Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies

Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, Steve Larkin, Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, Steve Larkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429802379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies is the first comprehensive overview of the rapidly expanding field of Indigenous scholarship. The book is ambitious in scope, ranging across disciplines and national boundaries, with particular reference to the lived conditions of Indigenous peoples in the first world.

The contributors are all themselves Indigenous scholars who provide critical understandings of indigeneity in relation to ontology (ways of being), epistemology (ways of knowing), and axiology (ways of doing) with a view to providing insights into how Indigenous peoples and communities engage and examine the worlds in which they are immersed. Sections include:

• Indigenous Sovereignty

• Indigeneity in the 21st Century

• Indigenous Epistemologies

• The Field of Indigenous Studies

• Global Indigeneity

This handbook contributes to the re-centring of Indigenous knowledges, providing material and ideational analyses of social, political, and cultural institutions and critiquing and considering how Indigenous peoples situate themselves within, outside, and in relation to dominant discourses, dominant postcolonial cultures and prevailing Western thought.

This book will be of interest to scholars with an interest in Indigenous peoples across Literature, History, Sociology, Critical Geographies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Native Studies, M?ori Studies, Hawaiian Studies, Native American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Race Studies, Queer Studies, Politics, Law, and Feminism.

Part 1

Disciplinary knowledge and epistemology

Part editor: Chris Andersen

1

The institutional and intellectual trajectories of Indigenous Studies in North America

Harnessing the ‘NAISA Effect’¹

Chris Andersen

At the opening of the 2007 inaugural meeting of what eventually became the Native American and Indigenous Studies² Association (NAISA), several long-standing Indigenous Studies scholars gave brief welcoming remarks to the first conference attendees. In doing so, these scholars emphasised an interdisciplinary and ‘big tent’, global vision for NAISA, a vision borne out not only by the geographical diversity of the original attendees but by the tenor of the conversations organisational naming (including, for example, whether the descriptor Native American should be included or whether the organisation should use the more expansive ‘Indigenous Studies Association’). Speaking later on the creation of NAISA, Robert Warrior (2008) noted similarly that the original global vision for NAISA sat in contradistinction to the vision of the earlier American Indian Studies association, which was narrower in philosophical scope and more geographically local to the United States.

As I will explore in further detail below, there can be little doubt that the creation of NAISA has exerted a fundamental and positive impact on the intellectual growth of Indigenous Studies as a discipline, drawing thousands of predominantly Indigenous scholars from across the globe. What is less clear, however, is whether the last 13 years of NAISA’s intellectual growth, particularly in North America,³ has been matched by an equally robust institutional growth in the discipline or, perhaps more importantly, whether Indigenous Studies units have taken sufficient advantage of NAISA’s constitutive presence to build our Indigenous Studies institutional networks. In the context of exploring what I regard as the gap between the discipline’s intellectual and institutional trajectories, the chapter is laid out in three parts. Part one will focus on a discussion of the intellectual growth of Indigenous Studies in the NAISA era and in this context, I will emphasise two key factors: the increase of theorisation as an explicit part of Indigenous Studies and the impact of the intellectual globalisation on North American Indigenous Studies, both fuelled by the creation and growth of the NAISA.

Part two will then chart the evolution of Indigenous Studies’ institutional capacity in North America to demonstrate that although the increase in Indigenous Studies units (including, but not limited to, faculties, departments and programs) and the attendant growth of graduate programs appears positive, the growth of all-important doctoral programs has not kept pace. Following this discussion, part three will then map out the contours of where Indigenous Studies units can (continue to) orient ourselves in the future in light of NAISA’s powerful presence, in the context of thinking explicitly about how to build (and/or continue to build) our formal relationships with one another. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of two concrete steps that Indigenous Studies units can take to benefit institutionally from NAISA’s phenomenal role in our intellectual growth. We will begin with a discussion of this intellectual growth.

Indigenous Studies’ global/theoretical currents: The ‘NAISA effect’

Much of Indigenous Studies’ current intellectual growth has been fuelled by the expansion of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. As noted in the introduction, the progenitor of NAISA was created in 2007. Following several initial meetings at the University of Oklahoma and University of Georgia that saw hundreds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars in attendance, the organisation was formally incorporated as a non-profit association in 2009 (see Warrior 2008 and O’Brien and Warrior 2016 for an in-depth discussion of its creation and growth). Since its inception, it attracts more than a thousand students, scholars, and community members annually from across the globe, the large majority of which have been Indigenous. Moreover, its largest conference to date took place in 2019 in Hamilton, New Zealand, led by the Faculty of Māori of Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato, which hosted nearly two thousand delegates from around the world. All of which speaks to the increasingly global reach of Indigenous Studies.

The impact of NAISA extends beyond its annual meetings, however, leading additionally to the creation of new global intellectual networks of scholars, many of whom met and interacted for the first time at its annual meetings. These new networks have in turn produced new forms (and forums) of intellectual kinship. Though the discipline of Indigenous Studies in North America has been marked by several long-standing academic journals,⁴ these intellectual networks are perhaps best symbolised by a marked increase of edited Indigenous Studies collections that include chapters from Indigenous (studies) scholars located across the globe that centre Indigenous Studies in its various theoretical and methodological lenses. In the context of centring this kinship, I will touch on four popular edited collections published by major academic presses (Hokowhitu and Devadas 2013; Simpson and Smith 2014; Moreton-Robinson 2016; Andersen and O’Brien 2016) to demonstrate what the increased ‘pace’ of Indigenous Studies theorising and its globalisation has begun to look like in practice.⁵

In their explicitly theoretical introduction to Fourth Eye: Māori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand, Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas (2013) explain the intent of their edited collection to bring together the fields of media studies and Indigenous Studies to offer an agentic, Indigenous-centred intervention into the previous research undertaken in so-called ‘third eye’ media studies extend its insights to ask us to think more complexly about how Indigenous peoples engage with and use media “to confront conventionalized regimes of representation and to engender Indigenous sovereignty” (Hokowhitu and Devadas 2013: xvi). A globalising spirit underlies their argument: while the book is centred in Aotearoa/New Zealand, they suggest that the kinds of issues and dynamics it raises reverberate far beyond its shores and indeed, given the global presence and growth of Māori cinematic production, this seems apt. The global temperament that orients their discussion is further evidenced in a usefully complex discussion about the meanings and uses of the term “Indigenous” as it gets mobilised in various cultural and political contexts (Hokowhitu and Devadas 2013: xviii).

In this same globalising context, they make the bold (and I believe, correct) argument that part of the power of colonialism is not just that we live in it but that it lives in us. That is, “the inevitable impulsion to produce internationally recognized scholarship within Western academia has compelled many Indigenous writers to theorise their local context within theoretical frameworks that enable dialogue across colonial contexts” (Hokowhitu and Devadas 2013: xix). In so doing, they additionally point out the dangers of an Indigenous Studies field that views the ‘pan-Indigeneity’ that underscores its global currency with the progressive import it is often accorded. In juxtaposition, they note – in what is a fundamentally Indigenous Studies stance – that the deeply place-based character of first peoples otherwise positioned as ‘Indigenous’ resist the easy cataloguing that comes with the global use of a single, apparently unifying terminology. Indeed, in his own contribution to this volume, Hokowhitu (2013) argues that even in Indigenous Studies, the term ‘Indigenous’ “is epistemologically limited because of the ontological importance of local contexts, languages, and cultures. Such inattention to the local Indigenous condition inherently devalues the very concept of indigeneity because of its tethering to place” (Hokowhitu 2013: 112).

Audra Simpson’s and Andrea Smith’s (2014) Theorizing Native Studies similarly centres the importance of theory and theorising to the growing discipline of Indigenous Studies. Pushing back against the all-to-common criticism that theory is ‘Western’ and as such, unhelpful (if not harmful) to Indigenous communities, Simpson and Smith (2014) posit that “theorizing Native Studies troubles … simplistic and ultimately divisive theory-versus-practice dichotomies, reconceptualises what theory is, and provides a critical framework for political and intellectual praxis” (Simpson and Smith 2014: 1–2). Along these lines, they note that Indigenous Studies debates have already been peppered with sharp theoretical interventions that not only critiqued colonial pretentions to ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ but demonstrated “the centrality of the historical method and critique … as a project that responds … to settler colonialism as not only a material practice of dispossession but as a representational practice of social scientific discourse” (Simpson and Smith 2014: 5).

While noting the manner in which theory and theorising in the academy have been deployed to dismiss the theoretical agency emanating from within Indigenous communities (and in doing so, attempting to turn us into passive objects that are theorised on and about), Simpson and Smith suggest:

[t]he real question on the table is not whether we should theorize. Rather, we need to ask how we can critically and intelligently theorize current conditions in diverse spaces inside and outside the academy, and how we can theorize our responses to these conditions.

(Simpson and Smith 2014: 7)

As such, they ask Indigenous Studies scholars to conceptualise theory and theorising beyond the academy while (re)affirming the importance to our growing discipline of building and advancing our own analytical agendas and conceptual scaffolding beyond those of conventional academic disciplines (Simpson and Smith 2014: 22). In short, far from signalling the envelopment or assimilation of Indigenous Studies into the settle colonialism of the academy, for Simpson and Smith (2014), theory and theorising actually represents a key element of its resistance.

In her Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations, Australia-based Indigenous scholar Moreton-Robinson (2016) argues that critical Indigenous Studies represents intellectual and institutional contexts within which “scholars operationalize Indigenous knowledge to develop theories, build academic infrastructure, and inform our cultural and ethical practices. We do this critical work to challenge the power/knowledge structures through which Indigenous peoples have been framed and known” (Moreton-Robinson 2016: 5). Building on a broad Foucauldian tradition, Moreton-Robinson’s conceptualisation of a critical Indigenous Studies demonstrates a desire to move beyond Foucault’s limiting oeuvre to explore the role that Indigenous Studies as an emerging discipline should play in analysing the relationship between colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty.

Of note here is Moreton-Robinson’s (2016) specific use of the adjective critical to designate a new ‘turn’ in the evolution of the discipline. For Moreton-Robinson (2016), a critical Indigenous Studies is thus a growing discipline:

with global reach, one that is multicultural, multinational and multidisciplinary. It is where Indigenous-centered approaches to knowledge production are thriving and where the object of study is colonizing power in its multiple forms, whether the gaze is on Indigenous issues or Western knowledge production.

(Moreton-Robinson 2016: 4)

This description sophisticatedly enfolds a number of otherwise competing issues within the broader umbrella of the discipline – different cultures, different nations (and colonial nation-states) and perhaps most complexly, different disciplinary tenors – positioning them instead as productive tensions rather than barriers (see also Warrior 2014: 7). And as with all of her work, Moreton-Robinson emphasises that a willingness to theorise must sit at the base of our scholarly labour and intellectual network building.

Finally, Andersen and O’Brien (2016) published a large methodological collection – Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies – that asked contributors to frame their discussion according to the following question: “what is your methodological approach to the way you undertake research, and how does it differ from past research in your discipline”? (Andersen and O’Brien 2016: 4). This question was rooted in three basic premises: first, that there is something methodologically distinctive about Indigenous Studies scholarship that differentiates it from the disciplines that volume contributors were trained in (which were usually not Indigenous Studies); second, that potential contributors would recognise these differences and deem them valuable enough to be worthy of discussion; and third, that contributors would see the research they were asked to engage in an exercise of self-reflexivity as methodologically bei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Disciplinary knowledge and epistemology
• PART 2 Indigenous theory and method
• PART 3 Sovereignty
• PART 4 Political economies, ecologies, and technologies
• PART 5 Bodies, performance, and praxis
• Index