In his last talk, a former Fulbright Director Tom Robertson discussed Tharu's agency/power. I watched few starting minutes and will share my general observation. During his presentation, he also comments on an Ojibwe scholar David Treuer's "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present," and dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." Interestingly, Robertson uses the later book to extract 'bikas' (development), not GENOCIDE though the presenter claims that those books are used as a point of motivation to build his arguments. Robertson's point of motivation seems misplaced if one knows what Truer is arguing in his book. Questioning the "dead Indian" narrative and certain thesis stressed by Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Truer emphasizes that "The year 1890 was not the end of us, our cultures, our civilizations. It was a cruel, low, painful point, yes--maybe even the lowest point since European arrived in the New World--but a low point from which much of modern Indian and American life has emerged" (p. 15). Treuer insists that the US-led massacre was part of "its ongoing efforts to break up the Great Sioux Reservation into five smaller reservations so that Indians would have a harder time gathering in large numbers. The government also continued its missionary efforts, pushed through the policy of allotment that sought to impose individual property ownership on the Lakota, and stepped up the removal of Indian children to boarding schools far from the reservation" (p. 4). Nevertheless, these instances might also show how the Indigenous Peoples in the US rarely ended at that horrific 1890 moment where the U.S. cavalry killed more than 150 Sioux warriors. In addition to such a framework and historical realities, Robertson's work starts with the assumption that what the imperial government did and how the Indigenous Peoples resisted the genocide can be framed within the terrain of development. Of course, readers might find where the US imperial apologists appear benevolent always erasing certain history and blaming 'Other' for the cruel erasure. Decentering the main argument and evidence of a specific book embedded in a particular history and contemporary moment serving both the imperial and national elites and their social and material foundations is one of those ways.
Photo 1: Tikapur Conference 2019 brought Tharus residing in different parts of the globe. Laxman Tharu, a community leader and organizer was released a day before. The Nepal government dominated by the Hill Hindu nationalists safeguarded by the prison-military complex arrested him and many other Tharus protestors after the Tikapur conflict in August 2015. More than 50,000 Tharu community members attended the conference. Reshami Chaudhary shared this photo with me.
Moreover, one might find how certain imperial history led by the US contributed to the land dispossession of Tharus and destroyed their social, political, economic, and ecological history while benefiting the project of Hindu nationalism in Nepal. These dynamics still affect both the broader politics of Nepal and also trans-national and local Indigenous movements. According to Resham Tharu (name changed), a community organizer also shared her critique. She said, "Robertson is mainly centered in Chitwan and such positioning also neglects different forms of violence the Tharu communities experienced residing in the other parts of the country." Her statement also shows the ways certain researcher tends to position himself concerning the imperial history often at the expense of violence impacting Indigenous communities.
Apart from his theoretical framework, Robertson's position mainly bodily position in presenting the virtual talk (looking down) occupying certain space and set of specific social and material realities he refers to must be questioned. Every resource disciplined and controlled to produce specific narratives and positions erasing imperial history must be critically analyzed as, without all of those politics and mechanisms, not only words on paper are rarely ordered, typed, and printed often contributing to produce *intellectual McCarthyism, these theoretical moves could shape and restrict Indigenous futures.
Moreover, I stopped myself listening to the available recording shared by Martin Chautari, a research organization centered in Kathmandu right there. Anyways, both foreigners and other elite scholars need to stop assuming Tharus and many other Indigenous Peoples never resisted the process of Hindu national formations. What Tharus continue to experience can never be categorized as 'Tales' which Robertson's presentation also implies but the Tharus' and other Indigenous Peoples will never rest challenging multiple dehumanizing and ungender-ing conditions marked and strengthened by both national and imperial ideologies, structures, epistemology, ontology, narratives, myths, relations, and so on. Better scholars with possible access to dominant sections of US and European countries need to do more digging about their own US and European imperial history and how that still destroys Tharus and affects their multiple relations.
For more:
https://www.recordnepal.com/portfolio/lavkant-chaudhary/
https://twitter.com/TashiTewa/status/1339936587979894786
https://www.iwgia.org/en/nepal/2289-nepal-tharu-indigenous-peoples-clash-at-protest-le.html
https://cijnepal.org.np/00017-2019/
https://www.recordnepal.com/wire/trouble-in-tikapur/
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