Written by Nicholas Cragoe (Sociology)
It’s been a few months since we heard anything much about Cliven Bundy. He’s fading farther and farther from the front page, being quickly forgotten by the media and the public. But for a few weeks in the Spring of 2014, he held court on the dry plains of Nevada grazing country. All the same, a quick refresher: Bundy was and is a cattle rancher near Bunkerville, NV, who decided one day that he’d had enough of being pushed around by federal legislation he had little say in. The straw that broke the rancher’s back seems to have been an attempt by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to curtail ranching ranges in Nevada in order to protect the endangered desert tortoise.
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| Cliven Bundy |
Bundy decided to protest what he saw as federal overreaching by grazing his cattle on federally owned land without providing the necessary paperwork and fees. This was an illegal action under federal law, but through every microphone that would come near him, Bundy proclaimed his refusal to recognize the authority of the US federal government, believing Nevada to be a “sovereign” state and the highest authority to which Bundy would pay allegiance (or anything else). Bundy quickly became a cause-celebre and the mouthpiece for disgruntled anti-government types across the nation, making headlines and giving interviews, receiving support from conservative politicians and media outlets, and whipping the far right into a frenzy. When the government wrangled Bundy’s cattle and tried to make some arrests, an armed standoff ensued near Bundy’s home involving the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), law enforcement officers, and a small militia of Bundy’s family and supporters. Ultimately the government opted to return the cattle and retreated from the scene. Bundy became the darling of the anti-political right, at least until he made some ill-advised and, frankly, surreal comments about the history of race and slavery, at which point Fox News was seen sprinting in the other direction as fast as possible, along with most of Bundy’s more mainstream supporters. In the months since, Bundy’s fame has faded, but the political and cultural conflict surrounding the Bundy family ranch remains genuinely bizarre and unsettled.
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On September 30, 2009 Robert Warrior, writing on behalf of the American Indian Studies faculty (several of whom, including Warrior, are affilaites of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory), circulated a statement which appears below. The statement responds to the Friday, October 2 event at Assembly Hall depicted in the above photograph. The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory invites readers of this blog to comment on and discuss the statement as well as the broader issues and contexts to which it responds.
For those interested in consulting them, the American Indian Studies Program maintains a series of links providing background on this topic at http://www.ais.illinois.edu/mascot/
American Indian Studies statement on the October 2 event at Assembly Hall
I am writing on behalf of my colleagues in the American Indian Studies
Program to join those students, faculty, staff, and others who stand in
opposition to the event planned for Assembly Hall Friday, October 2, and I
ask others to join us, as well.
People in our program have stood against these invidious forms of racial
stereotyping and masquerade for many years, and our program remains
committed to moving forward in creating an inclusive campus environment for
everyone. Those who continue to engage in these actions that demean
American Indian people exacerbate a climate of intolerance, abuse, and
hostility that increases with each move further into the past of a sports
mascot tradition that the University retired over two years ago.
The real failure here, of course, is one of leadership, and Chancellor
Richard Herman, President Joseph White, and the Board of Trustees have
abdicated their responsibility to lead us away from this painful chapter in
the University's history. Hopefully, new campus leaders will swiftly and
decisively steer us in wiser directions.
Because of the failure of our appointed leaders, others must stand in the
breach. To those we join in standing against what is happening, I want to
express on behalf of our program my appreciation, admiration, and
solidarity.
Robert Warrior
Director
Professor of American Indian Studies, English, and History
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posted under
American Indian Studies
,
west
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Jodi Byrd, American Indian Studies, English
After thirty years of existing within the academy, American Indian Studies is still not quite yet at critical mass, but headed in that direction. Often, the field is perceived by those within and without its purview as a project of recovery, culture, identity, polemic—let's be honest—and as a kind of anti-intellectual, essentialist project of victimry. American Indian Studies, however, has been steadily establishing methodological and theoretical tools with which to engage the multi-directionality of a discipline that
1) intervenes within the colonial institutions and disciplines of academia;
2) bears accountability to indigenous communities and indigenous philosophical traditions, and;
3) spans transoceanically and transhemispherically to address the international diplomacies of "indigenous peoples" in the wake of globalization.
Such epistemological tools, developed by scholars such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Taiaiake Alfred, Noenoe Silva, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and Dale Turner to name just a few, offer the radical notion that what we might term "indigenous critical theory" provides valid critiques of imperialism and colonialism at the same time that such work might, finally, move us toward restorative justice.
In thinking about this post for Kritik and offering up indigenous critical theory for a dialogue with those scholars committed to critical theory but perhaps unfamiliar with "indigeneity" as a category of critical analysis, I wanted to provide at least a couple of provisional thoughts as well as foundations. "Indigenous," like "aboriginal," "Indian," "native," "First Nations," "Native American," and any other monolithic namings within colonial languages is highly contested and contestable. Jeff Corntassel and Taiaiake Alfred provide a preliminary definition in their essay, "Being Indigenous," (which can be found here) that is a useful starting point:
Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. The communities, clans, nations and tribes we call Indigenous peoples are just that: Indigenous to the lands they inhabit, in contrast to and in contention with the colonial societies and states that have spread out from Europe and other centres of empire. It is this oppositional, place-based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle against the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples, that fundamentally distinguishes Indigenous peoples from other peoples of the world.
Indigenous critical theory, then, emerges as a contentious, oppositional discourse that confronts imperialism and colonialism. It also necessitates certain Manichean allegories of foreign/native and colonizer/colonized within reclamations of "place-based existence." As it has emerged thus far, indigenous critical theory centers itself within indigenous epistemologies and the specificities of the communities and cultures from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European philosophical, legal, and cultural traditions. Steeped in anticolonial consciousness that deconstructs and confronts the colonial logics of settler states carved out of and on top of ancestral lands, indigenous critical theory seeks to offer a transformative accountability dependent upon radical alterity and recognition.
In other words and among other things, indigenous critical theory provides a diagnostic way of reading and interpreting the colonial logics that underpin cultural, intellectual, and political discourses. And it asks that settler, native, and arrivant each acknowledge their own position within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible that which settler colonialism has sought to obscure. Within in the continental United States, it means imagining an entirely different map and understanding of territory and space constituted by over 500 different native nations, each with their own borders and boundaries, that transgress what has been naturalized as 48 states and contiguous territory. Of course, indigenous critical theory is more than this, but it's a starting point to draw attention to entire histories, peoples, and philosophical traditions that inhabit and inform how land, space, and narratives are perceived.
From there, indigenous critical theory offers alternative questions and concerns. For instance, here we might return to Michael's posts "Against the West" and "All About the West" and the discussions that emerged around the geologeme, "the West," and its prevalence within American "mainstream" journalism, politics, and critical theories. This continued use of "the West" and "western," at least in the U.S. context, could additionally be read as something of a trace, a différance that is tied to the frontier narratives and consolidations of U.S. imperialism in relation to American Indians. Evocations of "the West" speak to colonial discourses that consolidate through repetitions and provide an imperial subjectivity steeped in "cowboys" and "Indians" and as the work of Richard Slotkin, Patricia Limerick, Richard Drinnon, and even Susan Faludi have shown, frontier narratives and cowboy diplomacies continue to undergird a United States that seeks to turn all those against it into "Indians." All this speaks to an interesting discursive turn and gestures towards deeper problematics inherent within debates that orient the world either through West/East or North/South logics. What happens to indigenous peoples in these paradigms if they exist somewhere in the third-space solidus between and among?
And this, perhaps, is enough for a preliminary post on "indigenous critical theory” and how it has begun to emerge out of American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Here at Illinois, the American Indian Studies Program has been hosting a lecture series over the course of the 2007-2008 academic year entitled, "Indigeneity as a Category of Critical Analysis" and those lectures are archived and viewable online for those interested in more. The series culminates May 1-2, 2008 when American Indian Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory will be hosting "Decolonizations: Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory" to open up further dialogue around the intersections between postcolonial studies and indigenous studies.
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