Indigenous geographies II

I Introduction

Geographers employ postcolonial theory to understand the perpetuation of colonial norms within the present, emphasizing in particular how they affect Indigenous peoples. It has been less common for them to apply a second mode of postcolonial scholarship that identifies those contradictions and hybridities within neocolonial discourse which subaltern peoples can exploit to initiate anti-colonial projects. We maintain that the second mode of postcolonial inquiry provides insight into Indigenous agency and permits deeper understanding of currently important topics within human geography – reconciliation, belonging and responsibility. In particular, it provides optimism and prototypes for the geographies of hope. Accordingly, we review how geographers are casting aside their past treatment of Indigenous peoples as victims of neo/colonial relations and are instead detailing small triumphs in Indigenous service provision and in the other activities of Indigenous organizations. Health care, job-training and welfare projects reveal innovation to adapt classical service models to fit community needs, pathways to Indigenous self-administration and alternative models for economic and social life. Nevertheless, postcolonial legacies condition state responses to Indigenous rights, so community activism, special legislation, programmes of reconciliation and nation-building must also confront those legacies. We caution that the fragility of otherwise inspiring projects reveals a need to balance their analysis with the earlier, retrospective gaze of postcolonial theory, especially because there are limits to their capacity to transcend colonial relations.

II Postcolonialism and the progressive spaces of Indigenous mobilization

Rather than attempt an overarching review of the engagement between Indigenous geographies and postcolonial theory, we focus on the latter’s role in conceiving spaces of Indigenous resurgence. Early treatments of postcolonialism in geography veered towards retrospective critiques of colonial discourse and its influence on the postcolonial state (Blunt and McEwan, 2002; Sidaway, 2003). Geographers quickly adopted that retrospective, discursive mode of postcolonialism, but they skirted the prospective implicit in Bhabha’s (1994) third spaces, interstices and enunciatory moments. In that second mode, postcolonial theory speculates that hybridity in the contact zone will generate excess creative diversity, contradictions for the patronizing hierarchies of colonial discourse and, thereby, scope for subaltern agency to displace neo/colonialism. Although geographers returned late to those possibilities, they are now placed at the forefront of the geographies of hope (Mavroudi, 2012), opportunities for belonging in the Anthropocene (Gibson-Graham, 2011) and postneoliberal strategies (Radcliffe, 2012). Yet it is precisely because those possibilities are born of contradiction, messiness and the influence of the past that the oracular visions of postcolonial theory cannot be precise, and that the emancipatory projects which it foreshadows are often compromised, fragile or contested.

Futurity dominates current geographical concern and, by virtue of their focal position in past and emergent paradigms for reconciling humans to their world, the postcolonial condition of Indigenous peoples is also pivotal in geographers’ evaluation of potential alternatives (cf. Baldwin, 2012a, 2012b). The renaissance of Indigenous lifeways provides glimpses of collective projects that may resolve imminent planetary challenges (Wildcat, 2009). The hybridity in those emergent lifeways is no simple melding of Indigenous and settler; it engenders an interconnected, more-than-human world that requires a new way to see, trial and sponsor on-the-ground experiments. Those experiments emerge in the unconventional spaces of diverse, cultural economies – outside the orthodox gaze of human geographers who by habit obsess with what capitalism does to us (Gibson-Graham, 2008; Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010). Exploring the peoples and places through which these social economies operate challenges ‘our understandings of the assumptions that underpin global economic processes’ to provide intellectual support for other development pathways (Gombay, 2012: 22).

The Indigenous past is germane to those discussions but, rather than romanticizing their connections to nature and community, it is Indigenous peoples’ negotiation of the hybrid present which offers cause for optimism. Pieris (2012) and Short (2011) consider the Aboriginal presence in cities as a visible assertion of Indigeneity that prompts reconsideration of White Australians’ sense of order, progress and responsibility. It also shifts the discourse of Aboriginal remoteness to one of proximity and centrality (Gibson et al., 2010). Such ‘critical examination of the ambiguous and culturally complex nature of postcolonial relations’ unsettles the Aboriginal/settler dichotomy, and stimulates, inter alia, hybrid experiments in built environments (James, 2012: 249).

Representing another negotiation of transcultural relations, Indigenous approaches to alliance-building hint at other bases for common ground. Many activist groups lack both cohesion and – through limited intimacy with everyday causes – legitimacy with the public, hindering the realization of alternatives. While they will not always achieve broader solidarity, Indigenous conceptions of responsibility and autonomy provide lessons about how to ground activism in place-based politics, a basis for alliance-building and shared visions for decolonization (Barker and Pickerill, 2012; Morgensen, 2011). Sceptics dismiss Indigenous responsibilities to place as particularistic, claiming that they have no constructive role in universal, humanist causes (cf. Noxolo et al., 2012). However, the mutability of Indigenous activism – as witnessed by the Amazigh of Morocco, whose ‘imaginative geographies’ enable scaling of their campaigns to both transnational and local affairs – supports broad alliances against homogenizing practices (Cornwell and Atia, 2012).

Notwithstanding these hopeful testimonies, the promotion of aspirational cases needs to be balanced against daily evidence of conflict and contradiction, particularly tensions between Indigenous rights and multiculturalist policies. That projects based on a new era of Indigenous leadership and transcultural relations are fragile and sometimes paradoxical is demonstrated by ‘postcolonial’ Fiji, where artifacts of British colonial administration problematize any call for racial equality. As a response to contradictions in the indentured migration of Indian workers, it was the British who established notions of Indigenous paramountcy in the 1870s (Hodge, 2012). It is not possible for today’s governments to cast aside the historically constructed notions of Fijian supremacy, nor the presence of Indian Fijians with their own social needs, so successive regimes have acted violently in the name of either Indigenous or multicultural rights (Hodge, 2012). Despite renowned constitutional reforms which safeguard the interests of 32 ethnic groups, the ‘Plurination of Bolivia’ is already unravelling amid resurrected discourses of developmental progress and, significantly, because ‘a colonial epistemology remains embedded within the State’ (Laing, 2012: 1051). Ecuador provides another example of how postcolonial endorsement of multiculturalism and Indigenous rights becomes problematic when it confronts the reality of colonial history. Radcliffe (2012) explores the national implementation of sumak kawsay (‘living well’) – a central principle of the 2008 Constitution and a commitment to Indigenous precepts of collective wellbeing, social economy and the rights of nature. Those commitments form an inspiring postneoliberal strategy but, by not confronting the longer-term dilemma of land redistribution because that may seem to contradict assurances of a multicultural utopia, the promise in sumak kawsay cannot be fully realized. Long-established elites already capture the benefits of its new economic practices, and ‘the language of sumak kawsay has been used to cloak postcolonial development as usual’ (Radcliffe, 2012: 248).

In this section, we outlined two modes of postcolonial theory. Those who research Indigenous geographies embraced the second mode belatedly, but perhaps they now overindulge. If they had balanced both types of scholarship, they might not have been so surprised at how quickly the progressive can become authoritarian and the liberal may default to neoliberal.

III Reconciliation: belonging and co-existing in place

The geographies of hope promised by postcolonial scholarship are in constant tension with persistent geographies of marginalization, disadvantage and desperation. Rose’s (1999: 181) powerful image of pernicious and persistent damage from well-intentioned practices as ‘deep colonizing’ sounds a strong conceptual, ethical and methodological warning against naive representations of Indigenous success. It also encourages engagement with Indigenous understandings and place-specific consequences of what Nixon (2011) describes as ‘slow violence’. Thus, recent geographical scholarship acknowledges the ambiguity and fragility of hopeful spaces in contemporary Indigenous geographies (Gibson-Graham, 2008). Contextualized in approaches to understanding Indigenous peoples’ sense of place as connection and belonging, this work emphasizes the distinctiveness of local ontologies and reframes national-scale policy initiatives and local actions for self-determination in both relational and postcolonial terms (Lloyd et al., 2012).

Pickerill (2009) considers the relationships among Indigenous peoples and environmental groups, where the political efficacy of finding common ground is widely acknowledged, but the cost of doing so may reinforce Indigenous marginalization. Contrasting perspectives on settler notions of ‘environment’ and Indigenous Australians’ ideas of ‘Country’ underpin a delicate and constant negotiation of language, recognition, understanding and respect: ‘For non-Indigenous activists, articulating their desires for environmental protection without sounding racist has been difficult’ (Pickerill, 2009: 72). Lloyd et al. (2012) explore these issues through their entanglements with more-than-human geographies in Bawaka Country, and in their alternative research practices for exploring questions of place and belonging. As in their research collaborations, reconciliation in general may require shared experiences of place to reveal intercultural and collective priorities.

The entanglements of Indigenous and settler societies also produce more problematic questions of identity. For instance, Kobayashi and de Leeuw (2010: 118) discuss the interplay of African-American and Native American identities and how ‘colonially imposed distinction has led to troubling contemporary schisms’. Non-European histories of colonization in Hokkaido (Nakamura, 2012) and Taiwan (Chi and Chin, 2010) produce similar limitations on the realization of Indigenous rights. Efforts to accommodate Indigenous peoples into national polities through programmes of reconciliation, legislative recognition of rights, and notional tolerance of Indigenous identities have produced new politics and new geographies of identity, belonging and place (Brugnach and Ingram, 2012). Co-implication of various colonial and postcolonial identities in processes of globalization and in local geographies reinforces the need to address questions of complicity, ambiguity and messiness in Indigenous geographies. For instance, when Askins and Pain (2011: 816) reflect on their work in community-based art projects, they emphasize the experience of contact across difference and in messy, chaotic contexts as a basis for conceptualizing just what creates ‘more enabling spaces’.

Reconciliation across such messy complexity has prompted debate over national apologies, shared histories and co-existence in ways that challenge ideas of singular identities, or simplistic notions of belonging. Johnstone (2007: 393) notes that there is an ‘“enmeshed relationship” between Indigenous health research and the history of colonialism’ in Australia. Such relationships burden all participants in research undertaken in the hybrid spaces of Indigenous action – they are part of the context that Askins and Pain (2011) see as framing encounters across difference. Gibson-Graham (2011: 2) suggest that similar ethics of connection must be considered in a wide range of research endeavours, and that this requires a ‘project of actively connecting with the more than human, rather than simply seeing connection’.

In practice, the spaces for Indigenous belonging and reconciliation are tenuous and fleeting rather than consensual and certain. Johnson (2011) notes in her detailed reading of the 2008 Australian apology that it shifted the source of authority in the nation state away from imperial narratives of settlement to localized narratives of settler belonging. Howitt (2010) sees that shift as discursive re-inscription of dominant fictions of emptiness, occupation and possession which undermine sustainable, just and equitable futures for Indigenous Australians. Such discursive re-inscription is not limited to reconciliation and apology, but is also reinforced in discourses of vulnerability to climate change (Cameron, 2012; Haalboom and Natcher, 2012), expectations for (and denial of) entrepreneurial behaviour (Bargh, 2011a) and the biocentric demands of environmentalists in planning processes (Petheram et al., 2011). Such new or reconstructed forms of Indigenous economic engagement as Maori corporations (Bargh, 2011b), Native American casinos (Nicoll, 2009) and Indigenous conservation areas (Haalboom and Campbell, 2011; Stevens, 2010) are simultaneously progressive and ambiguous as vehicles for achieving responsible forms of belonging in uncertain times. Yet, in exploring connection, belonging and co-existence within more-than-human settings, Indigenous geographies foster an optimistic sense of change amid considerable diversity (Larsen and Johnson, 2012a, 2012b). Rather than relying on a simplistic set of pre/post binaries, the most compelling work in Indigenous geographies is ‘opening up a field of radical heterogeneity’ which explores the challenge of place-making, hybridity and belonging in constructive ways (Gibson-Graham, 2011: 2).

IV Going it alone? Self-determined responses to social need

Inspired by postcolonial scholarship, geographical studies on Indigenous wellbeing reframe social determinants of disparity – the fixation of health social research – as outcomes of historically specific political, economic and discursive practices (Richmond and Ross, 2009). These studies have been less concerned with delivery of community wellbeing, employment and youth services by and for Indigenous peoples, but recent research illuminates more hopeful pathways to independent provision. The need for Indigenous self-governing services emerges because ‘[w]ithout a concerted effort to treat Aboriginal health in place … the non-Aboriginal treatment system may never succeed’ (DeVerteuil and Wilson, 2010: 505). Confirming postcolonial theorization of benevolent care, however, there is ongoing reluctance to accept Indigenous autonomy in service delivery. Indeed, the ‘impulse to improve and help Indigenous peoples is remarkably immune to critique’ (de Leeuw et al., 2010: 289), and there is ‘an endless deferral of the time at which Indigenous peoples can be deemed “ready” to “manage” themselves’ (p. 290).

Reviews of the Indigenous experience with preventive (Van Herk et al., 2012), dementia (Finkelstein et al., 2012), palliative (Castleden et al., 2010) and aged (Wilson et al., 2011) care reveal cultural sensitivity in mainstream services as the prime aspiration for Indigenous wellbeing research. Isolation from services remains critical and it simultaneously encourages and delimits experimentation with alternative delivery models (de Leeuw et al., 2012). It is often claimed that Indigenous fertility is higher than for coincident populations, and that Indigenous peoples are uniquely susceptible to the health and place-based impacts of climate change, possibly challenging autonomous provision in the future (Cunsolo Willox et al., 2012; Ford, 2012). Because governments were previously reluctant to endorse Indigenous services, restricting them to referral agencies, Indigenous peoples will continue to rely on mainstream services. Hence, it is not regressive to focus on such apparently limited agendas as co-production of services, Indigenous inclusive citizenship or culturally sensitive institutions (Ouart, forthcoming; Walker and Barcham, 2010). DeVerteuil and Wilson (2010) maintain that the realities of White privilege legitimize and problematize Indigenous-controlled services. Monopolization of mainstream services by White middle classes justifies separate funding but also diminishes any likelihood that it will be advanced. These explanations are valid, but their ongoing application to forestall Indigenous alternatives validates retention of postcolonialism as discursive critique alongside its more optimistic variants.

A special issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint (50, 2) on the ‘Progressive Spaces of Neoliberalism’ justifies retention of both modes of postcolonial scholarship. All contributors frame progressive spaces pejoratively, recognizing that premature celebration of Indigenous provision may invoke neoliberal dereliction in state responsibility. Lewis et al. (2009) applaud the efforts of Te Rarawa, a tribe from northern New Zealand, to subvert competitive tendering of formerly state services and to deliver an impressive range of support programmes. Relocation of the tribal service provider into the premises of the government department that once delivered those programmes signifies the postcolonial promise in going it alone. Yet Bargh and Otter (2009) question whether feting progressive spaces will insult or silence those Indigenes whom neoliberalism abandons to self-help doctrine. Bargh (2011a) contests the implied linearity in progress[ive] because it evokes the ‘development view of humanity’ that too often leads to dismissal of endogenous solutions. Interpreting the work of Maori-controlled organizations from the vantage of Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies framework (Bargh, 2011b), she remains confident that those organizations are fit to implement ‘the alternatives that indigenous peoples argue are already making another world possible’ (Bargh, 2012: 272). Indeed, when public policy complies ‘with Maori practices, rather than Maori practices needing to be compliant with public policy’, rousing models for ‘cooperative co-existence’ in social provision emerge (Chant, 2011: 116). Although there was public anxiety that awarding service contracts to Maori NGOs would lead to ethnic capture, these NGOs often extend services to Pasifika and Asian communities, refugees and others in need. They are also cost-effective, innovative, inspirational and well-received by their beneficiaries (Abel et al., 2012). Similarly, friendship centres in Canadian cities have creatively thwarted their limited mandates and funding to deliver culturally appropriate services across ethnic boundaries (Ouart, forthcoming).

Because the state wilfully misconstrues urban migration as an inauthentic desire of Indigenous peoples to assimilate, cities are politically challenging for them, but self-governing Indigenous organizations flourish there (Peters and Lafond, forthcoming; Wilson and Cardwell, 2012). The evolution of urban Indigenous NGOs highlights how Indigenous identities can thrive in new, dynamic relationships, yielding alternative means of envisioning Indigenous futures (Peters, 2011). The resurgence in Indigenous services also emphasizes the important linkages between cultural landscapes and collective wellbeing, thereby validating further research on ‘therapeutic landscapes’ (DeVerteuil and Wilson, 2010; Wendt and Gone, 2012). In that and other respects, the Indigenous experience presents novel possibilities for delivering programmes outside conventional institutions – for instance, through the coalescence of cultural and biophysical wellbeing in community food gardens (Mundel and Chapman, 2010).

Examples of multicultural cooperation and supra-market innovation in difficult contexts are the causes célèbres for the geographies of hope, but Indigenous communities remain cautious about independent service provision. Its authorization may be tied to reductions in state grants or to ‘shared responsibility agreements’ which stipulate non-Indigenous precepts of child care and domesticity as conditions of funding (Lawrence and Gibson, 2007). Managers of Indigenous NGOs are anxious about the capricious, politicized and competitive environment for funding (Moore et al., 2011; Ouart, forthcoming). In her optimism for those organizations, Bargh (2011a, 2012) avoids naivety because she accounts for the discourses of entrepreneurialism which condition the state’s engagement with them. Similarly, when assessing youth training schemes, Morgan (2012a, forthcoming) balances opportunities in the emergent cultural economy with realism about whether Aboriginal youth will commit to the entrepreneurial, self-managing image that accompanies those opportunities. Resistant identities and hip-hop cultures may be preferred to clichéd roles in touristic or creative industries, but championing those identities in youth services may be viewed as an aberrant departure from expected behaviour (Morgan, 2012b). Ironically, the decision to provide services independently may perpetuate othering of Indigenous peoples as deviant, administratively incompetent or morally deficient, especially because Indigenous service providers and their occasional failures are closely monitored (Lawrence and Gibson, 2007; Prout and Howitt, 2009). The examples in this section confirm that postcolonialism as critique must accompany hopeful optimism about community projects. A decision to pursue autonomy is insufficient to promote Indigenous wellbeing, and such decisions must be juxtaposed against the continuing impacts and opportunities within neo/colonial discourse (Anderson and Kowal, 2012).

V Conclusion

The breadth of postcolonial critique, both retrospective and prospective, has contributed to geographers’ reflections on their engagement with Indigenous peoples and with the discipline’s colonial history. It has also impacted on how we engage Indigenous communities through our research, the focus of our next progress report. In current literature, we discern a tendency to view Indigenous aspirations and social projects in wholly negative or positive terms. Indigenous peoples are framed as either heroes and champions of avant-garde politics or vulnerable casualties of colonial pasts and environmentally destructive futures. Neither caricature provides an adequate representation of the complex material, political and cultural characteristics of emergent Indigenous geographies.

The ongoing relevance of postcolonial theory is its capacity to interrogate truth statements about Indigenous futures from within the scrambled palimpsests of the transcultural present. It cannot prescribe which projects are likely to succeed but, applied with the sense of balance called for in this article, it can be used to resist discursive framings which habitually dismiss Indigenous alternatives and community solutions as naively localist, separatist or outmoded. The small triumphs in Indigenous attempts to reconcile themselves with other participants in multicultural realities, or to provide for their own social wellbeing, are real and significant. They also reveal the incomplete state of colonial erasure, the interstices in neoliberal practices and a more hopeful politics of place-based identities, all of which have significance for geography as a discipline. Constructive critique of the ambiguities and fragilities of progressive cases need not dismiss their value nor dwell on the negative. Rather, such critiques draw focus to the spontaneous social relations and non-conventional spaces from which genuinely aspirational politics emerge.