This dissertation, based on 20 months of activist fieldwork, is an ethnographic examination of Afro-Indigenous peoples’ struggle to conjure territory—that is, to convert the legal recognition of territorial rights into a social reality. In 2009, the Indigenous Rama and Afrodescendant Kriol peoples in southeastern Nicaragua received a joint title to roughly 4,000 km2 of land and 4,000 km2 of sea. Since then, they have faced dispossession and displacement at the hands of land speculators, cattle ranchers, gold miners, and state-supported megaprojects. As community members grapple with the failure of the law itself to generate freedom from dispossession, the dissertation demonstrates that they are confronting fractally recursive colonialism: a form of colonialism at one scale that reproduces another form of domination at a different scale. Specifically, the violent, extractive relation of United States imperialism toward Nicaragua is reproduced within Nicaragua as mestizo settler colonialism toward Afro-Indigenous peoples. Over the past century, Global North actors have forcibly indebted the Nicaraguan state, resulting in current debts to multilateral and private lenders. Paying these debts requires constant growth in exports to bring in U.S. dollars. The state meets these obligations by promoting mining, cattle ranching, and infrastructure projects that depend on the settler colonization of Afro-Indigenous lands.

After conceptualizing fractally recursive colonialism, the dissertation moves on to an ethnographic account of Rama-Kriol political thought and action. Starting from oral histories in two Rama and Kriol communities, the dissertation examines the historical roots of Rama-Kriol political thought on territory and freedom, attending especially to concepts of territorial care. The dissertation then narrates Rama and Kriol communities’ efforts to contest dispossession through an array of strategies, including lawsuits, vigilance, outright refusal of state and settler authority, cooperation with government officials and settlers, and appeals to international authorities. Through political and economic entanglements with state and international institutions, the communities are generating jurisdiction within their territory—a key building block for sovereignty. The conclusion reflects on the enormous stakes of the Rama and Kriol communities’ work to get free and—alongside similar communities around the world—to create a livable future on this planet.

This thesis examines Lakota storytellers, specifically through the works of Ihunkthunwan Dakota anthropologist Ella C. Deloria, and analyzes the various research methods and spaces she articulated her communities’ histories with her “kinship methodology.” Deloria, by writing in different genres and speaking to different audiences, allowed her to serve her community while also shaping the development of Federal Indian policy, reforming the general public’s views about Native peoples, and documenting traditional histories. Deloria’s use of “tribalography,” oral history, and storytelling showcase the valuable ways to (re)create history grounded in tribal traditions, values, and ceremonies that went against a Western approach to documenting history. In her lifetime, she created a multitude of texts that were intertextually connected through the Lakota concept of tiospaye. Deloria would ultimately impact the way her community was viewed more accurately while also preserving their culture, languages, and histories.

The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and the Tongva Tahrahhat Paxaavxa Conservancy provide an alternative space (outside of our settler-colonial present) for Indigenous peoples to connect and practice their cultures; allowing for people to reimagine and Indigenize the present and future. This thesis examines the process and impact of land rematriation and “land back” for unrecognized California Native communities. The process and practice of both land rematriation and “land back” is foundational in supporting access and caretaking for ancestral homelands, cultural revitalization, Indigenous sovereignty, and self-determination efforts for these communities. California Native communities have survived three waves of colonial governments, laws, policies, and actions that continue to create enormous barriers for non-federally recognized California Native communities. This has not stopped unrecognized California tribal community members from building upon the inter-generational movement work that their families and communities have been a part of to advocate and practice land rematriation and “land back.” This thesis focuses on the work of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and the Tongva Tahrahhat Paxaavxa Conservancy, two case studies that exemplify and uplift the impactful work of land rematriation and “land back.” By establishing and building restorative relationships with their ancestral homelands and community, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust’s and Tongva Tahrahhat Paxaavxa Conservancy’s praxis reimagines and provides a space for people to re-engage and practice deep radical relationality, healing, and supports reestablishing a relationship with their homelands, culture, and one another in meaningful ways. In this thesis, through the experience of these two Native-led organizations, I focus on local “land back” struggles and how the collaborative, Indigenous-centered focus and practice they engage in have shaped the outcomes as land rematriation. I conclude my thesis by highlighting community voices on the impact of land rematriation work and suggestions that these communities recommend to support “land back” efforts.

Sewing Intimacies, Routing Refusals analyzes the relational qualities of Dakota aesthetics in sewing, letter-writing, dance, and adornment to illustrate how they challenge carceral containment in and beyond boarding schools. Despite totalizing, gendered attacks on Native bodies and epistemologies, how did/do Dakota women use relational aesthetics to reject settler colonial violence by figuratively and literally escaping? This research contributes to carceral studies and boarding school histories, and extends queer aesthetics, to engage the liberatory capacities of Indigenous aesthetics. Using a gendered analysis of intergenerational carceral violence and resistance related to boarding schools, Sewing Intimacies conceptualizes Dakota aesthetics as a crucial site to resist ongoing forms of gendered state violence.

I draw on critical archival practices, to read between the gaps, slippages, and ellipses in the photos and boarding school records of several students (my maternal relatives), garment factory reports from the National Regional Archives in Kansas City. I combine this method with participant observation ethnography and reflexive autoethnographic experiences communicating to my relatives in epistolary form. Throughout three chapters I analyze attempts to escape, highlighting the intimate routes my grandmothers took toward joy, and the ways they circumnavigated school surveillance. I attend to the adornment practices of my direct maternal grandmother at Wahpeton Indian School while comparing Dakota crafting to the expectations outlined in garment factory reports to find the hidden transcripts of refusal that formed quotidian acts of sabotage and escape. I demonstrate how queer expressions of radical relationality communicated and cultivated through aesthetic crafting practices with each other and more than human kin are contiguous articulations of the Dakota ontological imperative to “be a good relative.” This leads me to the argument that Dakota aesthetics demonstrate a fundamentally different understanding of beauty that undermines the capitalist and heteronormative scaffolding of the boarding school. Finally I conclude with an analysis of data from the 2021 virtual sewing group (The Sewing Intimacies Project) I facilitated in 2021 and the jingle dress dancers at the No Dakota Access Pipeline Movement in 2016 to demonstrate how digital commons and sound sustains radical relational kinship both in activist spaces and crafting circles. I show that it is the subjectivity of jingles and other adornment objects that help to bridge kinship across space and time. Overall, Sewing Intimacies demonstrates that Dakota aesthetics undermine gendered state violence precisely because they are relational sites that can (and do) nourish Indigenous sovereignty and liberatory futures.