Narrating the Territorial Foundations of Privilege: Racial Discourse and Indigenous Peoples

2021 ◽  
pp. 233264922110439
Author(s):  
David W. Everson

This article focuses on the cultural narratives underlying U.S. society’s racialized inequalities. Informed by settler colonial theory and Charles Tilly’s work on “durable inequality,” I outline a privilege narratives framework that centers the dual mechanisms of racial dispossession that construct white supremacy’s material foundations: (1) the exploitation of non-Indigenous bodies and (2) the opportunity hoarding of Indigenous resources. I argue that these complementary, yet divergent, mechanisms shape distinctive patterns in contemporary racial discourse. In contrast to color-blind racism’s ahistoric and spatially disembedded storylines, the hoarding of Indigenous resources requires narrations that historically legitimate the dominant culture’s territoriality. Thus, in comparison with other racialized groups, racial discourse surrounding Indigenous peoples remains rooted in the defense of the territorial foundations of white property. Empirical support for the theoretical framework is provided through a sample of purposive follow-up interviews of non-Indigenous bystanders with historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) “Red Power” activism in the 1970s.

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenny A. Paris ◽  
Brady A. Garrett ◽  
Kimber J. Kinsey

Author(s):  
Liana MacDonald ◽  
Adreanne Ormond

Racism in the Aotearoa New Zealand media is the subject of scholarly debate that examines how Māori (Indigenous Peoples of New Zealand) are broadcast in a negative and demeaning light. Literature demonstrates evolving understandings of how the industry places Pākehā (New Zealanders primarily of European descent) interests at the heart of broadcasting. We offer new insights by arguing that the media industry propagates a racial discourse of silencing that sustains widespread ignorance of the ways that Pākehā sensibilities mediate society. We draw attention to a silencing discourse through one televised story in 2018. On-screen interactions reproduce and safeguard a harmonious narrative of settler–Indigenous relations that support ignorance and denial of the structuring force of colonisation, and the Television Code of Broadcasting Practice upholds colour-blind perceptions of discrimination and injustice through liberal rhetoric. These processes ensure that the media industry is complicit in racism and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples.


Incarceration ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 263266632110656
Author(s):  
Bruce Western ◽  
Jessica T. Simes ◽  
Kendra Bradner

In a given year, one in five people incarcerated in the U.S. prisons is locked in solitary confinement. We study solitary confinement along three dimensions of penal harm: (1) material deprivation, (2) social isolation, and (3) psychological distress. Data from a longitudinal survey of incarcerated men who are interviewed at baseline in solitary confinement are used to contrast the most extreme form of penal custody with general prison conditions observed at a follow-up interview. Solitary confinement is associated with extreme material deprivation and social isolation that accompanies psychological distress. Distress is greatest for those with histories of mental illness. Inactivity and feelings of dehumanization revealed in qualitative interviews help explain the distress of extreme isolation, lending empirical support to legal arguments that solitary confinement threatens human dignity.


1994 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 675-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherry M. Dingman ◽  
Mary A. Mroczka

Laterality Quotients for 80 American Indian college students were less right-biased than those for 80 Caucasian college students on the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory. Oldfield's 1971 empirically derived deciles for the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory were used to assign decile levels to the data. Deciles were then used to assign data to one of three proposed handedness phenotype classifications. Pheno-type classifications were based on Annett's 1985 proposed distribution for a single gene theorized to underlie human handedness. Chi-squared goodness-of-fit analysis showed that the data for Caucasian college students did not differ significantly from what would be anticipated by Annett's model, but American Indians differed significantly. Results provide empirical support for the hypothesis that frequency distributions for Annett's hypothesized right-shift gene may differ across racial groups.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Selma Hedlund

In 2016, a historically large gathering of Indigenous peoples, tribal nations, and allies took place at the Standing Rock reservation, North Dakota, in response to the proposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Under the assertion of Mni Wičoni (Water Is Life), a social movement emerged with the purpose of protecting clean drinking water and Indigenous lands. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s theoretical framework that emphasizes storytelling and active presence over settler resistance, this study argues that Indigenous water protectors’ collective action in the movement, as well as their stories and remembrance of Standing Rock, are acts of survivance, in which they are able to denounce othering and challenge the colonizer’s gaze. While water is often described as a first medicine by Indigenous peoples, the water protectors’ stories in this essay suggest that the movement itself represented another remedy as well. Specifically, this movement represents a pivotal moment of cultural revitalization and community across what participants refer to as “Indian country,” in which individuals are able to engage in large scale grassroots decolonizing praxis rooted in spirituality and ceremony, and suspend genocidal traps of victimry that they have long battled.


Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-411
Author(s):  
Josh Garrett-Davis

American Indian Soundchiefs, an independent record label founded by the Rev. Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) in the 1940s, developed a remarkable model of Indigenous sound media that combined home recording, dubbing, and small-scale mass production. Alongside other Native American media producers of the same era, Soundchiefs built on earlier engagements with ethnographic and commercial recording to produce Native citizens’ media a generation prior to the Red Power era of the 1960s and 1970s. This soundwork provided Native music to Native listeners first, while also seeking to preserve a “rich store of folk-lore” sometimes in danger of being lost under ongoing colonial pressures. Pauahty’s label found ways to market commercial recordings while operating within what music and legal scholar Trevor Reed (Hopi) calls “Indigenous sonic networks,” fields of obligation and responsibility.


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.


Nutrients ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 1639 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Hansson ◽  
Jason Glaser ◽  
Kristina Jakobsson ◽  
Ilana Weiss ◽  
Catarina Wesseling ◽  
...  

Background: Chronic kidney disease of non-traditional origin (CKDnt) is common among Mesoamerican sugarcane workers. Recurrent heat stress and dehydration is a leading hypothesis. Evidence indicate a key role of inflammation. Methods: Starting in sports and heat pathophysiology literature, we develop a theoretical framework of how strenuous work in heat could induce kidney inflammation. We describe the release of pro-inflammatory substances from a leaky gut and/or injured muscle, alone or in combination with tubular fructose and uric acid, aggravation by reduced renal blood flow and increased tubular metabolic demands. Then, we analyze longitudinal data from >800 sugarcane cutters followed across harvest and review the CKDnt literature to assess empirical support of the theoretical framework. Results: Inflammation (CRP elevation and fever) and hyperuricemia was tightly linked to kidney injury. Rehydrating with sugary liquids and NSAID intake increased the risk of kidney injury, whereas electrolyte solution consumption was protective. Hypokalemia and hypomagnesemia were associated with kidney injury. Discussion: Heat stress, muscle injury, reduced renal blood flow and fructose metabolism may induce kidney inflammation, the successful resolution of which may be impaired by daily repeating pro-inflammatory triggers. We outline further descriptive, experimental and intervention studies addressing the factors identified in this study.


Author(s):  
Sudheesh R. Chemmencheri

Participation and decentralisation have been shown to yield democratic outcomes in terms of efficiency, accountability and transparency through citizen engagement and devolution of powers. It has been a matter of debate whether they also benefit marginalised communities like the indigenous peoples. This paper analyzes the implications of decentralised governance in a tribal zone in India using the case of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006 − the Forest Rights Act. The effects of the Act are studied in the district of Wayanad, Kerala, through the theoretical framework of transformative decentralisation and spatial politics of participation. The key objectives of the Act − securing tenure and access to Minor Forest Produce − have achieved limited success in Wayanad as a result of a narrowly construed ideas of people’s participation. While the process prescribed by the Forest Rights Act has the potential to create new spaces for participation, most of these spaces remain closed in Wayanad. The absence of a larger vision and a radical motive to engage with the underlying patterns of domination and subordination in society has confined the process of decentralisation to its technocratic essentials, raising questions on the extent to which the Act can pave the way for transformation.


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