Colonization and Resistance: The making of indigenous subjectivities in Mexico and India

• In Event: Invited Session - Cuerpo, violencia y cultura: actualización de las subjetividades políticas en América Latina I

Abstract

While the notion of Indigenous People finds its roots in the context of settler colonies, indicating those communities that lived in these lands prior to the arrival of the colonizers, a context like India where the British never settled, complicates this notion of Indigenous People. The long history of migration and mobility throughout the Indian subcontinent for centuries has meant it is next to impossible to ascertain who the original inhabitants of this land are. However, India too is home to Indigenous People. Who are then these Indigenous People? A comparison of the two contexts of a settler colony, and of one such as India will, I propose, allow us to think more deeply about how an indigenous political subjectivity is constituted and in this context de-centers of the notion of being the first settlers in the constitution of indigeneity. Instead, I argue it is the collective historical experience and memory of a particular form of colonial domination that marks an indigenous political subjectivity. Without colonism, there is no indigenous. At the same time, part of this collective memory is the lineage of resistance to domination, colonial as well as post-colonial. In other words, to be indigenous is also to struggle against domination. Indigenous subjectivity cannot be divorced from this history of domination and resistance within which it is so fundamentally imbricated. By situating indigenous political subjectivity within struggles over power relations, I dismantle the relevance of being original or first settlers in a land and instead shift focus to the lineages of collective historical experience that produce and reproduce this subjectivity into the contemporary period that is fraught with fierce battles over control over resources.

Author

• Vasundhara Jairath, Research Scholar