Dancing On Our Turtle's Back Analysis

Being indigenous in the contemporary world means having to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous injustices from innumerable sources. However, despite the failings of the past, and the threat of colonization there are many indigenous scholars who are pushing back against common trend lines in indigenous discourse, and are offering different ways to interrogate what it means to be indigenous, and how they can fight back in the modern world. This essay will critically look at two separate authors attempts to interrogate what it means to be indigenous regardless of the definition forced upon them by settler-colonial society. This essay will be formatted in the following way. First it will looks an article by Taiaiake Alfred, and Jeff Corntassel

Secondly it will look at two chapters of Leanne Simpson’s book Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back which looks at using stories and history to resist. Finally, this essay will compare and contrast the two article’s attempts to interrogate this important issue. The first article by Taiaiake Alfred, and Jeff Corntassel covers not a single indigenous population, but provides a broad overview of indigenous issues and resurgence across the world. They argues that the Settler Colonial mindset across the world, while it differs from country to country, is not about removing the indigenous population as an individual people, but as an attempt to remove their history and traditions and integrate them into the settler-colonial state through any means necessary. They point specifically to Canada as an example of this model through their use of the term aboriginal. According to the article the term aboriginal is a tool of the settler-colonial state to erase indigenous identities due to the way it surpasses their individual identities in place of a state sanctioned one that does not fully address the differences within the different communities. This supposedly pulls indigenous people away from their traditional and historical identities and towards a contemporary legal form thereby erasing those histories. This is backed up by how some indigenous people in Canada identify with the state sanctioned

They promote reconnecting with the land, their language, their idea of freedom, and their diet (in a way that does not rely on global capitalism) at a personal level. However, the arguments suffer somewhat in the approach, and how it attempts to define each of these things. The article is written not from the perspective of a particular tribe, or country, and indeed notes that each indigenous experience is different, but instead as a workbook that all indigenous people could follow across the world. However, when it comes to specific examples on how to do this they are inherently built on their own knowledge and come across as both vague and not fully appreciative. For example, when speaking of decolonizing diets, the article states:
“Ultimately important to the struggle for freedom is the reconstitution of our own sick and weakened physical bodies and community relationships accomplished through a return to the natural sources of food and the active, hard-working, physical lives lived by our