Introduction: Contexts of Efflorescence

Gerald Roche

Why has Indigenous efflorescence occurred more-or-less simultaneously, in parallel, in so many different contexts? What shared conditions and circumstances have enabled it, and what changes may enable efflorescence to continue and expand in the future? Before looking at the answers suggested by contributions to this section of the book, we first draw on the literature to suggest how political and economic developments since the mid-twentieth century have created the conditions for contemporary Indigenous efflorescence.

Indigenous efflorescence has been facilitated, in part, by incremental changes in the political and economic spheres that have gathered momentum since the mid-twentieth century. Politically, the Canada–Australia–New Zealand–United States (CANZUS) bloc has experienced increasing Indigenous enfranchisement, first through the abolition of aggressive, explicitly assimilatory policies, and then through the legal and political measures that recognised the rights of Indigenous peoples within settler colonial states, supported by a framework of international mechanisms focusing on Indigenous peoples (Merlan 2009). International landmarks in Indigenous rights include the establishment of the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention, International Labour Organization (ILO) 107, in 1957; growth in the global Indigenous civil rights movement, exemplified by Red Power in the USA and Black Power in Australia during the 1960s and 70s (Merlan 2005); the transformation of ILO 107 into ILO 169, the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, in 1989; the founding of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the UN in 2000; the declaration of two UN decades of the World’s Indigenous People (1995–2004; 2005–14), and; the creation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been constant feedback between national Indigenous movements and the global Indigenous network (Johnson 2016), which has established a supportive political environment in which Indigenous efflorescence can take place.

Indigenous efflorescence has also been facilitated by economic changes, under the conditions of ‘late capitalism’ or neoliberalism. James Clifford describes how this new economic order supports the proliferation of ‘zones of exception, niche markets, and commodified cultural exchanges’ where ‘Indigenous cultural resurgence and political self-determination can find room for maneuver’ (2013: 17). Not only has the neoliberal era been one of increasingly diverse economic relations, spaces, and livelihoods, but it has also seen the emergence of a more complex, pluricentric economic and political order. This has been accompanied by a cultural crisis in Anglophone settler societies—‘a moment of acute public uncertainty’ as these countries ‘dissolved economic and cultural ties to Britain and sought out new postcolonial identities’ (Johnson 2016: 3). During this same time, economic historians have identified a Great Convergence—an ongoing, global levelling of income and standards of living, the reversal of economic inequalities that date back to the nineteenth century and the apogee of the colonial era (Korotayev, Goldstone and Zinkina 2015). John Wendel and Patrick Heinrich (2012) have described this contemporary moment of increasing decentralisation, prosperity, mobility and rising equality as constituting a ‘glocalising’ language ecology, characterised by language revival and nativisation.

The contributions in this section explore how these political and economic developments, amongst others, have created an enabling context for Indigenous efflorescence. We also consider contextual factors that continue to constrain efflorescence. The first contribution, by Markus Nyström, looks at how the narrative practices of settlers, in this case mainstream Swedes, act to constrain Indigenous efflorescence. Nyström examines Swedish parliamentary debates for evidence of colonial masterplots—easily recognised, oft-repeated story templates that frame understandings, interpretations, and retellings of events. In Swedish parliamentary debates, Nyström finds evidence for several colonial masterplots, including the Terra Nulius, Robinson Crusoe and Noble Savage masterplots, and argues that these serve to justify the continuing colonisation of Sapmi and the oppression of Sami people. He concludes by reflecting on the importance of counter-narratives in bringing about critical insights that help problematise privilege, build settler-Indigenous solidarities, and support efflorescence. Nyström’s article is a reminder that there is still much to be done in creating political contexts that support Indigenous efflorescence.

The next series of case studies examines land as an important context for Indigenous efflorescence. These studies suggest that access to and control over land, which have both increased in postassimilationist multicultural societies as the result of political struggle by Indigenous people, are important contexts for efflorescence; later in the volume we will see that this continues to be the case even when Indigenous people move away from their land and into cities. In these case studies we see not only the struggle to access and gain stewardship over land, but also the important role that interacting with land plays for identity. Kouichi Kaizawa writes on the Cikornay National Trust, an Ainu organisation that works to acquire and rehabilitate forests that have been devastated by industrial forestry. The second case study in this section comes from Tero Mustonen from the Snowchange organisation in Finland. Mustonen describes distinctly Sami ways of interacting with seen and unseen elements of the landscape, and ways of being with the land, which are essential for not only maintaining local environments in the face of climate change, but also for fostering other aspects of local culture, in a holistic relationship between land, people and culture.

Whilst Mustonen’s contribution shows how the land can be a resource that enables Indigenous people to adapt to the future, Ewa Ljungdahl’s contribution demonstrates how land connects them to their past. Claiming that ‘Sami history is a fairly quiet history’ because it is unwritten, Ljungdahl shows how subtle traces in the landscape—overgrown hut foundations, bone deposits, cairns, ancient pathways—provide evidence of ongoing relationships with the land. As climate change and economic development erode these records, the South Sami community is faced with difficult decisions about how to preserve records of this knowledge whilst remaining control and a sense of intimacy with these facts once they become public records. The final two contributions on land, from Yōsuke Kosaka and Shizue Ukaji, both focus on water as land. These authors take, respectively, a past- and future-oriented approach to the issue of the Japanese state’s denial of Ainu people’s access to rivers and salmon. Yōsuke Kosaka explores the importance of rivers and salmon to the Ainu, and how Japanese colonisation denied Ainu people access to these, and then discusses the revival of a ‘salmon welcoming’ ceremony in the early 1980s. Shizue Ukaji continues this trajectory of loss and recovery into the future, asking what might happen if the Ainu had a river—just one river—in which to hunt salmon and practise their traditional livelihood.

Whilst Shizue Ukaji’s speculations suggest that the future may, in some sense, entail a return to the past, the next series of contributions look at one way in which the future will be radically different from both the past and the present: technology. These case studies examine how the development of new technologies can provide another context that supports Indigenous efflorescence, particularly the revitalisation of language. As with developments in politics and economics, many of the activities taking place within the broader field of Indigenous efflorescence would not have been possible without developments of new, particularly digital, technologies. The first case study looks at a project to provide support for the learning of an endangered language, Ume Sami, which has less than 50 speakers, through a partnership between the community and the online learning platform, Memrise. Following, Hanna Outakoski’s contribution examines the use of virtual learning space for language teaching and learning, particularly in contexts where communities are small and dispersed, and learners highly mobile. A third case study in this section, from Coppélie Cocq, introduces Tjutju, an online, multimedia narrative in the Lule Sami language, which demonstrates how traditional narratives can be adapted to new, digital contexts.

The fourth and final group of contributions in this section all address the topic of social movements for Indigenous efflorescence. They demonstrate how the affordances for social, cultural and political mobilisation within the context of postassimilationist multicultural societies have been crucial to the emergence of Indigenous efflorescence. These social movements take a variety of forms and scales, but all enable individuals to collectively or independently pursue their visions of Indigenous flourishing. Chisato Abe describes starting the ‘Ainu Indigenous People’s Film Society’ and other activities to bring together the Ainu community in Sapporo and promote greater understanding of Indigenous issues amongst the wider public. Mattias Berglund introduces the Sápmi Awards, which provided recognition of excellence in Indigenous cultural pursuits, whilst also employing and promoting Sami languages. Åsa Virdi Kroik, meanwhile, discusses an effort to promote language revitalisation work through the formation of a children’s choir, which also introduced students to traditional South Sami music. The final case study in this section, from Yuji Simizu, discusses efforts by Ainu Elders to have Ainu remains, previously seized by Hokkaidō University, returned to the community. All of these case studies deal with the numerous ways in which Indigenous people can mobilise to pursue shared goals and create efflorescence.

Collectively, these contributions remind us that the emergence of Indigenous efflorescence is over-conditioned by a variety of political, legal, economic and technological developments. Rather than serving to mystify how Indigenous efflorescence takes place, this multiplicity of supports, sources and conditions should encourage anthropologists to think about the many ways we may intervene in support of individuals and communities engaging in projects of efflorescence.

References

Clifford, James. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard: Harvard University Press. doi.org/10.4159/9780674726222

Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, adopted 27 June 1989, ILO 169 (entered into force 5 September 1991).

Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention, adopted 26 June 1957, ILO 107 (entered into force 2 June 1959).

Johnson, Miranda. 2016. The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190600020.001.0001

Korotayev, Andrey, Jack A. Goldstone and Julia Zinkina. 2015. ‘Phases of global demographic transition correlate with phases of the Great Divergence and Great Convergence’. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 95 (June): 163–69. doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2015.01.017

Merlan, Francesca. 2005. ‘Indigenous movements in Australia’. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 473–94. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120643

Merlan, Francesca. 2009. ‘Indigeneity: Global and local’. Current Anthropology 50(3): 303–33. doi.org/10.1086/597667

Wendel, John and Patrick Heinrich. 2012. ‘A framework for language endangerment dynamics: The effects of contact and social change on language ecologies and language diversity’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 218: 145–66. doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2012-0062