Indigeneity and US Settler Colonialism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Powys Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
Blood Quantum ◽  
The Us ◽  
Collective Self

Indigenous identity in the US context presents many difficulties, including issues related to the use of blood quantum, ethnic fraud, and tribal disenrollment. These difficulties should be understood as oppressive dilemmas and disappearances that are built into those structures of US settler colonialism that seek to erase indigenous peoples. Kim TallBear suggests at least one possible alternative for addressing issues associated with indigeneity and settler erasure. TallBear’s alternative is multifaceted, focusing on collective self-determination, survival, and land, and it can be used—as just one example—to understand current uses of indigeneity in some contemporary indigenous environmental justice projects.

Indigenous Planning: From Forced Assimilation to Self-determination

2021 ◽  
pp. 088541222110266
Author(s):  
Michael Hibbard
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Indigenous Planning ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land

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.

Indigenous stewardship as a lifeway1

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Avalos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
The World

As the decade closes, Indigenous peoples have re-emerged as a critical voice advocating not just for environmental justice but for an entirely different way of living and being with the world. As the descendants of the original inhabitants of lands now dominated by others, they are often entangled in ongoing struggles to protect their lands and sovereignty. Settler colonialism is now famously understood as a structure, not an event, meaning that colonial projects must be continually re-inscribed through discursive and juridical means in order to naturalize Indigenous dispossession. As a religious studies scholar, I am interested in the ways Native peoples in the United States operationalize religious action as an expression of refusal ‐ a refusal to acquiesce their religious lifeways and rights to their lands.

scholarly journals Diamond Mining in Denendeh: Colonial Natural Resource Extraction and Indigenous Peoples in Canada’s Northwest Territories

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-44
Author(s):  
Julia Werkman
Keyword(s):  
Northwest Territories ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Reciprocal Relationships ◽  
Natural Resource Extraction ◽  
Diamond Mining ◽  
National Economies ◽  
Colonial Frontier ◽  
Indigenous Land

Diamond mining is a rapidly developing industry, with an immensely large presence in Canada's Northwest Territories (NWT) with two currently functioning mines. Since the opening of the first mine in NWT in 1998, the Canadian federal government has viewed diamond production as 'essential' to both the territorial and national economies, frequently highlighting the benefits of diamond production. Entrenched in colonial language, the very existence of diamond mines in operation within NWT violate teachings, values, and the time honoured reciprocal relationships with the land held by Indigenous peoples across the territory. In problematizing this relationship, this paper employs the theories of Glen Coulthard's work For the Land: The Dene Nation's Struggle for Self- Determination, and examines the ways in which the operation of diamond mines exist as strongholds of settler-colonialism while simultaneously seeking to 'modernise' Canada's North. This is achieved through an exploration of Indigenous land relationships, the false beneficiary nature of diamond mine corporations, and finally the homeland vs. colonial frontier dichotomy.

Food Sovereignty, Justice, and Indigenous Peoples

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Powys Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Capacity ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Wild Rice ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Collective Self

Indigenous peoples often claim that colonial powers, such as settler states, violate Indigenous peoples’ collective self-determination over their food systems, or food sovereignty. Violations of food sovereignty are often food injustices. Yet Indigenous peoples claim that one of the solutions to protecting food sovereignty involves the conservation of particular foods, from salmon to wild rice. This chapter advances an argument that claims of this kind advance particular theories of food sovereignty and food injustice that are not actually grounded in static conceptions of Indigenous cultures; instead, such claims offer important contributions for understanding how settler colonial domination is a form of injustice that undermines key relationships that support Indigenous collective self-determination as an adaptive capacity.

scholarly journals The Rise of Indigenous (Pluri-)Nationalism: The Case of the Sámi People

Sociology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (6) ◽  
pp. 1141-1158
Author(s):  
Aslak-Antti Oksanen
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
State Level ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
International Norms ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Status ◽  
State Relations ◽  
Freedom Of Action

Indigenous peoples have found the nationalist language of peoples’ inherent right to self-determination helpful in articulating their political demands. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred’s model of indigenous nationalism explains the emergence of this form of indigenous self-assertion as a reaction to settler-colonial incursions. However, it cannot account for the timing of its recent successes in unsettling the status quo of indigenous–settler-state relations. This article addresses this limitation by incorporating Michael Keating’s concept of post-sovereignty, which highlights the supranational plane constraining states’ freedom of action, while providing indigenous peoples with laws and norms above state level to appeal to. Additionally, Keating’s concept of plurinationalism is drawn upon to capture the emerging reconfiguration of indigenous–settler-state relations. This combined conceptual framework is used to illuminate the Sámi people’s relations to the Nordic states as expressive of emergent indigenous nationalism, formed in reaction to settler-colonialism and enabled by international norms, laws and global indigenous peoples’ networks.

Hunting for Justice

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Eichler ◽  
David Baumeister
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
The North ◽  
Indigenous Worldviews ◽  
Seven Principles ◽  
Indigenous Lands ◽  
American Model ◽  
Theoretical Apparatus

Within the mainstream environmental movement, regulated hunting is commonly defended as a tool for preserving and managing populations of wild animals for future generations. We argue that this justification, encapsulated in the seven principles of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, perpetuates settler colonialism—an institutional and theoretical apparatus that systemically eliminates Indigenous peoples, expropriates Indigenous lands, and disqualifies Indigenous worldviews— insofar as it manifests an anthropocentric ideology that objectifies hunted animals as “natural resources” to be extracted. Because this ideology is antithetical to Indigenous views, its imposition through hunting regulation interrupts Indigenous lifeways, contributing to the destruction of Indigenous identity.

scholarly journals Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Brink Mosey
Keyword(s):  
Nova Scotia ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Canadians ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Right ◽  
Collective Thinking

As part of a collective thinking project, article proposes that all Black Canadians move to Nova Scotia to set up a decolonial, anti-racist, non-patriarchal, abolitionist settlement. Recognizing the denial of the right to collective self-determination for Black Canadians, this article explores how Black Canadians can work in solidarity with Indigenous solidarity movements to correct the injustices of settler-colonialism. 

Grounding Indigenous Teacher Education Through Red Praxis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Garcia ◽  
Valerie Shirley ◽  
Sandy Grande
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Education ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Theory And Model ◽  
Indigenous Teachers

Red Praxis centers Indigenous sovereignty rooted in epistemological and ontological orientations to place—to land. Applying Red Praxis requires teachers to understand, in greater detail, the ways in which settler and Indigenous ontologies represent not only different but also competing ways of being in the world. Red Praxis asks teachers to reconceptualize an intellectual space that reaffirms, reclaims, and (re)stories our relations to land as a decolonial practice and pedagogy of refusal. Red Praxis calls for Indigenous teachers and community educators to ground teaching in decolonial practices and aims to regenerate a sense of hope in rebuilding Indigenous communities. The exigencies of Red Praxis can be found within Indigenous teachers’ application of critical Indigenous theories and ongoing acknowledgement and protection of our relationship to land—the origin for our claim to exist as Indigenous peoples. In doing so, Red Praxis is about creating curriculum and enacting pedagogy that makes evident and mitigates the impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous communities’ knowledge systems and ways of being. Red Praxis is an extension of Sandy Grande’s theory and model of Red pedagogy. Grande proposed the pedagogical framework of Red pedagogy to rethink the ways in which teaching can confront the challenges Indigenous communities face in the 21st century. Red pedagogy is about critically analyzing the material realities resulting from the settler colonial project and creating decolonial spaces of resistance, hope, self-determination, and transformative possibility in Indigenous education. In addition to addressing structural issues, it is important for Indigenous teachers to address what is taught in schools—the curriculum—as well as how it is taught—pedagogy—as key factors in revitalizing and transforming Indigenous education.

scholarly journals Sacred Sites Protection and Indigenous Women’s Activism: Empowering Grassroots Social Movements to Influence Public Policy. A Look into the “Women of Standing Rock” and “Idle No More” Indigenous Movements

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 380
Author(s):  
Francesca Gottardi
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Grassroots Activism ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
The Us ◽  
Interpretative Research ◽  
Modern Technologies

Religion and public policy are interconnected across a variety of issues. One aspect where this linkage has been understudied is religion and Indigenous sacred sites protection. This article aims to address this gap by analyzing how Indigenous women’s activism advances this cause. The focus is on how Indigenous Peoples, specifically women, use grassroots activism to provoke change on public policy in the context of the protection of Indigenous sacred sites. Two case studies are used to illustrate this concept: the American “Women of Standing Rock” and the Canadian “Idle No More” grassroots social movements. My analysis draws from interpretative methods. Interpretative research revolves around the concept of individuals as active producers of meaning. The women-led grassroots social movements at issue highlight a fundamental lack of awareness of the historical and current struggles of Indigenous Peoples, both in the US and Canada. Modern technologies and social media provide democratic means for grassroots social movements to be heard and empowered. The growing movement by Indigenous women to assert their rights, and their quest for self-determination in land use and sacred sites protection create a positive discourse that advances Indigenous women’s position in crossing the obstacles onto “institutional places of privilege,” hence influencing public policy.

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