FREE
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"We are Not Red Indians" (We Might all Be Red Indians): Anticolonial Sovereignty Across the Borders of Time, Place and Sentiment
Monday, September 28, 2015
Speaker
Professor Audra Simpson, PhD
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
In a 2004 interview Yasser Arafat, in a state of near confinement and exhaustion, reflected upon his incapacity to move without the immediate threat of assassination, about the Palestinian right of return, about American elections, and his achievements. Among these achievements was the fact that “the Palestine case was the biggest problem in the world” and that Israel had “failed to wipe us out.” As a final mark of that success, he added the declarative and comparative and final point of distinction, “we are not red Indians.” This paper uses this point of comparison of a departure point to reflect upon the deep specificity and global illegibility of Indigenous struggle and life in the face of death and dispossession in North America. In order to do so I will choose a series of historical assemblages—of sociality, treaty-making, militarized pushbacks upon encroachment, spatial confinement (“reservationization”), and pushback for land, for life and for dignity within occupation to amend Arafat’s statement and reimagine “success.” At the end of the paper it is asked how these processes may be re-narrated and comprehended in a global, comparative frame of not only analysis, but struggles for justice.
A dinner reception precedes the lecture at 6:00 PM
Registration Pricing
This meeting is free.
Travel & Lodging
Meeting Location
The Wenner-Gren Foundation
470 Park Avenue South, between 31st and 32nd Streets
8th Floor
New York, NY 10016