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Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group
Sponsored Session
2009 Annual Meeting
Association of American Geographers
Las Vegas, Nevada; March 22-27, 2009


Title:

Spatial Strategies of Indigenous Resistance I - Place-Making

Description:

In most settler societies, indigenous peoples have been subjected to a range of spatial strategies aimed at dismantling culture and/or assimilating them into the mainstream society. Whether it is being relocated to reservations or having the structures and infrastructures of modernity imposed on Native societies, these "spatial strategies of incorporation" target everyday life in a way intended (consciously or otherwise) to disrupt indigenous socio-spatial structures and practices and align them with the mainstream.

At the same time, indigenous peoples engage various spatial strategies of resistance to retain cultural identity, if not a degree of sovereignty. This session focuses on "place-making" efforts whereby indigenous communities resist spatially destructive forces through (re-)assertion of their own practices.

Anticipated Attendance:

100

Organizers:

RDK Herman

Chairs:

G. Rebecca Dobbs

Participants:

Presenter:

Sarah Prout, Always out of place: Indigenous spatial struggles in contemporary Australia

Presenter:

Kristina Monroe Bishop, Colonial Medicine in South Africa: The Regulation of Nature, Witchcraft and Stethoscopes

Presenter:

Judith Miggelbrink, Indigenous territoriality as argument: the case of the Sámi

Presenter:

Laurie Richmond, Fishscapes and Power: Place-making and Alaska Native resistance in the Pacific halibut fishery on Kodiak Island

Presenter:

Zoltan Grossman, From Nisqually to Iraq: Imperial Placemaking and Resistance at Fort Lewis

 

Sponsorships:

Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

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