Gwendolin McCrea, University of Minnesota mccr0063@tc.umn.edu.

Displacement, Mobility, Diaspora and Indigenous Peoples, Or, Rootedness Might Not Mean What You Think It Means

Recent work by scholars and activists has outlined several reasons why the tools of diaspora studies might or might not be useful for examining indigenous peoples and cultures. Similarly to diasporic populations, indigenous peoples have been subject to various forms of displacement and dispersal yet retain a strong sense of identification with a land and place of origin. On the other hand, even if lived experiences include mobility, the invocation of tropes of mobility can undermine the political power behind indigenous identity and struggles for self-determination in the context of a land-based politics. In this paper, I use native land claims in White settler states, particularly North America, as an arena for the examination of some ways in which current work in diaspora research may or may not be appropriate for studies concerning indigenous peoples. By unpacking the concept of "rootedness" I will demonstrate the vast differences in the ways in which it is deployed, from indigenous peoples who use their rootedness in place in order to question the sovereign territorial claims of settler states, to academics and activists who conflate indigeneity, land, and environment, to state actors who deny land-based identities in order to subsume aboriginal communities within a Œmulticultural state¹. To answer these questions I will look to court cases dealing with native land claims and their judicial, political and cultural implications in British Columbia, Canada. Ultimately, I ask how examining an aboriginal reality that simultaneously includes many kinds of displacement and forms of mobility, and, at the same time, includes cultural, economic and political attachments to land, may lead us to question some of the central concepts of diaspora studies.