17 posts tagged “indigenous peoples”

The Seventh Annual Conference of the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology will be held at the University of Oklahoma-Norman from June 5 - 7, 2009. This year's theme broadly focuses on "Aging and the Indigenous People of North America." Any topic is welcome; examples include aging and health issues, the revitalization of culture and language, and overviews of the field as a whole. The conference is an interdisciplinary small-scale meeting emphasizing the close critique of works-in-progress. It includes a workshop focused on the future of gerontological work with the indigenous people of North America. It also features an optional mentoring component for students and junior researchers, who are paired with senior researchers who offer technical assistance concerning research proposals or manuscripts.

Papers from the conference will be considered for publication either individually or as a special issue of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology. Presenters are invited to submit a one-page abstract by February 15, 2008 to Dr. Lori L. Jervis, University of Oklahoma, lori.jervis@ou.edu. Registration forms are available here.

Read more about Aging and Indigenous Peoples of North America here.

One of the most contentious issues facing indigenous peoples around the world today is the fight to maintain a connection and identity to – and with – traditional homelands. This fight, largely the historical outcome of imperial and colonial processes over the last four hundred years, is in many cases the only fight that matters for indigenous peoples.

After working closely with indigenous peoples in three different countries, I have learned just how important and closely held the land is. For indigenous peoples, the culture, the language, and the identity of the individual is directly tied to the land. It is the land that informs indigenous peoples and their world views (1). One question that has arisen as a result of this understanding centers on the ways and methods indigenous people can use to maintain their relationship to the land – often traditional homelands that have been occupied for generations – in the face of such overwhelming colonial and imperial forces, both present and past. In the recent book by professor Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast,we are given an example from Native North America of one way this identity was maintained.

Looking at indigenous Native American writers, activists, and leaders of colonial Northeast North America, Brooks convincingly argues that Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess all used the mechanism of writing to maintain their Native identity and cultural ties to the land. In relying on the tool of writing, these indigenous Native American peoples were able to maintain – and in some instances reclaim – their rights, identity, and culture in the face of incredible colonial and imperial forces. In fact, as Brooks points out this method was indigenous to the Algonquian, Iroquois, Ojibwa, Abenaki, and other Native Americans of the Northeast as demonstrated by their long tradition of making awikhigan.

Read more about the recovery of indigenous Native American Indian space in the Northeast here.

The social sciences have experienced a number of rapid and expansive theoretical developments over the course of the last hundred years. From fighting for their existence as an intellectual endeavor within academia and the university during the 19th century, to experiencing a series of popular and wide scale adoptions with such theoretical epistemologies as positivism and behaviorism, the social sciences are currently at an epistemological crossroads. In the aftermath of such powerful critiques as deconstructionism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the Frankfurt School’s singular attack on positivism and the Vienna School, the social sciences are struggling to find their epistemological footing. This is particularly true within the field of anthropology, including its daughter discipline of archaeology, for not only has the theoretical foundations of the discipline been called into question, but the field’s subject matter – its source of data and existence – has also been brought to bear. In an effort to reestablish some form of theoretical footing, the social sciences have begun to open their epistemological doors to cultures and ways of knowing historically allowed to only represent data. In this process, indigenous peoples and their epistemology have played a key role.

Over the past two decades a significant amount of academic energy has been invested in professing the urgent need and essentialness for developing what some have called an indigenous archaeology. Books, essays, and academic conferences have discussed, defined, and designed a multiplicity of paths towards this goal. Very little effort has been expanded, however, in seriously examining the intellectual viability or the social and cultural desirability of this project. In a recent paper entitled Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology Robert McGhee attempts to examine this theoretical endeavor within the field of archaeology.

Read more about indigenous peoples, archaeology, and the development of social science theory here.

James Cox takes the title of his book from Sherman Alexie, for whom "white noise," the static that remains on a television after broadcasting ends, represents "the oppressive noise of white mass-produced cultures, the loud demand to conform to the invader's cultural belief system or be destroyed" (p. 11). Cox takes "white noise" to signify a broad history of colonial domination and erasure, which Alexie and the other novelists he considers write to resist. The introduction to Cox's book, "A Cup of Water," states his purpose to demonstrate how Euro-western and Euro-American literary and popular narratives, which almost always "culminate in the absence of Indians" (p. 13), support ongoing colonial dominance and produce real-world consequences for living Indians; and to explore the strategies used by some contemporary Native fiction writers to intervene in these colonial narratives of conquest, to render them powerless and suggest that "conquest, as imagined by non-Native authors, did not take place" (p. 18). Cox argues that his study "implements Osage scholar Robert Warrior's proposal ... that, in any scholarship on work by Native authors, the 'critical interpretation of those writings can proceed primarily from Indian sources,'" (p. 4); thus he intends to avoid "academic colonialism" by privileging the voices of Native writers in his own interpretations (pp. 4-5). If reality is constructed by stories, and if, as Greg Sarris observes, "In oral discourse ... no one party has access to the whole of the exchange.... [O]ne party's story is no more the whole story than a cup of water is the river" (quoted, p. 16), Cox wishes his own "cup of water" to resist the narrative flow that justifies domination and to "nourish" new plots for Native people (pp. 16-17).

Read more about Muting White Noise: Native American and European Novel Traditions here.

The history and indigenous people of present-day southern Mexico and northern Guatemala have had a long and complex intersection with colonial and imperial forces. Ever since the Spanish first landed on the shores of Central America and began exploring inland during the 16th century, the indigenous peoples of the region have been impacted by a continuing array of diseases, policies, and discourses. Within this larger area, the southern Mexican state of Chiapas including the Lacandon rain forest has been of particular focus and interest. Although Chiapas has a long and rich tradition within the larger arena of indigenous issues, it has been decades since academia in the United States has examined this tradition with some specificity.

Teobert Maler (1842-1917) traveled through the region in the late nineteenth century to photograph Maya ruins, capturing the first known images of the Lacandones. Not long after Maler, Alfred Tozzer (1877-1954) published his A Comparative Study of the Mayas and the Lacandones (1907), which is essentially a study of Lacandon religion. More recently, Didier Boremanse’s work Hach Winik: The Lacandon Maya of Southern Mexico (Latin American Monograph Series) (IMS Monograph) (1999) and R. Jon McGee’s book Watching Lacandon Maya Lives (2001) have contributed to a modern understanding of the Lacandon region and it’s indigenous peoples. However, until now there has been a general hole in scholarship concerning the Lacandon and its indigenous peoples within a broader context. In an exciting new book, Reinventing the Lacandón: Subaltern Representations in the Rain Forest of Chiapas, Brian Gollnick attempts to remedy this dearth of focus, by bringing into view and discussion the indigenous peoples and their history.

Rather than addressing cultural production from Chiapas in all of its breadth, however, Gollnick agues that Chiapas and the Lacandon rain forest are best understood not as a Central American backwater but as one focal point within a global field of struggle around culture and politics. This is particularly true as local, national, and international activist scholars, NGOs, and others look to hot spots such as Chiapas for signs of hope in the continuing struggle of indigenous people’s rights and justice.

Read more about Reinventing the Lacandon: Subaltern Representations in the Rain Forest of Chiapas here.

A recent article published in Ethos by Naomi Adelson brings up several important points concerning indigenous peoples and mental health. Specifically, she highlights some of the disjunctions between Euroamerican mental health categories such as stress, and Cree First Nation Women's understanding of this category and its place in their lives.

The Abstract

Allan Young's classic thesis on stress discourse underscores the way in which the biomedical discourse of "stress" reflects and legitimizes existing social inequalities even as it removes the language of stress to the decontextualized domain of the clinic. In this article, I address the way in which the "stress discourse" of a group of young adult Cree women who live in a remote northern Canadian village reflects and reinscribes the social, cultural, and historical conditions of inequality as part and parcel of community life. This study, as a reflection of Young's thesis, reveals that sometimes one is bound to replicate inequities because it is necessary to do so. The women with whom I spoke are entangled in an historical and social reality that they are wholly aware of such that the paths of inequity that are expressed in a rationale of "stress" cannot readily be challenged or changed.

Read more about stress, mental health, and Cree First Nation peoples of Canada here.

Ecotourism is big business, accounting for millions of dollaers a year. Started in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not until the 1990s that the industry really began to flourish. At that time it was more about adventures on private yachts or safaris to newly accessible part of Africa. In fact, back in 1999 I was a representative at the 9th Annual World Congress on Adventure Travel and Ecotourism held in Tucson, Arizona, where I was involved in getting various ecotour companies to include a cultural component in their Caribbean and Latin American tours. I had some success, but at that time the infrastructure and overall agenda of the industry was not there to really achieve the goals desired. Now, however, this is no longer the case.

More and more ecotour companies are not only including a cultural component, but some are heavily focused on including the local indigenous people in their activities. One such ecotour company is Posada Amazonas located in Infierno in eastern Peru. Infierno and Posada Amazonas are located in the province of Tambopata, several hours by motorized canoe from the capital of Madre de Dios, Puerto Maldonado. The community covers approximately 10,000 hectares on both sides of the Tambopata River and is located within the buffer zone of the Tambopata National Reserve and near the Bahuaja-Sonene National Park.

Read more about indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon and ecotourism here.

The idea of replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day was not a new one. It was first proclaimed by representatives of Native nations and participants at the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, which took place in 1977 in Geneva, Switzerland. The declaration of this body was applauded and echoed by Native peoples around the globe.

Indigenous peoples and human rights/peace/social justice/environmental organizations were beginning to gear up for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage, 1492-1992, which marked the beginning of the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere and Native resistance to it. While governments were trying to make it into a celebration of colonialism, Native peoples wanted to use the occasion to reveal the historical truths about the invasion and the consequent genocide and environmental destruction, to organize against its continuation today, and to celebrate Indigenous resistance.

With representatives from 120 Indian nations from every part of the Americas, the all-Indigenous First Continental Conference on 500 Years of Indian Resistance, held in Quito, Ecuador in July 1990, saw itself as fulfilling a prophesy that the Native nations would rise again when the eagle of the north joined with the condor of the south. The conference resolved to transform Columbus Day, 1992, "into an occasion to strengthen our process of continental unity and struggle towards our liberation."
Resistance 500.

Read more about changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples day here.

Natural resource management planning has become a central activity in the management of resources across all levels of agency. Increasingly, management plans are being called for to secure rights to, and guide management of resources used or held by, indigenous people in less developed regions. A problem that is being encountered in the development of natural resource management plans and indigenous peoples is the differing understandings and perspectives each stakeholder has towards natural resources. While natural resource planners often break up a resource into its constituent parts, indigenous peoples often view them more holistically. This is especially true when it comes to what are known as common pool resources (CPR) and customary resource use norms associated with those natural resources.

In the context of common pool resources (CPR) that are used by indigenous communities, the development of natural resource management plans often involves formalizing the customary resource use norms or “unwritten rules” held by the local indigenous peoples. By documenting them in a format recognizable to non-indigenous professionals and government resource management bureaucracies such as through a management plan, a local resource management code, or a local ordinance the management of those natural resources can take on a collaborative dynamic with the local indigenous peoples. Likewise, the study of CPRs and common property management regimes has helped to advance understanding of indigenous and traditional resource management systems by recording and analyzing informal rule systems that govern resource use and management, and by proposing “design principles” associated with successful management regimes for CPRs.

Read more about Common Pool Resources, Management Policies, and Indigenous Peoples here.

One of the most important trends to develop in both anthropology and archaeology during the latter half of the 20th century was the inclusion of indigenous peoples into the larger social science discourse (beyond simply being “subjects” or “objects”). In some countries and in some areas of investigation this inclusive process began at an earlier time then in others. For example, in North America the collaborative process between anthropologists and Native Americans began as early as 1941 (Jones and Stapp, 2008). In other places, such as in South America, the process of including indigenous voices and knowledge in social science research and theoretical discussion did not begin until much later. Despite these differences in time, it has generally been acknowledged that including indigenous peoples in the anthropological and archaeological research process has greatly expanded our knowledge base, data sets, and overall understanding of the human condition. A contemporary example of this is the current collaborative process taking place in the Central Andean region of South America between archaeologists and local indigenous people.

In the yungas (hot valleys in Quechuan) of the eastern cordillera Montana along the eastern face of the Central Andes archaeologists are working with indigenous peoples in several endeavors (see the work of Christian Isendahl and Daryl Stump for example). The Montana plays a decisive ecological role at both the continental and global scales – forcing the moist easterly air masses of the South Atlantic anticyclone to ascend and release precipitation that feeds the Amazonian drainage with nutrient-rich, sediment-laden water. The Montana provides an important variable for Amazonian rain forest ecology, structure, and distribution and played an important role in the growth of indigenous peoples’ prehistoric complex societies in the lowland Neotropics, as well as contemporary indigenous groups and cultures. But the Montana physiography is not a homogenous slope landscape; it forms a complex mosaic of landforms that house considerable ecological variation principally based on differences in altitude, precipitation level, and slope gradient.

Read more about indigenous peoples and archaeologists collaborating in the Peruvian Amazon here.