We Belong to Each Other: Resurgent Indigenous Nations

By Jeff Corntassel, Indigenous Nationhood Movement

What happens when the salmon people can no longer catch salmon in their rivers? Or when the medicines, waters, and traditional foods that Indigenous people have relied on for millennia to sustain their communities become contaminated with toxins? And how will future generations view our efforts to protect and respect the places and relationships we value?  It’s no accident that in places where Indigenous nations thrive on their homelands and exercise their self-determining authority, those natural environments are biologically diverse and healthy. State-run environments, on the other hand, are often sites of unlimited extraction, freshwater depletion, desertification, deforestation, and the overall destruction of genetic and biological diversity. The fact that over eighty percent of the world’s biodiversity thrives on Indigenous lands is not a coincidence.

Whether disguised as states, corporations, non-governmental organizations etc., colonial powers treat the planet as a tradeable commodity to be militarized and exploited. In the quest for unlimited growth via new versions of the Doctrine of Discovery, each state/corporate extraction project attempts to disconnect Indigenous people from their collective and individual roles and responsibilities to land, culture, and community. Yet as resurgent Indigenous nations reclaiming and maintaining our place-based existences, we become credible threats to the future survival of the colonial system.

While state governments attempt to “claim” Indigenous peoples as citizens, workers, and/or rights-holders, Indigenous nations claim their own in a much different way: as relations with inherent responsibilities to our homelands, cultures, and communities. A Cherokee word that describes these lived relationships is digadatsele’i or “we belong to each other”. It is this sense of belonging that breaks through the colonial confines of the “nuclear family” and guides our relational responsibilities as clan mothers, chiefs, grandmothers, grandfathers, youth, children, parents etc. Mississauga Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson describes it as a “series of radiating responsibilities”, which require actions to reciprocate and renew these relationships.

Our self-determining authority as Indigenous nations is grounded in healthy, continuously-renewed relationships. For Cherokees, the notion of Gadugi expresses how our governance has persisted for over 10,000 years on the land: people working together in a spirit of community comaraderie. According to Cherokee Elder Benny Smith, Gadugi is a community-centered process that ensures “no one is left alone to climb out of a life endeavor”. This cooperative, place-based consciousness ensures that community is valued through respect, reciprocity and humility. As Indigenous peoples, we have long memories and despite state attempts to erase our presence on the land/water, we embody the struggle to reclaim, reconnect, and regenerate our place-based existence. Remembering life beyond the state and acting on those remembrances is resurgence!

When I was a graduate student at the University of Arizona, an official from the Mexican consulate gave a talk at the university shortly after the Zapatista (EZLN) uprising in 1994. At one point, the Mexican official said that there was no legitimate reason for the Zapatistas to rebel against the government because “we’re all Indigenous, we’re mestizo, and we all have some Native blood.” It was stunning to hear such ignorance and I realized later how prevalent this classic colonial tactic was. It is common for states to proclaim “we are you” in order to legitimize their continued presence on the land. And what the Mexican government official stated is the essence of a nation-state mentality – justifying their illegal occupation of Indigenous homelands by creating the illusion that the state and nation are the same things.

Over 500 years of experience tells us that state-building is about nation-destroying. An Indigenous nation’s self-determining authority comes not from the state but directly from the land itself and thousands of years of experience living in relation to the land, not just on it. States and corporations founded on the theft of Indigenous homelands are inherently unsustainable, which is why they utilize colonial mechanisms such as fear, repression and jurisdictional fictions. But our love for the land and our relations cannot be overcome by state violence, and we live on as Indigenous nations despite colonial attempts to erase Indigenous peoples and our place-based relationships from the landscape.

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Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee Nation, Wolf Clan) is an Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor in Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria. Jeff’s research has been published in Alternatives, American Indian Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Human Rights, Decolonization, Human Rights Quarterly, Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, and Social Science Journal. You can follow him on Twitter: @JeffCorntassel

Against the Law: Indigenous Feminism and the Nation-State

By Andrea Smith[1], Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, Vol 5, No 1 (2011)

Abstract

The Native feminist theorizing advocated in this article points to the importance of looking at Native organizing and Native Studies – and by extension ethnic studies as well – as going beyond an intellectual commitment to a politics of multicultural representation. Native feminisms must be oriented less toward questions of representation and more toward questions that interrogate the material conditions that Native women face as subjects situated within a nexus of patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy.

Introduction

A good number of non-white women have addressed the women’s movement and decried the fact that we are outside the women’s movement.  I have never felt outside of that movement… I have never felt that the women’s movement was centered or defined by women here in North America.  That the white women of North America are racist and that they define the movement in accordance with their own narrow perspective should not surprise us… We are part of a global movement of women in the world, struggling for emancipation.  The world will define the movement.  We are part of the women who will define it… I represent the future of the women in North America, just as any other woman does.  That white women only want to hear from me as a Native and not as a voice in the women’s movement is their loss.

— Lee Maracle[2]

As Sandy Grande notes, Native Studies is often confined (both by Native and non-Native scholars) to the realm of cultural representation. She asks: “How has this preoccupation [with cultural representation] obscured the social and economic realities facing indigenous communities, substituting a politics of representation for one of radical social transformation?”[3] And as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues, Native Studies is not seen as in intellectual project with its own integrity that has broader ramifications. Thus, the key questions often posed in Native Studies are, what is indigeneity?  What is Indian identity?  Such questions often derail Native Studies into essentializing discourses about indigenous cultures and/or epistemologies.

These trends in turn negatively impact the development of Native feminist theory. First, many works still rely on essentializing claims that Native women cannot be feminists,[4] thus erasing the diversity of thought that exists within both scholarly and activist circles.[5] Second, to the extent that scholars do engage Native feminism, they do so almost solely to demonstrate the racism of white feminism. Such rhetorical strategies limit Native women to a politics of inclusion – let us include Native women in feminist theory (or if we do not think that they can be included, let us reject feminist theory completely). This politics of inclusion inevitably presumes that feminism is defined by white women.

However, if we use Lee Maracle’s above quotation as a starting point, we begin to move from a politics of inclusion to a politics of re-centering. That is, if we were to situate Native women at the center of feminist theory, how would feminist theory itself change? Such a project moves from a narrowly-defined identity politic that ascribes essential characteristics to indigenous womanhood to a revolutionary politic emerging from the nexus of indigenous praxis and the material conditions of heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy. Indigenous feminist theory, contrary to what even some Native scholars argue,[6] is not simply a multicultural add-on to “white” feminist theory (which itself is varied and complex).  Rather, the theorizing produced by Native women scholars and activists make critical and transformative interventions into not only feminist theory, but into a wide variety of theoretical formations. In this essay, I will not provide an exhaustive account of these interventions because these interventions are the work of collective thought and organizing. Instead, I will focus on Native feminist theorizing about nationalism, the nation-state, and sovereignty in order to demonstrate the significance of Native feminist theory for anyone who engages in political theorizing and activism.