The largest group of Indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon, the Mojos, has coexisted with non-Natives since the late 1600s, when they accepted Jesuit missionaries into their homeland, converted to Catholicism, and adapted their traditional lifestyle to the conventions of mission life. Nearly two hundred years later they faced two new challenges: liberalism and the rubber boom. In Indigenous Agency in the Amazon: The Mojos in Liberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842–1932, Gary Van Valen postulates that as ex-mission Indians who lived on a frontier, the Mojos had an expanded capacity to adapt that helped them meet these challenges. He demonstrates that the Mojos were able to survive the rubber boom, claim the right of equality promised by the liberal state, and preserve important elements of the culture they inherited from the missions. The following excerpt from the book’s introduction discusses the failure of the Guayocho rebellion as an exception to the Mojo’s adaptation to liberalism and the rubber boom.

On a hot day in May 1887, a group of Bolivian soldiers halted their march across a flat savanna laced by lakes and tributaries of the Amazon. They were taking ten Indigenous prisoners back to their headquarters in Trinidad, the local capital, but stopped to administer several hundred lashes to each. The soldiers took special delight in whipping an eighty-year-old man before finishing him off with gunshots. They saw that old man, Andrés Guayocho, not as the pathetic figure who begged them for a drink of water before dying, but as the leader of a major Indigenous rebellion. Guayocho was a Christian shaman who used his ability to throw his voice to convince the Mojo Indians that Jesus Christ and deceased Mojo leaders were speaking to them, and attracted hundreds of Mojos away from the ex-Jesuit mission of Trinidad to a new settlement in the backlands. The local government ruthlessly crushed Guayocho’s millenarian movement not so much because of its religious unorthodoxy, but because it deprived the white elite of the Mojo labor necessary for the extraction and export of rubber for the world market.

Figure 3.9 Chacobo family. From Erland Nordenskiold, Indianer und Weisse in Nordostbolivien (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schroder, 1923).

The Mojos who survived this massacre shared the same heritage that had informed Guayocho’s movement: a mixture of Indigenous culture and the Catholic, colonial culture introduced by Jesuit missionaries in the late seventeenth century. However, those who began returning to Trinidad in 1888 asked that they be respected not just as natives with original rights to territory or as fellow Christians, but also as fellow citizens with constitutional rights. In the ensuing years, these same Mojos served in the local military, celebrated Bolivian Independence Day, sang the Bolivian national anthem in their church choirs, sought out modern educations, and participated in private land transactions. They clearly knew about and used the European ideology of liberalism, with its language of citizenship and equality before the law. The contrast between millenarian rebellion and participatory citizenship could not be greater, yet it gives some indication of the incredible range of strategies employed by the Mojos in their relations with the state and the local white elite.

During the nineteenth century, the Mojos brought together Indigenous culture, mission Catholicism, and liberalism to form a hybrid identity, which they used to defend their interests. The Mojos’ hybrid identity gave them an expanded capacity for what has been called “agency.” Agency, the freedom to act, can vary among individuals, groups, and classes in any given historical situation. It is relational, for people operate within a web of social relationships, pushing or pulling against other individuals or groups with their own potential for agency. Any attempt to renegotiate power relations is agency, from engagement in overt resistance such as a rebellion or millenarian movement, to the use of discourse, or language encoding a vision or plan for social relations. The value of agency as a tool of historical analysis lies not in insisting that all people have unfettered agency at all times, but rather in studying what factors promote or limit agency in certain contexts. Agency is especially useful for the analysis of complex Indigenous societies like the Mojos, whose internal differentiations can lead individuals or subgroups to take different actions based on what will benefit each the most. It thus allows for a more flexible treatment of Indigenous history than previous theoretical frameworks permitted, whether ethnographic ideas of closed communities from the 1930s through the 1950s, Marxian accounts of peasant rebellion popular in the 1960s and 1970s, or theories of resistance employed in the 1980s and 1990s.[1]

In this book, I weave the theme of agency through an ethnohistory of the Mojos during the liberal reforms and the rubber boom. Until now, this period in the Mojos’ history has largely been an untold narrative. Their history, exceptional because of the Mojos’ unique historical and geographical situation, has at the same time a much wider significance. Our incomplete understanding of the varieties of Latin American liberalism and of the rubber boom is further illuminated by a detailed examination of Mojo history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [….]

Most scholars dealing with this era have interpreted the period of liberalism and export economies as a time of suffering for poor and Indigenous people.[2] But by looking through the prism of agency, we can see that the Mojos were not inherently victims or powerless in the face of changes imposed by others, and that they would prove to be active participants in shaping the course liberalism and the rubber boom would take in their region.

Liberalism, a compilation of ideas from the European Enlightenment, came to inform political thought throughout the Americas by the mid-nineteenth century. Liberal thinkers discarded inherited, preconceived notions of state and economy, including the legal inequality and state-licensed monopolies of the eighteenth century. They conceived of human reason as the key to creating new and better societies, and assumed that reason dictated a new approach to government’s relationship with individuals and the economy. In an ideal liberal society, corporate groups with unique and differing legal privileges would be replaced by a nation of individuals given equal treatment under the law, and individuals would be citizens, not subjects, of the state. The ideal liberal economy would be of the “free market” type, free from state intervention, ruled by the law of supply and demand. Liberals came to believe that by liberating the individual and the economy, they could open the doors to progress, and that education would ensure the continuing progress of the nation. [….]

Just as independence created new possibilities for Latin Americans to experiment with liberalism, it also opened Latin America to a world market dominated by the industrialized nations of Europe and North America. Their industries and industrial societies consumed vast quantities of raw materials, and Latin America helped meet the demand with its resources. In the Amazon basin during the years considered by this book, local elites and foreign capitalists extracted rubber for export in response to this external demand. According to the traditional historiography, the development of Amazonian rubber extraction resulted in massive movements of people into and within the rubber zone, the conversion of rubber workers into debt peons, and the decimation of Indigenous communities through exposure to disease, warfare, and virtual enslavement. Although this depiction largely holds true for Indigenous groups living outside state authority in northern Bolivia, it cannot be applied to the Mojo region, which was transformed without being devastated by the rubber boom. The Mojos themselves were changed by their experience of the rubber boom, but retained their sense of community. By adapting to political and economic change, they remained Mojos.

Figure 1.4 Mojo Machetero dancer in church in the 1860s. From Franz Keller-Leuzinger, “The Amazon and Madeira Rivers” (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1875).

The Mojos were not destroyed by the rubber boom, and during some five decades of Bolivian participation in the export of rubber, their opportunities for independent action varied but remained quite high. The period from 1860 to 1880 was a time of increased agency as the Mojos and other ex-mission Indians found new opportunities beyond their home towns. The Mojos’ ability to act was severely challenged only during the decade of 1880–90, and Guayocho’s movement emerged in response. The years from 1890 to 1910 can best be characterized as a time of increasingly creative responses to a narrowing space for action. The greatest limits on Indigenous agency came only after 1910, when the rubber boom ended, Indigenous participation in the export economy became limited, and cattle ranching replaced rubber as the principle economic activity of the Bolivian Amazon. After a thorough examination of Mojo history, the idea that the rubber boom was prejudicial to all Indians at all times becomes untenable. [….]

Earlier interpretations of modern Latin American Indigenous peoples tended to limit their survival strategies to sealing off communities from the outside world or engaging in fruitless rebellions against outside oppressors. I find that the Mojos never tried to isolate themselves, and they never completely rejected change. Nor were they just hapless victims of the rubber boom. While Guayocho’s millenarian movement may appear at first to be a singular and failed resistance to profound change, it is better understood as one facet of native agency. Guayocho’s movement thus was not a onetime reaction to an external stimulus, but an episode in a long history of Mojo action. And as we shall see, his movement was not a failure, but rather the tumultuous birth of a new Mojo community that survived and engaged effectively with the outside world for another three decades.

From Indigenous Agency in the Amazon: The Mojos in Liberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842-1932  by Gary Van Valen. Copyright © 2013 by the University of Arizona Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

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Notes

1. Scholars have used the concept of agency more frequently in studies of Africa and its diaspora than for Latin American Indigenous peoples. My ideas of agency are informed by the introduction to Andrew Apter, Beyond Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Important examples of earlier theoretical approaches include Eric Wolf, “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13, no. 1 (1957): 1–18, in ethnographic theory; Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959) in Marxian theory; and James Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) in resistance theory. Important studies of Latin American history informed by resistance theories include Steve Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Erick Langer, Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Roger Rasnake, Domination and Cultural Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988); John Kicza, ed., The Indian in Latin American History (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1993); William Beezley et al., eds. Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994); and Catherine Legrand, “Informal Resistance on a Dominican Sugar Plantation during the Trujillo Dictatorship,” Hispanic American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (Nov. 1995): 555–96. The limitations of resistance theory have been raised by social scientists in Deborah Poole, ed., Unruly Order (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Michael Brown, “Beyond Resistance,” in Anna Roosevelt, ed., Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 287–311; Michael Brown, “On Resisting Resistance,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 (Dec. 1996): 729–35; and Jocelyn Hollander and Rachel Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (Dec. 2004): 533–54.

2. E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), represents the traditional view of the effects of liberal reforms on Indian and mestizo peasants throughout the entire region. See also the introduction to Robert Jackson, ed., Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997) for a summary of the literature on Latin American liberalism.

In the growing dialogue about Native language practices and revitalization, limited attention has been given to Indigenous children’s everyday communication. Voices of Play: Miskitu Children’s Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua is a study of multilingual play and performance among Miskitu children growing up on Corn Island, part of a multi-ethnic autonomous region on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. In the book, author Amanda Minks weaves together theories of culture and communication, creating a transdisciplinary dialogue that moves across intellectual geographies.  In the following Q&A, Minks explains why Corn Island is a particularly good place to study  processes of cultural creativity in response to colonialism and the complexities of Indigenous language use, cultural reproduction, and change.

What first attracted you to study children’s play on Corn Island?

In the early stages of my graduate work at Columbia, I had been doing exploratory research studying cross-cultural interaction in peer play among immigrant children in New York City. I already had some background in Latin American and Caribbean studies and had read Edmund Gordon’s book Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community, focused on Creole culture, history, and politics (University of Texas Press, 1998).  Out of curiosity, I took a trip to Corn Island and was absolutely captured by the innovative and diverse practices of communication I overheard there. I was expecting Creole English and Spanish, but I was not expecting to hear kids playing in a mixture of languages, of which I could understand only bits and pieces.

Corn Island sign erected by a regional bilingual-intercultural education project, with a message in English, Spanish, and Miskitu. Photo by author.

As I talked to people I met on the island, I figured out they were Miskitu kids, and when I went back to New York I became obsessed with learning more about Miskitu language, history, culture, and politics. The communicative practices of Miskitu kids on Corn Island brought the issues of cross-cultural interaction that I had been studying into much sharper focus, and I felt compelled to change research topics.

Though it is a small, out-of-the-way place, Corn Island sheds light on much more widespread processes of cultural creativity shaped by colonial and neocolonial histories. Its location in a border zone between the Caribbean and Central America, its history as a site of cross-cultural interaction and mixture, and its contemporary condition as a dynamic community of diverse migrants and founding Creole families all make Corn Island a special place for examining Indigenous peoples’ language use, cultural reproduction, and change.

How do children at play provide insight into the language acquisition process?

In linguistic anthropology, we think of language acquisition as part of a broader process of language socialization, which Bambi Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs initially theorized as socialization (learning) to use language, and socialization through language. From this perspective, children’s language entails a much broader acquisition of practices that are fundamental to cultural reproduction and change.

The paradigm of language socialization always included a range of actors not limited to children, and the recognition that socialization is an ongoing process across the lifespan. However, many of the early studies focused more on adult-child interaction than on children’s peer interaction. When we focus on peer interaction, we are able to see some similarities with child-adult interaction. For example, children are very adept at recognizing cultural norms, making them explicit, and enforcing them in peer play. Other times, in contrast to adults, children’s play reveals much more spontaneity, improvisation, and creativity in the forms and meanings of their communication.

This openness and capacity for transformation make children’s play a key site for tracking processes of cultural change. Taking a broad view of children’s play also enables us to expand beyond language use and to consider music and other aesthetic practices as equally important media for communication and socialization.

When describing your research methods, you mentioned having an older sibling or parent help to decipher and contextualize a younger child’s language. Can you expand on this process?

In language socialization studies, researchers typically transcribe recordings of naturally occurring discourse in collaboration with native speakers. Even when the researcher is a native speaker, this methodology is useful for incorporating other viewpoints of people familiar with the particular social setting, and getting multiple perspectives of “what is going on” in an interaction.  This process may be especially important for studying children’s discourse, because children can be very idiosyncratic and creative in their language use. It is also important because the meaning of an interaction can never be reduced to a literal transcription and translation of the utterances used.

Communication draws on layers of social and cultural contexts that can only be analyzed through ethnographic methods, including a great deal of observation, listening, and analysis in collaboration with people who know the setting and actors very well. In my own experience, working with my co-interpreters was essential not only for the process of transcription, translation, and interpretation; it also provided a small circle of people who deeply understood what the research was about and became some of my closest friends and intellectual companions.

How does a child’s language within the family unit or at play differ from their language used in an education setting?

Playing a marble game called koko mana. Photo by author.

The range of communicative practices that are encouraged and explicitly incorporated in educational settings is usually much more narrow than the range that children use and hear at home and in the peer group. The Miskitu-dominant Moravian school on Corn Island was exceptional in this regard because most children felt comfortable using and mixing a variety of languages in and out of the classroom, even before the school implemented a multilingual-intercultural education program. Still, educational contexts on Corn Island typically used multilingualism as a stepping stone to Spanish-dominant classes in the upper grades. At home and in the peer group, multilingualism was a much more deeply engrained practice of everyday communication that even older children continued to use after they acquired proficiency in Spanish at school.

Another key point is that in contrast to educational settings, informal play activities tend to be child-directed, revealing children’s emergent tendencies and preferences for language use (as well as other repertoires of communication). On Corn Island, as in many other places, children’s activities at home and in the neighborhood are overseen by older siblings, cousins, and other peers rather than being closely monitored by adults. Children have considerable freedom to experiment with different modes of communication in their play, but they also have tremendous influence on each other.

A good example is one of my focal groups of children on Corn Island whose cousins from a mainland Miskitu village came to live with them permanently. The new arrivals only spoke Miskitu, while the Corn Island kids spoke more Creole English and Spanish, though they also had a lot of Miskitu knowledge. The parents of the Corn Island kids had discouraged them from speaking Miskitu because they feared it would hinder their success in school. When the Miskitu-dominant cousins arrived, this peer group’s play shifted to incorporate more Miskitu, which their parents were not very happy about. Last summer when I was chatting with some of these kids (now in college in Managua), they laughed heartily when they recalled one of the family matriarchs coming out and yelling at them (in Miskitu), “If I hear you speaking Miskitu, you girls are going to get a whipping!” The irony of this bivalent message was not lost on them, as the mother seemed to be conveying “do as I say and not as I do.” Children adapt to multiple, sometimes contradictory messages in language socialization, and these particular kids ended up greatly valuing and maintaining their multilingualism.

You used recordings and transcripts to help with your research, and in later chapters, you also mention the effects that television and other technology have on language.  How do the use of recordings and other technology help or hinder language revitalization?

Let me first address recording as a research methodology. Recordings are very useful tools to document how people actually use language in everyday practices. However, researchers need to be cognizant of culturally appropriate ways of making and using recordings, and always uphold ethical obligations to the people with whom they work. Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have a troubled history in this regard, since early research was not always carried out with informed consent of those being studied, and communities often did not maintain control over how the recordings were used. There is no justification for this history, aside from recognizing the limits of our ethical standards at any given moment. But paradoxically, many of the recordings produced under unethical circumstances have become a resource for cultural and linguistic revitalization in recent years, as younger generations use them to learn forgotten practices of their communities.

Contemporary researchers, at least those affiliated with universities, must follow much stricter guidelines for obtaining consent to make and use recordings. Those who work with Indigenous communities often collaborate with them to develop research topics and methodologies that are desired and valued by the community itself. The Miskitu people with whom I worked were open to recordings of various kinds, but I did make a difficult decision to use only audio recording rather than audiovisual recording. Recent language socialization studies have shown the special value of videorecording for capturing a rich interactive context that includes gesture and bodily stance. However, videorecording was not feasible in the public spaces on Corn Island in which children played, in a volatile social context where crime and random (or not so random) violence were a daily reality.

I used audio recording, which was much more discreet from the perspective of passers-by, along with detailed notes and photographs to document children’s play activities. All forms of documentation create a representation of a social interaction rather than reproducing the interaction itself, but recordings still help to reveal the moment-by-moment negotiation of interaction, and to ground the analysis in specific interactions rather than relying on generalizations. Understanding how people use language provides essential insights for designing and implementing effective language revitalization programs, as Barbra Meek has shown in her book in this series, We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community (University of Arizona Press, 2010).

Researchers have never had a monopoly on technology. Radio and recordings have long been a source of expressive repertoires on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, evident for example in the regional popularity of classic U.S. country music like George Jones and Tammy Wynette. At the time of my study, Miskitu children on Corn Island were the first generation of their families to grow up with regular television viewing, somewhat delayed because of the irregular access to electricity and the relatively recent development of a satellite cable TV system on the island.

Boys playing Nintendo for a fee, and watching for free. Photo by author.

Some observers might view increased television viewing as a threat to Native language maintenance, but I think it was actually part of a broader expansion of communicative resources that continued to include Miskitu and other regional languages (or language varieties). In chapter five of my book, I show how Miskitu kids enacted elaborate pretend play scenarios that involved characters and plots from Spanish-language TV shows, but they often voiced these characters in Miskitu, revealing a creative recombination of figures and voices.

On the mainland Atlantic Coast, community radio and television stations foreground regional languages and cultures, reclaiming technology for cultural and political imperatives at the local and regional level. In order to understand the impact of technology and media in any particular place, we must employ ethnographic methods to see what people are using in their daily lives and how they are using these forms of communication.

What changes do you see happening to Corn Island’s hybrid languages in the future? 

I think that Corn Island will continue to be a vibrant site for hybrid and transformative language use. One aspect that has changed since my research is that use of Miskitu seems to be less stigmatized in public spaces now, so that Miskitu kids at the public school are more likely to use Miskitu openly rather than hiding it. This is partly due to the ongoing changes in demographics and political representation on the island and in the region, as Miskitu identities and cultural practices have been revalorized in official spaces under regional autonomy.

This process is ambivalent, sometimes caught up in the clientelistic management of power at the national and regional level, and not always tied to improved opportunities for the poorest sectors of society.  Nevertheless, a larger argument of my book is that Miskitu kids’ creative practices of communication open up new possibilities for different kinds of political subjectivities and interventions. I end the book on an optimistic note that brings Walter Benjamin’s concept of children’s mimetic cognition into dialogue with some of the Miskitu kids’ current reflections, as young adults, about the political possibilities of their diverse communicative repertoires and the continued maintenance of their Miskitu identities (intersecting, always, with many other kinds of identities).

Amanda Minks is an assistant professor of anthropology in the University of Oklahoma Honors College. Voices of Play: Miskitu Children’s Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua is now available from the University of Arizona Press.

This book is unique in how it brings together a novel ethnographic focus, ethnomusicology, and linguistic anthropology. Few ethnographies have been written about children in the anthropological literature, and even fewer have focused on children’s interactions. Voices of Play provides a detailed look at the everyday exchanges and the play performances of children and adolescents of Miskitu descent who are marginalized in various ways within the Nicaraguan nation-state.

[This article is crossposted on the UNC Press blog.]

In Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence,Tracy Devine Guzmán examines the contested process of constructing Indianness from Brazil’s independence to the present. Engaging issues ranging from citizenship and national security to the revolutionary potential of art and sustainable development, Devine Guzmán argues that the tensions between popular renderings of Indianness and lived Indigenous experiences are critical to the unfolding of Brazilian nationalism, on the one hand, and the growth of a Brazilian Indigenous movement, on the other. In the following excerpt from the epilogue, she discusses contemporary Indigenous assertions of sovereignty and self-representation, especially in the context of opposition to the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam.  

Although much work remains to educate nonindigenous peoples about Brazil’s indigenous past, present, and future, and to offset the ever-popular lore of benevolent colonialism, racial democracy, and Indian grandmothers “caught with lassos,”[1] many indigenous scholars and teachers choose to prioritize first the educational needs of their own communities. This impetus has inspired national-level conferences aimed at improving the content and delivery of indigenous education and the intensified pro- duction of pedagogical materials in Native languages authored by or in collaboration with Native speakers of those languages.[2] Likewise, university-level programs offering specialized training in bilingual and intercultural pedagogies for indigenous teachers exist in at least nine states, and research centers for the study of indigenous languages, cultures, histories, and philosophies are expanding beyond the domain of state-backed indigenist institutions like FUNAI and the Museu do Índio.[3] Vital changes are taking place, for example, among Terena communities in Mato Grosso do Sul, where instruction in the Terena language is offered to Terena children and adolescents, as well as to Terena adults who may have never had an opportunity to read or write in their Native tongue.[4]

Notwithstanding such positive initiatives, the broader configuration of political, social, economic, and cultural power in which they take place reveals a steep road ahead. As a result of the intensified and institutionalized disempowerment of indigenous peoples and interests during the first decade of the twenty-first century, which culminates in state sponsorship of Belo Monte, it seems unlikely that a substantial number of nonindigenous politicians or citizens will in the near future embrace or even begin to consider the ideas and projects of indigenous intellectuals and communities seriously enough to assess their practical and theoretical implications for the future of national development policy, educational reform, environmental protection, governance, or international relations.

Founder of the Movimento Indígenas em Ação (MIA), Ysani Kalapalo (fourth from the left) leads a demonstration against the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in downtown São Paulo, 20 August 2011. Also pictured (from left to right): Yamuni Barbosa, Samantha Aweti Kalapalo, Mariana Aweti Kalapalo, India Tikuna Weena Miguel, Guayra Wassu, I. Wassu, and Tayla Kalapalo. Photo by the author; reproduced with the permission of Ysani Kalapalo.

Native Brazilians’ efforts to counter the privatization of the indigenist bureaucracy and the deleterious effects of contemporary indigenist policy through intensified demands for land demarcation, ethnodevelopment, intercultural education, and other empowering social programs, as well as through heightened cultural activism and political participation at all levels of government indicate, indeed, that the struggle for indigenous self-representation has in some ways just begun. Nonetheless, the viral proliferation of indigenous political commentary and cultural production via the Internet in the form of journalism, fiction, film, video, blogging, and election campaigning (for example) continues to revolutionize the relationship between Native peoples and visual representation, on the one hand, and Native peoples and the written word, on the other. [....]

Rethinking how the representation of indigenous needs and interests works in local, national, and international politics, and reconfiguring the problematic relationship between indigeneity and dominant sovereignty, means more than Native peoples’ being inserted, or even inserting themselves, into existing political structures and institutions—however crucial and challenging that feat continues to be. At the very least, it must also mean rethinking sovereignty in collaboration with indigenous peoples and not for them, while taking into account their interests, values, renderings of the past, and policy proposals with regard to development, education, social welfare, environmental protection, land tenure, governance, and freedom.

As Marcos Terena suggested more than two decades ago, reforming politics and rethinking the political to the collective benefit of Native peoples means building and strengthening interindigenous connections and collaboration across national borders, as well as nationally, while at the same time restructuring the colonialist configurations of power that have shaped relations between Native and non-Native peoples since the Conquest. Seeking to explain his own political trajectory in the context of the Brazilian indigenous movement, he conceded: “After seeing so many of our brothers decimated over the course of four centuries, we discovered that we could not walk alone. It [was] necessary to discover allies for our cause and for the survival of our . . . peoples among the [then] 140 million [nonindigenous] members of Brazilian society.” [5]

The population numbers have changed dramatically over the past two decades, but the urgency of forming such alliances across the dividing lines between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples, and among individuals and groups working within the parameters of other socially and historically formed notions of ethnicity, “race,” class, and geography (for example), most certainly has not. Shared and increasing interest among indigenous and nonindigenous Brazilians in preventing the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam—because of the social and economic ills it will engender, the environmental destruction it will wreak, and the human rights it will violate—is surely the most significant example of our day. National and transnational opposition to the initiative articulates these issues as ultimately inseparable from one another, thus resonating with the traditional indigenous belief in the inexorable interconnectedness of all human experience, and an increasingly widespread question- ing of dominant notions of progress.[6] “The hurt of one is the hurt of all,” Phil Lane Jr. has long argued, “and the honor of one is the honor of all. . . . Unless justice animates all that we do in human and community work, what we are doing is not development.”[7]

“We are Xingu.” Demonstration against the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in downtown São Paulo, 20 August 2011. Photo by the author.

Reflecting on his many years of political activism and the culmination of that experience in his candidacy for public office, Marcos Terena expressed optimism about Native participation in the selection of Brazil’s national self-government despite the growing improbability of success for his own bid: “An indigenous candidacy is an odd human feat, but one that manifests democracy—democracy that inspires us to throw off the discrimination that has until now placed us at the margins of the decisions that affect us, and that every four years gives us hope for a voice in a representative body like the National Congress.”[8] That dozens of Native candidates chosen by mainstream political parties to defend mainstream political platforms sought in nationwide elections to represent indigenous interests in concert with the interests of their nonindigenous constituencies destabilizes the colonialist foundations of twentieth-century indigenism. The fact that they continue to work toward this goal in the wake of defeat, and the fact that at least part of the coalition against Belo Monte has come to articulate its opposition in resonance with Native conceptions of sovereignty, give us cautious hope that despite—and perhaps also, because of—the great challenges that together we face, a new political order may be on the horizon.

Notes

1. On the circulation of ideas about Native peoples in nonindigenous classrooms and curricula, see A. Lopes da Silva and Grupioni, A temática indígena.

2. On such initiatives across Brazil, see Nincao, “Kóho Yoko Hovôvo”; “Primeiro Encontro Nacional de Educação Indígena”; Professores de Pataxó, Uma história; and Troncarelli, Kaiabi, and Instituto Socioambiental, Brasil e África.

3. As of late 2011, such programs are in place at the Universidade Federal de Roraima (UFRR); Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG); Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM); Universidade Federal do Tocantins (UFT); Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG); Universidade Federal de Bahia (UFBA); Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso (UNEMAT); Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL); Universidade Estadual do Amazonas (UEA); Universidade Estadual da Bahia (UNEB); Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS); and Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná (UNIOESTE). See Rede, “Conheça a REDE.”

4. Recent initiatives also exist to offer classes in indigenous languages to nonindigenous students, teachers, and researchers (Paulo Baltazar, personal communication; “Base de Estudos Indígenas”).

5. Terena, “Vôo do índio.”

6. And yet the problem of popular perception and media representation remains. The day following the 20 August 2011 manifestation against Belo Monte in São Paulo, the print version of the Folha de São Paulo included not a word about the protest. Instead, it highlighted a new Globo TV reality show called Expedição Xingu, in which eight (nonindigenous) university students would “leave the comforts of the city” and head to the forest, suffering various hardships of the 1950s and otherwise following in the footsteps of the Villas-Bôas brothers. Their adventure “even included participating in indigenous celebrations and fighting with them [sic].” See Castro Torres, “jovens refazem expedição.”

7. Lane, “Indigenous Guiding Principles.”

8. Terena, “Uma candidatura indígena.”

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Tracy Devine Guzmán is associate professor of Latin American studies, Portuguese, and Spanish at the University of Miami.

From NATIVE AND NATIONAL IN BRAZIL: INDIGENEITY AFTER INDEPENDENCE by Tracy Devine Guzmán. Copyright © 2013 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/11663.html

“Lucid, intelligent, and thoroughly researched, this book tracks 150 years of public policy and official imaginings around Indigenous peoples in Brazil and the continuing contestatory work of Indigenous leaders and thinkers. Native and National in Brazil offers students of global indigeneity indispensable access to the Brazilian scenario, whose unfolding will shape the future of Indigenous peoples worldwide.”
–Mary Louise Pratt, New York University

Shona Jackson is the author of Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean, an investigation of how descendants of colonial Guyana, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies. Here, Jackson discusses her personal connections to her research.

This book springs from two disavowals and a sense of deep longing. The first disavowal occurred growing up in Guyana where I was born. Many Guyanese, collectively Creoles, are mixed but we are taught to assert our black or Indian (descended) identity to the exclusion of its composite parts—so I was raised to see my self as black despite the obvious Indian and Amerindian (Native) ancestry in our family.

The second disavowal occurred after I left Guyana at the age of seven. In my first diaspora home, the U.S. Virgin Islands, identity was articulated in terms of its exclusion and difference from other Caribbean identities, especially those not yoked to U.S. political economy. When I arrived in the continental U.S. in 1989, I realized that although Guyana had taught me to see myself as black, the term African American did not include this child of the Americas.

The author at age two in Guyana.

Black identity in the U.S. was asserted in terms of an African past and not in terms of its cultural multiplicity and connectedness, for example, to Caribbean and Native cultures. Additionally, blackness in the United States has been constructed in large part against whiteness, while in the contemporary Caribbean it was understood in terms of its difference from later arrivants and links to other black cultures. By age 15 I had lived on two continents and two islands and was at home neither in the Caribbean diaspora nor in the black diaspora. So few people even knew about Guyana, much less that it is a mainland country included in the Caribbean/West Indies because of its culture and history, which significantly repeats but substantially differs from those more well-known archipelagic ones such as Jamaica. And those who knew enough not to mishear “Ghana” knew nothing more than Jim Jones, El Dorado, and, the most confidently discharged response from a professor at George Mason (where I was an adjunct): “Yes, there is a species of frogs there that they lick.” I am afraid of frogs.

Multiethnic, multi-religious, creative, brilliant, and impoverished, where the riot of nature threatens every slab of concrete laid down against it, the Guyana I knew seemed in the United States subject to an unrelenting fiction and one that could not grant me true belonging anywhere in the world. These disavowals and fictions of identity led me to question how we as blacks, primarily in the Caribbean, come to belong: how we in other words become Indigenous and why and how certain exclusions or limits become essential to this process. It led to a rethinking of indigeneity not from the perspective of Native status, but from that of the techniques of settler power and how they inform the modes of belonging of those involuntarily brought to the new world, specifically enslaved and indentured peoples.

“Creole indigeneity” is the term I use to capture these modes of belonging of subalterns that refashion settler power. In the book, I demonstrate how this occurs across political, historical, and literary narrative to produce a new social structure and “grammar” of being that can support and reinscribe the post-contact grammars of subaltern settlers whose mode of becoming rests now not on the time of prior origin but on the time of their labor, deeply embedded within modernity. Creole Indigeneity rethinks Enlightenment humanism, as it is adapted by subalterns for their own ontological and political sovereignty. It also achieves a rethinking of the project of postcolonial nationalism in the Caribbean as a nativizing project to institute that new “man,” or in the words of the late Guyanese president Forbes Burnham the “real man,” of the postcolonial humanist project and its inscription of labor as the new time of belonging for non-Indigenous arrivants. In this dual critique, the book looks at how blacks and Indians reproduce or rewrite the labor of the formerly enslaved and indentured and utilize it as a legitimating narrative for nation building, belonging, and social being. The book therefore includes two chapters on political discourse that center on Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan. It also engages the Calibanesque literary tradition, which is the site of constant articulation of this belonging in and through labor. It is in this tradition that the grammar of native being for blacks and Indians is articulated and the subaltern subject becomes the sovereign subject within western modernity. Not only have we reached the productive limit of the Caliban tradition which reproduces the conditions for bourgeois humanism—conquest, Native displacement, and modern labor—but it leads to a misreading of Indigenous writing because it is always viewed through the epistemological strategies of labor.

The most difficult part of this work has been confronting the way in which the reworking of indigeneity for Creole being has and continues to require the subordination and displacement of indigenous peoples in the Caribbean. In Guyanese society and politics, they are marginalized by every successive administration. Moreover, while they did not provide labor for the Caribbean plantation to the extent of blacks and Indians, they are brought into the regime of labor of our discourse and forced to continue to work for Creole being, where they serve as the limit of Creole humanity. The displacement of the region’s aboriginal peoples both in cultural discourse and in political economy has become essential for Creole being and sovereignty.

Author Shona Jackson

Shona Jackson is author of Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean and associate professor of English at Texas A&M University.

“Shona Jackson’s Creole Indigeneity breaks open a long-standing conundrum on the relationship between diasporan blacks and the modes of indigeneity with which they are both intersected with and/or located as oppositional to by dominant discourses in the West. Simply put, it is must-reading for all scholars of blackness and the African Diaspora because she does indeed ‘illuminate those interwoven histories beneath the surface’ that inform our broad and deeply complex ancestries.”

—Michelle M. Wright, Northwestern University

This guest post also appears on the University of Minnesota Press blog.

A view from Saint Vincent island, where author Beth Rose Middleton traveled to participate in the conference, “The Garifuna: Land, Reparation, and Human Rights.”

Since the 2011 publication of Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation, land trusts in the United States have increasingly come together to discuss ways to support one another and to support the growth of Native land conservation. Today, Beth Rose Middleton, author of Trust in the Land, provides an update on some of the latest developments in tribal conservation and land trusts. Middleton also details a new collaboration she’s fostering with the Garifuna people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in an effort to increase the global scope of her work to promote social justice, Indigenous rights, and thoughtful stewardship of land and cultural heritage.

The Indigenous conservation initiatives discussed in Trust in the Land are expanding in exciting new ways, both domestically and internationally. The book, which was developed in dialogue with partnering Indigenous organizations and agency staff, is contributing to a strong movement of Indigenous private land conservation, stewardship, and re-acquisition in the United States and beyond.

Within the United States, the number of Native land trusts has continued to grow. While two Native land trusts (the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council and the Native American Land Conservancy) are profiled in full in Trust in the Land, there are now at least seven full-fledged Native land trusts in the United States and more are forming. To share the work of these inspiring Native land trusts, I have organized and participated in several collaborative presentations with leaders of groups profiled in the book (to the Land Trust Alliance, the California Indian Conference, and the Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 Regional Tribal Operations Committee), and given presentations on the book to tribes upon their request. Many seem to be using both the “how-to” chapter by Dr. Kurt Russo (Chapter Six: “The Art and Science of Creating a Native American Land Conservancy”) and the 12 chapters of inspiring examples of applications of the model. Students have also been using the books in university classes, and examining the more theoretical chapters on environmental justice and private conservation, in addition to the applied examples. It is a good feeling to get to collaborate with the Native land trust leaders and with educators in Native studies, environmental studies, and other programs, and to see this work being applied to achieve Native land conservation and land restitution.

Native land trusts in the United States have begun to come together to discuss ways to support one another and to support the growth of Native land conservation using these particular private conservation tools. Trust in the Land has been able to support this movement, and it has been my honor to provide volunteer support to an emerging group of Native land trusts. We have been discussing the possibility of a future text on Native land trusts specifically, so there may be a “sequel” to Trust in the Land.

Outside of the United States, the Garifuna people of the greater Caribbean and Central America have expressed interest in the private Indigenous conservation models profiled in Trust in the Land. I have begun a dialogue/collaboration with them regarding applying private conservation tools in their context. The rest of the blog will focus on this emerging collaboration.

In general, Indigenous peoples internationally are applying diverse legal and political strategies to protect cultural and natural heritage. This often includes negotiation with surrounding nation states to develop programs and priorities to protect Indigenous homelands, or with private corporate and NGO actors. With limited success, Indigenous peoples have been able to draw upon supportive language in international frameworks, such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Culture and Natural Heritage.

Trust in the Land is focused on American Indian tribes’ use of private conservation tools such as conservation easements and land trusts to protect their homelands. As Sally Fairfax et al. remind us in Buying Nature (MIT Press 2005), these tools for citizen-initiated conservation have been around since the foundation of the US and are a permutation of English common law. They are a unique public-private hybrid, enabled by public laws and often public monies, yet initiated and funded by private organizations and their members. These private conservation mechanisms provide important and useful tools for tribes, Native non-profits, and Native community groups looking to re-acquire, re-gain access to, or re-gain rights to steward their homelands.

In May 2011, just a few months after Trust in the Land was released, I had the opportunity to attend a conference at York University in Toronto, Ontario, entitled “Our Legacy: Indigenous-African Relations Across the Americas.” After giving my paper, I mentioned that Trust in the Land had just come out, and passed a copy around to the group.

There was a strong presence at the conference of Garifuna people from Belize, Honduras, Saint Vincent, and the Grenadines. The Garifuna are a distinct ethnic group in the Caribbean that are descended from Indigenous Africans brought to the Americas by slave traders, and Caribs, who are Indigenous to the Caribbean. Africans and “Yellow Caribs” intermarried and formed distinct communities, which became known as Garifuna. Garifuna people speak their own language (Garinagu) and have a unique culture. In 2001, the United Nations Education and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated the Garifuna Culture a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The Garifuna homeland is Saint Vincent in the eastern Caribbean. Following war with the English and the French, remaining Garifuna were captured in October of 1796 and incarcerated on a small, rocky island in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines called Balliceaux. While many perished on Balliceaux, the survivors were shipped across the Caribbean in February 1797 to the island of Roatan off of the cost of Honduras. The descendants of present-day Garifuna communities in Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua trace their heritage to this forced relocation from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

A group of Garifuna who remain in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have formed the International Garifuna Heritage Foundation (IGHF). Ms. Browne intimated to me the Garifuna desire to protect the Island of Balliceaux, which is in private ownership and in danger of sale and development. The Garifuna people are concerned about disregard for this site of their struggle and survival; a landscape of cultural patrimony. As such, they are interested in learning about the conservation tools that other Indigenous peoples are using to protect sites of trauma and survival and cultural renaissance.

A cultural presentation by young Garifuna women at the October 2012 conference, “The Garifuna: Land, Reparation, and Human Rights.”

The IGHF had an international conference in February 2012, to which I submitted a paper entitled “Opportunities for Using Conservation Easements/ Land Trusts to Protect the Island of Balliceaux.” The paper began an exploration of how to apply conservation easements and land trusts (a potential Garifuna Land Trust) in the context of SVG and broader Caribbean environmental and cultural resource protection law. This investigation is ongoing, in dialogue with Garifuna partners. I am currently undertaking a literature review of environmental and cultural legal tools in the Caribbean and examining the ways in which the activities of conservation and cultural NGOs are enabled in the Caribbean. A group of presenters from the 2012 IGHF conference are preparing papers for a special issue that we hope will be published in Caribbean Quarterly.

I am very excited about this international application of the work begun in Trust in the Land. As my father and all of my paternal relations are from Belize, Honduras, and Jamaica, the work begun in Trust in the Land has helped to re-connect me to one (as a mixed-race person, I have multiple sites of origin) of my homelands in the Caribbean. I hope that this work, which is deeply important to me both personally and in broader terms of social justice, Indigenous rights, and thoughtful stewardship of land and cultural heritage, will be of use to Indigenous peoples worldwide.

As I noted in my first blog entry, I believe that Indigenous applications of private conservation tools—conservation easements and land trust structures—is nothing short of revolutionary. We are taking a legal instrument that was and can still be used in a colonial fashion—that is, asserting control over Native lands without Native consent—and re-fashioning it into a tool that Native entities can use to assert sovereignty and gain ownership of, or at least a stake in, the management of traditional lands.
–
Beth Rose Middleton has published articles in Economic Development Quarterly, the Journal of Political Ecology, Ethnohistory, Environmental Management, Smoke Signals, and News from Native California. She is an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Native American Studies, where she has developed courses on Native public health, Native environmental policy, and federal Indian law.

Middleton illuminates a new and exciting avenue for advancing tribal sovereignty and environmental justice in Indian country.

–SAIL

Beth Middleton’s Trust in the Land is a well-researched, well-written book which offers an important analysis of private conservation tools as a way for Indigenous peoples to reacquire ownership of their traditional lands and, perhaps more importantly, re-establish a relationship with these lands by reasserting their rights of stewardship as the land’s original inhabitants.

–AlterNative

Historians gathered in San Francisco last week to attend the 2013 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. The meeting, which took the theme “Entangled Histories: Connections, Crossings, and Constraints in U.S. History,” featured several panels that examined historical trends and future directions in the field of U.S. history.

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert with “The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue: Voices and Images from Sherman Institute,” the book he co-edited along with Clifford E. Trafzer and Lorene Sisquoc.

A panel organized by Donald Fixico on American Indian history included First Peoples authors Rose Stremlau (Sustaining the Cherokee Family, UNC Press 2011) and Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue, OSU Press 2012). In his comments on the panel, Sakiestewa Gilbert underscored the importance of engaging Indigenous scholarship and theory when researching and writing about Native communities:

“Some scholars need to do a better job consulting the work of Native historians and other thinkers when we research and publish on their Indigenous communities. When we write about the Choctaw or Kiowa, we ought to honor their people by citing and listening to their scholars and other writers. I’m thinking here of Choctaw historian Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe, and Kiowa historian Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote. And when we write about the Diné, we ought to ask ourselves how the scholarship of Diné historians Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Lloyd Lee, and many others, might enlighten our understanding of their people.”

Sakiestewa Gilbert discussed a recent experience in which the peer reviewer of an article he submitted to a major scholarly journal mistook his use of a Hopi theoretical framework for a lack of theory. That experience and other observations of historiographical trends led him to argue that, “as Native historians, we need to continue asserting and introducing Indigenous frameworks of understanding in ‘mainstream’ academic history journals with the hope of demonstrating that there are ways of thinking about Native history that go beyond the theories and models so commonly used and accepted by western historians.”

A Sunday morning panel brought together some of the founding members of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), an organization established in order to create a space for the Indigenous studies scholarship that has been chronically marginalized in other disciplines. The panel–consisting of Robert Warrior, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Jean O’Brien, and Phil Deloria serving as chair–discussed the development of the Association from the first planning conference call among the founding members to, over the course of just a few years, a vibrant organization with an international membership and a forthcoming academic journal.

Robert Warrior commented on some of the trends he’d seen emerge at NAISA conferences over the course of the past few years. When the conference first met in Oklahoma in 2007, he said, there were many panels organized around a specific tribe or region but that there were now more panels comprised of scholars doing work on some central theme or idea in various places across the globe. Warrior cited queer Indigenous studies as an example of an intellectual trend that had developed in panels and conversations at NAISA meetings and that continues to gain traction as a critical subdiscipline. Read more about the Association’s history and founding principles here.

Amy Lonetree chats with colleagues at a launch event for her book, “Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums.”

Together, the American Indian history and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association panels demonstrated the remarkable growth of Indigenous studies scholarship over the past decade. They also underscored the fact that, although Indigenous studies now has its own thriving academic community, there is still work to be done when it comes to decolonizing western intellectual paradigms and the institutions that support them.

While both panels were inclusive of Native and non-Native scholars alike, Sakiestewa Gilbert ended his talk with a powerful reminder that regardless of the ethnicity of the researcher, Indigenous voices should be centered in scholarship on Indigenous peoples:

“We have a message to tell about our history and cultures. And we have a responsibility to tell these histories in ways that are meaningful and useful to our people. When we write about our communities, our voices matter. They have always mattered.”

Students of the Native Hawaiian Charter School Halau Ku Mana sail in Kanehunamoku’s home waters of Kane’ohe Bay off of Honolulu.

In just a few short months, the ongoing protest movement Idle No More blossomed from four women and a hashtag to a multinational field of Indigenous uprising and vocal presence. INM has gathered Indigenous and settler peoples to stand up for the health of lands and the communities that rely on them, and it has brought the importance of teaching people about Indigenous nationhood to the fore. Most recently, various Indigenous activists and scholars have also called us to consider the next step—where does INM go from here?

Students at Halau Ku Mana observe and fortify the pu’epu’e (mounds) in which the taro plant grows. This type of interaction allows students to interact with their plants without damaging the root systems.

In The Seeds We Planted, I describe the ways Kanaka Maoli educators seized upon the opening created by the crashing of two distinct waves—late twentieth-century Hawaiian nationalist movements and U.S. educational reform movements based on school choice—into one another. The convergence of these movements produced a moment of possibility, as Kanaka Maoli communities could, for the first time in over a century, take direct control over our educational destinies by starting our own charter schools. Predominantly Native communities, which were explicitly asserting Indigenous rights to educational self-determination, accounted for more than half of those groups who initiated public charter schools in Hawaiʻi. As some leaders of the Hawaiian charter school movement put it, these new schools provided spaces of liberation from the failures of assimilatory schooling, as well as the inadequacies of earlier models of Hawaiian studies education that included representations of Kanaka Maoli without disrupting dominant epistemologies and relations of power.

Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua is author of The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School. She is associate professor of political science at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She was a cofounder of the Hālau Kū Māna public charter school and served as a teacher, administrator, and board member at various times during the school’s first decade.

[This article is crossposted at www.uminnpressblog.com.]

Since the 2011 publication of his book, Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation: Indigenous Ritual, Land Conflict, and Sovereignty Claims, author Paul M. Liffman has contributed a number of guest posts to the First Peoples blog on the Wixarika (Huichol) people’s fight for cultural rights and their efforts to ban large-scale silver mining near their principal sacred sites in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Here he expands upon those previous contributions and provides a timely update on the situation, highlighting how the Wirikuta desert has become an emblem of resistance to transnational extractive enterprises across the country.

On Paritekia, where shamans say the springs called Tamatsima Wahaa—The Waters of Our Elder Brothers—nourish the entire planet. Photo credit Paul Liffman.

The focus on land struggle that’s at the core of Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation has developed in a new direction that I only mentioned in a few brief moments of the book. That is: the crisis over mining in Mexico and across the world, oftentimes in Indigenous areas lacking the clout to protect their ancestral landscapes. In Mexico something like a quarter of the entire surface area of the country has been concessioned to mining companies, the majority of them under foreign control (often corporations based in Canada). This challenge has led to new and/or reinforced alliances of people that cross ethnic and class lines with shared concerns about their cultural and environmental heritage, sometimes calling for local political autonomy or new forms of “biocultural” governance.

This has led me to do a series of papers, articles, and interviews on the mass-mediated, multi-ethnic movement against two major mining projects slated for the Huichol (Wixarika) ceremonial territory of Wirikuta in northern San Luis Potosí. The first is the plan by Vancouver-based First Majestic Silver Corp’s Mexican affiliates to renew and expand shaft mining behind the sacred peak of Paritekia (Cerro Quemado). The second is an open-pit gold mine designed by another Canadian consortium, Revolution Resources, which would obliterate much of the Wirikuta desert floor including Kauyumarie Muyeika, the pyramidal emergence point of the deer ancestor who transformed himself into the peyote Huichols travel there to hunt. In a recent Spanish-language interview, activist leader Carlos Chávez Reyes described what’s at stake in these disputes. My main public intervention for the spring is called Economies, Ecologies, and Sovereignties in the Wirikuta Silver Mining Dispute, San Luis Potosí, Mexico, for the Rice University Cultures of Energy symposium held April 19-21 in Houston.

Mass mediated shamanism: Wixarika anti-mining activist Santos de la Cruz interprets the divination of shaman Eusebio de la Cruz before the press and public. Ska Punk singer Rubén Albarrán of Café Tacuba, a movement organizer, sits at right. Photo credit Paul Liffman.

The latter venue highlights the links between the global anti-extractivism movement and the ontology of energy transition. Key among the common denominators between extractivism and energy are the strategies activists use to bridge the spatial and temporal scales that separate local economic practices from global ecological effects in everyday consciousness. Another globally shared concern is water, surely the most endangered and critical resource of this century. My book details how in both regards the Huichols (Wixaritari) of western Mexico have long invoked the implications of their ritual practices, which knit together a vast landscape and the ecological processes controlling rainfall and underground water flows over the whole planet.

Now the Huichols’ planetary ethic has become globalized environmental politics as the mass-mediated Indigenous protest movement against the planned Canadian silver and gold mines in the Wirikuta desert has become an emblem of ethnonationalist resistance to transnational extractive enterprises across the country. Huichol ceremonial groups have long trekked to Wirikuta from their homes and temples 400 kilometers west of there in the Sierra Madre Occidental in order to undertake sacrificial exchanges that propitiate the rains at Paritekia mountain, which they regard as the birthplace of the sun. But mining there is also centuries old. Consequently, Wirikuta—particularly its ancestral springs—is included but not necessarily protected against all eventualities in state-level ecological and cultural reserves covering 1,400 square kilometers between the towns of Salinas de Hidalgo and Real de Catorce, San Luis Potosí. A more recent decree—issued surprisingly during the last days of the conservative presidency of Felipe Calderón in Fall 2012—calls for a biosphere reserve that would cover over 1,900 square kilometers of the region.

Tanana Mukaniere, first spring in the chain at Tui Maye’u (San Juan Tuzal, SLP), which produces rain and feeds the subterranean “veins” that lead to the four cardinal points in states to the west and to the Sierra where the Huichols live. Photo credit Paul Liffman.

As members of a proposed regional “biocultural reserve” board composed of inhabitants and political authorities, Wixaritari would have some authority over regulating land use practices across that considerable area. This would happen despite the fact they don’t inhabit Wirikuta in a conventional sense but do have traditional use rights to it under Constitutional amendments that were passed in the 1990s as a counterweight to broader moves toward privatizing collectively held lands. Instead, it is the home of divine ancestors who they must ritually propitiate—indeed recreate—in annual pilgrimages in order to renew the life of their society and the planet. For Huichols this layering of economy, governmentality, ecology and ritual geography makes the landscape and its subsurface resources of water and silver a living ancestral body. In Wixarika sacred histories, the link between silver and water is the blood of the ancestors who died there on the original treks that formed the landscape we know today. My current research investigates how Huichols, their NGO allies and expert witnesses predict threats to endangered plant and animal species, cultural disruption, pollution and aquifer depletion from mining. They attract large publics by framing their sacrificial exchanges for precious water in a sacred wilderness as an environmental service to Mexico and the whole planet, beset as it is by desiccation from global warming.

Overall, this research describes how these actors circumscribe the territory of Wirikuta as a unique ritual and biological province and scale the local impacts up to planetary proportions in both space and time. That discursive strategy founded on respect for and reciprocity with a personified landscape, implausible as its planetary reach may seem at first glance, is nevertheless of vital importance as a model for our species, focused as it is on short-term, individually-defined consumption and production over long-term shared values. We persist in this short-circuited epistemology even when it is clear to all but the most dogmatic science deniers that anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate change represent some of the greatest challenges to the viability of humans across the globe.

On the other hand, non-Indigenous desert residents want mining for jobs now and fear that plans to redefine the region as a federal biosphere reserve would threaten their own territoriality and long-term shared identity. They are encouraged by local officials and the corporations, whose experts speak of “sustainable mining,” avoid the pressing issue of aquifer depletion from ore processing, contest the notion that Wirikuta extends much beyond the one mountain peak, hint at possible seizures of local land by Wixarika interlopers and are building a museum to commemorate the legacy of mining in the region. After all, there have been mines in Real de Catorce at least since the 18^th century and historically minería represented one of the only forms of wage income in the desert, so the museum would recognize and inscribe another kind of cultural patrimony that could compete with Indigenous sovereignty claims over Wirikuta.

Remains of the last major phase of silver mining in Real de Catorce, San Luis Potosí, ca. 1900. The ruins and denuded mountains are the cultural heritage of the region’s mining communities. A few kilometers west stands the Wixarika sacred peak, Cerro Quemado (Paritekia). Photo credit Paul Liffman.

Finally, for its part, the Mexican government is weighing two regimes of sovereign value. On one side is its stewardship of a national economy dependent on mining revenues when silver and gold prices are near all-time highs and the global policy environment pressures all governments to welcome foreign investment with the technological capacity to capture increasingly hard-to-exploit mineral and energy resources. On the other side is its own legitimacy, which depends on recognizing historical debts to the Indigenous and other rural citizens who together still constitute a quarter of the population. That legitimacy also depends on defending the public ownership of the nation’s subsoil, ecological and cultural patrimony. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which recently returned to the presidency after 12 years of rule by the conservative Catholic party, traces its descent directly to the 1910 revolutionaries, whose nationalization of resources—including oil, silver and water—remains a key triumph in the popular imagination despite seemingly inevitable privatizations by governments of all stripes in the neoliberal age, so the PRI must thread a fine needle.

Balancing contradictory constituencies and agendas has been the PRI’s historical forte and it seems to have remained true to at least that much of its legacy in the Wirikuta mining conflict. On one hand, the federal court in San Luis Potosí that since May 2012 has been weighing the Wixarika alliance’s request for the cancellation of provisional mining concessions granted to First Majestic Silver has so far ordered a suspension of activities until the case is fully adjudicated. On the other hand, based on a protest from a member of one of the local desert communities claiming it would lose control of the land tenure granted it under Revolutionary-era titles, the federal government has suspended the implementation of Calderón’s biosphere reserve decree.

With proposals within the PRI for reforming the national Mining Law later this year and given the changing degrees of political pressure from the different stakeholders sketched in this post, the temporary impression of balanced forces may soon shift. One can only hope that more private and public sector actors will come to share the common sense embodied in the Huichols’ temporally long and spatially broad view of respect toward the landscape, or at least that they will respect the tremendous symbolic power that the waters of Wirikuta exert over national and world publics.

–

Paul Liffman is a professor at the Center for Anthropological Studies at the Colegio de Michoacán and a member of the National Research System of Mexico. He has worked as a consultant and translator for the Wixarika exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and is currently a Research Associate attached to the Department of Anthropology at Rice University working on a new book about indigenous people and mining. His book, Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation: Indigenous Ritual, Land Conflict, and Sovereignty Claims, is available from the University of Arizona Press.

For thousands of years, humans have lived on the sprawling escarpment known as the Mogollon Rim, a stretch that separates the valleys of central Arizona from the mountains of the north. A vast portion of this dramatic landscape is the traditional home of the Dilzhe’e (Tonto Apache) and the Yavapai. Rim Country Exodus: A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making offers a compelling narrative of how—from 1864 to 1934—the Dilzhe’e and the Yavapai came to central Arizona, how they were conquered, how they were exiled, how they returned to their homeland, and how, through these events, they found renewal. The following excerpt from the book’s conclusion details how paternalism structured social relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers, while at the same time influencing race and gender ideologies. 

Between 1864 and 1934, Dilzhe’es and Yavapais experienced conquest, removal, return, and renewal. Central Arizona settlers meanwhile shifted from discussions of genocide to acts of paternalism to promoting tourism. They shifted, moreover, from a racial logic premised on honor—a logic that prescribed genocide—to a racial logic premised on conscience, and, finally, to a genuine (though constrained) appreciation for Indian peoples.

During that entire history, Indians struggled for a way forward. They fought the government, they scouted for the government, and they sued for peace in hopes of gaining a reservation in their homeland. In 1871, they succeeded. President Grant set aside the vast Rio Verde Reservation for Dilzhe’es and Yavapais. What President Grant gave, however, he took away. In 1875, Dilzhe’es and Yavapais found themselves embarking on a long, agonizing walk to a distant, dry reservation, San Carlos. When they arrived, they began almost immediately to petition to go home. Sometimes they ran away. Sometimes they left the reservation with permission. In the 1890s and 1900s—after perhaps the most brutal half century in their history—many hundreds returned to their homeland in the Rim Country and Verde Valley.

Once home, Indians found new obstacles. Settlers fenced them out of prime farming sites near creeks. Often settlers drove them away. Even when settlers allowed them to stay, returnees met hardship. Though they could still hunt in the mountains, the vast populations of deer, elk, and antelope had given way to sheep, goats, and cows. Unable to sustain themselves solely by hunting, gathering, and farming, Indians had to learn new ways to interact with whites. They had to find ways to be of use. They had to offer their labor. They had to help build the very society that displaced them.

What developed was paternalism. Settlers, despite their initial fears of Indians, soon came to trust them. Indians worked for settlers as herders and crop pickers. Settlers paid them not only in wages but also in kindnesses and small favors. Indians reciprocated. What developed was friendship. But what also developed was caste. Whites and Indians developed a paradigm for social relations that was, for the most part, humane and tolerant, but also unequal. In a sense, Indians became dependents. They needed jobs. Sometimes they needed other things, too: small loans, guns for hunting, protection from the law, protection from abusive husbands, protection from the BIA’s attempts to do away with dancing, singing, gambling, and drinking.

On the San Carlos and Camp Verde Reservations developed a different paternalism. Indian agents—men dedicated to conscience—were charged with molding Indians into Christians, farmers, and speakers of English. To do that, agents sought to abolish Indian culture. They left room, however, for negotiation. Paternalism on the reservation, though overbearing, did have holes. Like antebellum slaveholders, agents wanted approval. To get it, they offered favors, even freedoms. Agents helped Indian women deal with abusive men; they helped both women and men find jobs; they protected Indians from creditors; they helped Indians gain pensions; they established cooperatives; they sold farm goods at cost; they allowed dances and sings. At times, agents buttressed not individualism and self-help but communalism and tradition. Often, Indians manipulated agents to their own ends.

For their every indulgence in traditional behaviors, however, Indians received judgment. Agents continued to view them as spendthrift, sinful, childlike, incorrigible. Agents, in short, viewed Indians through the lens of conscience. If Indians gained the right to remain Indians—if they forced agents to allow them to engage in old patterns, old traditions—they simultaneously guaranteed that agents would find them wanting. They guaranteed the perpetuation of a paternalism premised on conscience.

Agency paternalism was not the same as that of slaveholders. It was not a paternalism that marked one race with honor and another with shame. It did not relegate racial others to permanent subservience. But it sometimes came close.

Paternalism—the paternalism of conscience—lay at caste’s core. Paternalism created social relationships—human relationships—that were humane yet unjust. Paternalism rewarded paternalist and subaltern alike even as it created a vast gulf between them. Paternalists gained subalterns’ goodwill (at least a modicum of it). Paternalists were benevolent, good, giving. Subalterns were tractable, modest, grateful. So long as subalterns received the fruits of charity and negotiation—and so long as they could retain old cultural patterns— they could accept the status quo (albeit sometimes grudgingly). So long as paternalists earned Indians’ goodwill, they could perpetuate inequality. Such behavioral prescriptions did not apply everywhere and always; they were open to challenge. But they applied often enough to create a measure of stability in the early twentieth century.

For women, paternalism offered practical advantages. Amid the storm of social change, Apache and Yavapai gender relations shifted and warped. Men lost powers they had once held. No longer did they gain status through raiding, warfare, and diplomacy. No longer did they bring back captive women, children, or livestock. Women lost power, too. No longer were they keepers of agricultural villages. No longer did they possess farms. No longer did women hold unchallenged authority over gowas and gotas. In other ways, however, gender codes persisted. Women remained farm laborers, gatherers, and basket weavers. Men remained hunters, shamans, and political authorities. As gender relations oscillated, however—and as Indians experienced the stresses of conquest, exile, and exodus—men occasionally resorted to violence.

Women found themselves caught between two sorts of patriarchy: an Indigenous patriarchy that accorded men the power to inflict corporal (or even capital) punishment on wives, and an agency patriarchy that made BIA officials into arbiters of economic, sexual, and social relations. Women were caught between an older patriarchy premised on male honor and a newer one premised on conscience. Denied power both by Indian men and by agents, women played them against one another. When husbands were abusive, wives recruited agents to restrain them. When husbands acted as partners and protectors, women conformed to old roles. They farmed, they prepared food, they manufactured baskets and clothing, and they sometimes prepared tulapai and tiswin for male rituals and male social affairs. Rather than working with agents to “civilize” men by forcing them to stop dancing, singing, drinking, and gambling, women helped men participate in those very activities.

In seeking agents’ assistance, however, women gave paternalism stability. Paternalism did not offer justice, perhaps, but it offered rewards. It helped define gender. It gave women a small measure of power. It gave order to the chaos that followed conquest. It also played a role in relegating honor killings to the past.

None of this is to suggest that Indians—male or female—capitulated to white domination. Resistance, however, tended to be oblique, indirect. Indians resisted by re-creating old social patterns, old traditions, old ways of life. Those old ways, however, led whites to continue to identify Indians as delinquents in need of reform. At times, Indians also protested white domination more directly, as when they rustled cows, befouled wells, or directed travelers’ cars into mud bogs, then demanded money to pull them out. Those acts, too, tended to harden white judgment. At the same time that whites judged Indians as delinquents, however, they cultivated their loyalty. Both agents and settlers gave Indians jobs. Both agents and settlers did Indians favors. Indians, in turn, gave whites deference and thanks. Indians protected settlers from rustling, gave them small gifts, even taught them their language.

Paternalism and resistance were not necessarily at odds. They could work in tandem. Paternalism bred resistance, perhaps, but resistance bred paternalism. Indian resistance gave ammunition to whites who believed that Indians needed reform. The more Indians danced, sang, gambled, and drank, the more their white agents sought to guide them. The more that Indians reconstituted old social behaviors, the more they seemed—in the eyes of settlers and agents—to be delinquent and incorrigible.

Unlike agents, settlers looked the other way when Indians danced, sang, drank, gambled, or feuded. If settlers tolerated Indian behaviors, however, they remained judgmental. Settlers made Indian “delinquency” a yardstick for their own civility. Precisely when settlers became paternalists—in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s they sought to do away with “uncivilized” behaviors. They banned drinking, gambling, and boxing; they passed gun control laws; they gave women the right to vote; they abolished capital punishment. White reform suggested Indian dereliction: thus the mockery of Indians in the press. Whites rejected old patterns of honor and moved toward conscience. In doing so, they moved toward a racial logic based on conscience. They moved, moreover, toward paternalism. Though paternalism was built on decency—it was far removed from the genocidal racism of earlier decades—it was also built on inequality. Amid that shift, race was remade.

From Rim Country Exodus: A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making by Daniel J. Herman. Copyright © 2012 by the University of Arizona Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

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Daniel J. Herman teaches history at Central Washington University. He is the author of Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West and Hunting and the American Imagination. Rim Country Exodus: A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making (University of Arizona Press 2012) is the recipient of the Fifth Annual Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award.

In Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, Mishuana Goeman traces settler colonialism as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence enacted upon Native peoples. She argues that Native women have been pivotal to how nations have been imagined and mapped, and that these women play an ongoing role in decolonization. Through a close reading of Native American women’s writing, Goeman interrogates the use of historically and culturally situated spatial epistemologies, geographic metaphors, and the realities they produce. In the following excerpt from the introduction, Goeman examines the role maps played in advancing colonialism and the mapping of an “imperial imaginary” in order to foreground her discussions of spatial decolonization and the production of imaginative possibilities featured throughout the remainder of her book.

Mapping Empires

Maps, in their most traditional sense as a representation of authority, have incredible power and have been essential to colonial and imperial projects. The commission of surveying projects by both the Canadian and American nation-states was not a simple act of scientific research, but implicit involvement in creating empire. While many authors have examined this earlier period and mapping of the Americas as a colonial project, I argue that these mappings of Native land and bodies continue well into the contemporary time. [26] I intend to interrogate the process of mapping, both as a metaphor and as the physical mapping of lands and bodies, as one that supports and naturalizes race, gender, heteronormativity, and colonial power relations. The mapping of settler nations is too often misunderstood as a “deceptively simple activity,” while the power exerted through state structures is made normative through this deceptiveness. As human geographer Dennis Cosgrove tells us: “To map is in one way or another to take measure of a world, and more than merely take it, to figure the measure so taken in such a way that it might be communicated between people, places, or times. The measure of mapping is not restricted to the mathematical; it may equally be spiritual, political, or moral. By the same token, the mapping’s record is not confined to the archival; it includes the remembered, the imagined, the contemplated.”[27] As “a spatial embodiment of knowledge,” maps can reveal much about the processes of producing settler colonial nations. As a “stimulus to further cognitive engagements,” the mappings in Native women’s literary texts challenge the organization of land and bodies into categories generated during the age of enlightenment, past surveying of Native land; and the continued use of these categories, albeit in different forms, sustains the settler nation-state. The literary mapping in the texts I work with in the following chapters represents and “communicates” a Native ethics and politics of their place in the world with potential to contest the ever-developing settler/imperial nations.

While the literary works I discuss begin in the twentieth century, I would like to step back a bit further into the eighteenth and nineteenth century, when European nations sought to solidify power, and newly forming nations, such as the United States, Mexico, and Canada, sought economic independence. It is no surprise that maps were instrumental to these projects, just as they were to early empires that sought domination of Native land in the Americas. Ricardo Padrón, in his book The Spacious Word, investigates the trajectory of cartography, specifically of the Spanish empire, as foundational to modern conceptions of space and the “invention of America” by the West. He traces not just the practical use of maps, such as planning of military operation, delineating control, or even those that laid out “the faithful or idolatrous” Indigenous peoples in order to proselytize them, but also the ideological uses of maps in early modern Spain. It is the residue of these ideologies that continues to influence contemporary understanding of space and authorize state force over Native land and bodies.

In speaking of the aesthetics used to “flatter” a monarch or contemporary uses of the “image of territory that inspires our affection, demands our loyalty, calls us home,” Padrón discusses the ideological purposes of cartography at a time when European empires “were only beginning to learn how to imagine their world, relate to it, and transform it in ways that depended upon the unique conceptualization of space that lay at the heart of modern map.”[28] Padrón makes clear that in the Middle Ages the words “map” (mappaemundi) and “space” (spatium) were rarely found or used outside the context of traders and mariners, and, in fact, maps were limited to a few uses and not used by many people. The conception of space and “the cartographic revolution” ushered in new notions of space that would hold sway as America became invented in the European imagination. In this book, I aim to look at the ideological mapping that continued from these early formations. The development of the “scientific” modern map—one of geometric, abstract grids—is a development that coincides directly with Europe’s war on Indigenous people. As Padrón, invoking Said’s Orientalism,[29] makes clear, however, and as I examine in my reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead, the “invention of America” through the trajectory of cartographic development did not just reflect the Americas as “a purely natural object” but also defined Europe and its colonies. Padrón states, “America is indeed a slice of the natural world, but it is one that has been cut from the globe by a particular people, at a particular time, interested for particular reasons in carving the world up in the first place . . . this process of ‘inventing America’ can be understood as the process or ‘remapping’ the European imagination in ways that bring to light the connections between the early modern cartographic revolution, a larger process of cultural ‘mapping,’ and deep change in Europe’s conception of itself and its world.”[30]

While maps were essential to earlier projects of exploration as well as the documentation of explorers and literate traders before the nineteenth century, it was in the 1800s that maps were understood by many to simultaneously represent the “real” as they symbolized the destiny of settler states. These early maps differed from their predecessors and were often naturalized and understood to project the real through the use of grids and mathematics. No longer were the maps laden with religious icons or pictorial symbols of the aristocracy that commissioned their making, yet the ideology behind the earlier forms of these maps remained. Hidden in the rhetoric and its visual presentation—in particular in the intent—was still the imagery of colonial empire. Exploring the discourses of mapping is necessary in understanding the way worldviews are represented. Maps exert political control by manipulating the representation of space into a language of normativity. For instance, the Louisiana Purchase as an inventive claiming of territory is still rarely questioned in the public imagination. Though we know that Sacagawea met with other Nations and translated languages, the relationship of Native people to place is absented and obscured. Without these stories, or in the suppression of them, the entire West is depicted as a blank slate, even though Native people were and are acknowledged as inhabiting the land. There remains a spatial imaginary of vast landscapes filled with flora and fauna. Native people in this unjust spatial imaginary become part of the flora and fauna open to settlement, while the state supports its fantasy through the law. [31]

The development of modern nation-states depended on sending out official mapmaking expeditions as a state tool to find information that would enable the assertion of political force over territories and all contained within. For instance, it was President Thomas Jefferson who commissioned the famous mapmaking Corps of Discovery expedition led by Lewis and Clark. Interestingly, Jefferson was inspired by Enlightenment tales of the West and sagas of those who traveled to hostile lands, yet he was also prompted by the threat that the British were sending expeditions to Western lands. [32] The famous expedition arose from the geographic imaginings of Jefferson, who often engaged in voyage and travel literature and for whom territorial accumulation was pivotal. His assignment to Meriwether Lewis reflects the goals of empire; the future of Jefferson’s fledgling nation meant expanding the territory and exploring “for the purposes of commerce.” In the instance of the Great Basin Indians, Ned Blackhawk contends that these early mappings were crucial to conquest: “Their maps, reports, and journals ultimately carried greater influence than the thousands of beaver pelts and horses ferried to market in St. Louis. By producing the knowledge from which conquest could flow, those who extended American claims in the region became agents for the most violent forms of imperialism. The settlement, law, policing, and governance—the mechanics of colonial rule—that followed within a generation overturned the worlds of Great Basin Indians forever.”[33] While Lewis and Clark’s journey has perhaps been the most celebrated in United States history as an event that opened up the West to incorporation into the nation-state, there were many other cartographic projects that sought to survey and explore lands as the Indigenous world was carved up in settler imaginations and writings in a push to map and consolidate empire.[34] In the imagination of Jefferson and his companions, these early expeditions into the West laid claim over the land and resources. While several studies have connected the geographical knowledge produced during colonization with that of the making of the modern nation-states and the advance of capitalism, I am also concerned with how these early events have set up gendered colonial structures that continue to dominate and enact violence at both the interpersonal and state level on Native peoples.[35] The spatial violence asserted through the geographical imaginings and subsequent mappings would be tremendous throughout the west in both what is now Canada, the United States and Mexico securing an ongoing and violent spatial legacy.

Native nations, however, had and still have their own claims on the land, beginning with creation stories. Colin Calloway opens his book One Vast Winter Count: The American West before Lewis and Clark with a mapping of Native nations’ place-based creation stories in the West. By centering these stories in relation to the Bering Strait theory’s assumption of a land bridge in the context of a history of this region before Lewis and Clark’s mapping expedition into those lands, Calloway adeptly tackles ongoing disputes over representations and relationships to time and space, or to history and place. He asserts: “Often in history what we think we know turns out to need revision and what we dismiss as nonsense proves to make a lot of sense. ‘Other’ stories of coming into America—whomever may be telling them—may not be any more or less ‘accurate’ than those we think may be true. Indian peoples had many stories to explain their presence in the West.” He provocatively proposes a reconsideration of the archeological, historical, and anthropological narrations of understanding Native people as “first immigrants” by shifting the paradigm, suggesting that “perhaps the first pioneers did not come to the West; perhaps they were made in the West.”[36] Oral stories, often embedded in contemporary literature, predate the European maps made by Lewis and Clark and other early surveyors of the East and West who sought to claim land for their respective nations.

These colonial maps were instrumental in treaty making and creating national boundaries; they are still used to regulate and determine spatial practices. Dispute of these maps was not uncommon, and tribal leaders would often draw on their own geographical interpretations to dispute the treaties. [37] Native scholars, researchers, and mapmakers who now have more access to the archive are also using maps and documents as sources for land reclamation. The exchange of knowledge that took place in the early years was common, as Malcolm Lewis acknowledges in his essay “First Nations Mapmaking in the Great Lakes Region,” though in fact, acknowledgment wasn’t often given, and when it was, “ambiguously so.”[38] In fact, it was the oral stories or words that would convey distances, villages, landmarks, and so forth. The additive oral component, according to Lewis, could be beneficial and at other times could lead to omissions or errors. At any rate, what is made clear in cartographic historians’ engagement with colonial maps was the power that they would continue to have after these early years. Cole Harris situates domination in the early surveying of Native territory: “My conclusions are these: the initial ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and the supporting infrastructure of the state; the momentum to dispossess derived from the interest of capital in profit and of settlers in forging new livelihoods; the legitimating of and moral justification for dispossession lay in a cultural discourse that located civilization and savagery and identified the land uses associated with each; and the management of dispossession rested with a set of disciplinary technologies of which maps, numbers, law, and the geography of resettlement itself were the most important.”[39] Harris continues with his investigation by turning away from cultural studies discourse, or what he frames as a concentration on the word, and by concentrating on the “disciplinary technologies” of mapping as the instruments of colonialism and later empire that do the dispossessing.

While I agree that to understand colonialism we must begin with asking the question of how colonial power was deployed, it is important to see mapping as a means of discourse that mapped an imperial imaginary. Later it would map discourses of spatial identities that would have the real effect on access to resources, such as on-reserve/ation or off-reserve/ation. [40] Native people did resist the technologies of colonialism, as Harris reminds us: “Like oppressed people everywhere, they engaged in a virtually constant micro-politics of resistance: moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey parties. There was a stream of letters and petitions, often written with missionary assistance, to officials in Victoria, Ottawa, and London, and meetings with cabinet ministers, prime ministers, and even, on one occasion, the king.”[41] Yet, in the end, it was the power of the word and marking of Native place passed on through stories that refuted settler power.

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Mishuana Goeman is assistant professor of gender studies at University of California Los Angeles. Her book, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, is now available for purchase from the University of Minnesota Press.