Tracing Definitions & Uses of Rematriation

This document helps us folx on The Rematriation Project trace our understanding and mobilization of rematriation.

We understand Rematriation as …

I. A direct response to issues with rePatriation as a tool for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.

  • According to Gray (2022), “new paradigms for reparation and return are essential” (p. 16), because white, male, settler definitions and philosophies of society, property, and law are rooted in the active removal and displacement of Indigenous peoples.
  • “… repatriation is defined as the return of someone or something to their home country. Derived from the Latin root word patr-, referring to the father or the patriline, repatriation assumes that the nation is patriarchal, or that “the state is a man” (Simpson 2016b). Repatriation expects that peoples, profits, and properties return to the “fatherland” and that what counts as being returnable are patriarchal possessions.” (Gray, 2022, p. 15)
  • A. Smith (2011): “[H]eteropatriarchy is essential for the building of US empire. Patriarchy is the logic that naturalizes social hierarchy. Just as men are supposed to naturally dominate women on the basis of biology, so too should the social elites of a society naturally rule everyone else through a nation-state form of governance that is constructed through domination, violence, and control.”
  • “One would be naïve to think that these colonial property structures do not persist alongside advancements in human rights or improved Indigenous-settler relations.” (Gray, 2022, p. 16). Gray argues that repatriation will ultimately advance the protocols and power of white-settler nations, since it is a path of return paved by white-settler, cishet man, colonial rules. Overall, repatriation embodies white, specifically male, patriarchal ways of possessing and objectifying.

II. An Indigenist articulation of feminism

II.i Intersectional

Gray and Tuck do not use “intersectional” explicitly. However, we extend and apply it more explicitly as intersectional in our work. For instance, Tuck (2011) states that rematriation includes the work to “map the variety of ideas in a community.” (p. 36). We see protocols, like those described by Gray and by Haas’ Wampum, as templates for such worn in how it helps what Tuck called others to do in Curriculum Studies: “uncover the quiet thoughts and beliefs of a community” (Tuck, 2011, p. 36). We envision rematriation as a call to center those who are multiply marginalized within Indigenous communities: their thoughts, beliefs, and material realities and knowledges.

II.ii Challenges nation-state systems
  • Andrea Smith (Cherokee) (2011): “Indigenous feminists are also challenging how we conceptualize indigenous sovereignty — it is not an add-on to the heteronormative and patriarchal nationstate. … ”
  • A. Smith (2011): “Native feminism is not simply an insular or exclusivist “identity politics” as it is often accused of being. Rather, it is framework that understands indigenous women’s struggles part of a global movement for liberation.”
II.iii Center and lead with embodied knowledge
  • “… rematriation can also be described as an embodied praxis of recovery and return” (Gray, 2022, p. 4).
  • Numerous movements “led by women and Two-Spirit people” (Gray, 2022, p. 4)
  • Positionality and identity matter and should be considered when mobilizing self-determination.
    • Gender & sexuality (Gray): “Proponents of the term [rematriation] express strong sociopolitical commitments that range from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, return of lands, and safeguarding of waterways to recovering cultural objects and ancestral remains, reclaiming Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing—or even restoring female seeds in Indigenous territories.” (Gray, 2022, p. 4)
    • Race impacts our worldviews and sociolegal, political movements (Gray): “Gender is not the only consideration here. If the state is a man, he is also white and very possessive. Legal conceptualizations of property and racialized conceptualizations of personhood (or “racial regimes of ownership”) have developed in tandem and in symbiotic fashion (Bhandar 2018). Whiteness is not only dogma and privilege but also a commodity protected by law because “possession—the act necessary to lay the basis for rights in property—was defined to include only the cultural practices of whites. This definition laid the foundation for the idea that whiteness—that which whites alone possess—is valuable and is property (Harris 1993, 1721). Whiteness is encoded in colonial property structures because owning is analogous to being (Butler and Athanasiou 2013).” (Gray, 2022, p. 15-16)

III. A set of cultural, communal, embodied protocols and practices

III.i Resurgence practices & protocols
  • Practicing protocols will “make generational knowledge of elders, youth, parents, warriors, hunters, leaders, gardeners, fishers, teachers, and others available to other generations.” (Tuck, 2011, p. 36)
  • Remembering is an impactful action: “[R]emembrance of the true purpose of knowledge in/for our communities” (Tuck, 2011, p. 36), because “indigenous traditions are the repository of vast experience and deep insight on achieving balance and harmony” (Alfred, 1999, p. 21)” (qtd. in Tuck, 2011, p. 36).
  • “Make use of home languages to express ideas, and to bring new language to new and recovered ideas.” (Tuck, 2011, p. 36)
  • “Honor all of our relations by engaging in the flow of knowledge in community” (Tuck, 2011, p. 36). A return to protocols and paradigms that not only return material goods (repatriation), but living, embodied methods to meaningfully turn away from colonial practices and turn toward Indigenous ways of being and knowing.
III.ii Refusal practices & protocols
  • When capable, refuse to abide by colonial law & order: “Rematriation involves both a turn away from the colonial order of things and a turn toward Indigenous nationhood. It moves Indigenous peoples further away from the distractions and constraints of state-sanctioned recognition politics toward the resurgence not only of our own sociopolitical systems but also a politics of refusal in our dealings with settler states, subjects, and institutions” (Gray, 2022, p. 5)
  • When capable, replace colonial protocols with local protocols: “Protocols … nurture, ratify, and validate property relations, social relations, and political relations. When we lead with our protocols, we embody our laws, live our sovereignty, and strengthen our relationality. Because protocols are an extension of our laws, they shape the character of place-based resurgence and refusal. Protocol is a way to say yes to Indigenous law, politics, and nationhood, and it is also a way to say ayn (no) to every iteration of nullius, every elimination tactic, and every mode of dispossession.” (Gray, 2022, p. 15)

IV. As designing data attuned to local & global Indigenous relationality

  • A. Smith (2011): “Native feminism is not simply an insular or exclusivist ‘identity politics’ as it is often accused of being. Rather, it is framework that understands indigenous women’s struggles part of a global movement for liberation.”
  • As living out sovereignty: “Relationality means much more than just ‘understanding our place in the world as situated within relations of interdependence with all of creation’ but rather ‘living in a way that carries out our responsibilities within these relationships [original emphasis]’ (Starblanket and Stark 2018, 177).” (Gray, 2022, p. 5)
  • “Engage place and land in ways that dramatically differ from more commonly held constructions of place and space” (Tuck, 2011, p. 36). Place as more than space, as text, and as context. Place is not fixed and Indigenous/Native nations and communities need not follow colonial understandings, protocols and legalities of ownership and control.
  • “Rematriation requires us to reconsider what it means to be a nation, what it takes to embody our sovereignty, what it means to be in relation with all of our relations, how we act in relation with other Indigenous nations, and how we act in relation to states.” (Gray, 2022, p. 5)
  • “Reflect the cosmologies of our communities. [Data are] shaped by a community’s understanding of the relationships between human knowledge and/within the cosmos. [Data are] crafted to have multiple points of entry, and multiple meanings to be drawn. Design continuity between [data] and community life that moves in recursive ways to further inquiry and further applications of meaning.” (Tuck, 2011, p. 36; replaced “curriculum” with “data”)
  • “Wampum records are maintained by regularly revisiting and re-“reading” them through community memory and performance, as wampum is a living rhetoric that communicates a mutual relationship between two or more parties …” (Haas, 2008, p. 80)
  • “In order to retrieve the encoded communication [of Wampum], an individual must be a part of the community with the cultural context for accurate retrieval of that information. The messages are spoken and woven into the wampum, and those messages are repeated each time an individual (re)presents the material rhetoric, or wampum hypertext, to the community.” (Haas, 2008, p. 86) As recognizing how data experiences extend beyond the digital and operate multimodally
  • “… wampum beads serve as nodes to topics, and the sinew, hemp, tree bark twine, or other stringing devices serve as links or pathways to associated information. Architectural mnemonic associations are employed as wampum belts, and strings are encoded with information.” (Haas, 2008, p. 89)
  • “Wampum presents a hypertext visually and aurally via an accompanying oral story. Whether it is treaty belt, peace pact, a welcome belt, condolence string, or adoption belt, it is presented to all affected parties, and most are revisited on a regular basis and re“read.” Thus, not only is the wampum belt crafted with memories, but it is also “read” by memory.” (Haas, 2008, p. 90)
  • “in order for wampum to be communicative, a hybridization of the oral tradition and symbolism is woven into the material rhetoric. Furthermore the technologies woven into the belt have communicative agency, as with the colors of the shells and the design patterns. The cultural context and community where the wampum resides is yet another source of meaning that gets encoded into the wampum. Thus wampum is a hypertext of communicative modes—all of which contribute to cultural knowledge production and preservation.” (Haas, 2008, p. 91)
  • Haas’ summary of parallels of wampum with Damian Baca’s work on Aztec codices: “[an Aztec] codex is an amalgam of typography, typeface, and lettering that weaves between pictographs, bloodstains, and American cultural icons; the codex serves as a hypertextual cultural memory; designers employ various and multiple rhetorics (e.g., visual and alphabetic, different languages, etc.); both serve as annals and rituals; and the reading of the codices as a communal ritualistic and ceremonial event” (Haas, 2008, p. 98)

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