Browsing by Subject "Indigeneity"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11

Crucibles of cultural and political change : postmodern figured worlds of Tejana/o Chicana/o activism
(2011-08) Campos, Emmet Espinosa; De Lissovoy, Noah, 1968-; Urrieta, Luis; Foley, Doug; Cvetkovich, Ann; Foster, Kevin; Guajardo, Miguel
Supervisors: Luis Urrieta and Noah De Lissovoy This qualitative and sociohistorical study examines the lives and experiences of Chicana/o educators in Texas and the ideological and political discourses of equity and social justice that they draw from to shape their practice in three educational sites: the Llano Grande Center (LGC), Red Salmon Arts/Resistencia Bookstore (RSA), and the Advanced Seminar in Chicana/o Research (ASCR). I document their work based on the oral narratives of fifteen educators, site document analysis, and ethnographic work I conducted as observant participant associated with these organizations. This project extends recent scholarship that links critical pedagogy, social and cultural theories of identity formation and new social movement scholarship to understand the multiple cultural, social and political dimensions of activist education. My principal findings indicate new senses of individual and collective identity practice, reframed critical and culturally relevant pedagogies, and a reconceptualization of indigenous discourse and practice. These findings have important implications for activists, educators and researchers by rearticulating scholar activist work in new more emancipatory ways that considers place-based models of critical and cultural relevant teaching and learning and more radically democratic research practices.
Discourse and identity in Guatemala: imaginaries of indigeneity and Luis de Lión’s decolonial grito/llanto
(2015-05) Olen, Amy Therese; Arias, Arturo, 1950-; Del Valle Escalante, Emilio; Carcamo-Huechante, Luis; Romero, Sergio; Speed, Shannon
This dissertation examines Guatemalan discourses of identity and indigeneity from the colonial period to the mid-1980s. Through the theoretical lens of the coloniality of power and by means of a genealogical approach to discourse, I argue that Maya Guatemalan writer Luis de Lión’s (1939-1984) literary project decolonizes Guatemalan discursivities regarding Mayas in the nation. His work does so by problematizing the violence of the social myths and discursive “truths” about indigeneity circulating in Guatemalan society and literature, such as the “glorious Indian of the past” and the “miserable Indian of the present” binary. Additionally, Luis de Lión’s literary work articulates a discursive, emancipatory decolonial project for Mayas in the nation that moves beyond “clasista” and “culturalista” approaches to Guatemalan revolution during the armed conflict period by underlining both the coloniality of spirituality and gender racializing Indigenous subjectivities. I begin with an analysis of the political conceptualizations and policy debates regarding national identity and Mayas’ place within it from Criollo, Ladino (mixed Spanish-Indigenous), and Maya perspectives to evidence the construction and contestation of the notion of Mayas in the nation as a “problem”. Next, I trace how the social myths of indigeneity developed in the political sphere are articulated in literature from the colonial period to the mid-20th century in order to understand how literary discourses normalize social myths into imaginaries asserting discursive “truths” about Mayas. Finally, I consider a sample of Luis de Lión’s narrative production to argue that his work commences a veritable decolonial turn in Guatemalan discourses of Indigenous identity through the creation of a counter-discourse complicating the racial and gendered framing of Mayas in the nation, what I call his decolonial “grito/llanto”. I further evidence the different, “other” versions of Maya identity de Lión offers in his “rewriting” of a Maya cosmovision and his intertextual plays with the Popol Wuj, the Maya classical book. For his contestation of “truths” of indigeneity, de Lión’s work emerges as a complex, multifaceted, discursive emancipatory project for Mayas in Guatemalan textualities.
Indigeneity and mestizaje in Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead
(2014-05) Hernandez, Zachary Robert; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-
In an attempt to narrow a perceived gap between two literary fields, this thesis provides a comparative analysis of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Humminbird’s Daughter, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. I explore and critique the ways in which Luis Alberto Urrea mobilizes mestizaje and Chicana/o nationalist rhetoric. I argue that mestizaje stems from colonial representations that inscribe indigenous people into a narrative of erasure. Furthermore, I address Leslie Marmon Silko’s critique of mestizaje within Almanac of the Dead.
Indigenizing cyberspace: the possibilities of new media technologies for indigenous peoples
(2015-12) Brown, Amanda Frances; McDonough, Kelly S., 1970-; Mallapragada, Madhavi; Dorn, Edwin
The information superhighway. The global village. Cyberspace. These are only a few of the metaphors used to describe the Internet, a vast global interconnected computer network which has dominated life in the 20th and 21st centuries. While online media spaces are often described as an open limitless frontiers by scholars and users alike, recent scholarship has shown that racism, sexism, and other discriminatory forces shape user experiences. While this emerging literature on the issues surrounding cyberspace has uncovered important aspects of identity making in this space, this thesis project takes a different approach and considers the potential possibilities of new media technologies. By focusing specifically on the possibilities for indigenous users, an identity often ignored in new media scholarship, I argue that cyberspace is a critical landscape for indigenous peoples to work toward decolonization, carve out indigenous spaces online, and foster indigenous cultures and ways of knowing. By positing two new frameworks to analyze cyberspace, cyborg-intimacy and the virtual third space, I demonstrate new ways of thinking about how indigenous bodies matter in this space and how cyberspace can function as a zone outside of traditional political and cultural boundaries. Through this work, this thesis project not only asserts the presence of indigenous peoples in these spaces, countering stereotypes of these peoples as outside modernity, but also showcases the innovative ways that indigenous peoples are contributing and shaping cyberspace.
New indigeneities : race, politics and everyday social relations in Andean Bolivia
(2016-06-13) Ravindran, Tathagatan; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ali, Kamran Asdar; Sturm, Circe; Speed, Shannon
This dissertation entitled New Indigeneities: Race, Politics and Everyday Social Relations in Andean Bolivia studies the process of revalorization of indigeneity in Bolivia. It is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Bolivian city of El Alto, known as the largest indigenous city of the Americas. It examines two paradoxes engendered by the process of revalorization of indigeneity: (1) the simultaneous strengthening of indigenous political identity and the proliferation of divisions between distinct indigenous groups and (2) the persistence of internalized racism despite the increasing influence of an anti-racist indigenous political discourse. The work highlights that historical differences between various Bolivian indigenous groups in their encounters with colonialism and modernity created multiple indigenous modernities with distinct and contradictory perspectives on indigenous political liberation and wellbeing. This explains the proliferation of conflicts between various indigenous sectors. Secondly, in contrast to existing anthropological scholarship on race in most parts of Hispanic Latin America that defines race primarily in terms of the social elaboration of acquired and embodied traits (like education and hygiene) instead of the social elaboration of inherited traits (like phenotype), I argue that Latin American racial formations are characterized by a constant alternation between these two classificatory logics. This alternation creates ambiguity and undecidability, which explains the coexistence of an anti-racist indigenous political identity and internalized racist beliefs and practices. The demarcation of multiple indigenous modernities provides new explanations for increasing political divisions between various indigenous sectors in Bolivia. While the majority of highland indigenous groups conceive of indigenous liberation in developmentalist terms, their lowland counterparts adhere to a postdevelopmentalist vision. These findings also offer a new framework for explaining similar conflicts over indigeneity and developmental paradigms in other Latin American countries. It also advances global debates in postcolonial theory on alternative and non-western modernities. The re-theorization of Latin American racial formations enables a better explanation of the maintenance of racial hegemony and the persistence of internalized racism in Bolivia and other parts of Latin America.
Occupying spaces of belonging : indigeneity in diasporic Guyana
(2013-05) Cordis, Shanya; Sturm, Circe, 1967-
This report focuses on the intersections between diaspora and indigeneity in the nation-state of Guyana. To illustrate this conflicting, yet overlapping relationship, I examine the nature of state indigenous governing policies by tracing the colonial genealogy of the current 2006 Amerindian Act. I draw on the analytics of settler-colonialism, specifically the “logic of elimination,” to analyze dominant representations of indigeneity in the legislation, which grants recognition of collective rights and ancestral lands while constructing a narrative of national unity and belonging. Ultimately, this report seeks to sheds new light on an indigenous identification as a rights-bearing subject and ultimately rethinks indigenous/non-indigenous social and political relations.
Re-braiding our neglected kin : Urban Indigenous young adults fumbling to belong in the Twin Cities
(2023-12) Gaskill, Joseph James; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-
In this report, I illuminate the stories of nine Urban Native and Indigenous young adults navigating the complexities of claiming their Indigeneity. My goal is to showcase how young adults in the Twin Cities cannot belong as their full genuine selves, because of a normalized reality of neglect they embody from their community. Neglect that is fueled by forms of purity-centered authenticity that are internalized and carefully maintained to establish a specific foundation of how one must be, look, and perform their Indigeneity to belong. Emerging across generations of dehumanized Indigenous identity and the preservation of our lifeways in the west, this has created the particularistic forms of relation for what it means to be a “real” and “authentic” Native and Indigenous person that our Urban kin are propelled to strive towards as subjects to formulate our identities, but can never become. Yet, our many diverse mixed and multiethnic, queer, urban and suburban, and reconnecting young people navigate and continually resist this embodied neglect by following their joys and dreams of expanding belonging. I have come to understand this neglect and methods of navigating its limits through ethnographic interviews, observations, and community organizing work with young adults and older community members during the summer of 2023. I collected the narratives of diverse Indigenous young adults that illuminate the fumbling journeys of identity development and belonging that they face as neglected kin in their communities. This allowed me to understand more intimately the limits of belonging and relation in the Twin Cities Indigenous communities that have left young adults with various feelings of neglect as afterthoughts to their community’s relational capacities, and internalized doubt in living up to limiting expectations of Indigeneity to find belonging. Yet despite these struggles to belong, we young adults also show how following diverse avenues of self-expression and dreams push ourselves and our future kin to expand the possibilities and definitions of Indigeneity to build better, more fluidly accepting worlds of belonging today to resist these forms of subjecting Indigenous bodies, minds, and spirits to care only for an identity defined by purity-centered authenticity.
Reviving musical indigeneity : institutionalization, transmission, and revival of Taiwan’s aboriginal music
(2019-08) Hsu, Chia-Hao; Slawek, Stephen; Moore, Robin; Seeman, Sonia; Webster, Anthony; Hsu, Madeline
This dissertation studies the revival of Taiwan’s Aboriginal music motivated by the emergence of a strong Aboriginal consciousness during the last three decades. This revivalism has been stimulated in part by government initiatives to foster diversity in the national arts, by the changing economies of Aboriginal musical performance, and by the Aboriginal communities’ emerging commitment to musical-cultural preservation. Instead of framing revival as a mere counterhegemonic move of returning to an “authentic tradition” with a long history, this research argues that Aboriginal music revival is a contemporary phenomenon of constructing or reimagining the musical past enacted in discursive, performative, and institutional efforts. By emphasizing the articulation of musical indigeneity, this dissertation teases out the processes and multiple ways practitioners respond to the state and engage in the specific aspects of revived music in relation to their adaptations, interpretations, and cultural choices. My dissertation links the study of Aboriginal music revival to recent literature related to affect, critical organology, and language revitalization, focusing on several essential phenomena of Aboriginal music revival: (1) the institutionalization and the state’s heritage projects of Paiwan nose flutes (lalingedan) and mouth flutes (pakulalu) that have reinforced a particular thoughtful sorrow as a core aesthetic symbol of the Paiwan; (2) the craftsmanship of Paiwan flute making and playing that are central to the transformation of the Paiwan soundscape and changing state’s heritage projects, and; (3) the emerging movement of Aboriginal mother-tongue songwriting that participated in a wider revalorization of the “local” in Taiwan’s music industry, with a particular focus on Paiwan songwriters. Through a close examination of affective, material, and vocal dimensions of Aboriginal Paiwan music, this study aims to provide an alternative mode to reexamine the naturalized connections to the ancient past and bounded reification of identities occurring in music revival. I argue that the examination of these dimensions of music contributes to the understanding of diverse manifestations of Aboriginal music and how certain aspects of local musical practices attain new importance as core values for revival.
Singing beyond boundaries : indigeneity, hybridity and voices of aborigines in contemporary Taiwan
(2014-12) Hsu, Chia-Hao; Slawek, Stephen
While Taiwanese Aboriginal culture has become essential for Taiwanese to construct a new national identity, this report examines the uses, makings, and transmissions of Taiwanese Aboriginal music in contemporary society, illuminating power dynamics of how Aboriginal music has been presented and perceived among different groups. The shifting Taiwanese identity within the contemporary political context opens up the discourses of indigeneity that have interpreted the Aboriginal culture as a site either for forming the new Taiwanese identity or claiming indigenous rights and subjectivity. Through the analysis of these discourses, I deconstruct how Taiwanese Aboriginal music has been exoticized and folklorized as Other by the Han-centric perspective. Further, by examining Aboriginal song-and-dance at intra-village rituals, at a Pan-Aboriginal festival, and at international cultural performances, I seek to argue that Aborigines are neither simply implementing the “otherness” imposed by the Han majority nor are they completely in conflict with it. By using Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third space that resists the binary of the dominant ideology and counter-hegemonic discourses of a minority, I particularly consider the Aboriginal vocable singing as a site within which Aborigines strategically adopt different identities depending upon the performative context. Through this theoretical perspective, I argue that the multiplicity of identity and the interconnectedness of Aboriginal musical practices across different groups and regions challenge the rhetoric of multiculturalism and diversity of cultures in the sense of neo-liberal ideology.
Sı eres Genízaro : race, indigeneity, and belonging in northern New Mexico
(2017-05) Gonzales, Gregory Paul Esteban; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-; Denbow, James; Menchaca, Martha; Sturm, Circe
Despite a sustained interest in the formation of Genízaro identity in northern New Mexico during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, little has been done to address its collective persistence and maintenance today. Whether serving as the corporeal buffer zones between Native and colonial nodes of power as Indigenous slaves, settlers, or military scouts, Genízaros continue to be recognized for our historical presence and contemporary absence. Yet nestled in the Rio Chama and Taos valleys of northern New Mexico, individuals, families, and communities maintain Genízaro identity as a continued experience—myself included. This ongoing tension motivates my dissertation to examine the politics of recognition, representation, and subject formation in northern New Mexico and the U.S. Southwest Borderlands through an anthropological study of Genízaro identity in the Rio Chama and Taos valleys. While facilitating rigorous archival and ethnographic research agendas, my analytical and methodological movements are intently focused on particular histories and experiences of Genízaro social life within both communities, including: education, land tenure, cultural representation, cultural expression and spatial formation, and the politics of Indigenous recognition. This study is situated at the intersections of sociocultural anthropology, Mexican American and Latinx Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Striding along these disciplinary boundaries, my project speaks in multiple registers, simultaneously, to consider how the structuration of intelligible social, cultural, and political forms shape the examination, expression, and embodiment of recognizable subject positions and social formations. Indeed, this question is approached through the distinct lens of Genízaro Indigeneity to explore its dynamism by repositioning its analytical focal point toward the discursive interstices of race, latinidad, transnationalism, and Indigeneity. In effect, this dissertation illuminates the ways in which region-based logics of intelligible, Indigenous “livable life” have impacted the examination and expression of Genízaro identity in northern New Mexico.
Totonac ‘usos y costumbres’ : racial sensibilities and uneven entitlements in neoliberal Mexico
(2012-12) Maldonado Goti, Korinta; Speed, Shannon, 1964-; Hale, Charles R.; Costa Vargas, João H.; Cárcamo-Huechante, Luis E.; Sierra Camacho, María Teresa; Padilla, Guillermo
This dissertation investigates the pernicious effects of neoliberalism in postcolonial, ostensibly post-racial Mexico. I analyze and thickly describe the daily negotiations of race in neoliberal Mexico, as they play out between indigenous Totonacs and Mestizos, or dominant, non-indigenous, non-Black identity, in a small town in central Mexico. I focus specifically on the discursive and material life of indigenous “traditions and customs,” or usos y costumbres that reverberate within and around an Indigenous Court in Huehuetla, Puebla. Usos y costumbres is the core concept around which indigenous rights revolve and the legal justification of the indigenous courts. As such it becomes the arena of struggle and a key site to investigate power relations and social transformations. First, I analyze and chart how Mestizo authorities, Indigenous Court officials, and Totonac community members struggle to fix, define, and redefine the meaning of usos y costumbres, and consequently shift local racial sensibilities and perceptions of self and others. Second, I analyze how the success of indigenous mobilizations, crystallized in this case in the courthouse, incites potent decolonial imaginaries, knowledge productions, and practices that in previous moments were likely unimaginable. The central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the multicultural logics of governance and related languages of rights and cultural difference are lived through, incorporated in, and complexly contested in Huehuetlan social life. I will argue that the formative effects of state-sponsored multiculturalism in Huehuetla repositioned the Totonacs as subjects with power, crystallized in the institutionalization of “cultural knowledge” as jurisprudence in the Indigenous Court, that reverberates in daily confrontations with the legacy of hegemonic Mestizaje.