Indigeneity in the 21st Century

I just came across this conference, I really wish I had known about it and attended.

Here's the conference link and you can even buy DVDs of the presentations.






As we begin the 21st century, political recognition – within the context of great population displacements and current globalization processes – has been and continues to be a primary locus of struggle for Indigenous nations, international confederations, national, regional, and local organizations, and Indigenous persons at large. In striving for recognition, Indigenous peoples have made a critique of the terms of recognition a critical part of the political struggle. Recognizing legal and racial identities as legacies of imperialism, Indigenous activists and scholars are probing the ways that individual-centered western concepts embody gender- and culture-specific norms of citizenship. Indigenous groups are reimagining, challenging, and inventing new modes of political activism that are reshaping the contours of political recognition. Equally importantly, these re/memberings and reimaginings are taking a multiplicity of paths and forms: legal, cultural, artistic, academic, socio-political, and economic.

The purpose of this conference is to provide a forum for Indigenous scholars from a broad range of disciplines both from within California and from other parts of the United States, including Hawai’i as well as the Solomon Islands, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Canada and New Zealand to address and reflect upon the most recent forms of “Indigeneity” and its politics of re/membering Indigenous identity in a global and local context. The conference will be organized around panels addressing specific sites in which Indigeneity is being played out. The panels are tied together by several interwoven themes: alternative meanings of sovereignty; the politics of inclusion and exclusion; critical traditions of Indigenous local knowledge; and the essentialism-anti-essentialism dialectic.