Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision

345 Pages·2000·22.832 MB·English

by  Marie Battiste

Reclaiming Indigenous
Voice and Vision
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Edited by Marie Battiste
Reclaiming Indigenous
Voice and Vision
UBC Press • Vancouver • Toronto
© UBC Press 2000
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior
written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying
or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency), 900 - 6 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, ON M5C 1H6.
09 08 07 06 05 5 4
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper <=°
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Main entry under title:
Reclaiming indigenous voice and vision
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7748-0745-8 (bound); ISBN 0-7748-0746-6 (pbk)
1. Indigenous peoples. 2. Decolonization. I. Battiste, Marie, 1949-
GV380.R42 2000 306'.08 C99-911286-4
Canada
UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing
program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the
British Columbia Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications
Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada
Set in Stone Serif by Brenda and Neil West, BN Typographies West
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Copy editor: Dallas Harrison
Indexer: Christine Jacobs
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Contents
Foreword / ix
L.M. Findlay
Acknowledgments / xiv
Introduction: Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization / xvi
Marie Battiste
Prologue: The Experience of Colonization Around the World / 3
Erica-Irene Daes
Western Door: Mapping Colonialism
1 The Context of the State of Nature / 11
James (Sake]) Youngblood Henderson
2 Indigenous Peoples and Postcolonial Colonialism / 39
Robert Yazzie
3 Hawaiian Statehood Revisited / 50
Poka Laenui (Hoyden F. Burgess)
Northern Door: Diagnosing Colonialism
4 Postcolonial Ghost Dancing: Diagnosing European Colonialism / 57
James (Sdkej) Youngblood Henderson
5 Jagged Worldviews Colliding / 77
Leroy Little Bear
vi Contents
6 Applied Postcolonial Clinical and Research Strategies / 86
Bonnie Duran and Eduardo Duran
7 Transforming the Realities of Colonialism: Voyage of Self-Discovery / 101
Ian Hingtey
Eastern Door: Healing Colonized Indigenous Peoples
8 A Different Yield / 115
Linda Hogan
9 From Hand to Mouth: The Postcolonial Politics of Oral and
Written Traditions / 124
/. Edward Chamberlin
10 The "Repressive Tolerance" of Cultural Peripheries / 142
Asha Varadhamjan
11 Processes of Decolonization / 150
Poka Laenui (Hayden F. Burgess)
12 Postcolonial Ledger Drawing: Legal Reform / 161
fames (Sdkej) Youngblood Henderson
13 Invoking International Law / 172
Ted Moses
Southern Door: Visioning the Indigenous Renaissance
14 Indigenous Knowledge: The Pueblo Metaphor of
Indigenous Education / 181
Gregory Cajete
15 Maintaining Aboriginal Identity, Language, and Culture in
Modern Society / 192
Marie Battiste
16 Protecting and Respecting Indigenous Knowledge / 209
Graham Hingangaroa Smith
17 Kaupapa Maori Research / 225
Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith
Contents vii
18 Ayukpachi: Empowering Aboriginal Thought / 248
James (Sdkej) Youngblood Henderson
Appendix 1: Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of the Heritage
of Indigenous Peoples / 279
Appendix 2: Saskatoon Declaration of Indigenous Cultural Restoration
and Policy Recommendations on Cultural Restoration Developed at the
Saskatoon Summer Institute / 285
Contributors / 295
Index / 306
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Foreword
L.M. Findlay
I bring to you
these Voices I will not name. Voices
filled with bird calls, snorting buffalo,
kicking bears, mountain goats.
1 do not recognize who speaks.
Listen to the bones.
- Louise Halfe, from "Listen to the Bones," in Blue Marrow
But what's in it for me? The apparent crassness of this question may star-
tle the reader attracted by the title of this book and moved by my epigraph
from Louise Haifa's most recent book of poems. Is this not a collection of
essays specifically directed beyond narrow self-interest and the human and
planetary costs of its pursuit by colonial powers? This is indeed the case,
but to disapprove of or argue against narrow self-interest is not, alas, to
eliminate it from the considerations and practices of individuals, commu-
nities, nations, and cartels. There is a need for at least a double strategy to
combat such an entrenched orthodoxy, linked as it is to the fundamentals
of modernity expressed in an increasingly globalizing economic and polit-
ical ideology. One must vigorously protest the reduction of important and
complex questions to the calculation of narrow self-interest, and the folly
and dangers of such a reduction are eloquently documented in the main
body of this text. But there is also a need, I think, to work within power
structures that claim and compromise all of us whether we want them
to or not. There is no escaping, for instance, the economic and military
consequences of satellite surveillance or the appropriation of all forms of
communities everywhere as markets to be penetrated or obstacles to be
eliminated in one way or another. All the world's a stage - but too often
and too simply a stage in the accelerating history of transnational capital-
ism. And once China comes to its senses, many say, we can all play the
same consuming game with equal zeal, until, on the surface of an Earth
made massively unproductive in the name of productivity, we are forced
literally to cannibalize each other, just as they said (and say) those early
"savages" did.
The task of opposing the dominant orthodoxies of modernity from a
position at their ever-extending margins, or from a strategically primitivist