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a position that earned him both praise and scorn. We argue in this article that Irving’s stance prioritizes a form of rugged individualism characterized by neoliberal politics and professional sport. His retreat into rugged individualism contributed to delegitimizing public health policies and prompted vocal defenses of his actions from political conservatives who had condemned his earlier forms of activism. The controversy over Irving’s vaccine hesitancy spotlights the rhetorical effect of his ambiguous voice and its implications for democratic contestation. More specifically, it speaks to the challenges of prioritizing the public good under the conditions of neoliberal political culture.

Of Strangers and Relations: Native American Hospitality in Toni Jensen and Susan Power

This article examines narrative articulations of Native American hospitality in the autobiographical essay “The Worry Lines” (2020), by Métis writer Toni Jensen, and the fictional chapter “Sacred Wilderness” (2014), by Standing Rock Sioux Tribe member Susan Power. In both texts, relevant connections to the Other are made outdoors by means of words, deriving in the lowering of walls—which both separate and connect—and calling for a reexamination of Indigenous peoples as strangers within the doors of the US settler colonial state. The result is a vindication of Indigenous sovereignty and literary activism through the epistemological and ethical value of relationality, as well as a contribution to hospitality studies more broadly through its vindication of the power of conversation and literature.

It Ain't Over Until We're Smoking Cigars on the Drill Pad: Poems From Standing Rock and the Frontlines by Mark Tilsen (review)

It Ain't Over Until We're Smoking Cigars on the Drill Pad: Poems From Standing Rock and the Frontlines by Mark Tilsen (review)

Scope-shifting: Bureaucracy, Energy Justice and the Dakota Access Pipeline

Through a study of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) environmental assessment (EA) of the Dakota Access Pipeline's crossing of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, this paper explores regulatory agencies’ “interpretive implementation.” We find that, in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice, USACE “scope-shifted”—facultatively expanding and contracting the scopes of its spatial, scientific and cost–benefit impact analyses—to expedite industrial expansion, contravening the policies’ original intents. In doing so, USACE's EA created various energy injustices by excluding local tribes (especially the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes) and their concerns, e.g. treaty rights, local histories, climate change and especially potential oil spills with impacts on human health and subsistence resources. We analyze this scope-shifting through the lens of Karl Polayni's double movement between socioenvironmental protections and capitalist development. We elaborate this framework further via a triple-helix model that analyses ideologies, power relations and policies (here further complicated by both “law” and “interpretation” threads), as three intertwined strands that pull with or against each other, jointly progressing toward greater rights for vulnerable communities, “retrograding” toward earlier, oppressive conditions or simply stagnating. Ultimately, we argue that understanding scope-shifting and other forms of interpretive implementation as threads within the triple-helix policy strand, in dynamic tension or synchrony with other threads and strands, can help explicate agency decision-making processes. We hope that this conceptualization can elucidate the capacity of seemingly mundane bureaucratic practices for exacerbating, or potentially alleviating, energy injustice.

Lawfare in America: A Commentary on the Standing Rock Sioux

ABSTRACT Renewed emphasis by the executive branch regarding the value of indigenous knowledge in government policy hints at the long historical trajectory of eliding native perspectives in American federal planning. Even liberal democracies can marginalize social groups through the enforcement or threat of enforcement of laws. Rules-based societies therefore can exercise disproportionate command through the application of laws in which sanctions are attached to noncompliance. This article follows Charles Dunlap’s definition of lawfare, where laws are applied, or misapplied, as a substitute for military action in order to achieve an operational objective. Lawfare so defined is a valuable lens through which to view the Standing Rock Sioux protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, a more than 1000 mile long underground oil pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois. This protest was effectively criminalized and dissent met with sanctions including incarceration. The case illustrates the fragility of rights when the law is applied to achieve operational objectives.

Grandma's Tipi: A Present-Day Lakota Story by S. D. Nelson

Reviewed by: Grandma's Tipi: A Present-Day Lakota Story by S. D. Nelson Kara Forde Nelson, S. D. Grandma's Tipi: A Present-Day Lakota Story; written and illus. by S.D. Nelson. Abrams, 2023 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781419731921 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9798887070599 $15.54 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 1-4 Clara is finally old enough to spend the summer on the Standing Rock Reservation with her unci (grandma) and her cousin Juniper. After Clara arrives, her Uncle Louie brings a special surprise in his pickup truck: the family tipi. Unci's mother was the tipi's first keeper, and unci says someday it will belong to the two girls. Unci sends a prayer upwards, asking for a blessing for the tipi to stand strong, and then together they assemble the tipi's poles and wrap around the canvas-cloth that is adorned with colorful drawings from generations of family members. Representations of contemporary Native American life are sorely needed on children's literature shelves, and this extended picture book lovingly chronicles daily life on the reservation as it follows one family's summer of activities, all centered around the sacred cultural space of a tipi. A scene in which the girls paint symbols of their desired future occupations (Juniper on a basketball team and Clara as a jet pilot) on the tipi's canvas powerfully emphasizes the continuity of indigenous peoples and traditions. Nelson's art is exquisite, balancing smooth and speckled textures with multilayered pastel hues, which makes the spreads feel both enduring and alive. Ethereal endpapers introduce the glowing tipi in all its glory, contrasted by the shimmering blue night sky filled with constellations of stars and Native art motifs. An author's note briefly outlines the role of the tipi within the context of Native American Indian history, shares information about two of Nelson's notable ancestors who share the name Flying Cloud, and states his enrollment as a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice by Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys

Reviewed by: Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice by Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys Claire Patton Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys, Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xii, 352 pp. $24.95 (paper). For good reason, historians are fond of quoting William Faulkner's famous observation from his novel Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Few recent events demonstrate the ability of the past to motivate action in the present than the 2014–17 opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys's Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice follows the stories of four Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation women and their work protesting the pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. This work shows that the past is inextricably tied to the present and that the legacies of settler colonialism still present themselves in the twenty-first century. Most importantly, this book shows how history creates the present we live in and that Native peoples remain active in confronting threats to their land. This book situates the protests against the pipeline in a long tradition of Indigenous activism and a continuation of the American Indian Movement of the late twentieth century. Although the pipeline did not cross current Standing Rock Reservation boundaries, it did go through land that historically belonged to the Lakota, as confirmed by the United States in the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868. The United States subsequently annexed much of this land, creating five separate reservations, including [End Page 208] Standing Rock, by 1890. Moreover, the pipeline went under the primary water source for the reservation, a direct threat to the people living there. The book follows the stories of Lisa DeVille, Jasilyn Charger, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, and Kandi White, with a separate section dedicated to each of these women. The book moves in a linear fashion, beginning in the early 2010s before culminating with the major public protests of 2016–17. Each section, in addition to telling the story of its respective activist, describes a portion of the protest. The primary connection with Native American history is found in the title of the book, the story of the black snake. According to Lakota tradition, a black snake would enter their land bringing death and destruction, starting with the water supply (90). It is a brilliant connection which could have elevated the book's storytelling. Unfortunately, Todrys missed this opportunity. The story comes too late in the book to be an effective metaphor; retelling this legend at the beginning and alluding to it again in at later chapters would have made for a more cohesive narrative. Additionally, the separation of the book into four sections is not a terribly effective technique. The overall story seems to stand without the women as the main framework, and each section ends up discussing all four women anyway. The book would have worked better if the separations had been delineated temporally, allowing the author to move between the four women more freely. One stumbling block the uninitiated reader must overcome is understanding how companies produce oil. The book might have alleviated this by containing a brief section on how companies produce oil and why there were so many spills with this pipeline. This would have helped reinforce the danger that life on the reservation was, and is, in. A timeline would also have helped clarify the sequence of events. As a final critique, it would have been fascinating to look at Indigenous water rights activism through the lens of borderlands studies. This field explores how different entities interact at their borders and how events on one side of the border affect the other side. Perhaps future historians can continue this scholarship through that framework. Todrys fully acknowledges the story is a sad one and wonders what the impact of the pipeline will be many years from now. Readers wanting a more hopeful ending will be disappointed. The activists did not achieve their end; the pipeline still ran. In the end, Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline...

Art, Affect, and Social Media in the ‘No Dakota Access Pipeline’ Movement

Indigenous-led activism against proposed oil pipelines has relied heavily on social media, as in the #NoDAPL campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This paper explores affective engagement in online activism, including the Standing Rock ‘check-in’ campaign on Facebook. Moving beyond dichotomous understandings of embodied vs digital activism, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shields Project employs digital media in order to support direct action at Standing Rock. Patricia Clough draws a direct link between affect and technoscientific understandings of the body in her concept of biomediated bodies. This helps explain how physical and digital activism are linked: the digital and the physical cannot be understood as independent of each other, since online engagement always has an embodied aspect as well. Luger’s Mirror Shields Project functions as a form of alterlife, in resistance to biopower, recognizing historical and ongoing harms while also creating new possibilities for resistance.

Review: Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future, by Todd LeVasseur

Review: <i>Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future</i>, by Todd LeVasseur

The double movement and the triple-helix: Divestment, decommodification, and the Dakota Access Pipeline

This paper investigates divestment movements’ attempts to influence investment decisions. I use the example of #DefundDAPL, which targeted private-sector funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), an oil conduit crossing the Missouri River a half-mile from the Standing Rock Reservation. I analyze activists’ engagements with banks as a manifestation of Karl Polanyi's second movement, that is, resistance to environmental destruction and human rights violations that accompany “commodification” (the subordination of social relations to the economy). I identify divestment as a “withdrawing” type of decommodification that restrains free-market dominance by defunding environmentally and socially destructive projects. Next, I explore how investment practices can be analyzed as a “triple-helix” comprised of three intertwined strands—ideologies, power dynamics, and private-sector policies—that pull one another toward commodification and/or decommodification as they coproduce each other in dynamic tension, creating a constantly evolving investment environment. Applying this framework to #DefundDAPL, I examine how activists’ success in mobilizing societal ideologies to paint DAPL as an unethical investment was informed by banks’ concerns about project profitability as well as by place-based conditions and relationships between banks and pipeline companies. Further, I find that private-sector policy changes in response to the DAPL controversy were prompted by evolving societal ideologies yet constrained by interbank power relations. In conclusion, I argue that a triple-helix lens helps unpack the black box of decommodification by revealing complex interactions among ideologies, power relations, and policy-making and demonstrates limits to private-sector initiatives’ ability to impose adequate restrictions on environmentally and socially harmful investment practices.

Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 by Jada Ach

Reviewed by: Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 by Jada Ach Jenna Gersie Jada Ach, Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2021. 328 pp. Hardcover, $39.95; e-book, $19.95. In Jada Ach’s Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925, the ecomaterials of the West’s arid deserts and oceanscapes are radical, dynamic elements that become entangled with the human bodies that live there. Sand, water, and salt are neither waste materials nor commodities, but actants that resist control by the humans who try to manage both the elements themselves and their own bodies as they are exposed to the elements. “Try as we might, we can never manage our way out of ecological enmeshment” (9), Ach writes, and through her observations of intimate human–element engagements, Ach employs material ecocritical and queer ecology lenses to counter the top-down, hierarchical environmental management of the West’s wasteland spaces. Through her analysis of Progressive Era literature, Ach searches for hope in the porous spaces of environmental management, suggesting that we might learn from these texts how to “manage without mastery” as we approach human–environment relationships in the Anthropocene with compassion, care, and a focus on environmental justice (16). In McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank Norris (1899) and The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin (1903), Ach reads the desert sand as a queer actant with “revolutionary potential” as it works to undermine human attempts at management of desert spaces (76). As porous human bodies are inundated with sand in an intimate becoming, interactions with this lively element reveal human desires and longings as they resist the temporal progression and masculine ideals of administrative management. Similarly reading elements of desire and liveliness in the West’s water resources, Ach suggests that Progressive Era attitudes about water management can inform today’s water policy. In The River by Ednah Aiken (1914), The Virginian by Owen Wister (1902), and Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1883), Ach shows how water is co-actant with the humans that attempt to [End Page 427] manage it, even as water, in its liveliness, remains beyond complete control. Finally, Ach heads further west, to the Pacific Ocean, where she reads The Sea-Wolf by Jack London (1904) and The American Diary of a Japanese Girl by Yonejirō Noguchi (1902) to explore how ocean salt permeates human bodies in culturally mediated ways, illustrating how both race and gender are managed in the production of imperial and transnational modern bodies. Throughout Sand, Water, Salt, Ach addresses contemporary environmental concerns, from uranium mining on Navajo land and managing radioactive waste to water crises at Standing Rock and in Flint. To address these environmental crises of the Anthropocene, Ach proposes “managing-by-drift,” allowing our engagements with the lively elements to inform and inspire decision-making about management. By drifting into moments of intimacy, activism, and pleasure, “situated managements” of “mutual care and shared governance” (29) can supplement already-established practices and policies as we “shift our attention from an ethics of fixing to one of living-with” (233 emphasis original). Together with the elements we can learn to resist hierarchies of management as we recognize our inseparability from the “strange agents and agencies” with which we are always intermingling in the West’s varied environments (233). Jenna Gersie University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association ...

Ecological Calendars, Food Sovereignty, and Climate Adaptation in Standing Rock.

Indigenous food sovereignty relies on ecological knowledge of plants and animals, including knowledge related to their development and behavior through the seasons. In the context of anthropogenic climate change, ecological calendars based on Indigenous knowledge may enable communities to anticipate seasonal phenomena. We conducted research with communities in the Standing Rock Nation (North and South Dakota, USA) to develop ecological calendars based on their ecological knowledge. We present ecological calendars developed in seven communities through a series of workshops and interviews. These calendars are rich with knowledge about temporal relations within each community's ecosystem, including the use of plants and animals as seasonal indicators and cues for food system activities. However, the calendars also reveal the impacts of cultural genocide wrought by the United States government in its efforts to colonize the lands and minds of Indigenous communities. Given the diversity of knowledge among Standing Rock communities, we identify opportunities for knowledge exchange to revitalize ecological relations at the heart of food sovereignty. We highlight the potential for ecological calendars to facilitate climate adaptation by enabling communities to synchronize their food systems with an increasingly variable climate.

Decolonizing US anthropology

AbstractAfter Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence within world anthropologies. We propose that a reassessment of US anthropology might fruitfully begin with some counterfactual history. How would US anthropology been different had the founding generations conceptualized the discipline as a decolonizing project? What topics or themes might have become central to US anthropology? How might our methods have been different? To make anthropology departments more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, we need to do more than add faculty and students of color. Despite being a field whose central concept is “culture,” we have paid far too little attention to the culture of anthropology departments. Do unexamined practices of “white‐norming” that shape the everyday lives of faculty and students in anthropology departments persistently “Other”—marginalize and alienate—people of color?

Mapping Inter/National Terrain: On Violence, Definition, and Struggle from Afghanistan to Standing Rock

Abstract Definitional work has authorized vaguely articulated, unending, US-led terror wars, constituting amorphous, violent, global terrain, spatially, temporally, and discursively. Mapping the terrain in which this violence is enacted helps us examine re-emergences of violence, including entangling Indigenous communities inside the United States—particularly as they engage acts of protest—within the same colonial machines of terror deployed in the name of war outside those boundaries. This essay maps these circulations as they coalesce at one point: the use of battle grade military equipment and former special operations teams against Indigenous protesters at the Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance fight in 2016 and 2017. As Native protestors were transformed into jihadists and assaulted at Standing Rock, frames of savage indigeneity permeated boundaries from the terror wars’ battle sites of Pakistan and Afghanistan back to the United States. In this cartography, conditions of possibility for governing global communities are remapped. The inter/national crossroads expand and are weaponized into new necropolitical tools of colonization. Examining this violent landscape and engaging with histories of settler colonialism as well as the spatial, temporal, and discursive power of definition, this essay explores rhetorical cartography as the ground for mapping new rhetorical terrains and inter/national coalition against ongoing materializations of colonialism.

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas

The question of how Spanish and Indigenous people grappled with the real and existential threat of widespread colonial epidemic diseases is the subject of a timely new book by Jennifer Scheper Hughes titled The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas. It focuses on the religious dimensions of the catastrophic deaths due to illness in the late sixteenth century, events labeled with the author's adopted term of mortandad. Hughes relies on colonial visual and textual sources to reveal the harrowing origins of Mexican Catholicism. It is a welcome addition to the field of understanding the epidemics, which has been based largely on sterile demographic accounts.Arguing broadly, Hughes claims that in place of a millennial hope we should be evaluating the colonial church as forged in countless deaths, as best encapsulated in the phrase “ecclesia ex mortuis,” the church of the dead (p. 23). The analysis is anchored in the emotional landscape of the people who comprised the church and how their reactions to the mortandad influenced the development of the institution. Thus, the author claims a three-pronged approach to the topic: cataclysmic, theological, and decolonial. The approach is cataclysmic in examining the full emotional register of any document related to the deaths, in contrast to minimization that would dismiss the tenor as exaggeration. It is theological by pursuing the Christian meaning available in the consulted sources. Finally, it is decolonial by highlighting the agency of Indigenous communities and the survivance of their cultures.The book is divided into two parts, the first focused on lived and imagined corporality and the second on the altered geographies left in the wake of the cataclysmic epidemics. The first chapter explores how ailing Indigenous bodies necessitated medicalized sacraments in which missionaries would treat the body in addition to the soul. Indigenous corporality is centered in the second chapter, which explores the development of a new spiritual regime based on a wounded New World body of Christ. Moving from the body to the environs, chapter 3 stalks the path of Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras as he processes lands devoid of humans and filled with death. The final chapter presents the ways that survivors conceptualized and enacted their own vision of the church and their abilities to map their landscape; thus the chapter scrutinizes the maps of the Relaciones geográficas.In the same vein of her previous scholarship, Hughes focuses on how communities sustain syncretic practices independent of the directives of church officials. In the most original contribution, the author details the collective maintenance of sacred buildings and practices following the century of epidemics; by dubbing such communities the Catholic altepetl, Hughes revitalizes the Nahua social unit of organization during and as a method to cope with disastrous times (p. 136). The formulation of such religiously sovereign pueblos, she argues, was brought to fruition not by Spanish missionaries but instead by Indigenous Christians and their descendants.The least developed but by no means uninteresting facet of the work relates to the effort to decolonize its approach. Hughes explains that part of this approach includes relying on related histories in the United States to open new avenues for interpretation (p. 26). Complex Indigenous practices from cultures distant geographically and temporally are found in brief explorations. These include references to food justice at the Pine Ridge Reservation, activists in New Mexico protesting the statues of the Spanish invasion, the Ghost Dance movement at Standing Rock, and related Hopi terminology (pp. 57, 97–99, 142, 172–73). I admire the effort to situate Tenochtitlan (rather than Plymouth Rock) as the origin point of North American Christianity. Yet such a momentous objective requires an appreciation of specific context (i.e., the differences in missionizing strategies in northern territories) in addition to broad cultural similarities and topical connections. The author does explore how some modern Indigenous Mexican people participate in their heritage, but these are found only in the introduction and conclusion.The Church of the Dead is a unique history of Christianity in the Americas because it centers death as a founding principle but examines the surviving practices as exceptionally autonomous in Indigenous communities. Best suited for theologians and historians, it breathes affective life into our understanding of past pandemics, at a time when everyone struggles with the reality of COVID-19. This book recenters our understanding of Catholicism in Mexico as a coping and mourning practice, one that supported autonomous Indigenous communities that survived such cataclysmic death from epidemic diseases.

Theorising from the Land: House or Tipi of IR?

In 2004, Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling wrote their important intervention, entitled ‘The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poises of Worldism,’ that ordered various theories of International Relations within an analogy of a colonial household, calling instead for a Worldism that builds communities based on interests and support. One glaring omission from this analysis, however, is mention of indigeneity. Increasingly, in North America, the experiences of Indigenous peoples are shaping national imaginations and popular political discourses – take for instance Idle No More, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Standing Rock, and Mauna Kea, to name a few. These shifts seen at a national level in North America, however, are not fully reflected in the field of IR. In fact, it would be easy to conclude that the field of IR has largely ignored Indigenous lived-experience. To this, this article asks how IR theorising, practice, and pedagogy could be significantly transformed by taking seriously Indigenous experiences and knowledge? To explore this question, this article explores the two central IR concepts of power and sovereignty to illustrate how the meanings and practices of these concepts are significantly furthered by attention to Indigenous experiences, practices, and knowledge. It concludes by asserting that an Indigenous approach to IR would not only be a mechanism for incisive analysis and critique of dominant constructions within the field, but also could provide an emergent space for (re)imagining collective futures across race and difference – something sorely needed in a world of ever increasing uncertainty. Des théories issues de la terre : la maison ou le tipi des relations internationales ?

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...