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

In Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States, scholars Amy Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien bring together a critical collection of essays that shed light on some of the complex issues surrounding federal and state recognition for Native American tribal nations in the United States. In this excerpt from the introduction, the editors examine the multifaceted benefits, critiques, and challenges that have accompanied federal recognition for the Mashantucket Pequot, especially after their construction of the world’s largest casino complex. Like other contributions to this collection, the Mashantucket Pequot example demonstrates the complexities that accompany federal recognition, especially when situated in the broader legal, economic, and racialized terrain of the United States.

In New England, for example, the myth of Indian disappearance that was generated in the colonial period was reinvigorated in the late twentieth century as tribal nations seeking acknowledgment from the U.S. federal government garnered unprecedented media attention, as did several newly recognized tribal nations that launched hugely successful gaming operations after their federal recognition was secured. Then, as now, the native peoples of New England have faced the charge that they are not “real Indians” and are thus undeserving of recognition by the U.S. government.[1]

As explained by Renee Ann Cramer, a leading scholar on federal acknowledgment and racialized reactions to it, the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation’s federal recognition by an act of Congress in 1983 and their creation of what is now the largest casino complex in the world, Foxwoods Resort Casino, elicited “intense scrutiny and controversy.” Not only has their casino “been a political hot potato” since the mid-1990s, but their identity as Indian people has been subjected to relentless assaults as well.[2]

Fomenting in public reactions to the Mashantuckets’ casino and in the context of rancorous debates that erupted over other tribal acknowledgment cases in Connecticut at the time, the racist stereotype of the “casino Indian” took hold in the region and has had an increasingly negative impact on public attitudes toward federal recognition.[3] As Cramer argues in a recent essay, a new anti-Indian racism that is “fueled by casino success” has transformed “Pequot” into “a trope for everything a ‘real’ Indian is not,” and the backlash against the Mashantuckets’ economic success–and against Indian gaming more generally–”has turned into a backlash against tribal recognition.”[4]

Thus, the “Connecticut effect” offers an important introductory example of the complexity and contentiousness of recognition and of the way in which it is enmeshed with wider U.S. economic and sociopolitical concerns. Racism and its impact on the rights and futures of indigenous peoples is certainly one of those wider concerns. In the Mashantucket Pequot case, we are compelled to consider how racial assumptions about Indian identity have shaped public assessments of the right to federal recognition.[5] Likewise, we must question how the anti-Indian racism Cramer describes has hampered possibilities for expanding public knowledge of the specific histories of the native peoples in Connecticut, deflecting questions about the historical foundation of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century federal acknowledgment efforts and the long history of tribal-state relationships.[6]

In spite of what Mark Edwin Miller aptly terms the “deluge of press coverage” that has rendered the Mashantucket Pequots “the dominant face of recently acknowledged Indian tribes in the United States,” what does the public know about the Mashantuckets’ pre-twentieth-century history as a state-recognized tribal nation?[7] Or about the state recognition of other tribal nations in Connecticut? A recent Connecticut Post editorial, “As Wealth Looms, Recognition Fades,” makes a point rarely addressed in the local media: Despite all the public attention to the issue of tribal gaming in the state and the uproar over the federal recognition efforts of the Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, and Golden Hill Paugussett tribal nations, Connecticut’s long relationship with the indigenous peoples within its borders–evidenced in its own statutes and laws dating back to the colonial period–appears to be ignored. “You could look it up,” the editorial chides.[8]

More than just tribal nations’ historical relationships with the state have been obscured in the anti-Indian/anticasino discourse that has flourished in the region since the opening of the Mashantucket Pequot casino. Also overlooked is a central question that would help a public audience better understand what is at stake for tribal nations and communities that seek recognition: What choices are available for native peoples in the United States today as they contend with problems of unemployment and lack of adequate access to health care, housing, and education?

As Algonquin scholar Paula Sherman has phrased it in a recent analysis of the Mashantuckets’ struggle for sovereignty and the political and social costs of gaming, “What is required to make sustainable Native communities in the twenty-first century?” Casinos, Sherman contends, have become “the most important tool Native people have today for national renewal”: Mashantucket Pequot “dreams of community revitalization only happened through the adoption of gaming.”[9] Nonetheless, Sherman emphasizes that native people have serious concerns and disagreements about whether gaming is an economically sustainable and culturally appropriate means of indigenous nation building.[10] And as anthropologist Jessica R. Cattelino has argued, a persisting colonial mentality in the United States expects “real Indians” to be poor and casts the economic successes of tribal nations that operate casinos as historical anomalies proving that they have “lost” their “genuine” Indian culture.[11] Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the Americas, a boom in oil, gas, and mining development has pushed the extractive frontier deeper into indigenous territories. Centering on a long-term study of Enron and Shell’s Cuiabá pipeline, from Enron to Evo traces the struggles of Bolivia’s Indigenous peoples for self-determination over their lives and territories. In his analysis of their response to this encroaching development, author Derrick Hindery also sheds light on surprising similarities between neoliberal reform and the policies of the nation’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales. In the following excerpt, Hindery  illustrates the necessity of comprehending the nature of the Morales administration’s development model in order to understand the multiple development paradoxes that exist in Bolivia today. 

Disgruntled over the Bolivian government’s renewed support for a controversial road through the Isiboro- Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro- Sécure, TIPNIS), in January 2012 a block of Indigenous legislators from President Evo Morales’s political party, Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS), formed a caucus to defend Indigenous rights and keep the project at bay. Although the representatives retained their party affiliations, the act spoke to a broader rift forming between the MAS and some Indigenous groups. The move came as a long- promised countermarch of coca-dependent communities supportive of the highway [1] approached the highland capital of La Paz, without police repression and without much press coverage.

During the previous year, Bolivia’s main Indigenous organizations had joined Yuracaré, Mojeño, and Chimane Indigenous peoples from TIPNIS in a two- month- long march— the Eighth Indigenous March— from the Amazon Basin to La Paz in opposition to the project. They feared the road would bring development activities that would undercut the livelihood of communities dependent on hunting, fishing, and subsistence agriculture. Several weeks before this seminal march took place, Morales made it clear that he supported the highway when he urged men from the coca- producing Chapare region to woo Yuracaré females into accepting the road: “If I had time, I would go to enamor the Yuracaré comrades and convince them to not be opposed; so, young men, you have instructions from the president to win over the Trinitarian Yuracaré comrades so they don’t oppose construction of the road” (qtd. in Chipana 2011, translation by author).

Image 1.1 Construction of the Cuiabá pipeline through the Chiquitano Forest.

The TIPNIS conflict was seen as a litmus test of whether Morales’s reputedly pro-Indigenous government would respect the rights that Indigenous groups had won since the first March for Territory and Dignity in 1990, and whether Morales would comply with his own proposal to adopt the Indigenous doctrine of “Living Well” (Vivir Bien) over the capitalist, modernist ideology of living better (vivir mejor):

As long as we do not change the capitalist system for a system based on complementarity, solidarity, and harmony among peoples and nature, the measures we adopt will be palliatives that will have a limited and precarious character. For us, what has failed is the model of “living better” [vivir mejor], of unlimited development, of industrialization without borders, of modernity that disregards history, of increasing accumulation of goods at the expense of others and nature. That is why we propose the idea of “living well” [Vivir Bien], in harmony with other human beings and with our Mother Earth. (Evo Morales, November 28, 2008, qtd. in Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Agua 2008, translation by author)

In contrast to the countermarch, the high- profile Eighth Indigenous March garnered wide coverage in the domestic and international press. The marchers, who were hampered by violent police repression and resistance from coca growers, eventually arrived in La Paz and prompted passage of a law declaring TIPNIS an untouchable area, off limits to highways and other development activities. A statement from a Chiquitano, Isabel García Ipamo, who marched against the highway, captures a feeling of betrayal shared by Indigenous groups and supporters who had grown increasingly weary of Morales’s policies:

The president is the president of the coca growers. He is not representing all of the country. He has always resented the Indigenous peoples of the eastern lowlands of Bolivia. Now we have seen how he is discriminating against this mobilization that we are undertaking, even though we had complete faith in him because he is Indigenous, and even though he is now president because of our support. We thought that he was going to be more sensitive toward Indigenous peoples, but we were mistaken because now we are marching once again. We believed that there werenot going to be more marches asking for our demands, but that is not the case: we continue marching, we continue worse than before, because at least the previous governments respected protected areas. Our constitution establishes that protected areas are untouchable, but in an instant this president wants to undo the TCOs [native communal lands] and protected areas, which we care for extensively. What will happen to the other TCOs if this protected area is not cared for? We have taken great care to ensure that the TCOs are not violated or colonized by the same people that the president now wants to place in all of the TCOs and protected areas. (qtd. in Bolpress 2011a, translation by author)

This individual, a law student who suspended her studies to participate in the march, came from a Chiquitano community located in a large- scale, collective Indigenous territory (tierras comunitarias de origen, or TCO) in the Chiquitano forest. The Chiquitanos, like the Guaraní and many other Indigenous groups located across the country, had sent contingents to support the march in solidarity with TIPNIS communities opposing the road. They knew that the TCOs they had struggled long and hard for during the 1990s were under threat, as was their inclusion in a reputedly “Indigenous” government. For more than a decade, the Chiquitanos, Bolivia’s most numerous Indigenous group in the lowlands,[2] had battled boldly against cattle ranchers, farmers, loggers, mining companies, and transnational energy giants to reclaim ancestral lands through the new mechanism of TCOs.

How could it be that Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, who vowed to “refound” Bolivia as a twenty- first-century intercultural, plurinational, socialist state (Kohl and Bresnahan 2010a:5), was now being targeted by some of the very groups that had brought him to power? How could a head of state with the most radical proposal to address global climate change [3] be simultaneously pursuing an extraction- oriented development model that harmed the marginalized populations he was supposedly defending? How could an administration that implemented a new constitution guaranteeing Indigenous peoples’ rights to land, self- determination, and a healthy environment pursue such a contradictory agenda? And how could a government that was the first to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as national law advance development projects in violation of Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent? Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

–

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.

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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.