scholarly journals Redrawing Relationalities at the Anthropocene(s): Disrupting and Dismantling the Colonial Logics of Shared Identity Through Thinking with Kim Tallbear

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-119
Author(s):  
Priyanka Dutt ◽  
Anastasya Fateyeva ◽  
Michelle Gabereau ◽  
Marc Higgins

AbstractWhat does it mean to respond to the Anthropocenes, plural, when doing science education? Specifically, can we critically engage with the Anthropocene, singular, without responding to the multiplicity in which Indigenous land and its many facets within the global community were at risk of destruction from Man? In this work, we contemplate the urgency of the inclusion of Indigenous philosophies and ways-of-knowing within the arching body politic, giving space to these practices that have been otherwise silenced within and beyond Western colonial frames. We argue that if the ways of thinking and practicing science and science education continue to stem from settler colonialism, capitalism, and toxicity, having previously and continually been responsible for the erasure of Indigeneity, the response within the Anthropocene will be multitudinously harmful. Here, we turn to Dakota scholar, Kim Tallbear, (Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic belonging, University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and her work in the intersections of identity, science, settler relations, and Indigeneity with the use of provocative imagery to the innate feeling of and within the Anthropocene(s).

With the rise of new scholarly paradigms in the study of Native American histories and cultures, and the emergence of the Native South as a key concept in US southern studies, the time is more than ripe for a critical reassessment of Native sites, characters, communities, customs, narratives, ways of knowing, and other indigenous elements in the writings of William Faulkner—and of Faulkner’s significance for Native American writers, artists, and intellectuals. From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional place-name “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based worldviews to deepen understanding of Faulkner’s fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Indian topics), the eleven essays of this volume take the critical analysis of Faulkner’s Native South and the Native South’s Faulkner beyond no-longer generative assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations or the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters, turning instead to indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner’s writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures. Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner’s creative energies and about Faulkner’s own complicated presence in Native American literary history.


2021 ◽  
pp. 088541222110266
Author(s):  
Michael Hibbard

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.


Polar Record ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Britt Kramvig ◽  
Dag Avango

Abstract In this article, we engage with environmental conflicts on indigenous land through a focus on an attempt to gain social licence to reopen and operate the Biedjovággi mine in Guovdageainnu/Kautokeino in Sápmi, Norway. We argue that mining prospects bring forth ontological conflicts concerning land use, as well as ways to know the landscape and the envisioned future that the land holds. It is a story of a conflict between two different ways of knowing. The paper explores the Sámi landscape through different concepts, practices and stories. We then contrast this to the way the same landscape is understood and narrated by a mining company, through the programmes and documents produced according to the Norwegian law and standards. We follow Ingold’s argument that the Sámi landscape practices are taskscapes, where places, times and tasks are interconnected. These were not acknowledged in the plans and documents of the mining company. We conclude by addressing the tendency of extractive industries to reduce different landscapes in ways that fit with modern understandings, which oppose culture to nature.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Laura Ahlqvist ◽  
Mathias Bjørnevad ◽  
Felix Riede ◽  
Magdalena Naum

We present a hitherto unresearched part of a shared Danish and American cultural heritage: Native American objects in Danish regional museum collections. Thus far, we have identified more than 200 Native American artefacts in 27 local museums, largely a result of Danes abroad privately collecting in the late 1800s and 1950s–70s. The majority of these artefacts, many of which are prehistoric in age, have never been displayed and have lingered in storage since they were accessioned, understudied and often unrecognised for what they are. Recent deaccessioning pressures from the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces potentially place these objects at risk of destruction, making the discussions presented here a timely issue. These Native American objects, like the unknown numbers of other non-Danish artefacts held by regional museums, hold tremendous potential to elucidate overlooked parts of Danish museum history, trans-Atlantic networks and interconnectedness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as rich material cultures originating far from Denmark. We argue that this perspective is highly relevant and should be utilised in Danish museums, as it begets reflections on Danish glocal identity and society in a post-colonial world.


Author(s):  
Emmerentine Oliphant ◽  
Sharon B. Templeman

Indigenous health research should reflect the needs and benefits of the participants and their community as well as academic and practitioner interests. The research relationship can be viewed as co-constructed by researchers, participants, and communities, but this nature often goes unrecognized because it is confined by the limits of Western epistemology. Dominant Western knowledge systems assume an objective reality or truth that does not support multiple or subjective realities, especially knowledge in which culture or context is important, such as in Indigenous ways of knowing. Alternatives and critiques of the current academic system of research could come from Native conceptualizations and philosophies, such as Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous protocols, which are increasingly becoming more prominent both Native and non-Native societies. This paper contains a narrative account by an Indigenous researcher of her personal experience of the significant events of her doctoral research, which examined the narratives of Native Canadian counselors’ understanding of traditional and contemporary mental health and healing. As a result of this narrative, it is understood that research with Indigenous communities requires a different paradigm than has been historically offered by academic researchers. Research methodologies employed in Native contexts must come from Indigenous values and philosophies for a number of important reasons and with consequences that impact both the practice of research itself and the general validity of research results. In conclusion, Indigenous ways of knowing can form a new basis for understanding contemporary health research with Indigenous peoples and contribute to the evolution of Indigenous academics and research methodologies in both Western academic and Native community contexts.


Author(s):  
Aubrey Jean Hanson ◽  
Sam McKegney

Indigenous literary studies, as a field, is as diverse as Indigenous Peoples. Comprising study of texts by Indigenous authors, as well as literary study using Indigenous interpretive methods, Indigenous literary studies is centered on the significance of stories within Indigenous communities. Embodying continuity with traditional oral stories, expanding rapidly with growth in publishing, and traversing a wild range of generic innovation, Indigenous voices ring out powerfully across the literary landscape. Having always had a central place within Indigenous communities, where they are interwoven with the significance of people’s lives, Indigenous stories also gained more attention among non-Indigenous readers in the United States and Canada as the 20th century rolled into the 21st. As relationships between Indigenous Peoples (Native American, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) and non-Indigenous people continue to be a social, political, and cultural focus in these two nation-states, and as Indigenous Peoples continue to work for self-determination amid colonial systems and structures, literary art plays an important role in representing Indigenous realities and inspiring continuity and change. An educational dimension also exists for Indigenous literatures, in that they offer opportunities for non-Indigenous readerships—and, indeed, for readers from within Indigenous nations—to learn about Indigenous people and perspectives. Texts are crucially tied to contexts; therefore, engaging with Indigenous literatures requires readers to pursue and step into that beauty and complexity. Indigenous literatures are also impressive in their artistry; in conveying the brilliance of Indigenous Peoples; in expressing Indigenous voices and stories; in connecting pasts, presents, and futures; and in imagining better ways to enact relationality with other people and with other-than-human relatives. Indigenous literatures span diverse nations across vast territories and materialize in every genre. While critics new to the field may find it an adjustment to step into the responsibility—for instance, to land, community, and Peoplehood—that these literatures call for, the returns are great, as engaging with Indigenous literatures opens up space for relationship, self-reflexivity, and appreciation for exceptional literary artistry. Indigenous literatures invite readers and critics to center in Indigeneity, to build good relations, to engage beyond the text, and to attend to Indigenous storyways—ways of knowing, being, and doing through story.


Author(s):  
Douglas K. Miller

The chapter situates Native American incarcerations within a long history of broken treaties, circumscribed sovereignty, land theft, forced removals, reservation and boarding school confinement, and economic and cultural paternalism. The framework that the chapter offers is one centered on what the author calls “settler custodialism,” where the root of Indian incarceration runs through the reservation system. The chapter locates Native American prisoner resistance within a longer trajectory of struggle against settler colonialism that has drawn on traditional ties to land, family, tribe, and community. The rising consciousness of the American Indian Movement (AIM) is linked directly to the incarceration of two of its principal founders, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt. From AIM’s police patrols to the Alcatraz Island prison takeover, the radicalization of the Red Power movement had more to do with its encounter with the carceral state than has been previously recognized. The chapter concludes that the prison also served as a blunt instrument to dismantle the Red Power movement when many of its leaders were incarcerated following the 1973 Wounded Knee operation.


2008 ◽  
pp. 14-29
Author(s):  
Kevin F. Downing ◽  
Jennifer K. Holtz

The practical application of theory, or praxis, in science education is arguably less straightforward today than it has been in preceding generations. While formal education and learning theories have been promulgated for close to 100 years, the changing disposition and balance of academia, and the consequent dissemination of questionable and unverifiable social theories, have led to a more ambiguous discussion and application of au courant learning theories to science education. Much of what the authors consider the detrimental entanglement in academia of definitions and educational theories about science occurs at the confluence of different professional attitudes and motivation. Scientists are generally complacent in terms of championing and defending their own core philosophy and epistemology, and a scientist’s professional rewards and efforts rarely consist of debunking critics in the so-called other ‘ways of knowing’ (see the Science Wars website and the Sokal Affair for a droll exception at http://members.tripod.com/ScienceWars/). The defense of scientific reasoning is not what scientists focus on by training; thus, this is an area that almost certainly needs more systematic attention and treatment in science curricula. By contrast, science’s detractors in the humanities, social sciences and even education, find professional incentive and marketable topic in assailing the science colossus. Most notably, postmodernism with its socially relativistic and radical constructivist theories, replete with the denial of objective truth, have attempted to undermine science, or as Fishman (1996) noted, are attempting to put science on an “indefinite furlough” (p. 95). Like it or not, the science community is at war with nihilistic ideologies and one of the battle grounds is pedagogy, a deliberation that extends to online science learning environments.


Author(s):  
John Corrigan ◽  
Lynn S. Neal

Settler colonialism was imbued with intolerance towards Indigenous peoples. In colonial North America brutal military force was applied to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the United States, that offense continued, joined with condemnations of Indian religious practice as savagery, or as no religion at all. The violence was legitimated by appeals to Christian scripture in which genocide was commanded by God. Forced conversion to Christianity and the outlawing of Native religious practices were central aspects of white intolerance.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hoover

The first chapter introduces the Superfund process, and describes how concepts and theories around environmental justice and political ecology need to be framed with an understanding of settler colonialism to be applied to Native American communities. This introduction also describes the community based methods from which this project was born, and lays out the three bodies (individual, social and political) through which Akwesasro:non responses to topics throughout the book are framed


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