Indigenous Encounters with Neoliberalism: Place, Women, and the Environment in Canada and Mexico by Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez (review)

On 1 January 1994 five cities in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico woke up to find that men and women from the Zapatista National Liberation Army (ezln) had taken charge. The date of this uprising was hardly coincidental, designed rather to correspond with the day on which the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) came into effect, a neoliberal trade policy they believed would economically disenfranchise them. A largely peasant-based movement comprised of Mayan indigenous communities, the Zapatistas’ demands centred upon indigenous rights of dignity, justice, and land. While this uprising took Mexico and the world by surprise, the presence of women at the highest level of command within the Zapatista organization was even more striking. While the Zapatista movement has gained a global reputation, unbeknownst to many a wide variety of indigenous responses to neo-liberal policies have emerged in the past several decades.

In her path-breaking work Indigenous Encounters with Neoliberalism, Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez explores the Zapatista and three other encounters between indigenous or aboriginal communities and neoliberalism, highlighting the complex relationships between the global market, colonialism, and gender. Within an ambitious set of goals, Altamirano-Jiménez demonstrates how indigeneity is shaped by colonial structures, by economic, social, and political interests, and by gendered senses of place all of which operate on different scales and make certain political visions (im)possible. She pays particular attention to the roles of gender and women within the broader global processes of environmentalism, indigeneity, and neoliberalism.

The book is structured in a fairly straight forward manner. The first two chapters outline the theoretical foundations Altamirano-Jiménez employs in the four case studies. The author defines many critical terms including neoliberalism and neoliberalization, as well as differentiations between types of colonizers, primarily between settler and extractive colonizing practices consistently situating the role of governments within indigenous histories. Her central focus here is how indigeneity is produced, arguing that the historical comparative analysis demonstrates the process by which colonial structures and modes of governance have produced the roots of gendered indigenous material inequities, displacement, and containment. As a contested field of governance, indigeneity is strongly linked to these colonial formations.

At the centre of her analysis is the connection between the colonial experiences of indigenous communities and the contemporary neoliberal challenges. The author tests her theories through four case studies, two from Canada and two from Mexico, the two weaker parties within nafta, in order to highlight the different forms of dispossession, exploitation, and othering of indigenous communities, as well as spatially and economically distinctive colonial and neocolonial projects. In Canada, aboriginal engagement with neoliberalism in the northern Arctic region of Nunavut is now at the centre of the government’s attempt to a timeless claim of sovereignty to the territory while the Nisga’a in British Columbia have legalized private property. Unlike other aboriginal groups, the Nisga’a have engaged with the capitalist market and wage economy which has been crucial to their survival as a people. In Mexico, Altamirano-Jiménez analyzes the Zapatista uprising, an indigenous led movement for self-government, a conflict which continues to unfold. In the state of Oaxaca, indigenous communities are in conflict with the government over natural resource management. In all cases, the author notes community strategies to engage with neoliberal reforms are judged by preconceived criteria of outsiders.

Critical to Altamirano-Jiménez’s analysis is her distinction between settler and extraction colonialism. The settler model (as found in Canada) starts from the preconception that the land was empty and it eliminates the indigenous peoples in a particular way, not because they have or have not a right to the land but because they are indigenous. In contrast, the extraction model as seen in the Spanish colonization of Mexico allowed indigenous peoples to retain their lands in exchange for labour, resources and social humiliation...