Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Revitalizations and Postapocalyptic Research

Mark Minch-de Leon
English
UC Riverside

Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Revitalizations and Postapocalyptic Research is grounded in the ongoing proliferation of cultural and intellectual production taking place amongst California Indian communities in the aftermath of what many refer to as the end of the world and others, genocide. Striving to reassert their sovereignty and the legitimacy of their ways of life, these communities, this project argues, enact ways of being that diminish and seek to neutralize the forces of reproductive and progressive futurism and strong forms of power and political organization of the settler state. Caught in the dilemma of creating a future with the remnants of a catastrophic past, California Indians engage a number of inventive reorientations that shift the meanings and values of survival, culture, knowledge, vitality, and what it means to be human. Drawing on the same material sources used for cultural revitalization, Indigenous Inhumanities performs alongside these projects as a form of research into these reorientations and itself a reorientation of study towards Indigenous intellectual resurgence. This is in order to draw out the “medicine,” the antibiotic power of revitalization as research that eats away at the settler state through a form of “weak” decolonization.