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Reviewed by:
  • Transcontinental Dialogues: Activist Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of Canada, Mexico, and Australia ed. by R. Aída Hernández Castillo, Suzi Hutchings and Brian Noble
  • Sheehan Moore
Hernández Castillo, R. Aída, Suzi Hutchings, and Brian Noble, eds., Transcontinental Dialogues: Activist Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of Canada, Mexico, and Australia, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019, 280 pages.

Transcontinental Dialogues consists of eight contributions, each of which provides a compelling ethnographic account of contemporary Indigenous activism and contestation across Canada, Mexico and Australia. What distinguishes the volume is the commitment of its editors and authors to coupling these reports from the field with thoughtful reflections on the role of anthropologists aligned with Indigenous struggles, on the kinds of anthropology that are best oriented toward this work, and on the ramifications of such research for the discipline as a whole.

If the bulk of comparative writing on and with Indigenous movements up to now has occurred within a narrower geographic scope than Transcontinental Dialogues offers, this owes less to any methodological nationalism than to the specificity of the forms and trajectories taken by colonialism around the world. Moving from Canadian to Mexican to Australian colonial contexts as if these were fully interchangeable would do a disservice to those resisting contemporary colonialism. To this end, R. Aida Hernández Castillo and Suzi Hutchings introduce the volume with nimble surveys of the colonial histories of these three countries, underscoring points of overlap in the paths taken by colonisation, as well as instances where these diverge – especially in the present-day interactions between Indigenous peoples and state juridical and social forms.

The book’s chapters are divided neatly by the colonial national contexts in which their cases are embedded. Not surprisingly, almost every chapter makes some reference to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s pathbreaking text Decolonizing Methodologies (2012), with its injunction to make Indigenous self-determination into a research agenda. As a whole, the volume shows what this call can look like in practice, with all its attendant complexity and contradictions.

In the first two contributions from Canada, Mi’kmaw anthropologist Sherry M. Pictou and L. Jane McMillan discuss Mi’kmaw territorial struggles, taking the 1999 Supreme Court fishing rights case R v Marshall as their starting point. Pictou reflects here on the promises and limitations of anthropological and Indigenous alliances, especially as they pertain to a more expansive and decolonising concept of treaties. McMillan examines these issues from a legal anthropological perspective, demonstrating how researchers can “document and expedite Indigenous responses” (p. 65) through her own work with Mi’kmaw juridical frameworks. Colin Scott, in the final chapter from Canada, reviews his decades of fieldwork with Cree hunters and considers the kinds of knowledge co-production it takes to live well together. He moves beyond flattened calls for one-dimensional dialogue through a thoughtful engagement with “knowledge dialogues capable of circumventing the historical subordination of Indigenous knowledges and relationalities” (p. 98).

The three chapters from Mexico begin with R. Aída Hernández Castillo’s analysis of the tension between legal anthropology’s critiques of rights-based discourses and their emancipatory potential. Like other contributors to this volume, Hernández Castillo pairs an account of her political work and research, including alongside an incarcerated women’s publishing collective, with a discussion of her “double identity as a scholar and an activist” (p. 117). She goes on to grapple with dilemmas surrounding the expert witness reports that many activist anthropologists are asked to produce and that risk reinforcing the exclusionary authority of formal academic knowledge. From her own legal activist experience, Hernández Castillo contends that anthropologists might “seek more participatory and dialogic ways of elaborating the reports” (p. 128). [End Page 204] The subsequent chapter by Xochitl Leyva Solano describes her work with the Chiapas Network of Artists, Community Communicators, and Anthropologists, and the influence of both Zapatistas and US women of colour on decolonising research. Genner Llanes-Ortiz rounds out the section by discussing collaborative work on the Yucatán Peninsula and the struggle to find “a language that makes sense anthropologically as well as in Yukatek Maya” (p. 184).

In the first chapter from Australia, the Indigenous anthropologist and...

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