American Indian Culture and Research Journal

It’s getting hotter, harder to breathe, Why should I calm down, I know I’ve been deceived. Like oceans of regret, all these questions rise. Will they drown with our mistakes, or will they learn to fly? She said it’s over, overwhelming. We’re past the breaking point, the breaking point again. It’s getting hotter, and harder to see. Balancing the contradictions, how much do we really need? Standing on the broken edges of apathy, Occupied by your destruction, your waves crashing over me. So restless, she’s shaking, Can you feel her temperature rising? We’re so complacent and apathetic, while she’s given us everything. —Blackfire (Diné Nation) On 1 August 2007, Indigenous nations from within the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) signed a treaty to found the United League of Indigenous Nations (figs. 1, 2, and 3). The Treaty of Indigenous Nations offers a historic opportunity for sovereign Indigenous governments to build intertribal cooperation outside the framework of the colonial settler states. Just as the Pacific Rim states have cooperated to limit Native sovereign rights and build polluting industries, Indigenous nations can cooperate to decolonize ancestral territories and protect their common natural resources for future generations.

Prolonged stays in French Polynesia and Madagascar and later in the state of Connecticut awakened my interest in Indigenous culture and its preservation, colonial imposition and appropriations, and postcolonial relations between the colonized and colonizers. Such research could seem unreasonably rash because, according to Lyotard, Indigenous people are different, “irrepresentable,” for Europeans. Stokes too cautions to “tread warily as this is not our geography.” As a bilingual researcher in the Pacific, I feel compelled to bring knowledge of the French-speaking territories and some understanding of their different and differing political contexts to the attention of the English-speaking world I live in. Research in Pacific Island countries, including French pays, requires that its methodology and approaches be decolonized so that the Kanak (in New Caledonia) or the Polynesian (in French Polynesia and the Territory of Wallis and Futuna Islands) voice “enunciates” or spells out their concerns and priorities rather than mine. This article analyzes how tourism, because it is possible to establish it from the grass roots, encouraged within New Caledonia by the French government is used to (try to) overcome decades of colonial rule in spite of political and colonial resistance by the white settler community known as Caldoche (see fig. 1). Caldoche also often includes other white groups who have settled in New Caledonia, even if only temporarily. The article will first justify the postcolonial framework used for this analysis, including its limitations. It will then describe the (post?) colonial context of New Caledonia. Tourism is examined from a postcolonial geographic perspective to determine its validity as a tool to rebalance economic wealth in New Caledonia through economic growth in areas where the Kanak population is predominant. One aim of tourism is to counter emigration so that people remain on and exploit the tribal lands located in the two provinces where the Kanak are the majority.

INTRODUCTION The conduct of fieldwork is an adventure, a voyage into the unknown. How will the local Indigenous people receive me? What will I say I am doing? What will I say is my purpose? How will I introduce myself? I have several times had the opportunity to reflect on my fieldwork, which was most often conducted among remote Indigenous groups, initially in Australia and then wider afield in Thailand, the Philippines, and Africa. I am struck by the significant amount of time, effort, and resources lost as I discovered how to conduct fieldwork efficiently. Although my experiences during that initial learning period may have been character building, it is clear that much time and expense of field support could have been saved had I been well versed in fieldwork prior to venturing into the field for an extended period. My purpose in reviewing the manner in which I undertook fieldwork over the last thirty years is not to justify the information I obtained or the analyses I undertook but to provide an overview about how I conducted fieldwork in the hope that researchers venturing into the field for the first time might better understand and be prepared to conduct fieldwork. In undertaking this task let me start by relating my introduction to fieldwork. Having finally arrived in a remote Indigenous community that was to be our family’s home for some years to come, it was time to meet the local people. My first foray into the camp where the local Indigenous people lived was a case of a stroll along a path that wound its way between the family encampments of the various clan groups situated along the low ridge behind the beach. It was late afternoon when the women and children had returned from gathering bush food and the men had returned from hunting.

Using storytelling from his experiences with the Western Apache, Keith Basso elaborates the notion that “wisdom sits in places,” that is, the way in which social and cultural knowledge and guidance—wisdom—is based on experience. Because experience occurs in places, landscapes (and their stories and place names) can come to encode social and cultural knowledge. This notion of geography as philosophy would not have been foreign to the ancient Greeks to whom the discipline is often traced, but geography today, with some notable exceptions, is only slowly returning to the quest for wisdom. As an academic discipline, geography must struggle against the limitations of the larger (post)modern episteme within which it is situated. A genuine engagement with Indigenous geography may open a pathway out of this fix. What I call “modern geography”—meaning the Anglophone geography that has emerged during the past two centuries with influence from France and Germany—grew as both a tool and a product of the colonial era. The discipline helped map out the civilized and the uncivilized and the place of each in a world of empires. Its scholars at times justified territorial expansion with hints at world domination, laid out “scientific” justifications for racial inequality, or provided the technical tools and know-how for conquest and colonial rule. In the process, Western notions of geography—of space, time, and human- environment relations—were imposed on the rest of the world. The hegemonic power of the resulting modernist worldview continues to perpetuate in part through its intimate relationship with global capitalism. It is important to bear in mind that what is now held forth as a “rational” worldview has its roots in a European culture war—the Reformation. Although this worldview is accepted as common sense today, it embodies a distinct ideology that enabled the colonization of the world and the commodification of nature.

As Kuhn writes, our paradigms are not all the same. When a Native person and an academic refer to that period of Indian history known as allotment or assimilation or urban relocation, for example, they not only discuss it from different perspectives, but also talk about it from fundamentally different worldviews. Even after years of formal learning, field research, and obtaining a terminal degree, I remain a student of the Arizona-Sonora border region (in which I have now spent more than a decade) and of Tohono O’odham history, culture, and views with which I have had contact for more than eight years. My experience in the Sonoran Desert pales in comparison to the Tohono O’odham’s “time immemorial.” My life experiences are different. My academic training makes me even more different. Before becoming a geographer I had a career in intercultural communication, but I still struggle with a full understanding of Native perspectives. I feel I have done a decent job on my dissertation, subsequent publications, and daily interactions, but the real challenge is to bring together the two worlds in which I presently stand: the academy and Native America. I do not call for more Native research or attempt to facilitate others’ entry into such research with this article; rather I make a case for a greater understanding of such work and how the academy can learn from it to become more sensitive to the concerns of our research constituencies. How we handle the intellectual property that results from our research is also critical. What we make public and what we decide is better not to publish is only a beginning step. Making our efforts something of benefit to research constituencies as well as academia can be self-serving as it protects our interest in future research possibilities, but it is also the right thing to do.

INTRODUCTION Indigenous communities have successfully used Western geospatial technologies (GT) (for example, digital maps, satellite images, geographic information systems [GIS], and global positioning systems [GPS]) since the 1970s to protect tribal resources, document territorial sovereignty, create tribal utility databases, and manage watersheds. The use of these techniques and technologies has proven to be a critical step for protecting cultural sovereignty by communicating the importance of Indigenous cultural knowledge to people outside the community. However, the inappropriate use of these tools negatively affects the expression and preservation of cultural heritage and cultural survival because of differing ontologies and epistemologies. This is not to imply that these techniques and technologies are inherently inappropriate for Indigenous cartographic representation; rather, we perceive them as flexible and capable of being adapted to suit traditional Indigenous cultural geographies if used in an informed way. Thus far, Western cartographic techniques and technologies have overwhelmingly been used to present positivist representations of space, although some mapmakers are beginning to expand these tools in innovative ways. This article contributes to this expanding dialogue by calling for a focus on cartographic language as a potentially useful means of incorporating Indigenous and non-Indigenous conventions in the same map. To illustrate this, we look at the example of ahupua‘a resource management in Hawai‘i and demonstrate how the innovative use of cartographic language can better express Indigenous cultural knowledge of natural resources. The protection of Indigenous cultural knowledge and cultural sovereignty continues to be a challenge that unites Indigenous people worldwide and was most recently acknowledged and defended in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the UN General Assembly on 13 September 2007. The declaration notes Indigenous peoples’ shared histories of colonization and dispossession of traditional territories and resources and reaffirms Indigenous rights to self-determination as an inherent human right.

using aboriginal knowledges protocols and practices rather than western ones is seen by the colonizer set as being problematic our methodologies and protocols are not deemed to be scientific or rigorous or valid they’re seen as being primitive second class at best our methodologies don’t fit the white rules the house rules dealer’s choice and of course our protocols are simply precolumbian how our elders say (though not in so many words) has it come to be that scientific rigor (mortis) has infected this land of our ancestors how have the mis taken assumptions of science come to be privileged over other ways is the scientific method itself not fundamentally flawed an intellectual virus which has become the agent of transmission for western hubris so is perpetuated ad ministratum —Peter Cole, “trick(ster)s of aboriginal research: or how to use ethical review strategies to perpetuate cultural genocide” I wish to start this article in search of a middle path; there will be no effort made to hide myself behind some outdated and outmoded convention that pretends a disembodied and objective author/researcher has produced this work. I free myself from (the myth of) objectivity and follow in the path of feminist and critical researchers by recognizing and identifying my own positionality. I hope, through writing this article, to build an atmosphere of safety “where I can begin to speak from an integrated place” as an Indigenous man and not just as a social scientist “who normally speaks as an objective authority and removes [himself] from the spoken or written word.” I seek a middle path through which to traverse the “tricky ground” of Indigenous research; a middle path that will hopefully find “in-between spaces” open to new epistemological pathways, through which new voices and ideas can be heard within the social sciences and, in particular, within geography.

The map is a primary tool in geographic research, and the discipline of geography has experienced a significant methodological transformation during the last three decades with the development and now near ubiquity of geographic information systems (GIS) technology. The introduction of this technology into Indian country has spurred a debate over the appropriateness and effectiveness of using GIS for Native mapping purposes. In this article, I review issues concerning the use of GIS in Native communities and present a case study of one particular tribe’s implementation of the technology. GIS are computer systems designed to store, manipulate, and portray spatial data, theoretically making analysis of such data easier, faster, and more powerful. However, many in the geographic community view GIS as a “contradictory technology that can both empower and marginalize people and communities.” At the same time that broader debates about the social impacts of GIS, public-participation or community-based GIS, and GIS and society developed in urban geographic research, so did a more focused debate centered around GIS and Indigenous peoples. INDIGENOUS GEOGRAPHY AND GIS Major concerns that have been raised about the uncritical use of GIS in Native communities include perpetuation of established power relations through use of the technology, incompatibility between Native geographical knowledge systems and Western cartographic techniques inherent to GIS, and risks associated with storing Indigenous knowledge in digital form. Other concerns are more methodological in nature and include issues of cost and accessibility. First, in the United States, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has been instrumental in introducing GIS technology to many reservations. As Rundstrom, Deur, Berry, and Winchell point out, some tribes have curtailed BIA access to their databases because of a deep-seated suspicion of the agency and its historically assimilationist tendencies.

Social and political conflict appear to be the rule rather than the exception in contemporary relations among American Indians, their non-Indian neighbors, and the governments of the states in which they reside. Conflicts between states and tribes occur over issues such as land claims, casino gaming, taxation, environmental pollution regulation, zoning, water rights, hazardous waste disposal, mining, the protection of sacred places, and on-and off-reservation hunting and fishing treaty rights. Although the specific details of state-tribal relations vary from state to state and from tribe to tribe, a common thread underlies and structures the contours of these relations and conflicts. What ties these different conflicts together is that they center on the question of political control over geographical space. They revolve around the question of who has a legitimate claim to legal and political authority over reservation space and off-reservation spaces that are now situated as part of a state’s territory. Such conflicts are fundamentally about differing constructions and interpretations of the spatial boundaries and spatial extent of state-tribal political relations. Understanding the political construction of the geographies of state-tribal relations requires an archaeology or excavation of the historically constituted assumptions about the spatial organization of political power as it emerged in Western societies and as it has been imposed by the Western colonial project. What is being questioned and contested in these conflicts are Euro-American, state-centric conceptions of exclusive territorial sovereignty that deny and erase or seek to limit autonomous Indigenous geographies. Alternatively, American Indian (Indigenous) conceptions of political space assume an autonomous-sovereign space for Native peoples within the spatial confines of contemporary states. Moreover, American Indians and other Indigenous peoples challenge the exclusive territorial definition of the state.