Global Indigeneity & Information Colloquium 

Dr. Georgia Ennis & Dr. Jen Shook | Penn StaTE Center for the humanities & information, Fall 2020

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Representations of Indigenous peoples rarely place them in the Information Age. In this colloquium, we explore what Dakota Sioux historian Philip Deloria would call “unexpected” ways in which Indigenous peoples have and continue to engage “information.” From digital archives to colonial khipus, Indigenous peoples around the world use many technologies of mediation to record and transmit information. What is Indigeneity? What is Information? Bringing these two questions together reveals the necessity to profoundly rethink the concept of information in the humanities.

* readings will be available for CHI participants on our shared Box folder

Session 1:

Indigeneity, representation, and information

What does Indigeneity mean in a global context? What is “Indigenous Knowledge”? Is this the same thing as “Information”?

READINGS & MEDIA:

• Alfred, Taiaiake, and Jeff Corntassel. “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism.” Government and Opposition 40, no. 4 (2005): 597–614.

• Definitions for “Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonialism” in Barnd, Natchee Blu. 2017. Native Space : Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. pp. 7-12

• Ch. 1: “Network Thinking” in Duarte, Marisa Elena. 2017. Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country. Seattle, University of Washington Press. pp. 9-25

• Ch. 1 “Indigenous Resurgence and the Internet” (pp. 1-7 only) in Wemigwans, Jennifer. A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online. University of Regina Press, 2018.

• Watch “I’m Native but I’m Not” (Buzzfeed As/Is, 2016, 1:33)

• Watch The 1491s: “The Indian Store” (3:57) 

• All My Relations podcast: Ep 3: Native Mascots (listen to first 30 minutes)

Further materials:

• UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

• Watch Reel Injun (2009, 1 hr 35 minutes) - available on Kanopy

• All My Relations podcast: Ep 4: DNA and race with Kim TallBear (listen to first 22 minutes)

Session 2:

Indigenous archives + Media sovereignty

How is information encoded and transmitted in Indigenous systems? What does sovereignty entail when applied to media?

READINGS & MEDIA:

• Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, no. 9 (January): 67.

• Haas, Angela M. “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 4 (2007): 77–100.

• Christen, Kimberly. 2012. “Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness.” International Journal of Communication 6 (January): 2870–93.

• Watch Supaman and Maimouna Youssef “Miracle”(4:58)

• Watch “Changing the Way We See Native Americans” Matika Wilbur TEDx (19:44)

• Watch Leanne Betasamosake Simpson + Amanda Strong Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) (19:15) (or at least the teaser)

• Check out Quipu Project

• Explore Illuminatives projects

Further materials:

• Indian & Cowboy Media Network

• The Red Dress Project #MMIW #MMIWG #MMIWG2S 

• Siobhan Senier, “Indigenizing Wikipedia: Student Accountability to Native American Authors on the World’s Largest Encyclopedia,” in Web Writing: Why and How Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, ed. Jack Dougherty Tennyson O’Donnell (University of Michigan Press/Trinity College ePress edition, 2014).

• Protocols for Native American Archival Materials

• “About” the Indigenous Midwest project

• Cohen, Matt, Matt Cohen, Jeffrey Glover, and Paul Chaat Smith. 2014. Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (eBook available from PSU)

Session 3

Place as Information

What is the connection between Indigenous peoples and place? What kinds of information are stored in geographical and digital places?

READINGS AND MEDIA:

• Goeman, Mishuana. 2008. “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the Discussion of Indigenous Nation-Building.” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1 (1): 23–34.

• “Ch. 9: Land as Pedagogy” pp. 145-173. In Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Gould, Rachelle K., Māhealani Pai, Barbara Muraca, and Kai M. A. Chan. 2019. “He ʻike ʻana Ia i Ka Pono (It Is a Recognizing of the Right Thing): How One Indigenous Worldview Informs Relational Values and Social Values.” Sustainability Science 14 (5): 1213–32.

• CBC Unreserved: (2019) “‘I regret it: Hayden King on writing Ryerson University’s Territorial Acknowledgment”

• Delilah Friedler (2018) "Indigenous Land Acknowledgments Explained" Teen Vogue

• Watch Heid Erdrich’s poem film “Pre-Occupied” (6:39) 

• Check out When Rivers Were Trails game

• Watch interview with Lisa Jackson on “Biidaaban” (VR project) - “CBC: Imagine if Toronto were reclaimed by nature”

Further materials:

• Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone (2020) “Land Grab Universities.” High Country News

• Check out https://native-land.ca/

• Listen to Robin Wall Kimmerer “On the Intelligence of Plants”

• Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

• Lempert, William. 2019. “Gesturing Across Settler Divides in Marumpu Wangka! Kukatja Hand Talk.” Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy 4 (2): 11–20.

Session 4

Relationality and reconciliation

How can we come into right relation with each other and with information? And what would a decolonized Information look like?

READINGS AND MEDIA:

• Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. 2012. “Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (1): 95–109.

• Jodi A. Byrd. 2014. “Tribal 2.0: Digital Natives, Political Players, and the Power of Stories.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 26 (2): 55.

• Walcott, Rinaldo. 2020. “Diaspora, Transnationalism, and the Diaspora Project.” In Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, edited by Tiffany Lethabo King and Jenell Navarro, 343–61. Durham: Duke University Press.

• Aileen Moreton-Robinson,“Relationality: A key presupposition of an Indigenous social research paradigm” pp. 66-77 in

  Andersen, Chris, and Jean M. O’Brien, eds. 2017. Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

• Listen to The Henceforward: “Episode 10: Writing into the Henceforward” (30 minutes)

• Review Carlisle Indian Industrial School Digital Resource http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/

• Check out the bdote memory map

Further materials:

• Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.

• Todd, Zoe. 2015. “Indigenizing the Anthropocene.” In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters A Mong Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 241–54. London: Open Humanities Press.

• Rowe, Aimee Carrillo, and Eve Tuck. 2017. “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17 (1): 3–13.

• TallBear, Kim. 2019. “Badass Indigenous Women Caretake Relations: #StandingRock, #IdleNoMore, #BlackLivesMatter” in Estes, Nick and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NODAPL Movement. University of Minnesota Press.

• TallBear, Kim. 2019. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou 6 (1).

We respectfully acknowledge that the campuses of Penn State University reside on the expropriated homelands of the Erie, Lenape, Shawnee, and Susquehannock, as well as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.