Indigenous Places and Colonial Spaces: The Politics of Intertwined Relations 2018018684, 9780815384533, 9781138202979, 9781315472539

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Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics

INDIGENOUS PLACES AND COLONIAL SPACES THE POLITICS OF INTERTWINED RELATIONS Edited by Nicole Gombay and Marcela Palomino-Schalscha

Indigenous Places and Colonial Spaces

In the aftermath of colonial occupation, Indigenous peoples have long fought to assert their sovereignty. This requires that settler colonial societies comprehend the inadequacy of their responses to Indigenous peoples’ contestations of existing power relations. Taking an international and contemporary perspective, this book critically explores the extent to which Indigenous peoples are transforming the conditions of their coexistence with settler colonial societies. With contributions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers across the humanities and social sciences, the book is divided into four sections that reflect some key arenas of debate: ontological negotiations; assertions of connections to and rights over land; the contradictions embedded in practices of “recognition”; and the possibilities for change based on rightful relationships. From medicine to urban spaces, from love to alternative economies, from acts of citizenship to environmental justice, the chapters of this book provide a grounded analysis of how these spaces of intertwined coexistence are being crafted, resisted, reconfigured, and expanded. Providing concrete insight into the responses of Indigenous communities to the impacts of settler colonialism, this book will appeal to researchers in Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Rural Studies, Political Geography, Indigenous Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies. Nicole Gombay, Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal. Since the 1990s, both within and outside of academia, Nicole has sought to understand the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the context of settler colonialism. Inevitably, this has also made her think about her own experiences as a settler. Marcela Palomino-Schalscha, Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. Marcela has research interests in development studies, human geography and political ecology, with a special emphasis on Indigenous issues. She theorises the politics of scale and place, diverse and solidarity economies, decolonisation, tourism, and development in Latin America.

Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics Series Editor: Professor Clive Barnett University of Exeter, UK

This series offers a forum for original and innovative research that explores the changing geographies of political life. The series engages with a series of key debates about innovative political forms and addresses key concepts of political analysis such as scale, territory, and public space. It brings into focus emerging interdisciplinary conversations about the spaces through which power is exercised, legitimized and contested. Titles within the series range from empirical investigations to theoretical engagements and authors comprise of scholars working in overlapping fields including political geography, political theory, development studies, political sociology, international relations and urban politics. Psychological Governance and Public Policy Governing the mind, brain and behaviour Edited by Jessica Pykett, Rhys Jones and Mark Whitehead Citizenship, Activism and the City The invisible and the impossible Patricia Burke Wood Un-making Environmental Activism Beyond modern/colonial binaries in the GMO controversy Doerthe Rosenow The Challenges of Democracy in the War on Terror The liberal state before the advance of terrorism Maximiliano E. Korstanje Indigenous Places and Colonial Spaces The politics of intertwined relations Edited by Nicole Gombay and Marcela Palomino-Schalscha For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ series/PSP

Indigenous Places and Colonial Spaces

The Politics of Intertwined Relations

Edited by Nicole Gombay and Marcela Palomino-Schalscha

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Nicole Gombay and Marcela Palomino-Schalscha; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nicole Gombay and Marcela Palomino-Schalscha to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Breuch, Lee-Ann Kastman, author. Title: Involving the audience: a rhetorical perspective on using social media to improve websites / Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch. Description: New York: Routledge, 2019. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018018684| ISBN 9780815384533 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Online authorship. | Interactive multimedia. | Web sites—Design. | Rhetoric—Social aspects. | Internet--Social aspects. Classification: LCC PN171.O55 B74 2019 | DDC 302.23/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2018018684 ISBN: 978-1-138-20297-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-47253-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times NR MT Pro by Cenveo® Publisher Services

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 (Trans)forming Indigenous – settler colonial relations

viii ix x xiv 1

NICOLE GOMBAY AND MARCELA PALOMINO-SCHALSCHA

PART I

Being, becoming, and knowing: ontological questions in an intertwined present 2 It’s not ‘Traditional’ without the elders: epistemological authority in a Macehual knowledge system

31 33

AURELIO RAMÍREZ CAZAREZ, FILOMENA SEDILLO PARRA, AURELIO RAMÍREZ CAMPOS, RAÚL RAMÍREZ GUERRERO, EMMA RAMÍREZ CAMPOS, HORTENCIA RAMÍREZ CAMPOS, D. LANE SANTA CRUZ, AND PATRISIA GONZALES

3 Everything is love: mobilising knowledges, identities, and places as Bawaka

51

BAWAKA COUNTRY INCLUDING SARAH WRIGHT, SANDIE SUCHET-PEARSON, KATE LLOYD, LAKLAK BURARRWANGA, RITJILILI GANAMBARR, MERRKIYAWUY GANAMBARR-STUBBS, BANBAPUY GANAMBARR, DJAWUNDIL MAYMURU, AND MARNIE GRAHAM

4 Narratives of Indigenous place(s), space(s), and citizenship(s) SARAH HENZI

72

vi

Contents

PART II

Asserting connections, belonging, and responsibilities: the politics of territory, land, and home 5 Reclaiming a place: post-colonial appropriations of the colonial at Budj Bim, Western Victoria, Australia

89 91

LOUISE C. JOHNSON

6 Making Indigenous space in the city: Mapuche migrations and territorial reconfigurations in Concepción, Chile

108

BASTIEN SEPÚLVEDA

7 Counter-mapping commercial forests and reclaiming Indigenous reindeer herding pastures in Finnish Upper-Lapland

127

NUCCIO MAZZULLO

PART III

Scrutinising recognition: the contradictions of exclusionary inclusions 8 The tortuous politics of recognition: local festivities, protest, and violence in Oaxaca, Mexico

153 155

JULIE MÉTAIS

9 The politics of indigeneity recognition in Southeast Asia: opportunities, challenges, and some reflections related to communal land titling in Cambodia

176

IAN G. BAIRD

10 Emerging political movements in the post-Ainu Culture Promotion Act era in Japan HIROSHI MARUYAMA

194

Contents vii PART IV

Rightful relationships: enacting change for entangled futures

209

11 Building an alternative economy as decolonial praxis

211

ERIN ARAUJO

12 Governing for Indigenous environmental justice in Canada

226

DEBORAH MCGREGOR

Index

244

Figures

1.1 Living on a little square of land 2.1 The Códice Borbónico depicts Oxomoco and Cipactonal, the First Man and First Woman, as ceremonial medicine keepers 3.1 Djawundil illustrating her Bawaka marr through a Facebook word cloud 3.2 A work in progress – conceptualising and illustrating our work together 3.3 Marr at the Gapan Gallery, Garma Festival, North East Arnhem Land 5.1 Map of Australia and Victorian Aboriginal language groups with Gunditjmara country 5.2 2007 and 2011 Native title consent determinations 6.1 Mapuche population in Chile, 2002 6.2 Mapuche population in the MAC, 2002 6.3(a) & (b) Rehue and fresco at the Laguna Grande Park, San Pedro de la Paz 6.4(a) & (b) Mapuche neighbourhood of Santa Josefina 2, Hualqui 7.1 Linguistic map of Sámi languages 7.2 Reindeer herding area 7.3 Reindeer herding districts 7.4 The negotiated agreement 8.1 The Nochixtlán delegation 8.2 The Nochixtlán delegation 8.3 Poster of the popular Guelaguetza 8.4 Cultural event and political claims

17 34 57 61 65 92 96 112 118 122 123 131 136 137 142 157 157 167 168

Tables

6.1 6.2 6.3 12.1

Mapuche population in the 1992 and 2002 official census Mapuche population in the MAC in 1992 and 2002 Indigenous associations created in San Pedro de la Paz UNDRIP and environmental justice

111 117 119 236

Contributors

Erin Araujo  is a non-Indigenous geographer at Memorial University in Newfoundland. She has been living in Chiapas, Mexico for the past 11 years. She currently does research in Chiapas and Sonora, Mexico as well as Lima, Peru. She has lived in various parts of Latin America at different times aligning herself with anti-systemic, Indigenous rights, and anti-capitalist resistance movements. Ian G. Baird  is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also affiliated with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison and UW-Madison’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. He coordinates the Hmong Studies Consortium at UW-Madison. Originally from Canada (non-Indigenous), he received his PhD in Geography from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, in 2008, and has been a faculty member at UW-Madison since 2010. Bawaka Country  (including Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd and Marnie Graham) are an Indigenous and non-Indigenous research collective. They are four sisters, elders and caretakers for Bawaka Country in northeast Arnhem Land, and their daughter, Djawundil. Also involved are four non-Indigenous academics, Sarah, Sandie and Kate from Newcastle and Macquarie universities, who have been adopted into the family as granddaughter, sister and daughter, and research assistant, Marnie Graham, who is a post-doctoral fellow at Stockholm Resilience Centre and Macquarie University. Bawaka Country refers to the diverse land, water, human and non-human animals (including the human authors of this chapter), plants, rocks, thoughts and songs that make up their Indigenous homeland of Bawaka. Theirs is a story of lives entwined and of new places of being and belonging. It is also a collaborative narrative of unexpected transformations, embedded families and the spirituality and agency of non-human elements in and of the landscape. The group

Contributors xi has worked together as a research collective since 2006, and has written two books and several academic and popular articles together. Leticia Corrales Torres,  Nahua (Macehual), granddaughter of Doña Leocadia, is a founder of the clinic and a woman dedicated to the practice of traditional medicine and the caretaking of spiritual ways. Nicole Gombay,  Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal. Since the 1990s, both within and outside of academia, Nicole has sought to understand the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the context of settler colonialism. Inevitably, this has also made her think about her own experiences as a settler. Patrisia Gonzales  (Kickapoo/Comanche/Macehual), a professor at the University of Arizona, teaches courses about Indigenous healing systems, both outside of and within university settings. She continues collaborating with medicine keepers to impart traditional teachings in Indigenous communities. She is author of Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (University of Arizona 2012). Sarah Henzi  is a settler scholar and Assistant Professor of Indigenous Literatures in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on genres that are redefining and expanding upon what has been considered thus far as “literature” in the field of Indigenous Literary Studies: comic books, graphic novels, science fiction, speculative fiction, film script, erotica, and new media. Her work also seeks to promote the Francophone literary and artistic works of Indigenous Peoples in Québec. Taken together, her research seeks to offer new ways of thinking about these interventions, without them being constrained to or by fictitious frontiers – national, generic, linguistic or institutional. Louise C. Johnson is Professor of Australian Studies at Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. An Australian-born, non-Indigenous human geographer, she has taught at Sydney University, Australian National University and Waikato Universities as well as at Deakin. Over a long and distinguished career that saw her awarded the 2011 Institute of Australian Geographers Australian and International Medal she has researched the gendered nature of suburban houses, changing manufacturing workplaces as well as the dynamics of Australian regional economies. Major publications include Suburban dreaming (DUP 1994), Placebound: Australian feminist geographies (OUP 2000) and Cultural capitals: Revaluing the arts, remaking urban spaces (Ashgate 2009). Her most recent book, co-written with Sue Jackson and Libby Porter, is Planning in Indigenous Australia: From imperial foundations to postcolonial futures (Taylor & Francis 2018). In addition, she is researching the nature of suburban communities, regional restricting and affordable housing.

xii Contributors Hiroshi Maruyama is a non-Indigenous academic affiliated with the Hugo Valentin Centre at Uppsala University, Sweden, and is a Professor Emeritus at the Muroran Institute of Technology, Japan. He conducts research on environmental and Indigenous issues for and with minorities who seek local autonomy and social justice. He has published various monographs and articles, including in Acta Borealia and in Understanding the Many Faces of Human Security: Perspectives of Northern Indigenous Peoples. He was the principal organiser of the International Conference on Policy towards Indigenous Peoples: Lessons to be Learned, which was held in 2017 in Sapporo with 70 international researchers and artists. Nuccio Mazzullo  is a non-Indigenous social anthropologist at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, in Rovaniemi, Finland. He has recently completed one project on narrative and indigenous elders (ORHELIA), and is currently examining the relations between narratives and animal genetics in the Arctic region (ArcArk). His interests include reindeer herding, hunters and gatherers, human–environment relationships, environmental politics and indigenous rights, landscape and perception, learning and skills, handicraft and narratives, and anthropology of circumpolar peoples. Recent publications include chapters in Nomadic and Indigenous Spaces: Productions and Cognitions (Ashgate), in Polar Geopolitics? Knowledges, Resources and Legal Regimes (Edward Elgar Publishers) and in Arctic Anthropology, Volume 54, Number 1. Deborah McGregor  (Anishinaabe) is an Associate Professor with the Osgoode Hall Law School and Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice. Her research focuses on Indigenous knowledge systems, water and environmental governance, environmental justice, forest policy and management, and Indigenous food sovereignty. Julie Métais is a non-Indigenous anthropologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), currently associated with the Interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology (IIAC). She has conducted her research in Mexico, providing an anthropology of politics from a cultural perspective. For her PhD research, she explored the practices of political mediation and protest in Oaxaca (Mexico), particularly as understood through the militant and activist local teacher’s union. Her most recent postdoctoral research aim to offer analyses of political conflict in Mexico, using an interdisciplinary approach focusing on aesthetic and affective expressions. Marcela Palomino-Schalscha, Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. Marcela has research interests in development studies, human geography and political ecology, with a special emphasis on Indigenous issues. She theorises the politics of scale and place, diverse and solidarity economies, decolonisation, tourism, and development in Latin America.

Contributors xiii The late Aurelio Ramírez Campos,  Nahua (Macehual), the son of Don Aurelio, was a founder of Atekokolli Centro de Medicina de Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl and a traditional doctor who dedicated his life to the clinic. Hortencia Ramírez Campos,  Nahua (Macehual), the daughter of Don Aurelio, is a founder of the traditional medicine clinic. She has been dedicating her knowledge to treating women’s health and she promotes the culture and protection of sacred sites in Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl. Emma Ramírez Campos, Nahua (Macehual), the daughter of Don Aurelio, attends to people in her house and is a woman close to her community of Amatlán. She continues practising the knowledge of traditional medicine based in home remedies and traditional massages. Aurelio Ramírez Cazarez,  Nahua (Macehual), is a medico Indígena and president of the Consejo Autónomo de los Pueblos Indigenas del Estado de Morelos and on the elders’ council for Amatlán del Quetzalcóatl. Raúl Ramírez Guerrero, Nahua (Macehual), founder of the clinic, currently is one of the people responsible for attending to the health of his community in the clinic. D. Lane Santa Cruz, a second generation Chicanx/Indigena (Eudeve-Opata) born and raised in the south side of Tucson, AZ, is passionate about doing community work grounded in her auto-historia, Indigenous/popular education, worker cooperatives and bicycle and plant/food literacies. Filomena Sedillo Parra, Nahua (Macehual), a mother of five, a midwife and medica Indígena, started “catching” [delivering] babies at age 18 and says she has lost count of how many thousands of babies she has delivered. Bastien Sepúlveda  is a non-Indigenous human geographer and research fellow based at the Université de Lille, France. He has conducted research on Indigenous issues, especially in Chile and Canada where he worked with a number of Indigenous communities and organisations. His current research focuses on the roots, developments, and perspectives of Indigenous geographies in the French-speaking world.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Esther Kiddle who, at short notice, stepped into the breach and helped get this book to the end. So, too, thanks to Sarah de Leeuw, Adam Pasamanick, and Dorothee Schreiber for their careful reading and feedback.

1

(Trans)forming Indigenous – settler colonial relations Nicole Gombay and Marcela Palomino-Schalscha

Introduction Indigenous peoples have long histories of encounter and occupation of their territories by colonising states and people. Broadly speaking, this has entailed a violent politics of denial, erasure, and dispossession, which for many settlers have culminated in a widespread ignoring of, or indifference to, their colonial histories. Thus, for example, as recently as 2009, the Prime Minister of Canada stated before an international audience that his country had, ‘no history of colonialism’ (Ljunggren 2009, para. 11). Yet in recent decades, Indigenous peoples have been increasingly successful in forcing settler colonial polities and publics to acknowledge their colonial histories, and in so doing realise the destructive and inequitable terms of their coexistence with Indigenous peoples. The violence of forced displacement, loss and spoliation of lands, and compelled acculturation have been central features of Indigenous peoples’ experiences of colonisation. In general terms, no matter where the setting, the settler colonial project has, over time, sought to impose its own categorical order on Indigenous peoples and, in the process, define and undermine their lifeways. This has often entailed the adoption by settler colonial states and publics of strategic forms of compartmentalisation, based on binary and exclusionary logics – Indigenous/non-Indigenous; public/private; nature/culture; civilised/savage; rational/irrational; animate/inanimate – that had simplified complexity and helped to make the process of rule intelligible within very specific limits (cf. Little Bear 2004; Mackey 2016; A Simpson 2014; Sium, Desai & Ritskes 2012). For colonised peoples, the result has been the creation of a ‘narrow world strewn with prohibitions’, which are not of their making (Fanon 1963: 36). The binary thinking at the root of many of the ways of apprehending and acting in settler colonial contexts gives rise to relations and institutions that have sought to bracket out complexity so that what falls within these limits is permitted to be visible and everything outside of them can be disregarded. Generally, this entails defining categories to ensure fixity, stability, and control. Complex, power-laden, and contested dynamics of cohabitation have involved the constant crafting of spaces in which abuse, rewards, resistance,

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complicity, creativity, and rejection have all intermingled. The politics that shape these contested spaces, both as material places and symbolic fields of negotiation, are marked, amongst others, by a complex weaving of identities, policies, knowledges, legal frameworks, and ontologies. In the main, this process has ultimately resulted in exclusionary, oversimplified, racialised, and technocratic forms of conceiving relationships, not only amongst people, but also between people and the worlds they inhabit. Such either/ or logics are central to the workings of colonial power, but they deny the intricate realities of living. Conscious of the malignant character of binary ways of apprehending and acting, and aware of the deeply inequitable circumstances the settler colonial project has produced, the question we ask ourselves is ‘how to move between things and establish a logic of the AND’ where multiplicity, heterogeneity, and change, all the result of processes existing in interaction, are understood as fundamental characteristics of existence (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 25). This volume thus reflects our belief that far from existing in clear, binary terms, ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ worlds are intertwined. Indeed, these designations have come into being as a consequence of the existence – fluctuating in time and space – of each in the lives of the other. It is an entanglement that entails ‘a process; a series of encounters; a structure of power; a set of relationships; a matter of becoming’ (de la Cadena & Starn 2007: 11). What this book seeks to unpack is how these intertwinings operate. What are the workings of power that underpin and define them? What has been assumed and what ignored? How, and for whom, have these bonds been shackles? And how have people sought to liberate themselves from these? The co-constitutive co-presence of Indigenous and settler colonial persons and institutions, shot full of power, has profoundly affected the lifeways of all: valourising and devalourising ways of being and knowing; reconfiguring the shape and meaning of territories; and defining the terms by which people may be seen by others and may know themselves. These entanglements are of crucial importance for understanding not only what is now, but what was, and what could be. Recognising that the violence of colonialism bears little resemblance to weaving, nonetheless we have found Ingold’s work on the topic helpful for conceptualising how acts of intertwining operate. For him, intertwining is fundamentally about relationships emerging in mutating contexts, whose form is the product of an interplay of dynamic, emergent, and relational forces that are built into the structural properties of entities (Ingold 2000). Reflecting on the embodied experience of weaving a basket, he points out that, when merely looking at the finished product, it seems ‘natural’ and what is ‘meant to be’, yet, in fact, it entails the forceful interweaving of willow lengths that must accommodate to one another. Consequently, its form is the outcome of relations of resistance and friction that forcibly hold the structure together (Ingold 2013). The configuration varies, then, depending on the interplay of forces, but ultimately shape and substance are mutually

(Trans)forming Indigenous–settler relations

3

constitutive. In the interwoven dynamics of settler colonialism, located in multiple sites and enacted across time, Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and collectivities exert pressure on one another, albeit often unequal and uneven, which give rise to diverse and evolving expressions. This is partly why settler colonialism must be understood as a structure rather than a series of distinct events, because each action gets built into, and becomes, a structural quality of the institutions and relations that constitute its ongoing existence (Wolfe 1999, 2006). It is a structure whose manifestations, at times seemingly minor, at others clearly enormous, may pass unnoticed by some and be resisted by others. The daily speech that is privileged and the disappeared language; the dwelling one resides in and claims to the land people live on; are all ongoing expressions of the evolving exertions of force between colonised and coloniser. This book, then, based on this weaving metaphor explores the intertwined worlds being created through the ongoing ‘resistance and friction’ that shape Indigenous and settler places and spaces. It is divided into four sections that reflect some key arenas where these deliberations occur: ontological negotiations; assertions of connections to and rights over territory, land, and home; the contradictions embedded in practices of recognition; and the possibilities for change based on rightful relationships. From medicine to urban spaces, from love to alternative economies, from acts of citizenship to environmental justice, and from reclaiming ancestral territories to asserting recognition, the chapters of this book provide a grounded analysis of how these spaces of intertwined coexistence are being crafted, resisted, reconfigured, and expanded. We, editors and contributors, have worked to unpack these entanglements from different positions. From our geographical locations on five continents to our various disciplinary backgrounds, this collection provides new spaces for reflection by weaving together diverse, and at time disparate, strands. We each write from different positions in relation to the colonial experience. Many of us (including the two editors) identify as non-Indigenous, some identify as Indigenous with affiliations to different peoples, and one chapter is authored by a collective consisting of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members. As editors, we acknowledge the anxieties we have faced as non-Indigenous researchers leading this project. To the degree to which we are able, we are aware of how we are ‘embedded in and benefiting from ongoing colonial relations’, and consequently of our need to be constantly reflexive on how this shapes the language, assumptions, and attitudes we bring to our work (Coburn 2015: 42). We recognise that this awareness does not solve issues around power and representation, but is rather part of an ongoing, unsettling, and conscious effort to contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge production. We are also aware of Indigenous voices that question the legitimacy of non-Indigenous scholars whose research focuses on Indigenous settings. Therefore, constantly navigating anxieties, uneasy questions, and tensions, we embarked on the project, with the understanding that we cannot escape the destabilising politics of these colonial relations and our positions

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within them. For us, as non-Indigenous editors, this meant that we chose to engage carefully (and at times uncomfortably) with these issues, to challenge ignorance and to foster spaces of decolonisation that, we believe, concern us all. Working on this book that particularly addresses the entangled co-constitution of Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds, we understood bridging this divide not as a space for learning ‘about’, but rather learning ‘from’, the other in such a way that ‘the indigene-coloniser relationship [… is] interrogated in uneasy ways that insist on examining power and common sense, as well as the place of histories in the present’ (Jones & Jenkins 2008: 483). Covering debates that spread beyond the four main settler colonial countries – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States – that tend to dominate the English-speaking literature around Indigenous issues, we believe the diversity encapsulated in the chapters of this book is one of its main strengths. We also intentionally invited pieces that reflected on specific, lived realities of Indigenous peoples instead of abstract, disembodied, generalised analysis. Although both approaches are valuable, our focus on grounded experiences is one way to counter trends that overgeneralise Indigenous peoples, conflating their cultures, values, nations, and goals for change (H King 2015). Yet our emphasis on both diversity and groundedness entails certain challenges. Acknowledging that the particularities of the issues addressed in each chapter are individual in nature – reflecting specific relations and dynamics that gave rise to and sustain them – and aware that colonisation and decolonisation are not uniform processes, we faced the thorny question: what can be said that is generalisable and that does not oversimplify these varied, complex particularities and assume some sort of ‘pan-Indigenous identity’? Thus, for example, in writing this text we were confronted with the challenge of even finding terms that are commonly applied (or accepted) to name those states and societies that occupy Indigenous peoples’ lands (cf. Veracini 2010, 2015). ‘Settler’? ‘Colonial’? Such terms are contested in contexts such as Japan, Cambodia, and Finland where, for example, the ‘salt water thesis’ precludes the notion that colonialism applies in instances where there is no geographical separation between colony and coloniser (cf. Lehtola 2015; Stewart-Harawira 2005). What these conversations have highlighted is precisely the fact that identities, narratives, policies, and laws are evolving constantly, and the language and terms used are consequently also always negotiated, power-full, and changing. They are expressions of co-constitution and interweaving of layer upon layer which constantly reshape this colonial/ decolonial world, making a process that, although uneven, can foster alternatives for more just, respectful, and decolonised futures.

Examining ontological questions in an intertwined present The first section of the book consists of chapters that explore some of the ontological implications of these intertwinings. Indigenous ontological considerations have become increasingly visible within and outside academia.

(Trans)forming Indigenous–settler relations

5

In some ways, this prominence has coincided with the ‘ontological turn’ of the social sciences and humanities. However, it goes well beyond this, as ontological issues have been articulated by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people since their first encounters. Within academia, though, this ‘ontological turn’ is noteworthy for the fact that it encompasses diverse perspectives, including, amongst others, cultural studies of nature (Braun 2002), actor–network theory (Latour 1993, 2004), hybrid geographies (Whatmore 2002), non-representational theory (Thrift 2008), and animal geographies (Philo & Wilbert 2000), all of which question the modern ontological difference or separation between nature and culture, humans and non-humans. These more-than-human, post-human or relational forms of analysis, despite their differences, share an interest in denaturalising nature or re-naturalising politics (Jackson 2018) as a means of questioning the modern ontological distinction between humans and non-humans (Castree 2011; Jones 2009). Although questions about the nature/culture binary are not necessarily new, what is novel in these approaches is their level of depth and their broader appreciations for the political, economic, and legal implications of these binaries. Despite being remarkably invisible in much post-human thought, Indigenous peoples actually have been thinking and writing about these modes of being and knowing for much, much longer. The fact that these Indigenous authors’ ideas and practices are largely ignored by many of those aligned with the ontological turn is not a mere unfortunate, innocent coincidence, but emerges from the colonising epistemic privilege of Western academic spaces (Jackson 2018; Todd 2016). As Zoe Todd (2016: 16) asserts, the euro-western academy is indeed a largely colonial institution, and ‘the Ontological Turn is perpetuating the exploitation of Indigenous peoples’. She explains that this is the case as, first, this ‘turn’ privileges the voices of academics who are, directly or not, enrolling Indigenous knowledges in their studies which have been around for thousands of years, while ignoring the many Indigenous thinkers who have been writing about these issues for decades. Secondly, Todd argues, such analyses are problematic because only parts of these Indigenous cosmologies are being ‘cherry-picked’ by non-Indigenous intellectuals, without engaging with the contemporary realities and struggles of Indigenous peoples, who face ongoing colonialism. She therefore suggests that those non-Indigenous intellectuals who do not engage with the political situation and agency of both Indigenous individuals and scholarship are actually complicit with colonial violence, even if some of them declare that their aim is to ‘decolonise’ the academy and call for the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in these debates (Davis & Todd 2017; cf. Cameron, de Leeuw, & Desbiens 2014). As a first step, then, it is crucial to acknowledge the ways in which Indigenous voices have provided invaluable conceptual insights into different ontologies, including the ways of understanding the connections of the human and the non-human, and through which they are fighting for

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self-determination and sovereignty around the world. To name just a few, the work of Cajete (1994), Chihuailaf (1999), Donald (2009), Little Bear (2000), Marileo (2001), Rivera Cusicanqui (2012), Stewart-Harawira (2005), and many others has been crucial in this regard. Engaging with these debates and contributions seriously can provide new ways to decolonise not only the academy, but also political spaces in a broader sense. As Johnson and Murton (2007: 127) suggest, by including and recognising Indigenous ontologies, ‘we have the opportunity to re/write the colonial/neocolonial displacement of the Indigenous voice’. In Latin America, for instance, revaluing and acknowledging these Indigenous ontologies, made invisible by the imposition of modernity and coloniality, has become central. As Marisol de la Cadena (2009) argues, relational ontologies are at the root of many Indigenous movements, resistances, and, more recently, the transformation of states and legal systems. These relational ontologies articulate and ‘[pull] out of the shadows’ particular understandings of the connections between humans and non-humans (ibid.: 163, our translation; cf. Escobar, 2010). According to her, conflicts such as the mining of the Apu Ausangate in the mountains of Cusco, Peru, are creating ‘out of the ordinary’ and hybrid political conflicts, where unusual players are being brought to the centre of political attention (de la Cadena 2009: 162, our translation). Thus, she argues, these Indigenous struggles are expanding the possibilities to ‘pluralise’ politics, not only by enhancing Indigenous sectors’ participation, but also because of the need to negotiate the role and rights of non-humans, as well as different ways of being (de la Cadena 2009). However, aiming to engage with Indigenous ontologies is far from unproblematic. It is paramount to be aware of the way these knowledges and practices are represented and articulated in colonial spaces of knowledge production, such as Western academia (Simpson & Smith 2014). We are faced, then, with a crucial question: ‘is there a way of addressing difference that does not necessarily fall back into essentialisms?’ (Blaser 2012: 51). Blaser suggests that a side-effect of post-colonial concerns to avoid othering has led many intellectuals to end up saming, which he describes as practices that deny the right to difference and reinforce colonial legacies by assuming the universal applicability of Eurocentric categories and concerns. Thus, ‘[c]omfortable on the assumption that the subaltern cannot speak, we surrender any effort to hear about “things” that our categories cannot grasp’ (Blaser 2012: 52). Instead, he calls for a form of radical alterity that entails challenging, at an ontological level, the colonial and Eurocentric forms of categorising the world, which can help to take other ontologies seriously. Beyond mere relativist stances that acknowledge ontological differences, we need to consider carefully broader frameworks where knowledge claims emerge (Cruikshank 2012; L Simpson 2004). Failing to interrogate the ontological frameworks from which we work, suggests Blaser (2009), risks reaffirming modern ontological claims to knowledge, thus just confusing ‘ontology’ with ‘culture’.

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So, what would ‘taking Indigenous ontologies seriously’ entail? Sarah Hunt (2014) states that a starting point is to accept the partiality of knowledge – the impossibility of it ever being fixed or complete – and embrace its relational, alive, and emergent nature. In particular for non-Indigenous people, she suggests, this can involve becoming ‘unhinged, uncomfortable, or stepping beyond the position of “expert” in order to also be a witness or listener’ (ibid.: 5). De Leeuw (2014) adds that another aspect of engaging carefully with Indigenous ontologies is to question the often-pervasive connection of indigeneity with land, resources, and territory. Indigenous ontologies are not necessarily restricted to these spaces, especially in the face of long-standing colonial interventions that have fostered the ontologies that emerge from racialised colonial experiences of poverty, violence, and dispossession. One way to engage with Indigenous ontologies in diverse ways has been to engage with a range of media that reflect them. Henzi’s chapter in this book does exactly that: using literature and films, she problematises colonial impositions of citizenship at an ontological level to unpack Indigenous narratives of personal and collective acts of defiance, survivance, and belonging. For Johnson and Larsen (2013) stories are an important means for engaging deeply and ‘seriously’ with the ontologies of many Indigenous peoples. Indigenous spaces may thus be understood as storyscapes, constituted in non-static ways, that, in their retelling, recreate the ontological foundations of communities. Indigenous ontologies, then, are intimately tied to places and the reciprocal relations they involve; they are always contextual instead of abstract, and in a constant process of retelling (ibid.). Sarah Hunt (2014) also emphasises the situatedness and relational nature of Indigenous knowledges, as well as the ‘epistemic violence’ of erasing embodied and practised aspects of Indigenous ontologies when they are performed by Indigenous peoples. The chapter by Cazarez et al. in this volume provides a concrete case in point. Highlighting the complexities of the situatedness and bodily aspects of Indigenous ontologies, they weave storytelling into their discussion to explore the role of embodied practices, in particular places for the transmission of Macehual medicinal knowledge. When dealing with the challenges of encountering different ontologies beyond binary logics, Marisol de la Cadena (2015) asserts that we must engage in communication that accepts incommensurability and mutual difference. Doing so means acknowledging that we are not merely dealing with the different ways people understand a shared world but recognising that what is at play are indeed different understandings of what these worlds actually are. So, incommensurability, according to her, means the impossibility of fully communicating across differing ontological formations, even if we often are not attuned to the ‘gaps’ present in these communications. This impossibility, though, does not mean that attempts to communicate should or actually can be discarded. Instead, she proposes a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ to foster dialogues that are deeply respectful of these divergent worlds.

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Blaser (2009) proposes political ontology as a useful approach to deal with this incommensurability. For him, political ontology can address radical difference without falling into saming or relativism. It entails ‘a commitment to the pluriverse – the partially connected unfolding of worlds’ (Blaser 2012: 55). This means that these ‘worlds’, distinct from each other, are at the same time ‘partially’ connected, but without any ‘overarching principle’ that binds them together. Thus, he argues, we need to debunk the idea of a ‘universe’ where there is some basic common ground, and instead embrace the radical ontological difference contained in a ‘pluriverse’. In the midst of this interaction, interference, and mingling between worlds, political ontology, then, is less about unravelling an external reality and more about ‘reality-making, including its own participation in reality-making’ (Blaser 2012: 55). Hyper-reflexive attention to the ontological incommensurability embedded in Indigenous-non-Indigenous collaboration, such as that employed in the chapter by Bawaka Country in this volume, provides a fruitful path to open uneasy conversations that are nevertheless necessary in the path towards decolonised futures. Although exploring Indigenous ontologies carefully is a relevant and complex task, it also involves dealing with some hard questions. We in no way aim to provide easy, universal answers to them. Rather, we want to prompt us all to keep thinking, discussing, challenging, and checking our assumptions, positions, and privileges. It is clear that engaging with Indigenous ontologies in predominantly Western academic settings is a political, complex, and uncertain undertaking. As Hunt (2014: 5) sharply asks: ‘What does it mean for Indigeneity to be theorized, accounted for, and constructed as a category, within hegemonic […] systems of knowledge production where only a small number of Indigenous people situate their work?’ She points to the importance of paying attention to the politics of knowledge production when engaging with indigeneity and ontology, and the need for an ‘actual shift in disciplinary ontologies and epistemologies’ when doing so (cf. Cameron, de Leeuw & Desbiens 2014; Simpson & Smith 2014). We must remain constantly aware of the risks of reproducing colonial legacies, ‘whether through romanticized returns to the “Indigenous”, by refusing to take Indigenous ontologies seriously or, perhaps more importantly, in ways that we cannot and do not know’ (Cameron, de Leeuw & Desbiens 2014: 25). As we will see in the following section, Indigenous connections to, and rights over, land and territories have been one key arena where the dangers of essentialising, dismissing, or not taking seriously Indigenous ontologies have had dramatic consequences.

Territory, lands, and home: the politics of connections and responsibilities Colonial and post-/neo-colonial expansion has deeply influenced Indigenous peoples’ relations with territory, land, and home. Subjugating and marginalising Indigenous territories and knowledges, these past and present

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practices continue to involve dispossession, erasure, genocide, co-optation, and, more recently, the language of management. However, and despite some commonalities, colonial experiences of Indigenous peoples cannot be reduced to singular narratives, but rather are marked by differences both in terms of Indigenous relationships with place and territories, as well as particular colonial histories and contemporary processes (Howitt, Muller & Suchet-Pearson 2009; H. King 2015). Attention to these particularities requires that we consider how these processes are enacted and governed at multiple scales, from the body to the globe. Negotiations around the realities of territory and home may thus be understood as happening in different and contested ways at these different scales. These territorial politics occur in all sorts of settings, including the urban and the rural, the intimate, and the public. Recognising this diversity of settings helps to disrupt colonial assumptions of Indigenous spaces as distant and isolated (James 2012; Palomino-Schalscha 2012; Radcliffe & Laurie 2006). Indeed, rooted in colonial encounters, which place Indigenous peoples either in remote places or an ahistorical past, these ‘frontier metaphors’ have proven crucial to defining Indigenous peoples’ territories as empty and available, thus justifying dispossession, occupation, and exclusion while denying the realities of Indigenous presence and rights (Howitt 2006). In the face of this, and as the chapters by Johnson, Mazzullo, Sepúlveda, and Baird in this book demonstrate, Indigenous peoples have continued to assert their presence and agency, navigating the assertion of belonging while being put out of place, and enacting connections and responsibilities to their lands within constrained recognition of their rights. Exploring the complexities of territory, land, and home at different scales and in varied settings, it is important that we problematise colonial constructions that fix Indigenous peoples spatially and temporally (Johnson & Murton 2007). Doing so involves highlighting not only the realities of coexistence but also their diverse and contested nature. For instance, urban spaces have increasingly been recognised as important sites for negotiating Indigenous rights, presence, and self-determination. Thus, Sepúlveda’s chapter in this book demonstrates how Mapuche are reinscribing cities as Indigenous places. As we shall see in the following section, any kind of formal recognition, including that related to issues of rights and jurisdiction over Indigenous territories, is intertwined with tensions and contradictions. There are many reasons for this. Questions of land involve access to material, often contested, resources, which are generally managed and regulated according to settler colonial legal and political frameworks that Indigenous peoples do not control. In addition, processes of territorial recognition have a tendency to overemphasise the possibility of consensus, and are often inclined to homogenise Indigenous peoples, communities, histories, and aspirations. Therefore, these territorial negotiations tend to ignore deeper ontological and material connections and rights and can end up trapped in

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administrative and legalistic riddles (Coombes, Johnson, & Howitt 2012a). Focusing on a conflict over forestry in Finland, these tensions are vividly illustrated by Mazzullo in this book, as he demonstrates how, using a range of strategies and technologies, Sámi organisations have successfully asserted their connections and rights to their threatened territories. Instances in which Indigenous peoples have succeeded in advancing their territorial demands have increasingly been recognised as important not only in their own right, but also to highlight the incomplete nature of colonial logics and erasures. These successes illustrate how, despite their entangled realities, and despite their need for ongoing negotiations with settler colonial polities and publics, nevertheless Indigenous peoples’ struggles can foster hope for more just and respectful alternatives (Coombes, Johnson, & Howitt 2012b). In her chapter in this volume, Johnson not only unpacks the multiple strategies used by the Gunditjmara, in Australia, to resist and persist despite two centuries of systematic colonial violence. She also carefully examines how they have been able to intertwine colonial regimes with Gunditjmara knowledges and practices around connections to territory to transform them and open broader, if still far from perfect, decolonial alternatives. However, these negotiations and strategies that enlarge Indigenous spaces and connections to place are always shot full of politics related to questions of recognition, which are far from straightforward.

What it means to be ‘recognised’ Years ago, while working on a land ‘claim’ for an Indigenous organisation, one of us scoured archives to identify historically documented accounts of Indigenous people’s movements in the area concerned. The sketchy notes of foreign priests and traders provided ‘legitimate’ proof of Indigenous presence in the region. To augment these claims, she travelled to a distant settlement to map people’s ‘land use and occupancy’. This required her to record where people hunted, fished, and trapped a range of animals. Together with the archival information, this served to delimit what lands were permitted to be claimed as Indigenous and what the state claimed for the Crown. Some days into the mapping project, the person from the village who was working with her said that one of the men she had interviewed that day, in response to the question about where and when he hunted wolves, had simply told her he did not do so. This was because, said her colleague, in his youth that man’s family had been saved from starvation as a result of coming upon the remnants of a kill left behind by some wolves. In thanks, his family had vowed never to hunt them. For the purposes of the map, there was no need to know any of that, though. And she, an interloper, was forced to confront her complicity with the silencing mechanisms of erasure and ignorance. Countless such events have characterised, and continue to characterise, the interactions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies. They reflect some of the multifarious workings of ‘recognition’ that occur globally in

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formal and informal settings, and radically shape how people may be, may know, and may conduct their relations. Fundamentally, to recognise entails issues of visibility, legibility, and the power to define and value the criteria for knowing, seeing, and being. Since it has widespread legal significance, and since the framework of international law reflects a fundamentally Western epistemological stance, it is informative to consider how ‘recognition’ has been defined from an Occidental perspective. These definitions essentially reflect three sets of concerns: first, epistemological – founded on identifying expressions of knowledge or cognition; second, self-recognition; and, finally, mutual recognition, which entails recognition of the other at a social or judicial level (Ricœur 2005). Amongst the multiple definitions listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), perhaps the following best encompasses, either explicitly or implicitly, these three forms of recognition: ‘The action or fact of perceiving that some thing, person, etc., is the same as one previously known; the mental process of identifying what has been known before; the fact of being thus known or identified.’ Yet on what basis is this fact of perception known? What is perceived and what is not perceived? Who defines the terms for what is recognised by whom? What are the repercussions of adhering to these terms? As the OED’s definition illustrates, questions of power clearly come into play in these modes of understanding, depending on whether the act of recognising is an expression of an active or a passive voice. We thus need to be aware of the distinction between what it means ‘to recognise something, objects, persons, oneself, one another—or […] to be recognised or ask to be recognised’ (Ricœur 2005: 19). To recognise in the active voice assumes a claim of ‘mastery’, whereas, in the passive voice, ‘the demand for recognition expresses an expectation that can be satisfied only by mutual recognition, where this mutual recognition either remains an unfulfilled dream or requires procedures and institutions that elevate recognition to the political plane’ (ibid.). In the interactions between Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states and societies, recognition, and its lack, have restricted and produced what is known and may be known, how people as individuals and collectives may know and be known, and how they know and may know one another. Dynamics of recognition have shaped both Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals, collectivities, institutions, and practices in unequal, interwoven, and relational ways, with the dual effect of limiting what may be recognised by whom and producing, amongst others, identities, relationships, spaces of resistance, and economies. These intertwined workings of restrictive and productive power have generally been inequitable, mostly serving to the advantage of settler colonial states and publics, and to the detriment of Indigenous peoples. As a result, the enactment of recognition has not only profoundly affected Indigenous peoples, but its twisted performance has, both by omission and commission, also shaped and rested upon non-Indigenous (self)understandings. These understandings, in turn, have enabled settlers to impose (and ignore) categories of knowledge and ways of

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being in the pursuit of goals that serve their own interests. It is in response to such selective awareness and ignorance that analyses focusing on the politics of recognition seek, in part, to highlight and undo. The various forms of connection and belonging to land and territory, the systems of belief that attach people to their places, and the various economic and political interests that seek to rupture these connections are in many ways central to debates about recognition. They are linked to the ways in which Indigenous peoples have, as a means of substantiating their sovereignty, often been obliged by settler colonial states and people to conform to sets of structures, institutions, processes, and ways of being that are not of their own making. The challenge for many contemporary states founded on notions of liberal pluralism is how to ‘reconcile’ Indigenous peoples’ defence of their own nationhood with those states’ assertions of sovereignty (Coulthard 2014). As the story about land claims at the outset of this section demonstrates, assorted responses have been developed by settler colonial states to effect such resolutions. These entail such things as the allocation of various rights granting preferential access to lands and resources, targeted economic development, and/or qualified systems of governance. Yet, to be entitled to these rights, Indigenous peoples face a double bind whereby they must fit into and reproduce preconceived expectations imposed on them by any number of non-Indigenous institutions that delimit how indigeneity may, and in many cases must, be expressed and enacted (Cattelino 2010). The double bind lies in the fact that this recognition is conditional, with terms set by settler colonial states and publics. To be recognised, Indigenous peoples are required to conform to certain expectations of difference from the settler society occupying their territories; if they do not, their indigeneity comes into question. Such requirements for distinctiveness, combined with the necessity that these be recognisable and recognised by settlers, have profoundly hampered the lives of Indigenous peoples. Only some forms of difference may be judged by settler states and publics to be socially, politically, and culturally acceptable. So, for example, an ‘Indian’ in a feathered headdress is ‘real’ and is hence entitled to differential rights, whereas an Indian playing golf, running casinos, selling cigarettes, or eating Kentucky Fried Chicken is not, and so these rights may be questioned (cf. Cattelino 2010; Clifford 1988; Deloria 2004; T King 2012; Povinelli 2002; A Simpson 2014). To avoid the allocation of special categories of rights distinct from any other ethnic minority, settler colonial states and publics may frame indigeneity within discourses of multiculturalism whose performance is sanctioned and permitted only in so far as it does not challenge the status quo of liberal states and publics (cf. Postero 2007; Povinelli 2002; Stewart-Harawira 2005; Tuck & Yang 2012; Veracini 2015).1 Yet such forms of legitimised recognition generally rely on unquestioned moral intuitions about what is acceptable and true and what is not; intuitions that are culturally, historically, politically, and geographically contingent. The state-defined conditions for recognition limit Indigenous peoples’ options for controlling the terms

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of their own representation. In such situations many Indigenous peoples have repeatedly sought to resist, refuse, rearticulate, and re-cognise those terms. Doing so requires a certain creativity which highlights and challenges the expectations that gave rise to those initial forms of categorisation (cf. Deloria 2004; Povinelli 2002; A Simpson 2014). Métais’ contribution to this volume provides a cogent example of the ways in which Indigenous peoples challenge the performance of indigeneity that is imposed on them by multicultural practices of recognition, thereby refusing to adhere to the limitations that reassure and sustain settler colonial institutions. Far from calling the fundamental institutions and values of the state and its citizens into question, such forms of recognition actually legitimise and reinforce them. In fact, sanctioned signifiers of indigeneity ultimately ignore instances when the differences of Indigenous peoples are so radical that they cannot be seen, much less (be permitted to be) recognised. Such lack of recognition needs to be parsed out. In its essence, ignorance, the opposite of recognition, assumes various guises (Gross & McGoey 2015; Proctor & Schiebinger 2008). The relations between Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states and societies may often be characterised by very particular forms of ignorance. Although in some instances the ignorance reflects either an absence of knowledge or an expression of faulty cognition, in others, actually, a powerful component of settler colonial ignorance entails a strategic, socially sanctioned, wilful decision of not knowing that builds and sustains an agreement to ‘know the world wrongly’, which, all the while, seeks to naturalise and thereby obscure, the repercussions of the institutions upon which it is founded (Schaefli & Godlewska 2014: 229). Law, public culture, and daily interactions combine to constitute and maintain particular forms of what are permitted to be legitimate expressions of indigeneity. This is an important component of the ‘cunning’ involved in recognition (Povinelli 2002). It is a structural, deeply institutionalised mode of wilful ignorance backed by the power of the state that is used to sanction and restrict how the world can be known, acted upon, and configured. It is an ignorance that enables settler colonial states and publics to perceive the ‘dysfunctions’, ‘illogics’, and ‘abnormalities’ of Indigenous peoples as products of their own societies, rather than as generated by colonial histories and the conditions imposed on them that form the basis of recognition (A. Simpson 2014). The ways in which settler colonial states and societies require Indigenous peoples to adhere to particular expressions of indigeneity to be recognised combines with both wilful ignorance and a lack of capacity to discern instances of radical alterity. This produces double binds that inhibit challenges to the expectations of difference that underpin recognition, so that ‘the unexpected, which resists categorization and, thereby, questions expectation itself’, cannot be countenanced (Deloria 2004: 11). In the face of such cognitive denials that set the boundaries of what can be seen and what can be heard, Indigenous peoples are often forced to reframe their claims in terms that settler colonial polities can (or are willing

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to try to) understand (cf. de la Cadena 2015; Nadasdy 2003). And so, we scour archives and draw lines on maps that contain and erase Indigenous modes of habitation. As Baird’s and Maruyama’s chapters in this volume demonstrate, the criteria by which indigeneity is permitted to be recognised are strictly defined by states to ensure that they retain control over the mechanisms and conceptual framings by which these standards are determined. In turn, these criteria create and sustain the systems of belief and institutional structures which justify and reinforce the state’s legitimacy. According to these criteria, not only are Indigenous peoples required to look and behave sufficiently different from the general public in order to be deemed Indigenous, but they also determine and restrict the ways in which Indigenous peoples are ultimately permitted to know themselves. In the process they are obliged to conform to larger settler social structures – including those of race, gender, capitalism, patriarchy, and property – that are central to the state’s existence (Coulthard 2014). Analyses of the politics of recognition thus generally underscore the degree to which Indigenous peoples’ visibility and legibility, far from challenging the power relations that construct and sustain settler colonial states and societies, instead serve craftily to reinforce them. In reality, settler colonial practices of recognition fundamentally permit the visibility of Indigenous peoples only in so far as they interact with settlers, but either deny or are impervious to the existence of ‘irreconcilable spaces of aboriginality’, where Indigenous peoples neither seek nor wish for recognition (Williamson 2017: 22). Ultimately, for many Indigenous peoples and settlers alike, the question underlying much in their relations relates to the legitimacy of the terms on which their cohabitation is founded. Thus, in reaction to a national call for ‘reconciliation’ in Canada (cf. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015), Williamson argues that this represents a project that has been ‘visited upon us as Canada tries to maintain a great myth the dispelling of which would unravel a nation: how can Canada continue to exist on the stolen land of Indigenous peoples while we are still here?’ (Williamson 2017: 22; cf. T. Alfred 2009; Tuck & Yang 2012). The answer to this question requires disrupting and dismantling the structures that produce, enable, reinforce, and sustain ongoing colonial processes that, through the logic of elimination, seek to wrest lands and resources away from Indigenous peoples and place them under the control of settler colonial states and societies (Wolfe 1999, 2006). The history of relations between Indigenous peoples and those who have sought to gain supremacy over their territories and very beings has been one of colonists’ imposing and Indigenous peoples’ resisting the terms of recognition as each seeks to demarcate and maintain their own sovereignties. In problematising the politics of recognition, Indigenous scholars have identified not only the ways in which these practices have limited them, but also how their nations have refused to adhere to, and interrupted, the terms defining their legibility by settler colonial states and publics (Coulthard 2014; López Bárcenas 2006; T. King 2012; A. Simpson 2014; L. Simpson 2014;

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Simpson & Smith 2014). Far from destabilising settler colonial claims to sovereignty, the policies and practices of recognition serve rather to defend them. The cunning underlying colonialist impulses of recognition manifests itself in acts that attempt its very denial, with the result that Indigenous peoples’ refusal to accept the terms of state recognition cannot be easily disentangled from the historical impacts of colonialism. They can operate like a hall of mirrors so that, for example, Indigenous peoples’ assertions of sovereignty can sometimes become inflected by some component of the terms defined and imposed by state recognition. As a result, for example, questions of membership, citizenship, or rights in Indigenous polities can become refracted through the lens of settler colonial institutions, logics, and imaginaries within which Indigenous peoples have had to operate (cf. A. Simpson 2014). Thus, questions of recognition play out within, between, and across multiple and nested expressions of sovereignty that exist at various scales – personal, local, regional, national, and international. For instance, Baird’s chapter in this volume discusses how government-imposed processes required for gaining recognition of communal land titles set up competitive interests and conflicts amongst Indigenous peoples in Cambodia, which has caused them to choose courses of action that undermine the claims and concerns of their fellows, while adopting ‘customs’ that are not theirs. As Audra Simpson (2014: 193) points out, ‘Choices are not choices if they are bestowed rather than self-generated’. The dual exercise of power as both restrictive and productive of permitted beliefs and behaviours is at the very centre of the politics of recognition. If settler colonial-defined terms of ‘recognition’ appear to be the prevailing option available to Indigenous peoples, the question is, what strategies do they adopt to respond to the false choices put before them. How can they refuse to adhere to the faulty logics and practices with which they are presented? In response to these questions, Indigenous peoples have been calling for resurgent forms of self-determination reflecting their own social, political, intellectual, and cultural traditions and enkindling profound and comprehensive decolonisation (G. Alfred 2005; Corntassel 2012; Coulthard 2014; Forte 2006; Kino-nda-niimi Collective 2014; Gustafson 2009; L. Simpson 2008, 2014; Tuck & Yang 2012). Rather than ‘colonisation’ and ‘decolonisation’, which they see as referring to specific empirical episodes in the past, scholars, artists, and activists, primarily in the Americas, argue that ‘coloniality’ and ‘decoloniality’ are more accurate, in that they refer to the continued existence of the nexus of knowledge, power, and being that were created and sustained by processes of colonisation and decolonisation (MaldonadoTorres 2016). To decolonise, then, requires that we create, think, and act to address the dynamics created by this triad of knowledge, power, and being, and focus on ‘practical and metaphysical revolt’ (Maldonado-Torres 2016: 30). Clearly, what such revolt means in practice will vary, given the diverse settings and institutions to which Indigenous peoples across the globe have been obliged to adhere. Since the restrictive forms and dynamics of the

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politics of recognition have had radical impacts on the psyches of many Indigenous peoples – influencing how they have come to know themselves and behave in the world – Indigenous scholars have argued that responding to these constraints requires resurgent and permanent transformations at all levels of society, from the personal to the collective. They note that Indigenous leaders play a crucial role in this process (Coulthard 2014; Manuel & Derrickson 2015; L Simpson 2014). Decolonisation requires unsettling settler colonial states and societies for whom the systemic structures upholding their (our) relations with Indigenous peoples are so deeply engrained that, whether actively or passively, they (we) are ignorant not only of their (our) expectations and privileges underpinning these relations, but also of the irreconcilable spaces of indigeneity existing on the lands that they (we) have occupied. What is required is the unsettling and disrupting of the ‘Colonizer Problem’ that assumes and promotes the repetitive recolonisation of peoples and lands by settler societies (T Alfred 2017, n.p.; cf. Mackey 2016; Manuel & Derrickson 2015). Eliminating the structural components of settler power and privilege requires a process of decolonisation that promotes not just a set of selective transformations, with an exclusive focus on Indigenous peoples in and of themselves, but a collective revolution that changes the criteria by which all participants ‘see’ the world (Sium, Desai, & Ritskes 2012). Settlers, in particular, must be startled out of their (our) ignorance, so that the leftovers from wolves can define how the land is inhabited. Doing so requires a careful consideration of what is necessary to promote and sustain rightful relationships within and amongst peoples, and with the worlds in which we live.

Changing relations All relationships are constituted by formal and informal forces. As Indigenous peoples and settler states and societies negotiated their relations, one institution they often drew (and continue to draw) on was their legal systems, which served to configure their interactions. Settler colonial laws and regulations evolved hand-in-hand with the creation of social, economic, political, and spatial structures that enabled the transformations of Indigenous and settler colonial societies, impoverishing the one while enriching the other. In some instances, colonial states early on demonstrated a certain awareness of the complexity of relationships inherent in their occupation of Indigenous lands, adopting components of Indigenous legal traditions, for example, in treaty negotiations (cf. Asch 2014; Borrows 1997; Ford & Rowse 2013). However, over time, colonial states used their laws to rationalise and enforce their positions of power with respect to Indigenous peoples. Legislation has thus been used to delimit, restrict, and contain Indigenous peoples: defining who could claim indigeneity; determining what rights these claims gave rise to; dispossessing them of their lands; and, in the process, often limiting them to ‘little squares of land’

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Figure 1.1 Living on a little square of land. Source: National Film Board of Canada (1983).

(Tulugak & Murdoch 2007: 247). This enabled not only the expansion of settler colonial capitalism, but also naturalised and reinforced the seeming legitimacy of the legal structures that produced and maintained it. It begins and ends with the land (Figure 1.1). Such forms of operating literally and figuratively c ut people off fr om one another and from their territories, denying and preventing nuanced understandings and ways of being required for the maintenance of rightful relations. The question is: what is the animating principle of these relations? What is the force that gives form to the sorts of relationships that cut the world into little squares of land? Fundamentally the exercise of settler colonialism is linked to the workings of power in the interests of capital. It has set in place and perpetuated destructive relations amongst people and between people and ‘the other nations of trees, of animals and fish and insects and the waters and winds’ (Alfred 2017, n.p.). It has worked at once to limit the options available to Indigenous peoples and produce the conditions by which they are left with no alternative but to participate in these restrictive processes, with the result that, for many, market-as-opportunity has become market-as-compulsion (Li 2014: 6). In its most extreme form, the accumulation by dispossession so central to the workings of settler colonial capitalism has, amongst others: removed Indigenous peoples from their

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lands; sought to transform them into isolated, self-interested individuals bound by contractual rather than communitarian social relations; erased moral connections of responsibility to land and resources as living entities, transforming them into inert commodities; instilled ideas of competition and profit; and often promoted to positions of leadership individuals who subscribed to these modes of operating (cf. Corntassel 2012; Coulthard 2014; Gombay 2013; Harvey 2003; Manuel & Derrickson 2015). Notions of what constitutes proper relations within and amongst Indigenous polities, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and between humans and the worlds we inhabit do not fit into tidily generalisable configurations; they are historically, geographically, and culturally specific. Therefore, what such intertwined relations entail, and the processes of decolonisation required to further these relations, must necessarily be grounded in norms specific to the varied contexts in which settlers and Indigenous peoples coexist. This poses a challenge for drawing universal conclusions about how to enact rightful relations in settler colonial contexts. Similarly, being aware of the diversity that exists, we are loath to make sweeping statements about the nature of Indigenous peoples’ metaphysics. Generally, though, many Indigenous peoples’ traditions reflect a view that existence is governed by relationships, which are founded in expansive understandings of personhood in which multiple elements of the world are sentient, conscious subjects who have volition, and are active moral agents: ‘the world, and all its possible experiences, constitute a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything ha[s] the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything [i]s related’ (Deloria & Wildcat 2001: 2; cf. Armstrong 2006; Cajete 2000; Caniullán 2003; Johnson 2007; Little Bear 2004; Ramos 2009; Stewart-Harawira 2005; Wilson 2015). All that exists is constituted in relation in a world of movement. Fundamentally, this requires that people are aware of, and act in accordance with, the actuality that entities generally exist in a context of interdependent links of kinship. Awareness of one’s connections with others as familial means that attachments are not objective things of the abstract contract, but rather require morally and emotionally informed engagements. It requires a ‘commitment to love in action’ based on awareness of deep relationship with, and responsibility to, each other, the metaphysical world, the land, and all living things (Wilson 2015: 257; cf. Armstrong 2006; Johnson 2007; L Simpson 2014; Bawaka Country, in this book). In considering how to enact rightful relations, then, we need to think about what love might mean politically and comprehend how it might be the outcome of honest and principled action (Coburn 2015). Such an approach needs to be effected in all realms of operation at all scales: from personal relations of care as the basis of economies (Araujo’s chapter in this book) to global declarations of rights as the basis for enacting national programmes of environmental justice in which relationship with, and responsibility to, the land and waters and all that is therein is central (McGregor’s chapter in this book).

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Enacting rightful relations entails acknowledging complexity, thus calling into question the tidy categories imposed by settler colonial binaries. As Indigenous scholars note, in response to the injurious consequences of colonisation, enacting such relationships requires resurgent practices of self-recognition that serve as permanent features of individual and collective decolonisation (G Alfred 2005, 2009; Corntassel 2012; Coulthard 2014). It means moving from rights-based, state-accorded recognition to forms of practice that encompass Indigenous political and legal traditions (cf. Borrows 2016). We must perceive the various formally constituted (legal) mechanisms that have been developed to negotiate relations between Indigenous and settler colonial societies as verbs rather than nouns, as processes requiring our active engagement, rather than as statically delineated entities (Mackey 2016). As Forbes (2001: 116) puts it, the verb-based structures of many North American Indigenous languages entail a fundamental awareness of movement, rather than stasis. Thus, he argues, ‘society’ ought more correctly to be interpreted as ‘together-living’. We must therefore comprehend relationships as evolving, open-ended, and ongoing processes of negotiation that entail not so much rights as obligations, for such was the understanding of many Indigenous peoples in agreeing to accept settler colonial presence on their territories (cf. Asch 2014; Johnson 2007). Although the forging and maintenance of rightful relations implies a focus on future relations amongst the parties concerned, the past cannot so easily be shrugged off, for it constitutes those relations (Stewart-Harawira 2005). To disregard the past is to accord forms of ‘recognition’ that ignore how systemic structures of dispossession have shaped Indigenous peoples’ and settlers’ relations to the present, which, in turn, give form to their futures. Such temporal blinkers seek to deny the colonial present, thereby silencing, or framing as unreasonable, Indigenous peoples’ dissent with the limited terms defining their recognition (Coulthard 2014). Adopting an awareness of evolving and ongoing negotiations of cohabitation requires that all involved adopt an open temporal stance which accepts that all relations past, present, and future are inevitably woven together, and must necessarily be taken into account. Yet, how this might be enacted requires careful thought. One framework for conceiving of rightful relations between Indigenous peoples and settler colonial powers is set out in the Haudenosaunee tradition of the Two Row Wampum, or Guswentha. A long, beaded belt, it depicts two parallel white lines on a purple background. The white lines represent two boats travelling side by side on a shared river. Three rows of beads separate the two white lines and signify peace, friendship, and respect, the basis on which all relations must be built (cf. T Alfred 2017; Borrows 1997; Mackey 2016). It represents a vision of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples walking beside one other as equals, connected by relations of mutuality, where neither has power over the other, neither should interfere with the other, but, instead, each must simultaneously negotiate autonomy and interdependence. It requires the need for openness and active, ongoing renewal

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of relations, worked out in specific contexts and accounting for particular histories and trajectories of relationship. Rightful relations cannot be enacted simply by using fine words – ‘reconciliation’, ‘decolonial’ – which translate into empty deeds, for such words and deeds risk becoming yet more examples of ‘settler moves to innocence’ (Tuck & Yang 2012). This involves the adoption by settlers of an array of evasive strategies that serve concurrently to reconcile settlers’ feelings of guilt with their complicity in the mechanisms that benefit their own interests at the expense of Indigenous peoples and ensure the perpetuation of their own privilege. Hence, settler pronouncements of mea culpa mean little without substantive structural and material transformations of the systems that put in place and perpetuate the inequalities experienced by Indigenous peoples in relation to settlers (cf. T Alfred 2009; Chrisjohn & Wasacase 2009). Building decolonial relationships requires that, as settlers, we take responsibility for our relative positions of power in our entangled relations with Indigenous peoples. It means that we disrupt our assumptions and decolonise ourselves so that we apprehend our privilege and ignorance and honestly confront unwished for truths, particularly in the face of indifference, mistrust, and anger. We must comprehend that our dominance is founded on the displacement and (attempted) replacement of Indigenous peoples and we must address the serious inequalities that have been the result. Building just relations requires embracing complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty. It requires having the humility not only to recognise our ignorance, but also to ask questions and engage in honest dialogue and dissent. This means, too, that we recognise, respect, and accept the spaces of incommensurability that exist in our relations, so that we can appreciate why there are instances when our presence is not wished for (de la Cadena 2015; Williamson 2017). Ultimately it requires fundamental personal transformations that give rise to abiding connections that are mindful of the dignity of others (IrlbacherFox 2012; Sium, Desai & Ritskes 2012; Tuck & Yang 2012). Only from such awareness can effective actions spring that might then result in ‘the production of counter-resources, counter-knowledge[s], counter-creative acts, and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and […] open up multiple other forms of being in the world’ (Maldonado-Torres 2016: 10). Rightful relations require not only a movement of the mind, but also material acts, including the restitution of lands (T Alfred 2009; Sium, Desai, & Ritskes 2012; Tuck & Yang 2012), for ultimately their loss and their gain have set in motion the structures of force and inequality that have given form to contemporary ‘unrightful’ relations in settler colonial contexts.

Conclusion The chapters that make up this book demonstrate the variety of realms in which Indigenous peoples are confronting and responding to their entanglements with settler colonial states, individuals, collectivities, and institutions.

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In the process, they are forming strategic alliances that challenge continuing oppression. Divided into four sections, the volume covers four key areas of contemporary debate around which the political spaces of Indigenous peoples are entwined and through which they are constituted. Each section provides a conceptual basis for understanding those that follow. Linking theory with action, the chapters provide international, concrete illustrations of ontological and epistemological spaces of encounter, of successful assertions by Indigenous peoples of belonging to land, of the impacts of restrictive impositions of recognition, and of projects to enact constructive change by transforming the rules of a corrupt game. Addressing ontological aspects of (co)existence and encounter, Part 1 presents some of the starting points that frame the conceptual worlds of Indigenous peoples in historical and contemporary contexts. The various chapters of this section illustrate something of the breadth of realms in which ontological questions are at issue. They instantiate some of the strategies used by Indigenous peoples to reinforce their ways of life and confirm their presence in the face of diverse colonial impositions that have often sought to ‘correct’, if not outright erase, indigenous modes of being and knowing. In Chapter 2, Cazarez et al. attend to the accounts of Macehual traditional healers who question the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘Indigenous’ medicine. These elders reiterate the epistemic and ontological dimensions of Indigenous knowledges, emphasising the relational, spiritual, genealogical, and contextual nature of medical knowledges. In a context in which Indigenous forms of medicine are being institutionalised and commodified, the authors carefully explore how the elders challenge, interrogate, and support these new forms of learning and practising. They identify crucial elements for sustaining and respecting not only their medicinal practices, but the ontological foundations that support them. In Chapter 3, Bawaka Country confront romanticised and essentialised understandings of indigeneity and Indigenous ontologies. Providing an honest, hyper-reflexive account of how their Indigenous–non-Indigenous, human–more-than-human collective works and communicates, they address tricky questions that emerge when confronting the incommensurability of communicating across ontologies. Examining the politics of representation which they constantly negotiate, they explore issues around risk and vulnerability, emphasising that love is what binds them together and shapes their commitment and relationships. They recognise that referring to love can be read as another form of ‘romantisation’ but suggest that, for them, it is about the deep emotional connections that shape their work, writing, being, doing, and co-becoming in multifaceted ways. Far from being complacent or self-righteous, Bawaka Country critically interrogate the implications of their work and how others might interpret it as reinforcing colonising processes even if they aim to do just the opposite. Drawing on literature and film, Henzi, in Chapter 4, engages with different narratives of Indigenous citizenship, unpacking the ways in which

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reclaiming Indigenous citizenship can be construed as acts of ‘poaching’: essentially linguistic, intellectual, and ethical acts of defiance that, despite government regulations and colonial continuities, expand individuals’ and communities’ liberties. Through artistic and linguistic performances that enact personal and collective volition, Indigenous peoples call into question the territorial impositions that are ‘Canada’ and the ‘United States’. Not only do they emphasise continuity, survival, and resistance, but also ontologically restore a physical and spiritual sense of belonging and home in spite of settler colonial boundaries. In doing so, Henzi argues, they are using Indigenous perspectives to (re)educate the broader public about both settler and Indigenous histories. The various means by which Indigenous peoples disturb colonial impositions on their ways of being and knowing are taken up in the second section of this volume through explorations of an assortment of strategies used by Indigenous peoples to enact their obligations and connections to place, home, land, and territory. It highlights the ways in which they are using their bonds to place as a means of countering settler colonial narratives of sovereignty while insisting on their ongoing presence on their lands, be they rural or urban. Acknowledging Australia’s inherently colonial, racist, and patriarchal expressions of formal recognition of Indigenous peoples and their territories, Johnson, in Chapter 5, also highlights the fact that colonialism was never a system of total domination. Indeed, she demonstrates how, despite the attempted erasure of the Gunditjmara through systematic killing, containment, and assimilation, they have, over two centuries, persistently resisted and mobilised to transform colonial regulatory regimes and legal systems and thereby secure their own lands, identities and economic futures. Sepúlveda, in Chapter 6, explores the ways in which Mapuche experiences and initiatives in urban spaces challenge historical and contemporary colonial discourses in Chile that attempt to make Indigenous peoples’ presence in cities invisible. Contesting both the relegation of Indigenous peoples to reserves and the assumption that cites are spaces of settler societies where Indigenous peoples have no rights, Sepúlveda highlights how the urban can be transformed into spaces of coexistence. Focusing on the Metropolitan Area of Concepción, he explores various strategies used by Mapuche to mark their existence in the city. These have the double effect of recalling that cities are built on Mapuche ancestral lands and of reincorporating the city, in new ways, into the broader Mapuche territory. Looking at the conflict between Sámi reindeer herders and forestry interests around Nellim, in Finnish Upper Lapland, Mazzullo, in Chapter 7, focuses on the role maps play in ‘emptying’ and re-signifying territories and, in particular, Indigenous uses for and relationships to those territories. He demonstrates how maps transformed Sámi homeland into administrative spaces designed to enable ‘efficient’ resource use and erase Sámi presence and connections to the land. However, through de-mapping and counter-mapping, Sámi have reinserted their connections, knowledges,

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and livelihood activities in the region, thereby halting commercial forestry and continuing to herd reindeer. Although mapping Indigenous knowledges is not free of complexities and contradictions, this case demonstrates how, through the use of colonial tools and in collaboration with a range of allies, the entanglement of knowledges and languages that resulted have enabled the Sámi to advance their rights, aspirations, and demands for recognition and sovereignty. Indigenous peoples’ insistence on their territorial belonging are often negotiated in the context of settler colonial states’ attempts simultaneously to assert their dominion and ensure the subordination of Indigenous peoples by delimiting both those whom they deem to be ‘Indigenous’ and what rights accrue to them as a consequence. Part 3 therefore explores the contradictions and tensions stemming from the use of state-sanctioned and popular mechanisms that are used to define the terms by which Indigenous peoples may be recognised. Métais, in Chapter 8, focuses on a performance at a local festival in Mexico that occurred in the aftermath of a demonstration against educational reforms in which police killed and wounded numerous members of the public. She explores how, together, teachers and Indigenous Mixtec destabilised popular discourses of multiculturalism and challenged state-sanctioned impositions of authenticity. She discusses how, through transgressive performances and collective public expressions of grief and anger, labour and Indigenous peoples’ movements combined forces both to show their contempt for ‘folklorised’ forms of recognition and to demand justice for those killed and wounded by the state. Whereas Métais underscores the ways in which people unite to problematise the politics of recognition, Baird, in Chapter 9, explores the ways in which state-defined processes of recognition subvert relations and divide Indigenous peoples of Cambodia’s highlands. In a region of the world where the notion of ‘ethnic minorities’ has predominated, states such as Cambodia strive to retain sovereignty in the face of the various collectivities who are claiming and asserting their rights as Indigenous peoples. Baird outlines the contested nature of indigeneity in Cambodia and explores how state-controlled legal mechanisms determining the process of land titling produce divisive politics amongst Indigenous peoples who are seeking to consolidate communal control over their lands. It is a process that, far from empowering Indigenous peoples, has served to reinforce state rule over their identities and lands. Like Baird, Maruyama, in Chapter 10, highlights the struggles of formerly defined ‘ethnic minorities’, in this case in Japan, who seek to assert their rights as Indigenous peoples. He explores how the Japanese Government develops policies and institutionalised forms of authority that serve the dual purpose of controlling the terms by which Ainu are permitted to be recognised and asserting state power over them. Importantly, Maruyama underscores how knowledge is contested, so that on the one hand academics

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have been an integral component of the institutions used to bolster state authority and, on the other, segments of Ainu society oppose the terms by which they have been defined and kept in their place. Maruyama describes how, faced with such restrictions, Ainu use international human rights law to subvert the policies designed to establish state sovereignty over them. As the chapters of Part 3 demonstrate, although on the surface of things settler colonial polities and publics may appear to recognise Indigenous presence, such recognition often functions as a means to ensure that many of the structures of settler colonialism remain intact. The question of how to counter structures of oppression and enact transformative change is the focus of the chapters in Part 4. Given the wide-ranging impacts for Indigenous peoples of settler colonial capitalism, the question of how to effect alternative economic practices is vital. Focusing on El Cambalache, a women’s moneyless economy in Chiapas, Mexico, Araujo, in Chapter 11, discusses the experience of connecting decolonial, feminist theory with practice. The chapter underscores the significance of social relations as the basis for developing economic spaces that express non-capitalist means of creating value. If sociality is at the centre of how to constitute just economic relations, it also has an important bearing on the ways in which many Indigenous peoples enact their relations to the lands, waters, skies, and other beings who constitute the worlds they inhabit. With histories of profound dispossession and confronted by ongoing, systematised assaults on their territories, Indigenous peoples have long fought to maintain their connections to their lands, drawing creatively upon a range of strategies to do so. In Chapter 12, McGregor provides a detailed analysis of how the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) may be used by Indigenous peoples as a framework to enact policies and governance structures that foster environmental justice. Focusing on Canada, McGregor highlights how Indigenous peoples could use the UNDRIP to assert control over their territories and uphold their sovereignty and self-determination. Resistance and friction, and the violence these have provoked – overt and covert, active and passive – are essential forces configuring the relations between Indigenous peoples and those who have colonised their lands. The suppression of ontological difference; the blindness to spaces of incommensurability and irreconciliation; the wrongful seizure and occupation of lands; the associated undermining of lifeways rooted in place; and the limited and limiting conditions of recognition that close off options for Indigenous peoples while securing settler colonial domination are just some of the many expressions of force that constitute settler colonialisms. As the chapters that follow illustrate, Indigenous peoples across the globe have continually disrupted, pushed back, and thus reworked settler colonial projects to oblige the forms they take to accord more closely with Indigenous ends. At issue is not reformation, but transformation.

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The multivalent bonds of force that have characterised the intertwined relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers have been and must continue to be, rearticulated. Each contributor to this volume has explored something of what these processes of trans-formation entail. The dynamics provoked by these processes – questioning, bending, breaking apart, and reworking the shape of settler and Indigenous relations – are all woven into the fabric of this book.

Note 1. For example, in the context of international law, states have framed rights as individual rather than collective, thereby fundamentally limiting the powers of Indigenous peoples to enact processes of self-determination and decolonisation (cf. Corntassel 2008; Stewart-Harawira 2005).

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Palomino-Schalscha, M 2012, ‘Descolonización, fronteras y lugar: desafiando la exclusión a través de la relacionalidad en la experiencia de Trekaleyin, Alto Bío Bío, Chile’ Revista Geográfica del Sur, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 91–112. Philo, C & Wilbert, C 2000, Animal spaces, beastly places: New geographies of human-animal relations, Routledge, London. Postero, NG 2007, Now we are citizens: Indigenous politics in postmulticultural Bolivia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Povinelli, EA 2002, The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Proctor, RN & Schiebinger, L (eds.), 2008, Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Radcliffe, S & Laurie, N 2006, ‘Culture and development: Taking culture seriously in development for Andean Indigenous people’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 231–248. Ramos, A 2009, ‘El nawel y el pillán. La relacionalidad, el conocimiento histórico y la política Mapcuche’, Journal of the World Anthropology Network, No. 4, pp. 57–79. Ricœur, P 2005, The course of recognition, trans. D Pellauer, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Rivera Cusicanqui, S 2012, ‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A reflection on the practices and discourses of decolonization’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 111, no. 1, pp. 95–109. Schaefli, L & Godlewska, A 2014, ‘Social ignorance and Indigenous exclusion: Public voices in the province of Quebec, Canada’, Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 227–244. Simpson, A 2014, Mohawk interruptus, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Simpson, A & Smith, A 2014, ‘Introduction’, in A Simpson & A Smith (eds.), Theorizing Native studies, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 2–30. Simpson, LB 2004, ‘Anticolonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of Indigenous knowledge’, The American Indian Quarterly, vol. 28, pp. 373–384. Simpson, LB (ed.), 2008, Lighting the eighth fire: The liberation, resurgence, and protection of Indigenous nations, Arbeiter Ring Publishing, Winnipeg. Simpson, LB 2014, ‘Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 1–25. Sium, A, Desai, C & Ritskes, E 2012, ‘Towards the ‘tangible unknown’: Decolonization and the Indigenous future’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–13. Stewart-Harawira, M 2005, The new imperial order: Indigenous responses to globalization, Zed Books, London. Thrift, N 2008, Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect, Routledge, Abingdon. Todd, Z 2016, ‘An Indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: “Ontology” is just another word for colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 4–22. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015, What we have learned: Principles of truth and reconciliation, viewed 24 January 2018, www.trc.ca/websites/ trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Principles_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf Tuck, E & Yang, KW 2012, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1– 40. Tulugak, A & Murdoch, P 2007, A new way of sharing, Fédération des Coopératives du Nouveau Québec, Baied’Urfé, Québec.

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Veracini, L 2010, ‘The imagined geographies of settler colonialism’, in T Banivanua Mar & P Edmonds (eds.), Making settler colonial space: Perspectives on race, place and identity, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 179–197. ———2015, The settler colonial present, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Whatmore, S 2002, Hybrid geographies: Natures, cultures, spaces, SAGE Publications Ltd, London. Williamson, T 2017, ‘Canada’s vanishing point’, Monitor, vol. 23, no. 7, pp. 19–23. Wilson, A 2015, ‘A steadily beating heart: Persistence, resistance, and resurgence’, in E Coburn (ed.), More will sing their way to freedom: Indigenous resistance and resurgence, Fernwood Publishing, Halifax, pp. 255–264. Wolfe, P 1999, Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: The politics and poetics of an ethnographic event, Cassell, London. ——2006, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 387–409.

Part I

Being, becoming, and knowing: ontological questions in an intertwined present

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It’s not ‘Traditional’ without the elders Epistemological authority in a Macehual knowledge system Aurelio Ramírez Cazarez, Filomena Sedillo Parra, Aurelio Ramírez Campos, Raúl Ramírez Guerrero, Emma Ramírez Campos, Hortencia Ramírez Campos, D. Lane Santa Cruz, and Patrisia Gonzales

The cardinal points of ceremonial investigation This medicine history began in ceremony. These words faced and received sacred directions. All from above, and below, gathered in the centre in interwoven movements. Knowledge and cycles were folded in/to each direction as we aligned in spiritual configurations. We stood in the Northern door, the Macehual direction of elders and ancestors, and the sacred winds of deep experience of knowing beyond knowing, calling in the ancestors to this creation. The knowledge of Macehual/Nahua elders, Don Aurelio and Nana Filo, guide this medicine history. In respectful protocols for permission to sacred thought and action, we ask for knowing and to reset our world in balance. Ceremony in seven directions weaves prayer into universe. These elders live in accord with the original instructions for the traditional doctor from the huehuetlatolli or elder’s oratory recorded in the 1500s: The physician The physician [is] a knower of herbs, of roots, of trees, of stones; she is experienced in these. [She is] one who has [the results of] examinations; she is a woman of experience, of trust, of professional skill; a counsellor (de Sahagún, 1950–1982, vol. 10, p. 53). These teachings were recorded under Inquisitorial violence, which sought to vanquish Indigenous knowledges contrary to Church doctrine. Traditional healers were punished for acts of power, such as blowing smoke or casting corn for ceremonial doctoring. Such ancient doctoring practices are the sacred domain of elders First Male and First Female, the Creator Couple called Oxomoco and Cipactonal, who are medicine keepers depicted in

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Figure 2.1 The Códice Borbónico (1979: 21) depicts Oxomoco and Cipactonal, the First Man and First Woman, as ceremonial medicine keepers. Source: The Códice Borbónico (1979: 21).

the Borbonicus Codex (a Nahua painted book from the 1500s). Conveying their ceremonial governance, and, therefore, knowledge authority, they are depicted as toothy elders carrying a gourd of tobacco and ceremonial instruments for prayer offerings and divining with corn (see Figure 2.1). These practices persist, secretly passed down through family lineages, elders, and spiritual agreements with the natural and unseen worlds, making family medicine the protective core of Indigenous medicine. Nanas (grandmas) cast corn and smoke tobacco to diagnose and heal time. The grandfathers and grandmothers are the bones of old knowledge. The existence of these medicine ways emanates from an enduring order of ‘enfolded’ Meso-American cosmologies (Klein 1976), which reflect and manifest organising principles within the continuing cloth of the cosmos that folds moments and movements upon each other – resisting and adapting

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to historical changes. Having survived the Inquisitorial gaze of the Church and ongoing assaults on Indigenous autonomies, these curing cosmologies are now transiting through new knowledge structures that are transforming this lived original medicine.

Knowledge authority of elders The oral histories of six Macehual medicine people presented here create medicinal histories that ‘make absences visible’ (Levins Morales 1997: 3). Their medicinal histories chronicle the presence of Macehual elders in the midst of knowledge formation, particularly when the teaching of Indigenous knowledge is taken into new spaces of learning. Since scant scholarship has documented elders’ responses to these changes, their histories ‘shift the landscape of questions asked’ (ibid.). What follows is the medicinal history of two elders who have worked with the younger generation of healers in a Macehual family who created the Atekokolli Centro de Medicina de Amatlán de Quetzalcoatl. From tangible and unseen worlds, elders connect Indigenous thought and knowledge with authority and experience.

Indigenous Knowledge: atmospheric pressure or intrinsic element? Numerous scholars recognise that Indigenous knowledges remain within the depths of Mexican cultures in what Bonfil Batalla (1996) termed as ‘México Profundo’. This Meso-American profundity to the ‘Mexican’ experience has survived through agricultural practices and traditional medicine (López Austin 1988; Viesca Treviño 2001). The resilient core of pre-Columbian deep knowledge prevails in Indigenous-specific ways and through certain interacting unities (López Austin 2012). A ‘relative coherence’ provides for a recalibrating consistency of key values, without imposing uniformity of thought and practice across Indigenous peoples (ibid.: 6–9). With this integration, Indigenous medicine ways are preserved by certain practices among peoples with varied historical relationships to colonisation, but the cosmologies manifest dynamically. As such, a Mixtec ceremonial healing may look similar to and/or share attributes with other healing ceremonies in another Native community, or another campesino (landbased) community that has lost its specific Indigenous name, language, and robust ceremonies, but maintains its ancestral relationships with the land and natural world. All may share certain foundational legacies of MesoAmerica but still maintain distinctions as a result of language, and/or due to cultural lifeways. Knowledge of ancestral medicine is part of the general cultural history of many Mexicans, so it is sometimes difficult to demarcate the parameters of what is called traditional medicine when it has originated from

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Indigenous knowledge (Gonzales 2012). The factors that have contributed to de-Indigenising Mexicans pose a critical loss of structures of accountability for autochthonous knowledge. Local cultures survived colonisation and the establishment of a national cultural identity that exalts the mixing of cultures and Indigeneity when it serves the purposes of a nation. Yet living Indigenous peoples often face discrimination, leading some to disavow or hide their Indigeneity. De-Indigenisation in Mexico’s many decentralised Indigenous communities Sometimes displacement from Indigenous markers happens without people ever moving, for example, by ceremonies dying out as elders pass on, or through language loss. A Nahua village becomes, over time, a mestizo or campesino town, or they are defined out of existence by a census or by scholars. For instance, the renowned Nahua midwife Dona Vincenta Villalba of Amatlán de Quetzalcoatl, Morelos, was presented as a mestiza or culturally mixed Mexican, in a book on the Meso-American sweat lodge or temazcal/ temezkalli (Lillo Macina 2007), thus showing how the archive can define away Indigeneity under the mestizo paradigm of mixture. Dislocation of Indigeneity also occurs as a result of migration both within and outside of Mexico. Millions have migrated from the rural land bases that provided the ground for these Indigenous knowledges to coalesce as ‘México Profundo’. Because de-Indigenisation is an ongoing process that may be a recent phenomenon for a family or community, people may lose their collective ethnic identity but not all of their traditions, indicating how Indigenous healing knowledges may persist even when people no longer have the discursive markers or the spectrum of ancestral knowledge of their progenitors (Gonzales 2012).1 Indigenous ways of knowing are challenged by such fluidity which occurs as part of the larger array of different dynamic ethnic identities and where Indigenous knowledge is also part of popular knowledge (see Brush 1996).

Unbraiding terms of traditional indigenous medicine Traditional Indian/Indigenous Medicine (TIM) refers to the various healing systems practised by Indigenous peoples across the Americas. They are as varied as each peoples’ world views, languages, and ecological relationships to their biocultural territories. In Meso-America, these healing systems include shared plant knowledge across communities and ecosystems, and the additional layer of culture–place botanical knowledge in Native languages. Meso-American Traditional Medicine (MTM), a parallel term to TIM, is founded on aggregate and contingent worldviews that formed pre-Columbian societies. These resonating knowledges evolved out of Meso-America where

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there were dynamic processes of knowledge development and layered spiritual teachings across a wide terrain. These affinities from ancient protocols permeate the present as they cohere, or function interdependently or distinctly, in Indigenous healing systems, while being informed by larger conceptual matrices. MTM and TIM may be used interchangeably with the term Mexican Traditional Medicine, depending on which healing tradition the term addresses from within what is known as Mexico today. The idea of tradition here refers to various beliefs and acts founded on centuries of practice by a group or society who share a similar culture or world view.

Macehual traditional medicine Aspects of originating knowledge: sometimes we align ourselves with an anthill to get well Permeating many Meso-American healing systems is an understanding of the agency of life; its intelligence and ability to act above and beyond human efforts. Meso-American medicine draws from well-articulated knowledge systems. Nahua medicinal knowledge was so vast that entire books are dedicated to Nahuatl names for the human body, anatomy, and dozens of MesoAmerican doctoring specialties. The Meso-American legacy in Macehual ecological healing systems includes concepts of a complementary balance through dualities. The world, life, and the human body must be set and reset into balance through ceremony; drinking a herb with ‘hot’ properties for the ‘cold’ condition of infertility or aging, or making an offering to the natural world to restore a displaced part of human existence. In these healing systems within bio-cosmologies, concepts of the body are distinct from current biomedical understandings of human physiology. Traditional knowledge systems may hold that the body is aligned with the sun, moon, stars, mountains, winds, anthills, bodies of water, and other living entities of the natural world.

Making medicine keeping present In 1990, I [Patrisia] began my walk with elders of the lands of Zapata and Quetzalcoatl, a great teacher, whose story is woven with the Creator Life Force of the same name. Since then, I have worked with Macehual knowledge keepers (elders) to preserve Indigenous knowledge. The elders and my family bonded through ceremonial relationships and kinships. As a member of this kinship, the elders invited me to work with them. They checked me for markings to see if I had inherited el don, the inborn capacity to do healing work that comes from Creation and an inherited lineage. They knew that my family carried a lineage of medicine from three generations of traditional healers who were the offspring of Comanche and Kickapoo peoples who travelled into the chichimecatlalli/la Gran Chichimeca of

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Northwest Mexico, marrying Indigenous peoples in different territories, including Nahuas from near the sacred site of Chicomoztoc. The medicine teachings transpired as I learned to start and keep a fire going at four in the morning, the coals and the fire were my elders’ writings and teacher as Thought emerged through fire. Those designated as guardianes or guardians of sacred ways are charged with protecting, preserving, and ‘presencing’ traditional knowledge. In this medicine history, the guardianes are grounded in relationships with the huehues or elders. Huehue translates as ancient, grand or elder in the Nahuatl language, and the huehues continue the contemporary movement for Indigenous autonomy in Mexico. The elders in this medicine history are the inheritors of the first Zapatistas, their grandparents having fought with, hidden, and doctored Emiliano Zapata. Living elder epistemology When Don Aurelio and Doña Filo came to Indigenous ‘youth and elders’ gatherings’ in Texas in 2000 and 2001, my family made sure that they had food and comfort. Over the years, this familial relationship evolved in ceremony. As a guest in their homes, I have slept on floors, bathed in buckets of cold water, shared meals, feasts, and weddings, and we have held each other in tears while facing death. Together, we have created altars and closed them, and prayed before home fires. I have helped my elder Nana Filo listen to babies’ heartbeats, bless babies and wombs, and assisted as we made ceremonial crosses, and walked through her ancestral homeland planting protection prayers. During this time, Mexican traditional medicine was adapted by new generations; as it gained rapid momentum in the 1990s, Mexican traditional medicine began to be taught outside of the structures of family or communal ownership, through formal institutions. As I listened to elders, I sensed their critique of some of the changes. Practicum was taught by a younger generation of Mexicans; many of them school-educated, some with limited lived experience of Mexican traditional medicine, and not necessarily from an Indigenous community. Numerous courses also incorporated elders in various ways, but not with the power to design the learning process. Formal certification displaced the ancestral protocols that establish authority to heal. I also teach about TIM, both in traditional ways through apprenticeship, and in university settings. Later, I wondered how I impacted traditional knowledge when teaching it in settings and methods far removed from how I had learned it. These experiences and reflections led me to ask, what happens when traditional medicine is taken outside of its place and the ecological context from which it evolved? I sought to explore these changes in various expressions of Indigenous medicine as they were being changed and adopted as public knowledge. What happens when hidden knowledge becomes public? How

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does this transformation of an Indigenous knowledge system impact the power of an Indigenous community or elders in controlling knowledge and/ or its healing? These questions produced a research pilot project: ‘Adaptation and Preservation of Mexican Traditional/Indigenous Medicine’. This oral history project is based on ‘elder epistemology’ or elders’ ways of knowing and how that knowledge becomes inter-generational knowledge (Christensen 2003). Elder epistemology presents Indigenous ways of knowing based on core values embedded in elder knowledge, oral tradition, and participatory learning (ibid.). Inter-generational knowledge is based on respect, reciprocity, and fulfilling responsibilities that create and maintain relationships. In ceremony, we engage in reciprocal protocols with the human, natural, and spiritual worlds through mutual kindness and respect. Ceremonial epistemologies create accountability to elders, the community, and the spirit world. For instance, I teach courses about Indigenous medicine at a university in an Indigenous-led teaching space, the Native American Research and Training Center. Out of respect for Indigenous traditions and to fulfil my responsibility to the knowledge and to the elders, I stress we are not creating traditional healers in my courses, nor are we authorising people with credentials in these ways – that authority lies with the elders and communities from where the knowledge originates. The knowledgeable elders in Macehual country, meanwhile, preserve their lineage of knowledge and maintain their skills and expertise through their ceremonial symbol systems, oral traditions, and traditional protocols that access ancestral worlds in a ceremonial process of knowledge. Based on my work in Morelos, this chapter presents the oral tradition of six Nahua or Macehualmeh traditional doctors and guardians of traditional medicine, including a ticitl (traditional doctor) and his offspring who have experienced these dramatic changes, and his comadre, ceremonial kin, who is a midwife. The elders who participated in this project learned their practice through traditional ways. They, and others like them, are instructors in these newer programmes and some of their offspring have participated in these new forms of instruction, while also learning from their elders. The knowledge keepers and the graduate student who was funded as part of the grant are listed as co-authors in acknowledgement of their authorship in this work. Notably, it is not my intent to collapse Macehual medicine as part of a nationalistic Mexican identity, but rather to provide a critique of the changes in MTM/TIM within the transcultural terrain of Mexico, from the Indigenous foundation from which it evolved.2

Elders and authoritative knowledge In pre-Columbian symbol systems and early colonial documents, elders are depicted as holding up the structures of the universe, processes of transformation, medicine, and teachers of children. Cajete, a Pueblo scholar

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from New Mexico, explicates how elders embody a dimension of thought in Native science (1994, 2000) which results from the accumulation of experience, whereby they become authorities of knowledge. This resonates with how elders are designated as ‘authorities’ in Nahua communities. Elders provide orientation – a mindset, a direction for participating in (spiritual) ecologies. This relationship between elders and levels of thought can help us understand how an Indigenous education arrives at what Cajete (1994) offers as learning from someone whose thoughts derive from wisdom and respect for self, the community, and the environment. Cajete (ibid.) delineates the following levels of thought that range from common thoughts to deep cosmology: First level: Thinking and knowing from your particular physical place. It is also thinking in a particular location, such as an Indigenous village. Second level: Thought that comes from being in relationship with other people and the natural world. Third level: Thought through contemplation and thinking and being in the world with wisdom, humility, and respect. Fourth level: Thought from accumulation of experience – which is embodied by elders. Wisdom is ‘a complex state of knowing founded on accumulated experience’ (Cajete 1994: 48) and is also ‘beyond knowing’. Fifth level: Thought that comes from deep visions and the spirit world. Cajete (1994: 46–48) describes this level as ‘a multi-sensory consciousness’, such as that of medicine people and spiritual leaders. This chapter examines how elder knowledge becomes articulated within a Macehual medicine system among 1.5 million Nahuatl speakers and hundreds of communities of distinct Nahua/Macehual peoples. In this knowledge system, within this particular communal experience in the village of Amatlán de Quetzalcoatl, Morelos, elders represent a dimension of accumulated knowledge that constitutes a foundation of Indigenous logic with an accompanying ethos to preserve and interact with this medicinal knowledge. When practitioners operate within a structure where they direct and influence the production of knowledge over time and in crucial moments of care, such as in birthing, this ‘authoritative knowledge’ (Jordan 1997) is acknowledged by bringing forth a vast realm of memory and experience on which to base their decisions and actions. In examining Indigenous authoritative knowledge in TIM, it is important to ask how knowledge is gained by elders? More specifically, how does this accumulation of experience become expressed in the Macehual healing system? Where does traditional authority lie when the relationships that create Indigenous knowledge are curtailed in the commoditisation of MTM?

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Permiso: asking for permission in this ceremonial participatory research project Elders and others with insight into the relational process of Indigenous knowledge are intrinsic to an Indigenous research framework (Hart 2010). However, this research does not capture the long trajectory of relationships that began far earlier than the exploration of these questions as part of a research project. Don Aurelio Cazarez is called the ‘man with the huevo [egg]’. Known for his powerful limpias, or purification rites with an egg, I have watched him do fifty limpias in a day. These ceremonies reconstitute the life force. He is a granicero, or rain maker, can read the clouds and sky markings, and perform specialised ceremonies related to rain, weather, and water. He collaborates with Doña Filomena Cedillo Parra, a midwife who carries extensive knowledge, and who conducts powerful sobadas or traditional massage. When she touches someone, her hands emanate a dense power of more than one life force. These elders do not broadcast the powers of their medicine. Through their relationships within their communities, through the efficacy of their medicine ways, and because of how they have carried their responsibilities as Indigenous leaders, people come to them for healing at all hours, day and night. In July 2010, as part of our research, we videotaped oral histories over several days. We did not call these ‘interviews,’ but rather ‘gatherings’. They named the process, reviewed all materials, determined what to do with the words condensed on the pages, and confirmed that the process had adhered to their original instructions as Macehual people. During the interview process, the elders discussed that a ceremony was not conducted to initiate the gathering. The tata (grandfather or elder) Aurelio concluded he was not concerned because, he said, ‘we were already united’ across two decades of ceremonies. Typically, whenever a gathering is held, there is a ceremony to open the field of experience. The ceremony initiates through a permiso or a calling of the sacred directions, acknowledging and asking permission from the unseen world and the powers of these spiritual forces. The elders concluded that the permiso had already been done. Before any of this university research was initiated, permission was asked of the elders; their permission, once granted, was sealed with ceremonial smoke and prayer that acknowledged the respectful relationships made, and kept, across the years by all of us. We had undergone a ceremonial protocol for coming to know life: ‘Our respect is the limpia, the sahumador’, said Doña Filo, meaning respect is created through these ceremonies and sacred instruments. Though open-ended questions guided our discussions, the elders often responded indirectly by a spiralling logic of storytelling. Their answers showed their practical knowledge of traditional doctoring and their practiced relationship with land, body, stars, moon, and other elements of life. When they chose to speak, they described how the cycles of the moon are a

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purification process or how the tracking of stars is related to traditional healings. They spoke of the old knowledge contained in the limpia or ceremonial cleansing. ‘Ours is an ancient respect’, says Doña Filo. Respeto antiguo.

Curative history of the rain maker: Granicero Don Aurelio and his Comadre Doña Filomena Don Aurelio’s town is the birthplace of the historic figure Quetzalcoatl. An old form of Meso-American medicine heals with the power of the creator Quetzalcoatl. As Don Aurelio states, Quetzalcoatl was the first nagual or spirit guide. The highest position attained by certain spiritual teachers was that of another living Quetzalcoatl. Such high designations continue today, but rarely are openly asserted. Don Aurelio began healing as a youth. As a boy of seven, he was struck by lightning while riding his mule. Survivors of such an occurrence, having passed the test of lightning, are often destined to become rain makers or graniceros, gaining the ability to work with water, including lightning and rain. Their powers can bring rain or divert storms, even hurricanes. As such, Don Aurelio is called ‘el hombre del rayo’, the man of lightning. At age 14, elders would bring Don Aurelio children to heal with the limpias. Don Aurelio spent most of his life as an Indigenous political activist and a leader in land struggles. He serves on the elders’ council and travels extensively, except when it is time for him to plant and harvest the cornfield. He descends from a family of traditional healers. At his adobe home, the location of his family’s traditional temazcal (ceremonial lodge) leads to their consultation room. The Atekokolli clinic emerged from this healing room and now has become an Indigenous clinic in another part of the village. Shelves in the room hold various plants and some are lined with ten or so glasses containing huevos that Don Aurelio utilises as part of his practice. In ceremonial sweepings, the egg is passed over the body of patients and used to diagnose maladies, imbalance, and if the limpia was effective. Sometimes he has five people waiting for him on his patio at all hours. In prayer he has seen the clouds come to announce rain; a vision that sees clouds far in the atmosphere that is beyond the sight of most humans. His water prayers have brought water to drying lakes. The Atekokolli project emerged in 1991 from a youth group dedicated to preserving Indigenous medicine and traditional knowledge. Now, the clinic provides Indigenous and alternative medicine, with a plant nursery, traditional gardens with Nahuatl and Spanish signage, a herbal dispensary, and ceremonial structures and altars for doctoring. While there are nominal fees for various services, the pay system is flexible so that no one from their village is turned away from the highly utilised clinic. Meanwhile, Don Aurelio continues in a traditional manner, doctoring from his home. Don Aurelio often instructs on energies, powers, and the forces in the universe as part of Indigenous medicine. He teaches, as he says, ‘through

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the elements’. He speaks of how to rebalance the universe through limpias. There are thousands of ways to do limpias based on family knowledge and the healer’s own gifts that derive from direct relationships with the cosmos obtained through prayer, visions, and dreams. Often, an egg, plants, or stones are rubbed on the person to purify and strengthen their energy. As the elder said, ‘Limpias rebalance through nature’. Don Aurelio is compadres of Doña Filomena. They have ceremonial kinship through ‘Mama Fi’s’ temazcalli, a type of sweat lodge. Such kinship ties reflect the depth of responsibility that comes with Macehual medicine, where the temazcal is acknowledged as being alive, accompanied by nature spirits, and inhabited by sacred guardians who oversee spiritual governance. Both of the elders carry the title médicos indígenas, or Indigenous doctors, an official designation recognised by the Mexican government and one conferred by the practitioner’s own community governing body. Mama Fi can cure infertility, set bones, is an experienced herbalist, and has intervened in domestic violence. Both of the elders have been active in a council of Indigenous doctors from Morelos. She has attended monthly training for traditional midwives. She credits a great deal of her knowledge of traditional medicine to the late elder ‘tata Ricardo’ of Xoxocotla, Morelos, who was from this town widely known for its ancestral medicinal knowledge. She also indicates she has benefitted from workshops and gatherings on Meso-American medicine and MTM as well as state and federal programmes that offer training in biomedical medicine for Indigenous and traditional midwives. Such training has generated controversy, mainly about the way the medical model is displacing traditional midwifery. Don Aurelio’s son Aurelio, daughters Emma and Hortencia, and nephew Raúl participated in Indigenous medicine gatherings and workshops provided in the newer era of instruction. Many of these programmes initially had elders as teachers; over time, they have been replaced by the younger generation of healers. Some traditional people are critical of such programmes when the knowledgeable elders are not given the respect they deserve. They have seen elders ‘treated as children’ for being illiterate or not conversant at a particular level of verbal skills or for challenging organisers and criticising fees that make traditional medicine unaffordable and inaccessible. At one 2005 traditional medicine conference in the state of Morelos, the revered elder Doña Vicenta Villalba of Amatlán was never invited to speak. Additionally, some elders and traditional people simply are not comfortable with creating and reading written materials and, therefore, decline to participate in these new settings in significant ways. Many are dying with that knowledge. Another criticism is that the gatherings are no longer affordable for traditional peoples and that TIM is overshadowed by other modalities. Some elders distinguish between what is Indigenous medicine, with its own movement and logic, and that which is being blended with other forms of traditional medicine from other cultures. Don Aurelio and Doña Filo practice Macehual medicine. Some are quick to proclaim themselves traditional

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healers and teachers after attending only a few workshops or completing a few years of training. Conversely, Don Aurelio speaks of el don. One is endowed with it. ‘The don comes from a ray in the sky’, he says. ‘It is a ray of light that comes from above.’ He checks for marks on the body that indicate defensas or defenses that make a person capable of interacting with energy and spiritual powers in a more potent way. ‘El curandero nace, no se hace’, he says. A traditional healer is born, not made. ‘We are of a lineage.’ This understanding of who gets to heal is significantly different from the practice of paying for a workshop and gaining credentials after a short period of instruction. Traditional healers are born to heal and have a direct connection to healing powers. Traditionally, they inherit this gift from prior generations of healers, such as a grandparent; it may skip generations only to resurface later. The concept of inheriting a lineage of vital force from your family is pre-Columbian (López Austin 1988). Other ways that people come to heal include initiations from the spiritual realm through dreaming, finding a sacred object that indicates they are selected for the healing path or surviving a sacred test such as being struck by lightning, and apprenticeship with elder healers. Such traditional beliefs do not diminish other forms of healing, but serve to distinguish an Indigenous paradigm.

Where does authority lie? In traditional Macehual knowledge, place is where the lineage of knowledge begins and flourishes. Knowledge emerges through the elements. As Don Aurelio said, ‘We are of the plants’. The elders know of these places where nature provides an opening to other dimensions that offer spiritual forces to help with healing. These special places allow apprentices to experience medicine at fertility spirit places and ceremonial altars. Elders – as inheritors and guardians of ancestral knowledge from prior generations – are the key links to these places through their lineage, their stories, and memories of their ancestors. It is a consciousness that takes place in a particular location that contains spiritual strata. What is thinking and learning like in a village, a particular location or the ecosystem of the forest? Doña Filo stated that the best setting for teaching is a sala tradicional – traditional room – with three walls, the fourth side being the open air. Don Aurelio, who taught courses at Universidad Nahuatl in an outdoor ceremonial setting, as well as in a more traditional classroom, speaks of places saturated with power. Don Aurelio imparts ceremonial knowledge based on the circumstance and ability of the student. Only a few are designated to engage the deeper recesses of the spiritual world. The different ways traditional medicine is taught is the source of some tension. The classroom model is not the way most elders learned – they learned from other elders, from physical sacrifice, from sustained interactions with place, and from the very spirit of the natural elements. ‘We suffered, moved up and down mountains’ said Doña Filo. ‘It is not traditional if you did

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not learn it in a traditional way. It is not Indigenous. It is traditional if you learned from the elders (los abuelos), the grandfathers and grandmothers.’ Thought through relationships Traditional medicine is learned with elders who are part of one’s extended kinship, which includes the plants, minerals, animals, and the four elements of life (water, air, earth, fire). Such kinship relations are key in sustaining relationships in Indigenous communities. A student learns through interacting with relatives and lived knowledge. Sometimes the teachings take place at opportune times, such as while travelling to the market, over coffee, in the back of a truck on the way to a ceremony, or while in a hands-on treatment to palpate the womb. Doña Filo says: ‘We learned naturally. What they learned is copied, from buying books. They go to universities, big schools. We learned from our own people, the Indigenous people.’ Thus, this knowledge becomes distant from the relationships of being Indigenous, and distant from the life-to-life ancestral connections, the living relationships over generations that preserved and generated Indigenous knowledge in the first place. This form of knowledge and teaching is ‘nothing but a copy’. Doña Filo, who well knows the form of training provided by the federal and state authorities for midwives, distinguishes between learning from a text and from oral traditions, from knowledge that courses through the body, and from movement upon the land. ‘Ours is a verbal course’, she said. Mama Fi, Don Aurelio, and Aurelio Jr say that without elders, what is taught is not MTM, but natural (akin to naturopathic) medicine. It is a subtle distinction with important consequences; it points to how ‘alternative medicine’ in the United States is created by how people come to know healing ways. This change happens when certain knowledge is displaced from popular knowledge and settings, such as family, kinship or ethnic group, and becomes a commodity and merges into profit-making enterprise. The elders distinguish natural medicine as holding Indigenous knowledge about healing but without key relationships through which the knowledge is experienced, thereby losing its unique Indigenous character. Meso-American medicine functions within systems that carry their own internal balance. Certain people may have the gift of plant knowledge, while others, such as Don Aurelio, have the gift of doing limpias. His grandchildren know that some of them are designated to do limpias, while others have the inherited capacity of working with plants. Don Aurelio notes that his children are the fifth generation of traditional healers in his family. This lineage, particularly as it courses with an accumulation of knowledge and experience in elders’ lives, represents that ‘fifth dimension’ of knowledge that contains the fields of multisensory consciousness of Meso-American world views. This is grounded in the memory and practice of inherited abilities, an endowment received from the natural world and its unseen outer dimensions.

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The younger traditional healers are conferred with the descendency to this knowledge ‘We learned along the path because there were no notebooks and pencils, it was as we walked and they showed us plants’, said Raúl. ‘The elders are a school.’ He continued: Their form of teaching is not done at a school or in a classroom. It is done as we walk. And as it has always been the case, whenever we ask them something, they begin to talk and say things about a plant that cures. We never write down anything. We have to learn and remember. And little by little that part begins to develop, from that energy, that strength that is no longer mentioned. We have in mind what we are going to do, what we are going to use and the expression of all the ways, the plants and what needs to be done to cure this person. Well, the other part is what you hear from them. How they own that medicine, that knowledge, how they defend it, how they criticise those that take that knowledge, manipulate it, and give it another direction for another purpose. They are the ones that keep it and point out the ones who are not practising it well. It is correct. Both Aurelio and Raúl recognise the usefulness of the knowledge they learned within these newer forms of educational programmes, but most of this additional formal education augmented the pre-existing Indigenous knowledge that was passed on to them from their elders. In the classroom, the youth noted that they were with people who had never experienced a limpia. Some of the programmes they attended had Indigenous traditional healers and elders as teachers while others did not. Their exposure to these different learning situations led them to realise how much of this knowledge was already within their family. Elders such as Doña Vicenta, their greataunt Doña Leocadia Ramírez Cazarez, elders from Morelos, and their mothers were all teachers of ‘secret knowledge’. They saw the elders’ great love for the medicine and for people. ‘We began to realise and value what we had’ said Raúl. One can still learn from within community because of general knowledge that exists in a family. As Raúl explains, ‘Brinca de vida a vida’. Knowledge moves or jumps from life to life. So, the formalised programmes on MTM can serve to amplify knowledge of traditional healers who already are formed by the knowledge within their communal context. However, these Macehual medicine people advise that Indigenous medicine must rely on original instructions that help to determine who can heal. Aurelio Jr noted that: ‘It is not traditional medicine unless they have the inheritance from their family or the don. Then the classes reinforce the knowledge. It’s not traditional without traditional education: From parent to child or grandparents to children’. Maintaining their practices of Macehual medicine, the elders support the younger generation through teaching about Indigenous medicine while the

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young apprentices also learn other therapies. They are responding to these changes on their own terms – from within Indigenous relationships, structures, and forms of governance. Macehual medicine remains grounded by knowing their ancestral lands and through spiritual genealogy; a lineage that has been authorised from the spirit world and elders. I asked Doña Filo if what we – their direct students and lineage – learned was traditional Indigenous medicine. She responded, ‘Yes. You all learned traditional medicine because you learned it with us, the elders. You sought us out, the grandmothers and the grandfathers.’ Indigenous medicine is the relationship to the natural world and original instructions, including our respect for elders.

The physicality of indigenous knowledge Part of what distinguishes how we learned is rooted in how we use our bodies. The great transformation occurring in MTM includes the diminished presence of knowledge that has coursed through the life and flesh of an elder over time. The life thread to lineage and el don is intricately connected to the multi-tiered structures of the cosmos. Those who carry this lineage are connected to concepts of land–body–cosmos as conjoined signs of experience. Such knowing is embedded with the physical sacrifice and physicality of being Indigenous people and ways of acquiring knowledge or asking for an answer. Ceremonies may require great physical fortitude for knowledge gained not by thinking but through doing; through such physical exertion that our minds recede to arrive at depths of knowing and being that transcend accepted reaches of the body and mind. Underscoring this physical sacrifice is the commitment made by the traditional healer, who must be available at all hours, and be willing to doctor under challenging conditions, and traditionally with no set monetary fee. The ultimate sacrifice is to give one’s life, as Doña Filo has given. In 2006, her three sons were attacked and one was killed in retaliation for her role in protecting her forests from over-cutting. ‘My family’s valour’ she says, ‘is my pride’. This ultimate consequence of being Indigenous peoples is the relationality with the natural world. It is an important foundation of Indigenous authoritative knowledge. Many Indigenous peoples have teachings related to sacred directions that serve as philosophical and cosmological maps for how the world stays balanced. They convey more than the cardinal points for each direction; they are alignments of certain characteristics and roles that provide balance for the mind, body, spirit, and the four elements, as well as between male and female, youth and elders, and self and community (which includes the natural world). When Don Aurelio calls the sacred directions, he is asking for balance across the coordinates, and their sacred precincts, in their totality. These sacred orientations help Indigenous people find their place in the world. The elders are sacred ties to our Original relationships with life. They have

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a way of speaking in ceremony that touches the deep order of life. Their prayers permeate the mysteries of life, unbounding the spiritual and the physical, and making unseen geographies concrete. When an elder passes we mourn both the loss of thousands of years of continuity, and of access to the possibilities that manifest from unseen realities. We especially mourn those with a generosity of spirit, who teach us with love. Without elders, or as a result of their diminished influence in maintaining Indigenous knowledge, access to that sacred source becomes skewed, potentially limiting how we experience the spiritual world of the ancestors. When elders function with integrity and wisdom, they orientate the next generations through the ongoing flux of change; one with seemingly rapid, global velocity.

Conclusion: the axis of knowledge Traditional medicine, knowledge, and skill have been held by extended families and/or communally in Mexico, prior to colonisation to the present. As the practice of learning MTM moves from a traditional education model that is relational to purchased education, the significance of the learning process is slowly being replaced. Aurelio offered this example: ‘Esto viene de tradición, de transmisión oral’. He stressed that this learning is through tradition and oral transmission. You can learn the form of doing healing ceremonies, but you will not arrive at the spiritual depths from which energies and powers emerge. Consequently, if elders as authorities are a key distinction in the production of Indigenous knowledge, what implications does this have for the teaching of Indigenous knowledges in universities, where elders are rarely primary teachers? As Wilson (2008) notes of relationality, Indigenous knowledge is the relationship itself. The knowledge authority of Indigenous elders also has ramifications for protecting original medicine amid ‘transborder’ knowledges, where Indigenous knowledge permeates a national culture that has been created as a result of de-tribalisation. Without elders and Indigenous structures in place, how can authority over traditional knowledge be maintained and asserted in response to the globalised commoditisation of Indigenous knowledges? Rather than applying a tribal–non-tribal dualism to the complexity of epistemic authority, what should be considered is the growing impact of market forces on a form of healing that was largely maintained outside of profit driven systems in a porous atmosphere of Indigeneity. It remains in the hands of Indigenous peoples and family lineages to maintain those original teachings. Practising the medicine correctly will serve to protect it, advises Hortencia, the daughter of Don Aurelio. The lineage has its own internal form of protection for its continuance and, as such, knowledge operates with a system that is alive with intelligence. The family notes that people came to them to correct maladies and disequilibrium which have occurred after a spa treatment, where more harm than good was done by practitioners who mixed imported healing ways with the

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original medicine of Mexico. This original medicine has its own coherence and a rationale based on thousands of years of practice. Indigenous peoples are the ‘vertebrae of tradition’ by which the resilient nucleus of Meso-America has survived and reconstituted after attempts to curtail Indigenous peoples and their knowledges through conquest, colonisation, and evangelisation (López Austin 2012: 6). Now traditional peoples must contend with systems that seek to gain access to their knowledge in ways that may not be aligned with the originating fields of knowledge. The relationships that created the accumulated knowledge of Meso-America remain a core axis through which traditional medicine keepers may maintain Indigenous knowledge within Indigenous healing systems, or multiple systems. New generations must determine the calibrating values and relationships that will make the world of their ancestors and elders present, whether in the knowledge system of original medicines or as Indigenous medicine interacts with new systems of knowledge. Connection to our elders is part of our knowing. Postscript ‘Where are you going?’ An elder hitting 100 asks me as she sits near the town store in a wheelchair and wearing a red ceremonial bandana across her forehead. It is the ceremonial time of honouring the spirits and deceased. ‘To the cemetery to see the grave of Aurelio’, I answered her. ‘The doctor? Oh life is so, so sad’, she says. During the editing of this chapter, young Aurelio passed away. In Amatlán, he is known simply as el doctor. He was to lead his village into the next century. He always had a laugh and sacrificed his life to serve his village. A year earlier, we conducted a ceremony for the elders Doña Vicenta and Doña Leocadia, who had passed on. The legacy of the clinic he built with his own hands lives on as his young nephews and his siblings step up to continue the lineage. ‘He was magnificent’, said Nana Filo. She cried as she told me that young Aurelio had gone into spirit at age 39, saying: ‘My teacher is gone.’ Perhaps he is a presence from the medicine realm of Creation and the recalibrating relationships of original instructions. This project was funded by the Office of Vice President of Research at the University of Arizona. A special thanks to Drs Jennie Joe and Jonathan Hook for contributing insights into this chapter.

Notes 1. According to Garcia-Moreno and Patrinos (2011), Mexico has 10 million Indigenous peoples or about 11 percent of its population. Native elders argue that there is a vast undercount. 2. Where possible, I denote the more Native-specific systems, such as the Macehual healing system addressed here. When examining the dynamic changes in traditional medicine across a diversity of peoples, MTM will refer to Mexican Traditional Medicine.

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References Bonfil Batalla, G 1996, Mexico profundo: Reclaiming a civilization, Translations from Latin America series, University of Texas Press, Institute of Latin American Studies, Austin. Brush, SB 1996, ‘Whose knowledge, whose genes and whose rights?’ in D Stabinsky & SB Brush (eds.), Valuing local knowledge: Indigenous peoples and intellectual property, Island Press, Washington, DC, pp. 1–24. Cajete, G 1994, Look to the mountain: An ecology of Indigenous education, Kivaki Press, Durango. ———2000, Native science: Natural laws of interdependence, Clear Light Publishers, Santa Fe. Christensen Ackley, R 2003, ‘Cultural context and evaluation: A balance of form and function’, Session 1: Evaluation issues relating to the academic achievement of Native American students, National Science Foundation, viewed 10 March 2018, www.nsf. gov/pubs/2003/nsf03032/session1.pdf. Códice Borbónico 1979, Manuscrito Mexicano de la Biblioteca del Palais Bourbon: libro adivinatorio y ritual ilustrado, publicado en facsímil, Siglo Veintiuno, México, D.F. de Sahagún, B 1950–1982, General history of the things of New Spain: Florentine Codex, Monographs of the School of American Research, no. 14, pt. 1–13, Books 1–13, trans. Jo Anderson & CE Dibble, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Garcia-Moreno, VA & Patrinos, AP 2011, Mexico country brief No. 7: Indigenous peoples, World Bank, viewed 28 March 2018, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/126671468280475397/pdf/647670BRI0700B0C00Mexico0brief00328.pdf. Gonzales, P 2012, Red medicine: Traditional Indigenous rites of birthing and healing, University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Hart, MA 2010, ‘Indigenous worldviews, knowledge, and research: The development of an Indigenous research paradigm’, Journal of Indigenous Voices in Social Work, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–16. Klein, CF 1976, The face of the earth: Frontality in two-dimensional Mesoamerican art, Outstanding dissertations in the fine arts series, Garland Publishing, New York. Jordan, B 1997, ‘Authoritative knowledge and its construction’, in Childbirth and authoritative knowledge: Cross-cultural perspectives, RE Davis-Floyd & CF Sargent (eds.), University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 55–79. Levins Morales, A 1997, The historian as curandera, Michigan State University and Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan. Lillo Macina, V 2007, El temezkalli Mexicano. Su significación simbólica y su uso psicoterapéutico pasado y presente, Plaza y Valdés Editores, México, D.F. López Austin, A 1988, The human body and ideology: Concepts of the ancient Nahuas, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. ———2012, Cosmivisión y pensamiento indígena, Conceptos y fenómenos fundementales de nuestro tiempo, Universidad Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, México, D.F. Wilson, S 2008, Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods, Fernwood Publishing, Canada. Viesca Treviño, C 2001, ‘Curanderismo in Mexico and Guatemala. Its historical evolution from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century’, in BR Huber & AR Sandstrom (eds.), Mesoamerican healers, University of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 47–63.

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Everything is love Mobilising knowledges, identities, and places as Bawaka Bawaka Country including Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd, Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, and Marnie Graham

Introduction In postcolonial spaces, thorny questions of romanticisation and essentialism remain central to Indigenous politics. Environmentalists, Indigenous rights activists, and academics are rightly called to account for imposing romanticised and essentialised versions of Indigenous peoples and their world views, and for mobilising these identity politics for their own political ends (Brosius 1997; Langton 1999). In this chapter we start to unravel these tricky questions of romanticisation and essentialism with reference to our Indigenous-non-Indigenous, more-than-human research collective. Our collective works together with marr, a love that binds us together, to and as Country; committed to working as kin and centring Yolŋu ways of being and doing. Yet, as we do this, we navigate difficult territory as we try to minimise the colonising potential of romanticisation. Here, we share how we navigate this fraught ground, take you inside how we ‘do’ research within our collective, and delve into the politics of representation in research with Indigenous peoples. We ponder the generative romance of co-becoming Country and discuss how our collective understands romance and romanticisation. We reflect on how our work embraces risk and vulnerability, so that our collective can strive, however imperfectly, to remain true to marr, to the love that binds us together.

Everything is love, it all comes under love As a Yolŋu (Indigenous) and ŋapaki (non-Indigenous), more-than-human collective, the authors of this chapter work together at, with, and as Bawaka Country1 in North East Arnhem Land, Australia.2 Our collective is bound together in many ways: by Rom (Law which provides rules for living), by gurrutu (kinship ties, both blood and adopted), by wetj (responsibilities shared with each other and with Country),

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and ultimately by marr (love).3 Our relationships with each other and with Country are infused by deep emotional connections. Our work, our writing, our being, doing and co-becoming together, all, as author Merrkiyawuy says, ‘come under love’. This love, this marr, is deep and multifaceted. As Merrkiyawuy explains: Marr is the feeling that comes from the chest, the middle of the body of a person … the feeling is from the centre of your heart, your soul, the centre of a person’s body. Marr is the foundation for many Yolŋu Matha verbs of emotion including to love, to be concerned, to trust and to treat someone respectfully (Christie & Greatorex 1986). Marr is both human and more-than-human. It is a Yolŋu person’s love for Country and Country for them. It is the ties of gurrutu, of kinship and responsibility. It is the foundation of singing, dancing, ceremony, and songlines; the cycles of song and grief that bring people and Country into being through co-becoming (Bawaka Country et al. 2016). Marr is the sounds and the very specific smells of Country. It is the smell made when geese come to the dry swamp and eat the bulbs of the water chestnuts. It is knowing the stories of Country and knowing that Country. Further, raki is the string that holds everything, including marr, together through the generations. Raki binds us. While the raki of marr binds our collective and holds us together, it is neither a simple nor unproblematic binding – we navigate complex and fraught territory between romance and romanticisation. The potential for reproducing a sentimental, essentialising, colonising love is strong; the dangers myriad. This is one of the realities of living in a world infused with colonising processes. To honour marr, we must acknowledge our differences as well as our points of connection, the active ways colonisation continues within and beyond our collective, and the responsibilities and complexities that bind us together, that make marr rich and real. Yet bound up with marr are dangers of romanticism, essentialism and sentimentality as deeply colonising (Rose 1999). While our collective aims to centre and respond to Yolŋu ways of being and knowing – the knowledges and priorities of Bawaka – we, especially the three academics of our collaboration, are simultaneously concerned that we may gloss over, ignore, or inadvertently reinforce the challenges, injustices, missteps, complexities, grief, and processes of re-colonisation. The academics, for example, need to grapple with the processes by which they mobilise their love with Bawaka and are concerned that good intentions in this regard are not enough. Indeed, ‘good intentions’ have often paved the road to hell for colonised peoples (Howitt & Stevens 2005). A key aspect of our troubled position is the ‘we’ of our collaboration. While we acknowledge the complexities of our Yolŋu and non-Yolŋu positionalities, and our more-thanhuman connectivities, our right to speak with each other and as Bawaka is

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potentially fraught. For example, does a colonising ‘talking for’ each other occur – intentionally or accidentally, within ‘our’ control and beyond it (Louis 2007; Smith 1999)? Do the academics ‘hide behind’ their Yolŋu and more-than-human collaborators – gaining a sense of prestige and authenticity which ‘sets them apart’? In this chapter, we discuss how our collective works together to honour marr, consciously aiming to avoid the pitfalls of romanticisation. We reflect deeply on our collaboration and the ways we mobilise our work and co-become knowledges (Kapoor 2004). We draw inspiration from Verran’s (2013: 158) call to attend deeply to the ways we think and do together, digging ‘deeper into the event to adduce some of the specificities and particularities of difference without resorting to a meta-framing that explains the other’s knowledge away’. Building on our previous reflections (Bawaka Country et al. 2018; Lloyd et al. 2012; Suchet-Pearson et al. 2013), we here lay bare the familiar, day-to-day of our collaboration, and attend to the different ways we come into our collective. We begin by discussing the all-too-real dangers of romanticising and essentialising the identity positions and relationships that accompany our work. We then describe some of the deep emotional attachments that hold us and our collaboration together. Finally, we explore how marr and raki underpin the work we are trying to do. We interrogate the processes by which we represent our work; who the ‘we’ is in our collaboration; the mechanics of how we write together; and the protocols and ethics that underlie our work. We identify themes of trust, risk and vulnerability and find that our work is inevitably messy and uneven. But, we hope, in the end and amidst that mess, our collaboration is deeply respectful and collaborative, and we collectively and pointedly strive to be true to marr.

Romanticising, essentialising, colonising Romanticisation has long been seen by Indigenous people and postcolonial thinkers as a deeply colonising process. Imagining colonised peoples in a stereotypically ‘romantic’ vision denies their diverse agencies, identities and lived experiences, and has served to validate colonial policies of expansion and appropriation. In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said noted how ‘imaginative processes’ are key in understanding the geography of imperialism and colonisation in which ‘others’ are produced and regulated by Western knowledges, institutions and scholarship: ‘we would not have had empire itself without important philosophical and imaginative processes at work in the production […] of space’ (Said 1978: 216). In the Australian context, these ‘imaginative processes’ have often taken a dual aspect with respect to Indigenous people and various colonial projects. On the one hand, Aboriginal people have been constructed as ‘lacking’ – primitive, an inevitably dying race, incompatible with ‘modernity’ – and,

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on the other hand, romanticised as fundamentally connected to ‘pristine’ nature, and as noble environmental warriors, holding all the answers to the environmental ills produced by industrialised society. Romanticised visions imagine Aboriginal people as relics, placed in a timeless space where past and present were one (Bilous 2013; Nygren 1999). In this way, indigeneity is regulated and produced (Howitt, Muller, & Suchet-Pearson 2009; Said 1978) as singular and cohesive; an ‘other’ that is defined in contrast to a rational, male, heterosexual, white self (Cameron, de Leeuw, & Greenwood 2009; Graham 2015; Rowland 2004). Diverse experiences of diverse people with diverse epistemologies and ontologies, strategies for navigating colonisation, and experiences of colonisation cannot measure up to such constructions of ‘authentic’ indigeneity and those without the (imagined) romantic and essential qualities are rendered illegitimate. Yet at the same time, Indigenous peoples and/or their allies may strategically deploy essentialised identities to meet social justice goals or to emphasise Indigenous strengths in the context of a pervading discourse of lack and dysfunction (Spivak 1996). Certainly, constructions of Aboriginal people as inherently dysfunctional have propelled horrific state interventions, from the Stolen Generations to the ongoing ‘intervention’ in Australia.4 In contrast, our collective aims to support strategically positive visions for and of Aboriginal people. As Merrkiyawuy says, ‘one of the other reasons we want to write this is to say we have songlines – they are strong, our culture is strong, everything is strong’. To speak of strength, then, is an important political interpolation. However, there is a fine line between depictions of strength within a diverse and changing world, and romanticised visions that gloss over ongoing issues and injustices. The ethics of strategic essentialism are both troubled and troubling. Even as our writing together strives to be honest, un-simplistic and un-essentialising, there are things that we do not share with our readers, for to do so may undermine the very important messages we are trying to put forth; things too private to be written. Knowing what to include and what to leave out is an important part of the research process in order for us to be true to raki, but it also leaves us open to producing romanticised representations of Yolŋu life in Bawaka and essentialised versions of Yolŋu identities. In addition, we cannot control the ways our messages are received and used. Our work could be seen, for example, as an idealised representation of ‘remote’ and ‘authentic’ Aboriginal people, deeply connected to Country. Such representations can exclude the experiences of other Indigenous people, such as urban-based Aboriginal people, who may not be able to share in some of these connections due to differing histories of violence, dispossession and colonisation. As we write of Yolŋu ontologies, we are aware this could invisibilise those deeply violent colonising experiences that have disrupted the multigenerational knowledges of many Indigenous peoples, for whom the ability to speak their language and maintain their songs are under sustained attack.

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Essentialised identities deny the realities of Aboriginal people’s lives and leave them open to manipulation. Merrkiyawuy explains the need for Yolŋu people to be strategic in their engagements: We want to talk about the struggles we face every day. We are Yolŋu but sometimes we feel like we are powerless. We have the power here; strong culture, strong language, strong; but sometimes we feel powerless because people, whether other Yolŋu or ŋapaki or academics or governments, they use people like us. We are not perfect, we fight. […] We are racing, always racing to be contemporary Yolŋu as well as old Yolŋu, the cultural Yolŋu. Involving diverse people with multiple identities, our collective clearly has many complex things to think about in how we represent ‘us’. And in how this ‘us’ is read. We have been confronted, for example, by reviewers who assume the ‘we’ of our articles is only the academic ‘we’ and assume the involvement of Yolŋu collective members is tokenistic. Such assumptions are deeply offensive and colonising. We have responded by increasing explanations of our roles and the nature of our collective, and by Laklak, Ritjilili, Merrkiyawuy, Banbapuy, and Djawundil co-presenting papers with the academics at conferences and workshops. However, the lack of respect for Yolŋu co-authors runs deep and we are concerned that our explanations are not enough. Tying our efforts together over time has been the way marr has developed and deepened between us. So where, then, do we place marr in our work and in our co-becoming? What is this marr that binds us to each other and to Country in different ways, acknowledging our vastly different relations to Country, as Yolŋu and ŋapaki, as Elder and younger, as human and non-human? What of the raki that binds Country differentially but nonetheless tightly to all of us through co-becoming? How do Yolŋu members of the collective communicate marr in ways that respect strength and continuity without feeding myths of white romanticism? And how do the ŋapaki members of our collective feel, do, and talk about marr without colonising, essentialising, and ‘speaking for’ or ‘hiding behind’ ‘the other’? How do we all acknowledge the strengths and challenges of contemporary life for Yolŋu people – inspiring, strong Yolŋu people who also make mistakes, do not fit stereotypes, surprise and challenge, grieve, fight, disagree, whose children suffer, whose land is mined, whose people are incarcerated, commit suicide, and die of preventable diseases? How do we make visible the lives and feelings of academic geographers, acknowledging often conflictual, tense positionalities and not ignoring potentially flawed and compromised aspirations and ambitions?

Be(com)ing in love Marr is a deep emotional attachment, a wrapping and a binding. Marr is loving your family, your land, your life, loving who you are and where you come from, loving yourself and having that pride in yourself. Marr is the

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love and raki the string that is the family tree. Everyone is connected through marr and through raki. With raki comes responsibility, to each other and to Country, which after all is part of the same thing. There is a responsibility to love, to act, to respond when needed, to care. This is true for both Yolŋu family and adopted ŋapaki family, so that when ŋapaki people are adopted into a Yolŋu family and kinship network they have obligations and responsibilities including, when appropriate, love. For the sisters – Laklak, Merrkiyawuy, Ritjilili and Banbapuy – and for their daughter, Djawundil, everything is a whole, everything is one. So, for all of us, even when we do our own djama, our own work, we are really one big living thing. That is why everyone goes through the same things – sorrow, happiness, crying – together. We are all connected. For ŋapaki members of the collective, marr and raki cannot equate to a sense of entitlement. This is marr, after all, not stalking, not colonising, not an acquisition. So modesty, and a sense of limits is important. Some ŋapaki take too much; take an expression of marr and raki as permission to go to Country, to act as Yolŋu. This abuses marr and raki. Our collective aspires to a more modest co-becoming, with limits. As Banbapuy says, ‘We have taught you so many insights. You’ve learnt all those insights because it’s made you understand, made you humble as well.’ Banbapuy elaborates on the meaning of Kate, Sandie, and Sarah’s connection: You walk in and we are teaching you in a good way, a better way. And it’s also establishing a relationship. […] [W]e learn from you and you learn from us, because then people can see you are part of the family. And responsibility, yeah. When we go to your country, you do the same for us. You guide us. When you come here, you are part of the community because you are adopted into the family—we call you by kin, because they know who you are adopted by, you are not a stranger. We are part of a journey together. The connections of marr and raki can be thought of as electricity; as wires and power. That power is connected. It goes to the light, goes to the washing machine, or goes to the television. It is a connection, a joining with someone. So when the light is on, the power goes through. Everyone who is connected, has their lights on – joining, just like electricity. Marr is multi-sensory and more-than-human. Smelling, crying, feeling, sensing are kinds of love as well as expressions of love. Marr is the specific feelings of being on, with and as Country. It is Country itself and loving back: the marr of mullet for mullet, of mullet for the person who will eat it and of that person who is nourished, the welcome call of the guwak (koel bird), the warning of the gukguk (pigeon) when the tides come in. These are all connected – love for self is love for Country and vice versa – because, when you sing about your Country, you are claiming yourself and Country because you are one.

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Banbapuy invites ŋapaki to understand connection with Country through an understanding of the connection and intense love a parent might have for a child. She asks: ‘What would you do if you lost your yothu, your child? What would you do?’ As a collective of mothers, we all relate to these emotions. Marr and these understandings become fundamental to our work, helping to cut across our differences, across inevitable tensions and difficulties. There are other ways of expressing marr. Djawundil shares her love with Bawaka through platforms such as Facebook. Her feed is full of expressions of love and joyous reunions: ‘Where we love is home, our feet may leave but not our hearts, missing you Bawaka’ (Facebook post 2014). She also focuses on generations of family, strong women, and strong relationships with ŋapaki: ‘Making friends with ngapaki is all about friendship.’ In 2016, Djawundil looked at the words most used in her Facebook posts (see Figure 3.1). Her most used word: Love. Our layers of emotional attachment to each other and to more-thanhuman worlds are complex and messy; as illustrated through the way that

Figure 3.1 Djawundil illustrating her Bawaka marr through a Facebook word cloud. Source: Maymuru n.d.

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people, Country and things move through complex, contingent, and intense worlds. Marr and other emotions such as grief, frustration, and yearning are all part of the more-than-human co-becoming of Country (Bawaka Country et al. 2016). For Country is affective. It is the ‘nourishment for the body, mind and spirit; heart’s ease’ (Rose 1996: 7). And love plays a central role in this co-becoming. Acknowledging marr and other emotions is central to what it means to live, to be, to co-become in relationship with Yolŋu people and Country (Ahmed 2004). We now move into laying bare some of the inconsistencies, negotiations and inevitable missteps that we take as our collaboration tries to honour marr in ways that avoid romanticising people and relationships. For while we try to honour and centre marr, we do not always succeed. Sharing some of our individual and collective vulnerabilities here is a potentially risky move; highlighting where we fail to live up to expectations, others’ and our own. Yet we see risk and vulnerability as key ingredients in marr (Brown 2012) and so we take these sometimes calculated, sometimes invisible risks, and make ourselves vulnerable. Critically, we place our trust in each other to produce a meaningful and fruitful collaboration, which will hopefully, in some ways, contribute towards more caring and just morethan-human relationships.

Going public Ten years ago, Sandie, Kate, and Sarah met with Laklak and Djawundil at Bawaka for the first time to get to know each other and see if we wanted to work together further (we met Ritjilili, Banbapuy, and Merrkiyawuy on later visits). Our relationship had a rocky start – we all later admitted how nervous we were, worried about cross-cultural blunders, and indeed a misunderstanding around what items Sandie, Sarah, and Kate could bring to Bawaka nearly ended our relationship there and then! The academics had their first experience of taking responsibility as they were told off by Laklak in an intense conversation that ended with a realisation that a misunderstanding had occurred. Despite, or perhaps because of, the way this was handled, a sense of friendship and an emerging respect, trust, and honesty became the basis for our collaboration. On later trips this extended to kinship through adoption into the Yolŋu extended more-than-human family (Suchet-Pearson et al. 2013). A key ingredient early on in our collaboration was a common sense of social justice and a desire to contribute to thinking and actions that could impact positively in a range of ways. For Merrkiyawuy, some of the key drivers for her work include wanting to talk about the struggles Yolŋu face every day: Living in two worlds is so hard. Sometimes it can be easy, sometimes it can be hard. But, through all these struggles and changes, we are

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determined to keep the old as strong as possible. For the next generation. But we are also worried about the next generation … Will it crumble and die or will it not? … the bad things, the drinking drunks, any kind of drugs are starting to come in; kids are experimenting. It is a struggle to tell the young. Yes, you are young, you experiment, but this is the kind of things that can make you lose the foundation, the djalkiri. You will float away. And then, only then, people will come in and take what is yours. They will rip the land apart and rip you apart; you will die with nothing. Unless you start using your land in a way where it can be good for yourself in the contemporary world and the old. We all have a common imperative to support Yolŋu self-determination through sharing knowledges, and this often requires producing outputs. With our collaboration based on a principal of mutual benefit, each of our outputs has grown in its own organic way – some conceptualisations (especially of our books) driven by the Yolngu researchers, others (especially the academic pieces) driven by the academics. Regardless of who suggests a particular piece of writing, conference presentation or project, we try to ensure everyone is supportive of the idea before it is pursued. Some tasks, especially if they are mandated by the academic world, are shouldered by the academics, just as the Yolŋu collective members have many mandated responsibilities that only they can undertake. Grant applications are so onerous that there are times the academics put in an application without fully discussing the details with the collective, as the Yolŋu co-researchers do not have the time or capacity to be fully involved in these academic tasks. Yet funding applications do create openings and need to be carefully checked; something we do before starting on any project, even if this means diverging somewhat from what was written in an application. As Banbapuy reminds us: Our collective is about giving and taking, not just take, take, take. That balance – bala ga’ lili – when the water flows from the land and when the water flows – the salt water – there is a balance there and that’s where the knowledge is. Where it turns into the brackish water. While Banbapuy is talking here primarily about respect and knowledge, about showing care to, with and as Country, and about meeting the social responsibilities of kinship, this also has a financial dimension. Being paid for work is an important way of acknowledging the input of each member of the collective. While the academic members are paid for this work, Yolŋu co-researchers have different jobs – which involve educating tourists and school children, acting as a principal and working in health promotion. These jobs are not focused on research and so they are not otherwise recompensed for our collective endeavours.

60 Bawaka Country When we began our research collaboration the academics had limited funds drawn from internal university grants to support their research at Bawaka, but not enough to fully pay each of the family members for their time and knowledge. To enable the work, the Yolŋu researchers generously gave their time through what payments could be made. Yet discussions were held about the need to find other sources of income to directly pay family members for their research work. After receiving an Australian Research Council grant, the collective was finally able to pay the family for their time and knowledge. While this is important, it is not simple. On the one hand, it requires negotiating between the needs and expectations of the Yolŋu researchers, for example paying knowledge authorities immediately after workshops; and on the other hand, the university financial systems require invoices and e-mails and Australian Business Number details, and 30-day terms of payment which somehow stretch easily to 60 – a bureaucratic and financial minefield! What the university sees as normal business practice can be experienced as insulting, frustrating, completely impractical, and deeply colonising to the Yolŋu researchers, and indeed to the academics who must grapple with university systems to try and bring them into line. This means finding different and ongoing solutions to managing money; from sending ‘gift cards’ that can be purchased and sent immediately, to academics pooling their cash and being reimbursed later, to handwritten invoices and long-winded e-mails of explanation that rely upon helpful and supportive administrative staff to find their way through the system. It also relies upon the trust and patience of Yolŋu collective members as they must ultimately wear the delays and inadequacies. Such dynamics put stress on our raki and ask it to weather the hierarchical and deeply colonising demands of the academy which, when it comes down to it, can be experienced in a very personal way as hurt, disrespect, and a lack of care. Beyond money, there are other intense risks in co-authoring and presenting our work together: risks of representation. Once you have written something down it is there to stay. As much as you agonise over every word (those that are there and those that are missing), try to clarify and elaborate, read it from various angles, and respond to feedback from reviewers, you are relinquishing control and making yourselves vulnerable to the (mis)interpretations and (mis)understandings of multiple readers and listeners. This is at the heart of this chapter – have our efforts to assert Yolŋu ways of knowing, be(com)ing, and doing reinforced romanticised notions of Yolŋu (and other Indigenous) people? Indeed, has discussion of our collective here romanticised the workings of our relationship? When the academics present our work with Yolngu members not present, we take care to make sure that our work is situated appropriately. Despite all our efforts to talk specifically about Yolŋu ontologies, to situate our work with and as Bawaka, what messages do our audiences take with them? Do they (and we?) over-generalise our messages to homogenise all Yolŋu

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people, or all Aboriginal people, or all people who identify or are identified as Indigenous? Do we emphasise difference at the expense of commonality? Or do we not differentiate enough? Do identities become set in time and place – how do we do justice to multiplicities, dynamism, overlaps, and messiness using written, English words? How do we acknowledge and relate to the different d iscourses, C ountries, a nd h istories o f the places where we present our work; where it is read? How do we show due diligence and respect to these sometimes unknown or unknowable places? We do not have answers to these questions, but we are constantly exploring them through our work. One strategy we are currently developing is a diagram to illustrate our relationships; to intensely situate our work for our readers, listeners, and the Countries on and with which we share our work. Figure 3.2 includes a photograph of Merrkiyawuy as she starts to conceptualise the diagram and draw it in the sand, alongside our latest diagrammatic version. This diagram is very much a work in progress as we discuss, negotiate, and brainstorm what each section and each overlap contain. It is the start of our collective response to the very real feedback from an Indigenous listener to our work (presented by the academics) who was uncomfortable with what we shared about Bawaka Country on another Country. We continue to collectively grapple with this, discussing thoughts and ideas, knowing that this is an ongoing process with no easy, simple, or correct way to respond.

Figure 3.2 A work in progress – conceptualising and illustrating our work together. Source: Bawaka Collective.

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Who is the ‘we’? This is a key question ‘we’ come back to again and again in our writing. Authored as a collective, the default ‘we’ encompasses all of us as a singular. However, we are a singular made up of multiplicities – a diverse group with diverse, shifting identities – including identifying, often simultaneously, as human, non-human, and more-than-human, with the ability to write words and to communicate in verbal and non-verbal ways; as women, sisters, mothers, daughters, partners; as Country, land, wind, tide, bird, smell, and sweat; identifying as Yolŋu and as ŋapaki, as Yolŋu knowledge holders, and as human geographers. In ‘our’ writing we try to interrogate every word and every sentence to ensure that the ‘we’ either encompasses the whole collective or to actively distinguish who within the collective is speaking. As ‘we’ go through final read-throughs of our draft papers (usually the academics although with the Yolŋu researchers if possible), checking the ‘we’ is always on the to-do list. It seems like there are always ‘we’ parts that need fixing, and these expose our taken-for-granted human-centeredness, academic-centredness or assumptions about positionality. Sometimes the academics think they overstep the mark or worry that they end up using a ‘we’ that they are not really part of as ŋapaki. Each piece of writing raises this issue and it is something we continually and openly try to navigate as a collective. Amidst these complex positionalities, a key challenge is to avoid essentialising the ‘easy’ dichotomies and slipping into simplified categories which other an Indigenous from a non-Indigenous, a human from a non-human.

Complementing, not subsuming How we go about writing and producing our outputs gives important insights into how we co-construct and co-become knowledges, and in turn, how these knowledges are shaped by our identities and how they, in turn, shape identities. The ‘we’ of our co-authorship is not neat and equitable, it is uneven and messy – underlain by trust in each other yet risky as not everything about each other can ever be known. So, in the interest of attending deeply to the ways we think and do together, sharing openly our specificities and particularities, trying to un-romanticise, and in doing so make ourselves vulnerable to you, with marr, let us look in detail at the co-authoring and co-becoming of this chapter. The academics received an invitation to contribute from Marcela Palomino-Schalscha. Sandie, Kate, and Sarah talked about it (via e-mail, on the phone, via Skype) and decided that it was an opportunity to contribute to work in this field and to share some aspects of our work together. This aligns with our collective’s broader aim of transforming academic knowledge to be more respectful of Indigenous knowledges and rights, but it also meets the academics’ career-orientated aims of producing a publication that

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our institutions would value, and situating our work as part of the growing sub-discipline of Indigenous geographies. The three academics always had this concern about their work romanticising ‘Indigenous knowledge’, so they thought this would be a good opportunity to collectively think and talk it through more carefully. However, they did not discuss the specifics of the chapter with the broader collective at this stage as discussing a book chapter abstract is not a high priority for the Yolŋu co-researchers. In early 2015, the academics submitted the abstract, brainstorming and bouncing it between themselves, drawing from earlier discussions with the collective – and sent it in under our full co-authored Bawaka Country collaboration. We drew on the marr and raki that envelops our collective to trust that the Yolŋu knowledge authorities would either support it and be happy with us all writing a paper on the theme (and with a very open sense of how the paper might actually play out when we got to imagining and writing it) or be confident to say it should not go ahead or only in an amended version. The academics drew on our collective’s understanding of mutual benefits and that the Yolŋu co-researchers have always supported the academics’ need to produce academic outputs. The Yolŋu researchers do not just support co-authored academic publications for the academics’ sake, but also value these publications as an opportunity to share Yolŋu knowledge with a wider audience. In addition, the academics were confident they would likely amend the abstract and details of the paper’s thesis after discussion (and that the collection’s editors would be happy with that – as indeed they have been) and could withdraw the paper from the collection if the Yolŋu co-researchers did not want it written. The first opportunity the academics had to discuss the chapter with the Yolŋu co-researchers was when Sarah was in Yirrkala in April 2015. At this point Sarah got broad support for the chapter from Merrkiyawuy, Ritjilili, and Banbapuy (Laklak was ill and in Adelaide with Djawundil) as it aligns with the research we are doing for our next book, Songspirals, as well as other conversations we have had over the years related to the appropriation of knowledge and our role in sharing knowledge. Notes from this and four other times we were together (three in Yirrkala and Bawaka and one in Adelaide) shaped this chapter. Although not all of us are always present when we work together, we comfortably talk for each other in some situations and in others ensure we discuss issues in appropriate groups and then get back to each other with a response. Between these opportunities, Marnie Graham started working on the paper as a research assistant. Themes of romanticising and identity were explored in her recently completed PhD thesis and she did some literature reviews, writing and thinking for us – including raising a range of ideas, questions, and prompts around the ideas of romance, love, risk, and vulnerability. While speaking of ‘getting together’ in Adelaide, Yirrkala, and Bawaka sounds easy, in reality this too entails complicated logistics and negotiation. How many people? Who? Can we communicate with each other adequately

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about names to use on tickets, dates? All the logistical issues of working in a group are magnified across distance, with different access to technology, across language and culture. E-mailing a plane ticket seems easy to a travel agent, sending a box of books straightforward. But this is no good if there is no computer to check e-mail, no printer to print itineraries, no e-mail account to check, no street address to send to. How we pay, where to stay, can we pay for family members, for children? Although Yolŋu collective younger family members are included on our ethics application as members of the research collective, the children and family of the academics are not. This means that, although they too are bound to the collective through marr and are understood as important contributors, they are often left at home, as there are not enough personal funds to bring them. All these questions are hard. And the logistics never, ever go according to plan. Yet, with marr, we muddle through. Our work together, and our logistics, are held together by a patchwork of different forms of communication. Nothing is better than being together at and with Bawaka, on and as Country, attending to each other and to Country, listening, watching, feeling, doing, becoming. Yet, raki also binds through different forms of communication: mobile phones, Skype, Facebook, Messenger, e-mail. Where phones may be lost and e-mail addresses mixed up and changed, in more recent years, Facebook and Messenger have really helped make contact easier. Papers have been written, and the full text of a presentation, videos and recordings have been shared through this technology. We have gathered with some of us in one place, some of us in another, calling mobiles on a speaker made louder by being placed in a bowl to amplify sound. And we have met up in different places, down south of Australia, at the homes of academic members, at conferences, and in New Zealand. The three academics finally got together in May 2016 in Sydney to start drafting the paper itself. Although they got quite a few words down, they felt that they could not actually write the paper without another round of conceptualising it with the Yolŋu co-researchers – there were too many ideas that were too vague or driven by the academics and not yet based on firm discussions around the themes of ‘romance’ and ‘romanticising’ as a collective. This meant the first draft of the paper missed the deadline (sorry, editors) but the delay was crucial to remain true to marr and to respect the need for full contributions from all of us to the paper. Our efforts to be true to marr can, at times, conflict with academic demands, just as marr can enrol those beyond the collective – as this book’s editors, Marcela PalominoSchalcha and Nicole Gombay, in turn showed love and respect by willingly adjusting the deadlines to allow for the diverse needs of the collective. We all spent a week together at Yirrkala in July 2016. This chapter was not the centre of our discussion – indeed we were celebrating Laklak being awarded an honorary doctorate by Macquarie University and focusing on our next book, a priority for the Yolŋu collective members. However, on the

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Figure 3.3 Marr at the Gapan Gallery, Garma Festival, North East Arnhem Land. Source: Bawaka Collective.

academics’ agenda was the thinking around this paper and so they brought it up when they could while camping at the Garma Festival. Our collective talked, listened, and wrote – after the early morning Milkarri (crying ceremony) where we focused on the concept of marr, around the camp fire in the evenings, and on the sand of the Gapan art gallery (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3). It was being together in these spaces, reflecting on how we learn and work together, and how we share our collective knowledge, that the ideas of marr and raki emerged and merged. As marr came to be more central in our conversations, we heard it mentioned again and again during our discussions as the Yolŋu authors, and indeed some of the other Yolŋu artists and commentators presenting at the festival, emphasised the centrality of love. These concepts spoke to all of us and we felt strongly that they were the right ones to describe the complex, powerful and always-in-the-making process of our co-becoming. We also felt the centrality of Country here, as it found different ways to communicate to the collective the centrality of marr through songlines, contemporary music, and the events and beings, such as the sand, that allowed and prompted discussion when we were together. Not everything we discussed is included in this chapter – our work is not focused and linear. Although some discussions are incredibly intense, they can easily meander, drawn on to another important thing. This can,

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at times, be frustrating for the academics; ‘finally’, they think, ‘we can get to the task on our list’ – but they have learned to relax and ‘go with the flow’ – aware that even though they may not achieve what they had hoped, something else, often equally as important, will emerge. Some things have more relevance in other contexts, some things are not to be shared, or not yet – they will need to wait until the right time. Following this time together, the academics flew back to their homes and sat down at their computers to write – bouncing the chapter between themselves. The words themselves co-become from multiple places: sometimes the academics write incorporating the actual words and quotes from the notes they have taken down verbatim from discussions with the Yolŋu researchers; sometimes the Yolŋu researchers send through specific words or concepts to use or suggest them through direct conversation. Sometimes the academics write sections from scratch, then edit to weave in the words that have come from different places. Sometimes we all sit around the computer and write together, taking turns to dictate, or we will project some text on a wall for checking. The balance is different for different papers, our work negotiated and in flux to that last moment. In co-becoming knowledges, like streams of bubbling water, our aim is not to merge or subsume each other, but to be enveloped by marr, tied together by raki. And, critically, to try not to romanticise.

Messy but not muddled The academics have been taught to be careful of muddling things up. The right process is critical and we must make sure we make things straight. As Merrki explains: Everything starts from this point to that point, and stops at that point. The process of everything in the world has to be right. So that you follow that process if something is going to be good. You make food, everything, you make it in the process so it becomes good. You don’t just make it in the middle. You don’t just start—so that what you are making has to be good at the end. We say it becomes dhawadatj. This is muddled up—the process is not right. But there is a difference between being muddled up and being messy. Muddling something up is to get it wrong, to do damage. Being messy is something we are learning to embrace. In working together over ten years we have learned that there needs to be a strong process in place. We are continually developing and improving this process and document it through a Research Agreement which we regularly revise as old projects are wrapped up, new projects emerge, and new people become involved. Although we write these new dynamics into the agreement, we have found that the fundamental principles underlying our agreement have stayed consistent.

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Something that parallels what the academics have been taught about the unchanging nature of Yolŋu Rom, Yolŋu Law. All of us are much more confident now than earlier on; relationships have deepened, there has been listening and learning, and this has led to a new level of trust. But it has not always been and still is not always easy. The academics, in particular, worry that when people read about our collaboration or Yolŋu ontologies they get a skewed view of things and think everything works in beautiful harmony. They have tried to address this by talking about the bureaucratic and financial challenges involved (Bawaka Country et al. in press) and explaining that everything does not always come up smelling of roses (e.g., ensuring we also talk about death in Bawaka Country et al. 2016). They agonise over which examples to include or not, depending on what people feel comfortable with or what is appropriate – but, of course, there is always stuff left out. What they focus on is following the right process. A process which has included blunders and mishaps, offence and anger, hurt and frustration. We are so very lucky that none of these has been deep enough or strong enough to damage our relationships; that indeed the hassling text-messages, the annoyance over the unanswered logistical questions and delayed flight bookings, the delayed payments and money transfers, have all been viewed as part and parcel of the marr – indeed may be the raki which ties our marr together. Becoming part of the family means that we have gained each other’s trust and been wrapped with love including the messy and sometimes fraught aspects that family love entails. The Yolŋu researchers tell the academics that family – parparu you are adopted into – are the ones who can guide you along and teach you, and that is how Kate, Sarah, and Sandie learn. They are not fooling around. They are in the family, they are part of Bawaka, being guided. So the academics learn, we all learn. We sit together, laugh, have a cup of tea together – as family – check that the kids are ok. We each get to know what each other is like rather than just sitting down and saying we have come to write a book. We have made that relationship into a family, a Bawaka family.

Conclusion Our collective is made up of a diverse range of humans and non-humans – yet we come together as Bawaka Country. This more-than-human co-becoming is an effort to not only be true to the love that has grown between and within us but is also an effort to challenge Western-centred, colonising ways of knowing and doing. Yet there is an ever-present danger that in challenging colonising processes we unintentionally reinforce them through, among other things, stereotyping, essentialising or romanticising. Although some of this is out of our control, through a hyper-reflexive discussion of our collective and the way we work together, we hope we have made our efforts to avoid this explicit. In doing so, we have shown that the fraught task of reworking colonialism is not only

68 Bawaka Country messy, complex, and always incomplete, but that it is also a critically worthwhile task through which unexpected opportunities, in our case for love, can emerge. The process of being in a relationship is complicated and often challenging. Yet we have found it to be rewarding as we nourish love across different worlds to co-become as a Bawaka collective. We have faced significant ontological challenges around knowledge and authority as well as practical considerations about finances, logistics, and reciprocity, and emotional challenges around love and trust. Ours is not a fleeting ‘romance’, but a deep intimacy that has fostered our awareness of each other’s flaws, foibles, and weaknesses. This awareness and intimacy means we hopefully avoid romanticising each other. We try to enter our relationships with truth and openness to honour marr, not to romanticise each other. Our relationships have developed in a way that as both learner and teacher, mother and daughter and granddaughter, we have all made mistakes and learned lessons that have bound us more strongly together. And we are continually learning. Learning through and with love. While this complex web may appear messy, and at times very disorganised, it is underpinned by very clear processes. Supporting and guiding us is Rom, the fundamental Yolŋu Law which underlies Yolŋu being and is the basis of Yolŋu ontology. Rom enables us to embrace complexity, to adapt and respond, to be open and flexible, yet, in a manner which may seem paradoxical to a Western mindset, it also dictates the right process. It ensures that marr is held in the right place in the right manner, in particular through Yolŋu systems of gurrutu and wetj; systems of kinship and sharing that bring everything together within an infinite pattern of connection, obligation and care, attention, response, and responsibility. In this instance we have chosen to share the process of writing this chapter and how we try to navigate our love in ways true to marr and raki, to take steps to minimise the colonising aspects within and beyond our collaboration, and to be true to each other and to Rom. We have made ourselves vulnerable, ‘burrowing’, as Verran (2013) suggests, down to share the ways we do, think, write, and organise together. These are the specificities of our collective and our collective knowledge and are an effort to acknowledge some of the details of our differences and commonalities. As we acknowledge the dangers of essentialising and romanticising and acknowledge our positionalities within the collective (and for the academics, our complicity with racist and colonising frameworks within the academy and Australian society more broadly), we move forward slowly and tentatively. We try to minimise essentialising and romanticising, and strive to be true to marr, by going through many iterative processes of collaboration that are underpinned by trust built up over ten years, by respect, by attention to Yolŋu Rom, and by engaging in the sometimes painful process of opening ourselves up to vulnerability and risk.

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It is fundamentally important to acknowledge and seek to overcome the potential of romanticising Indigenous knowledges, essentialising Indigenous identities, and romanticising research relationships in any work around Indigenous knowledges and social justice. In our work as Bawaka Country, we find that if we commit ourselves to staying true to marr then we find common ground with each other; a way to speak across our diverse ontologies and produce research that is as true to our collective ideals as possible. To be true to marr we must allow ourselves to experience the vulnerabilities and risks of essentialising and romanticising, and, through our considered and respectful dialogue throughout the research process, co-create representations that we are comfortable with and proud of. As we orient ourselves by marr, we aim to be true to our collective’s aims. That’s what we do. Perhaps it is all anyone can do.

Notes 1. Country is an Aboriginal English word which includes not just the territorial, land-based notion of a home land, but encompasses more-than-humans and all that is tangible and intangible and which become together in an active, sentient, mutually caring, and multidirectional manner in, with, and as place/ space and time (Bawaka Country et al. 2015). 2. With the exclusion of author Graham who worked with the team on this paper as a research assistant. 3. For more on wetj see Bawaka Country et al. (2013) and for more on gurrutu see Bawaka Country et al. (2016). 4. ‘The intervention’, officially the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, is a package of policies designed by then Prime Minister John Howard nominally in response to high incidences of child abuse in the Northern Territory. It required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 for its implementation and has been widely criticised as neocolonial. It is reminiscent of the Stolen Generations, the term used for Aboriginal people forcefully taken away (stolen) from their families under assimilation polities between the 1890s and 1970s. Both policies were prescribed under the pretence of being for Aboriginal peoples’ ‘own good’ and were initiated without consultation with Aboriginal peoples.

References Ahmed, S 2004, ‘Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21: 25–42. Bawaka Country including Lloyd, K, Wright, S, Suchet-Pearson, S, Burarrwanga, L, Ganambarr, R, Ganambarr-Stubbs, M, Ganambarr, B, Maymuru, D & Hodge, P 2018, ‘Meeting across ontologies: Grappling with an ethics of care in our humanmore-than-human collaborative work’, in J Haladay and S Hicks (eds.), Narratives of educating for sustainability in unsustainable environments, Michigan State University Press, Ann Arbor, pp. 219–244. Bawaka Country including Suchet-Pearson, S, Wright, S, Lloyd, K, & Burarrwanga, L 2013, ‘Caring as country: Towards an ontology of co-becoming in natural resource management’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 185–197.

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Bawaka Country including Wright, S, Suchet-Pearson, S, Lloyd, K, Burarrwanga, L, Ganambarr R, Ganambarr-Stubbs, M, Ganambarr, B & Maymuru, D 2015, ‘Working with and learning from Country: Decentring human authority’, Cultural Geographies, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 269–283. Bawaka Country including Wright, S, Suchet-Pearson, S, Lloyd, K, Burarrwanga, L, Ganambarr, R, Ganambarr-Stubbs, M, Ganambarr, B, Maymuru, D, & Sweeney, J 2016, ‘Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a relational understanding of place/space’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 455–475. Bilous, R 2013, ‘“An Arnhem Land Adventure”: Representations of MacassanIndigenous Australian connections in popular geographical magazines’, in M Clark & SK May (eds.), Macassan history and heritage: Journeys, encounters and influences, ANU E Press, Canberra, pp. 107–126. Brosius, PJ 1997, ‘Endangered forests, endangered people: Environmentalist representations of Indigenous knowledge’, Human Ecology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 47–69. Brown, B 2012, Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Avery Publishing, New York. Cameron, E, de Leeuw, S, & Greenwood, M 2009, ‘Indigeneity’, in N Thrift & R Kitchin (eds.), International encyclopedia of human geography, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, pp. 352–357. Christie, M & Greatorex, J 1986, Yolŋu life in the Northern Territory of Australia: The significance of community and social capital, Charles Darwin University, Darwin www.cdu.edu.au/centres/inc/pdf/Yolŋulife.pdf. Howitt, R & Stevens, S 2005, ‘Cross-cultural research: Ethics, methods and relationships’, in I Hay (ed.), Qualitative research methods in human geography, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 30–50. Howitt, R, Muller, S & Suchet-Pearson, S 2009, ‘Indigenous geographies’, in R Kitchin & N Thrift (eds.), International encyclopedia of human geography, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, pp. 358–364. Graham, M 2015, ‘Postcolonial nature conservation and collaboration in urban protected areas: Everyday relations at Macassar Dunes/Wolfgat reserves’, PhD thesis, Macquarie University, Cape Town. Kapoor, I 2004, ‘Hyper-self-reflexive development? Spivak on representing the Third World ‘Other’’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 627–647. Langton, M 1999, Indigenous social, cultural economic and cultural issues in land, water and biodiversity conservation: A scoping study for WWF Australia, vol. 3, World Wide Fund for Nature, Sydney. Lloyd, K, Wright, S, Suchet-Pearson, S, Burarrwanga, L, & Bawaka Country 2012, ‘Reframing development through collaboration: Towards a relational ontology of connection in Bawaka, North East Arnhem Land’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 1075–1094. Louis, RP 2007, ‘Can you hear us now? Voices from the margin: Using Indigenous methodologies in geographic research’, Geographical Research, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 130–139. Nygren, A 1999, ‘Local knowledge in the environment development discourse’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 267–288. Rose, DB 1996, Nourishing terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra. ———1999, ‘Indigenous ecologies and an ethic of connection’, in N Low (ed.), Global ethics and environment, Routledge, London, pp. 175–187.

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Rowland, MJ 2004, ‘Return of the ‘noble savage’: Misrepresenting the past, present and future’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 2, pp. 2–14. Said, E 1978, Orientalism, Random House, New York. Smith, L 1999, Decolonising methodologies, Zed, London. Spivak, GE 1996, ‘Subaltern talk’, in D Landry & G Maclean (eds.), The Spivak reader, Routledge, London. Suchet-Pearson, S, Wright, S, Lloyd, K, Burarrwanga, L, & Hodge, P 2013, ‘A footprint in a rock: Entwining lives and co-constructing “the field” in Australia’, in JT Johnson & SC Larsen (eds.), A deeper sense of place: Stories and journeys of collaboration in Indigenous research, Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, pp. 21–40. Verran, H 2013, ‘Engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: toward doing difference generatively and in good faith’, in L. Green (ed.), Contested ecologies: Reimagining the nature–culture divide in the Global South, HSRC Press, Cape Town, pp. 141–161.

4

Narratives of Indigenous place(s), space(s), and citizenship(s) Sarah Henzi

Introduction In this chapter, I lay the groundwork for an analysis of civil alienation as countered by acts of Indigenous citizenship and claims for sovereignty. To reclaim and establish place – a place from which to express firmly rooted, cultural affirmation and overture toward new avenues for artistic, individual, and pedagogical expression and performance – is to give up the belief of powerlessness, to shed the status of the silenced and oppressed, and to learn how to subvert participation in a discourse of victimisation into the claiming of self-location. It is, essentially, to impose oneself, but without violent conquest, albeit within ‘occupied territory’. As Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson discusses in her book, Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of the settler states (2014), questions of citizenship formation are crucial not only in the face of imperialist forces such as Canada and the US, but to the individual’s sense of allegiance, duty, and belonging – all of which are essential in the claiming of self-location and the re-appropriation of place. This, however, raises a delicate quandary: in Simpson’s (2014: 158) words: ‘How does one assert sovereignty and independence when some of the power to define that sovereignty is bestowed by a foreign power?’ For it is necessary to maintain a sense of balance between recognition of and antagonism to the State – a balance that becomes highly volatile in cases of territorial claims. Nonetheless, this balancing act is a source of power and control: there is great potential in having the choice between what Simpson (2014: 172) refers to as a ‘citizenship of convenience’ and a ‘primary, feeling citizenship’. To illustrate these points, I draw on literary and film examples, as well as current ongoing disputes, all of which reveal the potential in straddling the Canadian–US border, thereby suggesting an ‘unofficial’ space for taking advantage of its particular liminality and empowering the affected communities. Beyond the territorial (and therefore the political), these are acts of ‘poaching’ (Harel 2006; Gombay 2014) and they are essentially linguistic, intellectual, and, to an extent, ethical acts – in the sense that they address head-on the moments in which conventional Eurocentric ‘normativity’ encroaches upon the liberties of an individual or a community. As I make

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use of it here, ‘poaching’ is a performative act of defiance; it is an instance of positive violence that remains tightly connected to notions of place and situatedness.

Border crossings and acts of citizenship In Across cultures/across borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American literatures, the editors, Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque (2010: 9), sought to publish a new anthology of critical writings to be used alongside texts they taught in university on Indigenous literature. Of interest to me is that the editors raise the issue of having included international authors in a collection that was intended to contain only Canadian authors. They remark, ‘we felt strongly opposed to this recommendation [from Broadview Press] at first because it seemed to the editors that scholars south of the border, even Native American literary scholars, rarely paid attention to Canadian Aboriginal issues, never mind literary subjects’ (ibid.: 11). Furthermore, the fact that ‘the Canada–US border itself is often perceived by Aboriginal people as an arbitrary, foreign imposition, maintained and regulated today through colonial and neo-colonial attitudes and laws, was reason enough to include US material [in the anthology]’ (ibid.: 12). Thomas King’s (1993) short story ‘Borders’ certainly depicts the ironic non-sense (and nonsense) of the Canadian–US Border. Upon wanting to enter the United States with her son to visit her daughter in Salt Lake City, a woman is forbidden passage when she refuses to state her citizenship – that is, the citizenship she is supposed to state, i.e. American or Canadian. Instead, she keeps on repeating ‘Blackfoot’, when asked the question ‘Citizenship?’ (ibid.: 137). The same thing happens when, after being told she could not enter the US, she and her son drive back up to the Canadian border. For the purposes of (re)entering Canada, they are once again asked, ‘Citizenship?’ – to which, of course, the mother answers ‘Blackfoot’ (ibid.: 141). ‘I know’, said the [Canadian border guard], ‘and I’d be proud of being Blackfoot if I were Blackfoot. But you have to be American or Canadian’ (ibid.: 141). As the mother and son wait in limbo, they rely on the duty-free store for food and other necessities. Mel, the owner of the store, remarks, ‘You’d think they [the border guards] could handle the simple things’ (ibid.: 144). This casual statement reflects a partial ignorance on Mel’s part as to what the bigger picture is – a lack of understanding of how questions of identity are crucial to a person’s ability to come and go as they please.1 Indeed, the emphasis placed by the border guard on having to be American or Canadian is, of course, suggestive of what the authors of Across Cultures/Across Borders mean when they say the border is referred to as being a ‘foreign imposition, maintained and regulated today through colonial and neo-colonial attitudes and laws’ (DePasquale, Eigenbrod, & LaRocque 2010: 12). Based on the premise of the border guard, if one is neither Canadian nor American, one cannot exist: citizenship is required. Ironically, this is the same (albeit different) position

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as was held by both Canada and the US with respect to their Indigenous populations some 70 years ago, in the sense that they were not allowed to be citizens (unless they gave up their Indian status). By extension, for some individuals, citizenship today is not a desirable attribute, whereas when it was not a given – such as the right to vote – it could be. There is actually nothing simple in the story’s implications and, upon closer examination, this impression fades away. The two unnamed main protagonists in the story live in Standoff, Alberta; which is part of the Blood Tribe (part of the Blackfoot Confederacy) Reservation, as set by Treaty 7 in 1877 (cited in Blood Tribe–Kainai First Nation n.d.). The town is situated 91 kilometres from the Coutts/Sweetgrass US Border Crossing. Interestingly, the land set out for the reservation in 1880 by Chief Red Crow went as far south as the Canada–US International Boundary. But it was significantly cut back, without consultation with the Blood Tribe, following two re-surveys of the reservation area in 1882 and 1883. On the other side of the border, the Blackfoot entered into the Lame Bull Treaty with the Americans in 1855. The Blackfoot Confederacy’s original territory, before encounter, was bordered on the north by the North Saskatchewan River in Alberta, south by the Yellowstone River in the State of Montana, west by the Rocky Mountains, and east by the Great Sandhills in Saskatchewan (ibid.). Needless to say, this is but one example of how the Canadian–US border has split communities and nations into distinct segments that are actually part of the same whole. Furthermore, the notion of citizenship is an extremely difficult one to analyse and pinpoint. What is more difficult, however, is what it means to an individual. In the case of Indigenous peoples, the very late granting of citizenship and the right to vote can be regarded, at the very least, as an assault on an individual’s rights and status within his or her own country.2 On the other hand, it further complicates issues of self-identity and belonging, as well as unresolved land claim issues and territorial disputes. Daniel N Paul, Mi’kmaq Elder and author of We were not the savages (2006), was asked by a Halifax non-Indigenous education group to join a panel of experts at a forum held at Nova Scotia’s Government House on 20 October 1999. He writes that his ‘responsibility was to specify the benefits that First Nations Peoples have derived from Canadian citizenship’ (1999: para. 1). He further notes: [i]n spite of exclusion but caused primarily by the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, the quality of life for First Nations Peoples in Canada has improved measurably in the past 50 years. The Declaration forced the country to begin the process of cleaning up its act and stop discriminating openly against Natives […]. This did not, however, mean that legislation was immediately introduced to repeal well entrenched apartheid laws that were enacted to oppress ‘Indians’. When trying to

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pinpoint a date when the easing of apartheid laws allowed First Nations Peoples to escape from “Wards of the Crown status”, to third class Canadian Citizenship status, the water is very muddied. The repeal of some apartheid laws in 1951 wasn’t the watershed. The fact that it took governments fourteen years after the Canada Citizenship Act was proclaimed on January 1, 1947, to extend to us, August 10, 1960, the right to vote in federal elections clouds the matter further. Other apartheid laws were so well entrenched that it took another 25 years, after the government had graciously given us the right to vote in 1960, for it to repeal the majority of the worst ones. […] Up until 1985, if a Registered Indian wanted to be enfranchised, he/she had to sign a declaration containing this paragraph: ‘… and certify that I am capable of assuming the responsibilities of citizenship’. From this we can conclude that if, in fact, First Nations Peoples held Canadian citizenship, it was badly tainted. However, the language seems to indicate that we were still viewed as ‘Wards of the Crown in 1985’ (Paul, 1999: paras 10–13). With this history in mind, it is understandable that the mother in King’s (1993) ‘Borders’ refuses to adhere to having to be either American or Canadian. For some, being granted citizenship by government officials may be regarded as a gift generously bestowed on Indigenous peoples (in the same way that the federal government’s 1969 White Paper would have provided equal opportunities to ‘all Canadians’, thus erasing the ‘special governmental treatments’ that had left the Indian ‘different’, ‘lacking power’, and ‘without those feelings of dignity and self-confidence that a man [sic] must have if he is to walk with his head high’ (Government of Canada 1969: 3). Yet, in the eyes of others, it can be seen not only as a bitter reminder of the ailments of history (being a non-citizen, thus a non-person), but also as a further violent imposition regulated by neocolonial laws and a continuous denial of an individual’s original right to belong on his or her own terms, to his or her homeland. In the same way that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, Article 15, states that ‘(a) Everyone has the right to a nationality, and (b) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his [sic] nationality nor denied the right to change his [sic] nationality’ (UN 2015), so too, for instance, should the ‘Citizenship of Haudenosaunee Kanienkehaka Mohawk Peoples’ be considered on equal grounds. In effect, a very similar, and true, story to the one in King’s ‘Borders’ is that of a Mohawk delegation from Kahnawake to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia in the spring of 2010. As reported by Greg Horn in the June 1, 2010, edition of Iorì:wase Kahnawake News, upon travelling home from Bolivia, first via Peru and then El Salvador, the delegates met very little trouble, apart from curious questions, upon presenting their Haudenosaunee passports – they were, after all, ‘Indigenous’ passing through Indigenous land.3 But upon arriving at customs inspection to board their final flight to Toronto, and

76 Sarah Henzi having had to explain once again what the documents were, they are told by the officer: ‘Let me make a call and I’ll see if you can get on,’ [Tyler] Hemlock recounted. ‘So he calls the Canadian Embassy. The security officer explained that there was three guys carrying Haudenosaunee passports and asked if they should be let on the plane. ‘And the word came back from Canada that you don’t let them on the plane with those documents.’ […] All the airline needed was confirmation from Canada that the three Mohawks would be allowed into Canada. The confirmation could be a phone call or a letter. Meanwhile, Canada’s position was that they had to go home using the emergency travel document [which amounts to an emergency Canadian passport]’. ‘We said we can’t do that,’ Hemlock said. ‘We can’t compromise who we are because we left on these passports; we’re not Canadian; we’re not American; our political stance has always been that. We are not Canadian or American – we are Haudenosaunee’ (Horn 2010: n.p.). Much like in King’s short story, the situation evolves rather quickly once the media, lawyers, and different governments (El Salvadorian, American, and Canadian, as well as the Haudenosaunee) get involved. In the short story ‘Borders’, after a morning of interviews with the mother, questions ‘about how it felt to be an Indian without a country’ (King 1993: 145), and reporters going back and forth between the two border checkpoints, television vans actually escort the mother and son back to the American border, where the border guard, though with ‘his fingers patting the butt of [his] revolver’, finally lets them through (1993: 146). When the three members of the Mohawk delegation leave El Salvador, it is not, however, for Canada: they were granted the right to travel on their Haudenosaunee documents to the US, via Miami and then Plattsburgh (despite the US having initially made the same request that they apply for an emergency American passport – which turned out to be unnecessary, with help from individuals at the American embassy), from where finally they go on home, presumably by road. Of particular interest here is how the two stories (one real, one fictitious) relate a victory for Indigenous sovereignty, as much for the individual as for the community. They also underline the fact that many issues remain unaddressed and unresolved. As Thomas King has made clear: These are questions that still need exploring. Treaty rights in Canada, Native tax status and who decides how Native communities are organized and run – these are still live questions. I engage them in my novels because it is an ongoing debate. It’s a dangerous debate. People out there might not like it. But I try to present sticky issues from all

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sides. These questions still plague us. They are important issues. The Canadian government has no interest in Native rights. It doesn’t matter who is in power. There is a lethargy. No – that’s too kind a word – there is a turning of the political back to Native people […] I engage in these kinds of debates, like a nasty little black fly buzzing around. In person I am sweet and shy, but if you put a computer in front of me, I become a bit of a radical (Hyde 2001: 5–6). Holding one’s stance in the face of oppression is the important message both these stories convey. The stories themselves, in a way, are ‘nasty little black flies’, because they do not allow the repressed to remain unspoken. The three members of the Mohawk delegation held steadfast onto their one and only citizenship – Haudenosaunee – despite knowing there was an easier path, as Tyler Hemlock concludes: [W]e knew that the easiest thing would have been to sign those documents right at the get-go. But that’s not what we were sent out there [to Bolivia] for. That’s not who we said we were. We knew, coming home, we were still representing our people and we acted accordingly (Horn 2010: n.p.). This act of reclaiming citizenship is an act of ethical ‘poaching’, as it restores, despite governmental jurisdiction and regulations, a sense of belonging, a site of home. Furthermore, it maps out territory according to the individual’s stance within it and, consequently, indicates his/her position and relation to the surroundings; in effect the community to whom s/he feels allegiance. In a similar way, the mother in ‘Borders,’ through her stubborn – and justifiable – defiance, is poaching rather than stepping down: as the boy remarks, ‘it would have been easier if my mother had just said “Canadian” and been done with it’ (King 1993: 137) and he even attempts to resolve the situation by telling the border guard ‘that we were Blackfoot and Canadian, but she said that that didn’t count because I was a minor’ (1993: 139). Although, while the boy is clearly too young to understand the implications of his mother’s stance, her plight is mediatised and does have an outside effect as well, if only, we are led to believe, on her daughter Laetitia. The relationship between mother and daughter in King’s story appears to be a difficult one. When Laetitia left the reserve to cross the border to live in Salt Lake City, she did not get her mother’s blessing and the awkwardness of their farewell at the border is felt in the gap represented by each choosing to speak a different language: ‘You can still see the mountain from here’, my mother told Laetitia in Blackfoot. ‘Lots of mountains in Salt Lake’, Laetitia told her in English (1993: 135). Laetitia’s flight from her mother and the reserve is suggestive of a desire to escape from everything traditional, familial, and boring to a city where there was a temple, a downtown, a zoo, and skiing

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in the mountains. Nevertheless, the boring, sedentary image Laetitia has of her mother changes when she witnesses on television what happened at the border. Clearly the mediatisation of her mother’s defiance at the border, her stubbornness in standing her ground in the face of officials, incurred a sense of pride in Laetitia, which, as a result, had her thinking about moving back to the reserve. As Robert Nelson suggested ‘identity’, correctly speaking, is not an attribute of either the individual or of the context – the environment, including cultural traditions – in which the individual is embedded. Rather, identity is an event that takes place in the creation of the relationship between individual and context’ (1997: 265–266). In this sense, the mother’s self-location is rooted in the performative event of her defiance, in the act of poaching itself, which underlines a discourse of continuity and resistance. Laetitia’s final sense of belonging and desire to go home is a direct consequence of this: seeing her mother thus empowered, Laetitia experiences how it is possible to see oneself as a living part of the living place where one’s life takes place – in this case, Blackfoot culture and territory. As Ann Charney has noted, ‘in Mohawk, the word for sovereignty translates as “carrying ourselves”’ (1995: 133). However, in this desire to ‘carry oneself’, there resides also a sense of urgency. Audra Simpson discusses questions of Mohawk citizenship formation and its importance in the face of imperialist forces such as Canada and the US. Following a set of interviews with people from Kahnawake, she describes the difference between a ‘citizenship of convenience’ and ‘primary, feeling citizenships’: though the latter, she suggests, may not be ‘institutionally recognized’, they are ‘socially and politically recognized in the everyday life of the community and […] people get called out on them’ (2014: 175). To partake in the ‘citizenship of convenience’ – in this case, Canadian – is to acknowledge participation in a predefined set of norms and expectations. Yet, to partake in this ‘for the sake of convenience’ (2014: 173) is not, I believe, a form of co-option: rather, it may be understood as subversive participation. As the interviewee states: That [being Mohawk from Kahnawake] is my primary citizenship, that is my main citizenship – Canadian citizenship is sort of an ancillary citizenship which I invoke to avoid hassle. I don’t consider myself, ‘Canadian’, as I said I am a Mohawk of Kahnawake and I feel that that is where my citizenship lies (2014: 172; emphasis in the original). In underscoring that it is his Mohawk citizenship wherein lies his sense of allegiance, belonging, and, presumably, duty, it is clear that much like in the case of the Mohawk delegation to Bolivia, being ‘Canadian’ is not a matter worth fighting for. Nor does it bear the urgency of obligation or a recognition of duty – whereas being Mohawk does. This attitude fully subverts and rewrites the clause to which Daniel N Paul alluded; that upon enfranchisement, prior to 1985, an Indigenous person had to sign a declaration containing, ‘[I] certify that I am capable of assuming the responsibilities of

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[Canadian] citizenship’ (Paul 1999: para. 13). Thus, these alternative ‘narratives of citizenship’, according to Simpson (2014: 176), ‘are laden with desires that want in some ways to affect the differentials of power that underwrite notions of nationhood and citizenship away from the politics of recognition and into other unfolding, undetermined possibilities’. To claim (and thus impose, non-violently) oneself as Mohawk first and foremost subverts, defies – poaches – the various structures of governance that seek to implement the rules of the state and encroach upon an individual’s liberties. It emphasises narratives of belonging and, ultimately, the right to sovereignty. As Simpson points out, although Indigenous peoples now have Canadian citizenship, it is still coexistent and coterminous with the Indian Act. To adhere to a citizenship of convenience, not out of ‘failed consent’ but, rather, out of ‘positive refusal’ (2014: 128), is a strategy that permits seeing beyond the restrictive borders of the Indian Act, which continuously ‘limit[s] Indians … to spaces of reservations and bodies of certain substance and practice’ (2014: 155–156). In effect, the limitations set out by the original Indian Act provided for the erasure of any form of agency and made, literally, the body of the ‘Indian’ solely a public dimension, a wardship, something to be owned, and that called for protection and safeguarding. Nevertheless, it is important to maintain this coexistence, be it of convenience, all the while continuing to negotiate different forms of recognition. To reiterate Simpson’s crucial question stated above, ‘How does one assert sovereignty and independence when some of the power to define that sovereignty is bestowed by a foreign power?’ (2014: 158). In effect, much like the right to citizenship, the power to grant independence lies in the hands of the state in power, in this case Canada or the US. It is thus necessary to maintain a balance between recognition of and antagonism to the state.

Rewriting the reserve as ‘Indian land’, as home The future of that wilderness and, of course, the future of all life depends upon whose stories we listen to: the stories that tell us we are bound in a timeless and inextricable relationship with the earth which gives us life and sustains us, or the stories that tell us the earth is a resource to be exploited until it is used up (Owens, 1998: 211). Claims to territory, whether they be for unceded lands or for the reserves set aside by treaty, are of equal importance and need to be recognised in order to further negotiation and collaboration between states and Indigenous peoples. The question Louis Owens (1998) asks about whose stories one chooses to listen to continues to be of importance today, especially with respect to territorial claims, both for land already allotted and land to be retrieved. The most evident example is that of the reserve and how it is perceived (or how its story is told, in other words). On the one hand, reserves

80 Sarah Henzi have been viewed as ghettos or enclaves: their dissolution would force Indigenous peoples to assimilate into mainstream society. This aspect was one of the Canadian federal government’s proposals in its White Paper of 1969, as discussed earlier. In this sense, the reserve is regarded as a dark spot on the periphery to be ignored or, better yet, to be erased. But for many, the reserve itself has become the centre: it has become a physical and spiritual home – as an example, one need only look at how, in the summer of 1990, the Mohawk of Kanehsatake took up arms to defend their ancestral burial grounds – one that will be defended against intruders. There have been – and still are – numerous, similar battles that have occurred across Canada and the US. Clearly the causes for uprising are always different, both in scale and in nature, but in all cases, they are related to a form of desecration and lack of respect. The reserve of Akwesasne is a pertinent example of how the Canadian–US border has split communities and nations into distinct parts despite the fact that they are actually part of a larger whole. As a consequence of their communal lands having been bisected by the Canadian–US border in 1783, the Mohawk community of Akwesasne is split into two equal Canadian and American sectors: the territory straddling the intersection of international (US and Canada) and provincial (Ontario and Quebec) borders. This very particular situation of the community brings an entirely new definition to being in a state of liminality, creating, according to its residents, somewhat of ‘a judicial nightmare’ (Allen 2006, n.p.): Granted dual American and Canadian citizenship, Akwesasne residents require dual paperwork to secure employment and benefits in the United States or Canada. “I have Social Security on both sides of the border and health benefits on both sides”, [Cultural Resource Coordinator for the Haudenosaunee Cultural Resource Protection Program] Curtis Lazore says. “I am a citizen of the traditional Mohawk Nation here, but dual citizenship makes it easier to get a bank card, credit cards, and a driver’s license. When border guards say that a tribal ID isn’t enough and ask what side of the border I’m from, I just pull out all my cards. I could choose not to be an American citizen. The Mohawks, after all, have an alliance with the U.S., not allegiance to it. And some natives have renounced American citizenship, but then it is hard to get a job.” The duality in national government matters is also reflected in local government. In Akwesasne, every local governmental service has a Canadian and a United States counterpart in the respective districts. […] To supervise the delivery of all these services, the governments of the United States and Canada set up two Tribal Councils, one on either side, with the members elected by popular vote (Allen 2006: n.p.). In this way, the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne is an example of how the balance between recognition and antagonism is an extremely difficult and

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highly volatile status to maintain. In 1969, the Akwesasne Mohawk drew public attention to their grievances by blocking the International Bridge that traverses their communities. Their grievance was that they were being prohibited by Canadian authorities from duty-free passage of personal purchases across the border: a right, they claimed, which had been established by the Jay Treaty of 1794. However, according to the Aboriginal Rights and Research Office of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne: There are two popular misconceptions concerning the Jay Treaty, leading many people to assume that when Aboriginal Peoples speak of border crossing or trading rights, across the U.S.–Canada border, that it is the Jay Treaty that gives those rights. That is not the case. The Jay Treaty is not a Treaty with Aboriginal Peoples and it is not a Treaty which gives border crossing rights to First Nations People. It is however a Treaty which confirms those rights and which adds to the constitutional protection of those rights (Aboriginal Rights and Research Office 1999, n.p.). As Attorney Bryan Nickels (2001: 313) has remarked, ‘development and recognition of this right [of ‘free passage’ across the US–Canadian border per the provisions of the Jay Treaty] have taken decidedly different courses: while the US has treated the right very liberally under statutory codification, the Canadian government has opted to develop, and restrict, the right under their courts’ common law’. The current problem, according to Nickels, is that ‘the Canadian system never codified the Jay Treaty free movement provision’ (2001: 337), whereas the United States did.4 In consequence, Nickels argues: The restrictive Canadian treatment, balanced against the liberal American treatment, potentially exposes interested individuals (members of native groups attempting to cross the U.S.–Canadian border) to wild disparities in the law. Movement into the U.S. is highly deferential, and Indians enjoy great respect for prehistoric rights; however, movement into Canada essentially places the Indian individual on the same level as any other entering alien, despite his [sic] group’s occupation of the same borderlands for thousands of years preceding Great Britain’s establishment of the Canadian territories (2001: 338). The community’s 1969 grievances certainly speak to this idea of the ‘Indian individual’ on an equal level to ‘any other entering alien’ – specifically if one accounts for the lack of consultation in infrastructure developments. Indeed, not only were community members being prevented from freely coming and going across the border (while, ironically, being at the same time within the limits of the reserve), the Canadian government was also not respecting its own law of no trespassing, given that both the International Bridge and the Canadian Customs office had been built on reserve land

82 Sarah Henzi without prior approval from the Band Council and residents of Akwesasne/ St Regis. Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell takes up this specific aspect in his 1969 documentary You are on Indian land, in which he depicts how protestors ‘poached’ the federal notice ‘This is an Indian Reserve’ from Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs as the very foundation for their argument, as well as the justification for the their desire and legal right to defend Mohawk land.5 This assertion of defiance and re-appropriation demonstrates how the reserve was intended to constrict and ghettoise; the notice designed to keep people out becomes, in the eyes of Mohawk resistance, a tool to prevent intruders from coming in and further desecrating their territory, their home. In this way, disputes regarding land claims and border crossings have helped to re-inscribe the reserve as a space from which to assert sovereignty and elements of territorial control. The case of Akwesasne is, to this day, still highly volatile and unresolved. In 2009, another dispute erupted in response to Canada’s decision to arm border services officers with semi-automatic handguns. On the one hand, as reported on 13 July in the Ottawa Citizen (2009): [T]he geography of the Akwesasne reserve, which reaches into Quebec, Ontario and New York, makes for a jurisdictional nightmare in policing the reserve and controlling smuggling [and] the area has become the heart of the illegal cigarette trade in Canada (2009: n.p.). On the other hand, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that ‘the Mohawk protesters [were] angry about guards being allowed to carry guns, because they say it violates their sovereignty, and increases the likelihood of violent confrontations’ (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2009: n.p.). The ongoing debate around the cigarette trade is, in itself, extremely delicate, since, according to Ann Charney, the Mohawk ‘are aiming at nothing less than economic, cultural and territorial sovereignty. […] [By] invoking the force of ancestral tradition and combining it with contemporary Western know-how, [they] are going about the business of building an independent Mohawk republic, capable of defending itself’ (1995: 144). Though she is saying this with respect to the Mohawk of Kahnawake, it certainly applies to Akwesasne and to any other Mohawk communities that are using similar ways to assert sovereignty. Charney comments that, ironically, ‘the Mohawks take a certain wry pleasure in the fact that tobacco, a substance the Indians gave to the white man and which has enriched the coffers of provincial and federal governments through taxation, has been reclaimed for their own benefit (1995: 155). This ‘gross national product’ (1995: 115), as the Mohawk refer to it, is once again the result of a productive, yet offensive, strategy of reappropriation, which is not only about resisting past and present forms of colonisation but is also about restoring traditional knowledge and attempting to harmonise it with present-day societal – and in this case, economic – preoccupations.

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Returning now to the idea that the reserve itself has become a centre (as opposed to a dark spot on the periphery), as well as a physical and spiritual home, a proactive space from which to assert sovereignty, it seems necessary also to consider the reserve beyond a perspective of border disputes, restraint of movement, and confrontations. Instead it can be understood from a newer perspective in which acts of personal and collective liberation, as well as artistic and linguistic performance, underline discourses of continuity and resistance, rather than discourses of victimisation and grievance. Even though life conditions on many reserves in Canada still include extreme poverty, and insufficient housing and social and health services, the specific space that is the reserve enables the nurturing of traditional values and kinship affiliation that contributes to the sense of identity and belonging of Indigenous peoples. The ‘safety’ of the reserve enables the nurturing of a place that can then become a source of and for creative inspiration, a home: I am the product of liminal space, the result of union between desperate individuals on the edges of dispossessed cultures and the marginalized spawn of invaders. A liminal existence and a tension in the blood and heart must be the inevitable result of such crossing. How could it be otherwise? But the tension can be a source of creative power (Owens 1998: 176). While Louis Owens specifically refers in the above passage to his sense of self as ‘a mixed-blood, a person of complex roots and histories’ (1998: 176), to conform to either the socially or linguistically constructed, imposed identity of being ‘Indian’ or being ‘confined to the ghetto-reserve’ is to accept the label of the ‘hyperreal simulation’ that is the ‘Indian’, which would mean, ultimately, to remain embedded in the colonial discourse of absence. Being inside the reserve is now a vantage point directed toward the old centre (the city, the urban, civilised, space) from which a discourse of liminality repositions the global point of view inculcated by the old narratives of conquest in a fight for self-identification and self-determination. Several authors have written about this shifting in vantage point: the reclamation of a sense of place, both real and imaginary; however, I will only cite one poignant example. Innu poet Rita Mestokosho is from Ekuanitshit (Mingan), meaning ‘Take care of the place where you are’ – which she does. Mestokosho successfully rewrites (reclaims) the reserve-ghetto into a home, a place in which simply to be – however controversial and difficult. In her poem ‘J’imagine’, she writes: ‘That to live in a community / That is to learn day after day / What is my true identity / In the hope of a better day […] My reserve, my ghetto, my home / it doesn’t matter what name I give you / You bury a part of me / You hide a part of my person’ (2010: 57; my translation).

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‘My reserve, my ghetto, my home’, no matter what it is called; she writes that the reserve is also a community. It suggests a safe space for continuity, unity, and sovereignty from which to learn and in which each individual has his/her place. The final two lines of the poem, ‘Tu enfouis une partie de moi / Tu caches une partie de ma personne’ are of particular interest: the use of the word ‘enfouir’, which I have perhaps loosely translated as ‘bury’, can mean any of the following: hide, conceal, cover, enfold, engulf, tuck, cup, sink or enshroud. The intricacy of how the reserve can both hide and enshroud the individual is suggestive of the very history of the word: at times a ghetto, at times a home, it is both a protection and a prison. What Mestokosho’s poem achieves is to depict the complexity of the reserve: it is no longer the same space as when they were set aside for the use of ‘Indians’, a vacant, lifeless space upon which to pile lean-tos and build cheap housing. It is a complex, multifaceted place from which to assert belonging, sovereignty, and power. It is understandable, then, how forcibly removing people and children from this shared ghetto-space created an even larger breach in the transmission of knowledge and familial ties.

Conclusion As noted earlier in ‘Borders’ and with what happened to the Mohawk delegation, the present acts of claiming belonging and allegiance to an ‘alterNative’ citizenship not only underwrite the dominant discourse of nationhood and citizenship, they rewrite – in fact reinstate – a sense of duty and accountability toward the community and no longer toward the nation state. For to belong to a community, to borrow the expression from Jeannette Armstrong (1997) is ‘to share one skin’ (the Okanagan way of saying ‘extended family’). By revitalising communal knowledge and affirming, rather than merely restoring, a sense of collective memory, to ‘write home’ is a strategy of intervention that looks toward emphasising the importance of continuity and belonging. Re-appropriating the reserve, the community, one’s place, then, is not only about resisting past and present forms of colonisation: it is also about ‘communing’ traditional knowledge and attempting to harmonise it with present-day societal preoccupations. It enables the creation of a space in which ghosts of the past may be exposed and dealt with, and in which collective awareness, local activism, and pedagogical approaches underline the importance of interconnectedness. However, as both Armstrong and Owens remark, the reserve, albeit small, remains connected to the greater vastness of the land on which it is settled, the future of which ‘depends upon whose stories we listen to’ (Owens 1998: 211). The question Louis Owens (1998: 17) asks about whose stories one chooses to listen to continues to be of importance today, especially with respect to territorial claims, both for land already allotted and land to be retrieved. ‘To share one skin’, explains Armstrong, ‘refers to blood ties within [the] community and the instinct to protect our individual selves

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extended to all who share the same skin’. This sense of solidarity is also that ‘of peoples bound together by land, blood and love’. Unfortunately, she continues: [l]and bonding is not possible in the kind of economy surrounding us, because land must be seen as real estate to be “used” and parted with if necessary. I see the separation is accelerated by the concept that “wilderness” needs to be tamed by “development” and that this is used to justify displacement of peoples and unwanted species. I know what it feels like to be an endangered species on my land, to see the land dying with us. It is my body that is being torn, deforested and poisoned by “development”. Every fish, plant, insect, bird and animal that disappears is part of me dying. I know all their names and I touch them with my spirit (Armstrong 1997: 17). The continuous desecration of both space and place must be addressed, if there can be any true form of negotiation and collaboration between states and Indigenous peoples for, inadvertently, notions of language, memory, and resistance are all interwoven with what happens to the actual place from which one speaks. In rewriting, in fact re-appropriating, the allegiance to citizenship, community, and self-location, a specific place is created – one from which to express firmly rooted cultural affirmation and overture toward new avenues for artistic, individual, and pedagogical expression and performance. In ‘imposing’ oneself through acts of defiance and poaching, albeit within ‘occupied territory,’ it becomes possible to create narratives of survivance that reach beyond the territorial, the linguistic, the intellectual, or any kind of border. Furthermore, this opens up possibilities to (re) educate the greater public to both settler and Indigenous histories, enabling the audience to see and hear through and from the Indigenous perspective – from inside the reserve. In turn, the reserve becomes the centre for literary, cultural, and social heritage from which there is much to learn, if one seeks to instigate ‘concatenation’ across and beyond linguistic divides within a shared performative space of renegotiation and resistance – that strategic location of positive resistance and transformational power.

Notes 1. It is interesting to note that Mel’s own citizenship is not disclosed, nor is it a matter of importance for his ability to come and go, despite working in the liminal space of the duty-free shop between two border exits. 2. Indigenous men could be granted citizenship before the turn of the twentieth century, but only if they gave up their tribal affiliations (in the US in 1887 under the Dawes General Allotment Act) or accepted becoming enfranchised (in Canada as of 1857 under the Gradual Civilization Act). In the US, it was not before 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act that they were granted citizenship (and the right to vote); in Canada, the right to vote was not

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References Aboriginal Rights and Research Office, Mohawk Council of Akwesasne 1999, ‘Aboriginal border crossing rights and the Jay Treaty of 1794’, Kentenhko:wa. 19 November viewed 12 May, 2017. Allen, K 2006, ‘Homeland insecurity’, Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, September, viewed 12 May 2017, www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/ homeland-insecurity. Armstrong, J 1997, ‘Sharing one skin’, New Internationalist, issue 287, pp. 16–17. Blood Tribe–Kainai First Nation n.d., ‘History’, viewed 11 March 2018, www.bloodtribe. org. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2009, Border authorities shut down Akwesasne crossing 2009, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC News, 1 June 2009, Streaming video, 1 June, viewed 12 May 2017, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/ border-authorities-shut-down-akwesasne-crossing-1.776854.

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Charney, A 1995, Defiance in their eyes: True stories from the margins, Véhicule Press, Montréal. DePasquale, P, Eigenbrod, R, & LaRocque, E (eds.), 2010, Across cultures/across borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American literatures, Broadview Press, London. Gombay, N 2014, ‘“Poaching” – What’s in a name? Debates about law, property, and protection in the context of settler colonialism’, Geoforum, vol. 55, pp. 1–12. Government of Canada 1969, ‘Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy 1969’, viewed 2 April 2018, www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/DAM/DAMINTER-HQ/STAGING/texte-text/cp1969_1100100010190_eng.pdf. Harel, S 2006, Braconnages identitaires: un Québec palimpseste, VLB Éditeur, Montréal. Horn, G 2010, ‘Canada prevents Mohawks from returning home on Haudenosaunee passports’, Iorì:wase News, 1 June, viewed 12 May 2017, http://kahnawakenews. com/canada-prevents-mohawks-from-returning-home-on-haudenosauneepassports-p798.htm?twindow=Default&smenu=1&mad=No. Hyde, S 2001, ‘An interview with Thomas King’, One good story, that one: Thomas King – An author’s guide, HarperCollins Publishing, Toronto, viewed 2 April 2018, http://files.harpercollins.com/PDF/ReadingGuides/0006485251.pdf. King, T 1993, ‘Borders’, One good story, that one, Harper Collins, Toronto, pp. 131–147. Mestokosho, R 2010, ‘J’imagine. ‘Comment je perçois la vie, Grand-mère – Eshi Uapataman Nukum, Beijbom Books, Göteborg. Nelson, RM 1997, ‘Place, vision, and identity in Native American literatures’, in D Morrison (ed.), American Indian studies: An interdisciplinary approach to contemporary issues, Peter Lang, New York, pp. 265–277. Nickels, B 2001, ‘Native American free passage rights under the 1794 Jay Treaty: Survival under United States statutory law and Canadian common law’, Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 313–339. Ottawa Citizen 2009, ‘Akwesasne primer: a history of confrontation,’ 2 June, viewed 21 July 2016, www.pressreader.com/canada/ottawa-citizen/20090602/ 281586646563845. Owens, L 1998, Mixedblood messages, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Paul, DN 1999, First Nations Peoples Canadian Citizenship: Second Class at Best!, viewed 26 September 2011, www.danielnpaul.com/Col/1999/ FirstNationPeoplesCanadianCitizenshipSecondClassAtBest.html. ———2006, We were not the savages. First Nations History: Collision between European and Native American Civilizations, Fernwood Publishing, Winnipeg. Mitchell, MK 1969, You are on Indian land. National Film Board of Canada, viewed 2 April 2018, http://workforall.nfb.ca/film/you_are_on_indian_land/. Simpson, A 2014, Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states, Duke University Press, Durham. Tracy, A 2017, ‘Now reconciled’ tiff: The Review, viewed 24 May 2017, www.tiff.net/ the-review/now-reconciled/index.html. United Nations 2015, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, illustrated edn, viewed 11 March 2018, www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf.

Part II

Asserting connections, belonging, and responsibilities: the politics of territory, land, and home

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Reclaiming a place Post-colonial appropriations of the colonial at Budj Bim, Western Victoria, Australia Louise C. Johnson

Introduction After two centuries of systematic dispossession, the Gunditjmara people now have custodianship and formal recognition of an extensive tract of southwestern Victoria, Australia (see Figure 5.1). This has been secured through a set of non-Indigenous systems – native title rulings (which delivered 1,330 square kilometres in 2007 and 6,501 square kilometres in 2011), freehold title, Indigenous Protected Areas, joint management agreements, heritage rulings, and as a Registered Aboriginal Party. Expressing extraordinary community resilience and secured after long periods of political agitation and court action, these outcomes are providing a postcolonial foundation on which the Gunditjmara are securing lands, identity, incomes, and a future. For some, such as Glen Coulthard (2014: 3), these forms of recognition merely reproduce ‘the very configuration of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous people’s demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend’. However, this chapter argues that, while limitations must be acknowledged, the Gunditjmara experience, like many others in Australia (see Porter 2010; Porter & Barry 2016), has involved extraordinary successes. It is a story of survival but also of transformation of the colonial regulatory regime and its use to secure lands, identities, and economic futures. This chapter will detail the ways in which colonisation was enacted on Gunditjmara lands but also how these actions, and the associated sites, have become part of a post-colonial settlement. Through resistance to the many colonial technologies of dispossession and displacement, the Gunditjmara actively shaped the broader legislative and legal environment which, in turn, is now allowing them to reassert claims to a place on country. It is on this basis that possible post-colonial futures are being built as further claims, joint management plans, heritage bids, and economic development proposals are developed and enacted. The chapter will proceed by outlining the mythical constitution of this country, as this is both vital to Gunditjmara identity and included in recognition documents. It will then describe the way colonisation was enacted

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Figure 5.1 Map of Australia and Victorian Aboriginal language groups with Gunditjmara country. Source: Wikimedia Commons 2008.

on Gunditjmara lands: through mapping, violence, squatting, and reserves. In this process, lands were seized, people were removed and contained, but also new landscapes of significance were created – including the mission and pastoral properties. From the 1970s, and in the wider context of a land rights and black power movements, political challenges led to the creation of new regulatory and recognition regimes – of native title, of cultural heritage, and of environmental management – which have been mobilised to reclaim and reassert Gunditjmara identity, meaning, and occupancy of these lands. The Gunditjmara case to protect lands and places of cultural significance before the building of an ALCOA aluminium smelter was a breakthrough moment in the history of Indigenous recognition in Australia. This court battle and others, acknowledged pre-contact occupancy, landscape management, and meaning, but also colonial moments and places of significance in rulings recognising heritage and native title. Key acts were the handing back of mission lands in the Aboriginal Land (Lake Condah and Framlingham Forest) Act 1987, the 1996 lodging of a native title claim on Lake Condah, the 1999 granting of Indigenous Protected Area status, the 2004 Victorian state heritage listing, and the two major native title determinations in 2007 (of 133,000 hectares) and 2011 (for a further 650,000 hectares), as well as various freehold land purchases made possible by these rulings.

Reclaiming a place 93 Any historical narrative presents challenges and insights into how one story of occupancy, dispossession, and repossession can be told. Even the very notion of a linear history affirms the Eurocentric nature of such storytelling; while the many concepts that have been developed to examine colonial geographies are grounded in their own imperial standpoints (Blunt & McEwan 2002; Mignolo 2000, 2007, 2009; Said 1978). The discussion which follows will focus on a number of critical historical moments that have been identified in Gunditjmara histories. As a non-Indigenous academic observer, information can only be drawn from what is published and what has been revealed during semi-public, purposeful interactions between myself and Gunditjmara informants. The resulting account is necessarily limited but not precluded by such an engaged standpoint (Haraway 1988; Coombes, Johnson, & Howitt 2013). This account draws heavily on those created by, for, and with the Gunditjmara – by anthropologists, historians, and planning consultants – which, in turn, have been used to engage with the contemporary cultural heritage and native title regimes (such as Weir 2009; Gunditjmara with Wettenhall 2010; Bell & Johnston n.d.).

Dreaming and country For the Australian anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1996: 9) ‘Country is a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with […] [It] is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life.’ These Dreamings are written in the land and are known through kin, traditions, story, and cultural practices; they are the pre- and post-colonial foundations for all that follows. For the Gunditjmara, their creation story not only underpins their past but also their present. As an outsider I cannot know its full extent, but through published summaries I can gain some insight into the story which animates the Budj Bim landscape and its people. At the dawn of time, it was the ancestral beings – part-human, partbeast – who brought what was previously barren land to life. At the end of their Dreaming journeys, the ancestral beings left aspects of themselves behind, transformed into part of the landscape. To the Gunditjmara people, Budj Bim’s domed hill represents the forehead of one such being, with the lava spat out as the head burst through the earth forming his teeth (Gunditjmara with Wettenhall 2010: 7). The persistence and the clarity of this Dreaming story has been acknowledged in the various legal statements recognising the Gunditjmara’s connection to and rights over this land. It was specifically singled out in the 2004 listing of the Budj Bim landscape on the National Heritage List with ‘the link between the eruption of the volcano and Budj Bim is of outstanding heritage value as a demonstration of the process through which ancestral beings reveal themselves in the landscape’ (Commonwealth of

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Australia 2004: 5). In this way, a key element of what could comprise the post-colonial in Australia, namely the recognition of Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies, was brought into an ostensibly colonial state’s heritage ruling. In producing a post-colonial history of any one place or community or establishing a legal entitlement to land, a key element is to recognise and engage with Indigenous knowledge systems as best as they can be known or revealed to outsiders (Jackson, Porter, & Johnson 2018). However, this cannot be just words; a token recognition in a rhetorical flourish before the real business of legal recognition begins. Thus, Elizabeth Povinelli argues that it is insufficient to admit Aboriginal beliefs into formal deliberations on land or resources, as this renders them merely another input, a cultural trope akin to multi-culturalism, rather than something that transforms an assumption that only gives agency to (white/European) humans. In contrast, she points to the Dreaming which provides all humans, animals, and objects with the potential to act as agents that have subjective intentionality, and which therefore are incorporated into an alternative epistemology, mapping, and conception of landscape (Povinelli 1995, 2002). So, too, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Katherine Lloyd and others working in Bawaka country in the Torres Strait credit country as an author in stories told of it and in its tourism planning (Lloyd et al. 2012). It is this more-than-human presence of landscape elements, rendered through story and artistic representations, that has been admitted into at least some of the governance discourses within Australia – including the 2004 listing of the Gunditjmara landscape on the National Heritage List. However, this was not the only element of vital importance in ‘proving’ a legitimate Gunditjmara connection to these lands. In addition, a more concrete demonstration of occupancy was necessary for a native title ruling – rather than an exercise in recognising heritage and therefore cultural value. The physical modification of the landscape was critical to recognition in a colonial system imbued with a particular notion of legitimate land use.

Engineering the Budj Bim landscape For the Gunditjmara, Dreaming not only created the major landscape features of Budj Bim country, but also the resources that could be and were mobilised to sustain human life. As Gunditjmara Eileen Alberts notes: In the Dreaming, the ancestral creators gave the Gunditjmara people the resources to live a settled lifestyle. They diverted the waterways, and gave us the stones and rocks to help us build the aquaculture systems. They gave us the wetlands where the reeds grew so that we could make the eel baskets, and they gave us the food-enriched landscape for us to survive (cited in Gunditjmara with Wettenhall 2010: 7).

Reclaiming a place 95 Through a series of constructed weirs and channels across 500 hectares of wetlands and swamps, the Gunditjmara managed water flows. Within this area, there was an extensive aquaculture system to harvest the eels which migrated from the Pacific into the local creeks to spawn before returning to the sea. In Lake Condah/Tae Rak, these stone and earth structures – weirs, races and canals – enabled active management of water flows and effective trapping of the eels as well as fish, using woven nets. Use of deeper pools allowed eels and fish to be held over extended periods while their harvesting, smoking, and storage supported large ceremonial gatherings (Bell & Johnston, n.d.). The Gunditjmara landscape not only registers the elaborate and sophisticated engineering works for harvesting migrating eels but also stone-based semi-permanent dwellings that were established alongside them. Western archaeologists and anthropologists have long studied these works, ultimately confirming their human origins, their areal extent and longevity, with dates ranging from 500 to 7,000 years before the present day (Builth 2002; Clarke 1994; Coutts, Frank, & Hughes 1978; McNiven 2009). Thus, across the lands adjacent to what is now called Lake Condah are the foundations of dwellings, grouped together in communities of 50 to 100 and even 500 (Gunditjmara with Wettenhall 2010). Hundreds more of these structures have been recorded across the Gunditjmara landscape since the 1970s. Interpretation of them by non-Indigenous scholars has varied widely, with many confirming their status as houses and villages but others contesting their human and ancient lineage, pointing rather to post-contact construction, the role of volcanic lava flows, or tree roots in their creation (Builth 2002; Clark 1994; Coutts, Frank, & Hughes 1978: 38; Lane 2008a, 2008b; Wesson 1981). If debate rages amongst academics on the nature of this modified landscape, for the Gunditjmara, there is no doubt as to what the various features indicate. Thus, in 2008, I was taken by an elder, Eileen Alberts, to the 482-hectare Allambie property just south of Lake Condah – purchased in 1988 by the Minister for Planning and Environment on behalf of the Kerrup Elders Aborignal Corporation as part of the first heritage settlement (Budj Bim 2015; see Figure 5.2). Here, Auntie Eileen walked me in a vast circle, along pathways that edged canals and traversed bridges which, in turn, were dotted by groups of round stone circles. Adjacent to each other, in clusters of two, three, and more, some even had common walls, making this a terrace in a suburb, as Eileen cheekily explained. For her and other Gunditjmara there is no question that what we were seeing was an ancient and long-occupied site of semi-permanent habitation, where hundreds if not thousands of their forebears had lived and made skilful use of the aquaculture system that was all around us. The imprint of this community is clear to those who have the discursive tools to see. This was a cultural landscape that was labelled by the first European explorers – such as Thomas Mitchell and William Henty – in the early nineteenth century as a ‘wasteland’ that they dutifully mapped as empty.

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Figure 5.2 2007 and 2011 Native title consent determinations. Source: Victorian Department of Justice c.2011.

Contemporary interpretations of this constructed landscape move well beyond this early tendency to ignore its Indigenous origins. However, in the recognition given to this country as part of its inclusion into the National Heritage register in 2004, its significance is noted in a troubling, if not unexpected, way. Thus, the eel traps, channels, and stone fish traps were recognised as allowing the Gunditjmara to manipulate the wetlands, deliberately creating ideal conditions to grow and harvest eels and fish. Significantly, however, the heritage listing noted how such remains ‘demonstrate a transition from a forager society to one where there is practical husbandry’, whose creative land management allowed high population densities, the construction of stone huts, and a stratified society. Such a constructed landscape is confined to western Victoria and, in the words of this heritage listing, ‘show a high degree of creativity not found in other freshwater fish traps around Australia’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2004: 3). Other comparable sites have been destroyed by farmers; unaware, indifferent, or perhaps hostile to their significance. Indeed, it is due to the high level of resistance to occupation, as well as to the custodianship of the Gunditjmara, that such a landscape can be rediscovered and recognised today. But this recognition does occur within a European system of landscape valuation; one located within a familiar grand narrative of cultural change, from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilisation’ by way of notable way stations, including ‘the transition from a forager society’ to one of ‘practical husbandry’. What

Reclaiming a place 97 matters in this neo-colonial rather than post-colonial appraisal is the physical transformation, management, and usage of the landscape resources in ways akin to Western husbandry. Cultural heritage significance is thereby rendered through a European lens of ‘human’ progress, though such recognition was sought by the Gunditjmara who sought this ruling as a vital part of reinscribing their story and presence. For along with native title recognition, cultural heritage listing provides a discursive space in which landscape values can be articulated and landscape forms such as these engineering works can be restored. Here, then, are colonial appropriations of the pre-colonial, but also the use of Western notions of ‘heritage value’ to secure contemporary recognition.

‘Discovery’ and ‘settlement’ The ‘discovery’ by the British of what became known at the Portland District occurred from three main directions: inland from whaling and sealing ventures on the coast and the Henty brothers’ pastoral ventures (from 1834); expansion from the settlement to the east at Port Phillip from 1835; and following the explorer and surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell’s journey south from New South Wales in 1836 (Critchett 1990). As the British moved across this landscape, the local Aboriginal population tended to stay out of sight or be overlooked, with their fires and huts the main indicator of their presence (Learmonth 1934). The lands being described by these explorers and early settlers was ideal for grazing, and so initial reports led to their rapid occupancy. It was a country rich in wildlife and what was presumed to be untouched, ‘natural’ pasture – in reality, the result of active burning and management over the centuries by Indigenous occupants (Gammage 2012; Pascoe 2014). Despite regular accounts by such explorers and early pastoralists of Indigenous settlement and presence however, the early maps of the area show nothing beyond the pathways used by Europeans and what they regarded as significant physical features. This was an area officially unoccupied by anyone apart from the settlers, with their maps showing only their iconography, symbols, and markings of importance – the creeks, rivers, hills, and pathways – that made up a Western assessment of this landscape. The particular role played by mapping as a colonial technology has been subject to close examination. Thus, in a ground-breaking application of post-structuralist theory to the standard tool of the cartographer, Jonathan Harley (1989) located imperial map-making as integral to the colonial project. He deconstructed the means by which European power was inscribed into and onto maps, through notions of truth, measurement, and territorial reality; hiding its social origins at the same time as legitimating its own approach and denying that of others. He argues that all the steps in map-making – selection, omission, simplification, classification, and the creation of hierarchies and symbols – are inherently rhetorical; signifying,

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in their intention and appropriation, particular purposes. During colonisation, maps became crucial to the assertion and maintenance of state power, confirming boundaries and used for internal administration and the control of populations (Byrne 2003; Carter 1987; Dodge 2011; Harley 1989). There were numerous ‘outrages’ reported by contemporaries, with Jan Critchett’s (1990, 1998, 2003) detailed research indicating that around 350 Indigenous people – out of an estimated total of around 3,000 for the Portland District – were deliberately killed from the 1830s through to the 1860s. There were single violent encounters, systematic poisonings, and group campaigns supposedly to avenge Aboriginal incursions onto properties, the occasional stealing of stock, attacks on pastoralists, and resistance to the widespread abuse of Aboriginal women (Elder 2003; Reynolds 2003; Pascoe 2007). In addition, around 50 per cent of the Aboriginal population died from diseases introduced by Europeans, such as measles, smallpox, malaria, and syphilis. For the Gunditjmara, violence, disease, and removal from country was accompanied by a cessation of building activity and a collapse in the birth rate. Any post-colonial account must admit the violence that was committed by settlers and explain its scale, impunity, and horror, while noting its invisibility in the many histories of the area (such as Kiddle 1961; Powell 1970) and the absence of legal retribution for the crimes of murder, assault, and rape. In addition, there is the land theft that was systematically committed by those same settlers. Thus, it was into these evacuated lands in the western part of the Port Phillip District that ‘squatters’ came from Melbourne, New South Wales, and across Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s Land. Despite their technical illegality – the New South Wales-based colonial government had declared a Limit of Location around Sydney in an attempt to control the occupancy of eastern Australia (Jeans 1972) – the undeniable presence of squatters was recognised by the introduction of stock licence payments in 1839, and also by the despatch of soldiers in response to the demands by squatters for safety from resistant ‘natives’. The conversion of squatting to legal occupancy was confirmed in the 1860s when cries to ‘unlock the land’ from ex-gold miners were met by preferencing all current occupants and licence holders with access to freehold title (Carnegie 1993). Rendered invisible by earlier explorer’s maps emptying the landscape of all but significant European features, the presence of the Gunditjmara was further negated by violence and dispossession as squatters occupied their lands. Land regulations legitimised this occupancy first by licensing introduced stock, then through policing, and then by mapping and parcelling properties into neat lots for transfer and sale to those deemed to have the knowledge, funds, and authority to use them properly. Some of these properties – notably Allambie (480 hectares), Kurtonitj (353 hectares), Muldoons (660 hectares), Peters (132 hectares), Vaughans (270 hectares) and Bryants (103 hectares) – have subsequently been systematically purchased

Reclaiming a place 99 by either the state government (and then handed on to the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation) or outright by the Indigenous Land Council (Budj Bim 2015). While comprising only a small portion of their colonised country, such lands are nevertheless providing a vital material foundation for commercial activities – be they pastoral, agricultural, or tourist – and critical caring for country actions.

Containment If the main objective of colonisation was land seizure and sheep faming, European observers did confirm the scale of the Gunditjmara presence as well as their active resistance. Thus, in the 1840s the Gunditjmara began a more systematic resistance to this occupancy, stealing livestock, property, and burning crops and houses (Pascoe 2007). What became known as the Eumeralla Wars involved a guerrilla campaign, one which utilised the stony basaltic landscape as a natural barrier to European horses, though not ultimately a foil to their rifles and outside Native Police. Despite the earlier decimation of the population by violence and disease, the Gunditjmara mounted a spirited and lengthy defence to the invasion throughout the 1840s. These very acts of resistance, ironically, were recognised as having particular heritage value in the 2004 heritage listing of their lands. One outcome of such resistance was an ongoing presence and it was this which allowed the Gunditjmara to establish the high level of proof of continuous occupancy required for a successful native title ruling in 2007 and again in 2011. Imbued with a humanitarian impulse that had ended slavery, some colonists moved to ‘protect’ the local Aboriginal populations from the ravages of the settlers. George Augustus Robinson, fresh from apparent success in shepherding the Indigenous population from Van Diemen’s Land onto Flinders Island, was appointed Chief Protector and enjoined to ‘learn their language, and endeavour to protect them from cruelty and injustices and to guard their property’ (Broome 2005: 53). Noting, and at times despairing at, the depravity, violence, and ruthlessness that accompanied white ‘settlement’ of the region, the protectorate was a singular failure. Robinson’s observations did not slow the seizure and occupancy by pastoralists of the country (Robinson 1841). These actions were accompanied by intense and ongoing conflict with the Aboriginal occupants. The 1850s had seen a huge upsurge of European and Asian populations flocking to the gold fields of Victoria as well as another attempt by the churches to ‘protect’ the remnant Aboriginal population. Thomas McCombie, chairman of the 1858 Parliamentary Select Committee on the Condition of Aboriginal people, noted that while the ‘higher race’ had a ‘right to take possession of this land’, it also had an obligation to provide for the ‘protection and support [of the] inferior race’ (cited in Gunditjmara with Wettenhall 2010: 38). To this end 0.3 per cent of the colony was set aside for the Aboriginal peoples, including the 800-hectare Anglican Lake Condah

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Mission reserve. By the end of 1870, there were 70 Gunditjmara in 16 tworoomed bark huts, as well as cattle and horses along with 60 acres under cultivation on this reserve. By 1880 there were 22 permanent bluestone or timber buildings. As with other reserves across the nation, the so-called Protection Board gave their managers enormous control over the lives and movement of their charges, regulating their sleeping, schooling, employment, and marriage while instilling a coercive Christian regime. The Reverend John Heinrich Stahle and his wife Mary oversaw the Lake Condah mission from 1875 until its closure in 1919, and they instilled a brutal regime of violence, threats, intimidation, and regulation; all of which was actively challenged (van Toorn, 2005). However, for the Gunditjmara, while oppressive, the mission did provide a space of safety on country, a place where they could at least survive in relative security and be housed, fed, and clothed. Despite ever-tougher regulations, including the expulsion in 1886 of all ‘half-caste children’, many residents maintained their connection with the mission by occupying lands nearby. These tactics ensured the survival of community and maintenance of their cultural landscape. Despite oppressive treatment, the Gunditjmara defended the mission when it was threatened with closure. It was a place of safety and community on country which thereby assumed importance at the time and in their history. As a result, this site of containment assumed special significance and so ‘[t]he mission and cemetery were returned to the Gunditjmara in 1984 as part of the out of court settlement in the Onus vs Alcoa judgement’ (Budj Bim Plan 2015: 23).

Resilience and ongoing presence While closed in 1919, the mission remained the centre of community life, with 70 people still living there in 1939 and a number of other Gunditjmara families living on the lands nearby. There were regular dances, church services, and a functioning primary school. Fish traps were maintained on Darlot Creek and hunting continued, supported by a ‘sense of sharing, close kinship and strong commumity bonds’ (Gunditjmara with Wettenhall 2010: 49). Despite this active use, in 1951 the Lake Condah Reserve was given to the Soldier Settler Commission who allocated lands to non-Aboriginal returned servicemen, with the exception of 43 acres where the mission was built. In addition, Lake Condah was drained and allocated to pastoralists. The taking of lands continued well after the official end of colonial or British rule. But a new era was dawning, one with far more widespread and organised opposition from Aboriginal peoples over the 1960s and 1970s, demanding the vote, equal pay, and land rights (Clark 2008; McGregor 2009; Morris 2013). Thus, in response to a 1980 ALCOA proposal to build an aluminium smelter at Portland, Sandra Onus and Christina Frankland launched legal action to prevent the destruction of Gunditjmara cultural

Reclaiming a place 101 sites under the Archaeological and Aboriginal Relics Preservation Act 1972 (Vic). Eventually, after being denied by the Victorian parliamentary upper house, the case was taken to the Commonwealth and, in 1987, the Federal High Court agreed, overruling the state. In his ruling Justice Gibbs noted for the first time that the Gunditjmara had common law rights as traditional owners, giving them special standing in their own country. Thus, the Government acknowledged: that part of Condah land shown […] was originally Aboriginal land […] that part of Condah land was traditionally owned, occupied, used and enjoyed by Aboriginals in accordance with Aboriginal laws, customs, traditions and practices; the traditional Aboriginal rights of ownership, occupation, use and enjoyment concerning that part of Condah land are deemed never to have been extinguished that part of Condah land has been taken by force […] without consideration as to compensation […] Aboriginals residing on that part of Condah land and other Aboriginals are considered to be the inheritors in title from Aboriginals who owned, occupied, used and enjoyed that land since time immemorial (Aboriginal Land (Lake Condah and Framlingham Forest) Act 1987). The case set a landmark precedent – five years before the famous Mabo determination led to the legal acknowledgement of native title in Australia – and the State of Victoria responded in 1984 by offering 53 hectares of land, including the former mission and cemetery, as well as funding – A$1.5 million – to assist in its maintenance and to fund land purchases (Weir 2009). Here was the first formal claim and recognition within a colonial legal framework of Indigenous rights to land. The meaning and practice of heritage recognition in Australia had been altered forever as a result. The first major legal claim for acknowledgement, rights, land, and restitution, then, was through the state heritage regime. This ruling led to the recognition of prior and ongoing land rights and special symbolic, cultural, and economic connection to country. It was on this basis that lands and funds were allocated and custodianship granted over key sites, even if they were, significantly, places of ruthless containment. The later 2004 granting of state heritage recognition of the Budj Bim landscape was equally significant: as the creation story was explicitly acknowledged, along with the engineering works and the armed resistance of the 1840s. So, too, was the 1980s legal battle for cultural heritage recognition itself, which ultimately led to the Commonwealth intervening over a state matter, and in the process creating a legal precedent as well as a judgement favouring the Gunditjmara. The success in achieving national heritage recognition is now providing the foundation on which the Gunditjmara people are seeking World Heritage List status. As Gunditjmara leader Damien Bell noted, the heritage regime

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has delivered the ‘resources to share the story, in order to protect the story’ (Brennan 2015). The 2007 native title consent agreement over 133,000 hectares built on this heritage listing. The reasons for the 2007 native title judgement are instructive as they too acknowledge the long and particular history of the Gunditjmara on these lands – including the Dreaming story and engineering works – and the means by which they were displaced from them. The ruling further describes the history of the many attempts by the Gunditjmara to have this area recognised as their own, including the successful national heritage listing in July 2004 (North 2007). This and the later 2011 native title rulings do not confer freehold ownership but rather the right to access and use the named lands and waters for hunting, fishing, and ceremonial purposes. In addition, the state government and Gunditjmara reached agreements for the cooperative management of Mt Eccles National Park and the establishment of a joint body – the Budj Bim Council – to oversee its daily management and transfer freehold title of the Lake Condah Reserve to the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (National Native Title Tribunal 2007). It was on this basis that a National Heritage Landscape was formally recognised (in 2007) and the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation became the first Registered Aboriginal Party (RAP) under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 (Vic). As a result, Lake Condah was formally returned by the Victorian Government in 2008 and this formed the basis of an ongoing Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project (LCDP 2010), together with a number of environmental management plans and strategies to achieve a broad range of other objectives – including the reflooding of Lake Condah – aided by A$6.5 million in direct government investment (Alcoa n.d.). In addition, there have been a number of Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) designated and a federal government agreement with traditional owners to ‘promote biodiversity and cultural resource conservation’ (Budj Bim Plan 2015: 9). These include the properties adjacent to Lake Condah and Kurtonitj and will involve planning and support to develop a natural resource management framework for the sustainable development of the area, including a tourist plan and connection with the hardwood plantation industry. Regenerating the landscape and the lake has been integral to the restoration of country and community identity. It is on this basis that further bids for funding and work programmes to train and employ the young in landscape management techniques have been successfully made; with the Lake Condah Restoration Project, a multi-million-dollar project of community and landscape reconstruction, forging ahead (Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project 2010). As Gunditjmara elder Ken Saunders comments on the reflooding of the lake: Lake Condah is the heart of Gunditjmara country […] we have always been with the lake and it has always looked after us […] if the lake is

Reclaiming a place 103 good then we are good […] we have been different since the lake was drained by authorities but with water soon to return, we will achieve an important healing for the country and for ourselves (cited in Bell and Johnston, n.d.) The heritage and native title rulings along with other key legislative and planning mechanisms – the RAPs and IPAs – have therefore formed the foundation for a series of development initiatives – including the reflooding of Lake Condah and the development of a tourism and farming operation – as well as allowing the young to be trained and employed as rangers on country. In addition, the heritage ruling prioritised the Gunditjmara cosmology and history of the area to deliver both cultural and economic recognition. The native title rulings also acknowledged this pre-contact as well as contact history while granting limited rights to access, manage, and use lands and waterways. Both the heritage and native title decisions give both symbolic recognition and a material foundation for the Gunditjmara and, in that sense, they could be seen as post-colonial. However, following the caution given by Coulthard (2014), engagement with such contemporary state systems does not deliver Indigenous autonomy. Despite admitting elements of Indigenous prior occupancy and ongoing connection, heritage and native title regimes both maintain the integrity of the colonial land ownership system – freehold and leasehold being off limits to Indigenous claimants – and the land use system – in the elevation of agriculture and pastoralism over rights to hunt and fish (see also Alfred & Corntassel 2005; Jackson, Porter, & Johnson 2018). Indeed, as Markell (2003), Brown (1995) and Fraser (2000, 2003) argue, the state may be unable to deliver progressive policies, bound as its actions are by vested land interests and orientation to static identities which ghettoise and disempower. In contrast, Tamar Malloy (2014) argues that, while recognition may be imperfect and limited, it can and, I would argue in the Gunditjmara case, does offer a foundation for expanded legal, environmental, and cultural recognition. The actions described above have been very much driven by the Gunditjmara community, and this voice must be taken seriously rather than set aside on ideological grounds. As Malloy (ibid.) further notes, recognition, even when conditional and limited, can be a foundation for expanded legal and social transformation, offering a set of resources that can embolden and empower marginalised groups. Budj Bim is therefore a landscape rich in pre-contact significance – of creation stories, semi-permanent settlement, major engineering works, and a food economy built upon the harvesting of migrating eels. It is also a landscape that registers the history of colonisation, especially contact with explorers and surveyors and conflict with protectors, pastoralists, missionaries, and reserve administrators. It is therefore an area, much like any other in Australia, that has layers of colonial activities and governance regimes etched upon it. Despite its violent past, history of Indigenous displacement and containment, and recent incorporation into what could be

104 Louise C. Johnson seen as neocolonial frameworks, it is on the basis of their long-term continuous connection, and the related cultural landscapes of colonisation, that the Gunditjmara is engaging with some key legislative frameworks, seeking to build their economic and cultural future. Here, then, are examples of colonial systems of land administration being challenged and changed and, in the process, the Gunditjmara are actively creating a post-colonial alternative.

Conclusion The Gunditjmara of western Victoria have survived extraordinary colonial efforts to render them invisible before organising their systematic killing, removal, containment, and assimilation. The physical, sexual, economic, and epistemic violence involved in these processes confirms the reality of ongoing coloniality (Mignolo 2009), but also the complexity and contestation that occurred across two centuries. Not only was colonialism never a total system of domination, but the land management and planning system which failed to map their existence or recognise their land ownership, and which, in turn, legitimised occupancy by squatters through a licensing and then a lease and freehold system, has also provided possibilities for recognition and retribution. The cultural heritage regime and the native title system created in the 1980s and 1990s have been effectively mobilised but also altered by the Gunditjmara. In detailing and admitting their Dreaming story of landscape creation, their aquaculture management system, spirited military resistance to European occupation, and in taking governments and corporations to court to secure their lands, vital sites, and peoples, the Gunditjmara have secured material and symbolic recognition. In these exercises they have used many of the same planning technologies – of land valuation, regulation, and titling – that had once been utilised to steal from them. While their battles have ensured that these systems have altered, they still do not engage with a fully post-colonial regime – as native title is not freehold, cultural heritage is still defined by non-Indigenous others, and sovereignty has not yet been acknowledged nor a treaty concluded. But the Gunditjmara are now rebuilding their cultural and material futures on the basis of native title and cultural heritage recognition.

Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge that Deakin University’s Academic Study Leave from July to December 2013 gave me the time and space to work through the issues canvassed by this chapter. I also wish to thank Professor Leonie Sandercock at the School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, for the visiting position, and the generous insights and provocative readings offered by Professor Sneja Gunew and Ms Carolyn Prouse over this time. In addition, I wish to thank the Gunditjmara,

Reclaiming a place 105 particularly Denis Rose, Damien Bell, and Eileen Alberts, for their generosity in showing me their country and sharing their stories. The resulting views remain those of the author.

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Making Indigenous space in the city Mapuche migrations and territorial reconfigurations in Concepción, Chile Bastien Sepúlveda

Introduction Indigenous presence in urban areas is a recognised phenomenon, whose increasing importance has given rise to what has come to be known as ‘urban Indigenous populations’. In some countries, urban Indigenous represent the largest segment of Indigenous populations, which means that we should consider the city to be a more-and-more central place in the geography of Indigenous territories. An increasing body of literature consequently addresses this reality, shedding light on a wide range of topics in diverse regional and cultural contexts (Durin 2008; Peters & Andersen 2013; Watson 2014). Insofar as this body of literature stresses how Indigenous migrants reproduce their identity in the city, it reveals the complex dynamics that are involved in the production of space and in the processes of territorialisation. By different means, Indigenous migrants tend to invest in specific places through which their collective identities are (re)produced in the city. This has been referred to by Wilson and Peters (2005: 405) as ‘a process of spatial resistance that redraws the boundaries of identity and struggle’. This chapter aims to highlight such processes through the presentation of a case study from Chile. According to the last official census in 2002, 65 per cent of Indigenous individuals in the country live in urban areas (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas 2005). The research on urban Indigenous populations in Chile has primarily focused on the Metropolitan Area of Santiago (MAS), which contains approximately one-third of the total population of Mapuche – the main Indigenous group of Chile, with a total population of 604,349. While this literature has mainly suggested ways in which Mapuche migrants are reconfiguring their identities in the city (Aravena 2002; Gissi 2001; Imilan & Alvarez 2008), few publications have also attempted to explore the territorial dimension of these reconfigurations, paying attention to diverse forms of cultural revival in specific peripheral and poor municipalities of the MAS, such as Cerro Navia (Cheuquelaf Morales 2015) and La Pintana (Sepúlveda & Zúñiga 2015).

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Far from the MAS, the Metropolitan Area of Concepción (MAC) has not drawn much scholarly attention, even though it has also attracted a great number of Mapuche migrants over time. With a total population that is close to 1 million, the MAC is the second largest urban area in Chile. However, even more relevant are both the geographical location of this city and its historical importance vis-à-vis the ancestral Mapuche territory. Concepción was established in 1550 as a military fort, on the north shore and at the mouth of the Bío-Bío river, which was proclaimed as the formal frontier between the General Captaincy of Chile and the Mapuche territory in 1641.1 This specific position led Concepción to be considered as both a ‘frontier town’ and a regional capital. As such, it played an active part in the annexation and colonisation of Mapuche lands by the Chilean state during the second half of the nineteenth century. Concepción then became one of the most important and industrialised cities of Central Chile, and it experienced significant rural migration flows throughout the twentieth century, especially from Mapuche communities. In this chapter, I discuss how Mapuche experience of urban space challenges historical and current colonialist discourses and representations in relation to the city. Using data collected in the MAC where I have conducted in-depth research since 2008, I analyse how both access to and uses of specific places contribute to the making of Indigenous spaces in the city. To demonstrate how such experience helps Mapuche to incorporate the city into their territory, I first describe the Mapuche migration and urbanisation dynamics in Chile (part 1), then analyse the principles on which the urban Mapuche territorialisation process is based (part 2), and finally bring together a series of data collected in the field between 2008 and 2015 (part 3). The main argument supported here is that current migrations are transforming the Mapuche territory in both its form and its nature and that traditional social patterns are extended to, and reproduced in, the city. Indeed, and more generally, this specific case study shows that, far from being immutable and ahistorical, Indigenous territories may be defined as constantly changing geographical entities.

Mapuche migrations and urbanisation dynamics in Chile After conquering and annexing Mapuche lands, the Chilean state engaged in a limited land rights recognition process through the establishment of Indigenous reserves – called reducciones in Chile – which were varying-sized land grants accorded to the heads of the main Mapuche families. More than 3,000 reserves were established between 1884 and 1929 in the current regions of Bío-Bío, La Araucanía, and Los Ríos, which allowed the Chilean state to enclose Indigenous land rights, thereby opening the southern shore of the Bío-Bío river to agricultural settlement (González 1986). As land grants seldom covered the whole territorial extension of each Mapuche community, demographic pressure within the reserves dramatically increased over

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time. In addition, many Mapuche communities were simply excluded from the former process of land rights recognition and could not benefit from the establishment of the reducciones. As a result, many individuals were forced to leave their land in search of better opportunities. During the 1970s, Stuchlik (1999) estimated that close to half of the male Mapuche population had already migrated out of traditional communities into rural areas. The ensuing dismemberment of almost all the Indigenous reserves, which were divided in multiple individual plots during the military dictatorship (1973–1989), served to increase Mapuche migrations still more. On the one hand, the establishment of the individualisation of land within the reducciones thwarted the authority of the lonkos2 in managing land (re)distribution. On the other hand, land survey processes did not consider the rights of those who were not present during the labours of the topographical commission. Individuals who were working or living out of the reducciones were reported as ‘absent’ and were thereby unable to claim any legal title of land (Rupailaf 2002). On another front, in 1939, Chilean authorities drafted a general plan of industrialisation for the country based on the creation of the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO), which was created to fund specific investments and support national development. The action of the CORFO also had a strong impact on urban growth. A paroxysmal example of this process is the opening of the Huachipato steel plant in the MAC in 1950. By providing a significant source of employment, the plant provoked important flows of rural migrants – among them many Mapuche – and may even be considered ‘the most important milestone in Concepción’s urban history’, according to Aliste (2015: 123). In this context, major urban areas, such as the MAC, became the primary destination of Mapuche migrants. Despite evidence of the increased urbanisation of Mapuche, official censuses continued to assimilate the Indigenous population into a single peasant class during most of the twentieth century. Mapuche identity was only considered within the reserves, which had the effect of excluding the urban Mapuche population from the total count. Nevertheless, a first estimation was realised in 1952 in Santiago, where 875 Mapuche individuals were counted. According to Munizaga (1971), this number widely underestimated the total Mapuche population living in the Chilean capital at that time. As he argued, the electoral registers of the province contained almost 10,000 individuals with at least one Mapuche name. Another informal estimation was done by Stuchlik (1999), who considers that almost 100,000 Mapuche people were already living in the different urban areas of the country by 1966. However, things changed in 1992, when ethnic belonging was eventually considered to be a new census variable in the official Censo de Población. The results of the 1992 official census highlighted a reality that strongly diverged from the representation that Chilean society had of Indigenous peoples. Contrary to a widespread vision of indigeneity based on rurality and traditional cultures within the reserves, the 1992 census revealed a

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strong global urbanisation rate – close to 80 per cent – amongst Indigenous peoples across the country. By allowing that individuals formally recognised themselves as Indigenous, regardless of their place of residence, the 1992 census liberated Mapuche identity from the borders of reducciones.3 Actually, attention was focused more on the geographical distribution of the Mapuche population than on its demographic importance, which consisted of 900,000 individuals, representing close to 10 per cent of the Chilean population. This distribution was not consistent with the historical Mapuche territory – from the Bío-Bío river to the Chiloé Island – where only 36 per cent of the total Mapuche population was living. The most significant part – 44 per cent – of the Mapuche population in Chile was then in the MAS, which covers most of the Metropolitan Region (see Table 6.1). Even more striking was the fact that, in Santiago, urban born and raised Mapuche were demographically more important than Mapuche migrants (Valdés 1996). While the 2002 census confirmed t his t rend, i t a lso r evealed a s ignificant decrease in the Mapuche total population – 35 per cent less than in 1992 – probably due to the modification of the question that was used to survey ethnicity, which was formulated in terms of belonging rather than self-identification.4 Such a change also entailed a kind of ‘relocation’ of the Mapuche population within its historical territory, which henceforth contains 59 per cent of the identified p opulation (see F igure 6 .1). Even t hough t he M AS o nly h olds a pproximately one-third of the total population of Mapuche, the urbanisation rate remains quite significant at a national level, because 65 per cent of the Mapuche population now live in urban areas all over the country. Table 6.1 Mapuche population in the 1992 and 2002 official census

Region Tarapacá Antofagasta Atacama Coquimbo Valparaíso Metropolitan O’Higgins Maule Bío-Bío Araucanía Los Lagos Aysén Magallanes Total

Mapuche population 1992

Mapuche population 2002

Individuals

%

Individuals

%

Variation (%)

9.557 12.053 6.747 18.010 58.945 409.079 35.579 32.444 125.180 143.769 68.727 3.256 4.714 928.060

1,02 1,29 0,72 1,94 6,35 44,07 3,83 3,49 13,48 15,49 7,4 0,35 0,5