American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article intends an orientation of readers to critical Indigenous feminist politics through a theorizing of and engagement with water as an analytic. To do so, it focuses on two solidifications of Indigenous feminist politics in the United States and Canada. The first concerns theory and method: What informs and distinguishes the articulation of a critical Indigenous feminist politics, with/from other feminisms? What difference does water make within that articulation? The second involves the junctures of the Flint water crisis and the #NODAPL action at Standing Rock: How did water bring people together, not just there but around the world? How does the coming together matter? The article presumes that gender is a core, constitutive aspect of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and solidarity. It argues that water rests with women and women-identified individuals, and their social and cultural responsibilities to, and in, multiple kinds of relationships, which include other-than-human beings and involve other-than-seen realities.

Written from the perspective of a non-Indigenous woman of color “standing with” Indigenous communities through politicized allyship, this article explores the politics of becoming a comrade to Indigenous peoples in their struggles for liberation in the settler-colonial present. Dhillon highlights key moments in the development of her political consciousness by centering the fundamental leadership, knowledge, and guidance of Indigenous women in decolonial activism and scholarship across a range of areas—including environmental justice, colonial gender violence, and the arts—that have been foundational to the anticolonial framework informing her scholarship and organizing.

This paper maps colonial economies of trauma as they pertain to trafficking, disappearances, and deaths of Indigenous women and girls, and argues that we have a collective responsibility to dismantle these structures by uplifting the expertise and leadership of the most marginalized of Indigenous women and girls. In this way, this paper asks, if we shift our value system to one that acknowledges experiences such as sex work or incarceration as additional credentials that enhance capacity to design creative and effective efforts to account for and address violence, rather than barriers to success, what might that do for our organizing and our research, for our communities, and for Indigenous women and girls themselves?

Indigenous activist movements are often articulated through the concepts of struggle, resistance, and resurgence. Indigenous women activists often tie these concepts to vocabularies of responsibility and obligation. Nelson examines the root meanings, contested uses, and pragmatic roles of struggle and resistance in Indigenous women’s activism, including her own experiences as a Native woman and scholar-activist. She articulates this struggle through the concept of “wrestling with fire,” which serves not only as a metaphor for activism, but also as a unique approach by Indigenous women who have specific responsibilities to the natural elements. Real fire and the fire of activism can bring both destruction and renewal, and these interrelated and complex processes have always played important roles in indigenous land management, culture, and spirituality. An ethnopoetic analysis on the role and power of fire in ecological processes and Indigenous oral literatures concludes the essay, with a proposal for how to incorporate Indigenous ways of being in reciprocal relationship with the regenerative power of fire.

The phrase “women and 2spirits” has become increasingly popular in Indigenous gender-related activism, often noted through the expansion of the hashtag for missing and murdered Indigenous people to #MMIWG2. This article uses the phrase as a jumping-off point to think about how transgender Indigenous people remain marginalized even in feminist, queer, and Indigenous activist spaces. Emphasizing the scholarship of Indigenous trans women, the article argues that rhetorical exclusion has tangible negative impacts on transgender Indigenous people. The writing and activism of such individuals offers solutions that center decolonial love and interpersonal care work as sites for transforming gender relations in Indigenous communities.

This article aims to articulate a political formation that I term Indigenous internationalist feminism, which centers a critique of US imperialism and is premised on three intellectual and political traditions: radical Indigenous internationalism, Black left feminism, and queer Indigenous feminism. Indigenous internationalist feminism provides a framework for transnational Indigenous practices that seek to build counterhegemonic power with other anticolonial, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist liberation struggles, both within and outside of the United States. At the center of these practices is an ethics of expansive relationality between humans, and between humans and our other-than-human kin.