scholarly journals Editorial

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Aileen Moreton-Robinson ◽  
Maggie Walter

This special edition of the International Critical Indigenous Studies Journal focuses on Indigenous people's engagement with the economy in Australia. Over the past two decades neo liberalism has shaped global economic activity. The international reach of the current economic crisis propelled by the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States has affected Indigenous communities in different ways to those whose investments were depleted by the Wall Street activities of an unregulated corporate and banking sector. Throughout this roller coaster economic ride the low socio-economic position of Indigenous peoples continued in Canada, the United States of America, New Zealand, Hawaii and Australia. The logic, or illogic of capital, failed to extend the boom of the economic upturn to Indigenous peoples, but is poised to extend the repercussions of the current downturn deep into Indigenous lives. The consistency of the Indigenous socio-economic position across these countries, even where treaties exist, indicates that the phenomenon is based on a shared Indigenous reality. In this special edition, the commonality in the way in which Indigenous people are engaged in and positioned by market forces and regulation by their respective nation states is proposed as one of the foundation plates of that Indigenous positioning.

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (s1) ◽  
pp. 413-423
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Kruk-Buchowska

Abstract The aim of this paper is to analyze how Indigenous communities in the United States have been engaging in trans-Indigenous cooperation in their struggle for food sovereignty. I will look at inter-tribal conferences regarding food sovereignty and farming, and specifically at the discourse of the Indigenous Farming Conference held in Maplelag at the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. I will show how it: (1) creates a space for Indigenous knowledge production and validation, using Indigenous methods (e.g., storytelling), without the need to adhere to Western scientific paradigms; (2) recovers pre-colonial maps and routes distorted by the formation of nation states; and (3) fosters novel sites for trans-indigenous cooperation and approaches to law, helping create a common front in the fight with neoliberal agribusiness and government. In my analysis, I will use Chadwick Allen’s (2014) concept of ‘trans-indigenism’ to demonstrate how decolonizing strategies are used by the Native American food sovereignty movement to achieve their goals.


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):  
Arturo Aldama ◽  
Clint Carroll ◽  
Natasha Myhal ◽  
Luz Ruiz ◽  
Maria Ruiz-Martinez

Issues of indigeneity, along with mestizaje—racial and cultural mixtures of African, indigenous, and Spanish ancestries and cultures that came as a result of the European colonization of the Americas—are core aspects of Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino identities, histories, and cultures. For Chicanas and Chicanos, understandings of indigeneity have shifted significantly since the early 1960s. During that time, tropes of cultural nationalism argued that all Mexican-origin people were descendants of the Aztecs, and that Aztlán—what many believed to be the conquered homelands of their Aztec ancestors encompassing the Four Corners region of the United States (Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona)—should be reclaimed. Today, a more nuanced understanding of Latinx/Chicanx indigeneity considers, for example, the complex politics of indigenous subjects migrating to settler colonial nation-states such as the United States, and the resulting negotiations of language and identity in this transnational space. Scholars of decolonial studies have added to this nuance by analyzing systems of heteropatriarchy (and the resulting gender binaries and practices of toxic masculinity) imposed through colonization and reinforced by such institutions as the Catholic Church. The editors seek to assemble and summarize key sources that speak to how indigeneity works within the transnational and transborder archives of colonization. This includes the differentiated ways that nation-states in the Americas have engaged with their indigenous pasts (including the sociopolitical and legal definitions of and practices toward indigenous communities and nations within the nation-state), as well as indigenous-led revitalization and sovereignty movements that envision decolonial futures. The goals of this bibliographic overview are to provide scholars interested in indigeneity in the Latinx context with key sources specific to Latinx communities and histories, while also considering important works that are grounded in Latin American, US, and Canadian indigenous contexts and histories. This bibliography thus invites scholars to explore the legal, political, social, and historical differences and similarities of indigeneity across hemispheric geographies. By juxtaposing the radical feminism of Gloria Anzaldúa (writing from the US-Mexico borderlands) with the decolonial visions of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (writing from her Canadian First Nation) the disjunctures and commonalities of indigeneity and decolonial thought are highlighted. The bibliography also include some key texts on indigeneity in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Bolivia that discuss places where the majority populations are mestiza/o and indigenous, and yet most indigenous communities, many whose first language is not Spanish, live in varying degrees of dispossession, poverty, and racial marginalization. The bibliography also invites scholars to consider Afro-Indigenous identities and community struggles in hemispheric frames.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather A. Howard-Bobiwash ◽  
Jennie R. Joe ◽  
Susan Lobo

Throughout the Americas, most Indigenous people move through urban areas and make their homes in cities. Yet, the specific issues and concerns facing Indigenous people in cities, and the positive protective factors their vibrant urban communities generate are often overlooked and poorly understood. This has been particularly so under COVID-19 pandemic conditions. In the spring of 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples called for information on the impacts of COVID-19 for Indigenous peoples. We took that opportunity to provide a response focused on urban Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. Here, we expand on that response and Indigenous and human rights lens to review policies and practices impacting the experience of COVID-19 for urban Indigenous communities. Our analysis integrates a discussion of historical and ongoing settler colonialism, and the strengths of Indigenous community-building, as these shape the urban Indigenous experience with COVID-19. Mindful of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, we highlight the perspectives of Indigenous organizations which are the lifeline of urban Indigenous communities, focusing on challenges that miscounting poses to data collection and information sharing, and the exacerbation of intersectional discrimination and human rights infringements specific to the urban context. We include Indigenous critiques of the implications of structural oppressions exposed by COVID-19, and the resulting recommendations which have emerged from Indigenous urban adaptations to lockdown isolation, the provision of safety, and delivery of services grounded in Indigenous initiatives and traditional practices.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Randall Akee ◽  
Stephanie R. Carroll ◽  
Chandra Ford

In a two-volume, special edition, AICRJ volume 44, issues 2 and 3, we examine COVID-19’s unique implications for Indigenous Peoples, nations, and communities. Within the United States, African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians have experienced substantially higher levels of COVID-19 infection and death. The impact of COVID-19 on Indigenous Peoples residing in other countries differs according to the overall national strategy for dealing with the pandemic. The structural racism of colonialism is the driver of myriad negative outcomes for Indigenous Peoples, and the effects of COVID-19 are no exception. The articles in this first special issue take a granular and intersectional look at the impact of the pandemic, the resilience of Indigenous communities, and the relevance of self-determination in public responses. These articles document specific programs and methods to combat and cope with COVID-19 effects in Indigenous communities and nations.


Author(s):  
Brendan W. Rensink

On July 27, 1882, a group of at least seventy-five “Turtle Mountain Indians from Canada” crossed the US–Canada border near Pembina, Dakota Territory, ordered white settlers off the land, and refused to pay customs duties assessed against them. “We recognize no boundary line, and shall pass as we please,” proclaimed their leader, Chief Little Shell. Native to the Red River region long before the Treaty of 1818 between the United States and Great Britain drew imaginary cartographies across the region or the 1872 International Boundary Survey left physical markers along the 49th parallel, Little Shell’s Chippewas and Métis navigated expansive homelands bounded by the natural environment and surrounding Native peoples, not arbitrary latitudinal coordinates. Over a century later, Indigenous leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico formed the Tribal Border Alliance and hosted a “Tribal Border Summit” in 2019 to assert that “Tribes divided by international borders” had natural inherent and treaty-bound rights to cross for various purposes. These Indigenous sentiments, expressed over centuries, reveal historic and ongoing conflicts born from the inherent incongruity between Native sovereignty and imposed non-Native boundaries and restrictions. Issues of land provide a figurative bedrock to nearly all discussion of interactions between and boundary making by non-Native and Native peoples in North America. Indigenous lands and competing relations to it, natural resources and contest over their control, geography and territoriality: these issues underpin all North American history. Adjacent to these more familiar topics are complex stories of boundaries and borders that were imposed, challenged, ignored, violated, or co-opted. Native histories and experiences at the geographic edges of European empires and nation-states uncover rough and untidy processes of empire-building and settler colonial aspirations. As non-Natives drew lines across maps, laying claim to distant Indigenous lands, they also divided the same in arbitrary manners. They rarely gave serious consideration to Native sovereignty or rights to traditional or evolving relationships to homelands and resources. It is a wonder, therefore, that centuries of non-Natives have been surprised when Indigenous peoples refused to recognize the authority of imposed borders or co-opted their jurisdictional “power” for their own uses. Surveying examples of Indigenous peoples and their histories across imposed boundaries in North America forces historians to ask new questions about intercultural exchange, geopolitical philosophies, and the histories of nations, regions, and peoples. This is a worthy, but complex, pursuit that promises to greatly enrich all intersecting topics and fields.


2019 ◽  
Vol 684 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asad L. Asad ◽  
Jackelyn Hwang

Research on Mexican migration to the United States has long noted how the characteristics of sending communities structure individuals’ opportunities for international movement. This literature has seldom considered the concentration of indigenous residents (those with origins in pre-Hispanic populations) in migrant-sending communities. Drawing on data from 143 communities surveyed by the Mexican Migration Project, and supplemented with data from the Mexican Census, this article uses multilevel models to describe how the share of indigenous residents in a migrant-sending community relates to different aspects of the migratory process. We focus on (1) the decision to migrate to the United States, and (2) the documentation used on migrants’ first U.S. trip. We do not find that the concentration of indigenous residents in a sending community is associated with the decision to migrate to the United States. However, we do find that people in communities with relatively high indigenous populations are more likely to migrate as undocumented rather than documented migrants. We conclude that the concentration of indigenous peoples in communities likely indicates economic and social disadvantage, which limits the residents’ possibilities for international movement.


2019 ◽  
pp. 108-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanondora Billiot ◽  
Jessica Parfait

Environmental changes are projected to have adverse impacts on marginalized populations through additional pressures placed on already struggling social systems. Indigenous communities, given their attachment to and dependence on the land, are especially vulnerable. Though indigenous peoples throughout the world contribute the least to changes in the environment, they are disproportionally affected. To date, there has been limited research on health impacts resulting from environmental changes, especially among indigenous peoples in the United States. This chapter presents a case study on how environmental change exposure (e.g., observations, frequency, threats) and indigenous-specific sensitivities (e.g., historical trauma, ethnic identity, discrimination) affect the likelihood of participation in adaptation activities by indigenous peoples living in a physically vulnerable coastal area of the United States. It connects these findings with themes arising within other indigenous communities experiencing environmental changes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Aliza Gail Organick

After more than two decades winding its way through a variety of United Nations (UN) mechanisms, in September 2007 the world’s indigenous peoples welcomed the news that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (hereinafter the Declaration) was at last approved by the vast majority of nation-states.2 The four settler3 states that opposed the Declaration initially (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) have each in turn voiced their ultimate approval of the declaration and have issued statements in support to their indigenous citizens.In spite of the fact that these statements expressed a measure of regret for past wrongs committed, not one of those endorsements embodied a formal apology. Now that the Declaration has entered its eleventh year, many continue to question to what extent these endorsements have meaningfully advanced reconciliation for indigenous peoples and whether these endorsements were authentic in their stated desire to do more than just acknowledge the aspirations contained in the Declaration.This comment will examine the framework for political apologies in general and then consider the endorsements of the Declaration by the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in light of contemporary apology theory. The article will then examine affirmative actions taken by those states following their endorsements in order to advance the claims of indigenous peoples and look at whether these actions have fallen short in providing meaningful redress for centuries of past wrongs.


This book explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the middle decades of the nineteenth century from a continental perspective. Today’s political map took its basic shape in the continental crisis of the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This crisis transformed the continent from a patchwork of foreign empires, republics, indigenous polities, and contested no-mans-lands into the nation states of Mexico and the United States and the Dominion of Canada, an expanding, largely self-governing polity within the British Empire. Key to this process was the question of sovereignty, or the power to rule. Battles over sovereignty ran through the struggles waged not only by the nation states that came to dominate the North America, but also those that failed, like the Confederate States of America, and others—like the European empires and indigenous peoples—that came into conflict with the three main states. In light of the global turn in 19th-century historiography, this book examines these political crises as an inter-related struggle to redefine the relationship of North Americans to new governments. This volume brings together distinguished experts on the history of Canada, indigenous Americans, Mexico, and the United States to re-evaluate an era of political transformation that has had profound consequences for the future of the continent.


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