Kevin Lujan Lee + Josh Campbell

Trans-Indigenous Dialogue: Towards A Framework for Transnational Indigenous Planning

With its roots in the Red Power movement, and formalized in the late 1970s amidst the global emergence of Indigeneity as a distinct political analytic, the international Indigenous rights movement has yielded enormous successes over the past two decades––including the passage of the monumental 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the solidification of international law and global governance institutions as key sites for local Indigenous sovereignty struggles. An understudied condition of possibility for reproducing the strategic import of international Indigenous rights are sustained practices of trans-Indigenous solidarities between Indigenous people: establishing treaties between Indigenous nations, building pan-Indigenous coalitions, and creating cross-cultural exchange programs. Rhetorical frames are central in these practices: they draw discursive parallels between colonial subjugation and Indigenous resistance across Indigenous nations, blend culturally-specific vernaculars and iconographies to highlight the deep resonances between Indigenous nations, and construct a distinct set of Indigenous cultural responsibilities that reinforce relational accountabilities between Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the works of Black and Banaban scholar Teresia Teaiwa, we construct a novel theory of trans-Indigenous dialogue, and apply it to the case of Mariånas for Palestine––a Chamoru- and Palestinian-led grassroots activist collective based in Låguas yan Gåni (the Mariånas archipelago in the Western Pacific Ocean)––demonstrating the particular ways that Indigenous, place-based notions of relational accountability feature into the construction of cross-national Indigenous solidarities under global conditions of empire and colonialism.

Kevin Lujan Lee is Chamoru and an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo. His current research focuses on (1) the Indigenous politics of decolonization in Oceania; (2) Pacific Islander social movements in the continental United States; and (3) Indigenous Oceanic political thought, in collaboration with Josh Campbell (UCLA). He was previously a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at the University of British Columbia and holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Politics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Josh Campbell (they/them) is a white (American with familial roots in Ireland) non-binary Ph.D candidate in the Political Science Department at UCLA specializing in political theory and the history of political thought. Their work largely focuses on the interconnections between politics, religion, and populism through the lens of German exile writers around World War II, as well as collaborative projects with Kevin Lujan Lee (University of Buffalo) on Indigenous political theorists in Oceania centered on questions of space, place, Indigeneity, and the cultural and intellectual manifestations of colonialism.

Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Diana Guo, dg3372@columbia.edu; Vinita Govindarajan, vg2588@columbia.edu; Mauricio Enrique Rada Orellana, mer2245@columbia.edu

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is organized by the second year PhD students in Urban Planning: Vinita Govindarajan, Diana Guo, and Mauricio Rada Orellana.