Varieties of Indigenous Experience PDF

3 ❖ Varieties of Indigenous Experience We shall visit our people who have gone to the lands of diaspora and tell them that we have built something, a new home for all of us. And taking a cue from the ocean’s ever-flowing and encir...

3 ❖ Varieties of Indigenous Experience We shall visit our people who have gone to the lands of diaspora and tell them that we have built something, a new home for all of us. And taking a cue from the ocean’s ever-flowing and encircling nature, we will travel far and wide to connect with oceanic and maritime peoples elsewhere, and swap stories of voyages that we have taken and those yet to be embarked on. — Epeli Hau’ofa, on the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture Home is where the navel cord was cut. — A Melanesian saying What contradictory people we are! —Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Wenner- Gren conference, “Indigenous Experience Today” “Indigenous experience” is difficult to contain: the senses of belonging evoked by the phrase are integral to many, and diverse, localisms and nationalisms. Sometimes it comes down to a minimal claim, relational and strategic: “We were here before you.” Feeling indigenous may crystallize around hostility to outsiders, to invaders or immigrants. Many forms of nativism sustain these sorts of borders, reflecting immediate political agendas, self-defense, or aggression. The anteriority claimed can be rela- tively shallow and fundamentally contested: all sorts of people, these days, claim “indigeneity” vis-à-vis someone else. There are, nonetheless, many social groups with undeniably deep roots in a familiar place, and they are the subjects of this essay. The peoples in question are called Aboriginal, tribal, First Nations, Native, autochthonous, or a range of more particular, local names. They may or may not (or may only sometimes) claim the identity “indigenous.” Whatever names these people take or are given, they are defined by long attachment to a locale and by violent histories of 68  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 69 occupation, expropriation, and marginalization. A diverse range of experi- ences falls within this loose grouping, and its boundaries are fuzzy, despite attempts at the International Labor Organization and United Nations to formally define indigenous peoples (Niezen 2003; Brown 2003). This fuzziness suggests a certain open-ended historical dynamism. People are improvising new ways to be native: articulations, performances, and translations of old and new cultures and projects. The increase of indigenous movements at different scales—local, national, regional, and international—has been one of the surprises of the late twentieth century. Tribal (“archaic” or “primitive”) peoples were, after all, destined to wither in the relentless wind of modernization. This was a historical fact, under- stood by everyone— except the people in question, busy with difficult and inventive survival struggles. This “survival” has been an interactive, dynamic process of shifting scales and affiliations, uprooting and rerooting, the waxing and waning of identities. In the current moment these processes take shape as a complex emergence, a présence indigène or a performative indigenous “voice” (Tsing 2007). What experiences of loss and renewal, what shifting past and present attachments, what social, cultural, and political strategies are active in these rearticulations? A growing body of scholarship grapples with these questions: for example, the programmatic overview of Sahlins (1999) and the complex Native American histories of Harmon (1998) and Sturm (2002). To grasp the active, unfinished processes at work in various articu- lated sites of indigeneity it helps to open up, or at least “loosen” (Teaiwa 2001a), common understandings of key terms like native, autochtho- nous, and sovereign. The definitional closures built into these words, the cultural and political practices they authorize, are both necessary and dangerous. The strong claims they express contribute centrally to indig- enous social movements. They also close down possibilities, and are, in practice, supplemented and crosscut by less absolute experiences and tactics. There are various ways to be “native” in relation to a place; assumptions of firstness or “autochthony” often obscure important his- tories of movement; and “sovereign” control is always compromised and relative. More happens under the sign of the indigenous than being born, or belonging, in a bounded land or nation. This essay works to make space for contradiction and excess across a broad spectrum of indigenous experiences today by loosening the common opposition of “indigenous” and “diasporic” forms of life. The goal is a richer and more contingent realism, a fuller sense of what has happened, 70 Returns is happening, and may be emerging. The argument does not deny claims for landed, rooted, or local identities, asserting that they really are, or ought to be, diasporic. Nor does it assume that cosmopolitan experiences are historically more progressive— even though new scales and dimen- sions of indigenous life are proliferating in a globally interconnected, locally inflected postmodernity. Questioning an essential opposition does not eliminate the historical differences or tensions expressed by the con- trast. Native or tribal peoples claim, often with strong historical justifica- tion, to belong in a place, a densely familiar and deeply inhabited landscape. Australian Aborigines, for example, have been living in and with their “country” for an extremely long time—long enough to per- suade even skeptics committed to a linear historical ontology that it makes sense to say they have been there “forever,” or “from the beginning.” Such quintessentially “mythic” assertions of ancient origins evoke a “his- torical” continuity. With varying degrees of archaeological support, Inuit, Pacific Islanders, the various native peoples of North and South America; Sami in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia; the Dayaks of West Kalimantan all make credible claims, if not to autochthony, at least to deep local roots: an indigenous longue durée. Such historical experiences begin and end with lives grounded, profoundly, in one place. What could be more distant from diasporic identifications, experiences that originate in, are constituted by, physical displacements, uprootings? Yet many of the experiences made visible and intelligible by diaspora theorists such as Hall (1990), Gilroy (1993), Mishra (1996a, 1996b), or Brah (1996); the transmigrant circuits revealed by Roger Rouse (1991) and Nina Glick-Schiller (1995); and the historical pressures and struc- tures analyzed by comparative sociologists like Robin Cohen (1997) have their equivalents, or near equivalents, in contemporary indigenous life. In everyday practices of mobility and dwelling, the line separating the diasporic from the indigenous thickens; a complex borderland opens up. Contested lines of indigenous autonomy and sovereignty are drawn across it, such as the fraught relationship of “off-island” Hawai‘ians to movements of native nationalism (Kauanui 1999), or tensions between urban-dwelling Aboriginals or Indians with those living close to ances- tral lands. Indigenous attachments to place are complexly mediated and do not necessarily entail continuous residence, especially in contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, where a majority of native people now live in cities. Thus it makes some sense to speak of “indigenous diasporas.”  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 71 What kind of sense? Translation is continually at issue. One cannot simply import a concept that is associated with, say, the North Atlantic slave trade’s aftermath (Gilroy 1993) or with postcolonial migrations to former imperial centers (Brah 1996) into situations of profound, ongoing connection with land and country, experiences associated with Australian Aborigines, with Pacific Islanders, with Arctic Inuit, or with Mayan Indians. We need to explore the specificity of indigenous diasporas, or perhaps better, diasporic dimensions or conjunctures in contemporary native lives. To bring the language of diaspora into indigenous contexts is to confront its built-in difficulties. Among recent critiques of diasporic/ postcolonial theorizing, native scholars (e.g., Teaiwa 2001b) observe that when traveling, displacement, and migration are seen as normative, or at least characteristic of the contemporary world, the focus tends to relegate native peoples, yet again, to the past or to the margins. For example, when cultural studies diaspora theorists reject “nativism” in its racist, little England, Thatcherite forms, they can make all deeply rooted attachments seem illegitimate, bad essentialisms. Genuinely complex indigenous histories, which involve mobility as well as staying put, and which have always been based on transformative, potentially expan- sive interactions, become invisible. The native is thrown out with the bathwater of nativism. (For correctives, see the essays in Diaz and Kauanui.) The result is to obscure specifically indigenous forms of interactive cosmopolitanism: genealogical inclusion of outsiders, trading relations, circular migration, vernacular discourses of “development,” or mission, maritime, and military travel (Swain 1993; Sahlins 2000; Phillips 1998; Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003; Gegeo 1998; Chappell 1997). Exclusivist nativism is, of course, prominent in political indigenism: for example, the nationalist rhetoric of “Red Power,” of Hawai‘ian sover- eignty movements, and of Native Fijian attacks on diasporic Indians. However, such claims are not sustainable in all, or even in most, lived circumstances. Across the current range of indigenous experiences, iden- tifications are seldom exclusively local or inward looking but rather work at multiple scales of interaction. The language of diaspora can be useful in bringing something of this complexity into view. It cannot transcend the tension between the material interests and normative visions of natives and newcomers, particularly in structurally unequal settler- colonial situations (Fujikane and Okamura 2000). But when diasporic displacements, memories, networks, and reidentifications are recognized 72 Returns as integral to tribal, aboriginal, native survival and dynamism, a lived, historical landscape of ruptures and affiliations becomes more visible. “Diaspora theory” may have enjoyed its fifteen minutes of academic fame. Aihwa Ong (1999) and others writing about overseas Chinese have questioned its extension. Some cultural studies writers—like Ien Ang in her recent collection, On Not Speaking Chinese (2001)— have backed away from an earlier positive embrace of diasporic self-location, now grappling with the absolutist dimensions of what Benedict Anderson (1998) calls “long-distance nationalisms.” In his accounts of Indian diaspora cultures, Vijay Mishra avoids celebration, always keeping the constitutive tension between essentialism and hybridity clearly in view, showing the “interrelated conditions” of what he calls diasporas of “exclusivism” and of “the border,” the former focused on return, the other on interaction and crossover (Mishra 1996a, 1996b). Celebratory visions of diaspora, whether they take nationalist or antinationalist form, are permanently troubled by their opposites. This dialectical insta- bility, however, can be an analytic strength: the opposed tendencies of diasporic experience, exclusivism and border- crossing, are good to think with. Indeed, a contradictory complexity with respect to belonging— both inside and outside national structures in contemporary multisited social worlds—may turn out to be diaspora’s most productive “theoret- ical” contribution. The last section of this essay argues that indigenous claims to “sovereignty” contain analogous contradictions, as well as possibilities. ❖ Colin Calloway (1990), an ethnohistorian of the Abenaki Indians in the U.S. state of Vermont, uses the term diaspora to describe the dispersal of local Indian groups in the face of settler encroachments during the nine- teenth century. The apparent melting away of the Abenaki, which was interpreted as a disappearance (there were of course the usual military pressures and epidemiological disasters), was, according to Calloway, in part at least a movement to different, safer, places in the neighboring state of Maine and in Canada (see also Ghere 1993). According to this account, diaspora was a means of survival for the Abenaki, who did not entirely lose contact with each other and are still around, reconstituting elements of their culture in new circumstances. For relatively mobile native groups, the experience of moving away from homelands under pressure may not be adequately captured by the notion of “exile.”  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 73 “Diaspora” gets somewhat closer to a sociospatial reality of connectedness- in-dispersion. “Exile” denotes a condition of enforced absence, with the sustained expectation of returning home as soon as the conditions of expulsion can be corrected. The term thus applies to a broad range of displaced native peoples, even to those still living on their ancestral lands in reduced reservations or enclaves without the ability to freely hunt, fish, gather, travel, or conduct ceremonies in appropriate sites. The goal of an actual return remains alive, and it takes concrete political form in land claims and repatriations. At the same time, many people give up the idea of a physical return to traditional communities, and land, focusing instead on ceremonial observations, seasonal visits to reservations or “country,” and symbolic tokens or performances of tradition. To the extent that later generations, forced or drawn into towns or cities, have no realistic intention of actually living continuously in traditional places, then the connection to lost homelands comes closer to a diasporic relation, with its characteristic forms of longing, long-distance nationalism, and dis- placed performances of “heritage.” Diaspora classically presupposes dis- tance from the place of origin and deferred returns. This distinguishes it from the “circuits of migration” and “borderlands” experiences of many Mexicanos in the United States or Caribbeans in New York City, where coming and going is frequent. Yet modern communications can shrink distances and make many diasporas more like borderlands in the fre- quency and intimacy of possible contacts (Clifford 1994). Indigenous populations actively sustain these sorts of diasporic bor- derlands, as we will see in an Alaskan example discussed in detail below. It will be no surprise to anyone who studies labor migrations that many native populations are spatially far-flung. Indians from Michoacan inhabit Mexico City and do farm work in California. There are many thousands of Samoans in Auckland, Tongans in Salt Lake City, and Hawai‘ians in Los Angeles. Significant Navajo populations can be found in the San Francisco area (the result of government relocation programs in the 1960s). Examples could be multiplied: the classic portrayal by Mitchell (1960) of Mohawk steelworkers; Gossen’s early account of Chamulan migration as expansive cosmology (1999); the Kabre diaspora and travel circuits integral to Piot’s recent ethnography, Remotely Global (1999); Darnell’s (1998) grounded “accordion model of nomadic Native American social organization.” When addressing the lived spectrum of indigenous separations from, 74 Returns and orientations to, homeland, village, or reservation, we need to compli- cate diasporic assumptions of “loss” and “distance.” Likewise, urbaniza- tion should not be conceived as a one-way trip from village to city. Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003) provide a sophisticated critique of both Marxist and liberal modernisms in an ethnographically persua- sive account of “circular migration” by “tribals” and “dalits” in India. Embodied practices of work and desire are portrayed in Gramscian terms as entangled counterhegemonic projects opening up “rural cosmopolitan” possibilities for identity and cultural assertion. The same can be said of much contemporary “indigenous” migration— coerced, voluntary, or specific combinations of the two. Avoiding a modernist teleology of urbanization as the simple abandonment of rural life, ethnographic accounts now follow the “routes” of multisited communities. (Lambert provides a rich West African case study.) The focus shifts to par- ticular connections and translations, intermediate stopping places and circuits of return. For example, in Merlan’s finely detailed ethnography, Australian Aboriginal “mobs” have clustered on the outskirts of towns, and at cattle stations, while orienting these settlements in the direction of traditional “country” and making regular journeys “out bush” in groups to gather traditional foods and to dance and sing at sacred sites (Merlan 1998; see also Christen 2004). Relations of kinship with country can, in practice, be sustained, even when the land is legally owned by non- Aboriginals. Of course there are struggles over multiple “uses,” and access is not always negotiable. (The same goes for hunting, fishing, and gathering rights in North America.) But the essential fact of pragmatic, if not legally recognized, sovereignty is that concrete ties to ancestral places have not been severed. “Diasporic” distance is specific and relational. These partially displaced, sustained relations to “country” need to be compared, along a continuum, with the seasonal, or deferred, “returns” of more distant city dwellers. Recent scholarship in Australia has invoked the language of diaspora when addressing differential attachments to land in the “Native Title Era” (Rigsby 1995; Smith 2000; Weiner 2002; see also Lilley’s archaeological interventions: 2004, 2006). Without reducing Aboriginal identity to a single nexus of struggle, it is worth dwelling on how key issues of articulated continuity are being debated in the emerging land- claims context. Benjamin Richard Smith (2000), drawing on Rigsby, questions a rigid distinction, prevalent in both schol- arship and law, between “traditional” and “historical” people. The former live in proximate relationships with ancient lands and customs  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 75 and express this in “mythic” claims to have “been here forever”; the latter trace their “Aboriginal” heritage through colonial histories of dis- placement and recovered genealogies. Native title law has tended to rec- ognize the claims of locally based groups while denying those of Aboriginals whose physical distance from country is viewed as an index of lost authenticity. Smith makes clear that many of the people he calls “diasporic,” living in towns and cities, do not fall readily into either his- torical or traditional categories. He sees negotiable differences, not an essential opposition. City dwellers tend to subscribe to a more homoge- nous “tribal” model of Aboriginality than local people whose sense of belonging and ownership is based on specific clans and responsibilities to sites. This difference of perspective may lead to incomprehension and mutual suspicion. But in the process of making land claims, the two groups can overcome initial suspicions and work together. One group learns to defer, at least some of the time, to the local knowledge of elders; the other, at least pragmatically, comes to embrace a wider “Aboriginal” mobilization and future. Of course there is no guarantee of unity in these contingent alliances. Drawing on what Merlan (1997) observes is an “epistemological openness” in Aboriginal connections to country, and on a common, underlying sociocultural structure, diasporic and local people fashion new coalitions and scales of identification. Rather than embodying the “mythic” past and the “historical” future, local and diasporic groups represent “two trajectories of cultural continuity artic- ulating with changing contexts” (Smith 2000: 8; see also Sutton 1988 for practical fusions of myth and history). James Weiner (2002) challenges legal and anthropological notions of “continuity” that see specific traits (such as physical proximity to country, language fluency, religious observance, etc.) as make-or-break conditions of identity. He recognizes a more polythetic and dynamic ensemble through time (see also Clifford 1988a, 2001). The reproduc- tion of social life is always a matter of recurring “loss” and “recovery,” of selective transmission and reconstructed history in changing circum- stances. Urban Aboriginals who reconnect identities and affiliations are doing nothing fundamentally new. Drawing on Jewish diaspora experi- ences, Weiner lends support to land rights for displaced Aboriginals: “The idea or image of a homeland, such as has sustained diasporic pop- ulations throughout the world in countless examples through the centu- ries, would be sufficient to maintain something that the legal profession would have to call proprietary rights to country.” This rather strong 76 Returns culturalist position is kept in tension with a materialist criterion deployed by Australian courts (and more than a few hard-nosed Marxists) that would require native title to be based on continuing use, “a system of economic and adaptational relations to a particular territory.” Accepting the tension, and properly rejecting any ideational/materialist dichotomy, Weiner concludes: “Somewhere between these two poles— as imaginary as they are unrealistic in Australian terms—lie all of the native title claims in Australia” (10, original emphases). Between these poles, too, lies an uneven continuum of ideational, embodied, structural, and mate- rial practices that needs to be understood as both complexly rooted and diasporic. Confronting the actual diversity of indigenous societies, one works with a series of contexts and scales, new terms of political mobilization and expanded social maps. Collective terms such as Native American, Native Alaskan, First Peoples (in Canada), Kanak (in New Caledonia), Mayan (in Guatemala), Aboriginal (in Australia), or Masyarakat Adat (in Indonesia) represent articulated identities— alliances of particular “tribes,” language groups, villages, or clans. They include people sus- taining different spatial and social relations with ancestral places, a range of distances from “land.” For all who identify as “native,” “tribal,” or “indigenous, a feeling of connectedness to a homeland and to kin, a feeling of grounded peoplehood, is basic. How this feeling is practiced, in discursive, embodied, emplaced ways, can be quite varied. Urban pop- ulations may or may not return to rural places for family gatherings, ceremonial events, subsistence activities, dance festivals, and pow-wows. For some it is a matter of frequent visits; others go once a year, for summer or midwinter social activities; some return rarely or never. The varieties of indigenous experience proliferate between the poles of autochthony (we are here and have been here forever) and diaspora (we yearn for a homeland: “Next year in the Black Hills!”). Seeing an articulated continuum, a complex range of affiliations, offers a fresh perspective on both ends of the spectrum. If there are diasporic aspects of indigenous life, the reverse is also true. For something like an indige- nous desire animates diasporic consciousness: the search for somewhere to belong that is outside the imagined community of the dominant nation-state. In diaspora, the authentic home is found in another imag- ined place (simultaneously past and future, lost and desired) as well as in concrete social networks of linked places. This whole range of felt attach- ments is crucially a part of what Avtar Brah has called “a homing desire”  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 77 (1996: 180). Diasporic dwelling practices (as distinct from the absolutist ideologies of return that often accompany them) avoid the either/or of exile or assimilation. People make a place here by keeping alive a strong feeling of attachment elsewhere. The all or nothing of naturalization, of proper citizenship, is sidestepped, but without condemning oneself to a condition of permanent marginality. This, at least, is the project of diasporic belonging: to be black and British, Muslim and French, Latino and U.S. American. In this lived practice, various strong forms of “cul- tural citizenship” emerge and become battlegrounds, as the hyphen in “nation-state” loosens (Flores and Benmayor 1997; Ramirez 2007). Analogues from indigenous experience are not hard to find: it is common, for example, to be a tribally enrolled American Indian, to love baseball and be proud of one’s service in the United States Army. Such “double belonging” (a phrase applied to Turks in Germany by Riva Kastoriano ) requires a portable sense of the indigenous. It is why claims to ethnic identity or peoplehood can be profound yet not nation- alist in a bounded, territorial sense (Hall 1989). In lived practice, then, indigenous and diasporic multiple attachments are not mutually exclu- sive. And although there are certainly situations of political struggle in which the ideological opposition indigenous/diasporic is activated, there are also a great many relatively invisible intermediate, pragmatic experi- ences where the two kinds of belonging interpenetrate and coexist. The purpose of opening up the borderland between diasporic and indigenous paradigms is to recognize an uneven terrain of spatial scales, cultural affiliations, and social projects. (Tsing offers a lucid and com- plex map.) A realistic account of “indigenous experience” engages with actual life overflowing the definitions, the political programs, and all the museums of archaism and authenticity— self- created and externally imposed. ❖ Let us now turn to a particular case, drawn from the work of Ann Fienup-Riordan (1990, 2000), an anthropologist who has worked closely for nearly thirty years with the Nelson Island Yup’ik of western Alaska. Fienup-Riordan and her Native collaborators have described Yup’ik society, colonial and postcolonial, in considerable detail. What follows are the broad outlines. Before the arrival of the Russians in the late eighteenth century, the inhabitants of the Kuskokwim and Yukon deltas lived a life of settled 78 Returns mobility, “nomadic” within discrete territories. Hunting, gathering, and fishing (freshwater and ocean) provided a relatively rich livelihood. Long classified as “Eskimos” (based on linguistic and social similarities to Inupiaq and Inuit), Yup’ik have never lived in igloos or speared seals through the ice. In many ways they defy common stereotypes (Fienup- Riordan 1990). The colonial impact of the Russians was relatively light, since there were no sea otters to hunt along the Bering Sea coast. The aboriginal inhabitants of western Alaska did not suffer the harsh con- quest and forced-labor regimes imposed on their neighbors to the south, “Aleuts”— a Russian catchall term now distinguished as Onangan (Aleutian Islanders) and Alutiiq (former Pacific Eskimos). Later, the absence of gold in Yup’ik territories spared them the heavy disruptions experienced by other Native populations in Alaska. Yup’ik did suffer from contact diseases, and their societies underwent disruptive changes. If Russian influence was more gradual than elsewhere, it did result in widespread conversion to Russian Orthodoxy (albeit with syncretic indigenous components), the presence of Creole kinship (Russian coloni- zation encouraged intermarriage), and new trade and commercial rela- tionships. After the Americans took control of Alaska in the 1870s, fresh missionaries arrived, and new indigenized Christianities took hold, par- ticularly Catholic and Moravian. Over these years, Native kinship struc- tures, village affiliations, subsistence food consumption, and language use, while undergoing transformations, remained viable. In recent decades, with the renewal of Native land claims in Alaska, heritage dis- plays, development activities, and identity politics, Yupiit have sustained their reputation as a locally rooted people, confident in their sense of identity, still connected with traditional affiliations while pragmatically asserting new ways to be Native. There is no need to paint a romantic picture of sociocultural survival. Many Yupiit continue to suffer the pernicious effects of colonial disrup- tion, economic marginalization, and blocked futures. As elsewhere in Native Alaska, alcoholism and high suicide rates take their toll. Welfare dependency coexists with independent subsistence hunting and fishing. The sweeping land settlements of 1971 (the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, or ANCSA) were a mixed blessing. ANCSA stabilized landholdings in a state where indigenous populations, while dispossessed of much territory, had never been subjected to the forced localization of a reservation system. And while it brought considerable new resources to tribal communities, ANCSA capped indigenous title to land and intro-  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 79 duced property boundaries between Native communities and Native corporations. The settlement subsidized new forms of economic activity and the emergence of corporate elites. It also supported a broad range of heritage projects, the articulation, translation, and performance of what Fienup-Riordan calls “conscious culture” (2000: 167). In Yup’ik country this involved the revival of mask making and dancing, once banned, now encouraged, by Christian authorities—part of a more general context of Native resurgence, alliance, and entanglement with state structures. (Dombrowski and Clifford [2004a] offer contrasting assessments of these developments.) In this ongoing period of Native Alaskan socio- cultural realignments, tribal governments and liberal state structures can neither be separated nor melded in a functioning hegemony. Fienup- Riordan documents a generally hopeful story of Yup’ik continuity: a dynamic local tradition is sustained, refocused, and in certain respects strengthened by experiences of mobility and diaspora. In Hunting Tradition in a Changing World (2000) Fienup-Riordan shows that movement out of traditional Yup’ik villages into regional towns and state urban centers has markedly increased. And while the story she tells may have a class bias, focused as it is on Yupiit who have the means to create extended networks, to travel and distribute food in the city (279n13), the phenomena she traces are far from limited to a narrow elite. Most importantly, this migration does not conform to the one-way “urbanization” of modernization models. There is considerable circulation between traditional Yup’ik country and new centers of Native life in Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. Fienup-Riordan portrays these movements as part of an emerging Yup’ik “worldwide web”: multi- centered Native life at new social and spatial scales. In 1970, 4,800 Alaska Natives were living in Anchorage more or less permanently (“more or less” is an important qualification). By 1990 the number had risen to 14,500, and by 2000 it was approaching 19,000. In Fienup- Riordan’s assessment, the trend reflects not so much an emptying of Yup’ik country as its extension. Yup’ik circulation between village and city adapts and transforms traditional exchanges and seasonal rhythms. Formerly, the summer was a time of mobile hunting and gathering in small family units, the winter a time for coming together in large social groupings, intense ritual life, festivals, and exchanges. For urban-based Yupiit, similar social activities are performed in new ways and sometimes at different times. This is the result of many factors, including employment patterns and vacations as 80 Returns well as transportation possibilities. Yup’ik community is stitched together today with snow machines, telephones, and especially airplanes, large and small. Yupiit living in Anchorage regularly return to villages around Nelson Island and the Kuskwokwim delta to engage in fishing, hunting, and gathering of seasonal foods. “Subsistence” activities (widely identi- fied in Alaska with Native identity and “tradition”) can be combined with commercial projects. In winter, recently revived dance festivals, Catholic and Moravian holidays, and the Orthodox Christmas and New Year draw return visitors. During an especially intense period in early and mid-January, old midwinter traditions of social gathering and exchanges meld with Christian rituals brought by the Russians two cen- turies ago (Fienup-Riordan 1990). Yupiit who dwell in regional villages and towns visit Anchorage for a variety of reasons, including marriages, births, deaths, and shopping, as well as dropping off frozen and recently gathered “Native foods.” They also travel to the Alaska Native Medical Center. (ANMC is something more than a medical establishment; it is specifically designed for Native Alaskan health needs and organized with local cultures in mind. Its gift shop offers an important outlet for arts and crafts.) Political and educa- tional gatherings are also a draw, for example the convention of Alaskan bilingual teachers that annually draws more than one thousand partici- pants from all over the state. Heritage performances and sharing of Native foods play a central role in all such encounters. Patterns of visiting and circulation between village and city are driven by interlocking social, economic, political, and cultural forces. Clearly many of the pressures and opportunities that are familiar from modern- ization theories, forces that work to “dis-embed” local societies (Giddens 1990), are responsible for the movement out of villages and into cities. These forces include poverty and an erosion of rural subsistence, as well as a search for employment and loosened social constraints around gender, religion, or age. What emerges from Fienup-Riordan’s account, however, is a recognizably “indigenous” form of modernity, or at least its entangled possibility. Traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering, while they are threatened and regulated, have not been wiped out by capitalist modes of production and distribution. They take new forms alongside, and in conjunction with, modern economies. Communal (familial, village-level) affiliations and exchanges are extended by move- ments into and out of cities. Rather than a linear process of disembed- ding (or deterritorializing), one observes a transformation and extension  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 81 of culturally distinctive spatial and social practices: reembedding, extending territories, dwelling with airplanes. Fienup-Riordan sees strategies of survival and “development,” indi- vidual and communitarian, that are pursued to significant degrees on Native terms. (Compare work on indigenous conceptions of develop- ment in Melanesia by Gegeo ; Sahlins ; Curtis ; and in Africa by Peel.) This agency is not free or unconstrained. Nor is it simply coerced. For example, more young women than young men from Yup’ik country are going to Anchorage—both in search of educa- tion and to escape village restrictions. Such “modernizing” strategies are not experienced as a loss of Native identity— quite the contrary. In Anchorage, Yupiit enter extended networks of economic exchange, poli- tics, and culture— connections at state, national, and international levels. In these networks they come to feel “Yup’ik,” rather than primarily rooted in specific kin groups or villages. This tribal or national ethn- onym, which only began to be widely used after the 1960s, now marks distinction in multiethnic neighborhoods, in pan-Alaskan Native set- tings, in Fourth World contacts, in relations with non-Natives, in a variety of cultural performances, exhibits, websites, and the like. Clearly, an increase of traveling and dwelling beyond local villages and regional centers has contributed to an expanded articulation of “Yup’ik” identity. The experience is far from unique. David Gegeo evokes a comparable, though differently compelled, Solomon Island experience, in which Malitans migrating away from their homeland “will see their movement as an expansion of place, and attendant on it will be a strengthening of the sense of indigeneity” (2001: 499, original emphasis). Indeed, many nationalisms have first been articulated by exiles or students in foreign capitals. (See, for example, Vicente Rafael on José Rizal and the Filipino “ilustrados.”) Indigenous “tribal,” as opposed to place-based or clan, affiliations, tend to be more charac- teristic of displaced populations living in urban settings where language, extended kinship, and consumable symbols of objectified “heritage” pre- dominate over specific local ties with land and family. It would be wrong, however, to turn a contrast into an opposition. In practice, identifica- tions are plural and situated: one is from a village, from Nelson Island, from the Kuskokwim region, a Yup’ik, or an Alaska Native, depending on the situation. Local affiliations are not replaced by wider “indige- nous” formations in a zero-sum relation. Linda Tuhiwai Smith suggested a similar complexity at the 2005 Wenner- Gren conference referenced in 82 Returns the epigraph to this chapter, saying she grew up thinking that being bicultural was being a Maori person (since women’s roles were so dif- ferent in her mother’s and father’s tribes). Being “indigenous,” she observed, has been a way of working through the different layers of her identity: “What contradictory people we are!” In Alaska, the emergence of larger-scale “tribal” and “Native Alaskan” social formations is bound up with liberal multiculturalism and governmentality: ANCSA, Native art markets, heritage venues, tourism, UN forums, environmental NGOs, and human rights organiza- tions. Présence indigène comes at a price (Hale 2002; Clifford 2004a). As we saw in Chapter 2, the new scales and performances of identity are “called out” by hegemonic structures of managed multiculturalism. Yet the new identifications also transform and translate deep, if not always continuous, local roots (Friedman 1993). The range of phenomena some- times lumped together as “identity politics” includes processes of inter- pellation, performativity, translation, and political strategy. When associating new tribal identifications with displaced populations it is critical to recognize the specificity and flexibility of Native landedness, the expansive senses of “place” evoked by Gegeo. Large-scale tribal identities can remain in close articulation with other levels of affiliation and with homelands, both geographically and socially defined. At a time when men and women go from and come back to their home villages in greater numbers for longer periods of time, the villages themselves take on special importance. Personhood and “placehood” are closely intertwined in contemporary Yup’ik life. Although a person does not need uninterrupted residence on the land for that relationship to continue, the existence of the homeland is at the core of contemporary Yup’ik identity (Fienup-Riordan 2000: 156). This perspective is echoed in the final sentences of “Yup’iks in the City,” an essay by radio jour- nalist John Active that is included in Fienup-Riordan’s Hunting Tradition. Active suggests something of the performativity of Native identity in urban settings: “All in all, Anchorage is a fun place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Besides, the pavement is too hard on my ankles, and I always have to prove my Yup’icity to the kass’aqs [white people]” (Active 2000: 182). As this view of the city and “Yup’icity” suggests, different kinds of performance are required in specific relational sites. For John Active, the city is a nice place to visit, but also a place of uncomfortable encounters and coerced performances. For other Yupiit it feels like an extension of home. For others (or at different times) it is an exciting new place in  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 83 which to branch out. Fienup-Riordan clearly insists that “the existence of the homeland is at the core of contemporary Yup’ik identity,” but she also rejects any linear progression between rural and urban, old and new, performative sites. Tribal diaspora is not a condition of exile, of obstructed return; it is more multiplex, relational, and productive. (Compare Darnell’s account of traditional Algonquian “semi-nomadic” social struc- ture, “a process of subsistence-motivated expansion and contraction,” sustained and translated in new historical contexts [1998: 91].) Fienup- Riordan offers concrete examples of ways that contacts with villages (kin ties) and land (subsistence activities) are sustained by urban Yup’iks from a connected distance that is not that of an émigré or an exile. (Research on Indian communities in the San Francisco Bay area by Native American scholars Kurt Peters and Renya Ramirez echoes this com- plex experience of networking and multiattachment.) The language of “diaspora” (in its recent versions overlapping with paradigms of extended borderlands and migrant cycles) renders something of these mobile, mul- tipolar practices of belonging. “Transmigrants,” who create and sustain very particular “transnational communities,” might seem a more exact analogue (e.g., Levitt 2001). But while there is considerable overlap, the newly articulated sense of tribal identification at something like a national scale, combined with renewed yearnings for a return to tradition and land, is more suggestive of diaspora. ❖ No single analytic language can exhaust what is at stake in these com- plexly rooted and routed experiences. Diaspora discourse is good at keeping multisited, multiscaled predicaments in view and resisting teleo- logical narratives of transformation. It acknowledges but does not ade- quately analyze the political, economic, and social forces at work in contemporary displacements: histories of violent dispossession, the mate- rial push/pull of labor mobility, collective strategies of circular migra- tion, individual flights from oppressive social conditions, consumerist desires, and the lure of the modern. And obviously, the sociocultural connections sustained in diaspora networks cannot compensate for, though they may make more livable, the poverty and racial exclusions typically suffered by indigenous people. Moreover, there is an “indige- nous” specificity that eludes diaspora’s central emphasis on displace- ment, loss, and deferred desire for the homeland. People who identify as First Nations, aboriginal, or tribal share histories of having been invaded and dispossessed within fairly recent memory. Many currently dwell 84 Returns either on reduced parcels of their former territory or nearby. The feeling that one has never left one’s deep ancestral home is strong, both as a lived reality and as a redemptive political myth. This affects the ways space and time are experienced, distances and connections lived. Urban- based Yup’it, as understood by Fienup-Riordan, are not so much dis- placed from a homeland as extensions of it. She points to similar patterns for other Alaska Native groups. Thus it is not a question of the center holding or not, but rather one of open-ended social networks sustaining transformed connections to land and kin. The tribal home—its animals, plants, social gatherings, shared foods, ancestors, and spiritual pow- ers—is not imagined from a distance. It is activated, “practiced” (de Certeau 1984), made meaningful in a range of sites by seasonal rituals, social gatherings, visits, and subsistence activities. “Diasporic” natives are more like offshoots than broken branches. No doubt this is an idealization. Negative experiences of exile, pov- erty, alienation from family, despair, loss of language and tradition, end- lessly deferred returns, nostalgia and yearning are certainly part of the varied experiences of native peoples living in settings removed from their homelands. The physical separation and different knowledge bases of “diaspora” and “local” peoples cannot always be bridged by kin ties, exchanges, and political alliances. The politics of culture and identity at new “tribal,” regional, and international scales cannot avoid failed, or very partial, translation between sites and generations, social exclusions, tests for racial purity and cultural authenticity. New leaders, culture bro- kers, and economic elites, new dependencies on governmental, corpo- rate, academic, and philanthropic resources are inextricably part of the processes by which extended indigenous connections are being made. Fienup-Riordan’s Yup’ik “worldwide web” is both a description and a hope that cannot be automatically generalized. Yup’ik, who enjoy rela- tively strong ongoing connections with language, land, and tradition, are able to sustain social ties across an enlarged space. And in this rooted experience of routes, they represent one example from a spectrum of decentered indigenous stories. Yet if the locally grounded “worldwide web” in Fienup-Riordan’s account is an idealization, it is not a delusion. For it describes established native practices and aspirations in many parts of the world today. The rather bright Yup’ik picture will always be shadowed by other realities of poverty, racial subjugation, inferior health care and limited education. Diasporic consciousness expresses contra- dictory experiences of loss and hope, despair and messianism (Clifford  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 85 1994). Thus, in thinking about indigenous diasporas, one necessarily confronts the disastrous histories of oppression that have created them, while simultaneously recognizing the sociocultural connections that sus- tain a sense of peoplehood and, in tangled political-economic situations, project a rooted, expansive future. While this essay has suggested some of the characteristic features of “indigenous diasporas,” it has not drawn a sharp contrast with the expe- riences of other migrants and transnational dwellers. What has emerged is an uneven, overlapping range of experiences, constraints, and possi- bilities. In practice, for those many self-identified natives who dwell in, and circulate through, urban and semiurban settings, there can be no essential, privative opposition between “indigenous” and “diasporic” experiences. The terms break down in the compromises and inconsisten- cies of everyday life. We struggle for languages to represent the layered, faceted realities of the “indigenous” today, without imposing reductive, backward-looking criteria of authenticity. What’s at stake in this repre- sentational struggle is an adequate realism in our ways of thinking com- paratively about a range of old and emergent histories. Realism is a term that needs to be used carefully. Here it is evoked in both its descriptive/historicist and pragmatic/political senses. The main problem with much descriptive realism is that it projects its vision of what’s really there and what’s really possible from an unacknowledged vantage point in time and space. Sooner or later, “full,” “realistic” accounts of historical development, modernity, progress, Westernization, or national liberation will be situated (Haraway 1988) or provincialized (Chakrabarty 2000) by the emergence of new historical subjects. Of course, some of these “new” subjects, whose interventions trouble for- merly settled projections of the real, are not new (recently invented) but formerly silenced, marginalized peoples who, in specific conditions, attain a widely recognized presence or voice. The continuity (Friedman 1993) and ethnogenesis (Hill 1996) at work in these processes of sur- vival/emergence include political articulations, conjunctural perfor- mances, and partial translations (Clifford 2004a). New historical subjects (in the present context, those loosely labeled “indigenous”) are seen and heard in translocal circuits, exerting enough political pressure to make them more than marginal actors in a broad historical field of forces. We have already seen that historical (historicized and translated) real- ism does not project one synthetic big story. It works with open- ended (because linear historical time is ontologically unfinished) “big- enough 86 Returns stories,” sites of contact, struggle, and dialogue (Clifford 2002). What counts as a big-enough story—representing a force, happening, or pres- ence that “matters”—is not something that can be finally decided by scholarly expertise or by cultural or political authority. Every projection of “the real,” however diverse, contested or polythetic, presupposes exclusion and forgetting: constitutive outsides, silences, or specters from unburied pasts that can reemerge as “realistic” in conjunctures or emer- gencies either currently unimaginable or utopian (Benjamin 1968). The current persistence and renaissance of so many different small-scale tribal and native societies rearticulated under the sign of the “indige- nous” is just such a critique and expansion of the historically real. Real refers here, simultaneously, to something that actually exists and that has a future in a nonteleological postmodernity. In this perspective, the present essay questions a conceptual opposi- tion (diaspora vs. indigenous) that has impeded understanding of how native peoples have reacted to experiences of genocide, material dispos- session, forced assimilation; how they have reckoned with political, cul- tural, racial, and economic marginality, as well as with opportunities for change and reidentification. (Marisol de la Cadena does similar work by opening up of the opposition indio/mestizo.) This kind of realism foregrounds complex histories: the syncretic experiences of diverse native Christians; “travels” with Buffalo Bill, on whaling ships, or as coerced and contract laborers; the work of Aboriginals on cattle stations, Mayans in coffee plantations, or Indians on high steel; and the broad range of “urban indigenous” experiences. This perspective strug- gles for a lucid ambivalence with respect to tribal engagements with tourism, with capitalist development, with museums and art markets. It views these activities as “historical practices” integral to “traditional futures” (Clifford 2004b). This, like any realism, is deployed at a par- ticular moment and from a specific location. Recognizing one’s own standpoint is, of course, difficult. Others can be counted on to help, not always generously. The present essay may be criticized as overly invested in the interactive, spliced, spatially dispersed aspects of tribal or native lives at the expense of continuities in place, kin- ship, language, and tradition. And this emphasis may be read as unfriendly to the necessary essentialist claims of nationalist movements for indepen- dence and sovereignty. There is warrant for this reading. The essay does argue that indigenous historical experiences are layered and fundamen- tally relational, that ethnically or racially absolute assertions foreshorten  Varieties of Indigenous Experience 87 lived reality and foreclose crucial possibilities. Diaspora has not, how- ever, been proposed as an alternative or cure for strong identity claims. Diasporic dimensions are understood as aspects of an uneven continuum of attachments. Strong alternate claims to autochthony, localism, and cultural/racial essence are equally part of the process. Indeed, groups and individuals migrate between these apparently contradictory positions depending on situation, audience, or pragmatic goals. An adequate realism needs to grasp specific interactions of diasporic/cosmopolitan and autochthonous/nationalist experiences— ongoing historical dialogues and tensions performed under the contested sign of “indigeneity.” (For an exemplary study that keeps these dialogues and tensions in view, see Mallon : “Samoan Tatau as Global Practice.”) It is not simply a matter of richer “historicist” description: telling it as it was or like it is. Realism has inescapable political and even prophetic dimensions, for it prefigures what does and does not have a “real” chance of making a difference. The aspirations of indigenous movements today for self-determination and sovereignty reflect an altered balance of forces, a post-1960s shift in what may, in certain circumstances, and without guarantees, be possible. Much is emerging under the sign of indigenous sovereignty, and the term’s range of practical meanings is dif- ficult to circumscribe, taking into account specific local and national contexts as well as uneven conditions of “globalization.” Exercised and negotiated at different scales, sovereignty’s meanings today are different from those projected at the treaty of Westphalia or imposed by Louis XIV and Napoleon. And they exceed the visions of integration and inde- pendence associated with either Wilsonian internationalism or anticolo- nial national liberation. Sturm’s (2002) subtle exploration of the Gramscian “contradictory consciousness” that has historically made and remade an irreducibly diverse “Cherokee Nation” is a case in point. Indigenous sovereignty, in its current range of meanings, includes the “domestic dependent nation” status of Native Americans, the semi- independence of Nunavut, the national status of Vanuatu (and its trans- national tax shelters), the bicultural polity emerging in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the cross-border institutions of the Saami, the federalism of New Caledonia’s Matignon and Noumea Accords, the “corporate” insti- tutions of Native Alaskans, the broad range of agreements that govern uses of Aboriginal country in Australia, and intensifying struggles around natural resources and “cultural property.” Roger Maaka and Augie Fleras explore this “proliferation of sover- 88 Returns eignty discourses,” arguing that they do not reproduce the nineteenth- century models underlying settler- colonial states. The current discourses express “patterns of belonging that accentuate a sovereignty without secession, involving models of relative yet relational autonomy in non- coercive contexts” (2000: 93, 108). Indigenous movements take advan- tage of interstitial possibilities, failures, and openings within national/ transnational governmental structures of “graduated sovereignty” (Ong 2000). James Tully, drawing on Taiaake Alfred’s trenchant Mohawk vision, sees indigenous social movements not as struggles for freedom (in the older sense of absolute independence, but as “struggles of freedom to modify the system of internal colonization from within” (Tully 2000: 58, original emphasis). Charles Hale (2002), in his Gramscian assess- ment of Mayan social movements, unevenly articulated with neoliberal multiculturalism, comes to a similar conclusion. Attaining formal inde- pendence does not necessarily change the situation, as the predicament of Pacific microstates struggling to reconcile cultural/political autonomy with economic (inter)dependence shows (Bensa and Wittersheim 1998). “Sovereignty,” understood as a range of current practices, evokes prag- matic possibilities and structural limits. Thomas Biolsi’s (2005) analysis of four distinct sovereignty claims currently made by Native Americans is a pointed reminder of this strategic complexity, as is Andrea Muehlebach’s (2001) account of mobile “place-making” in struggles for self-determination and sovereignty at the United Nations. Within each context, appeals to all-or-nothing (“ideological”) sover- eignty combine and alternate with negotiated (“pragmatic”) sovereignty. A nonreductive assessment of the historically possible, a political/pro- phetic realism, recognizes this necessary alternation and tactical flexi- bility. Without radical visions and maximalist claims, indigenous movements risk co-optation. Without ad hoc arrangements and coali- tions, where economic and military power remain overwhelmingly unequal, little can be gained in the short term. And the risk of backlash is great. One of the values, perhaps, of bringing diaspora into the com- plex domain of the indigenous is to import a constitutive ambivalence. Diasporic experience is necessarily both nationalist and antinationalist. Absolutist invocations of blood, land, and return coexist with the arts of conviviality, the need to make homes away from home, among different peoples. Diasporic ruptures and connections— lost homelands, partial returns, relational identities, and world-spanning networks— are funda- mental components of indigenous experience today.