While there is an abundance of research on Indigenous healing in the context of residential schools and intergenerational trauma in Canada, very little has been written specifically about community-based sexual assault services providing Indigenous-specific supports for survivors of sexual assault. "Visioning our Healing" begins to remedy this gap through a research partnership with one of the few mainstream sexual assault centers (SAC) in northern Ontario that provides culturally specific supports to Indigenous women, men, and Two-Spirit people. Using photo voice and other forms of storying with Indigenous clients of the SAC, "Visioning our Healing" provides thematic analysis of Indigenous pathways to healing and discusses how the SAC might continue to develop its Indigenous support services. Our report identifies key strengths, promising practices, and organizational challenges in decolonizing community and social services and funding.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) used the periodical Indians at Work to forward reforms and policies of the New Deal era. Seen primarily as a vehicle to transmit the views of John Collier, Roosevelt's commissioner of Indian Affairs, the periodical has often been overlooked as a source for understanding the perspectives and concerns of tribal communities. But many Indigenous authors appear in the magazine, and highlighting these contributions adds to the significance of Indians at Work. Critically, Indigenous authors conveyed meaning through culturally specific forms of expression that were recognizable to various audiences. Authors employed these discursive strategies to assert their authority to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers and to counter dominant historical narratives. Seen in this way, Indians at Work is a vital primary resource that illuminates how Indigenous communities were positioning themselves in a moment of significant political, social, and economic change. Local authors demonstrated a keen awareness of documentary power and used this form to challenge existing ideas and tropes about what it meant to be Indigenous in the early twentieth century.
The role of community control over education is an often-overlooked aspect of the history of Native American self-determination, sovereignty, and treaty rights movements, especially in Alaska Native history. Existing scholarship consistently implies that prior to the signing of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, Native Peoples had limited success in achieving sovereignty and control in any area, let alone in education. However, many Alaska Native communities successfully implemented community control over education well before 1975. Analysis of Alaska Native voices in newspapers, state and federal government documents, and the writings of educators and school administrators shows that not only did Alaska Native communities and leaders implement programs of community control over education, but also that education itself comprised a key component in the larger movement for political self-determination. Education thereby served as a primary mechanism by which Alaska Native communities resisted and reversed generations of erasure and cultural assimilation, achieving new levels of self-governance.
Ho-Chunk leader Hapoguwiga (Glory of the Morning) led her village in Wisconsin during a pivotal era of Ho-Chunk history. However, narratives crafted by settlers decenter her legacy, working to legitimize settler colonial occupation and identity. These narratives participate in and inspire settler affect- physical and emotional attachment to place identities-and further settler myths of Indigenous consent regarding land occupation. Jonathan Carver's Travels through the Interior parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768, illustrates the formation of Eurocentric nation-building narratives that dismiss Native American governance and relationships to land. Within the text, Carver describes Hpoguwiga as the "queen" of her village yet diminishes her role as a sovereign leader. This colonial imaginary strengthens settler attachment to place and erases Ho-Chunk presence. The twentieth-century play Glory of the Morning (1914) by William Ellery Leonard, serves a similar function by focusing on her consensual relationship with a French trader to reinforce a myth of settler belonging. This play describes Hpoguwigaas her husband's "sq**w," erasing her role as a Ho-Chunk leader and autonomous woman. As a historical figure, Hpoguwiga embodies Ho-Chunk presence amidst settler encroachment. In contrast, Carver's travel writing and Leonard's play reveal how settler affect shapes her presence in settler memory to sustain the myth of Indigenous consent to land occupation.
During the U.S. Occupation, Teruya was designated the Black District of Okinawa because of U.S. racial prejudice. The prevailing literary and scholarly representations of the Black District portray it as a place of ecological, social, and moral ruination-yet ruin is not all there is to see. In this essay, I propose a "yuntaku reading method" as an Indigenous feminist methodology to read against and beyond ruination, putting literary analysis in dialogue with the Okinawan cultural and social form of yuntaku (Uchinaaguchi: chit-chat, gossip, conversation). Drawing on a close reading of Jun Kishaba's short story "Dark Flowers" (1955) and yuntaku with Teruya residents, I argue that even as tropes of ruination allowed Okinawans to critique the transpacific coloniality and racial logics underpinning the U.S.- Japanese settler militarist structure, they demonstrated a refusal to allow ruination to be the sole condition of their social and psychic lives. By reading against ruination, a yuntaku reading method reveals the complexities of living with/in occupation. Ultimately, by conceptualizing the literary and the everyday, I suggest that Okinawans, through their everyday actions, transformed Black-Okinawan relationalities into fertile ground for articulating other possible futures, enacting everyday sovereignties between ruin and rebellion in Okinawa's Black District.
Intertribal organizing has long been a feature of resistance to settler colonialism in southern New England. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shared material culture practices facilitated ongoing intertribal connections and activism. The emergence of the Rhode Island-based organization the Sons and Daughters of the First Americans (SDFA) in 1937 illuminates how twentieth-century intertribalism in the Native Northeast constituted a continuation of these practices and responded to uniquely unfolding local settler colonial policies and narratives. The SDFA worked to recover and disseminate Native histories to assert the active presence of Native peoples in Rhode Island after the state's attempt to detribalize the Narragansett Indian Tribe in the late nineteenth century. The SDFA's focus on the creation of material culture, with members crafting, displaying, and selling their handicraft, communicated their continued existence and ensured the transmission of cultural knowledge to the next generation of Native children. For the SDFA, material culture practices did not only encompass handicraft, but the continuation of their relationships with historical landscapes, gathering places, and architectures. The study of these material culture practices reveals how twentieth-century intertribal activism in southern New England maintained Indigenous knowledge away from colonial sites of meaning-making while also intervening in false narratives of Native disappearance.
In this essay, I turn to Stuart Hall's use of articulation-in the sense of both "connection" and "expression"-to examine the politics of reconciliation in Canada. I argue that articulation enables an appreciation of ideological struggle within the politics of reconciliation-the contestation over the meaning of reconciliation-while refusing to treat that struggle as exogenous to social structure and social forces- allowing us to understand what reconciliation is doing. This provides a framework to explain the belated take-up of reconciliation in 2015, as it was then that reconciliation was articulated to a resource-led accumulation strategy across the Canadian federation in an effort to suture crisis. As I argue, the articulation of reconciliation to a resource-led accumulation strategy de-economizes Indigenous selfdetermination, amplifies patriarchal settler colonialism, and garners consent for coercive action against those who refuse this new arrangement. The upshot of this counter-history of reconciliation is that it (1) foregrounds the role of capitalist property as a constraint on Indigenous selfdetermination and flourishing; (2) identifies the role and function of "the economy" as a conceptual abstraction in circumscribing Indigenous selfdetermination and suturing crisis; and (3) facilitates a more productive reinterpretation of the "resurgence-reconciliation" debate as one that revives the politics of counter-hegemony.
In the twenty-first century, S & aacute;mi artworks have increasingly extended their reach among global audiences. This article examines the international circulation of works tied to the land that situate the Indigenous Arctic as a site of meaning, activism, culture, politics, and dissent. In this understanding, in S & aacute;pmi, land and art are historically relational, a connection augmented by global circulation through specific Indigenous "Highways," as per the "Arctic Highway" concept first developed by S & aacute;mi writer and artist Nils-Aslak Valkeap & auml;& auml; and further developed in the international Arctic Highways (2022-25) traveling exhibition. The case studies presented in this article employ mixed methodologies, examining the emergence of artist collectives in the 1970s and the current artistic practices of three contemporary S & aacute;mi artists in relation to land activism. These include a self-reflection by and study of the works of visual artist Tomas Colbengtson; contextualized first-person statements by video artist Marja Helander; and an analysis of the performance Matriarchy by Paulina Feodoroff, which convey messages of healing, renewal and land protection. These examples highlight the significance of ongoing artistic collaboration in relation to S & aacute;mi environmental stewardship and demonstrate how circulation through both nonprofit and commercial contexts showcased a growing number of practitioners and their multifaceted and interrelated activism.
University campuses are located within the homelands and lifeworlds of Indigenous Peoples, and often host Indigenous faculty, staff, and students from multiple Indigenous nations. Yet many Indigenous scholars continue to experience higher education as an extractive force and carry additional loads that extend far beyond the intense pressure that all academics experience to excel in a hierarchical setting. We examine how a year-long solidarity collective of Indigenous and allied scholars and artists created four comic art posters centering the experiences of Indigenous scholars in the academy. The So You Care About Indigenous Scholars? posters, titled "Extraction Zombies," "Pass the Ball," "The S.S. Academy," and "Indigenous Land," are an arts-based intervention using humor and irony to grow critical consciousness toward Indigenizing and decolonizing the academy. Following Patricia Hill Collins's flexible solidarity thesis (2020), we discuss our experiences building an intentional and contingent alliance, where differently positioned individuals came together for a common cause of Indigenizing the academy. We show how our positionalities informed, charged, and constrained the project, and how making mistakes and learning through doing is part of working across difference. In becoming "a group going together, shifting camp together," our collective both visualized and materialized a different kind of academic collaboration, unsettling our academic institutions- beyond making space for Indigenous scholars we demonstrate that Indigenous leadership is already present in the academy and claim the academy itself as Indigenous place.
In 1854, members of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head on the island of Martha's Vineyard rescued an escaped enslaved person named Edinbur Randall and led him to safety. All traces of an Indigenous presence in the story were erased when local and regional newspapers reported on the escape. Contrastingly, members of the Wampanoag Tribe, which has a long history of incorporating outsiders of different races, told and retold the story of Randall's rescue in ways that highlighted their Native identity, but simultaneously downplayed their African ancestry. During a period when Massachusetts was using strict blood interpretations of race to support policies designed to eliminate Native tribes, the different ways in which the identity of Randall's Wampanoag rescuers were portrayed in these accounts shows how members of the tribe both actively challenged Euro-Americans' conceptions of Native extinction and racialized Indianness even as Wampanoag identity became tied up with notions of racial belonging. Looking at how Native and non-Native authors from different generations characterize race in their telling of the Edinbur Randall story therefore reveals how the Wampanoag negotiated defining their own identity in ways that allowed them to survive eliminationist policies that would later be replicated across North America.
Since the mid-2010s there has been a proliferation of "ally toolkits" that purport to offer guidance or actionable ways for those who view themselves as "allies" or supporters of various movements. The politically resurgent movements of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, for example, have been accompanied by and formed the backdrop of a considerable literature of toolkits produced for would-be settler allies. These toolkits are written for an imagined or desired ally and imagine ends or political horizons toward which allyship is striving. These toolkits can be understood as documents of political theory in order to critically engage the models for political change that are being advanced. Ultimately, allyship and the terms on which it is established within the examined toolkits are situated as an overly thin political theory when confronting social forces of ongoing settler colonialism and racial capitalism.
The COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. disproportionately harmed Indigenous peoples and brought long-standing calls for increased data collection and data accuracy about systemic issues in Indian Country to national attention. Advocates believe data can help support Indigenous people and address past harms. However, we explore two consequences that arise from data inclusion within the context of Indigenous peoples' relationship with the U.S. colonial state. First, we assert that data demands often lack direct collaboration with Indigenous nations and agencies, resulting in data inclusion that reifies and legitimates exploitative U.S. colonial structures of power and domination. Second, the articulation of Indigenous life using statistical data analyses risks solidifying the racialization and categorization of Indigenous people in ways that obviate their political authority and self-determination by rendering them as populations rather than polities. We conclude by offering two Indigenous-led examples of data collection and data communication that refuse Indigenous erasure and advance Indigenous futures. These represent an invitation for future scholarship to actively consider the multiple ways data can be used and refused in efforts to end U.S. colonial domination, especially given that data has long been used to pathologize and criminalize Indigenous peoples.
In this work, the authors describe efforts aimed at Indigenizing a second-year linear algebra course at a small liberal arts university in Manitoba, Canada. This is done through an assignment, part hands-on and part written work, that explores the connection between Indigenous beadwork and linear algebra. Our collaboration was perhaps unconventional: Sarah, the first author, is a mathematics professor; while Cathy, the second author, is an associate professor in art history. However, we both had similar goals of putting theory into practice and making positive changes to student learning outcomes in a culturally appropriate way. We situate our work in the context of the current scholarly literature, adding to the important ongoing dialogue on Indigenization of course content and reflecting on the process and outcomes. This transformation of the course curriculum represented an applied approach to immerse Indigenous knowledge and pedagogy into a mathematics classroom. We hope that it may serve as an example of how other educators, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), can integrate Indigenous knowledge-centered pedagogy into their classroom.
Exploring the long history of solidarity between Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Palestinian people—through the activism of Ali Kazak and Gary Foley from the 1970s onward—we trace the political awakening regarding global connections with other peoples living under and with the experiences of settler (and other forms of) colonialism. We explore the foundations through which resistance and protest efforts have grown over time, focusing on revolutions and resistance to imperialism that connections between Aboriginal and Palestinian people and groups have made possible.
How does the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza, broadcast into homes around the world for over ten months, fail to compel decisive intervention? Such inaction from the Western political consensus relies on two settler colonial mythologies: that of a belief in the limitless settler imagination and incredulity toward testimony of interlocutors who challenge settler colonial world-building. Through the operation of these two features, Western hegemony, and settler states particularly, are engaged in defending a belief in what Hage theorizes as mono realism. It contrasts this analysis with the role of Indigenous solidarities, such as that offered by the Red Nation in October 2023, as a starting point for engaging the crisis of genocide by suspending an understanding of Israel framed according to its own terms.
Palestinian women's ways of experiencing and narrating violence offer important insights into the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Drawing on women's testimonies, I theorize this matrix of gendered colonial violence as Ibaada—Arabic for "annihilation," which refers to the annihilation of the Palestinian collective. Ibaada names extermination of the Palestinian people as the central imperative of Zionist colonialism, in Gaza and beyond, at the same time that it understands it to be a dynamic and multifaceted infrastructure of gendered violence. Palestinian women's stories highlight the calculated infliction of multiple and intersecting forms of physical and psychological terror, pain, suffering, and complex forms of loss onto the gendered Palestinian body and collective as intertwined with dehumanization, territorial dispossession, and the destruction of Indigenous ways of being in the world. I argue that Israel's genocidal project, hypervisible now in the intensification of warfare against the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, but also unfolding across occupied Palestinian territory since the 1948 Nakba, should be understood centrally as reproductive genocide, a systematic assault on Palestinian reproductive health, and an attempt to prevent the reproduction of present and future generations of Palestinian lives. Amidst this tapestry of grief and loss, Palestinian women's stories narrate a collectively forged vocabulary of survival that contests reproductive genocide and challenges colonial structures and discourses, including those of hegemonic Western feminisms, that render the collective experiences of Palestinian women invisible.
This essay examines the role traveling indigeneity plays in the creation of global Indigenous theories that honor connections between Palestinians and Natives. Global Indigenous studies is reliant on Indigenous movements that are dialogic, transgressive, and inter/national in their motives and trajectories. Two narratives that attest to the patterns and itineraries of Indigenous theory can be found in the writings of Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe and Palestinian scholar Steven Salaita. Inspiring a world of connections, these authors journey across settler colonial boundaries, centering place and producing land-based insights on relationality and reciprocity. Considering the global scale of settler colonial violence, and its ongoing drive to dispossess through continued genocide, this essay highlights indigeneity—and the stories and theories it formulates through acts of travel, movement, and mutual solidarity—as a historical and continuing force that should ground the work of resisting and unraveling settler colonialism and all that maintains it.
Solidarity has been an important mechanism for Indigenous Peoples to foster wider support for organizing and mobilizing against colonial dispossession, displacement, and resource extraction taking place in our homelands, from Water Protectors in the #noDAPL camps at Standing Rock to the Kanaka Kanaka Maoli blockade to protect Mauna Kea. Beginning in Palestine with the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) and their place-based practice of solidarity, this paper explores conceptualizations of solidarity within Palestine, and alongside land-informed Indigenous practices of solidarity on Turtle Island. Using Indigenous practices of grounded solidarity including presencing, sintering, and the formation of constellations of co-resistance, this essay argues that land-based practice holds specific potential for deepening relationships across anticolonial struggles.
Comprehending the ferocious scale of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza means reckoning with Palestinians' history and ongoing experience of Nakba, or "catastrophic dispossession." The events of 2023-2024 elicited narratives of 1947-1948 that demonstrate how the start of the Nakba made possible forms of violence that have continued for decades and have now intensified dramatically: Palestinians injured and killed in their homes, dispossession, dehydration that leads to death, imprisonment, and military siege. Stories that bridge generational differences and geographic fragmentation bring Palestinians back into community with each other. For Palestinians as for other Indigenous people, stories seed and sustain resistance and collectivity. Histories and rituals of Indigenous survivance of hundreds of years of eliminatory violence on Turtle Island-as well as Indigenous unity with Palestinians today- strengthen Palestinian community at a time of pervasive threat. Storytelling and media making that counter mass media narratives and hold up the perspectives of marginalized groups within Palestinian society are integral to building vital and democratic futures.
