The Resurgence of Indigenous Women's Knowledge and Resistance in Relation to Land and Territoriality: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Guest co-editors: Wanda Nanibush, Leanne Simpson, Carol Williams

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 15th, 2011

This guest-edited issue of Intensions examines the transformative effects of dissent, resistance, mobilization and social change after five centuries of Indigenous political engagement and corporeal interaction with the Empire. We welcome submissions that explore how Indigenous women engage with territory, relate to land and its gifts as well as submissions that interrogate the manifestations of colonial structures, policies, and controls over territory in all settings inclusive of the urban environment.

Scholar Sandy Grande reflected critically on “inherent tensions between the feminist and indigenous political projects” that arise from the conventional focus of ‘whitestream’ feminism on individual rights and gender equality in the marketplace (Grande 2004, 150-151). As Grande argues, the individualism of this perspective lacks crucial insight into the multigenerational effects of territorial and cultural dispossession on indigenous women and their families and communities. If, as Dian Million determined Euro-Canadian and American feminism “successfully reordered the political significance of familial ’privacy’” . . . and further determined that “private” acts were political these campaigns did not “immediately empower Native women.” However, the conception of private as political has been effectively reframed by Indigenous women who use “strategies and languages that located them within the heart of their own experiences” (Million, AIQ June 2008, 269)

This issue of Intensions anticipates innovative and nuanced insights regarding past and present resistance, activism and revitalization of Indigenous women’s relations to territory.

The editors seek a diverse range of interdisciplinary and transnational submissions including fiction, poetry, storytelling, theatre, historical and cultural critical analysis, oral interviews, and visual art—including digital projects (audio, video, animation, web-based), body work, spoken word, performance, and site-specific installation.

Please send copies of submissions to all three editors: leannesimpson@sympatico.ca ; carolwilliams@trentu.ca, wnanibush@gmail.com

~~~

About InTensions: InTensions is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed e-journal published biannually out of Fine Arts Cultural Studies at York University. This initiative brings together interventions by scholars and artists whose work deals with the theatricality of power, corporealities of structural violence, and sensory regimes.

Style and submission guidelines may be accessed and downloaded at http://www.yorku.ca/intent/submissions.html.