About Us

Supported by the International Institute, the Global Indigenous Peoples group brings together faculty, graduates, and visiting scholars to think together about the issues facing Indigenous peoples across the globe.

This is the fifth year of our collaboration. We began in 2016-17, focusing on the concept of Indigenous Resource Governance in Latin America. Theorizing about how governance is linked to resource extraction, we asked how indigenous groups organize to negotiate ongoing extractivism on their lands.

The following years we continued our focus on Latin America, but thinking more broadly about sovereignty, political economy, ontology, and post-coloniality. In 2019, we organized a very successful conference with our colleagues in the Nature, Space, and Politics group called Nature, Space, and Politics: Investigating Diverse Ways of Knowing. With Indigenous theorists and activists, we explored the tensions between Western and Indigenous science and knowledge production.

In 2019-20, we turned our attention more deeply to the Politics of Knowledge, thinking about Indigenous forms of interacting with and understanding nature. Does nature have rights? How can Indigenous visions of human-nonhuman  relations influence legal and political struggles?

In 2020-21, we expanded our focus to global politics of indigeneity, and specifically the idea of ‘indigenous development’. 

Several of our members and invited guests are contributing to the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Indigenous Development, and we have used our group to think together about visions of indigenous futures. We invite anyone interested in these topics to join us!