Joy Harjo's Web Log

"Empire's War on Extremism: Indigenous Peoples Write Back"
Guest Editors: Larry W. Emerson and D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark

Ongoing attacks by academics, journalists, and politicians on the political sovereignty and cultural autonomy of Indigenous Peoples highlight a disturbing anti-Indigenous racist trend disguised as public debate. Through what amounts to unchecked media access, writers around the globe use their privileged positions to promote western bias and dogma, deepen colonial trauma, and undermine futures of Indigenous Peoples. For instance, assertions by University of Auckland lecturer Elizabeth Rata that Kaupapa Maori "is a strategy of intellectual legitimatisation that promotes ethnic primordialism and culturalism determinism" and "weaken[s] the conditions essential for democracy" have currency in the climate created by the Bush administration's "war on extremism." Rata's rhetoric bears a resemblance to global right wing conservative messages that promote the notion that when "traditional fundamentalists" succeed in intervening into western power structures they contaminate and weaken western democracy.

The empire's war on extremism has engaged Marxists, African American and Latina/o critical theorists, feminists, and gay, lesbian, and queer writers. More recently, it has turned its predictable gaze on Indigenous peoples who not only support other oppressed groups but are also concerned with self-governance, cultural autonomy, ecologically-based kinship systems, and decolonization.

Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination embraces a non-western history, language, and worldview that express unique legal and spiritual ties to land, place, and community. These elements shape Indigenous political aspirations and method and often contradict modern and western ideology. Critical differences in Indigenous worldview emerge. The empire, therefore, approaches its global war on Indigenous Peoples in unique ways.

The Journal of Indigenous Nations Studies welcomes submissions that engage the empire's distinctive assaults on Indigenous peoples. We invite researchers and practitioners to share their findings and experiences to help shape a future INDIGENOUS research agenda that evolves critical theory and perspective. We welcome commentary, review essays, and research-based manuscripts.

Manuscripts may take issue with academics, politicians, journalists, and others who use their privileged access to educational resources, policy-making apparatuses, and mass media to undermine efforts to indigenize or decolonize scholarship, law, and culture. Manuscripts may also critique Natives who participate as empire's co-conspirators. Anti-Indigenism's long history veils issues of class, gender, economic privilege, power, and colonialism, blinding both settler and Native alike. Contemporary tribal government and organizational models, for example, risk reproducing unhealthy, dysfunctional, and colonialized relationships that may eventually destroy generations, cause various forms of exile, and create unhealthy