Indigenous Politics and Education in Early to Mid-20th Century Chile: Foregrounding Mapuche Women and Transnational Conversations

Mapuche intellectuals and political activists in early- to mid-20th-century Chile both worked within and subverted dominant modernizing and “civilizing” educational discourses. Mapuche women played an important role in the movement to democratize schooling in early-20th-century Chile by publishing articles in little-known Mapuche-run newspapers and advocating for Mapuche education broadly as well as specifically for women. There was also an important transnational dimension of Mapuche political organizing around education rights during this period. These two underexplored but important aspects of indigenous activism in Chile open interesting questions about the intersections between race, gender, and nation in the sphere of education.

The Ainu and Indigenous politics in Japan: negotiating agency, institutional stability, and change

In April 2019, the Japanese government officially legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people. Building on an institutionalist framework, the paper suggests that a phenomenon of institutional layering has taken place, resulting in tensions between the desire to preserve the legitimacy of old institutions and the pressure to develop more progressive policies. To explain this process, policy legacies, and institutional opportunities are relevant. First, the narrative that equality can be attained through assimilation, and the political construction of the “Ainu problem” as a regional one tied to Hokkaido pervade political imaginaries and institutions. Second, institutional opportunities have mediated the ways activists have sought to make their voices heard in the political arena. A focus on key historical segments illuminates the difficulty for activists to penetrate high-level political arenas while indicating the importance of agency, ties and interests in explaining major reforms and their limitations. The ambiguity that characterizes current policy framework points to the potential leverage that this policy configuration represents for the Ainu. At the same time, historical and institutional legacies that have shaped Indigenous politics continue to constrain, to a great extent, the possibilities for meaningful and transformative developments for the Ainu.

Gentes igual que tú y que yo: los textos de Rosario Castellanos en los contrasentidos ideológicos de la política lingüística indigenista

In this article we analyze documents written by Rosario Castellanos during the years that she worked as a scriptwriter for the puppet plays in the Highlands of Chiapas. These plays were part of educational campaigns aimed at the Tsotsil and Tseltal Maya population. We show that the discourses circulating during the years in which indigenous politics was being constructed were permeated by opposing and contradictory ideological tensions, tensions that were reflected in the proposal and use of categories of identification of the population and their languages, in the theoretical objectives and ideals and in the participants’ personal and collective stories.

Infighting will weaken indigenous politics in Ecuador

Significance Perez disputes the official election results, which place him third with 19.4% of the vote, behind right-winger Guillermo Lasso, with 19.7%. Perez has claimed electoral fraud stripped him of thousands of votes, denying him the chance to face leftist first-round leader Andres Arauz in April’s run-off. Impacts Lasso’s decision to back out of the agreement to recount the votes will cost him in the run-off. Perez will not endorse Arauz and many of his voters are likely to cast blank votes in the second round. While Pachakutik’s appeal stretches beyond indigenous communities, racial identity, ideology and regional cleavages will limit its growth.