Insurgent Non-Human Worlds: Understanding Indigenous Diaspora through more-than-human relationships

Keywords: Self-determination, Indigenous diaspora, more-than-human, non-human worlds, settler state, white surpremacy
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 45

Abstract

On March 2, 2016, Berta Cáceres, Goldman Environmental Prize winner, Indigenous Lenca leader, and water and land defender was assassinated in her own home in La Esperanza, a city in the department of Intibuca Honduras. Her assassination signaled a wave of hyper-violence between the state, international developers, and local Indigenous land defenders recreating settler violence against Indigenous peoples. Who choose to cross a multitude of borders to survive, contributing to the growing number of Indigenous peoples from Central America seeking asylum within the U.S. A crucial point as for the first time ever Central American migration has surpassed Mexican migration.1 The settler state is backed by its own rule of law, and through it employs violence to discipline, reclassify, and criminalize Indigenous sovereignty.2 As such this project explores how Indigenous diaspora refuses to engage with the settler apparatus, by rejecting their reclassification as outsiders, transform space through their more-than-human kinships to create Indigenous futurities. This project will reveal the role that settler-state borders play in upholding white supremacy, to understand why Indigenous peoples are repositioned as threats to settler-state governance e.g., the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.3 This new wave of spiritual organizing based on more-than-human relationships to land, rivers, caves, flora, and fauna raises questions on how refusal and relational understandings through kinships resist settler imperialism. This project will provide insight into a growing Central American experience through Indigenous peoples as their displacement informs imaginaries and discourses of what it means to be Native in contemporary America.