scholarly journals Indigenous Social Movements in the Americas

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-10
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Kruk-Buchowska ◽  
Jenny L. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Cultural Strategies ◽  
Indigenous Social Movements ◽  
Two Spirit ◽  
Areas Of Interest ◽  
Cultural Colonialism ◽  
Present Text ◽  
The U.S

The present text serves as an introduction to RIAS Vol. 12, Spring–Summer № 1 /2019, dedicated to Indigenous social movements in the Americas. It outlines the major areas of interest of the Contributors, explaining ways in which the issue explores selected cases of Indigenous resistance to oppressive forms of environmental, socio-economic, linguistic, and cultural colonialism. Looking at both multi-tribal and single-tribal contexts, the authors look at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the novels of Lakota/Anishinaabe writer Frances Washburn, the Two-Spirit movement in the U.S., and the Indigenous food sovereignty movement in the U.S. and Peru as sites of creative forms of decolonizing resistance, and analyze the material, discursive, and cultural strategies employed by the Indigenous activists, writers, and farmers involved.

Getting Tough

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
African American ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Penal System ◽  
Social Programs ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
The U.S

In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. This book sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. The book shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. This book rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the “underclass” could be managed only through coercion and force. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, the book offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.

scholarly journals Changing Social Focusing in Indigenous Social Movements

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. David Flynn ◽  
James M. Hay
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Social System ◽  
Centrality Measures ◽  
Northern Ontario ◽  
The Social ◽  
Incoming Information ◽  
Indigenous Social Movements ◽  
Self Immolation

Using complexity science, we develop a theory to explain why some social movements develop through stages of increasing intensity which we define as an increase in  social focusing. We name six such stages of focusing: disintegration, revitalization, religious, organisation, militaristic, and self-immolation. Our theory uses two variables from the social sciences: differentiation and centrality, where differentiation refers to the internal structure of a social system and centrality measures the variety of incoming information. The ratio of the two, differentiation/centrality (the d/c ratio) is a shorthand way of saying that centrality must be matched by a corresponding level of differentiation to maintain basic focusing. If centrality exceeds differentiation, then the result is a lack of focusing—disintegration. On the other hand, the more differentiation exceeds centrality, the more the system moves into the higher stages of social focusing, from revitalization to the final stage of self-immolation.   To test the theory we examine historically indigenous social movements, in particular, the Grassy Narrows movement in northern Ontario Canada. We also suggest how the theory might be applied to explain other examples of social movement, especially millenarian movements at the end of the 20th century. We also suggest sociocybernetic ways the rest of society and the social movement itself can change its own social focusing.

Indigenous Social Movements in Mountain Regions

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-118
Author(s):  
Carmen Martínez Novo ◽  
Shannon Elizabeth Bell ◽  
Subhadra Mitra Channa ◽  
Annapurna Devi Pandey ◽  
Luis Alberto Tuaza Castro
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Mountain Regions ◽  
Indigenous Social Movements

Using Social Media to Organize a Marginalized Community

2020 ◽  
pp. 216-249
Author(s):  
Todd R. Burton
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Online Behavior ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Bisexual And Transgender ◽  
Military Community ◽  
Social Media Tools ◽  
The U.S

Potential leaders within marginalized communities find it difficult to connect, learn, strategize, and support one another and build a cohesive community capable of effecting social change. This research contributes to filling a gap in empirical research on effective approaches to employing social media tools to organize and engage in social movements. The research builds on earlier studies of marginalized communities and social media to organize and engages in social movements by applying a case study design to assess how the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) military community employed social media to organize and advocate for inclusion and end discrimination within the U.S. armed forces. Seventeen findings were identified that describe key ways the LGBT military community employed these tools to organize, identify leaders and their roles, and how online behavior affected offline advocacy.

scholarly journals Strategic Incapacitation of Indigenous Dissent: Crowd Theories, Risk Management, and Settler Colonial Policing

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 325-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles Howe ◽  
Jeffrey Monaghan
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Protest Policing ◽  
Indigenous Social Movements ◽  
The Right ◽  
Management Of Risk

Engaging scholarship from sociologies of security to protest policing, this article explores how risk management and actuarial tools have been operationalized in Canadian policing of Indigenous protests. We detail RCMP actuarial tools used to assess individual and group risk by tracing how these techniques are representative of much older trends in the criminal justice system surrounding the management of risk, but also have been advanced by contemporary databanking and surveillance capacities. Contesting public claims of police impartiality and objectivity, we highlight how the construction of riskiness produces an antagonism towards “successful” Indigenous protests. Though the RCMP regularly claim to “protect and facilitate the right to lawful advocacy, protest and dissent,” we show how these practices of strategic incapacitation exhibit highly antagonistic forms of policing that are grounded in a rationality that seeks to demobilize and delegitimize Indigenous social movements.

scholarly journals Agroecological Formación in Rural Social Movements

2014 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 31-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nils McCune ◽  
Juan Reardon ◽  
Peter Rosset
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Local Circuits ◽  
Rural Social Movements

Among the many sectors currently engaged in struggle against the corporate food system, small farmers play a particularly important role—not only do they constitute a legitimate alternative to global agribusiness, but also they are the heirs to long traditions of local knowledge and practice. In defending peasant agriculture, rural social movements defend popular control over seeds and genetic resources, water, land and territory against the onslaught of globalized financial capital. A framework called food sovereignty has been developed by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC), to encompass the various elements of a food system alternative based on reclaiming popular resource control, defending small-scale agriculture and traditional knowledge, rebuilding local circuits of food and labor, and recovering the ecological processes that can make farming sustainable. Recognizing the need to develop “movement people” capable of integrating many ecological, social, cultural and political criteria into their organizational activities, LVC increasingly has articulated processes of popular education and consciousness-raising as part of the global social movement for agroecology and food sovereignty. Given the enormous diversity of organizations and actors in LVC, an underlying feature known in Spanish as diálogo de saberes (roughly the equivalent of “dialogue between ways of knowing”) has characterized LVC processes of education, training, formation and exchange in agroecology. The diálogo de saberes takes place at the level of training centers and schools of the LVC organizations, as well as the larger scale of agricultural landscapes and peasant territories. The interactions between peasant, family or communal farmers, their organizations, their youth and their agroecology create social processes that assume the form and dynamic of a social movement in several countries of Latin America.

scholarly journals Repression, Backfire, and The Theory of Transformative Events

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hess ◽  
Brian Martin
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Alternative Therapies ◽  
East Timor ◽  
International Support ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Movement Mobilization ◽  
The U.S

Repression sometimes can lead to greater movement mobilization: repressive events that are perceived as unjust have the potential to generate enormous public outrage against those seen as responsible. One result of repression-backfire-can contribute to the understanding of the conditions under which some repressive events may become transformative for social movements. Three case studies that highlight the processes involved in backfire are examined: the 1930 Salt March in India, in particular the beatings at Dharasana, that mobilized popular support for independence; the 1991 massacre in Dili, East Timor, which stimulated a massive expansion in international support for East Timorese independence; and the arrest of alternative cancer therapist John Richardson in 1972, which led to a huge growth in the U.S. movement for alternative therapies. The cases generate a preliminary understanding of the potential scope of backfire, the processes involved in backfire, and new hypotheses.

Indigenous Politics and Resistance in Latin America: Continuity and Change

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascal Lupien
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Indigenous Movements ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Indigenous Social Movements

Indigenous social movements have become influential political actors in Latin America over the past three decades. Indigenous peoples continue to experience higher than average political, social and economic marginalization throughout the region. The powerful organizations created by Indigenous groups and the positive outcomes they have achieved despite these barriers have produced a body of research that examines how these social movements emerged, why some have succeeded in influencing policy, the construction of collective identity, and the strategies and tactics used. Indigenous movements have made claims based on their status as pre-colonial peoples; their demands include land rights, control over natural resources, cultural recognition, and political autonomy. Indigenous movements in countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico have used disruptive tactics such as marches and roadblocks to demand the attention of governments, the public and media. They have also strategically participated in building alliances across borders, supporting political parties, and undertaking legal action against powerful actors including the state and extractive industries. The high-profile Indigenous protest cycle that marked the 1990s and early 2000s across Latin America began to wind down during the first decade of the 21st century, but Indigenous movements continue to engage in both politics and protest. In the digital age, they have adapted their tactics to include social media and other technologies.

Why No Mayan Party? Indigenous Movements and National Politics in Guatemala

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (03) ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Pallister
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Local Level ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Indigenous Social Movements

AbstractUnlike indigenous social movements in several other Latin American countries, Mayan movements in Guatemala have not formed a viable indigenous-based political party. Despite the prominence of the Mayan social movement and a relatively open institutional environment conducive to party formation, indigenous groups have foregone a national political party in favor of a more dispersed pattern of political mobilization at the local level. This article argues that the availability of avenues for political representation at the municipal level, through both traditional political parties and civic committees, and the effects of political repression and violence have reinforced the fragmentation and localism of indigenous social movements in Guatemala and prevented the emergence of a viable Mayan political party. The result has been a pattern of uneven political representation, with indigenous Guatemalans gaining representation in local government while national political institutions remain exclusionary.

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