Indigeneities

The Indigeneity section features articles by leading scholars in Indigenous Studies on Mapuche media activism in Chile, Cherokee transnationalism in London, and the regulation of indigenous identity by the Canadian government. Luis Cárcamo-Huechante is a Mapuche scholar from southern Chile. He now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin after eight years at Harvard. Cárcamo-Huechante's article on Wixage anai!, a Mapuche radio program broadcast from Santiago, is part of his new project on indigenous radio. The Mapuche activists that produce and broadcast the program claim an oral territory from which to advocate for political, cultural, and economic rights. In his study of Cherokee transnationalism, Daniel Justice situates a Cherokee diplomatic mission to England in 1730 within the context of contemporary Cherokee Nation legislation that disenfranchises the Freedmen and bans same-sex marriage. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation born and raised in Colorado, a naturalized Canadian citizen, and a professor of English at the University of Toronto, Justice has lived the inheritance of the seven young men who took the journey to England. Cheryl Suzack of the University of Toronto considers the conflicting agendas of political movements for gender justice and sovereignty and two legal cases that disproportionately disrupt the lives of indigenous women and children. She then reflects within this legal context on the possible contributions of transnational feminism to the indigenous women in Canada, who are well served neither by the Canadian government nor by indigenous sovereignty politics. These articles participate in an international indigenous network that foregrounds local indigenous experiences of difference—the voicing of Mapuche difference in a largely monolingual Chilean society; the incorporating of difference into the Cherokee Nation; the regulating of indigenous difference in Canada—often elided in global intellectual discourses.