The Emergence of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race and Culture in Native North America

Abstract

In this essay, I review four recent publications on American Indian life in the United States, past and present, through the lens of indigeneity. While indigenous activism has been a central focus of recent work in anthropology and American Indian studies, Indigeneity is still emergent as a conceptual tool for historical and ethnographic work. This essay traces conceptual issues associated with more general discourses of indigeneity through the reviewed works in order to examine the relationship between the politics of indigeneity and the racialized structures of settler colonialism that still confront American Indian peoples in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• American Indian
• Indigeneity
• Indigenous
• race
• racism
• settler colonialism

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank April Eisman, Laura Graham, and Max Viatori, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their input and suggestions for improvement.

Notes

¹See Martinez Cobo 1986 for an important definition arising at the United Nations, subsequently much discussed in the scholarly literature. See Weaver (2000) for an account of how the term indigeneity, previously used in postcolonial literature to denote strategies through which settler populations constructed a sense of identity as distinct from the fact of their exile from Europe (see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989:135–140), became associated with activism by indigenous peoples.

²These elements are found, explicitly or implicitly, in many prior accounts of indigenous activism. In addition to those already cited (or to be cited in the next few paragraphs), see Dyck 1985, Hodgson 2002, Kuper 2003, Geunther et al. 2006, and Ivison, Patton, and Sanders 2000.

³Hamilton and Placas 2011 provide a useful review of recent case studies of emergent indigeneity, and Starn and Cadena (2007) an important set of readings.

⁴For purposes of space and limitations of expertise, my discussion of the framework of indigenous struggles in Native North America focuses exclusively on the United States.

⁵Wilkins and Stark present a useful historical overview (2010:121–134); see also Biolsi 2004.

⁶Cobb also discusses the global vision of American Indian struggles by novelist, scholar, and activist D'Arcy McNickle. Neizen describes the efforts of Cayuga activist Levi General Deskaheh at the League of Nations in 1923–1924 (Neizen 2003:31–36).

⁷Lurie's 1971 account of the then-emerging American Indian activism of the treaty-rights and self-determination era anticipates Li's use of the concept of “articulation,” albeit with different theoretical inspirations, in theorizing such actions as an emergent “articulatory movement” (Lurie 1971).

⁸The Seminole were the subject of Sturtevant's classic account of “ethnogenesis”; for more recent accounts of Seminole history, see Weissman 2007.

⁹Klopotek notes that Tunica-Biloxi leader John Barbry cites other anthropologists with longer experience in the region, from Mary Haas to John Swanton, as “indispensable” to their recognition efforts (58).