“We the resilient”: colonizing indigeneity in the era of trump

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the functions of resilience in the political struggles of indigenous peoples against colonialism. In particular it analyses the discourse of indigenous resilience, which has grown in the United States, following the election of Donald Trump as President. It looks at how indigenous resistance to Trump has been constructed as a feature of their ‘resilience’, tracing the sources of that discourse, revealing its dubious origins, which while involving the mobilizations of indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, owe to a complex range of different interests, involving profit-seeking corporations, artists, colonial knowledge, and neoliberal ideologues. The paper compares the development of the discourse of indigenous resilience in the US with that which is growing in the Arctic. Calling into question the rationalities shaping the discourse in both regions, the paper argues for a rejection of the concept on account of its implicit racism and compliancy with neoliberal colonialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• indigeneity
• neoliberalism
• trump
• colonialism

Introduction

Resilience is advancing throughout the world as a major new framework for the legitimization and further extension of neoliberal governance and its advance threatens the poor and the vulnerable with new reasons to fear for their futures (Chandler & Reid, 2016; Evans & Reid, 2014; Reid, 2013, 2012). Resilience, however, is also deployed as a tool for strategies of resistance to power by groups considered to be among the most vulnerable. This article addresses the functions of resilience in the political struggles of indigenous peoples against colonialism. In particular it is interested in the discourse of indigenous resilience, which has grown in the United States, following the election of Donald Trump as President. It looks at how indigenous resistance to Trump has been constructed as a feature of their ‘resilience’, tracing the sources of that discourse, revealing some of its dubious origins, which while involving the performative mobilizations of indigenous peoples at Standing Rock in protest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, owe to a complex range of different interests, involving profit-seeking corporations, artists, colonial knowledge, and neoliberal ideologues. The paper compares the development of the discourse of indigenous resilience in the United States with that which is growing in the author’s own region, of Finnish Lapland and the wider Arctic Circle. Calling into question the rationalities shaping the discourse in both regions, the article argues for much greater circumspection concerning claims as to the resilience of indigenous peoples, and even outright rejection of the concept on account of its implicit racism and compliancy with neoliberal colonialism.

Recent trends in resilience research have sought to emphasize the relationality of resilience to resistance (Bourbeau & Ryan, 2018). The argument goes that it is wrong to see resilience and resistance as existing in binary opposition, and that resilience is the form which resistance takes when stronger forms of contestation of power are impossible. In this vein resilience is constructed as ‘a weapon of the weak’, echoing the studies of the ‘everyday’ forms which resistance takes, by James Scott (Scott, 1990). Of course there are circumstances where, for good strategic reasons, it makes more sense for a given subject to be resilient and try simply to survive rather than extinguish the sources of its oppression or transform the social and political conditions which hold it back. Is this the case however with respect to ‘indigenous resilience’? As we will see, the discourse of indigenous resilience owes to the inputs of various forces which have little or no interest in the real empowerment of indigenous peoples and are in some cases seeking simply to exploit and disempower indigenous peoples at the same time as commodify and profit from the image of their ‘resilience’.

‘We the resilient’

Following Donald Trump’s racist and xenophobic electoral campaign, and in the wake of his election to become 45^th President of the United States, in November of 2016, the artist Ernesto Yerena Montejano teamed up with fellow artists Jessica Sabogal and Shepard Fairey, and the non-profit Amplifier Foundation, a self-described ‘art machine for social change’ to produce works for the Foundation’s We the People campaign. The campaign’s objective was, as described to its Kickstarter funders, to flood Washington D.C. with symbols of hope on January 20^th of 2017, the date of Trump’s inauguration. And indeed, pictures and video footage of the marches and demonstrations that took place that day, in Washington D.C., as well as throughout much of the United States, indicate the efficacy of the campaign. Looking at those pictures we see people marching in their numbers carrying the images created by Fairey, one of an African-American woman, another of a Muslim woman, and one of a Latino woman, each titled, ‘We the People’. We also see Sabogal’s image being displayed, depicting two women, looking at each other tenderly, one above the other, whose neck she cradles, and whose hat reads ‘Women are perfect’. The image itself is titled underneath, ‘We the Indivisible’. Yerena’s contribution was a stenciled image, featuring Lakota elder Helen ‘Granny’ Redfeather, a frontline warrior fighting against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, where Yerena himself also spent time in the November of Trump’s election. Yerena’s work situates the Lakota elder underneath its title ‘We the Resilient: Have Been Here Before’. Giving background to his work, reasons for making it, and thinking behind it, Yerena explains:

‘“My relationship with the U.S. is very complicated…I was born here, I live here, but the government is like an occupying force on this land. The colonization process was so violent. It outlawed people from being able to practice Indigenous traditions and languages. How, through all that, have people been able to survive? Considering how hostile the attempted erasure was toward everything to do with our people, Indigenous people, it’s incredible. That’s resilience.” (Gürsöz, 2017)

The image Yerena created soon became ubiquitous, a symbol of hope and defiance for peoples protesting the xenophobia and white supremacist racism which Trump’s election represents. On January 21 Yerena could be seen distributing 4000 of his ‘We are Resilient’ posters within 15 minutes at the Women’s March in Los Angeles. Yerena himself was born in California, close to the Mexican border, and identifies as a ‘straight cis-gender Mexican-American Chicano male’ (Ibid). Although identifying as Chicano, he also strongly identifies as native/indigenous (Ibid). As such his work is dedicated to exposing ‘the weight of colonization and the effects of Westernization of Indigenous cultures’ (Ibid). ‘Trump is the Chernobyl of colonialism’, he explains, ‘but I don’t want to make artwork that’s against him; it gets too dark. I want to make artwork that’s for something. I’m for dignity. I’m for resilience. I’m for Mother Earth. I’m for honoring elders. I’m for working with my friends. I’m for making positive messages’ (Ibid).

Yerena’s positive message can be seen to have already spread. Inspired by the image and Yerena’s message, Sarah Bunin Benor, an Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at the Hebrew Union College Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, set to work on a book, now already published, titled We the Resilient: Wisdom for America from Women Born Before Suffrage (Benor and Fields-Mayer, 2017). The book began life as a website set up in October of 2016, designed to give voice to hopeful women voters who had been born in the years preceding the ratification of the 19^th amendment in 1920, and who were, in the lead up to the election of November 2016, not only able to cast a vote in ways that women not long ago were denied, but vote for what could have been the first female president of the United States, Hillary Clinton (Benor & Fields-Meyer, 2017, p. 2–3). The book, We the Resilient, features interviews with fifty-five of the women who appeared on the website, and who respond to Benor’s questions. Questions that included: when in your life have you experienced personal disappointment, tragedy or unexpected loss? How were you able to overcome those setbacks? Though coming from various different backgrounds, the women tell of similar experiences of disappointment, tragedy, and loss, such as losing parents, spouses, siblings and children, and contemplate how it was they were able to bounce back from such difficult experiences (Ibid).

Resilience is something that has interested me for some time. Within the health sciences it is identified as ‘a trait that enables an individual to recover from stress and to face the next stressor with optimism. People with resilient traits are considered to have a better mental and physical health’ (Van Schrojenstein Lantman, Mackus, & Otten et al., 2017). The analysis of resilience invariably involves examining how people cope with disappointment, tragedy and loss. What divides the resilient self who bounces back from life tragedies and hurtful loss from the failed selves who never recover? Where does resilience come from? What are its sources? Who has it and why? How to build resilience where it is lacking? These are the kinds of questions that health practitioners of resilience routinely ask. But its growth and influence as a concept within the health sciences can be traced in correspondence to its growth and development in a range of other fields, including the social sciences concerned with the attributes of human groups, as well as the non-human sciences concerned with understanding the characteristics of non-human living systems. Across these various different fields, transcending the boundaries of human versus life science, resilience is defined as the capacity of any living system, including human systems, both individual and social, to absorb and adapt to the shocks generated by disastrous events, and respond to them by either maintaining or changing form, evolving with them, and potentially growing stronger from their occurrence.

The word resilience has of course been around for a very long time. It comes from the Latin word resiliens, which derives from the verb resilire – to rebound or to recoil – and its usage can be traced to the 17^th century and descriptions in physics of the property of materials which can return to their original shape after suffering deformation. Its contemporary use developed largely, however, in the field of ecology during the 1970s and early 1980s to describe the capacities of non-human living systems, such as plant communities, to not just recover but evolve in exposure to disasters. Gradually it mutated into social and human sciences as a way to understand the abilities of human beings to absorb shocks and withstand disasters of multiple kinds. In the era of Sustainable Development it became a capacity identified especially with the Global Poor, given their excessive exposure to events and shocks of a disastrous nature (Reid, 2012). And in more recent years it has become a capacity especially attributed to indigenous peoples (Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2016). This is evidenced not just by Ernesto Yerena’s aesthetic expression of indigenous resilience in the posters wielded by protestors opposed to Trump, but also by a now large social scientific literature on indigenous resilience. For it is a fact that indigenous peoples are perceived by western social scientists to be particularly exemplary when it comes to resilience (Reid, 2018).

I live in the state of Finland, in the Nordic region of Europe, and I live in the northernmost region of Finland, called Lapland, a region that spreads across the borders of the state into other neighboring states of Sweden, Norway and Russia. ‘Lapp’ is a term of derision used for centuries to designate people who live, not simply in Lapland, but who live by so-considered Lappish economic activities – fishing and hunting and later, reindeer herding (Lehtola, 2004). To be Lappish, historically, was not simply to inhabit a particular place, or hail from that place, but to belong to the periphery, and to be uncivilized, on account of a supposed failure to have developed agricultural methods. If I travel a few kilometers north of the city in Lapland where I live, called Rovaniemi, I enter into the Arctic Circle. The Arctic designates the polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth, consisting of the Arctic Ocean, its adjacent seas, and parts of Alaska, Northern Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden. It is a unique place among Earth’s ecosystems, not least because of its extreme cold climates, manifesting varying degrees of snow and ice cover throughout the year. There continues to be intense interest among scientists of varying kinds in how it is that indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic adapted to its cold and extreme conditions. Today that interest also extends to the question of how those same peoples might adapt to the changing conditions of the Arctic forced by climate change and global warming. The Arctic is of course not a state, but a region encompassing different states, and the question of how it might be governed to deal with these changes, and of who takes responsibility for the threats those changes pose to the lives of the indigenous groups who live there is a vexed one. As it happens the Arctic is governed, to some extent, by a body known as the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that has existed since the 1990s.

November of 2016 was not just the month of Trump’s election, an event of some relevance to the futures of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, but also the month of the publication of the Arctic Resilience Report. The report is the final product of the Arctic Resilience Assessment, a project launched by the Arctic Council, and preceded by the Arctic Resilience Interim Report of 2013. The report is written in response to the large and rapid changes said to be occurring in the Arctic; the environmental, ecological and social changes, caused largely by processes occurring outside of the Arctic itself, especially climate change, but also migration, resource extraction and other human activities, and which are said to threaten large impacts on the Arctic and communities living there, including notably indigenous peoples, whose livelihoods look set to disappear and whose places of abode will become uninhabitable, as these changes occur (Arctic Council, 2016, p. x). Indeed these euphemistically described ‘changes’ represent no less than a catastrophe for many indigenous groups, given the scales of the devastating losses they are faced with.¹

The report describes the gravity of these changes occurring in the Arctic, the extent of the threats they pose to the futures of indigenous peoples living there, while also lauding the abilities of those same peoples to cope with these ‘challenges’. This is why it is called the Arctic Resilience Report. It is a report on the abilities of the peoples of the Arctic to absorb the shocks generated by climate change, to cope and recover, and adapt to the losses they will suffer, the traumas, and the tragedies of climate change.

Indeed policy makers not just in the Arctic, but the world over, concerned as they currently are with attempting to formulate policies to help people cope with the coming era of disasters portended by climate change, are attracted to indigenous peoples on account of their perceived abilities to live in a state of permanent crisis. Within the Academy, anthropologists are currently being mobilized to provide ethnographic studies of the practices and forms of knowledge that enable indigenous peoples to do so. For example the Oxford-based anthropologist, Laura Rival, has detailed the ways in which the Makushi, an indigenous people living in the borderlands of northern Brazil and southern Guyana, live with severe drought and flooding as normal conditions of life (Rival, 2009). This is a people as well adapted to a world of floods as much as it is to extreme drought, Rival argues, and able to cope with whatever the climate throws at them (Ibid). As such she holds them up as a model for the rest of humanity, faced as it is with a coming era of climate disasters and global ecological catastrophe. Anthropology and other sciences concerned with the study of indigenous peoples, including Indigenous Studies itself, are by now saturated with similar claims concerning the resilience of indigenous peoples. Often these claims are made in the name not simply of recommendations to policy but of indigenous critique, lauding the resilience of indigenous peoples to endure over time, in spite of the hostilities of the world, both climactic and political (Blaser, Feit, McRae, 2004; Da Silva, 2007; Fast & Collin-Vézina, 2010; Hill, 2012; Thomas, Mitchell, Aresenau, 2015). Indeed, the concept of resilience is often chosen for use by authors attempting to represent indigenous perspectives against the hostilities of the non-indigenous world. Mario Blaser, for example, identifies resilience as a ‘very appropriate’ concept for describing the politics of life projects of indigenous peoples (Blaser, 2004, p. 39).

Anthropology has, from its origins, ‘existed in a state of complex symbiotic dependency on government, in so far as anthropologists have been materially and practically dependent on state support to fund research, and the direction anthropological work has taken in any particular period has been influenced by state needs for certain kinds of information with which to govern its indigenous populace (Hinkson, 2010, p. 5). This is as true today in the context of the mobilization of anthropologists to produce knowledge about indigenous resilience. The arguments and conclusions of academic anthropologists are mirrored in policy reports such as that published by UNESCO, titled Weathering Uncertainty, and which likewise describes how indigenous peoples, on account of their high-exposure sensitivity to extreme weather events, are thought to be especially resilient to climate change (Nakashima et al, 2012). The indigenous are of interest and value to policy-makers because they have a proven track record of what the report describes as ‘resourcefulness and response capacity in the face of global climate change’ (Ibid).

The Arctic Resilience Report of 2016, following in the wake of a now burgeoning academic and policy-making literature, likewise extols the virtues and capacities of indigenous peoples, specifically those living in the Arctic. On the one hand it laments their extreme exposure to the effects of climate change, the loss of livelihoods and habitats which are sure to be caused by climate change, while on the other hand it celebrates the ‘resilience’ of these same peoples; a resilience which of course arises from the very exposure and vulnerability it otherwise laments. Sensitivity to change and crisis is seen to be the key component of the life-worlds of indigenous peoples of the Arctic, such as the Eurasian Sámi, who inhabit Arctic Finland, Russia, Sweden, and Norway, and the resilience of the Sámi is said to be ‘a living testimony of the strength of these societies and the autonomous capacities of their subsistence economies’ (Arctic Council, 2016, p. 32).

In one sense the attraction to and focus on the knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples represents a reversal of the long history of colonial denigration of indigenous knowledge and practices. Historically, colonial powers disparaged indigenous peoples for precisely the same reasons they now seem to revere them. In earlier phases of modernity the indigenous were seen as degenerate on account of their having too little a sense of their own exceptionality from nature, and too much in common with other non-human species. Colonial practices revolved around containing the indigenous, and preventing their contact with ‘higher cultures’ in order to secure the human from its feralization (Valayden, 2016). Today the reverse would seem to be true, but neither the discourse nor practices are any less racialized. The indigenous have in effect shifted, from being a figure that imbues white humanity with a fear at its potential to ‘slip back into and blend with nature’ (Valayden, 2016, p. 3), to now inciting desire, longing and admiration on account of that same purported proximity to the natural world. They are, more especially, to a new generation of anthropologists what Elizabeth Hall and Todd Sanders have described in a critically incisive analysis, as the ‘Endangered Other’, which while vulnerable to climate change, is nevertheless defined by its resilience and adaptivity (Hall & Sanders, 2015). Any number of anthropological studies of indigenous resilience and adaptability replay the same tired scripts concerning the plight and yet resilience and adaptation of indigenous peoples. ‘Indigenous peoples have gradually adapted over millennia to fill a local, ecological niche’ goes the script (Hall & Sanders, 2015, p. 442). Each indigenous people is unique in its adaptations to local geography and ecology (Furgal & Seguin, 2006). ‘Indigenous knowledge’, in each instance, is what enables the uniqueness of the adaptation in question. ‘Local culture brings a distinct mode of learning and thought, intimate relations with land and resources, and time-tested strategies of human survival’ (Kofinas, 2002, p. 60). But adaptation can only do so much. Faced with the crisis of global ecological catastrophe, the resilience of these peoples needs bolstering, and it’s up to the anthropologists in question to contribute to that.

This tired script testifies not to the end of race in its application to discourses around indigenous peoples, but to the changing nature of racialization. In a world in which threats to the security of the human species are seen to emerge from a tendency of human groups to see themselves as separate from and transcendent of nature, in ways that end up impacting on fragile environments, so indigenous peoples, in their supposed contentment with mere survival, are seen to promise a new image of perfectibility. Geneticists even argue that the indigenous are, in the biological sense, exceptionally adaptive and resilient. How else could peoples such as the Inuit of Greenland have learnt to cope with the ‘challenging environmental conditions of the Arctic?’ as one group of geneticists recently asked in the journal Science (Fumagalli et al., 2015, p. 1346).

In his celebrated lecture series, Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault demonstrated the ways in which racism emanated from the biopoliticization of power relations that accompanied the birth of modernity in Europe and beyond (Foucault, 2003). Biological thought impacted upon political practices by producing the idea of a new type of enemy and threat; one which does not simply make designs on your territory, resources or people, but which threatens the degeneration of the species as a whole on account of its genetic inferiority. Up until 1945 the idea that some racial groups could claim superiority to others and that the future of the species as a whole would be improved were inferior races to be destroyed was dominant, and applied not just by the Nazis but by liberal regimes driven by the desire to ‘make life live’ practically everywhere, both within their own social boundaries as well as externally in their colonizing missions (Dillon & Reid, 2009, pp. 48–52). The historical destruction of indigenous peoples was but one historical expression of such racism. After 1945, and the reckoning with the Holocaust amid the collapse of European empires, liberal biopolitics has taken new forms, in order to avoid the charge of favouring some races over others. However it is difficult to make life live in ways that don’t favour some life forms over others, and thus fall back into similar racist traps. When geneticists espouse the superior adaptivity and resilience of indigenous peoples, as much as when anthropologists claim to observe it in their ethnographies, or when governmental regimes celebrate it in their reports, they do so in ways that are consistent with the discourse of racial struggle which Foucault unearthed the origins of and through which certain races are entitled to define the prevailing norms on which society is organized, and in contrast with whom other racial groups are seen to deviate (Foucault, 2003, p. 61). Resilience is the calling card of the new biopolitical racism.

Back in the 17^th century, the settlers who went to war with the indigenous peoples they encountered in the United States soon learnt that to wage those wars they would have to ditch the tactics and strategies of war they had brought with them from Europe and adapt themselves to the ways of the indigenous peoples they sought to defeat. ‘The fifty seven postures provided in the approved manual of arms for loading and firing the matchlock proved too great a handicap in the chase of the nimble savage. In this era the frontier fighter adapted himself to a more open order, and lighter equipment suggested by the Indian warrior’s practice’ (Turner, 2017, p. 16). Clearly the espousal of the superior adaptability and resilience of indigenous peoples is not incompatible with strategic rationalities aimed at their annihilation or at least subjection. Nor are the desires to model the ways of the western subject on the ways of the indigenous incompatible with their designation as ‘the inimy’ or ‘savage’ or as the ‘tawny serpents’ who were then to be ‘hunted down and scalped in accord with law’ by the frontiersmen of the 17^th century (Turner, 2017, pp. 16–17).

Many are those who interpret the apparent reversal in attitudes of the West towards the indigenous as a step forwards in the decolonization of relations between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. For doesn’t it challenge the West’s teleological sense of its own superiority, debunk it even, and place the indigenous on a pedestal once reserved for the western subject of modernist tradition? (Lea, 2012, p. 196). What such enthusiasts don’t recognize is the problematic nature of the entanglement of this reversal with white western strategies of power. The ascription of resilience to indigenous people is not something being achieved simply by anthropologists working to the left of western states or other colonial institutions. It is a mantra being repeated by colonial states and deeply powerful western actors worldwide. Such that the representation of the indigenous as possessing exceptional capacities to care for their natural environments, to adapt to climate change, and deal with extreme weather events has become a governing cliché of white western neoliberal governance.

It is a powerful and dangerous cliché. For the indigenous functions within these international discourses as an exemplar of a neoliberal subject. A subject defined by its capacities to adapt to the dangers of the world in living a life of ongoing survival and exposure to endemic disaster (Chandler & Reid, 2016; Evans & Reid, 2014). This cliché is powerful and dangerous in that it functions to discipline the indigenous themselves into performing their own resilience. What happens to indigenous peoples, both individually and collectively, when for whatever reason, they don’t show resilience? Are they somehow to be deemed less indigenous? Or are they examples of failed indigeneity? Are they less ecologically intelligent than other indigenous peoples? The answer to these questions lies in the reality that performing resilience is practically a condition of existence for being indigenous in today’s world of neoliberal governance. Knowledge around resilience, concerned as it might seem to be with promoting the rights and empowerment of indigenous peoples, is constitutive of processes for the production and disciplining of indigeneity, rather than being some deep ethnographic description. This disciplining of the indigenous, as well as the Global Poor, and every other target population of the resilience agenda, is integral to the containment strategy for dealing with surplus humanity, forcing peoples into adjusting their expectations and accepting the neoliberal imperative to be self-reliant.

There are few clearer examples of this reality than the Arctic Resilience Report. The report assesses the resilience of different indigenous peoples located in the Arctic and categorizes them in terms of their relative capacities for resilience. Some, such as the Yamal-Nenets, a reindeer herding community of Western Siberia, it regards as success stories of resilience. Others such as the reindeer herders of Teriberka, it regards as failures (Arctic Council, 2016, pp. 100–101). Successful resilience it diagnoses as arising from the abilities of peoples to ‘self-organize, experiment, learn and adapt’ and failed resilience from the absence of these abilities (Arctic Council, 2016, pp. 100–101).

Of all the case studies on which the report is based, one stands out. It is that of the Inuit of Cape Dorset, Nunavut who have, according to the report, reinvented themselves, in the face of the loss of their traditional livelihoods, as what it describes as ‘international art sensations’ (Ibid, p. 109). The artworks of Inuit living in Cape Dorset are offered for sale, largely on the Internet, by urban gallerists, often for as little as a few hundred Canadian dollars. How much of a cut the gallerists take, and how much of the fee for which their art is sold reaches the Inuit themselves, I don’t know. Inuit artists themselves describe the desperate circumstances that have forced them to turn to art as a way of making a living. ‘There are no jobs’, explains one Inuit artist, Manasie Maniapik (Rathwell & Armitage, 2016). ‘We don’t have jobs, it’s the only way to make money’ explains another, Oqituq Ashoona (Ibid). Another ‘international art sensation’, Madaline Oumauataq, explains how the making of art helps her to deal with the trauma of the ‘heavy changes’ her people, the Inuit of Cape Dorset, have gone through in the last few decades (Ibid). Therapeutically, the production of the art, often depicting the effects of climate change upon landscapes and livelihoods, enables the Inuit to cope with the devastations of the losses entailed. As importantly, it enables them to survive economically in the context of the disappearance of their traditional livelihoods. None of this suffering and desperation is conveyed in the Arctic Resilience Report’s celebration of them as ‘international art sensations’ and exemplars of ‘resilience’ and ‘transformation’. No consideration is given either to the colonial relations of exploitation which continue to mediate the abilities of these Inuit to survive, given their dependence on the commodification and sale of their art, by gallerists. Western theorists who argue that the enabling of the Inuit to make art enhances their resilience fail to recognize any of the extent to which these practices represent the wholesale neoliberalization of the communities in question, the debasement of their traditions and livelihoods, the commodification of the catastrophes they have suffered, and their subjection to western economic reason.

Resilience is advancing in the Arctic, as well as in North America, and across the world, as a major discourse for the development and implementation of neoliberal governance and subjectification. Indigenous peoples are but one target population of strategies for the making of resilient subjects. Nevertheless they are a crucial one, given the nature of the arguments being made for their exemplary status. For this reason I urge critical thinkers and practitioners concerned with indigenous politics to be more circumspect when confronting claims about the inherent resilience of indigenous peoples. For the risks in accepting such clichéd and politically loaded representations of the indigenous are vast, and ultimately complicit with colonial power and neoliberal exploitation. We know much by now about the long history of colonial violence that arose from the western desire to destroy indigenous peoples on account of their perceived inferiority. We recognize and understand much less of the violence which arises from the apparent desire to protect indigenous peoples and the ontological alterity they supposedly embody (Bessire, 2014). Yet that is a form which colonial violence now takes. From South to North, indigenous peoples have the choice to resist the violence embedded in neoliberal strategies of resilience, while the anthropologists who study them must beware being drawn into the latest ideologically driven project to govern the lives of indigenous peoples.

What then to make of the artwork of Ernesto Yerena Montejano? And what to make of the many people carrying the ‘We the Resilient’ banners on the marches and protests against Trump? Are they also to be condemned, along with the discourse and concept of resilience itself, as part of the problem of colonialism today? Is resilience a univocal concept, or does it leave itself open to different usages? I recognize the salience of critiques of the critique of resilience that have appeared in the last couple of years. I read with interest the work of colleagues such as Peter Rogers who have argued that we must avoid the cynicism of a blanket dismissal of resilience and seek to distinguish between its positive and negative aspects, and recognize instead its potential; a potential for more open and inclusive democratic political orders, as he claims (Rogers, 2015, p. 66). The geographer Ben Anderson has made similar kinds of points when asking ‘what kind of thing is resilience?’ and by imploring that we make the connections between resilience and neoliberalism, into a question to be explored rather than a presumption from which analysis begins’ (Anderson, 2015, p. 60). These are useful interventions the basis for which I think echoes throughout this problem and phenomenon of discourses on indigenous resilience. The resilience at stake in strategy documents of the Arctic Council is not simply the same as that which was enunciated on the streets of Washington D.C., Los Angeles and other American cities as indigenous peoples and their allies took to those streets to protest the election of Donald Trump. There is a difference likewise between indigenous peoples articulating themselves as ‘We the Resilient’ and an intergovernmental forum made up of the representative of colonial states, such as the Arctic Council, saying that indigenous people are resilient. For one thing, the resilience which indigenous peoples claim for themselves refers fundamentally to their having survived a centuries old project of colonial extermination, while the resilience which colonial states now identify with indigenous peoples more often refers to their abilities to cope with environmental disasters and pays little heed to their own histories of colonial violence against indigenous peoples.

Nevertheless, there is a surface of contact between these different usages of resilience, and while their points of articulation are indeed different and to some extent opposed, they are nevertheless related by the concept itself. In each case the indigenous subject which resilience refers to is defined by its capacity to survive. Is there anything problematic in that?

Ernesto Yerena Montejano, like everybody else, and every other entity with a stake in the future, has also to survive. An artist has to make a living, and art, for the most part and for the majority of artists pays badly. In Yerena’s case survival requires once in a while taking a job that entails a relative sacrifice of principle. Which is why Yerena has sold his work to the manufacturer of the energy drink, Red Bull. Some of their cans are decorated with his signature rose symbolizing dignity and a calavera (Mexican sugar skull). As he candidly explains, ‘sometimes corporations will hire me because they want to tap into the “Latino” market. I take some of the jobs because I need to keep paying rent, but it’s a fine line. What I really want is to make critical, challenging work. A lot of times I have to self-fund [these pieces] or work with a small stipend. Unfortunately, the people with the best ideas don’t have a lot of money’ (Gürsöz, 2017).

Many of us know this conflict between good intention and its sacrifice to political and economic power. Images, ideas, concepts and arguments are all open to manipulation, appropriation and commodification by agencies whose intentions and effects are malign, or simply self-interested, as is the case with profit-maximizing corporations such as Red Bull, an Austrian company with the highest market share of any energy drink in the world, selling five billion cans a year; a market share that owes in no small part to the distinctiveness and recognizability of the blue silver design of the cans in which its drink is sold and on which Yerena’s designs appear.

There is no direct connection between Yerena’s work for Red Bull and the ‘We the Resilient’ poster that he made for the campaign against Trump and in defense of indigenous rights. In effect the former served the latter. Selling to Red Bull meant Yerena could pay the rent and paying the rent meant Yerena could design for the non-profit Amplifier Foundation and its political campaign against the particular formation of white racist neoliberal capital that Trump’s presidency exists to defend. We have no reason to believe Red Bull saw any capital in hiring an artist with his politics or with his links to indigenous peoples and political struggles. As Yerena is aware and states clearly, Red Bull were interested in tapping into the Latino market and it is the resonance of his designs with Chicano culture that attracted them. But there is some sense of a connection, vague and difficult to see, but there somewhere nevertheless, in this collaboration, between Yerena and Red Bull on the one hand, and the collaborations taking place between resilience and neoliberalism on the other. Red Bull, as the most iconic energy drink of its generation, in a certain sense, epitomizes resilience culture. It is what you drink when you are struggling to cope, stay awake, or persevere amid stress, physical or psychic. If you need resilience in a liquid form you need Red Bull. It is also the drink that besides giving you resilience, gives you stereotypes. On the website, Native Appropriations, a forum for discussing representations of native peoples, including stereotypes and cultural appropriation, a commercial campaign of Red Bull beginning in 2009 is described as reading like a ‘check list of native stereotypes’ (Native Appropriations, 2010). Amid tipis, smoke signals, war whoops, and ‘tom-tom’ drumming, two natives, Brown Bear and White Dove, express in third person broken English their frustrated sexual desire for each other.

‘Greetings White Dove, my heart is heavy’, says Brown Bear. ‘Mine too, Brown Bear’, replies White Dove. ‘The end of the year is near, and we still can’t get together. Brown bear can’t jump that far!’ complains Brown Bear. ‘And White Dove can’t fly! We are only united in mind’ concludes White Dove. ‘Yes, but my body longs for you too’, confirms Brown Bear. White Dove sighs. ‘No Red Bull, no happy ending’, warns the narrator.

Yes Red Bull is not only the drink that gives you resilience. It’s the drink that gets you laid. Or it’s the drink that gives you the necessary resilience to get laid. And, which in sexualizing resilience, also sexualizes indigeneity, making a commercial stereotype out of indigenous perseverance, and stoking colonial myths.

Red Bull is responsible for mythic representations of indigenous peoples, but what about resilience itself? In March of 2017 the Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare published an article titled ‘Mental Resilience, Perceived Immune Functioning, and Health’. The article is a classic of its kind, describing resilience as the ‘trait that enables an individual to recover from stress and to face the next stressor with optimism’ (Van Schrojenstein Lantman et al., 2017, p. 107). People with resilience, it argues, ‘have a better mental and physical health’ (Ibid). People with reduced immune functioning tend to be those who are less resilient, while people with resilience tend to have better functioning immune systems, is the conclusion it draws on the basis of a large empirical study (Van Schrojenstein Lantman et al., 2017, p. 112). Like a lot of medical research the article had as many as eight authors, among who is named a Dr. Joris Verster from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In the Disclosure section of the article the authors list the sources of financial support that have funded their research. Verster, a scientific proponent of resilience, lists among the different funders he is in the patronage of, Red Bull. Which is interesting. In fact, Verster is also the author of a another study, published in 2016, in the Journal of Human Psychopharmacology, titled ‘Mixing Alcohol With Energy Drink: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’ (Verster, Benson, Johnson, Scholey, & Alford, 2016). The article addresses the popular social suspicion that people who mix energy drinks such as Red Bull with alcohol end up drinking more alcohol than they ordinarily would. Reassuringly, Verster and his colleagues conclude that their research proves that mixing energy drinks with alcohol does not increase the total amount of alcohol consumed. Which is interesting. What to make of these connections between the science of resilience, so assured in its conclusions concerning the reality of resilience as property of healthy people everywhere, and an energy drink manufacturer which funds the science of resilience, and which employs the same science to defend itself from mythic representations of the properties of the product as a source of alcoholism and ill health? A corporation, and icon of the neoliberal economy, furthermore, which sells its products on the basis of colonial representations of indigenous people, as well as by decorating its cans with the designs of an artist who, unwittingly no doubt, is himself a proponent of indigenous resilience, and the creator of what is the most iconic image of indigenous resilience, the picture of Lakota elder Helen ‘Granny’ Redfeather, carried on banners by the many people who showed up to protest the election of Donald Trump, in Washington DC and other American cities in January of 2017.

There is a lot at stake in this nexus of relations between colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, the fight against fascism, and the science of resilience, both in the forms it is attributed to indigenous peoples, as well as people everywhere struggling to recover from stress and to face the next stressor with optimism.

Resilience, I agree, is not a univocal concept, and like all concepts in fact, it is open to different usages. We should never condemn, or at least be content with condemning concepts. But wherever it is used, and however it is used, resilience is, I believe, a dangerous concept. Beneath the surface of the seeming positivity with which it has been invoked as a defining characteristic of indigenous people everywhere, fighting their dispossession by colonial powers, and struggling to persevere against the racism of colonial states, there lurks a great deal of danger and malign investments. It’s not my place in the world to tell indigenous people who they are or what they are. All I have to say to them is ‘be careful’. And when you listen to the next anthropologist, the next statesman, the next well-meaning activist, or corporate brand manager, who talks about indigenous resilience, treat the term with the circumspection I think it deserves. Or, in the words of the great Saami poet, Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa:

The earth sounded, echoed

Set out now, my child

Spread your wings out, fly

Discover your own intention, deliberate

Consider

(translated in Gustavsen, 2019)

Conclusion

This paper has sought to reveal the complexity of interests and heterogeneous ensembles of performative knowledge and practice shaping the discourse of indigenous resilience, in the United States, amid the much reported mobilizations of indigenous peoples to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline. There is very little which is indigenous to this discourse of resilience. It originates elsewhere and is heavily embedded in colonial knowledge and power. Whether considering the resilience of indigenous communities fighting to protect their lands in the United States, or those living in the Arctic Circle for whom the threat is said to be extreme climate change, or anywhere, this reality is the same. Far from producing a decolonization of state thinking the ascription of resilience to indigenous peoples is functioning to disempower them further. Dispossessed, and disallowed the possibility to assert any counter-power to repossess, discourses on indigenous resilience reproduce a scripted story of how indigenous peoples simply persevere through adapting themselves to the woes of existence. They are peoples, as we are told by another critically acclaimed anthropologist, Elizabeth Povinelli, who lack the power ‘to act in the sense of making anything like a definitive event occur in the world’ but which, nevertheless, persist through their embodied and performative capacities for resilience: enduring and coping under extreme duress (Povinelli, 2011).

The task, by way of contrast, is for indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike, to reject these discourses of entrapment and stake out a different politics. In doing so we can no doubt learn much from minor traditions of thought and practice among indigenous peoples, which in contrast to today’s dominant discourses on indigeneity, insist on the integral importance of possession as a foundation for political subjectivity (Chandler & Reid, 2019). If we read, for example, the studies of the great anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda, of the Yaqui Indian shaman, Don Juan, we encounter an entirely different, and today it would seem, more or less lost image of the indigenous subject; defined by its autonomy and disconnection from the world, its mastery of techniques of the self, and its will to subdue and possess others (Castaneda, 1972, p. 15–243). Many of the virtues which indigenous critique derides in western subjectivity can be found in a celebrated form in Castaneda’s image of the indigenous subject.

Evading the traps of indigenous resilience demands a suspicion towards this new discourse. In Sámi language the word for trap (giela) is the same as the word for language (giela) itself (Gaski, 1997, p. 11). Possibly the foremost Sámi poet of all time, Paulus Utsi, penned a collection titled Giela giela which translates as ‘Ensnare the Language’. It was language itself that Utsi urged his fellow Sámi to hunt and trap. Never was that injunction of Utsi more urgent than it is today in this era of discursive entrapments of indigenous peoples, including the Sámi.

In the Western tradition the power to hunt and trap the other has, since Plato at least, been understood to owe to the power to deceive, which in turn depends on the ability to deploy images, and make the illusory appear true (Reid, 2017). In Indigenous cultures too, we can encounter similar ideas, about the relationships between hunting and entrapment to images and their powers. Valkeapää writes, in his celebrated work, The Sun, My Father, much of images, employing the Sámi words govva, to evoke a world which is itself govvás máilbmi, ‘full of images’, or a world-as-image (Dana, 2004). The word govva evokes, in Sámi language the particular image of a drum, and the drum of the shaman himself especially, an instrument for the making of images (Dana, 2004, p. 9). At the same time, it also evokes the power of the hunter, for govva is also the terms for the decoy used by hunters to lure birds (Dana, 2004, p. 9). If indigenous peoples such as the Sámi are to evade the traps being set for them by discursive entrepreneurs it will not be because they are resilient but because they know how to use and deploy images, as well as see the illusory nature of the worlds into which they are presently interpellated by powers which function by possessing and deploying language every bit as much as they possess and exploit the land.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Finnish Academy. Project title, Indigeneity in Waiting (2016-2020, decision no. 295557).

Notes on contributors

Julian Reid

Julian Reid is Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland. He is the Principal Investigator of Indigeneity in Waiting, a research project funded by the Finnish Academy (2016-2020) and the author with David Chandler of Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield in Autumn 2019).

Notes

1. I draw here directly from my own text ‘The Cliché of Resilience’ published in Arena Journal (2018) and which analyzed the discourse of indigenous resilience in the Arctic region more specifically.