Customer Reviews

First Peoples: Indigenous Cultures and Their Futures (Reaktion Books - Focus on Contemporary Issues)

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Jeffrey Sissons' book provides a feast of new ideas. In under 200 pages, Sissons displays thoughtful and penetrating analysis to cover a remarkable breadth of material. _First Peoples_ is part of a series by Reaktion, which attempts to publish books that "offer points of view, take sides and are written with passion." In this, Sissons succeeds remarkably well. His experiences living with and representing Maori people in court informs his analysis, and yet his work is also alive to the diversity of global indigenous histories, with a focus on "settler societies" of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the US.

Sissons provokes us to rethink concepts that have been central to indigenous studies, such as "assimilation." Sissons argues that assimilation was not just an abstract force, almost with its own momentum, but one deeply tied to acts of settlement through acts of force and legislation (and that such "legislation" itself ultimately relied on the threat of force to make it work). In another section, Sissons gives powerful arguments against what he calls "oppressive authenticity" and "eco-indigneity." Oppressive authenticity refers to the range of ways that indigenous groups are required to perform their connections to the land and their people, through explicit legal means such as blood quotas, as well as more implicitly expecting `authentic' performance of language, clothing, and action. He also shows how such demands often exclude a large group of indigenous people that live in urban areas. Eco-indigeneity is the particular set of expectations whereby indigenous people, in some places more than others, are expected to be environmentally oriented. While such expectations have been strategically helpful in some situations, Sissons shows how precarious such expectations can be, and how indigenous groups can be excluded from land claims when these are not met.

My only reservation about the book hinges on the several times that the author drifts into dualistic statements about the differences between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures. At these times, however, Sissons maintains a critical sensibility, and is aware of the potential to overstate such distinctions. His book could be profitably read alongside Courtney Jung's wonderful book, The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics. Sissons avoids the common trope whereby indigenous actions are understood in relationship to maintaining or reclaiming the past (just look at how many books on First Peoples use old, sepia-toned photographs). Instead, he makes a strong argument about how much creative work has been carried out in creating indigenous futures, and how much work remains.