We have to care for the land and protect it. The land will give you back only what you gave it” (Di Giminiani, 104). This sentiment, expressed by a Mapuche farmer to anthropologist Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, is emblematic of an important notion at the center of many recent works in Indigenous Studies, what Cutcha Risling Baldy and Melanie K. Yazzie have termed radical relationality, a framework of care and kinship among humans and other-than-humans (Yazzie and Risling Baldy Reference Yazzie and Baldy2018). In their words, “radical relationality is … simply the ontology of being-in-relation-to that describes all life and futurity” (2018, 11). For others, however, such a view of Indigenous relations comes uncomfortably close to essentialized and romanticized ideas of “ecological Indians,” notions that obscure the complex relations that differently positioned humans have in different ecologies (Krech Reference Krech1999).
These contrasting views reveal important debates over how indigeneity should be theorized in ecological disputes. They also reveal important distinctions between approaches that take Native epistemologies and ontologies as valid points of departure and others that see Native “cosmovisions” as a potential variable in need of testing.
Although all the works under review here were written by non-Indigenous scholars, they nonetheless reveal important social scientific engagements with Native ways of knowing and politics. Although this essay explores the work of anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists, we do not make a claim that one methodological approach is superior to the others. Instead, we suggest that the various theoretical and methodological choices made by the scholars reviewed here reveal important, often competing, ways to understand the important roles that Native communities, leaders, lands, and others play in debates over resource extraction and governance across Abiayala, to use the Guna word for Latin America.Footnote 1
ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERVENTIONS
Jean E. Jackson’s book offers an insightful analysis of how the political forces shaping Tukanoan cultural identity in the Central Northwest Amazon of Colombia have changed over time. Drawing from nearly 50 years of research experience in the field, Jackson presents a series of ethnographic vignettes and powerful self-reflections (and more important, self-criticism) to show how Tukanoans, in response to encroaching state discourses in the 1990s, began to craft renderings of their own cultural identity that struck her as divergent from the traditional ones she had observed in her fieldwork. In other cases, Native communities went through controversial processes of “re-indigenization” to gain political support for their claims to collective rights.
As one grassroots Tukanoan organization eventually became the primary producer of Tukanoan culture in Colombia, Jackson questions how scholars are to interpret Indigenous acts of complicity within official multiculturalism. “We might not like at all how Tukanoans were choosing to adapt to their new conditions,” she observes, “… But at the end of the day, Indigenous peoples have the right to choose … non-beautiful, non-‘authentic’ cultural forms. If the goal is to analyze such choices rather than judge them, an objective and neutral terminology is needed” (Jackson, 96).
Jackson walks a tightrope: she is aware that it is not her place to “judge” what is genuine or spurious, but also understands that the chronicling of the unevenness of Indigenous performance may have adverse consequences for the communities with which she is in solidarity. She may not always succeed, but her efforts at balancing these objectives are instructive. As a history of what she variously calls a dilemma, quagmire, quicksand, and paradox of interpreting cultural performances that seem “distorted,” she offers a candid view of the analytical and ethical challenges of tracking Tukanoan indigeneity and the consequences of those ethnographic judgments. As a portrait of Jackson’s half-century of commitments, her disagreements and disappointments, especially with herself, the book is a vivid account of the limits and possibilities of anthropology as it pursues the arguably impossible task of decolonizing itself.
Jackson’s book, however, like Di Giminiani’s, has not lost hope for the decolonial aspirations of anthropology as it extends beyond the liberal realm of the political and the anthropocentric focus on the human. Di Giminiani understands “sentient landscapes” as the mutual constitution of people and land as political subjects. His work examines the processes by which Mapuche people in Wallmapu (the homelands of Mapuche people in what is also called southern Chile) find ways to make sentient lands fit into the liberal property rights system in order to maintain Mapuche land connections for posterity. Di Giminiani argues that “the translation of sentient lands into property can activate new forms of ancestral land connections for claimants, but can also serve to domesticate Indigenous geographies within existing market configurations” (7). His sophisticated but accessible ontological analysis considers the long-term implications of land claims on Mapuche identity in a system of neoliberal governance. While it remains in the classic anthropological mode of an outsider (white, Italian, male expert coming to understand local knowledge), the work nevertheless takes Native ontologies and epistemologies seriously and not simply as the stuff of folklore. The argument is not that the Mapuche think this way, but that Mapuche ontologies offer important ways to move beyond liberal views about property and agency.
RETHINKING RESISTANCE
More than two decades ago, the anthropologist Les Fields, reviewing a similarly strong collection of innovative works in Indigenous politics, noted the emergence of a group of scholars he termed the resistance school, for whom “the resistance struggle itself has become the primary characteristic of Indian ethnicity” in Latin America (Field Reference Field1994, 239). That view of Indigenous identity as almost synonymous with resistance was by no means hegemonic. Historians like Steve Stern (Reference Stern1992) note that centuries of Indigenous rebellion and revolt existed alongside a wide variety of political choices, including not only resistance but also adaptation and alliance. A recent work that echoes Stern’s complication of the “resistance school” is Who Speaks for Nature? by political scientists Todd Eisenstadt and Karleen Jones West. Upending stereotypes that portray Indigenous people as stewards of nature, Eisenstadt and West propose the “politics of vulnerability” to predict which social groups are most likely to mobilize to defend the environment.
They maintain that the people who are most vulnerable to environmental destruction—those whose livelihoods and lifeways are most dependent on it—are more likely to take action to protect nature than those who are farther removed from it. The authors find that Indigenous communities are “motivated to protect the environment and defend their own ways of life … driven [in part] by self-preservation.
In fact, many indigenous individuals—and some groups—support oil drilling and mining projects on their lands, but with environmental safeguards, input into decisionmaking, and guarantees of benefits for communities. Yet many others do not support oil drilling and mining at all. (Eisenstadt and West, 4)
Claims to protect nature and to promote drilling “are more the result of whether [Indigenous people] think extractive projects on their lands will make them better off, rather than the product of innate preferences they have as indigenous people or as peasants” (Eisenstadt and West, 4). Operating largely within the positivist understanding of survey research and mainstream political science, Eisenstadt and West do not wade as deeply into epistemological and ontological waters as the work of the anthropologists reviewed here. Yet by encouraging researchers to think about the local specificities of struggle, these scholars help explain the varied positions that Native peoples have taken in relation to extractive industries.
Eisenstadt and West view Indigenous agency almost dichotomously: Native individuals resist or comply with drilling on their lands in accordance with each individual’s proximity to nature. Asking when and why people act to defend nature, the authors suggest that the rural poor—Indigenous as well as other groups—are the most likely to engage in activism when they see it affecting their livelihoods directly. Conversely, for communities that have already found ways to live with extractive industry, the propensity to mobilize is markedly lower.
Motivation for environmentalism among the poor stems not from postmaterialist concerns for the “rights of other species” or moral concerns for future generations of humans, but rather from a material interest in the environment as a source and a requirement for livelihood. (Eisenstadt and West, 10)
Their findings challenge views of the “ecological Indian,” which conceive of Indigenous people as inherently the “stewards of nature” and presume them to be the most likely group to mobilize. They also defy the claims of some Indigenous intellectuals that treat cosmovisions (like the Andean sumak kawsay) as frames for the relations between Native peoples and nature.
The authors explore the intersection of heterogeneous identities, class interests, and relationships to nature through the lens of individual economic independence. They suggest that although cosmovisions are a significant factor in shaping attitudes toward nature, they alone are not enough to generate widespread social action. It is the rural poor—often Indigenous, but not necessarily so—who act, and they do so not out of an inherent kinship with nature but when their means of survival are at risk.
As a work of survey research, it is not a surprise that the agency that counts in this book is the one expressed by human individuals, although that methodological individualism is tempered by an awareness of the role that community, social movement organizations, NGOs, and the state play in environmental politics. That said, the more radical claims of nonhuman agency or sentience (pace Di Giminiani) are not considered here.
This focus on Indigenous pragmatism and adaptation, however, does not mean that we are no longer in need of fresh perspectives on Native struggles. As Indigenous activism continues to shape politics from Standing Rock to Tierra del Fuego, it is clear that resurgence and resistance are important parts of our hemispheric reality and scholarly agendas. In contrast to Eisenstadt and West’s concern with the Indigenous people who do not resist, the unorthodox and decolonial sociologist Macarena Gómez-Barris focuses on resistance by Indigenous groups and alternatives to capitalism that emerge from the extractive zone. She insists that “extractive zones contain within them the submerged perspectives that challenge obliteration,” and describes “intangible” spaces beyond the Western imagination, which are “protected spaces” from which creative alternatives can emerge. She describes these “transitional and intangible spaces as geographies that cannot be fully contained by … speciesism, scientific objectification, or by extractive technocracies,” and insists that seeing and listening to these worlds can offer alternatives to “capitalist and extractive valuation” (Gómez-Barris, 12).
Her first chapter presents the social ecologies of Kichwa communities living in the Yasuní region of Eastern Amazonian Ecuador and their “complex systems of land management, resistance, and alternative anticapitalist economies” (18).
Long considered the most biodiverse region in the world, Yasuní National Park harbors millions of insect species, hundreds of bird species, and the greatest variety of tree species anywhere on the planet. Spaces of high biodiversity such as the Yasuní swirl away from full capture, despite the fact that teams of Western and Ecuadoran scientists constantly enter the forest to classify its plant and animal species and Indigenous populations. Given the contrast between the expanding extractive activity I describe above and the patches of forest that contain immense biodiversity, is it possible to imagine an alternative future to the elimination of planetary biodiversity? (Goméz-Barris, 18).
Protection of intangible zones requires the “constant and necessary political pressure” exerted by political groups such as YASunidos, a “transborder, queer, feminist, Afro-Indigenous coalition that works solidly to defend the Yasuní region” (Gómez-Barris, 13–14). Formed in 2013 to confront the pressures of petro- development, this coalition offers but one example of creative resistance and alternative models to the extractive zone. Her subsequent chapters provide other forms of resistance, including the work of Mapuche filmmaker Francisco Huichaqueo, Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, and the performative, artistic, and activist work of the Indigenous-Anarchist collective Mujeres Creando in Bolivia. Focusing on various forms—organizational, aesthetic, and political—Gómez-Barris elaborates a vision of agency that is close to what Doris Sommer (Reference Sommer2006) calls “cultural agency,” which generates new ways to see, and thus makes possible new ways to act.
Committed to a project of “perceiving otherwise,” Gómez-Barris braids the work of scholars like James Scott, José Muñoz, and Gayatri Gopinath to develop a “decolonial queer femme method” (8). With this theoretical frame, she examines Indigenous acts of resilience in what she terms “the extractive zone,” or “the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of ‘high biodiversity’ in order to reduce life to capitalist resource conversion” (xvi). She focuses on five specific regions in South America: the Bío Bío in Chile, the Sacred Valley in Peru, Potosí (and La Paz) in Bolivia, Eastern Ecuador, and Southwestern Colombia, “whose marginal status remains central to the global economy, and [which] gives us clues as to how we might understand a range of decolonizing efforts in the hemisphere” (1).
Centering her analysis on these extractive zones and focusing on the “submerged perspectives” of Indigenous actors in them, Gómez-Barris explores not just destruction and survival but “the creation of emergent alternatives that exist alongside extractive capitalism” (4). This slim but ambitious book covers a lot of ground: the politics of oil and indigeneity in the Ecuadorian Amazon, spiritual tourism in Peru’s Sacred Valley, timber plantations and Mapuche activism in southern Chile, anti-dam movements in Colombia, and Indigenous anarchist feminism in Bolivia.
This is an impressive work. Yet one cannot escape the feeling of the old refrain: quien mucho abarca poco aprieta. In trying to do so much, the book’s ethnographic engagements feel like important beginnings rather than thorough encounters. There are also a surprising number of errors. Some are historical (like locating Peru in the Viceroyalty of Nueva España when it was actually its own viceroyalty, or dating the Bolivian Revolution in 1954, when it actually took place in 1952). Others are unfortunate misspellings (Kichwa, the largest Indigenous nationality in Ecuador, is spelled three different ways, without explanation; the Aymara and Quechua social unit of ayllu is rendered as ayullu throughout the text, including the index, and more seriously, misdefined). We all make mistakes, of course. Yet the cumulative effect of so many errors, small and large, factual and editorial, is to shake the reader’s confidence in the account that has been otherwise so carefully conceptualized.
MULTICULTURAL COMPROMISES? NEGOTIATIONS AND TRANSLATIONS
Indigenous communities employ diverse and sometimes contradictory strategies to empower themselves within systems of neoliberal multiculturalism. Considering the vexed cost-benefit analyses at the heart of Indigenous decisionmaking processes, these authors explore the paradoxes inherent to Native self-determination in settler- colonial polities and the wealth of strategies for what Anishinaabe critic Gerald Vizenor (Reference Vizenor2008, 1) calls survivance, “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion.”
Jackson’s exploration of Tukanoan agency in its many forms will remind many readers of Gayatri Spivak’s famous argument about “strategic essentialism” (Reference Spivak, Landry and MacLean1996).
Jackson examines the role of the Regional Council of Vaupés Indians, a grassroots Indigenous organization, and its political responses to encroaching multicultural discourses in the Vaupés region of the Amazon. As state presence in the Vaupés increased, she explains, Tukanoan self-representation—targeted at outsiders and meant “for public consumption”—shifted to resemble that produced by official discourses celebrating “authentic” practices of “traditional” lifeways that Tukanoans had never before practiced, as a basis for their claims to ethnic rights. “An image derived from the exterior—simplified and romantic—of Tukanoan society and culture was being constructed, and Tukanoans were increasingly aware of these representations” (Jackson, 92), along with the material benefits that derived from cultural rights. Tukanoan communities, in her view, reduced the complexity of their self-representations to fit simplistic state notions of indigeneity in Colombia.
Describing the system of linguistic exogamy that defines the Tukanoan cultural complex, Jackson tracks how Tukanoan self-representation has changed over time to align with encroaching state discourses on multiculturalism. She writes, “To me, the system of linguistic exogamy was magnificent, and I was taken aback when young Tukanoan activists misrepresented it” in favor of adopting state-sanctioned images of “primitive” and “traditional” Indians to empower their claims to cultural rights (82). From this vantage point, multicultural state discourse that offers partial inclusion to select types of indigeneity but not to others converges with Tukanoan strategies to empower themselves within the multicultural state, which work together to extract the cultural complexity from representations of Tukanoan identity. Jackson struggles to find language to describe the process as something other than “cultural loss” and asks how we can adopt more neutral language for interpreting Indigenous agency that complies with systems of official multiculturalism.
In order to empower themselves, Tukanoans began to produce renderings of their identity that might better help them gain recognition and legitimize their claims to rights. Jackson insists that these decisions must be considered within the context of struggles for self-determination and a neoliberal state increasingly willing to recognize certain Indigenous peoples’ rights but not others.
The Mapuche land claims explored by Di Giminiani also must reckon with neoliberal discourse as a means for Mapuche self-empowerment. Di Giminiani centers on the dilemma in which “the protection of the link with one’s place of origin is a fundamental element of self-determination, which has historically necessitated the adoption of winka [non-Mapuche] practices often at odds with Mapuche sociological relations”—such as translating sentient Indigenous lands into a liberal property rights system (29–30).
Di Giminiani defines sentient landscapes “by the continuing presence of forces embodied in the land that are responsive to human action” (11). While legal land claims do empower the Mapuche in material and lasting ways, he suggests that they do so at the cost of domesticating Native geographies within a market regime. Di Giminiani contends that “land claims … show the limits of the commensuration between ancestral territories and property, and the forced translation of the former into the latter inherent to Indigenous land governance” (14). He elaborates the ways that Mapuche identity is understood as “a condition caught between two poles of alterity”—the “ancient ones,” on the one hand, and winkas, on the other—and demonstrates that “to be awinkado [like a winka] … is not a future prospect, but a condition lamented by many as a current threat to valued Mapuche practices” (28).
Citing the “historical quandary” of having to “become more like winkas in order to remain Mapuche,” Di Giminiani centralizes the dilemma in which “the protection of the link with one’s place of origins is a fundamental element of self- determination, which has historically necessitated the adoption of winka practices often at odds with Mapuche sociological relations” (29–30). Like Jackson, Di Giminiani views extraction to be a state-driven project, which, facilitated by Indigenous complicity, seeks to eliminate and reduce the complexity of Indigenous worldviews.
Proximity to extraction is the primary force that inspires certain groups of people to action, claim Eisenstadt and West. The politics of vulnerability contend that those whose livelihoods are most negatively impacted by the extractive economy will be the most likely to mobilize against it. The authors suggest that multiculturalist discourse that privileges Indigenous relationships to nature over those of other ethnic groups creates a rupture between otherwise similar interests, based on ethnic categorizations that selectively grant cultural rights in a way that precludes collective mobilization. They propose instead a “polycentric” approach, to allow coalitions of separate and self-interested groups to form interethnic and cross- class solidarities and collectively mobilize in defense of nature. In this view, Indigenous groups alone should not be responsible for resisting extraction; everyone whose livelihood depends on nature can and should participate.
Gómez-Barris conceives the extractive zone to contain within it the “intangibilities” that shelter spaces of decolonial resistance. She views these spaces as constitutively opposed to extractive logics and endows actors in them with an inherently insurgent capacity to act. While her regional case studies show that pockets of resistance do in fact exist, questions remain about the critical purchase of narratives of overcoming in our current historical moment. Other books discussed in this essay centralize the problematic ways that Indigenous people either participate in extractive projects or choose not to oppose them. Jackson and Di Giminiani both look at how Indigenous people mute the complexities of their own identities and worldviews to empower their claim to rights in the neoliberal state. Eisenstadt and West look at the various reasons for which Indigenous people either do or do not mobilize against extractive economies. By contrast, the binary between extractive viewing and Indigenous resistance in Gómez-Barris’s framework leaves little room to explain why Indigenous people might not oppose—and why they might even partake in—extractive projects and economies of the neoliberal state. Narratives of Indigenous overcoming and resistance to extraction may not offer a satisfactorily compelling framework to account for the complexities of Indigenous cultural identities, lived realities, and decisionmaking processes in Abiayala and Latin America’s contemporary political moment.
A CRITICAL SOLIDARITY
Recent protests indicate that Indigenous resistance continues to shape Latin American state formation and the resurgence of communities across Abiayala. Yet as these books attest, resurgence movements do not always require acts of resistance; a more nuanced form of politics beyond the visible is also crucial to Native sovereignty and self-determination. While recognizing acts of resistance is important, it is also necessary to account for the ways and reasons that Indigenous people choose to comply with neoliberal state projects. Such analysis does not intend to undermine Native strategies of survivance, but rather to fortify critiques of neoliberalism from a position of critical solidarity. Thinking about the implications of extractive zones can help us reconsider contemporary acts of Indigenous agency, to better imagine what decolonial futures might entail.
Reviewed together, these books offer several key takeaways for the field. First, as Osage scholar Robert Warrior affirms, “the ways in which we derive answers are as important as the answers themselves” (Warrior Reference Warrior1995, xvi). This observation does not only mean that we should be attentive to differences in positivist or constructivist social science; it also means that we should consider what the politics of research means for those communities at the center of the analysis. While the scholars whose works are reviewed here have different relations with Native communities and peoples, they all operate from positions of critical solidarity. Building on well-established practices of engaged anthropology, anthropologists Jackson and Di Giminiani, perhaps unsurprisingly, make their allegiances clear. Similarly, Gómez-Barris makes her political commitments explicit and seeks to amplify the “submerged perspectives” she discovers. Political scientists Eisenstadt and West are no less clear in their hopes of contributing to more just social and environmental projects, although they emphasize that polycentric or intersectional strategies will be essential, a view not that different from that of Gómez-Barris, even if their views of resistance diverge.
A second takeaway for the field involves recognizing that the most compelling narratives do not render Indigenous agency solely in terms of opposition and resistance, but rather seek to account for the reasons that, at times, it complies with state categories and logics. Scholars who take seriously the entangled nature of Native sovereignty projects, whose work seeks to explain Native complicity rather than label it false consciousness, offer more useful analyses of how neoliberalism works and how best to envision and enact change.
Third, the works provide some divergent views on what some scholars call the ontological turn, or what the Native scholars cited at the outset would term radical relationality. What role do nonhuman actors play in these struggles? Curiously, anthropologist Jackson, with her focus on Indigenous performativity, is, surprisingly, the least open to other-than-human agency. Both Di Giminiani and Gómez-Barris embrace Native understanding of relations to land, forests, rivers, and other-than- human kin. Even Eisenstadt and West, while skeptical about the explanatory power of Indigenous cosmovisions, still give primacy to the landscapes of vulnerability.
The difference between the political scientists and the others might be glossed as a methodological one, a concern with explaining variation rather than understanding broader ontological questions. Yet they may not be that incompatible. Di Giminiani ends his book with the “hopeful” notion that the very idea of sentient land “opens up the prospect for humans to feel for the land and recognize how land would be responsive to them.” Interestingly, he, too, is aware that the distribution of hope also varies. “Not all land is sentient. Some lands might have lost their sentience, and thus their ability to affect human life. Some others might be sentient, but we fail to perceive it as we might have lost our ability to feel for the land” (203). Colonialism, extraction, and Native resurgence all contribute to the sentience of the land. For all the scholars discussed here, as well as the communities they have learned so much from, forging decolonial futures will be a complex process and will require many ways of seeing, feeling, and struggling.
