Periodic Reporting for period 4 - IndiGen (Indigeneities in the 21st century: From ‘vanishing people’ to global players in one generation)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2024-04-01 al 2025-09-30
19 years after the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, Indigenous stakeholders act as global players in arenas such as the UN Convention on Climate Change, the Dakota Access pipeline in the USA, and the Humboldt-Forum in Berlin. Yet, until the 1960s, anthropological inquiries considered the same people as ‘vanishing’ and doomed to disappear. The so-called Indigenous Renaissance presents a remarkable phenomenon of late (post)modernity. How can this surprising process be understood and explained? The objective of this project is to study how Indigenous actors evolved from ‘vanishing people’ to global players. The project is located at the disciplinary intersections between anthropology, art, history, philosophy, and politics; and aims at making a future-oriented contribution to (re)emerging Indigeneities and the (re)negotiation of their (post)colonial legacies in and with Europe. While the label ‘Indigeneity’ circulates globally, it is also defined as a place-based marker of identity. This project breaks new ground by incorporating both dimensions – global circulation and local experience – in a common framework. It does so by studying entangled Indigeneities as transregional and transcultural formations along the transpacific intersections between North and South America, Australia and the South Pacific. By untangling these intersections through museums as research sites and laboratories, the project’s sub-objectives are: 1. to historically identify the moments and processes through which Indigenous people became re-ascribed through anthropological discourses and their involvement therein, 2. to ethnographically study the ways and forms in which Indigenous people appropriate these external ascriptions for self-insertion into global affairs, 3. to experimentally research, in exhibitionary environments, the layers of Indigenous continuity beneath the discursive transformation from ‘vanishing people’ to global players.
Despite the challenges posed by the COVID crisis, the project has made scholarly process through a threefold strategy: First, prior related research on Indigenous and museological topics have been further developed towards outputs, such as academic publications, and their dissemination, as through online events. Second, the overall project has moved from pursuing a multi-sited ethnography to establishing a multi-sited research infrastructure through which teams based in several localities - Munich, Cambridge, Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai’i and Rapa Nui - work collaboratively on initiatives under the umbrella of the ERC group. This methodological innovation has enabled the project to be productive on a global scale despite not being able to travel. Third, the team in Munich has pursued historical research, as planned, but from within Germany and Europe. While doing so, the intellectual orientation has evolved towards the investigation and deployment of a set of knowledge practices - collecting, filming, exhibiting - through which Indigenous multiplicities become constituted. A film project on NIU, known as the coconut, has been set up by the PI with a team at the University of Hawai’i, involving the affiliated researchers Vilsoni Hereniko and Ida Yoshinaga. The trilogy takes the pandemic as a springboard to tackle issues such as human-environment relationships, food security and Indigenous sovereignty. The exhibition ‘Indigenous Futures’ at the MAA Cambridge is developed through the curatorial leadership and input by four Indigenous residencies: Noelle Kahanu (University of Hawai'i), Taloi Havini (Independent artist, Brisbane), Leah Lui-Chivizhe (University of Technology, Sydney) and Jordan Wilson (New York University), who have all gathered in Munich and Cambridge. The project has led to major results: The exhibition 'Faultlines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections' has featured for a year (December 2024-December 2025) at MAA Cambridge, which also hosted the summative symposium of the project in May 2025. The exhibition's catalogue will be published with open access in the first half of 2026. Three films have been produced ('Sina ma Tinirau', 'Woven' and 'Ta'oa? (Objects?)'), all by Indigenous actors in collaboration with the PI. Those films have toured the festical circuit, won awards, and are or will become availabe with open access. Several articles, chapters, journal issues and books have been published. Key forthcoming books are: 'German-Rapanui Entanglements: Collecting, Knowing and Remembering Easter Island' (Leuven University Press), 'Experiencing Islandness: Oceans and Beyond' (University of Hawai'i Press), and the summative volume 'New Discoveries: Indigenous Collecting, Exhibiting and Filming' (Te Papa Press), all coming out with open access in 2026. Our project website has contributed to the dissemination of our work beyond common academic audiences and on a global scale, and was chosen by the ERC to feature on the CORDIS website.
The research group has made progress beyond the state of art at the level of content and form. By setting up a robust multi-sited research infrastructure with teams operating from several localities - Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai’i, Rapa Nui and the UK, all in close collaboration with the team based in Munich - the overall group has enacted a collaborative approach at each stage of knowledge production, from the posing of questions through the definition of methodical tools to the articulation of findings. Each initiative has addressed a common concern by simultaneously operating from several localities and by collaboratively engaging at the ‘cultural interface’. In doing so, the group has produced cross-cultural knowledge and enacted a ‘relational ethics’, working in and across several Indigenous (Aymara, Hawaiian, Rapanui, Rotuman and Sāmoan) and colonial (English, French, German and Spanish) languages. In pursuing the overall objective - understanding how Indigenous actors have evolved from ‘vanishing people’ to global players - the group has studied entangled Indigeneities as transregional and transcultural formations along the transpacific intersections as well as their archival, material and visual presences in Europe. In doing so, the project has deployed and investigated a set of knowledge practices - collecting, filming, and exhibiting - through which Indigenous multiplicities become constituted. In the realm of collecting, a ‘visual gallery’ of Rapanui carvings housed in museum institutions from across Europe has been set up via the project’s website to inform and study contemporary art practices in Rapa Nui. In the context of filming, for example, Sina ma Tinirau, an animated short film about the creation story of NIU, the coconut tree, has been produced and winning multiple awards since its premiere. The group thus collects and studies collecting, films and studies filming, exhibits and studies exhibiting. In doing so, the project has grounded a broad topic - Indigeneities in the 21st Century - in concrete institutional settings and specific practices to be explored and utilised. This dual focus on deploying and investigating, intervening and studying, sets this project apart and hs led to an interrelated sets of results - publications, films and an exhibition - which, in conjunction, make an original and ground-breaking contribution to how Indigeneities in the 21st Century can be understood and (re)imagined.