Indigenous Resistance

Vine Deloria Jr, intelectual y activista Lakota de la tribu Oglala, con profunda ironía hace una crítica de las relaciones y representaciones mantenidas por la sociedad dominante WASP y el Estado de USA, y también por las antropologías extractivistas (Con un excelente capitulo dedicado a los antropólogos)  con los pueblos originarios (y sistemáticamente marginalizados) de aquellas tierras, en esta su  obra más conocida, que sería un parteaguas para el American Indian Movement y el movimiento Red Power, y la lucha indígena por la autonomía y el territorio en el norte de este continente.

After waiting since 1849 for the United States Government to provide land title, compensation for Aboriginal rights or a Reserve, 500 Metis men under the leadership of Chief Little Shell took action against settler squatters at Turtle Mountain in 1882. The article which follows is from the Winnipeg Daily Sun, July 29, 1882

Empire in the Americas has been an abject failure, evidenced by massive change and climate disaster.  How do we assist the original Earthkeepers and First Nations of Turtle Island in their landback, sovereignty and resistance efforts? The allyship framework provides protocols for solidarity and anti-racism work, as well as a template for the return to earth-emergent societies for all people. Uncolonizing our hearts, minds and communities is the first step toward rejecting the paradigm of “endless growth,” recognizing the value of IK (Indigenous Knowledge), and supporting the repatriation of lands to First Nations. Uncolonizing insists that we understand ourselves as we existed before modern civilization, and that implementing traditional earth-emergent ways of life are vital to pre-coloniality.  If we collectively reject the delusional separation from nature that Empire has forced upon us, the potential is there to move back into right relationship with Earth Community. Anchoring ourselves into our own ethnoculture and reclaiming our own ancestral wisdom is a powerful blow against the monolith of cultural imperialism.

"Honouring Our Metis Heroes": A presentation prepared for Parks Canada, Batoche National Historic Site, The Friends of Batoche and the Gabriel Dumont Institute, November 2009.

A variety of interesting facts about the Metis families and veterans of the 1885 Resistance are presented in this pictorial review prepared for a Remembrance Day presentation at the Batoche National Historic Site and at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon..

In the winter of 2012, the Canadian political scene was shaken by the emergence of ‘Idle No More', a collection of protests directed by and largely comprised of Indigenous peoples. Originally, a response to a variety of legislation that was being passed through the Canadian government at the time, Idle No More spread across the country and around the world. In this paper, I argue that, drawing from Indigenous nationhood movements that extend back through five centuries, Idle No More represents a renewed assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in opposition to settler colonisation. Through transgressive actions, Idle No More has brought online activism into alignment with embodied defences of land and place, challenging Canadian sovereignty and Settler identity in multiple and creative ways. However, settler colonial tendencies in Canadian politics have sought to reinscribe Idle No More within established, generic political binaries. This paper positions Idle No More as a ‘movement moment’ that reveals significant insights about Indigenous activism, conservative politics, leftist resistance, and persistent settler colonialism in Canada.

A growing coalition of degrowth scholar-activist(s) seeks to transform degrowth into an interdisciplinary and international field bridging a rising network of social and environmental justice movements. We offer constructive decolonial and feminist critiques to foster their productive alliances with multiple feminisms, Indigenous, post-development and pluriversal thought and design (Escobar, 2018), and people on the ground. Our suggested pathway of decolonial transition includes re-situating degrowth relative to the global south and to Indigenous and other resistance movements. We see this decolonial degrowth as a profoundly material strategy of recovery, renewal, and resistance (resurgence) through practices of re-rooting and re-commoning. To illustrate what we mean by resurgence we draw from two examples where people are engaged in ongoing struggles to protect their territories from the impacts of rampant growth—Zapatista and allied Indigenous groups in Mexico, and three Adivasi communities in the Attappady region of southern India. They are building economies and ecologies of resurgence and simultaneous resistance to growth by deterritorialization. We argue that a decolonized degrowth must be what the growth paradigm is not, and imagine what does not yet exist: our separate and collective socio-ecological futures of sufficiency and celebration in the multiple worlds of the pluriverse. Together, the two cases demonstrate pathways to autonomy, sufficiency, and resurgence of territories and worlds, through persistence, innovation, and mobilization of traditional and new knowledges. We offer these as teachers for the transition to decolonial degrowth.

Review of "Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance" by Nick Estes, at pages 90-91 of the 100/101 issue of the Women and Environments International Magazine, 2019.

In 1849, Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) Chief Factor John Ballenden arrested Pierre Guillaume Sayer, André Goulet, Hector McGinnis and Norbert Larond of Grantown as they were about to leave on a trading trip to Lake Manitoba. They were subsequently charged with breaching the HBC monopoly on fur trading and brought to trial before the General Quarterly Court of Assiniboia on May 17, 1849.

In this current globalized world, indigenous populations, marginalized throughout history, face an increasing loss of their land and culture.  In response to this homogenization of their culture, loss of their land, and the continuing lack of their political and economic rights, indigenous movements in Ecuador and Mexico rose up in the 1990s demanding an end to this marginalization. Through work with key allies and members of these communities, this investigation intends to understand and elucidate the indigenous perspective of the effects of western culture and globalization on these indigenous peoples, and their ways of resisting and living in this globalized world.

This essay reconstructs defensive/offensive mechanisms of Aboriginal communication networks and presents historical examples of their application as a means of resistance during Australia's frontier wars. The principal focus is on smoke-signalling systems, especially in Queensland.

The capacity to inhabit and cope with living in disastrous environments is what social scientists widely label resilience. It is a capacity that peoples inhabiting the Arctic are especially renown for, and one that is attributed in particular to indigenous peoples living here. Indeed policy makers, concerned as they currently are with attempting to formulate policies designed to help people cope with the coming era of disasters portended by climate change, are attracted to indigenous peoples of the Arctic on account of their perceived abilities to live in a state of permanent disaster. The ability to adapt to disastrous events is seen to be the key component of the life-worlds of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, such as the Eurasian Sámi people, which inhabits Arctic Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and the resilience of the Sámi is said to be a living testimony of their strength. Within the Academy, anthropologists are currently being mobilised to provide ethnographic studies of the practices and forms of knowledge that enable the Sámi to do so. As such the Sámi are held to be a model for the rest of humanity, faced as it is with a coming era of climate disasters and global ecological catastrophe. Rather than join in with the chorus of celebration concerning Sámi resilience in the Arctic, this chapter will critique the strategic and colonial rationalities shaping it. Knowledge around resilience, concerned as it might seem to be with promoting the rights and empowerment of the Sámi, is constitutive of processes for the production and disciplining of their indigeneity, rather than being simply a deep ethnographic description. This disciplining of the Sámi, as well as every other target population in the Arctic, by proponents of resilience, forces them into accepting the necessity of a future laden by disastrous events. As such this chapter urges critical thinkers and practitioners concerned with indigenous politics in the Arctic to be more circumspect when confronting claims about the inherent resilience of indigenous peoples living here. It argues for the necessity of examining resilience as an element within a narrative strategy for the scripting of the Arctic and the life-worlds of indigenous peoples inhabiting it, rather than an expression of the agency of indigenous peoples as such.

In their process of despertar (awakening), thousands of Wayuu indigenous people have expressed their preocupación (anxious worrying) and mobilized to defend their indigenous collective rights. Through these protests, the Wayuu condemn the profound negative effects that the multinational conglomerate Cerrejón – the world’s largest open-pit coal mining company – and the Colombian state have brought to La Guajira, Colombia. In understanding indigenous political resistance, little attention has been given to the subjective and phenomenological processes by which experience, lived within certain social conditions, turn into active mobilization. Based on 9 weeks of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork (2012) and person-centered interviews with the Wayuu leaders in the lucha (struggle), I address this gap by analyzing the Wayuu’s narratives of suffering, the experiencing of sentirse mal (feeling bad) and preocupación, and the Wayuu’s engagement with a variety of mechanisms of resistance as a way to reproduce a lucha to protect what matters most to them, defend what is at stake in this struggle – wounmainkat (territory) and akwa’ipa (Wayuu way of being) – and heal their communities. In particular, I examine how different micro and macro processes and “critical events,” such as the living through the deep disruptions of mining within a neoliberal multicultural nation-state, shape a particular indigenous political subjectivity that enables these experiences and forms of political engagement. Thus, I consider how the “suffering through rights” and the emergence of a neoliberal indigenous political subjectivity simultaneously and inextricably reproduce a sense of indigenous agency, moral lucha, and nation-state, while empowering and constraining the Wayuu lucha.

Espanol
En su proceso de despertar, miles de indígenas Wayuu han estado expresando su preocupación y se han movilizado para defender sus derechos colectivos indígenas. A través de estas protestas, los Wayuu condenan los efectos negativos profundos que el conglomerato multinacional Cerrejón (la companía minera más grande a nivel mundal que está ejerciendo la extracción de carbón a cielo abierto), así como el Estado colombiano han generado en La Guajira, Colombia. Con el fin de entender la resistencia indígena, se ha prestado poca atención a los procesos subjetivos y fenomenológicos por los cuales la experiencia, vivida en un marco de condiciones sociales específicas, se convierte en una movilización activa. Con base en un trabajo de campo comunitario y etnográfico de 9 semanas en 2012 y entrevistas centradas en la vida de los líderes Wayuu en la lucha, me dedico a darle contenido a esta brecha de conocimiento, analizando las narrativas de sufrimiento de los Wayuu, la experiencia del ‘sentirse mal’ y de la preocupación, así como el compromiso y acción de los Wayuu con una variedad de mecanismos de resistencia como herramienta para reproducir  su lucha con el objetivo de proteger lo que más le importa a este grupo indígena, para defender lo que está en tela de juicio, wounmainkat (territorio)  y  akwa’ipa  (la manera de ser y de vivir de los Wayuu), y sanar a sus comunidades. En particular, examino cómo los diferentes procesos a nivel micro y macro, así como “eventos críticos”, por ejemplo el vivir en un contexto de  rupturas profundas por la minería en un estado-nación neoliberal y multicultural, constituyen una subjetividad indígena particular que permite generar estas experiencias y formas de compromiso y acciónpolítica. Por consiguiente, compruebo como el “sufrir por los derechos” y el surgimiento de una subjetividad indígena política neoliberal reproduce simultánea e inseparablemente un actuar indígena, una lucha moral y un estado-nación, mientras que empodera y limita la lucha Wayuu.

For 4 days, from the 20th to the 24th of March 2016, about 500 people among scholars, activists, and artists convened in Stockholm for Undisciplined Environments, the International Conference of the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE)

Global climate change threatens to kill or displace hundreds of thousands of people and will irrevocably change the lifestyles of practically everyone on the planet. However, the effect of imperialism and colonialism on climate change is a topic that has not received adequate scrutiny. Empire has been a significant factor in the rise of fossil fuels. The complicated connections between conservation and empire often make it difficult to reconcile the two disparate fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. This paper will discuss how empire and imperialism have contributed to, and continue to shape, the ever-looming threat of global climate crisis, especially as it manifests in the tropics. Global climate change reinforces disparate economic, social, and racial conditions that were started, fostered, and thrived throughout the long history of colonization, inscribing climate change as a new, slow form of imperialism that is retracing the pathways that colonialism and globalism have already formed. Ultimately, it may only be by considering climate change through a postcolonial lens and utilizing indigenous resistance that the damage of this new form of climate imperialism can be undone.

Stories of Indigenous resistance to colonisation were central to the Australian History wars and remain an area of contestation in Australian History. In recent years, documentaries by Indigenous directors have played a significant role in challenging orthodox histories of colonial conflict and Indigenous resistance. This paper reflects on this work by considering the production, form and style of Jandamarra’s War (2011) and Keepers of the Story: Jandamarra (2010), two historical documentaries by Indigenous director Mitch Torres that retell the story of the Bunuba freedom fighter Jandamarra from what she describes as a ‘Bunuba perspective’. It argues that by combining Indigenous storytelling practices with a process of textual hybridisation, Torres enacts a set of new historical practices that allows Bunuba people to reclaim Jandamarra’s story as their own, indeed as a story that comes from and belongs to their country. I therefore propose to consider Torres’ work not only as a new manifestation of the Jandamarra legend but as an historically significant strategic act of keeping the story of Jandamarra ‘alive’ by renegotiating the terms of its telling and reasserting its place in country.

The starting point for the discussion is that the causes of violence transcend the local. That is why I question the exceptional performance of the State as a servile component to global economic and political control, supported by field evidence. In this sense, the case of the P'urhépecha community of Cherán is emblematic because, given the damage perpetrated by the organized crime network towards their individual and collective bodies (the territory, nature and the community itself), they have addressed the problem through a communal project that has three axes: security, justice and reconstitution of the territory. This constitutes an example of public action that stimulates reflection, because the actions undertaken by the community device add to the discussion on the definition and treatment of violations of individual and collective rights. At the same time, it makes explicit the ability of indigenous peoples to determine and build a scaffolding to defend their lives against the attacks of violence. This is what I have proposed to name as a reappraisal of life (Márquez, 2016).

El punto de partida para la discusión radica en que las causas de la violencia trascienden lo local. Por eso cuestiono la actuación excepcional del Estado como un componente servil al control económico y político global, apoyada en la evidencia de campo. En ese sentido, el caso de la comunidad p´urhépecha de Cherán es emblemático porque ante el daño perpetrado por la red del crimen organizado hacia sus cuerpos individuales y colectivos (el territorio, la naturaleza y la propia comunidad), han encarado la problemática mediante un proyecto comunal que tiene tres ejes: seguridad, justicia y reconstitución del territorio. Esto constituye un ejemplo de acción pública que estimula la reflexión, porque las acciones emprendidas por el dispositivo comunitario suman a la discusión sobre la definición y tratamiento de las violaciones a los derechos individuales y colectivos. A la par que explicita la capacidad de los pueblos indígenas para determinarse y construir una andamiaje para defender su vida ante los embates de la violencia. Esto es lo que he propuesto nombrar como revaloración de la vida (Márquez, 2016).

In an era of economic globalization shaped by hegemonic capitalism, resistance movements introduce different alternatives for a life beyond capitalism. The powerful and dominant system logic criticizes such movements for being utopian dreamers with no pragmatic sense of plausible social change.
The 'ontology of the possible' for emancipatory social change is dominated by the coloniality of power and epistemic violence of modernity. Time becomes a powerful measurement tool developed by Western clocks in order to measure the successes and failures of social movements and categorize their impact on social change.
Based on the analysis of an ethnographic research with the campaign for Marichuy in Mexico, I argue that this indigenous movement constructs a conception of time related to social change, which challenge the Western notion of a measurable evolutionary timeline. Such iconoclastic strategy of indeterminacy becomes their emancipatory potential, which envisions the possibilities for emancipatory social change.
The purpose of this study is to contribute to a global conversation with scholarship and activism. Through a combination of theoretical literature and ethnographic data material, this thesis intends to challenge the status quo conception of time horizons for change.

Key words:
Emancipatory social change, time horizons, social movements, indigenous resistances, concrete utopias, system critique, participatory ethnography, neocolonialism, ontology of the possible, indeterminacy, Marichuy, CNI, CIG, EZLN, Zapatismo

In this paper I address educational matters that challenge academic and scholarly 'givens' so as to enrich knowledge. This acts in two ways to alert educators to the Eurowestern enculturization of knowledge and to propose some useful insights. Firstly, I make a personal scholarly narrative about the situation of the un-named native informant in postcolonial times. I call this a 'subjective academic narrative' to highlight that cultural stories are all subjective and personal narratives even when (maybe especially when) they claim to be scholarship that arises from disinterested data collection. Through the stories that are told we come to a view of the native informant that needs reconsideration. Secondly, this paper looks at such stories, at postcolonialism and at decolonization of knowledge, asking us to look anew at what we think of as black and white. Throughout I interpolate quotes from relevant narratives that admit their fictional genre. This paper considers how it is very startling to question the givens of Eurowestern knowledge structures when we see anew the foundations upon which they lie. In surveying this, I suggest that it is not sufficient merely to identify the colonised mind in the workings of the academy: it is also necessary to do something about introducing change. There is no way to recover an unchanged idealised past once colonisation has occurred. Today postcolonialism issues a challenge to the once geographically and now electronically colonised as well as the colonisers. It is to see how they can transform themselves into a culture that can reinstitute elements of the past in a culture that has been both traumatised and enriched by colonisation. This is a massive challenge as cybercolonisation occurs with its inevitable globalisation of cultures into EuroAmerican ways of being, thinking and knowing.

During the last decade, Maya peoples in the Yucatán and Belize have been articulating new resistance strategies to oppression and marginalisation through fiestas and festivals. Although all of these groups of activists self-ascribe as Maya, they speak different languages and have distinct historical and cultural traditions. Their collective celebrations – and the ideas, messages and values that performance genres reproduce within them – need also to be understood with attention to distinct political contexts and histories of oppression and marginalisation. [...]
In this contribution I will show that while the Maya of the Yucatán resist the neoliberal assault on their epistemologies and spiritualities by zealously protecting their local grains, Maya bodies and their practices in Belize can also be seen as grains of similar resistance to invisibilisation and marginalisation.
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This contribution to the digital book "Resistant Strategies" includes three short ethnographic documentaries: Fiesta of maize in Yucatán; Feria of native seeds in Quintana Roo; and Maya Day in Belize.

On November 6, 1869, Riel as Secretary of the council of French speaking population of Rupert’s Land asked for 12 representatives from the English speaking parishes and Winnipeg to meet with them on November 16 in the Court House at Fort Garry.

Tautai is the story of a man who came from the edge of a mighty empire and then challenged it at its very heart. This biography of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson chronicles the life of a man described as the “archenemy” of New Zealand and its greater whole, the British Empire. He was Sāmoa’s richest man who used his wealth and unique international access to further the Sāmoan cause and was financially ruined in the process. In the aftermath of the hyper-violence of the First World War, Ta’isi embraced nonviolent resistance as a means to combat a colonial surge in the Pacific that gripped his country for nearly two decades. This surge was manned by heroes of New Zealand’s war campaign, who attempted to hold the line against the groundswell of challenges to the imperial order in the former German colony of Sāmoa that became a League of Nations mandate in 1921. Stillborn Sāmoan hopes for greater freedoms under this system precipitated a crisis of empire. It led Ta’isi on global journeys in search of justice taking him to Geneva, the League of Nations headquarters, and into courtrooms in Sāmoa, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Ta’isi ran a global campaign of letter writing, petitions, and a newspaper to get his people’s plight heard. For his efforts he was imprisoned and exiled not once but twice from his homeland of Sāmoa.

Using private papers and interviews, O’Brien tells a deeply compelling account of Ta’isi’s life lived through turbulent decades. By following Ta’isi’s story readers also learn a history of Sāmoa’s Mau movement that attracted international attention. The author’s care for detail provides a nuanced interpretation of its history and Ta’isi’s role in the broader context of world history.

The first biography of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson, Tautai is a powerful and passionate story that is both personal and one that encircles the globe. It touches on shared histories and causes that have animated and enraged populations across the world throughout the twentieth century to the present day.

The Moseten people from Palos Blancos Township, La Paz, Bolivia, have features that have led me to define it as a contemporary anarchist society. One is the territorial identity which is built on hegemony over a territory, and that feeds the cultural resistance of the Moseten people against Bolivian State domination.

Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: The ways that First Nations women in art & community speak Blak to the colony & patriarchy.
APPENDIX A LIST OF WORKS Unconditional Love Space Performance Space Gallery FCAC.
The exhibition occupied two separate spaces but related responses. Roslyn Smorgan Gallery held an epistemological space (the knowing), an active studio of a new body of photographic based works drawn from my matriarchal family stories; both past, present and future, that honour matriarchal knowledge and ways of being and respond to a broad body of Aboriginal women’s work. This knowing includes family reclamation of Wemba-Wemba language and associated archival materials. The Performance Space held an ontological place (the being) of memory and timelessness, respite, healing and repair with familial story, survival, language and knowledge that speaks to loss & the need for spaces of unconditional love.
The installation, titled ‘place of unconditional love,’ was created site specifically for the Performance Space at FCAC and was created through 'daily acts of repair' over six months in collaboration with and sharing with other Aboriginal women and family members in a new process of eco dyeing fabrics, clothing & rags to become 'healing cloths.' This is not to claim that these cloths hold powers beyond them, but that they are comforting and hold the potential for healing and naming a healing process. Healing is often an elusive and difficult process and lacks a visual guide. This body of work is an attempt to grapple with and resolve this process. Eco dyeing is also known as bush dyeing, and though I come from the bush, I did this work in the city where I live, in urban spaces so refer to this process as ‘eco dyeing.’ Some of the plants and eucalyptus was collected on up the bush in my hometowns of Echuca and Kyabram on Yorta Yorta Country, and on Boon Wurrung Country & Wurundjeri Country along the Maribyrnong River. Each place I gathered, I said thank you to the plants and trees I gathered from and to the Ancestors of that Country. I was careful to only take small amounts from each tree or plant and to spread the collecting out so as not to deplete each place.
These practices are based on my relationships with others, my matriarchy, family and chosen blak family in urban space and through networks across Mobs through digital pathways of social media, messaging, sharing, communicating and finding solid Tiddas-or Yaryins as we say in Wemba-Wemba-Brother Boys, Sister Girls, our gender fluid Siblings, our Queer and Trans relatives and Family. Through ‘relationality’ as termed by Prof Aileen Moreton-Robinson, based critical analysis, I hope my work is generating insight about how Aboriginal women are at the intersection of colonial injuries that include their gender, race, class and social positioning. By subverting various forms of art and resistance in diverse contexts of community and ‘cross spaces,’ like academia and public life and social media, Aboriginal women create and recreate strategies to respond and express ‘survivance.’ The exegesis shows that creating multiple strands of art and cultural practice emerges from thousands of years of connected practice as sovereign people; and speak back and blak to an ongoing coloniality with attempts at healing and daily acts of resistance and repair.

Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking.

Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around the refusal of the dispossession of both Indigenous bodies and land. Simpson makes clear that its goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.

The Wounaan Tribe of Northwestern Colombia’s San Juan River is the latest casualty of a violent 25 year reign of terror hastened by the convergence of coca growers, gold miners, paramilitaries, guerillas, and government troops—all vying for control of the waterways and resources along the ancestral stretch of traditional Wounaan territories. Until the arrival of mono-crop production for export, Wounaan’s steadfast strategies have thwarted the bloodied battlefields of Spanish colonial impositions, nationalist armies, and Marxist guerrillas.

Bad Indians: a Tribal Memoir By Deborah A. Miranda, Heyday Publications- Written for Planet Drum PULSE

The poetic memoirs of Bad Indians are a beautiful and forceful telling of the traumas of growing up “Indian” in a post-missionized world.  Deborah Miranda of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation traces her family’s heredity generations back, recovering a broken ancestry as she compiles family stories through recorded conversations, newspaper clippings, and archival materials. With a dark but humorous voice, the author sees role models of resistance in those “Bad Indians” offering alternatives to the cultural expectations of a whitewashed world. She includes poems, pictures, and stories to tell the surviving story of a deeply important counter-narrative to the one so often heard today.

Miranda's story of “missionization” is a tragic one she compares to other dehumanizing systems like the southern slave-plantations and Nazi concentration camps. 80% of more than a million California indigenous died in a sixty-year period due to Christian contact, and by the later decades of the 19th century roughly only 20,000 were left alive. Yet the author points out our collective memory is still damaged by the lingering imperial fantasy depicting as “good Indians” those who embrace the Christian padres to reinforce cultural genocide and dispossession of land and voice. From missionization (“the end of the world”), the author introduces us to her own family through her great grandfather who acts as the bridge to a post-secular age still very much fused with the despair and hatred she writes is learned as the birthright of indigeneity. Miranda’s memoirs thus become for her a “post-colonial art project” to remember the generations of abuse, fury, rape, and fear that survived the Missions into self-perpetuating cycles of generational cruelty.

With facetious irony and a critical eye, Miranda dives into an historical mythology that stereotypes her people as instruments to fuel the American dream, reminding us we are each called to make our own stories and connections with those places we call home, born from the relationships with our ancestors, our families, and ultimately the land that nurtures us. In this regard, Miranda is able to trace the ownership of land changes over generations, along with the landscapes and people in them, who struggle to cleanse themselves of corruption while building new bridges of cultural history. Through remembered family events, lost land, and the accompanying loss of respect and esteem, Miranda offers up her work as a means for restoration, justice, and the reclamation of lost identity:

“Stories still exist, and testify that our connections to the land live on beneath the surfaces of our lives, like underground rivers that never see the light of day, but run alive and singing nonetheless. The stories call us back.”

Bad Indians is a story violently at odds with the all-too contemporary perspective that indigenous peoples are known only in history textbooks. But this book marks something else too—a claim to life and survival against all odds, against the overt and implicit racism of a “civilized” culture, alcoholism and rape. Miranda uses the language of her writing to aid in an ongoing project to heal shame, sadness, and harm, struggling for the right of indigenous peoples to remain visible and always “undisappeared.” In doing so she offers readers a written legacy not only powerfully transformative but perhaps able to transform power too.

In this thesis, the authors look into the issue of indigenous resistance against large-scale mining projects in Latin America. It is based on three months of qualitative fieldwork in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, close to the Marlin Mine, Guatemala. The thesis exposes the ways in which the indigenous communities contest the dominant discourses of powerful actors: Montana Exploradora and the Guatemalan state with regard to gold mining, development, resistance, closure, and impacts of mining. It provides a unique perspective because it 1) in contrast with most literature, focuses on a long-established mine, including the subject of mine closure and 2) equally pays attention to the way Montana Exploradora and state actors shape their discourse. The authors find that in the case of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, it is impossible to speak of a discourse of the indigenous community as a whole; different groups exist that shape their discourses differently, and are not exclusively negative about mining. They conclude that the main issue that from the beginning stood in the way of an honest dialogue between the two sides, has not been environmental destruction, contamination, or the method of working of the company, but the existence of uneven power relations and the patronizing way in which the mining company approaches the indigenous population and the municipality.

In this paper I address educational matters that challenge academic and scholarly 'givens' so as to enrich knowledge. This acts in two ways to alert educators to the Eurowestern enculturization of knowledge and to propose some useful insights. Firstly, I make a personal scholarly narrative about the situation of the un-named native informant in postcolonial times. I call this a 'subjective academic narrative' to highlight that cultural stories are all subjective and personal narratives even when (maybe especially when) they claim to be scholarship that arises from disinterested data collection. Through the stories that are told we come to a view of the native informant that needs reconsideration. Secondly, this paper looks at such stories, at postcolonialism and at decolonization of knowledge, asking us to look anew at what we think of as black and white. Throughout I interpolate quotes from relevant narratives that admit their fictional genre. This paper considers h...