2018-2019 Meetings
Focus questions
This year, our group proposed to ask the following questions:
- What does indigenous sovereignty mean?
- What sorts of agentive and sovereign practices do they exercise?
- How do they perceive and manage “nature”?
- What political and economic projects are they currently engaging in, and what forms of justice are emerging?
- What spatial practices and projects are emerging?
- How are the debates about coloniality of power influencing the uses and force of indigenous knowledge?
Asking these larger questions allowed us to examine the emerging literatures of post-coloniality, ontology, legal pluralism, and plurinationalism, while still keeping our eyes on the larger political economy in which indigenous actors operate, and their relations with the environment.
Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities Book Discussion with Author Mariana Mora
November 5, 2018
Dr. Mariana Mora, CIESAS, México City
Anthropologist Mariana Mora presented her recently published book, Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities (2017) about the efforts of the Zapatistas in Chiapas to resist the racialized policies of the neoliberal Mexican state.
Lithium Extraction and Indigenous Environmental Justice in Chile
November 6, 2018
With our co-sponsors in the Latin American Studies program and the Scripps Students for Environmental Justice, our group hosted five indigneous leaders from Chile to discuss their communities' resistance to lithium extraction on their lands.
A Conversation with Dr. Mark Carey
February 20, 2019
Mark Carey, Professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, presented his work on melting glaciers in the highland Andes. We discussed his 2010 book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society published by Oxford University Press.
Indigenous Films and Discussion
April 9, 2019
In this meeting with our group members, we watched four different films about contemporary Indigneous issues followed by a roundtable discussion.
Investigating Diverse Ways of Knowing Conference
June 10, 2019
To conclude our year, we co-sponsored a conference with the Nature, Space, and Politics Group entitled Investigating Diverse Ways of Knowing. The conference was a great success, with about 25 participants. The morning panel was entitled "Politics of Knowledge" and it featured: Dr. Esme Murdock (SDSU) and Francisco López Bárcenas (El Colegio de San Luís, San Luis Potosí, México). We had a creative event at the lunch break, featuring two local potters who taught us indigenous methods of clay work. Then the afternoon panel featured three advanced graduate students: Alberto Morales (UC Irvine, Anthropology), Riley Taitingfong (UCSD Communication), and Josh Jones (UCSD SIO, Marine Mammal Acoustics). We used two translators (Nestor Venegas Zarate and Maria Lorena Gómez Mostajo) for the whole day so that all our speakers could participate. The event was a wonderful capstone for our two years of thinking about indigenous relations with extractivist development, and natural resource governance.