From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
This article explores the geopolitical importance of the word “land ” to the field of Indigenous studies. Rather than simply take the word “land ” as a given and natural element of the world around us, in this article I suggest a closer interrogation of the multiple social and geopolitical meanings that make land a key concept in indigenous political struggle. The processes of colonialism and neo-colonialism resulted in abstracting land as part of making nations that are recognized by the liberal settler nation-states. How have concepts of land changed in this process? How do we make Indigenous spaces that are not based on abstracting land and Indigenous bodies into state spaces, while maintaining political vitality? How are the lived realities of Indigenous peoples impacted by concepts of borders and territories that support the power of the nation-state? I draw on the narrative dimensions of land in the work of Indigenous writers in order to intercede in limiting the meanings of l...
2018
This article explores the geopolitical importance of the word “land” to the field of Indigenous studies. Rather than simply take the word “land” as a given and natural element of the world around us, in this article I suggest a closer interrogation of the multiple social and geopolitical meanings that make land a key concept in indigenous political struggle. The processes of colonialism and neocolonialism resulted in abstracting land as part of making nations that are recognized by the liberal settler nation-states. How have concepts of land changed in this process? How do we make Indigenous spaces that are not based on abstracting land and Indigenous bodies into state spaces, while maintaining political vitality? How are the lived realities of Indigenous peoples impacted by concepts of borders and territories that support the power of the nation-state? I draw on the narrative dimensions of land in the work of Indigenous writers in order to intercede in limiting the meanings of land...
International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies
isrn.qut.edu.au
This article explores the geopolitical importance of the word land to the field of Indigenous studies. Rather than simply take the word land as a given and natural element of the world around us, in this article I suggest a closer interrogation of the multiple social and ...
On the Nature of Indigenous Land
Indigeneity on the Move, 2018
In this paper I explore the relationship between modes of land ownership, conceptualizations of land and nature, and notions of indigeneity. I proceed from the well known idea that the portrayal of upland communities of Northeast India as ‘indigenous’ depends to a large extent on a presumably inextricable relationship between people and land (Li 2010, Karlsson 2011). Upland people are believed to ‘belong’ to their land, and its forests, in the sense that it is considered sacred to them. One way in which this essential tie to land finds expression, is in joint land ownership. In the Garo Hills of Meghalaya, collective ownership has been legally secured in the colonial period. Whereas its aim is to avoid that villagers lose their land, it cannot counteract disparities in power and wealth that occur, and have always been prevalent, within village communities. Moreover, in much of the Garo Hills there is a tendency towards the privatization of land use, as well as ownership. This commodification of land is unavoidable for the modernization of agriculture, yet challenges Garo notions of indigeity, as well as related perceptions of land and nature. In the paper, I will analyze the transformation of land relationships, the legalities in which these are founded, and the consequences that these transformation have for Garo notions of indigeneity. Judith Pine wrote: "De Maaker provides a detailed description of the mismatch between global and local discourses that communities and activists nav- igate, challenging the assumption, fundamental to global discourses, that indigenous peoples in all cases have a par- ticular relationship with the land. He notes, for example, that Garo people—portrayed as loving the land in promo- tional literature—see it instead as full of danger and dif- ficulty. Cosmopolitan Christian Garo, on the other hand, create a global sensibility within which “authentic” Garo wearing loincloths perform the role of “archetypical con- servationists, driven by the ‘sacrality’ which they locate in nature” (31). There is a temptation to dismiss as inau- thentic the efforts made by these activists to situate them- selves or their rural counterparts as indigenous. Avoid- ing this oversimplification, de Maaker instead describes the complex, historically situated relationships to land, the discourses between traditional religion and Christianity, and the shifting notions of what it means to be indigenous in a South Asian context. This sets the tone for the book." (Pine, J. (2020) American Ethnologist 47(1): 92-94.
Against colonial grounds: Geography on Indigenous lands
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020
In this response to Natalie Oswin's provocation, 'An other geography', we consider how we might work against settler narratives and structures from our situated positions in the discipline and in a specific academic institution in the US South. Following Diné student Majerle Lister, we ask what it would mean to consider giving the land back: what does that entail? The academic institutions we inhabit were built to insure white futurity, on fictive histories. Can they be retrofitted in the present to enable the futurity of Indigenous people and theorizations? Can we turn our discipline's history of erasure inside out, to center the land, people, and practices that were both crucial to and absent from it except as shadowy and metaphorical presences? We draw on our own teaching, and from scholarship in Indigenous and Black Studies, to consider what it might look like to return land and reconfigure relations among those who have been cast aside by white patriarchal settler structures, but in incommensurate ways. At the time of this writing, Trump is ignoring the usual liberal celebrations of Native American Heritage Month for a cornball and intentionally provocative 'Founders Month'. Yet citizens of the more than 560 nations in the contested territoriality of the United States are not surprised by such self-delusionary histories. Trump is a particularly obnoxious manifestation of the tradition of white supremacy, but his administration is more the rule than the exception. In this response to Oswin's (2020) provocation, we build on Tuck and Yang's (2012) insistence that decolonization must not be metaphorical and think through the university setting as a place and set of practices that deny Indigenous presence. Majerle Lister, a Diné PhD geography student in our department, recently wrote on Twitter, 'when I am reading white academics [who are] writing about decolonization. .. I rarely see them write anything close to "give them the land back"'. Lister's quip directs our focus to the real
Geography and Indigenous Peoples: Struggles of Resistance
Brazilian Geography In Theory and in the Streets, 2022
This study aims to analyse the processes associated with indigenous struggles, particularly in relation to the Guarani and Kaiowá in Mato Grosso do Sul state, Brazil. Such processes embody the advancement and intensification of the contradictory movement of class and non-class antagonism, expressed by capitalists and land owners against indigenous peoples. In America, the processes of commodification and incorporation of labour around the axis of capital emerged from racial division and other structuring elements, such as patriarchalism and religion, which became dominating powers, closely linked to the socio-spatial relations that have (re)produced them. In Brazil, the process culminated in the constitution of privately owned land, expropriation and violence, consolidating windfall profits as a result of turning nature into a monopoly and commodities—a specific class power unfolding in the production of value, either by expropriation or by the violent proletarianisation to which indigenous peoples have been subjected. This process fosters capital territorialisation and impacts the life of the indigenous peoples, whose individuals contradictorily re-frame their (re)existence. Indigenous labour has been incorporated into the axis of capital, from overexploitation to the capital-centric focus, while the indigenous workers contradictorily refer to their ancestry and cosmology, taking a stand as indigenous people. In these struggles, the indigenous identity becomes an identity of resistance, and the socio-spatial practices aim towards the preservation of knowledge. Such knowledge and practices gain relevance and reaffirm the state of being and living in the world, opposing the metabolic rift between man and nature, even if the commodification of life and common assets leads to the self-destruction of humankind. Keywords: Indigenous peoples Guarani-Kaiowá, Resistance, Territory, Time and space
Foreword to _Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presence_
https://www.dukeupress.edu/biopolitics-geopolitics-life The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler colonial states across the globe, from the Americas and Hawai‘i to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, social sciences, political theory, visual culture, and film studies, they show how biopolitics and geopolitics produce norms of social life and land use that delegitimize and target Indigenous bodies, lives, lands, and political formations. Among other topics, the contributors explore the representations of sexual violence against Native women in literature, Indigenous critiques of the carceral state in North America, Indigenous Elders’ refusal of dominant formulations of aging, the governance of Indigenous peoples in Guyana, the displacement of Guaraní in Brazil, and the 2016 formal acknowledgement of a government-to-government relationship between the US federal government and the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout, the contributors contend that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism, thereby pointing to the transformative potential of an Indigenous-centered decolonization. Contributors. René Dietrich, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Sandy Grande, Michael R. Griffiths, Shona N. Jackson, Kerstin Knopf, Sabine N. Meyer, Robert Nichols, Mark Rifkin, David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile