Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by mburnamfink
Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces by Cindy Tekobbe
4.0
This is a tricky book for me to review. Cindy is a friend, I'm listed in the acknowledgments. I think the subject matter is important, and the structure and case studies are fairly interesting, at least as far as high academese goes. If you can't handle Cindy at her "I seek interventions into research problems created by mainstream critique and western theory, research practices that not only flatten meaning but reify singular authorship instead of valuing collaborative texts", you don't deserve her at her "The framing of good relations is largely unique to Indigenous research, but it is an ethical and holistic approach that would be of broad interest to cultural and digital researchers."
The book is structured in five chapters, an introduction, an account of a paper at the Association of Internet Researchers, a study of the Facebook group "Rezzy Red Proletariat Memes", an interview with the late Coast Salish comics artist Jeffrey Veregge, and the rise and fall of MazaCoin, a cryptocurrency launched by an Ogala Souix man Payu Harris, with each chapter introduced by a Chahta story. This book is about being an Indian academic in cultural rhetorics, about how Indians survive and resist in the 21st century, and about general methodological approaches that might be useful in digital culture. It does a really good job at the first, a decent job at the second, and leaves a lot to be done on the third.
I want to highlight some things I'll take away. The first is an explanation of the slogan "Water Is Life", associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline protest movement. In a settler-colonial mindset, "water is life" means that water is vital to life; humans are 70% water, we begin to die quickly without it, and while water is precious, clean water is an asset that can be calculated and balanced against a full set of priorities. In an Indigenous mindset, that of the Water Protectors, "water is life" means that water is literally alive. Water is a being with moral standing, one that we stand in relationship with. To build an oil pipeline across water resources is an act akin to regularly firing a gun into a neighbor's house. Even if you haven't kill anyone yet, you're going to.
A second is the way that Cindy and Jeffrey Veregge introduced themselves in their interview, by name, by profession (academic and artist), and by tribal affiliation. Cindy was not able to interview Payu Harris, and she speculates that he felt that having given many interviews about MazaCoin, talking to an academic wouldn't be useful to him. Another thread would have been a tie of kinship, from Cindy to another Choctaw to someone in the Ogala Souix to Harris, but she wasn't able to find that tie. These networks are very instantiated.
A third is how Indigenous people remix and rewrite their own history. My own opinion is that any Indian alive today is the survivor of at least three genocides: outright wars of extermination and removal by the American Army and other state sanctioned violence; campaigns of cultural extinction via Indian boarding schools and the suppression of Indian languages and religious/cultural/political traditions; and the ambient pressures of 21st century capitalism which flatten everything into a smear of content consumption. Along with these general trends, there are all the bad (inaccurate, incomplete, disparaging) stories about Indians: Savages (noble or otherwise), drunkards, poor, sick, etc. On one side Forbes and Russia Today are describing Payu Harris as a chief and descendant of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, claims which are at minimum lazy and racist journalism. And on the other side, posters in Rezzy Red Proletariat Memes are using a classical oil painting of 18th century Indian warriors (deerskin clothing, eagle feathers, bows and tomahawks etc.) to make a political claim about land back. We all live in a white male cishet Christian/technocratic hegemony, and we all have different ways of surviving and resisting.
What is shakier is the methodological approach to using stories as a research method. I'm not a digital rhetorician, I'm just an ordinary country doomscroller, but it strikes me that the academic techniques that we use to talk about entities like texts and cultures are entirely fucking inadequate to saying anything insightful, let alone true, about feeds and platforms and the churn of memetic internet activity. For all the talk of "digital natives", these venues are profoundly novel, profoundly artificial, and constantly changing. None of us are indigenous to the internet, and yet some people have the Heart of a Poster and others will never make a good post. Some places are funny, friendly, and interesting, and others are hostile wastelands of bots and scams. But we still don't know how to say that properly, let alone in a way that is durable and true.
The book is structured in five chapters, an introduction, an account of a paper at the Association of Internet Researchers, a study of the Facebook group "Rezzy Red Proletariat Memes", an interview with the late Coast Salish comics artist Jeffrey Veregge, and the rise and fall of MazaCoin, a cryptocurrency launched by an Ogala Souix man Payu Harris, with each chapter introduced by a Chahta story. This book is about being an Indian academic in cultural rhetorics, about how Indians survive and resist in the 21st century, and about general methodological approaches that might be useful in digital culture. It does a really good job at the first, a decent job at the second, and leaves a lot to be done on the third.
I want to highlight some things I'll take away. The first is an explanation of the slogan "Water Is Life", associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline protest movement. In a settler-colonial mindset, "water is life" means that water is vital to life; humans are 70% water, we begin to die quickly without it, and while water is precious, clean water is an asset that can be calculated and balanced against a full set of priorities. In an Indigenous mindset, that of the Water Protectors, "water is life" means that water is literally alive. Water is a being with moral standing, one that we stand in relationship with. To build an oil pipeline across water resources is an act akin to regularly firing a gun into a neighbor's house. Even if you haven't kill anyone yet, you're going to.
A second is the way that Cindy and Jeffrey Veregge introduced themselves in their interview, by name, by profession (academic and artist), and by tribal affiliation. Cindy was not able to interview Payu Harris, and she speculates that he felt that having given many interviews about MazaCoin, talking to an academic wouldn't be useful to him. Another thread would have been a tie of kinship, from Cindy to another Choctaw to someone in the Ogala Souix to Harris, but she wasn't able to find that tie. These networks are very instantiated.
A third is how Indigenous people remix and rewrite their own history. My own opinion is that any Indian alive today is the survivor of at least three genocides: outright wars of extermination and removal by the American Army and other state sanctioned violence; campaigns of cultural extinction via Indian boarding schools and the suppression of Indian languages and religious/cultural/political traditions; and the ambient pressures of 21st century capitalism which flatten everything into a smear of content consumption. Along with these general trends, there are all the bad (inaccurate, incomplete, disparaging) stories about Indians: Savages (noble or otherwise), drunkards, poor, sick, etc. On one side Forbes and Russia Today are describing Payu Harris as a chief and descendant of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, claims which are at minimum lazy and racist journalism. And on the other side, posters in Rezzy Red Proletariat Memes are using a classical oil painting of 18th century Indian warriors (deerskin clothing, eagle feathers, bows and tomahawks etc.) to make a political claim about land back. We all live in a white male cishet Christian/technocratic hegemony, and we all have different ways of surviving and resisting.
What is shakier is the methodological approach to using stories as a research method. I'm not a digital rhetorician, I'm just an ordinary country doomscroller, but it strikes me that the academic techniques that we use to talk about entities like texts and cultures are entirely fucking inadequate to saying anything insightful, let alone true, about feeds and platforms and the churn of memetic internet activity. For all the talk of "digital natives", these venues are profoundly novel, profoundly artificial, and constantly changing. None of us are indigenous to the internet, and yet some people have the Heart of a Poster and others will never make a good post. Some places are funny, friendly, and interesting, and others are hostile wastelands of bots and scams. But we still don't know how to say that properly, let alone in a way that is durable and true.