Geography and indigeneity I

Abstract

Why talk of indigeneity rather than of Indigenous peoples? This report examines the critical purchase on questions of inequality, subjectivity and power offered by critical geographies of indigeneity. In comparison with accounts that treat indigeneity as relational with nature and the more-than-human, the report highlights literature that examines indigeneity as relational with deeply historical, institutionalized and power-inflected ontologies. To think about settler colonialism as an ongoing effect, not a singular event, recognizes how patterns of engagement with and oppression of indigeneity pervade the colonial present and its geographies beyond the specific locales associated with Indigenous peoples. Finally, the report examines how indigeneity figures in the geography discipline’s knowledge production, and argues that worldly Indigenous ontologies are theorizing the world precisely because they are forced to apprehend, appraise and then rethink ‘universals’.

Off the beaten track? Critical approaches to exploration studies

“…This work has begun to reveal a more nuanced picture of how knowledge about the world has been constructed historically by a diverse range of different people (see Radcliffe, 2017). Adrian Wisnicki (2019) has developed these approaches further, looking not just at those directly involved in the expedition but also examining the contribution of on non-Western cultural, political, and material forces to the development of African explorers' travels and narratives.…”

Territoriality in the development policy of Evo Morales’ government and its impacts on the rights of indigenous people: the case of TIPNIS

“…This frame then intimately resembles the colonial order of racial domination and forced indigenous mobility (displacement and dispossession) in the name of political, economic or nationalist expansion (cf. Radcliffe 2015).…”

Geographical knowledge, Empire, and the Indigenous Other: Engaging a decolonising introspection into Early French colonial geography

“…Beyond these compelling works, however, insufficient attention has been paid to Indigenous people, understood here as non-Western people who suffered and continue to suffer from colonialism in settler societies (for further insight into the concept "indigeneity," see Hunt, 2017;Radcliffe, 2017b;Shaw et al, 2006;Sidaway et al, 2014;Staszak, 2009). French geographers influenced by postcolonial approaches have mainly considered the Indigenous Other from the angle of exoticism and its deconstruction (Hancock, 2007(Hancock, , 2008Staszak, 2008aStaszak, , 2008bStaszak, , 2009.…”

“…More modestly, it focuses on the very early colonial geography developed towards the end of the 19th century, between the "geography of exploration" era and that of the labelled "French tropical geography," which emerged in the mid-20th century when Gourou published his seminal but controversial book Les pays tropicaux (1947) (Berdoulay, 1995;Bowd & Clayton, 2019;Claval, 2008;Clayton, 2006;Clerc, 2017;D'Alessandro, 2003;Robic, 2008;Soubeyran, 1997). This exploratory paper does not seek to examine how early French colonial geography created the Other as a new "object of science," but rather to expand on an ongoing reflexive trend identifying the positivist objectification of Indigenous people as a primary driver of their dehumanisation (Anderson, 2013;Hirt & Desbiens, 2017;Hunt, 2017;Louis, 2007;Radcliffe, 2017b;Staum, 2003). Two main questions are addressed.…”