The masthead and the table of contents of RIAS Vol. 12, Spring–Summer № 1 /2019.

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The present text serves as an introduction to RIAS Vol. 12, Spring–Summer № 1 /2019, dedicated to Indigenous social movements in the Americas. It outlines the major areas of interest of the Contributors, explaining ways in which the issue explores selected cases of Indigenous resistance to oppressive forms of environmental, socio-economic, linguistic, and cultural colonialism. Looking at both multi-tribal and single-tribal contexts, the authors look at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the novels of Lakota/Anishinaabe writer Frances Washburn, the Two-Spirit movement in the U.S., and the Indigenous food sovereignty movement in the U.S. and Peru as sites of creative forms of decolonizing resistance, and analyze the material, discursive, and cultural strategies employed by the Indigenous activists, writers, and farmers involved.

The language of fire has sometimes been used in illustrative ways to describe how social movements spark, flare, and sometimes sputter out. Building on recent scholarship about protest camps, as well as borrowing language from environmental historians about fire behavior, this article draws from ethnographic research to describe the pyropolitics of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement at Standing Rock—examining how fire was used as analogy and in material ways to support and drive the movement to protect water from industrial capitalism. Describing ceremonial fires, social fires, home fires, cooking fires, and fires lit in protest on the front line, this article details how fire was put to work in myriad ways in order to support the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), and ensure social order and physical survival at the camps built to house supporters of the movement. This article concludes with descriptions of how these sparks ignited at Standing Rock followed activists home to their own communities, to other struggles that have been taken up to resist pipelines, the contamination of water, and the appropriation of Indigenous land.

The article applies the concept of tribalography, as defined by LeAnne Howe, to examine two novels by Frances Washburn, Elsie's Business and The Sacred White Turkey in order to demonstrate how Washburn participates in the discourse of native languages revitalization and thus offers an interesting comment on the potential of communal healing.

I focus on the discursive strategies within Two Spirit events and groups that center the definition of ‘Two Spirit’ first and foremost as an Indigenous identity by using both unifying/mass terms (Native American, glbtiq) and culturally & community specific terms (specific tribe names, Two Spirit). Rather than selecting a “right” term, such conversations highlight the constant, simultaneous positionings negotiated by Two Spirit people in their daily lives, and the tensions between recognizability and accuracy; communality and specificity; indigeneity and settler culture; and the burden multiply marginalized people carry in negotiating between all of those metaphorical and literal spaces. Drawing on Simpson’s (2014) concept of the politics of refusal, I demonstrate how Two Spirit individuals utilize available categories of identity, not as either/or binaries but rather as overlapping concepts— differentiated along micro- and macro- scales— to refuse attempts to both reduce the Two Spirit identity to one that is based either in gender or sexuality, and the appropriation of the identity and movement by non-Indigenous individuals and groups within broader national and global queer movements.

This article explores the Quechua peoples’ food systems as seen through a traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) lens and reflects on the vital role of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge for global food security. Data was collected from two Quechua communities, Choquecancha and Rosaspata, in the highlands of Peru, from March 2016 to August 2018. This data was collected via participatory action research, talking circles with female
farmers, oral history interviews with elders, and Indigenous gatherings at chacras with community leaders and local agroecologists. Analysis of this data suggests that Quechua people’s in-depth and locally rooted knowledge concerning food security provides an Indigenous-based theoretical model of food sovereignty for the revitalization of Indigenous foodways and collective rights to food rooted in often under-recognised
aspects of their Indigeneity and TEK.

The paper looks at the role of traditional foodways and related cultural practices in Oneida’s contemporary food sovereignty efforts, and the various understandings of the continuity of food and agricultural traditions in the community. The tribe’s Tsyunhehkw^’s (joon-hen-kwa) farm, whose name loosely translates into “life sustenance” in English, serves important cultural, economic and educational purposes. It grows Oneida white flint corn, which is considered sacred by the tribe and is used for ceremonial purposes, it grows the tobacco used for ceremonies and runs a traditional Three Sisters Garden. The Three Sisters – corn, beans and squash, are an important part of the Oneida creation story, as well as the vision of Handsome Lake – a Seneca prophet from the turn of the 19^th century, who played an significant role in the revival of traditional religion among the People of the Longhouse.[1] They inform the work done at Tsyunhehkw^ to provide healthful food for the Oneida community.

Starting with this issue, our journal will include a completely redesigned Book Review Section, featuring three to five high-quality reviews by leading and emerging scholars from around the world. As for the selection of the books to be reviewed, even though I am a literary scholar, it is my intention as Review Editor to consider books that engage with the U.S. and the Americas as a hemispheric and global phenomenon from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, and media studies.

R. Michael Feener's review of America's Encounters with Southeast Asia, 1800–1900: Before the Pivot by Farish A. Noor. 

L. Sasha Gora's review of Paul Freedman's study Ten Restaurants That Changed America. Liveright, 2016.

Sonja Dobroski's review of: by Virginia R. Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, eds., America Observed. On an International Anthropology of the United States. Afterword by Jane C. Desmond. Berghahn Books, 2017.

György Tóth's review of Steven Parfitt's Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland. Studies in Labour History, 7. Liverpool
University Press, 2016.

Abstracts and notes on Contributors of the feature texts in RIAS Vol. 12, Spring–Summer № 1 /2019.

The editorial policy of the Review of International American Studies and stylesheet for Contributors.