American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The world has seen in recent years what can only be described as an “Indigenous Resurgence” to which even governments are taking notice. There is a rise in popular culture regarding Indigenous peoples’ epistemologies, culture, languages, curation, and arts everywhere from New Zealand, the America’s, Africa, Australia, and other parts of the world. Historical fascinations with those systems have often been by and for the perspective of non-natives who exploited and romanticized Indigenous cultures to form their own national identities, write popular books, or make popular movies about their brief time with a tribe. The appropriation of Indigenous cultural and aesthetic motifs extended to Europe, with philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke and literary figures such as Karl May to Dylan Thomas. But now, many aspects of the resurgence arise directly from and for Indigenous peoples around the world expressing their own cultural values. Like any cultural resurgence, it is difficult to trace the precise genesis, however, it only recently became a transcontinental phenomenon, uniting disparate Indigenous peoples in the process. 

This essay offers a theoretical and historical framework for understanding the current global rise in this movement. We argue that the return of the Buffalo to Turtle Island provides one such example of Indigenous cultures and their spiritual relatives overcoming colonial boundaries and addressing the social ills of modernity by rebuilding relationships with each other and the earth. As guest editors, we also take time to introduce and celebrate the current special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal on the topic of Indigenous resurgence and the work of the inspiring group of authors who have found pathways for hope, action, healing, and wellbeing in the ongoing struggle against colonialism.

We are living in an era of Indigenous rematriation where Indigenous peoples’ ontologies, epistemologies, diverse cultures, languages, curation, and arts all around the globe are working to restore balance and return the sacred toward our self-determination and political sovereignty. As a collective led mostly by Indigenous women representing a broad span of what is currently known as the United States and Canada, we each are working with and alongside Indigenous communities to reclaim the cultural, spiritual, relational, and ecological protection of future uses of cultural fire.

Cultural fire includes Indigenous-led fire practices such as cultural burning, fire medicine, ceremonial fire, and ancestral land-based stewardship responsibilities. Outlawed by settlers and state-led agencies, Indigenous peoples understood our relationship with fire was not solely ecological—it was and continues to be cultural, spiritual, relational, and political. With increased extreme weather, settler government agencies are now calling for an increase in cultural burning to mitigate the effects of uncontrolled wildfires and climate- change impacts. As many of our nations across the globe revitalize our cultural fire practices, we are collectively experiencing what we deem a Fire Back movement.

The reclamation and revitalization of fire practices is being led through Indigenous rematriation (which is community-driven), Indigenous matriarchal-led practices, and relations with the land. Rematriation aims to restore balance and promote healing in Indigenous communities by reclaiming Indigenous knowledges, revitalizing cultural practices and obligations, and supporting Indigenous leadership and decision-making power. We conceptualize “rematriation” to mean the return, revivification, and restoration of our responsibilities and relationalities with fire as our relative. Furthermore, we offer rematriation not in opposition to “repatriation” (a legal term developed under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,  which aims to return cultural objects to Indigenous peoples)—rather, we offer the term as a balance of societal roles our peoples held in our communities and with our environments since time immemorial.

This article and the Indigenous fire scholarship curated represent a spectrum of geographies throughout the USA and Canada, offering a conceptualization of “Fire Back” through rematriation to restore rights to the intentional use of Indigenous-led and -informed fire practices. Our framework articulates fire rematriation through the interconnected kinship of people, fire, and planet. It also advocates for cultural fire sovereignty: fire practices, governance, safety, health, and adaptation led and informed by Indigenous peoples, including our scholars, practitioners, and allied researchers meaningfully engaging as partners and supporters.

Significantly, cultural fire differs from prescribed fire in both process and protocol. To differentiate, we expand on, adapt, and apply the role of cultural safety in relation to rematriating Indigenous fire practices and cultural fire sovereignty. In this context, cultural safety is trauma-informed and can only be defined and assessed by Indigenous peoples, our families, and our communities in the given fire-scape and related institutional setting. Outcomes can range from feeling physically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually respected and safe or safer, to experiencing the absence of racism and discrimination, to feeling that one’s Indigenous culture is acknowledged, appreciated, and incorporated into wildfire management. Furthermore, cultural safety in wildfire management can be recognized at various levels from the microlevel (individual) to the macrolevel (environmental and societal—land, water, place, and geography). Fostering spaces where Indigenous cultural practices are seen, heard, included and respected, relationality is built from cultural safety in fostering equity in the use of Indigenous-led fire practices: facilitating the exercise of inherent relationships and rights by Indigenous peoples, families, nations, and communities in this current Fire Back movement.

The impact and importance of place-based teaching and research with Indigenous communities globally is making a resurgence, and dominant Western institutions commit to but struggle with implementing these practices. This article outlines an Anishinaabe-based initiative to reoccupy space and create a network for Indigenous peoples interested in or participating in water research in the Great Lakes region by reimagining relationships around a university field station. The University of Wisconsin-Madison owns Trout Lake Station, a field station about 220 miles north of the main campus that is world-renowned for its work in limnology. The (Ph)enological Initiatives for (IN)digenous Peoples in Limnology is a project housed at Trout Lake Station aimed at reconnecting Tribal citizens to their homelands and with fellow Indigenous peoples to assess and strengthen relationships with freshwater. The project, a collaboration between the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and UW Madison Trout Lake Station, has hosted four seasonal workshops and is expanding to include seasonal internships for program alumni. We discuss the past and current versions of our workshop, synergistic relationships from in-house programs and research projects with the Lac du Flambeau Tribe, engagement and feedback from program alumni, and future plans for the projects and leadership. We conclude by providing suggestions and templates for similar place-based initiatives in other Indigenous lands and encourage field stations to be a place where reconnection and regeneration of land-based pedagogies for Indigenous communities are cultivated. 

This bilingual poem references the Māori concept of whakapapa which explains the layers of connections between everything in the natural world. Whakapapa is the lens through which we look to both the past and the future. Understanding our whakapapa means we understand our relationship with the land and with each other. It is also in our whakapapa that we find our resurgence as a people touched by colonialism. 

The international border that simultaneously separates and joins Canada and the US divides numerous Indigenous nations, ostensibly placing these nations solely under the jurisdiction of either state. While the unique political situations of Indigenous nations remain undertheorized in much of the border studies literature, this paper suggests that exploring post-9/11 security changes at the Canada/US border as a form of settler colonialism connects critical Indigenous scholarship with border studies. I theorize the processes of securitization to highlight the surreptitious ways settler colonialism is perpetuated by removing “the Indigenous” as a geopolitical entity. This article focuses primarily on the Coast Salish of Washington and British Columbia and their ongoing attempts to assert a transnational identity that spans the Canada/US border. Examining security changes at the international border demonstrates that securitization of the Canada/US border perpetuates the settler colonial framework by undermining Indigenous sovereignty – unsuccessfully in many cases. Nevertheless, First Nations and Tribes in the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere across the continent, have collaborated and implemented innovative strategies that resist securitization. In the Pacific Northwest, this includes deploying a nationalism movement that spans the border. The data for this article derive primarily from ethnographic fieldwork with the Nooksack Tribal Nation, Stó:lō Nation, and other Coast Salish collaborators.  

This article examines the development of global and transnational alliances built over the past twenty years in the fight to protect Indigenous information and knowledge, particularly in the context of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) passed in 2007. It focuses specifically on the foundational history, radical resurgence, and survivance of activists’ groups enacting change within spaces where Indigenous information is held in archives, libraries and museums, especially in non-Indigenous repositories, agencies and institutions. Examined through the lens of Indigenous Archival and Data Sovereignty, this article highlights the major challenges, as well as advances, made by transnational alliances of Indigenous activist groups, professional organizations and individual activists within the United States, Canada, and Australia, focused specifically on how they persevered during the foundational stages of information policy development in their respective counties, as well how they collaborated together to implement new protocols, policies, and procedures at the national, regional, and local level. Through the use of Indigenous research methods, including Indigenous storywork and reflexivity, this work argues that the foundational activist work of Indigenous activists fighting to bring awareness of Indigenous information rights has paved the way for the contemporary work within repositories. These Indigenous transnational alliances show the importance of collaborating on a global scale to assert Indigenous radical resurgence and political sovereignty. It concludes by proposing suggested ways forward in the fight for Indigenous Archival Sovereignty by activating global and national protocols and declarations at the local level. 

This document aims to serve as a foundational resource on seed rematriation for the Mandan Hidatsa and Arikara (MHA). We are revitalizing our history and culture surrounding traditional seed varities. The following is a case study in methodology on seed rematriation. In particular, we share the process when it is co-developed between an Indigenous institution and a Federal Research Agency with the same intention to support Indigenous Food and Seed Sovereignty. Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish (NHS) College and USDA-Agricultural Research Service Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory are conducting Indigenous research utilizing participatory action research methods deeply rooted in relationality and respect to support Indigenous Seed Sovereignty through seed multiplication and rematriation. The collaboration aims to support the health of the Traditional Seed Cache located at NHS College by increasing the quantity and quality of seeds available to MHA Tribal members. Through a sharing circle, we have asked the Pawnee Seed Preservation Society,  the University of Montana, and Montana State University to share the lessons they learned in seed sovereignty to complement our methodology. The result is a fabric woven together of genetic best practices, cultural best practices, chewing questions we have encountered, and lessons learned from the first year of our seed rematriation project. We hope that our reflection will be helpful to other groups pursuing a similar journey of rebuilding their kinship with their seed relatives.