Indigenous Political Thought and Pluralism

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Contemporary political theory largely excludes diverse traditions of Indigenous political thought. Indigenous political traditions are either invisibilized, simply absented from political theory, or misrecognized, that is, made legible in and through established Western conceptions of the political, instead of on their own distinctive terms. The contributors to this panel suggest that meaningful political pluralism may provide an opening for critical engagement with Indigenous political thought, in its diversity.
Importantly, the project of re-centering Indigenous political thought is not about situating Indigenous theorizing as a critique of mainstream liberal Western theorizing. Nor is it about accommodating Indigenous thought as a new sub-field, as a minoritarian perspective within a supposedly majoritarian Western political tradition. Rather, this is an exercise in intellectual openness rooted in an understanding that Indigenous political relationships and political imaginaries are innovated from diverse, distinctive worldviews whose foundations exceed existing Western theoretical frameworks and conceptual categories.
The contributions to this panel are rooted in the conviction that new ways of understanding and critiquing political theory and political praxis emerge when Indigenous thought and its complex histories – considered on their own terms – become the bases for thinking through the present and imagining possible futures. Each contribution draws on existing Indigenous scholarship, emphasizing the resilience of Indigenous political traditions and their contributions to the resurgence of Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing within more truly pluralist political thought.
In “Disjunction: Indigenous Resistance Beyond Oppositional Dialectics”, Yann Allard-Tremblay argues that Indigenous actors reclaim agency by turning away from the power relationship, refusing its terms and acting so as to transform – not merely change or metamorphose – the world by enacting a different one. His essay explores this distinctive “disjunctive” reclamation of Indigenous agency.
In “Indigenous Political Thought: Critical, Romantic and Existential Approaches”, Elaine Coburn turns to pluralism within Indigenous political thought, comparing and contrasting three approaches: critical, pointing to the limits of existing colonial politics, romantic, focused on developing new political imaginaries through a re-valorization of past Indigenous practices and ideals, and existentialist concerned with the facticity of contemporary Indigenous life and attendant choice, freedom and responsibility.
In “Red Ticket Women” Gina Starblanket describes and analyses the complexities of Indigenous women’s struggles against the Indian Act; due to patriarchal provision of the Act, women were stripped of their Indian Status because they out-married (wedded to a man without Status). Starblanket argues that traditional orientations to the study of Indigenous political mobilization in Canada, locate Indigenous political actors within narratives of rights and resistance and relegate Indigenous peoples to dichotomous frames of collective versus individual rights, and/or essentialism versus anti-essentialism. Starblanket contends that such debates and analytical frames obscure our ability to recognize and appreciate the full character and extent of political interventions by Red Ticket Women.
In “Counter-Ableist and Neurodivergent Challenges for Indigenous Decolonial Politics”, Kelly Aguirre argues for a serious reckoning with ableist and neurotypical normativities in conceptions of Indigenous resurgence and what it might mean to more fully realize their radical interventions in questions about the intelligibility, sensibility and disclosure of alterNative political life and imaginaries.
Taken together, these four contributions understand Indigenous political actors as offering a disjuncture that reconstitutes Indigenous agency on its own distinctive terms; explore plural traditions within contemporary Indigenous political thought; examine Indigenous women’s agency in terms that transcend easy narratives opposing individual vs. collective rights; and insist on the emancipatory possibilities of Indigenous resurgence from counter-ableist and neurodivergent perspectives. They thus take seriously the idea of political pluralism, as a potential opening to explore a rich contemporary tradition of Indigenous political thought.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Disjunction: Indigenous Resistance Beyond Opposition and Dialectics - Yann Allard-Tremblay, McGill University

• Indigenous Political Thought: Critical, Romantic and Existential Approaches - Elaine Coburn, York University

• Red Ticket Women - Gina Starblanket, University of Calgary

• Counter-Ableist and Neurodivergent Challenges for Indigenous Decolonial Politics - Kelly Aguirre, University of Victoria

Chair

• Didier Zúñiga McGill University

Discussant

• Kevin M. Bruyneel Babson College