Building the Future with the Past: Indigenous Authorship and the Function of Ethnography

Scholars and Indigenous communities alike have long interrogated Native peoples’ interventions into ethnography. Earlier treatments investigated how ethnographers ally with colonial states and how Indigenous people resist their objectification. The works that this essay explores mark a new turn. They ask what ethnography is for, and what its future will be. These scholars evaluate how Indigenous interventions into ethnography plant seeds for revitalized ceremony, kinship ties, and gender complementarities. Charting a broad expanse of time and place—from Central Australia to Dinétah to the Canadian Northwest Coast to Mesoamerica—these works assemble a toolkit for reimagining the function of ethnography.