Indigenous Futures: What makes resurgence possible?


Dean Ray, York University

Drawing on five years of field work with six Indigenous communities and 56 qualitative interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers in Indigenous organization this paper provides an empirical description of resurgence. I argue that Indigenous resurgence is made possible through the hybridization of different forms, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to create an institutional and cultural infrastructure for resurgence, principally through strategic organizational practices, self-help cultures, and a culture of vision. I trace these strategies of hybridization. Organizations fuse Indigenous cultures with modern organizational forms to create resurgence, providing an institutional infrastructure through which Indigenous communities create space and time for their cultural practices, reconnect with the land, limit whiteness as a credential, transform Indigeneity into a credential, and reject practices that perpetuate settler-colonial power dynamics. Self-help cultures are deployed by communities to reconnect their members with traditional language, spirituality, and culture, enabling the valuable work of rebuilding their worlds. Finally, Indigenous communities in the Valley combine different temporalities, including their own culture of vision with modern time, to create historical cognition or an enhanced awareness of the past and the future that reshapes the capacity for Indigenous agency in the present. This cultural toolkit, comprised of elements from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources, makes resurgence possible.

This paper will be presented at the following session: