IReflect – Student Journal of
International Relations
www.ireflect-journal.de
Looking at Global Politics through the Lens of
Indigeneity. Interview with Sheryl Lightfoot,
Canada Research Chair of Global Indigenous
Rights and Politics, University of British
Columbia
CLAIRE LUZIA LEIFERT
IReflect – Student Journal of International Relations 2015,
Vol. 2 (1), pp 89-92
Published by
IB an der Spree
Additional information can be found at:
Website: www.ireflect-journal.de
E-Mail: [email protected]
Website: www.ibanderspree.de
E-Mail: [email protected]
Berlin, March 2015
– I reflect – Lightfood / Leifert: Interview Looking at Global Politics
Looking at Global Politics through
the Lens of Indigeneity
Interview with Sheryl Lightfoot, Canada
Research Chair of Global Indigenous Rights
and Politics, University of British Columbia
Claire Luzia Leifert
Leifert: You are researching indigenous peoples' global politics. What are you
exactly looking at?
Lightfoot: My research agenda focuses around indigenous rights movements
at the United Nations (UN). However, if you start looking into indigenous
rights work at the UN you end up looking at the movement as a social movement as well as what I would call 'indigenous diplomacies', which I define as
meaning indigenous relationships with states, with non-state actors, with
international organisations such as the UN and also indigenous nations' relationships with one another. So what starts out as a quite particular project
ends up self-expanding very quickly. And necessarily critical IR and postcolonial literatures end up in the mix as well.
What sparked your interest in the intersection of indigenous peoples and International Relations?
This is a personal story that has to do with the two sides of my own identity.
On my mother's side I am Anishinaabe1 and come from the Great Lakes territory of North America. My mother's political background is rights-based
activism coming out of the Red Power Movement in the late 1960s and
1970s. I grew up surrounded by the ethos of a resurgence in indigenous
rights that was looking not only domestically but also transnationally at how
the human rights regimes could be used to leverage some changes in state
behaviour. On the other side, I have a father who was a World War II refugee,
a stateless person. I approached my studies from a very particular lens that
Anishinaabe is an indigenous nation, formerly called “tribe”, whose traditional territory is located around the Great Lakes of North America, especially around Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. An Algonquin-speaking people, this is one of the
largest indigenous nations in North America, located in numerous reservations in the
United States and reserves in Canada.
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– I reflect – Lightfood / Leifert: Interview Looking at Global Politics
looks at why do certain violences exist? What do human rights mean? How
can we mitigate conflicts so dreadful for people like those that had happened
in Europe? By the time I reached my early thirties I started to ponder if there
was not an intersection between these two interests. I always had an interest
in international politics and tried to answer the kind of larger questions that I
asked. At that time there were a lot of other people in indigenous communities starting to ask these questions: What do these UN movements mean?
What does the UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights mean? How can that help
us reach more peaceful relationships for our peoples? So I set about the task
of looking for those intersections. The indigenous rights movement, the history of it and its activities at the UN presented a natural subject matter to
bring these two very diverse areas together.
You said you are Anishinaabe. In what way do you feel this part of your identity
influences your academic work?
Oh, completely. It defines where I come from. It defines how I see the world,
how I see avenues of resistance, avenues of reconciliation, avenues of conflict
resolution. And also how I see the potential to exist for a better relationship
between indigenous peoples and states. I think in terms of ontology it is
inescapable. Epistemologies and ontologies come from one's backgrounds,
you cannot get away from them. Indigenous ontologies certainly inform both
my methodologies and also the subject matter of what I am looking for.
Speaking of ontologies and epistemologies, in terms of IR theories what approach are you taking to explore your subject matter?
I have been asked this question since my comprehensive exams: “Where do
you place yourself in IR?“. It is an interesting question because when I look
back at my studies and scholarship in IR, there are realist elements of my
work, there are constructivist and critical elements of my work. One of the
things I have noticed early on was that this particular way of studying global
politics brings in all kinds of different traditions and can be studied from a
multitude of perspectives. I seem to have landed in the critical constructivist
camp. I certainly am sensitive to identities and how those are constituting
actions and reactions to global politics. And 'critical' because indigenous
politics is inherently critical of the way that global politics is done.
Do you think this is a rather new approach to the study of global politics?
It is, but I would say it is very similar to other critical approaches like feminist and postcolonial IR and overlaps with both of them. Yet at the same time
it has a slightly different twist on things. Feminist IR would look at IR through
the lens of gender, I see indigenous IR as looking at the world and global
politics through the lens of indigeneity. Postcolonial theory is again very
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– I reflect – Lightfood / Leifert: Interview Looking at Global Politics
similar: It challenges binaries, eurocentric thinking, challenges us to look
beyond some of the assumptions or exposes some of the assumptions and
presumptions within global politics. Also similarly, I would say, it looks at
relations of power within the colonial structure and for us it is still emancipatory but how could we arrange power structures after the colonial structure
– that would mean if we could reach such a thing. However, most of the postcolonial literature is Indian/subcontinent-based and African-based. And for
those contexts colonialism is a post-reality: the coloniser has left, there is a
state behind that is postcolonial that is studied by postcolonial theories. We
do not have this. We have to rather look at how we can define our relationship with the state while the settler-colonial state remains. So it is a very
different course of study but it is definitely coming out of the same tradition
and intellectual history as postcolonial theories: It is emancipatory, it is liberationist. But it is doing so in a very different context.
Do you think your research findings are relevant for the wider discipline of IR
beyond the study of indigenous peoples' politics as such?
I would say, yes. One of the big debates in IR is: “Is the state growing or
shrinking?“. I think indigenous global politics helps us problematize the state
and start to answer this question. Is there something that will come to exist
that is beyond the state or post-state? State structures have only been with us
for several hundred years – in indigenous views that is not very long. There
were other forms of political organisation that existed prior to the state and
there will be something that comes after it, whenever that happens to be. I
think indigenous global politics in practice, and certainly then in theory, is
working towards a reconceptualisation of state sovereignty and in some
ways is actually leading the charge in problematizing the state or even decoupling the state from territorial understandings of sovereignty. Some call it
the miner's canary.
The miner's canary?
It's an old saying. When coal miners worked in the underground mines they
would have a canary in there. If the canary fell ill or died, they knew there
was something happening that they could not detect. The 'miner's canary' is a
way of saying: “Is this the first sign of something new?“. It may be or it may
be an anomaly, time will tell. But why we should study indigenous global
politics in theory is that it may be one of the first openings to something
beyond the state structure. And I think we should be paying attention to that
– all of us studying IR.
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– I reflect – Lightfood / Leifert: Interview Looking at Global Politics
Going back to your own research projects, what are you currently working on?
I have two projects on the go. One is a book project based on my dissertation
which was called simply ‘Global Indigenous Politics’. The book situates indigenous global politics within IR, why it is important for people to look at indigenous politics within IR studies and also in IR practice. Secondly, the book
looks at how and why the indigenous rights movement actually got a set of
rights articulated by the UN: what that journey was like, why it was so difficult and how they overcame all the obstacles to get there. The UN Declaration
of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) passed the UN in 2007 after
about a thirty year effort on the part of indigenous actors at the UN. The third
part of the book is looking at state responses to the Declaration. I try to learn
about state behaviour – is this the miner's canary? Is this something new that
we are looking at that states are particularly resistant to and why? The second project is on the particular topic of state apologies to indigenous peoples.
I am looking at three case studies Canada, the United States, and Norway.
How did the states apologise? Why did they apologise? And also what policy
changes went along with or did not go along with the apologies?
Thank you for the interview!
– Sheryl Lightfoot (Ph.D. Minnesota) is an assistant professor in the First
Nations Studies Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her research interests include
global Indigenous peoples’ politics, Indigenous rights, Indigenous diplomacy,
social movements, and critical international relations. She is currently working on a book project based upon her dissertation, “Indigenous Global Politics” which won the 2010 Best Dissertation Award in Race and Ethnic Politics
from the American Political Science Association. She also has fifteen years’
volunteer and contract experience with a number of American Indian tribes
and community-based organisations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, including nine years as Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Indian Policy Center, a research and advocacy group.
– The interview was conducted by Claire Luzia Leifert, student in the Joint
MA International Relations in Berlin, currently on exchange at UBC Vancouver.
Contact: [email protected]
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