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Do You Recognize Who I Am? Decolonizing Rhetorics in Indigenous Rock Opera Something Inside is Broken
Get PDFThis article analyzes the decolonizing rhetorics displayed in the indigenous rock opera Something Inside is Broken, which toured California and the Southwest United States in the Fall of 2016. By applying LeAnne Howe's concept of tribalography, I discuss the decolonizing potential of this rock opera, focusing on the implementation of Nisenan oral tradition, history, and language in its libretto. This article includes links to songs from the production to allow the reader and listener to experience the music and Nisenan language featured in the opera
Translating Images of Survivance: A Trans-Indigenous Corporeal Analysis of Spear and Maliglutit
Get PDFIn Gerald Vizenor’s novel Heirs of Columbus, the primary protagonist of the novel, Stone Columbus, is described by the narrator as the “image of . . . survivance” (17). While Vizenor does not return to Stone’s status as image after this description, merely seeming to infer that Stone is emblematic of Vizenerian theories of survivance in his embodiment of Christopher Columbus’s phenotypical features, this characterization leads to potentially invaluable theorizations of what effective Indigenous imagic resistance might look like. In Vizenor’s theorization, survivance narratives are “narrative[s] [of] resistance that creates a sense of presence over absence, nihility and victimry” (Vizenor American 1). The use of irony and the refocusing of the colonial gaze back on the colonizer stand as the primary indicators of survivance narratives. In Heirs, this imagic status relies on Stone’s ability to simultaneously look like the colonizer while subverting colonial practices. It is an ironic mimicry which draws attention to colonial constructions of Indigeneity. Because these images rely on previous colonial practices and mimicry, in what ways can viewers then delineate specific sovereign characteristics of visual Indigeneity that separate colonial imagery from survivance images? In Michelle Raheja’s theorization of visual sovereignty, she claims that “[v]isual sovereignty is a practice that takes a holistic approach to the process of creating moving images and that locates Indigenous cinema in a particular historical and social context while privileging tribal specificity” (194). While the creation of tribally specific images of survivance represents a fundamental process in reinforcing visual sovereignty and enacting self-determination, the application of survivance characteristics across tribal boundaries represents a powerful inter-tribal, globally Indigenous challenge to the colonial gaze. In analyzing Indigenous images from vastly different geographical and colonial contexts, then, we find common colonial images that Indigenous image makers strategically deconstruct and remake in the image of survivance, revealing performative inter-tribal sovereignty. The most foundational aspect of visual sovereignty according to Raheja is, “a revision of older films featuring Native American plots in order to reframe a narrative that privileges Indigenous participation and perhaps points to sites of Indigenous knowledge production in films otherwise understood as purely Western products” (196). To this end, Stephen Page’s Spear and Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit are useful films to demonstrate how this inter-tribal aesthetic directly engages Western colonial film conventions and colonial imagery, reframing narratives where Indigenous bodies encounter and resist their historically limited positionality in filmic mediums.
Viewing both Maliglutit and Spear as indicative of Barclay’s Fourth Cinema, focusing particularly on the postindian subversions of genre and plot, the strategic juxtaposition of these two films display an inherent metaawareness of the filmic medium as one of the most politically viable methods of creating a global Indigenous media. Speaking to film’s efficacy in this endeavor, Shari Huhndorf in her examination of Kunuk’s The Fast Runner, points to film’s, “capacity to mediate across temporal and geographical distances . . . supports an imagined Inuit community with deep historical roots” (Huhndorf 76). Film, then, inherently contains not only the tools to contrapuntally form Indigenous coalitions around imagined and real Indigenous relations, but as we see in both Spear and Maliglutit, in a specifically Indigenous context it also maintains the power to write and gaze back against the colonial apparatuses of film itself through Indigenous bodies’ movement through temporalities and spaces.
 
REVIEW ESSAY: Expanding Settler Colonial Theory: Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (Adam Dahl).
No full textDeborah L. Madsen
REVIEW ESSAY: Expanding Settler Colonial Theory
Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought. By Adam Dahl.
KEYWORDS: Settler colonialism, US federalism, constitutionalism, American Revolution, Manifest Destiny, William Apess, Native dispossession, Indigenous lan
A Girl Called Echo Series, Vols. 1-2 (Katherena Vermette)
No full textWritten by Katherena Vermette, illustrated by Scott B. Henderson, and colored by Donovan Yaciuk, the A Girl Called Echo series from HighWater Press follows a young Métis girl named, Echo, as she explores her personal Indigenous identity, a troubled home life, and just possibly time-travel
Through an Indian's Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (Drew Lopenzina)
No full textThis is a review of Drew Lopenzina's Through an Indian's Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot.
#Apess #cultural biography #unwitnessing #themis #survivanc
The Truth About Yoda
Get PDFLong ago, in an America not so far from us, really, captivity narratives were all the rage. A captivity narrative is the harrowing tale of someone captured by the Indians, someone who had to—gasp—live with the savages, and suffer all the mistreatment and indignities. Then, come the sixties and seventies, the spiritual descendants of all those captivity survivors started wearing beads and vests and headbands, and growing their hair out, and resisting the government.
Right around then, we got Star Wars
International Gender Equality Norms and their Fragmented Protection in Conflict
Get PDFNormative and legal developments in the protection of gender equality in conflict have proliferated in recent decades across diverse regimes of public international law. Nevertheless, the ultimate impact of such international norms on domestic conflict-affected settings is unclear. This article sets out to elucidate how international gender equality norms, underpinned by proliferating soft and hard legal sources, and implemented by separate institutions with widely varying powers of monitoring and enforcement, bring traction to women’s and girls’ rights in conflict-affected settings. While much discussion of fragmentation focuses on conflict between norms – and how to resolve such conflict within the non-hierarchical structure of international law – this article examines gender equality norms as they are operationalized by the institutions of international law charged with their monitoring and enforcement. International Relations literature suggests that, while international institutions are formally empowered through the consent and consensus of participating states, they in fact operate with considerable autonomy, due to their ‘expertise’ and consequent pedagogic function as ‘teachers’ of norms to states. The article investigates this thesis through the case study of the prohibition of sexual violence against girl soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, focusing on institutional activities under international humanitarian law, international criminal law and the United Nations Security Council. The case study reveals that the institutions of international law not only monitor and enforce relevant gender equality norms, but they in fact give substance to often-vague international norms through their operational activities in conflict-affected settings, though not necessarily in a consistent or coherent manner. The article concludes that studying international institutions in their operational activities in conflict settings is essential to understanding the impact of international gender equality norms on women’s and girls’ experiences of conflict
Indigenous New Media Arts: Narrative Threads and Future Imaginaries
Get PDFThis article seeks both to communicate a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Indigenous new media artworks and projects, and to “frame” them within the context of the particular transnational networks of friendship and support into which they are born and in which they circulate. It is my contention that Indigenous new media arts have particularly flourished across the parts of the “Anglo-world” (Belich) that are the result of the early waves of British settler colonialism, most notably in countries such as Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States. The article explores the conditions that make such global Indigenous networks across the British (post)colonial settler world possible, before moving on to study in more detail works by Hymhenteqhous Mizhekay Odayin/Turtle Heart, Skawennati, Ruben Anton Komangapik, Lisa Reihana, William Ray Wilson, and Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor, amongst others. It concludes with an analysis of the exhibition of Indigenous new media art in formal gallery spaces. It asks who the works are for and what kinds of audiences they reach in such spaces, exploring Indigenous artists’ hopes for how entering such formal spaces of the “artworld” might effect their decolonisation. Such optimism notwithstanding, it also cautions against the dangers of co-optation by the “artworld” that restrict the circulation of artworks, and makes recommendations for ways to ensure that they continue to be accessible to the communities from which they stem
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