Geography and indigeneity I

Why talk of indigeneity rather than of Indigenous peoples? This report examines the critical purchase on questions of inequality, subjectivity and power offered by critical geographies of indigeneity. In comparison with accounts that treat indigeneity as relational with nature and the more-than-human, the report highlights literature that examines indigeneity as relational with deeply historical, institutionalized and power-inflected ontologies. To think about settler colonialism as an ongoing effect, not a singular event, recognizes how patterns of engagement with and oppression of indigeneity pervade the colonial present and its geographies beyond the specific locales associated with Indigenous peoples. Finally, the report examines how indigeneity figures in the geography discipline’s knowledge production, and argues that worldly Indigenous ontologies are theorizing the world precisely because they are forced to apprehend, appraise and then rethink ‘universals’.