Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas

Description

Decolonizing Native Histories is an interdisciplinary collection that grapples with the racial and ethnic politics of knowledge production and indigenous activism in the Americas. It analyzes the relationship of language to power and empowerment, and advocates for collaborations between community members, scholars, and activists that prioritize the rights of Native peoples to decide how their knowledge is used. The contributors—academics and activists, indigenous and nonindigenous, from disciplines including history, anthropology, linguistics, and political science—explore the challenges of decolonization. These wide-ranging case studies consider how language, the law, and the archive have historically served as instruments of colonialism and how they can be creatively transformed in constructing autonomy. The collection highlights points of commonality and solidarity across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and also reflects deep distinctions between North and South. Decolonizing Native Histories looks at Native histories and narratives in an internationally comparative context, with the hope that international collaboration and understanding of local histories will foster new possibilities for indigenous mobilization and an increasingly decolonized future. Introduction. Decolonizing Knowledge, Language, and Narrative / Florencia E. Mallon 1 Part One. Land, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination 21 Hawaiian Nationhood, Self-Determination, and International Law / J. Kehaulani Kauanui 27 Issues of Land and Sovereignty: The Uneasy Relationship between Chile and Rapa Nui / Riet Delsing 54 Part Two. Indigenous Writing and Experiences with Collaboration 79 Quechua Knowledge, Orality, and Writings: The Newspaper Conosur Nawpagamn / Fernando Garcés V. 85 Collaboration and Historical Writing: Challenges for the Indigenous-Academic Dialogue / Joanne Rappaport and Abelardo Ramos Pacho 122 The Taller Tzotzil of Chiapas, Mexico: A Native Language Publishing Project, 1985–2002 / Jan Rus and Diane L. Rus 144 Part Three. Generations of Indigenous Activism and Internal Debates 175 Dangerous Decolonizing: Indians and Blacks and the Legacy of Jim Crow / Brian Klopotek 179 Nationalist Contradictions: Pan-Mayanism, Representations of the Past, and the Reproduction of Inequalities of Guatemala / Edgar Esquit 196 Conclusion 219 References 221 Contributors 243 Index 247