Indigenous Governance and Development How Do Community Members Respond?

In this era of reconciliation and unprecedented challenges – exemplified by the 2015 landmark report and recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada (Niezen 2013; TRCC 2015); the Aborigines’ shared effort with Parks Australia to close Uluru to tourism in 2019 (Everingham, Peters, and Higgins-Desbiolles 2021); the current COVID-19 global pandemic that has caused comparable crises in Indigenous communities, such as the Diné (Navajo) in the U.S. and the Yanomami in Brazil, and non-Indigenous communities worldwide (see, among others, Smith L. 2021; Wang 2021); and the decades-long threats that fossil fuel extraction and development have posed to indigenous health and land rights in places such as Ecuador and Alaska (see, among others, Berry 1975; Coates 1991; Coyne and Hopfinger 2011; Herrmann 2019; Postero and Tockman 2020) –,indigenous approaches to government, community social programs, and economic development have necessarily taken forms that blend cultural continuation with strategic or forced alteration. Notwithstanding common opportunities available to and challenges facing all Indigenous peoples globally, the idiosyncratic history of each Indigenous community and the particular social, political, and economic contexts in which these are set have allowed for the customization and periodic revising of governance and development practices. Such a notion of uniqueness in a local setting has been pushed further by scholars like Benjamin Gregg (2020), who went as far as questioning the applicability of the term indigenous on a broad, international scale – thus also doubting the efficacy of umbrella instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2007). Rather, Gregg envisioned the state, with its corresponding policy instrument the “indigenous rights state” (2020, 106 and segg.), as the only legal and political context within which indigenous rights, which are always internal and never international, can be constitutionally recognized according to the kind of state and the unique history and status of the local Indigenous peoples. Gregg’s perspective challenges the more established view that sees Indigenous peoples and indigeneity as valuable, if not necessary, actors in a decolonized international arena (see, among others, Lightfoot 2016; Sarson 2019; Simpson 2014; Tucker 2013). Setting semantics aside, contemporary indigenous cultures and practices of self-governance stem from and, at the same time, intersect with various aspects of indigenous experiences that include identity (see, among many, Alfred 2009; Poliandri 2011), the retention and change of customary leadership and traditional political practices (see, among many, Hania and Graben 2019; Nas, Nurlinah, and Haryanto 2019), economic development (see, among many, Hotte et al. 2018), relations with state governments, international political bodies, and corporate entities (see, among many, Chase 2019; Shadian 2017, 2018), sustainability and resource conservation (see, among many, Artelle et al. 2019; Diver et al. 2019; Lee et al. 2019), Indigenous nationhood and nation-building (see, among many, Cornell 2015; Poliandri 2016; Seelau and Seelau 2014), migration, and activism, in no particular order of importance when considered on a general basis. These dynamics, which have developed as reactions to and/or in collaboration with non-Indigenous international, national, regional, and local political bodies, have often affected or altered the social and cultural contexts and daily experiences of Indigenous community members. At the same time, the unique prioritization of such order by specific Indigenous communities, whether within the borders of a modern state or across multiple states, and, by result, their tailored approach to governance become then critical when considering individual cases in specific socio-geographic and political contexts. Keeping the political aspect of these processes as a backdrop, this special issue of Ethnologies offers a collection of case studies that address several of these aspects of indigenous experience, exploring …