INDG3015 slides week 2 public slides

INDG 3015
Week 2
Indigenous peoples, sovereignty,
and the environment
copyright Dr Zoe Todd 2021

Gathering Moss - Gathering Moss,
Preface; The Standing Stones; Learning to
See; the Advantages of Being Small; Back
to the Pond (pages xv to 28)
Joanne Barker – Sovereignty Matters. “For
Whom Sovereignty Matters”. Pp. 1-32 in
Sovereignty Matters Locations of
Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous
Struggles for Self-Determination, Edited by
Joanne Barker. University of Nebraska
Press.
Little Bear, Leroy. (undated).
TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND
HUMANITIES: A PERSPECTIVE BY A
BLACKFOOT. http://www.sfu.ca/sfublogs-
archive/departments/humanities-
institute/1101_tradition- al-knowledge-and-
humanities-leroy-little-bear.html
This
week’s
overview

The Standing Stones -
Kimmerer
¬ ”There is an ancient conversation going on between
mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and
shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has
been called the “dialectic of moss on stone—an
interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and
present, softness and hardness, stillness and
vibrancy, yin and yang.”1 The material and the
spiritual live together here.”
¬ Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss (p. 5).
Oregon State University Press. Kindle Edition.

Learning to See -
Kimmerer
¬ “Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful
magnifying lens.”
¬ “A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told
me that the best way to find something is not to go
looking for it. This is a hard concept for a scientist.
But he said to watch out of the corner of your eye,
open to possibility, and what you seek will be
revealed.”

Advantages of
being small -
Kimmerer
“Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of
rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log,
that small space where earth and
atmosphere first make contact. This meeting
ground between air and land is known as the
boundary layer.”
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss (p.
15). Oregon State University Press. Kindle
Edition.

Back to the Pond -
Kimmerer
¬ “Mosses are the amphibians of the plant world. They are the
evolutionary first step toward a terrestrial existence, a
halfway point between algae and higher land plants. They
have evolved some rudimentary adaptations to help them
survive on land, and can survive even in deserts. But, like the
peepers, they must return to water to breed. Without legs to
carry them, mosses have to recreate the primordial ponds of
their ancestors within their branches.”
¬ Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss (pp. 21-22). Oregon
State University Press. Kindle Edition.

Barker (2005)
¬ Class learning questions:
¬ What does Barker argue the roots of the western
understanding of sovereignty are? (pages 1-2)
¬ What kind of sovereignty did this entail?

Barker (2005):
sovereignty
“At the same time and owing much to its
proliferation, sovereignty has become notoriously
generalized to stand in for all of the inherent rights
of Indigenous peoples. Certainly many take for
granted what sovereignty means and how it is
important. As a result sovereignty can be both
confused and confusing, especially as its
normalization masks its own ideological origins in
colonial legal-religious discourses as well as the
heterogeneity of its contemporary histories,
meanings, and identities for indigenous peoples.”
(p. 1)

Barker (2005), p. 11
“Depending on the theorist, civility was evidenced by
the existence of reason, social contract, agriculture,
property, technology, Christianity, monogamy, and/or
the structures and operations of statehood. These
aspects of society or civilization were associated with
the possession of sovereignty. Nations possessed
the full measure of sovereignty because they were
the highest form of civilization; individuals roaming
uncultivated lands did not possess either civilization
or sovereignty. (11)”
¬ ‘progress’
¬ ‘teleology’
¬ Hierarchy of civilizations
¬ Lewis Henry Morgan – unilineal
evolution

Barker (2005)
¬ Two mechanisms of the sovereign state
¬ TREATY
¬ CONSTITUTION
¬ (see: Barker, p. 4)
¬ So why did Sovereign states (in Canada, this
would be ‘the Crown’) sign Treaties with
Indigenous peoples if they did not consider
Indigenous peoples to meet the criteria of
citizens (in euro-american legal sense?)

Doctrine of Discovery:
the legal fiction that
Indigenous peoples did
not have legal
traditions or claims or
reciprocal relationships
to the homelands they
occupied and occupy
“According to Marshall, the doctrine
established that American Indians were not
the full sovereigns of the lands that they
possessed but were rather the users of the
lands that they roamed and wandered over for
purposes of shelter and sustenance.” (Barker
p. 7)

Joanne Barker
Doctrine of Discovery (see Barker, 2005, page 4) –a legal
doctrine mobilized by settler colonial state in Australia and
also applied in the USA
-- Barker, Page 5
-- Barker, Page 6

Doctrine of
Discovery
¬ Trevor Noah on British colonization of India
(applicable to understanding ‘discovery’ in
North America as well) [closed captions]
¬ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi7SeBI
7z9A&ab_channel=ArseRaptor

Learning
Questions:
¬ In what ways does ‘discovery’ circulate
within and animate academia?
¬ How do we ‘trouble’ discovery?
¬ ALSO -- ‘discovery’ operated in concert
with enslavement of African peoples in the
Americas (collision of genocides across
continents).

Marshall Trilogy
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-Redone/id/17642

Marshall Trilogy
¬ “The Marshall Trilogy, 1823–1832
¬ The Marshall Trilogy is a set of three Supreme Court
decisions in the early nineteenth century affirming the
legal and political standing of Indian nations.
¬ Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), holding that private
citizens could not purchase lands from Native
Americans. [doctrine of discovery/Aboriginal Title]
¬ Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), holding that the
Cherokee nation dependent, with a relationship to
the United States like that of a "ward to its guardian.”
[domestic dependent nations]
¬ Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which laid out the
relationship between tribes and the state and federal
governments, stating that the federal government
was the sole authority to deal with Indian nations”
[federal jurisdiction]”
¬ Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Unit
ed_States#The_Marshall_Trilogy.2C_1823.E2.80.931832

Marshall trilogy
con’t
USUFRUCT (John Locke) (‘hunter-gatherer’
framing employed to argue Indigenous
peoples could not ‘own’ property in European
legal-philosophical sense)
‘Aboriginal title’,
domestic dependent nations,

Circulation of
Euro-American
legal thinking
§ Why does the Marshall Trilogy matter in a course
on global Indigenous issues?
“European nations likewise constructed themselves
as sovereigns with abject rights to claim
jurisdictional authority and territorial rights over
indigenous peoples in their colonies throughout the
Americas and the Pacific. The specific claims and
exercises of their sovereign powers- militarily and
otherwise made almost incestuous use of each
other's laws and policies to justify the
dispossession, enslavement, and genocide of"their
Indians."” (Barker, p. 13)

Euro-American legal thinking that justified
conquest, land theft in settler colonial US,
Canada, Aotearoa, Australia
¬ Relevant British colonial decisions
¬ Royal Proclamation (1763)
¬ Treaty of Waitangi (1840)
¬ Mabo vs. Queensland (1992)
¬ “Australia's high court found that indigenous customary law was a valid body of
legal precedence for deciding aboriginal title. It held that title existed prior to
Captain James Cook's maps of the area and the formal establishment of the
neighboring English colony of New South Wales in 1788. The ruling overturned the
discovery doctrine on which England had asserted title to indigenous territories in
Australia. In recognizing that prior title in the lands existed with the Aborigines, the
high court acknowledged that indigenous title still existed in any region where it
had not been legally ceded. 87” (Barker, p. 23)

Joanne Barker (2005)
¬ “Sovereignty as a discourse is unable to capture fully
the indigenous meanings, perspectives, and
identities about law, governance, and culture, and
thus over time it impacts how those epistemologies
and perspectives are represented and understood.”
(p. 19)

Joanne Barker
§ Self-determination is now bound up with discourses
of sovereignty
§ But Barker reminds us that sovereignty is ‘historically
contingent’ (page 21)
“The challenge, then, to understand how and for whom
sovereignty matters is to understand the historical
circumstances under which it is given meaning. There
is nothing inherent about its significance. Therefore it
can mean something different during its original uses in
the politico-theological discourses of the Catholic
church than it did during Marshall's delivery of the
Supreme Court's decision in Worcester v. Georgia,
differing again in its links to concepts of self-
determination and human rights and in the contexts of
Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, or Maori or Aborigine
struggles.”

Joanne Barker (p.21)
“Understanding the problems of translating indigenous
concepts of law, governance, and culture through the
discourses of sovereignty requires unpacking the
social forces and historical conditions at each moment
when it is invoked as well as the social relations in
which it functions. How did those forces cohere? What
social conditions were the social actors confronting?
What kinds of identities did they have stakes in
claiming and asserting? In relationship to what other
identities?77"

Joanne Barker (page
23)
“What all of these various political movements indicate is
an attempt by indigenous peoples to be recognized as
sovereigns and to be related to by their nation-states as
forming legitimate governments with rights to direct their
own domestic policies and foreign affairs, unmediated by
the regional contours of state/provincial politics and
corporate interests. Unevenly but steadily, the
movements have impacted the direction of national law
and policy, as nation-states have been held accountable
to the increasing validation of indigenous epistemologies
in matters of territorial rights and governance.”

Joanne Barker p. 23
con’t
¬ “Corollary terms like nations within and
government-to-government have been
deployed by indigenous peoples to
position themselves as comprising fully
self-determining political entities invested
with the power to be related to as
sovereigns in matters ranging from treaty
to intellectual property rights. 89”

Leroy Little Bear –
The Humanities
¬ “Aboriginal peoples are forever explaining
themselves to non-Aboriginal people:
telling their stories, explaining their beliefs
and ceremonies, and introducing ideas
that, in many cases, have never crossed
the non-Aboriginal mind. The following
overview of traditional knowledge serves
as a good example of what is meant.”

Leroy Little Bear – The
Humanities
¬ “Knowledge of all creation by any one person is impossible.
Consequently, traditional knowledge is not a uniform concept
across different Aboriginal cultures...it is a diverse knowledge
that is spread throughout different peoples in many layers (
Henderson and Battiste, 2000, 35). It is, in many cases, …part
of the clan, band, and the community, and even the individual,
that it cannot be separated from the bearer to be codified into a
definition. (Ibid., 36) In other words, there is knowledge that the
Aboriginal public knows or is expected to know. But there is
knowledge that is unique to clans, bands, societies, and
individuals. Some of this knowledge is considered as belonging
to the clan, band, society, or tribe but is given to individuals or
groups to keep for the benefit of the tribe. The Aboriginal public
is not privy to this knowledge but is kept for their benefit by
knowledge keepers.”

Little Bear – The
Humanities
¬ Little Bear cites the work of Marie Battiste, who has
written about the following concept:
¬ “You Can't Be the Doctor If You're the Disease
Eurocentrism and Indigenous Renaissance” – Marie
Battiste
https://www.caut.ca/docs/default-source/default-
document-library/you-can't-be-the-doctor-if-you're-the-
disease-eurocentrism-and-indigenous-
renaissance.pdf?sfvrsn=0

Marie Battiste - 2013
¬ “I would like to share an area of my decolonizing scholarship and activism
to raise attention to the generation of the Indigenous renaissance, the
learning spirit, the foundations of Indigenous knowledge systems and the
need for constitutional reconciliation from the Eurocentric institutions that
have marginalized Indigenous knowledge systems. All Indigenous
communities are in recovery today from a deep colonizing culture of
superiority and racism, and while there are new emergent forms of that
coming back, Indigenous peoples are now reconciling with what was
denied us, our knowledges and languages that leads us to the deep truths
about ourselves and our connections with all things” – Battiste, 2013 (“You
Can’t be the doctor if you’re the disease”)

This week’s prompt:
¬ Small activity:
¬ What can we learn from mosses as we live our daily lives? Spend a few
minutes each day for 2-3 days checking in with yourself to see how the
lessons of mosses – learning to see; living at boundary layers between
worlds/media/geographies; the advantages of being small; being
amphibian – might be influential in your own world. Report back with one
or two sentences/a drawing/poem etc about what thinking about mosses
offered to you.

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