Contending with Diasporic Indigeneities

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Living Indigeneity: Centering Critical Reflections, Epistemologies, and Reclamation for Diasporic Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Purpose
I engage in this conceptual paper with the difficult question of “who is Indigenous?” Cherokee scholar Jeff Corntassel (2003) asserted that the question of who is Indigenous “is best answered by indigenous communities themselves” (p. 75). My colleagues and I on the panel approach this question from our diverse positions as Indigenous Peoples in the diaspora. “Who is Indigenous?” is a complex and politically, socially, and culturally loaded question with answers that are not often satisfactory to Indigenous peoples. What is more, Indigenous Peoples do not necessarily use “indigenous” to identify themselves or others (Canessa, 2007). Nonetheless, I engage with the question of “who is Indigenous” for two reasons: 1) to broaden educational researchers, educators, and other education practitioners’ understanding of indigeneity and 2) to illustrate how Indigenous Peoples in the diaspora reformulate indigeneity under temporal spaces with colonial systems that overlap.

Theoretical Framework, Modes of Inquiry, & Data Sources
I employ an “Indigenous peoplehood” frame (Corntassel, 2003; Holm, Pearson, and Chavis, 2003) and Critical Latinx Indigeneities analytic (Blackwell, Boj Lopez, & Urrieta, 2017) in this paper. I adapt the term “Indigenous peoplehood” from Corntassel (2003), and Holm, Pearson, and Chavis (2003) to describe how Indigenous scholars have expressed a range of indicators that contribute to indigeneity (e.g., Barnhart & Kawagley, 2008; Cajete, 1994; Whit, Roberts, Norman & Grieves, 2001). Corntassel (2003) conceptualized Indigenous peoplehood as a matrix of interrelated indicators, including language, place territory, sacred history, and ceremonial cycles that contribute to Indigenous group membership. One limitation of the matrix is that it bounds indigeneity, failing to account for how Indigenous people in the diaspora reformulate Indigenous subject formations. For instance, US-born Indigenous peoples with parents from Mexico may reimagine their connections and relationships to land by creating transborder or transnational hometowns (Sanchez, 2024; Stephen, 2007). Critical Latinx Indigeneities” (CLI) developed by Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta (2017) takes stock of and interrogates how Indigenous subject formations are shaped over time, regions, within, and across colonial contexts that oftentimes overlap (Blackwell, 2010).

Points of View/Argument
The Indigenous Peoplehood matrix provides an initial frame for understanding the question of who is Indigenous, and CLI expands this frame by noting how indigeneity travels across space and time. Indigenous Peoples do not cease being Indigenous once they arrive in the US. I argue in this conceptual paper that indigeneity travels with diasporic Indigenous Peoples, where it is reformulated amid the complex relations Indigenous Peoples have with Latinidad and the US’s racialized system.

Scholarly Significance
Understanding how diasporic Indigenous Peoples reshape their indigeneity across time and space can assist us in rethinking the theoretical frames we employ in Latinx & Chicanx education studies when addressing the question of “who is Indigenous?”

Author

• David W. Barillas Chón, University of Northern Colorado