The Importance of What Existed Before Sooyáapoo: Nez Perce Influence the Global Capitalist World-System

• In Event: 3555 - Section on the Political Economy of the World-System Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Uneven Development, Revolutions, and Global South

Abstract

Theories of international political economics note that waves of colonization follow patterns associated with the material rise and fall of empires within a world-system (Wallerstein 2007). However, material conditions cannot explain all of the variation in colonial processes and outcomes and so newer scholarship focuses on culture (Go 2008, Steinmetz 2008), creating a dialectic between the explanatory value of material and culture. Two of the more compelling propositions to resolve this dialectic is placing Wallerstein in conversation with Bourdieu to focus on colonial cultural fields at the institutional level and the conflicts within and between these institutions (Steinmetz) and from the viewpoint of the colonized (Go). Nevertheless, much of this work begins with Western colonization, inadvertently reproducing power dynamics and epistemologies grounded in Western imperial history (Hung 2003). Of course, non-Western peoples were members of other world-systems prior to meeting the West. The history of these systems, including size and topography, are important to understand variation in colonial relations. Building on indigenous feminisms, theories of structural racism, and world-systems analysis, this research asks how a very-small world-system of Indigenous peoples in North America helped reorganize political economics of the global capitalist world-system. Using historical narrative analysis of scholarly and general audience publications produced or commissioned by Nez Perce tribal members, I argue that the Nez Perce were a core within the very-small world-system of the Columbia Plateau and they used that position to negotiate an existence within the capitalist world-system and continue to influence political economics (e.g., taking over state salmon fisheries). My findings highlight 1) how Western imperialisms are deeply embedded in modern social institutions; 2) how non-Western world-systems and their peoples influence political economics of the modern capitalist world-system; and, 3) what those histories might mean for the potential futures of surviving colonized peoples.

Author

• Levin Elias Welch, University of California, Riverside