Global Flows or Global Flaws? Indigenous Peoples in the Modern Global Conjuncture

DOI : 10.33876/2311-0546/2020-49-1/16-29

Abstract

The present essay is an attempt to consider the place and role of indigenous peoples in the modern world of global flows and shifting social, political, economic, and cultural environments. I discuss some strategies, developed by the Native communities in order to adapt themselves to the new conditions, yet maintaining their ethnocultural identities. Special emphasis is placed on the autochthonal North American nations’ multifaceted response to the ongoing globalisation, colonisation, and cultural assimilation, concomitant with these processes. I consider, in particular, the pan-Indian movement in the context of these processes. But some examples of the indigenous communities from other parts of the globe are provided in order to illustrate and substantiate the argumentation as well.

I utilise the Western—non-Western dichotomy, albeit its evident flaws as an essentially homogenising and oversimplified framework, intentionally for convenience. Different levels of identity, related sociopolitical discourse, and cultural mobilisations, from local to metacultural and transnational, various means of «resistance» and response to the global processes and their consequences, and the influence of these processes on the indigenous communities, both positive and negative, are considered.

References

1. Anaya, S.J. 1996. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
3. Appadurai, A. Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination. Public Culture 12 (1):1–19.
4. Balasubramaniam, V. 1999. Dynamics of Non-Involvement in ASEAN: Rhetoric and Primordialism. Economic and Political Weekly 34 (39): 2786–2790.
5. Barsh, R.L. 1983. Indigenous North America and Contemporary International Oregon Law Review 62: 73–125.
6. Basso, K.H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
7. Bittle, W.E. 1962. The Manatidie: A Focus for Kiowa-Apache Tribal Identity. Plains Anthropologist 7 (17): 152–163.
8. Bourdieu, P., and J.B. Thompson. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
9. Bucko, R. 2004. Religion. In A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, edited by T. Biolsi, 171–195. Malden: Blackwell.
10. Carpio, M.V. 2011. Indigenous Albuquerque. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press.
11. Cattelino, J.R. 2008. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.
12. Chaliand, G., ed. 1989. Minority Peoples in the Age of Nation States. London: Pluto Press.
13. Champagne, D., and C. Goldberg. 2005. Changing the Subject: Individual versus Collective Interests in Indian Country Research. Wicazo Sa Review 20 (1), Colonization/Decolonization, II: 49–69.
14. Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
15. Cobb, A.J. 2005. Understanding Tribal Sovereignty: Definitions, Conceptualizations, and Interpretations. American Studies 46 (3/4): 115–132.
16. Cobb, A.J. 2008. The National Museum of the American Indian as Cultural Sovereignty. In The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations, edited by A. Lonetree and A.J. Cobb, 331–352. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
17. Comaroff, J.L., and P.C. Stern. 1994. New Perspectives on Nationalism and War. Theory and Society 23 (1): 35–45.
18. Dennison, J. 2012. Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
19. Dennison, J. 2017. Entangled Sovereignties: The Osage Nation’s Interconnections with Governmental and Corporate Authorities. American Ethnologist 44 (4): 684–696.
20. El-Seedi, H.R., P.A.G.M. De Smet, O. Beck, G. Possnert, J.G. Bruhn. 2005. Prehistoric Peyote Use: Alkaloid Analysis and Radiocarbon Dating of Archaeological Specimens of Lophophora from Texas. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 101: 238–242.
21. Entessar, N. 1989. The Kurdish Mosaic of Discord. Third World Quarterly 11 (4), Ethnicity in World Politics: 83–100.
22. Field, M.C. and P.V. Kroskrity. 2009. Introduction: Revealing Native American Language Ideologies. In Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country, edited by P.V. Kroskrity and M.C. Field, 3–28. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
23. Gleach, F.W. 2006. Pocahontas: An Exercise in Mythmaking and Marketing. In New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations, edited and with an introduction by S.A. Kan and P.T. Strong, 433–455. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
24. Hanson, R.D. 2004. Globalization and Tribal S In A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, edited by T. Biolsi, 284–303. Malden / Oxford: Blackwell.
25. Harik, I.F. 1972. The Ethnic Revolution and Political Integration in the Middle East. International Journal of Middle East Studies 3 (3): 303–323.
26. Harkin, M.E., ed. 2004. Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
27. Herle, A. 1994. Dancing Community: Powwow and Pan-Indianism in North America. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 17 (2): 57–83.
28. Howard, J.H. 1955. Pan-Indian Culture of Oklahoma. The Scientific Monthly 81 (5): 215–220.
29. Howard, J.H. 1983. Pan-Indianism in Native American Music and Dance. Ethnomusicology 27 (1): 71–82.
30. Hultkrantz, Å. 1997. The Attraction of Peyote: An Inquiry into the Basic Conditions for the Diffusion of the Peyote Religion in North America. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion, No. 33.
31. Jackson, J.B. 2003. Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, in cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington.
32. Jackson, J.B. 2004. Recontextualizing Revitalization: Cosmology and Cultural Stability in the Adoption of Peyotism among the Yuchi. In Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands, edited by M.E. Harkin, 183–205. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
33. Jacob, M.M. 2013. Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
34. Keck, M., and K. Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond Borders. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
35. Kroeber, A.L. 1955. Nature of the Land-Holding Group. Ethnohistory 2 (5): 303–314.
36. Kurath, G.P. 1957. Pan-Indianism in Great Lakes Tribal Festivals. The Journal of American Folklore 70 (276): 179–182.
37. La Barre, W. 1989. The Peyote Cult. Fifth edition, enlarged. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. First published 1938.
38. Landzelius, K. 2002. Mapping the Unfathomable Frontiers of Indigenous Cyberspace: A Survey of the Expanding/Contracting Boundaries of Going Native on the Net. In IT-Users and Producers in an Evolving Sociocultural Context, edited by G. Arvastson, 41–50. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press.
39. Leacock, E. 1983. Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality: Conceptual and Historical Problems. Dialectical Anthropology 7 (4): 263–284.
40. Marshall, K.J. 2016. Upward, Not Sunwise: Resonant Rupture in Navajo Neo-Pentecostalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
41. Mooney, J. 1896. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Part II. Washington.
42. Morris, G.T. 1992. International Law and Politics: Toward a Right to Self-determination for Indigenous In The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, edited by M.A. Jaimes, 55–86. Boston: South End.
43. Muehlebach, A. 2001. «Making Place» at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Cultural Anthropology 16 (3): 415–448.
44. Niezen, R. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
45. Ong, A. 2005. (Re)Articulations of Citizenship. Political Science and Politics 38 (4): 697–699.
46. Perley, B.C. 2012. Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
47. Ramirez, R.K. 2007. Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press.
48. Rifkin, M. 2009. Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the «Peculiar» Status of Native Peoples. Cultural Critique 73: 88–124.
49. Said, E.W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
50. Sanford, M. 1971. Pan-Indianism, Acculturation, and the American Ideal. Plains Anthropologist 16 (53): 222–227.
51. Simpson, A. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.
52. Simpson, A., and A. Smith. 2014. Introduction. In Theorizing Native Studies, edited by A. Simpson and A. Smith, 1–30. Durham: Duke University Press.
53. Smith, C., H. Burke, and G.K. Ward. 2000. Globalisation and Indigenous Peoples: Threat or Empowerment? In Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World, edited by C. Smith and G.K. Ward, 1–24. Leonards, NWS Australia: Allen and Unwin.
54. Spivak, G. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, edited by Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
55. Stewart, O.C. 1987. Peyote Religion: A History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
56. Strong, P.T. 2005. Recent Ethnographic Research on North American Indigenous Peoples. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 253–268.
57. Strong, P.T. 2012. American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
58. Swan, D.C. 1999. Peyote Religious Art: Symbols of Faith and Belief. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
59. Terry, M., K.L. Steelman, T. Guilderson, P. Dering, M.W. Rowe. 2006. Lower Pecos and Coahuila Peyote: New Radiocarbon Dates. Journal of Archaeological Science 33 (7): 1017–1021.
60. Tsing, A. 2000. «The Global Situation.» Cultural Anthropology 15 (3): 327–360.