Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner

In California Indian epistemologies, water, land, language, and knowledge are intimately connected through ancient cycles of research, ceremony, and kinship. Since creation, ‘atáaxum champúulam//Luiseño medicine people sang for rain, holding ceremonies that kept the riv­ers full, the plants strong, and our people from thirst. Rainmaking in this essay serves as an example of an Indigenous lifeway and practice that was subjected to colonial violence; rainmaking also serves as a more figurative and emblematic example of a central feature of Indigenous epistemologies in which language, land, governance/clan systems, and ceremony are linked together as an embodied practice. Embodied practices and the cluster of concepts connected to them are contrasted throughout this essay with parcels, or aspects of Indigenous lifeways that are rendered as individualized pieces or as mere resources. Indigenous lifeways are rendered as parcels or mere resources through a process of structural epistemic injustice (contributory injustice) that can be referted to as epistemic damming. Through contributory injustice, or epistemic damming, settler colonial legal and academic structures have transformed Indigenous practices by rendering them into parcels, or mere resources, and doling them out piecemeal back to Indigenous communities as a lackluster gesture at justice. This essay (1) provides sorely underdiscussed historical context of the impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous lifeways and practices, spotlighting the specific manifestations of settler colonial violence in California, (2) shows how Indigenous practices are epistemically dammed, or subjected to structural contributory injustice, highlighting contemporary examples thereof, and (3) briefly gestures at a now-visible roadmap of avenues of Indigenous resistance with hazards such as contributory injustice flagged along the way.

White progressives in the United States are currently experiencing two profound reckonings that typically are assumed to be unrelated. On one hand, the Dobbs verdict overturned the assumption that the right to choose with respect to abortion is too socially entrenched, juridically settled, or politically sacred to be denied. On the other hand, climatological conditions for possibly having a comfortable existence are increasingly under threat in locales in which residents have come to expect to enjoy secure lives and livelihoods. This article highlights what Indigenous communities across the United States already know well. Namely, threats to reproductive freedom and climate crisis are neither new nor separable. Both phenomena have common colonial roots that continue to proliferate, each a result of the disruption and destruction of Indigenous kinship assemblages. Indeed, in aiming to remediate their current reckonings, white progressives routinely (if unthinkingly) support forms of settler-state violence that perpetuate reproductive and climate injustice in Indigenous communities. The authors appeal to white progressives, notably including white feminists, to embrace the proposition that their reckonings cannot be properly understood nor successfully addressed without prioritizing Indigenous futurity. They call for centering forms of Indigenous feminist praxis that facilitate robust Indigenous coalitions of anti-colonial resistance.

State violence against disabled people and Indigenous people as well as disabled Indigenous people has long been endemic in the US. Recent scholarship in philosophy of disability and disability studies rarely addresses the underlying issue that causes such state violence: settler-colonial conceptions of land. The aim of this article is to begin filling this gap in the literature. We detail settler colonial epistemologies and argue that the property relation underwrites operative concepts of accessibility dominant across disability theory. We show how such concepts of accessibility are Lockean and thereby defined terms of the project of settler colonialism. We instead offer an Indigenized account of access, which we term deep access, that does not rely on the notion of Lockean property and that provides a coalitional path for Indigenous futures and disability justice. On our account, decolonization is and must be a deep access measure.

It is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. The threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. In this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-than-human kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of Indigenous lands and lives. More pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. Framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational Indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change.

Settler colonial imaginaries are constructed through the repeated, intergenerational layering of settler ecologies onto Indigenous ecologies; they result in fortified ignorance of the land, Indigenous peoples, and the networks of relationality and responsibility that sustain co‐flourishing. Kyle Whyte (2018) terms this fortification of settler ignorance vicious sedimentation. In this paper, we argue that Outlaw Country music plays important roles in sedimenting settler imaginaries. We begin by clarifying the epistemic dimensions of vicious sedimentation. We then explore specific cases where Outlaw Country songs function as epistemic scaffolding for maintaining and preserving deeply sedimented settler imaginaries. Finally, we conclude by considering ways of using country music as epistemic scaffolding for constructing resistant epistemologies, through the processes of trickster hermeneutics (Vizenor, 1999) and epistemic chronostratigraphy.

In public health research, tracking folk racial categories (in disease risk, etc.) is a double-edged tool. On the one hand, tracking folk racial categories is dangerous because it reinforces a problematic but fairly common belief in biological race essentialism. On the other hand, ignoring racial categories also runs the risk of ignoring very real biological phenomena in which marginalized communities, likely in virtue of their marginalization, are sicker and in need of improved resources. Much of the conversation among epidemiologists and philosophers of medicine concerning the issue of tracking folk racial categories in public health research springs forth from largely black/white binarized health inequities. While health inequities between black and white Americans are certainly a very important topic, I am interested in investigating the complications to this conversation about the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research generated by the consideration of Indigenous identities in the US—groups whose health inequities are typically tracked based on the folk racial category of “Native American” or “American Indian,” but whose unique identity categories and community membership problematize the current spectrum of approaches to tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. This paper will draw on scholarship by and about Indigenous people in the US context to address an undertheorized facet of the conversations concerning the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research, including the potential undermining of American Indian sovereignty and Indigenous epistemologies. I will end on some methodological considerations inspired by the inclusion of Indigenous identities in the US in the conversation about tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research.

In Therapeutic Nations, Dian Million highlights the complicated role that neoliberal arenas like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and international dialogues concerning human rights play in the marginalization of Indigenous communities. Neoliberal arenas are empowered by sociopolitical imaginaries, or a metaphorical moral fabric of a given community, that consist in discursive content and affective, felt knowledge. According to Million, the sociopolitical imaginaries that give weight and context to negative stereotypes about Indigenous peoples are the same sociopolitical imaginaries that empower neoliberal arenas. In a sense, the proposed solutions are ‘cut from the same cloth’ as the causes of settler colonial violence. Million does not directly apply her argument to Indigenous language reclamation, but Million’s conceptions of sociopolitical imaginaries and paradoxically imposed neoliberal arenas are useful for framing a discussion of the potential harms in some Indigenous language reclamation projects, specifically, revitalization programming described by UNESCO and those pursued by U.S. research universities. I aim to show that some of these proposed solutions to Indigenous language loss are cut from the very same cloth, justified by the same sociopolitical imaginaries, as attempted linguicide itself.