PERMITTED USE: This image may be downloaded or is otherwise provided at no charge for one-time use for coverage or promotion of National Geographic magazine dated January 2014 and exclusively in conjunction thereof. ©Martin Schoeller/National Geographic
(credit: National Geographic)
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/01/kayapo/schoeller-photography; January issue of National Geographic magazine.”
Kayapo who live near border towns supplement their subsistence diet with trips to the supermarket, like this one in Tucumã.
We hear from Phil Deloria again this week in the form of his monograph that has become classic in the field in its own right. His arguments about expectation and time and history relate to the chapter by Mark Rifkin that accompanies the book.
Not only does Rifkin offer up a rendering of Indigenous temporality that begins to unravel Deloria’s positioning of Indigenous peoples in a shared and co-produced modernity, but he challenges modes of historical thought and inquiry more broadly. If the task of the historian is to analyze change over time and organize historically contingent structures into coherent narratives, how can we deal with the messiness and excess of “experiences that are temporally indeterminate and mixed?”
Of course, the call for avoiding universal, singular Hegelian temporalities is not unique to Rifkin’s book (as Rifkin notes). So I think the better question prompted by Rifkin’s work here is how can we avoid positioning time as an equalizer in which groups of people are marshalled at the same velocity towards particular (or even different) ends? As Rifkin indicates on page 5, imagining a shared modernity in which all peoples are citizens of the same temporal fold plays into a politics of recognition in which all subjectivities are included equally in dominant modes of discourse or in the modern, settler state. Maybe it is not Hegelianism that is the problem here, but rather attempting to do history in “inclusive” ways that attempt to reconcile subjectivities and temporal experiences.
Ohh, love your question Elspeth. I’ve been thinking about this too – what happens when we also complicate “settler time” to account for the multiple positionalities of settlers? Are there positions outside the binary of settler/Indigenous time?
I’m drawn into Deloria’s discussion of anomaly versus the unexpected this week. I’m particularly thinking about history as a discipline, the historical practice itself, and how my own work has been mobilized by what I’ve perceived as the unexpected (thanks to this book for giving me better words)—and also how this very fact has caused me some pretty big-time anxiety. So my question really, is trying to extend this into the realm of thinking about Indigenous history and the histories with which it might be connected more broadly. When does the unexpected become legitimate grounds for doing a “history” of the subject/topic/etc.? When does finding something unexpected in a colonial archive, a space I’m sure we all approach we skepticism, become expected enough for us to make a history with?
Another question… what is at stake in pushing for the general over the particular? How do we reconcile Deloria’s choice to look for general discursive patterns of Indigenous representation with other calls we’ve heard for specificity of Indigenous people and communities? What work does this do? What can it not do?
Loved this weeks readings and very excited to discuss on Tuesday. I must confess that maybe 30% of Rifkin went way over my head (especially the stuff about the speed of light) so I look forward to someone explaining that to me.
Do you think Rifkin completely undermines Deloria’s argument? Certainly he critiques the singularity of the temporal framework of “modernity” that Deloria locates his subjects within, and this is important. However, I think we shouldn’t lose sight of what “Indians in Unexpected Places” achieves in establishing Indigenous peoples as co-participants in the project of national imaginary creation. I see Rifkin as supplementing Deloria in this way- undoubtedly indigenous peoples were caught up in, entered and participated in the settler temporal modality called “modernity”, but they also had their own temporal streams and momentum providing alternate trajectories and different situational backdrops.
I want to focus in on the anxious “chuckle”. I must admit that some of the photos in this book made me smile/chuckle. Deloria focuses on the chuckle as a nervous response to the unexpected, to subliminal social codings being undermined by reality. However, a laugh, and humor, can also be a mode of representational resistance. I’m thinking particularly here of the Wild West actor impersonating an English accent in response to an Englishman’s stereotyped “Indian” accent. Or, outside of this text, the implicit joke and laugh behind the title of “These Mysterious People”. How do you see humor manifesting in this text? Is it a nervous exhibition of power undermined? Or a defiant unveiling of the absurdity of certain representation? How does Deloria himself use humor in his prose?
See you Tuesday!!
Great points, both! Glad I read them before reading the Rifkin piece. I’m not sure I see Rifkin as in conflict with Deloria- I saw them as kind of supporting each other (but I’m a little hazy on if I actually understand Rifkin). I also I think Deloria’s exploration of unexpectedness gives us a workable (although challenging and slippery) framework that allows room for deeper understanding. Rifkin explores the “making of Indians into ghostly remainders” that removes them from modernity and I wonder how scholars are lured into unintended declensionist narratives in examining colonial history. How can exhume histories of Indigenous peoples with more complexity and nuance? I feel like even White got lured in with his “shatter point” argument that uses violence and absence as the centre of his argument. This isn’t to say that history isn’t necessary but I’d like to know how others see Deloria as perhaps doing a better job of finding balance and reflecting back that it is non-Indigenous scholars to re-examine their expectations of how Indigenous people show up in history. I think I need to read the Rifkin piece again…
One question I have is are we sometimes looking for a perfect way of doing history? I’ve asked this question before over broader historiography but I also wonder in the context of decolonizing research there needs to be room for multiple, and at times, opposing, methods and approaches that overlap, interact, and counteract each other. I wonder if embracing the muddiness will help is arrive at challenging some of our expectations of where and how we place Indigenous people in history, as Deloria argues. I think Deloria and Rifkin are both arguing that to do this historical work, we need to challenge our expectations of what can be achieved by our methods, whether we’re doing the “small” or “big history.” What ways might be useful in seeing Deloria and Rifkin’s work as talking to each other, rather than in opposition?
Ah, beat me to it, Henry- also love the points about humour.
Really like this weeks readings! I’m interested in discussing Rifkin’s suggestion that academics engage Native literary texts to “open up possibilities for envisioning and engaging with alternative temporalities” (47). This reminds me of a suggestion in the Tuck and Yang article we read at the start of the term, where they discuss the possibilities of “engaging literature and art as theory” that “intervenes upon modes of theorizing in the social sciences, setting limits to social science research and also making those limits permeable to other forms of inquiry” (237). I find this really interesting, and both Rifkin and Tuck and Yang use literature/art in really insightful ways. But I am struggling to conceptualize what that would look like in an academic history. How do you guys think history can take up this suggestion to engage the literary? Would it require fundamentally changing what we mean by academic history?
Also, I wonder how some of the oral based texts we have read relate to Rifkin’s conception of time. For example, in Standing up with Ga’axsta’las, Robertson discusses time and change that does not engage with tradition/modernity binaries and actively tries to center the way Ga’axsta’las and her kin understand the past. Is this an example of engaging the sort of alternative temporalities that Rifkin suggests?
Also, if you were like me and the discussion of trains, balls, and simultaneity was totally over your head, I suggest watching this short youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wteiuxyqtoM
Focusing on Deloria I was struck by many of the images he uses in his work but particularly I would like to think a bit further about the image of Philip Wildshoe and family on page 172. Deloria uses this image of the Wildshoe family in their new Chalmers Automobile (1916) to ground his arguments about Indigenous relationships with automotive technology. However, I think it also gestures towards something else. In the caption Deloria indicates that “the family proudly posed in their car for an image commissioned and controlled, not by a white photographer, but by an Indian family” (172). Thinking about the growing accessibility of photographic technology in this time I think this gets at important question about how Indigenous peoples used western technology to document themselves. How does the camera in Indigenous hands work to construct a different historical record? And, in relation to Elspeth’s point, are these Indigenous subjective representations translatable? Or, are they misread by a western academic audience? On whose terms do they enter the historical record?
In the conclusion Deloria writes that, “This book argues that some Indian people – more than we’ve been led to believe – leapt quickly into modernity and not necessarily because they adopted political and legal tools from whites or because they were acculturated into the educational, political and economic order of twentieth-century America” (231). I feel like it would be productive to think about other contexts we’ve encountered where Indigenous people have ‘leapt quickly’ into modernity for reasons and in ways that counter these pervading / traditional discourses. Can we see this in any of the works we’ve read thus far this term? How does this relate to agency, self-representation and the politics of recognition that we’ve continued to revisit in our discussions this term? What connections are to be made in relating these texts?
I enjoyed Rifkin’s discussion about how narratives and stories can help us better understand and acknowledge the existence and legitimacy of differing conceptions of time. I think this is partly because I’ve spent the last several days reading about ways in which Kaska narratives need to be recontextualized and reevaluated within both a historical and present cultural context, and how these contexts have a certain continuity across differing temporalities. I’m sad I won’t be in class this upcoming week to talk about this more, but I feel like there’s an interesting connection to make between not only how time is conceived in different contexts and by different individuals and in different cultures, but also in the ways in which stories and narratives can index these elements. Once again, how can we bring this part of Rifkin’s discussion not only to Deloria’s work, but also to other texts we’ve read this term? What implications do they present for the discipline of history and the way its practitioners approach narratives and stories?
Great questions, everybody! I’m struggling to think of anything meaningful to say that has not already been covered. One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about while reading these books is the concept of tradition and how it relates the concept of the modern. Deloria’s history charts the ways that “some Indian people…leapt quickly into modernity” (231). His use of the word is fairly uncritical. There are things that are modern, and so there are things that are traditional. However, Rifkin writes that “the use of traditional” as a concept “to characterize Indigenous knowledges, experiences, and lifeworlds already tends to situate them within normative settler temporality” (30). In this sense, modernity is, if not synonymous, at least deeply intertwined with a settler frame of reference. To do responsible history, do historians need to do away with ideas of tradition and modernity? What happens to the kinds of insights gained by undertaking studies such as Deloria’s? Is it possible to engage with the binary of traditional/modern without privileging a settler temporality?
Really interesting points, thank you all! Jakub I look forward to discussing concepts of modernity with you tomorrow! There are several Latin American decolonial scholars who articulate similar ideas to your question about modernity and settler frames of reference. Mingolo, for example, describes ‘modernity’ as commonly associated with concepts such as “seamless progress, industrialisation, democracy, secularisation, humanism, linear time, scientific reasoning, and nation states (amongst others)”, and argues that coloniality is thus an expression (and condition of the maintenance) of modernity, defined by Quijano as “a system that defines the organisation and dissemination of epistemic, material and aesthetic resources in ways that reproduce modernity’s imperial project… including the geopolitics of knowledge production (epistemic violence).” A lot of these concepts are deeply bound up in western epistemologies, particularly Enlightenment thought and ideas about universal reason and history – and I wonder whether this raises bigger questions (which maybe we don’t want to get in to as it might move us too far away from the specific readings) about where (western) history as a discipline is situated in these concepts. Completely sidetracking from the reading, sorry!
In my attempt to raise some questions that haven’t already been covered I’m going to take up the idea of what constitutes ‘authentic indigeneity’ and try and relate this week’s readings (particularly Deloria) to some of the other work we’ve read in this course – (this link may or may not work) – going back to Tuck and Yang’s piece on pain and desire: if, as they assert, we (we = HSS researchers) often frame narratives of Indigenous pain and suffering as constituent of authentic indigeneity and simultaneously as something situated in the past, by implication, both the wrongs of colonialism and Indigenous peoples are also in the past. Could Deloria’s book be considered desire centred research? As Tuck and Yang argue that we should recognise experiences of tragedy, trauma and pain and position the knowing derived from such experiences as wise; could Deloria’s examination of the ways Indigenous peoples ‘hacked the system’ and created spaces within the very practices and representations that sought to limit them be read in the same way? See you all tomorrow!
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/look-above-the-sky-is-falling-humanity-before-and-after-the-end-of-the-world/
The article I mentioned
Also the cartography I mentioned:
http://www.decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/22168