Colonialism invigorated? The manufacture of resilient indigeneity

ABSTRACT

Amid and unpredictable change globally, indigenous peoples are frequently referred to as prime examples of resilience. The peoples’ proven track record of persevering and ability to adapt have attracted attention worldwide. Previously deemed in need of ‘development’, the peoples are being called upon to provide what is now an invaluable contribution. Resilience holds out a promise of a (better) future for us all, and for the peoples suggests a greater role in impacting the future. This article dissects the promise of change engendered through the call for indigenous resilience. By drawing on critical discussions on adaptation, indigeneity and contemporary colonialism, it offers an account of the ways in which resilience cements time-tried expectations that indigenous peoples always adapt. Even though the international community would have us believe that colonial practices are a thing of the past, this article argues that the global call for indigenous resilience signals a resurgence of those practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• indigeneity
• international politics
• contemporary colonialism

Introduction

Outlining the parameters for sustainable development in 1987, the Brundtland report acknowledged the significance of traditional knowledge and experience. These were seen as linking us as humans to our past. Most significantly, the knowledge of groups considered vulnerable – indigenous peoples in particular – was deemed vital for understanding and managing the complexity of ecological systems (Our Common Future, 1987, p. 98). Thirty years later, the UNESCO programme on Local and Indigenous Knowledge highlighted the contribution indigenous peoples can make to global resilience: ‘There is great potential for indigenous and local knowledge to contribute further to global challenges of climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss in order to achieve goals such as sustainability and resilience.’ (Local Knowledge, Global Goals, 2017, p. 45)

To a growing degree, international political initiatives and programmes, urging as they do a search for much-needed environmental knowledge, are shot through with calls for resilience. International politics has taken on the promotion of improved adaptation, preparedness and alertness in the face of global change. In tandem, political evaluations of resilience and adaptation boast observations of indigenous peoples’ superior capacity for resilience (e.g. Arctic Resilience Report, 2016; UNESCO, 2018). Indeed, indigenous peoples, who have historically been in the social, political, economic and geographical margins now find themselves in a position to play a key role in resolving ‘imminent planetary challenges’ (Coombes, Johnson, & Howitt, 2012, p. 692). The UNESCO programme quoted above also indicates that indigenous peoples can contribute to global sustainability through their traditional knowledge.

Rapid and drastic global changes have triggered the political and social scientific use of ‘resilience’. As Aradau (2014, p. 78) describes, resilience has come to correspond to the world’s ‘un-ness’, the need to be able to live in the unexpected and unknown. Resilience is presented as an answer to and a necessity in dealing with this unpredictability. The term, originally used in the natural sciences, has become widely deployed in international politics, especially in the context of environmental issues. In more social applications, contemporary politics has been keen to rely on the idea of subjects and communities being resilient and growing their resilience (Chandler & Coaffee, 2017; Chandler & Reid, 2016; Joseph, 2018; Walker & Cooper, 2011).

We reflect on the politics behind the desire for indigenous resilience and illustrate the contemporary call for indigenous resilience by drawing on examples from international politics, as seen in the United Nations and the Arctic. The documents and initiatives produced by these arenas demonstrate the depth and degree to which the expectation of resilience has permeated global politics. It is through this shared political will and rhetoric that indigeneity is manufactured as resilient and the peoples are promised progress towards betterment of their situation. We argue that while appearing to be a transformative political and social force, the international political mindset that assumes resilience on the part of indigenous peoples and calls upon them to increase that capacity, may very well work to cement the peoples’ marginalised position.

The paper weaves together critical discussions on indigeneity, (post)colonialism and adaptation. In its reflections on global mechanisms of othering and marginalisation, the analysis builds on contemporary research in native studies. Scholars such as Alfred (2005), Coulthard (2014), Corntassel and Witmer (2008), Simpson (2014), Veracini (2015) and Wolfe (2016) have made visible the multiple ways in which the relations between indigenous peoples and their (former) colonisers endure and take on new forms. This strand of research has highlighted the importance of postcolonial critique in understanding the ongoing social, political and legal circumstances of indigenous peoples and cultures. The scholars’ work shows influences of classic postcolonial theorists such as Fanon (2017), Mbembe (2001) and Spivak (1999) but also draws critical attention to the specificity of indigeneity within the histories of colonialism. Although the criticism of contemporary native studies has touched upon the nuanced ways in which colonial relations unfold, the global emergence of resilient indigeneity has largely eluded researchers’ gaze (for notable exceptions see Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2016, 2018).

Research focusing specifically on adaptation and indigeneity counts equally few critical studies (e.g. Cameron, 2012; Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2014; Tennberg, 2012). The expectation that indigenous peoples constantly adapt, are flexible and adjust is inherently linked to debates on resilience. The general critique of adaptation discourse has pointed out the neoliberal dimensions of the concept (Evans & Reid, 2014; Joseph, 2013; Welsh, 2014). Scholars have problematised the underlying assumption, embedded in the ethos of responsiveness, that individuals and communities are necessarily able to ‘rebound and resume after being exposed to a stressor’ (e.g. Walker & Cooper, 2011; Welsh, 2014). However, this critique has not extended to an account of the ways in which ordering through the expectation of adaptation and resilience has targeted indigeneity in particular.

The term ‘indigeneity’, used in this paper, is a product of global political institutions and indigenous peoples’ engagement in them (Dahl, 2012; Merlan, 2009; Niezen, 2003). While it offers indigenous peoples a common denominator and a shared reference point from which to advance their causes politically and legally, the term remains a simplification as it often fails to capture the peoples’ lived realities and diversities. Defining indigenous identity locally has also engendered debates (e.g. Joona, 2015; Sturm, 2011; Valkonen, Valkonen, & Koivurova, 2016). Despite its general nature, ‘indigeneity’ serves to define indigenous peoples as a particular group globally and constitutes a political resource that they may draw on. The salient question in this paper is the way in which resilience has become something that is categorically assumed to define a range of peoples despite the considerable regional, cultural and historical differences among them. The purpose of the paper is not to take a stand on whether indigenous individuals and communities are in fact resilient or to make judgements as to whether or not they should be. However, it is beyond dispute that the peoples have often found themselves in and coped with situations requiring enormous resourcefulness and responsiveness.

The article offers a critical analysis of the international political call for indigenous resilience and of the power relations it engenders. As the global narrative suggests, the call for resilience will be of particular benefit to indigenous peoples, to whom it seems to hold out a promise of their causes moving forward, of something better in the future. We set out to dissect this promise. As we see it, the call for indigenous resilience hinges on the core demand entailed in colonial relations: indigenous peoples are to adapt. In other words, hailing indigenous resilience as a solution to the insecurities of the world is a political choice, the power effects of which need to be scrutinised.

Global search for endurance

These are the people who did the least to cause climate change, yet they stand to lose their homes, their jobs, and even their lives because of the growing impacts of climate change. (Ban Ki-moon, 2015a)

It is with these words that the former Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, described the need for the Climate Resilience Initiative: Anticipate, Absorb, Reshape (A2R), launched in 2015. The initiative exemplifies the global mechanisms targeting those who are deemed most vulnerable in the face of a changing climate. The short UN Climate Resilience Initiative video (A2R Initiative, 2015) paints a picture where those in under-developed conditions, living in rural and remote places, are to ‘adapt to climate change and become resilient’. In other words, those in close proximity to and relying heavily on the natural resources at hand are to adapt. Although the spoken narrative of the video targets all of us and tells how resilience is something that ‘we all need’ and how ‘we can reduce risks’ by being resilient, the visual narrative conveys an understanding of resilience as a means of survival and a duty – but only for some of us. In effect, the prophecy and promise of resilience are being proclaimed to those at the edges of the world, those struggling amidst melting glaciers, burning bushlands, dwindling rainforests and biologically impoverished farmlands. Those who must learn to ‘anticipate change’, ‘absorb the negative’ and ‘reshape’ development (A2R Initiative, 2015) are, indeed, in most cases, people who have played only a very minor part in causing that change.

As we have detailed in our previous work (Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2016, 2018), the discussion of resilience has carved out a special position for indigenous peoples and the persistently adaptive subjectivity that indigeneity is presumed to represent. The unpredictability of the rapidly changing world has sparked a growing recognition of and interest in the peoples’ capacities to endure, adapt and persevere. As the Arctic Resilience Report (2016) illustrates, the coping skills of indigenous peoples are very much in demand given the dramatic changes in store in the future: ‘[L]iving in one of the world’s most variable biomes means that people of the Arctic, and in particular the Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic, know a great deal about resilience.’ (Arctic Resilience Report, 2016, p. xvi)

The report continues that the peoples and ecosystems in the region have to ‘adapt and even transform themselves as needed’ (Arctic Resilience Report, 2016, p. xii). The call for indigenous peoples to be resilient amidst changing conditions is a global one. Being one of the principal political forums, the UN has directed special attention to indigenous peoples in its efforts to reduce the peoples’ inequality through building up their climate resilience. A telling example of this is the World Economic and Social Survey (2016) published by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. The survey summarises how the indigenous peoples in particular ‘are under siege, as their livelihoods are seriously affected’ and how ‘in the worst cases, their way of life, and even their existence, is being threatened by climate change’ (World Economic and Social Survey, 2016, p. 12). The political reports discuss the causes of the peoples’ vulnerability, their abilities to adapt and potential risks of maladaptation as these are seen, respectively, to necessitate, support or threaten their resilience.

The ideal of indigeneity embodying flexibility and perseverance as built-in resources to draw on has swiftly been integrated into the political call for resilience. Indigeneity is seen to encapsulate the essence of the type of global being that, by Western standards, is marginalised, remote, underdeveloped and dependent on nature. The peoples’ resource-based traditional livelihoods, rootedness in the land, remote dwelling places and environmentally attuned cultures, have strengthened the assumption of their adaptability and perseverance. These capacities, in great demand in the midst of processes of colonisation and globalisation, are now being summoned through the global resilience discourse. Rotarangi and Russell (2009, p. 209; see also Brown, 2016) go so far as to claim that ‘to be indigenous is to be resilient’.

Indeed, in addition to the realm of politics, the idea(l) of indigenous peoples as adaptive prevails in contemporary social scientific and ecological research on global changes (e.g. Coombes et al., 2012; Galloway-McLean, Ramos-Castillo, & Castellanos, 2017; Hovelsrud & Smit, 2010). Local knowledge and community adaptation have been hailed as solutions to the various challenges and situations that indigenous peoples face. The ability indigenous peoples have to accommodate themselves to changing conditions has been considered a collective and cultural strength that they can harness in addressing challenges (Thomas, Mitchell, & Arseneau, 2016). The peoples’ resilience is taken for granted and considered an engine for change.

The peoples’ proven track record of perseverance is the source of the global political expectation regarding the resilience of indigeneity. For indigenous peoples, adapting has historically meant adjusting to extremes of the natural environment. Even more significantly, adapting has been tantamount to adjusting to the social, cultural, political and geographical conditions laid down by the prevailing order. Assumptions of indigenous peoples’ flexibility and their need to adjust have always been inscribed in Western political, legal and economic systems (Merlan, 2018; Simpson, 2014; Veracini, 2010). In the era of brutal colonial interventions – when indigenous bodies and minds were subjected to various measures of modification – the ‘options’ offered were managing to adapt to the dictates of the imposed order or ceasing to exist (Coulthard, 2014; Sylvester, 2006; Veracini, 2015; Watson, 2015). Adapting in order to survive meant constant cultural and social accommodations. Being adaptive and flexible might have enhanced a people’s chances of survival but never carried any guarantee of equality or rights.

After the 1960s, and with the upsurge of civil rights, decolonisation movements as well as minority and indigenous rights, the requirement of adaptation was reframed (e.g. Anaya, 2004; Morgan, 2011). In a relatively short time, the previously excluded were invited to join the political institutions, societal structures and legal frameworks created by the colonisers. There was a promise of multiculturalism, political partnership and cultural revival in the air. Survival, in its corporeal sense, was no longer at stake. Instead, what the peoples now had to adapt to was an alien political, legal and social rule in order to start claiming their rights and recognition. However, as many contemporary scholars in critical indigenous studies (e.g. Altamirano-Jiménez, 2013; Corntassel, 2008; Hale, 2002) have noted, requiring indigenous peoples to adapt to the prevalent order and its legal and political structures has in fact acted as a mechanism of exclusion and othering.

Although critical postcolonial studies have revealed the various manifestations of present-day colonialism, the ways in which the growing political attention to resilient indigeneity contributes to this has attracted very little, if any, attention. Previous studies have pointed out the ways in which historical practices of ordering indigeneity are present in political and legal practices today. The research has discussed the colonial under-currents in heartening processes of recognition, reconciliation and consensus-driven politics. Scholars have exposed the fundamental biases in institutional, political and legal mechanisms of inclusion and recognition (e.g. Balaton-Chrimes & Stead, 2017; Birrell, 2016; Corntassel, 2008; Lightfoot, 2015), criticised the social policies of settler states (e.g. Povinelli, 2011; Strakosch, 2015; Sutton, 2009) and questioned the foundations of the rule of colonial states (e.g. Alfred, 2005; Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2017). While this literature has pointed out how colonialism continues to operate, it has not explored the links that the ethos of resilience, with the expectations it places on indigeneity, has to colonial mentalities.

In a sharp contrast, the discussion on indigenous peoples’ resilience, along with international political programmes and initiatives, is viewed as something that resonates with the (alleged) life-worlds of the peoples and takes their knowledge into account. The attention of international politics to the resilience of indigenous peoples has been received in positive terms. The celebration of adaptive indigeneity and traditional knowledge, which culminate in resilience, appears as a symbolic and moral recognition of the particular capacities and histories of the peoples. Through resilience, global politics seems to give its blessing to the peoples to live and adapt on their own terms. It is as if the relations between indigenous peoples and states, their former colonisers, have found new, common ground for cooperation and addressing shared concerns. This stands in stark contrast to the past, when their resources or knowledge were not valued. It is precisely for this reason that the contemporary discussion surrounding indigenous resilience seems progressive and beneficial for the peoples and has thus avoided critical gaze. As we argue, the most compelling observation regarding the assumption that indigeneity is resilient is how this supposition smacks of the long history that has always demanded adaptation from the peoples.

The future in the present – resilience as a promise of its time

It is time to move from risk to resilience (Ban Ki-moon, 2015b)

In a world of unpredictability and uncertainty, resilience holds out a promise of a life worth living within the doom and gloom of the unknown. By being resilient, it is purported, individuals and communities, indigenous included, can avoid the worst-case scenarios of the changing world and be prepared for the inevitable hardships foreseen for tomorrow. Drawing on recently published work on social resilience, Keck and Sakdapolrak (2013) even envision resilience as entailing a potential to effect change. The UN Climate Resilience Initiative (A2R Initiative, 2015) goes so far as to suggest that prosperity will be a reward for successful endurance and resilience. The brochure promoting the initiative presents the goals of building global resilience, one of which, titled ‘Global Resilience Partnership: Prepare. Persist. Thrive’, describes the positive outcomes of ultimately achieving resilience:

The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) aims to identify and scale locally driven, high-impact, innovative solutions that will build the resilience of hundreds of millions of people in the Sahel, Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, supporting them to prepare for shock, persist through chronic stress and thrive in a more secure future. From coastal storms to pandemics to civil conflict, shocks and stresses are increasing in frequency and magnitude, with the international community often powerless to break the cycle of disaster, recovery – repeat. (A2R Brochure, 2017, p. 10, emphasis added)

Resilience entails the promise that by enduring and overcoming the obstacles one is confronted with one will only become stronger and more capable, an application of the classic idea of ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger’. This promise is targeted at those who have lacked rights, privileges and access; indigenous peoples being one such group. Being resilient is narrated as increasing the freedom, opportunities and self-determination of individuals and communities – the power to decide on one’s own destiny. Notably, the quest for resilience and the account of its promises, as illustrated by the excerpt above, is geographically very selective. It singles out the edges of the world and the populations there as targets of ‘innovative solutions’ in building resilience. In order for these groups to achieve prosperity – to thrive – they must be resilient, for the global community at large is ‘powerless’.

In the midst of the changing environment, the praise for local self-sufficiency and transformative agency projects an image of the peoples regaining the control that was once arrogated to others. Already in 2004, the Arctic Human Development Report complimented how ‘the resistance and resilience of Arctic cultures and societies are as impressive as the changes they have so far managed to successfully negotiate’ (Arctic Human Development Report, 2004, p. 45). In a growing trend, the Arctic Resilience Report (2016, p. xvi) emphasises the need and possibility for the ‘the people of the Arctic… to find their own solutions’. In a similar way, the UN A2R initiative (2015) brings to light the selective gaze of the search for resilience, despite its claim to be about ‘all of us’. The need for resilience and the requirement to endure is only valid for some people. This has also been noted by Evans and Reid (2014), who point out that the requirement of being resilient tends to apply only to those already in disadvantaged positions. In fact, encouraging resilience can make the existing social and societal divisions even starker. As Siegmann (2010) demonstrates in her analysis of international labour migration and gender, striving for economic wealth and stability in developing countries through resilience leads to worse conditions for certain social groups and individuals within the disadvantaged population itself.

The interests of global politics and its efforts to ‘develop’ those who ‘lag behind’ have shifted from trying to balance the world to responsibilising subjects, insisting that the only recourse they have is themselves. Resilience, along with other much-criticised ways of governing subjects (e.g. Agrawal, 2005; Dean, 1999; Li, 2007; Pupavac, 2005), transfers the responsibility of providing security away from the states, global community and the well-off developed world to the subjects themselves – to individuals and a variety of social groups in poor, under developed and remote corners of the globe. While this might appear empowering, it is a move away from social equality as a political goal. The quest for resilience functions as vehicle for the political reluctance to offer a type of global and local security that might previously have been, at least rhetorically, pursued (e.g. Chandler & Reid, 2016; Evans & Reid, 2014; Grove, 2018; Joseph, 2013; Welsh, 2014). Invoking indigenous resilience fits in smoothly with the political agendas emphasising self-help and individuals’ and communities’ inner resources. Viewed through the lens of resilience, what global development offers indigenous peoples is encouragement to build up and to rely and draw on their capacities to persist. Notably, the ‘option’ of enduring has already figured prominently in the lived realities of the peoples, whereby the promise of thriving through resilience seems questionable.

Indeed, the message propagated to subjects in urging resilience is that, in order to be saved, one needs to build up one’s resourcefulness and responsiveness and that this has to be done despite one’s vulnerability. In its insistence on the capacities and potential of the subject, the global political promise of resilience is very neoliberal. In line with the neoliberal rationality, the expectation is that a subject is able to enhance its economic, social and political potential by working hard on itself (Brown, 2015; Dean, 1999; Larner, 2005; Larner & Walters, 2004; Lemke, 2012). In a similar trend, the failures and successes of subjects in performing resilience and adaptation are measured and calculated. The Arctic Resilience Report (2016) exemplifies such a politically driven metrics that evaluates not only when and how adaptation has been successful but also when it goes ‘wrong’. The report talks about maladaptation as a result of individuals and communities failing to properly accommodate themselves to change. The assessment of (mal)adaptation puts the neoliberal rationality into practice: the decisive criterion is who has worked hard enough on oneself in order to adjust and who has failed to meet these entrepreneurial standards.

Where indigenous peoples are concerned, the political rhetorical move from victimhood to resourcefulness is a significant one. The assumption of resilient indigeneity has replaced references to victimhood with a vocabulary of adaptation and flexibility. The term ‘victim’ is either not used or, when used, is played down. The acknowledgement of indigenous peoples as being vulnerable is always coupled with their being capable of coping and responding. The underlying message is that the victims of the past are today’s active agents – recognised as vulnerable yet assumed to possess an enormous capability for survival. It is as if the marginalised and colonised indigenous peoples have morphed, without any intervention, into supremely resilient subjects solely by dint of their indigeneity.

Schott (2013, pp. 213–214) notes how the resilience discourse builds up a setting where ‘there is no unfinished business from the past or that such business puts no claims on the present’. Despite its injury, the resilient subject is assumed to ‘move on’. The call for resilience not only ignores the subject’s injuries but also fails to take into account the depth and degree of pain they entail. Resilience suggests that indigenous subjects should just forget and march on – as adaptive subjects do – as if the injury had never happened or no longer mattered. For indigenous peoples, the current setting requiring resilience of them is problematic precisely because it denies that the wounds of the colonial past might be felt in, and thus have a bearing on, the indigenous present. The colonial traumas of indigenous peoples – centuries-long marginalisation and physical abuse, to cite a few – are lumped together with the other injuries of all those whom the resilience rhetoric is now urging to just ‘get over it’. The promise of resilience – as it is all about the future – not only assumes that one will overlook the past but also purports that those victimised by history will transform their own conditions. Where this succeeds, the perseverance of the peoples will finally be rewarded: they will not only survive but thrive.

The stranglehold of endurance

[D]evelopment for post-colonial poor now consists not in achieving First World standards of urban affluence but in surviving – preferably on the land instead of slums – the after-effects of industrial modernization… (Walker & Cooper, 2011, p. 155)

As Walker and Cooper (2011) critically point out, although resilience promises subjects a proactive role in which they will thrive, in reality it leaves them little room for manoeuvre. In particular, those subjects that are already on the margins are to be concerned for their inner resources in order to cope in and with the world, not to entertain visions that the conditions around them might change. The insistence on resilience redirects any concern with the world towards the subject itself; what the resilient subject can strive to change is him-/herself. Accordingly, this adaptive subject is neither expected nor assumed to have the wherewithal to go any further than to face the challenges at hand. The paradox of the future-oriented promise of resilience is that despite the prosperity it proffers being resilient affords no opportunities to initiate economic, social, political and legal change; the only action that resilience enables is reaction. The underlying rationality of promoting resilience celebrates the capacities of the marginalised ‘to stick it out’ rather than to call for change (Hage, 2009, p. 97).

For indigenous peoples, there is nothing new in this promise that ‘waiting it out’ seems to entail. The ruling political and legal setting has reassured the peoples time and again that if they only persist and endure, things will improve (e.g. Miyazaki, 2004; Sutton, 2009). The resilience of indigenous peoples might enable them to persevere in the future, as they have in the past, but it will not make it possible for them to challenge or change the conditions of inequality embedded in this setting (Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2018). In sum, the political hype over resilient indigeneity presages a future where indigenous peoples can exist, be recognised and even be valued as subjects of a certain kind but may never gain equal rights or wealth. As Hage (2009) points out, for some, ‘not going anywhere’ has become a permanent state of existence, one deemed to be an organic part of the life inscribed in certain subjectivities.

Although one can find evidence of people experiencing various forms of stuckedness at all times and in all places, … the social and historical conditions of permanent crisis we live in have led to a proliferation and intensification of this sense of stuckedness. What’s more, there is an increasing sense that stuckedness has been normalized. Rather than being perceived as something one needs to get out of at any cost, it is now also experienced, ambivalently, as an inevitable pathological state which has to be endured. (Hage, 2009, p. 97)

In our view, the word ‘stuckedness’ can be used to describe the ways in which politics deals with indigenous peoples. The peoples have and are still going through an ultimate ‘endurance test’ of history, where the alleged reward keeps escaping them. Their struggles and suffering never seem to be valid in their time. On the contrary, they are called upon to focus on the future while their present suffering, as Povinelli (2011, p. 24) has put it, is always treated as something that ‘should be bracketed’. Embedded in the assumption of indigenous peoples being resilient is the very same understanding of the past and the present as not holding any weight. Proffering resilience as a solution or way forward is a promise anchored firmly in the future.

For indigenous peoples, the suffocating force of resilience is thus entangled with temporality. The hype over resilient indigeneity orders time for the peoples by defining the future horizon of the present time (when the ‘brackets’ will be removed) and whom this future is for (the self-reliant flexible and continuously improvable subject). Within the framework of resilience thinking, those with the means to endure and persevere must do so as long as the situation warrants. In policy initiatives, development programmes and global rhetoric, indigenous peoples are depicted as subjects endowed with such capacities. The underlying assumption is that the peoples can stand the test of time. Their present existence bears witness to their superior tenacity: after all, they have survived a violent past. The peoples’ past and continuous perseverance has enabled their survival but not without cost or sacrifice. As researchers have pointed out, the peoples have lost their distinctive systems of governance (e.g. Kuokkanen, 2011), their self-determination in defining their own community (e.g. Green, 2007) and their sovereignty (e.g. Merlan, 2018). Languages, livelihoods and intergenerational knowledge have been lost in whole or in part due to forced removals, social stigmas, confiscation of lands, legal sanctions and racism (e.g. Wolfe, 2006, 2016). Since the realisation of the demands of the peoples has been endlessly postponed, the remaining peoples and cultures, many withering away, might not survive being ‘on hold’ for much longer. In this light, it is highly contradictory to continue to assume that indigenous peoples will remain resilient and to place them in a position where they must wait for the realisation of the future promised them.

The ‘salvation’ that the contemporary ethos of resilience promises is particularly problematic in the context of indigeneity as it implies that the peoples, with their knowledge, would leave their dispossessed position behind and eventually thrive. With this promise of salvation the call for resilience joins the previous narratives of the postcolonial era, which have implied that the past and present suffering of the peoples will be their redemption in the future (Povinelli, 2011, p. 99). This promise locks indigeneity in a position where the envisioned endpoint or reward keeps eluding the peoples no matter how skillfully they keep adapting and adjusting (Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2018). As the peoples remain at the mercy of their conditions, always vigilant and on alert, ‘salvation’ turns out to be no more than the requirement that they continue to persevere.

Resilient colonialism

[I]t is enduring, it has its own structure and logic and refusal as well, operating like a grammar and posture that sits through time. It is a politics deeply cognizant of its own production, of the never-ending nature of inequality and the need to stay the course. (Simpson, 2016, p. 329)

These are the words Simpson uses to describe the operation of settler colonialism. The Western world has strived to convince us – often quite successfully – that its colonial past is indeed past, and that colonialist acts were events that had a discernible beginning and end. The upshot of these efforts is that colonialism has never been addressed as the pervasive practice or structural continuum of violence and discrimination that it is. Critical scholars engaged in native studies have pointed out how grasping the logic of contemporary colonialism, and the ways in which it is allowed and enabled to continue, requires one to move beyond its discrete episodes and easy ‘fixes’ to its structural and processual foundations (e.g. Alfred, 2005; Simpson, 2017; Veracini, 2015).

International politics has addressed its colonial past through institutional reforms, political partnerships and legal declarations. While these institutionally oriented approaches have given the indigenous peoples political access, the measures taken have been criticised as largely superficial efforts that have failed to change the political dynamics to any meaningful extent (Alfred, 2005; Corntassel, 2008). Indigenous peoples’ acknowledged position in Arctic politics, the establishment of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples are examples of such political ‘fixes’ through which the aim has been to relegate colonialism to the past. Far less attention has been paid to the content and messages that are propagated through these institutions and political structures. As we have argued throughout the article, we see the invocation of resilient indigeneity as an organic part of recent political processes that seem benevolent yet are deeply biased and bear great resemblance to colonial mentalities. Tellingly, despite all the institutional reforms, the assumption that indigeneity is adaptive and enduring persists, the logic being that the peoples have always adapted, are still adapting and will do so in the future.

As Veracini has pointed out, even though the historical forms of colonialism were explicitly and brutally violent, they were also easier to spot. The less explicit and less visible appearances of colonialism ‘have proven the most widespread and resilient’ (Veracini, 2015, p. 17). The assumption of resilient indigeneity is among these less visible conduits for colonialism because it nurtures and celebrates indigeneity as exceptionally adaptive and malleable. Indeed, what makes the global quest for resilient indigeneity seem benevolent is that the peoples’ resilience appears as an indisputable and neutral fact, as something that is always already there. It is as if, through resilience, the politics at work only wanted to strengthen the traditional practices of the peoples, support them and empower them to utilise their capacities. It seems like the expectation and assumption of resilience has lifted indigeneity – previously ignored, despised or violated – from the lowest rung in the political, social and cultural hierarchy. The politics that once deemed indigeneity unwanted and/or in need of modification, now salutes this subjectivity as a sought-after exemplar of perseverance.

One under-current of colonial power relations has been that change (for the better) might be on the horizon but will not take place for a while, if at all. Compared to other strategies of adaptation over time, resilience appears more acceptable and free from the burdens of history. At its best, resilience bears with it the promise of something better, thriving rather than mere survival. This being the case, the political quest for resilience produces a future envisaged as benevolent, attainable and desirable for everyone. In the case of indigenous resilience, while invoking it creates an expectation of a better future, it does not guarantee that the circumstances that have compelled one to cope, persist and adapt in the first place will be changed or stabilised. This is because calls for resilience and the associated requirements spring from existing global and colonial inequalities.

Studies on contemporary colonialism talk about ‘smokescreens’, techniques allowing unequal social, political and legal structures to continue and grow stronger. In a similar observation, Simpson (2017, p. 22) has pointed out that present-day colonialism narrates time as if it has been the same for everyone in the past and as if it carries the same meaning universally. However, as Simpson remarks, for indigenous peoples time is of the essence; it holds the power ‘to define what matters, who matters, what pasts are alive and when they die’ (Simpson, 2017, p. 22). The power of invoking resilience lies in its seizing of the future horizon. Through resilience, it is determined which lives and ways of being prevail, that is, who and what is of value, and when. In our view, resilience is the smokescreen of choice today: it obscures our perception of the past – and the present – by insisting that we should focus on a (rewarding) future. However, once again, the commitment to adaptability and resourcefulness that resilience insists on contributes to a configuration where indigeneity is not in a position to decide whether or not to adapt or to set the pace or the terms of this adaptation. Also making the contemporary call for resilience particularly powerful is its ability to portray persistence now and in the future as the only available option.

Investigating the expectation of resilient indigeneity affords us insights into the sources of contemporary ‘grammars’ of colonial power relations and the ways in which historical practices of othering indigeneity continue to this day. Historically, the indigenous peoples in particular were given to understand that there would be at least some level of compensation for their being subjected to foreign rule. In a similar way, through resilience, the peoples are once again asked to wait for change to work to their benefit even though it has been acknowledged that security can no longer be achieved. In effect, when resilience furnishes politics with an excuse to withdraw from its responsibility to provide security and social equality, the promise that resilience holds is no more than a call for more endurance. Indeed, the global call for resilience reveals how the requirement to adapt continues to apply unabated to indigeneity. The quest for indigenous perseverance lays bare the processual nature – and tenacity – of colonialism. Making indigeneity the particular target of the political call for resilience, rather than making a break with colonialism, in fact fuels and invigorates it.

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Notes on contributors

Marjo Lindroth

Marjo Lindroth is a Researcher in the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, Finland. She studies the ways in which indigeneity is governed in international politics. Her current research project, Indigeneity in Waiting: Elusive Rights and the Power of Hope (2016-2020), critically examines the political aspects of hope. Lindroth’s recent book, Global Politics and Its Violent Care for Indigeneity: Sequels to Colonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), co-authored with Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, analyses and illustrates how the inclusion and recognition of indigeneity in global politics constitute a continuation of colonial practices.

Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen

Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen is a Researcher in Gender Studies at the University of Lapland, Finland. Her research interests combine questions of development, power, gender and indigeneity from a critical perspective. Her ongoing research project, Indigeneity in Waiting: Elusive Rights and the Power of Hope (2016-2020), studies the complex ways in which indigeneity is managed in international politics. Sinevaara-Niskanen’s recent book, Global Politics and Its Violent Care for Indigeneity: Sequels to Colonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), co-authored with Marjo Lindroth, analyses and illustrates how the inclusion and recognition of indigeneity in global politics constitute a continuation of colonial practices.