Or, a Call for Papers for a panel at NAISA Conference, Toronto May 7-9, 2020.
This morning, my aim was simply to post a fresh CFP for a panel at the forthcoming Native American and Indigenous Studies Conference at Toronto in May 2020, which I am proposing together with the Canadian scholar Darryl Leroux. The panel is titled “The (Recent) White Turn to Indigeneity: Indigenous Self-Determination and the Challenge of “Race-Shifting” and we accept submissions until 23rd October 2019.
However, I ended up writing a short essay on my own encounter with the concept of “race shifting”, and why I think proposing a transnational comparative panel around this conceptual framework for the NAISA conference in 2020 is a good idea.
As a researcher, I am interested in social change and in the ways in which power and hierarchic relations (colonialism, capitalism, gender, race etc.) are articulated and re-articulated in response to broader change driven by a variety of social forces. This perspective owes much to Cultural Studies which has formed largely as an attempt to interrogate and theorise the politics of social change, and, building on such analysis, to device efficient strategies for a more just society.
This is the perspective from which I perceive also colonialism, or the “colonial present”. As an asymmetric relationship, structure or way of thought rooted in the violent expansion of European supremacy over lands, cultures and societies of other peoples, colonialism has been challenged, but never left behind – not in “multicultural” Europe, not in societies that have gained formal independence, and certainly not in settler colonial societies established through colonial expansion over Indigenous lands.
The ways in which colonial power relations are upheld and reasserted, however, do evolve, and it is the task of contemporary critical thought to explore and understand how hierarchies built in the past are reproduced in our own societies, or, how colonialism mobilises social forces in the present.
Settler colonial studies and critical indigenous studies share these concerns. Although institutionalisation of Indigenous rights regimes and self-government has significantly improved Indigenous peoples’ political representation and leverage in many parts of the world, it has also resulted in the construction of entirely new settler-colonial strategies and discourses, which contest and challenge Indigenous claims to land and identity, and which demand critical attention.
Race Shifting as an aspect of the settler colonial present
Among such new challenges is the phenomenon of “race shifting”, a growing tendency among some settler peoples to organize collectively to demand inclusion within Indigenous institutions of self-governance, based on an argument that they, too are Indigenous.
The concept of race shifting was coined by Circe Sturm, whose book Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century (2011) examines the cultural politics behind the recent surge among white Americans to turn to an Indigenous identity and claim themselves Cherokee, often based on commercial DNA tests or claims to distant Indigenous ancestry. After her book, the concept has been taken up by many others, especially in Canada where a very similar turn to indigenous identity by predominantly white Canadian settlers is receiving increasing critical attention.
I have studied issues around Sámi politics and identity already for some time now, but I did not come across the concept of race shifting before last year, when reading Adam Gaudry’s 2018 article “Communing with the Dead: The “New Métis,” Métis Identity Appropriation, and the Displacement of Living Métis Culture” in the journal American Indian Quarterly. Reading the piece was quite a powerful experience, because the resemblance between the phenomenon Gaudry was describing, and the one that I have been observing and researching in Finland where the issue over “who should be included in Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll” has turned into a huge political bedlam during the past decade, was so truly striking.
Having said that, on closer thought such resemblances might not be so surprising. In many parts of the world, Indigenous movements’ demands for rights and political representation have resulted in positive legislative changes and in the establishment or consolidation of Indigenous institutions and systems of self-government. As Indigenous identities have become increasingly valued and even regarded as a new social, political, cultural or economic asset, also (settler) people who previously have identified themselves as white, have began to construct new identities as “Indigenous”, and to organise themselves collectively, in order to demand “equal access” to those institutions and entitlements, which were established to protect and enhance Indigenous rights and self-determination.
The most recent contribution to this emerging field of study is Darryl Leroux’s fresh book Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, which meticulously deconstructs the “evidence” on which white Canadians base their recent claims to Indigenous and especially Métis identity, and traces the genealogy of movements associated with race shifting in Canada. According to Leroux, many organisations which now claim to be Indigenous are rooted in networks and organisations which were originally built in order to oppose the development of Indigenous rights, and to defend white entitlement to land (see Leroux 2019, chapters 4 and 5).
Following, it is clear that the focus of critical studies on race shifting is not, and should not be, on individuals who, for one reason or another, seek to re-identify as Indigenous. Rather, there is a need to focus attention on the social, economic and political forces which support and promote the emergence of such organisations and movements, as well as on the tangible effects that these organisations have on Indigenous communities, rights and institutions of self-government. For instance in Finland, it is now becoming clear that well-organised struggles around the question of who is entitled to vote in Sámi Parliament’s elections (i.e. “who is Sámi”), have led to an imminent crisis of Finland’s Indigenous policy, and nearly paralysed the Sámi Parliament which is the supreme body implementing Sámi cultural autonomy in Finland. It would be important to find out whether similar processes have taken place in other locations, and how Indigenous peoples or communities in those other locations have responded to the challenge.
Indigenous Self-Determination and the Challenge of Race Shifting
Given the on-going surge of white turn to Indigeneity in different settler colonial societies, the questions whether, to what extent and how the phenomenon is challenging Indigenous identities, rights, and self-determination, seem urgent for settler colonial studies and critical indigenous studies, as well as for Indigenous politics in general. This is why Darryl Leroux and I decided to collaborate around a panel proposal for the forthcoming Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference, which will be held in Toronto in May 7-9, 2020. We hope to bring together Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars who work with these questions in different settler colonial and indigenous contexts and hopefully, contribute to an emerging transnational comparative perspective on the political problematic of race shifting.
If you are interested in joining the panel, please send a paper abstract submission by the deadline October 23rd 2019. The abstract length is 250 words max. and all abstracts should be sent to both of us (laura.o.junka-aikio[at]uit.no and darryl.leroux[at]smu.ca). Papers in English, Spanish, and French will be considered for inclusion in the panel.
CFP: The (Recent) White Turn to Indigeneity: Indigenous Self-Determination and the Challenge of “Race-Shifting”
During the past two decades, growing numbers of settler-peoples in a variety of different locations have created organizations and demanded recognition by state institutions, legal venues, and Indigenous governing bodies as “Indigenous” people. Typically, claims associated with this turn, conceptualized here in terms of Circe Sturm’s (2011) notion of “race shifting,” rely heavily on blood/gene narratives (i.e., distant Indigenous ancestry) and family lore (i.e., stories of “hiding in plain sight” and/or “reconnection”) rather than on reciprocal (kinship) relations with living Indigenous communities (Doerfler 2015; Lee and Horn-Miller 2018; TallBear 2013).
The ways in which “race shifting” is challenging Indigenous conceptions of collective identity and belonging has already received some critical academic attention (Adese et al. 2017; Gaudry 2018; Junka-Aikio 2016; Kolopenuk 2018; Leroux 2019). We propose to consider how movements and organizations associated with this turn are challenging Indigenous self-determination at the level of Indigenous governance, political representation, and knowledge production. What are the origins of these movements? What are their impacts on Indigenous institutions? How have Indigenous peoples responded? Moreover, we want to explore how the political problematic of “race shifting” is articulated across widely different socio-political, territorial and settler colonial contexts. So far, existing scholarship has focused largely on North America, but very similar processes are also taking place in other territories. By bringing together contributions from these different locations, our aim is to build new comparative insights into the challenges that “race shifting” presents for Indigenous self-determination.
Panel organisers: Laura Junka-Aikio (Arctic University of Norway UiT) and Darryl Leroux (Saint Mary’s University). Please note that funding is currently unavailable for presenters.
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The project leading to this application has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 845232.
References
Adese, J., Z. Todd, & S. Stevenson. (2017). “Mediating Métis Identity: An Interview with Jennifer Adese and Zoe Todd.” MediaTropes, 7(1), 1-25.
Doerfler, J. (2015). Those Who Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg. University of Manitoba Press.
Gaudry, A. (2018). “Communing with the Dead: The “New Métis,” Métis Identity Appropriation, and the Displacement of Living Métis Culture.” American Indian Quarterly, 42(2), 162-190.
Junka-Aikio, L. (2016). “Can the Sámi Speak Now? Deconstructive Research Ethos and the Debate on Who is a Sámi in Finland.” Cultural Studies, 30(2), 205-233.
Kolopenuk, J. (2018). “‘Pop‐Up’ Métis and the Rise of Canada’s Post‐Indigenous Formation.” American Anthropologist, 120(2), 333-37.
Lee, D., & K. Horn-Miller. (2018). “‘Wild Card:’ Making Sense of Adoption and Indigenous Citizenship Orders in Settler Colonial Contexts.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 14(4), 293-99.
Leroux, D. (2019). Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity. University of Manitoba Press.
Sturm, C. (2011). Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century. School for Advanced Research Press.
TallBear, K. (2013). Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. University of Minnesota Press.
