Unsettling Intercultural Communication

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the contributors of this book for their thoughtful, rigorous, and much needed scholarship. This anthology took longer than it should have, and we thank the contributors for their patience. Thank you as well to the editorial staff at Peter Lang, and series editor, Dr. Thomas Nakayama, for his support of this project.

Santhosh thanks Bernadette for not giving up on him and for the mentorship that she has offered on this project and beyond. This anthology was compiled as I accumulated several personal losses, including the death of my parents, extended family members, and friends due to Covid. Thanks, amma and appa, for giving me the strength to keep going. My students at the University of Denver, who continue to hold the institution accountable to its colonial past, are also owed gratitude in so small measure. My partner, Daoine S. Bachran, who has been a great source of strength and love during these dark times; my four-legged kid, Mocha, who departed midway through this project (another loss); and Niko and Chandra, my current four-legged pals who bring great joy into my life, have all made this book possible. I could not have asked for a better family!

Lastly, I will be remiss if I did not thank the community in Albuquerque where I completed my graduate education. The conversations that I had there with Indigenous people, especially my elders and friends Amalia and Maria, were my first introduction to the ways in which settler colonialism continues to be a living force in the everyday life of Native communities and beyond. Those interactions have shaped me intellectually and politically in more ways than I can understand, and the best parts of this book bear those imprints.

Bernadette is grateful to Santhosh for being such a wonderful colleague and collaborator. Thank you to my colleagues, staff, and students in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University for their continued support. You continue to keep me engaged and inspired. Finally, thank you to Joshua Calafell and Raven Calafell for their love, kindness, and patience throughout the process of working this text and always.

Introduction: Indigeneity in the Position of the Unthought

In June 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered two judgements with far-reaching consequences. In a widely anticipated move, the court criminalized abortion in its June 24 ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. Five justices led by Samuel Alito struck down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had upheld the right to abortion as part of the right to privacy protected by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth amendments, and the Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey ruling that had declared that the right to obtain an abortion was part of the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause (United States Supreme Court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). The justices argued that neither was such a right rooted in the history and tradition of the U.S., nor was it an essential component of the nation’s “ordered liberty” (United States Supreme Court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization 2). Noting that abortion was largely criminal under common law up until Roe, the judgement reasoned that this history was critical in arbitrating whether the right to obtain an abortion is protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. In effect, the court held that the constitution does not guarantee right to abortion, and returned the issue to “the people and their elected representatives” (United States Supreme Court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization 1).

On June 29, just a few days after delivering its earlier judgement, the court in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta held that states hold concurrent jurisdiction with the federal government to prosecute crimes committed by non-Indians against Indians¹ in their territory (United States Supreme Court, Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta), thereby enlarging the control of non-Indian political entities over tribal affairs. Victor Manuel Castro-Huerta, who was sentenced by a state court to 35 years in prison on a child abuse charge, had approached the courts arguing that the state of Oklahoma did not have legal standing to prosecute a non-Indian such as himself for a crime committed against his stepdaughter, an enrolled member of the Cherokee nation, as this was the prerogative of the federal government. Noting that “Indian country is part of a State, not separate from it” (United States Supreme Court, Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta 3), the court held that federal law superseded state jurisdiction under ordinary principles of federal preemption or when state jurisdiction would interfere with tribal self-government, both of which were not at issue here. As such, the Supreme Court upheld the right of individual states to prosecute non-Indians for crimes committed against Indians within their boundaries.

The Dobbs decision created a firestorm in U.S. society and in many places across the globe² as people watched the rollback of reproductive rights in horror. In a remarkable turn of events, some pro-abortion activists in the U.S. suggested that tribal nations set up abortion clinics on their land to provide safe havens for those seeking the procedure and to augment tribal revenues. But such demands are not only oblivious to the Hyde Amendment that prohibits tribal nations from using federal monies to perform abortions, except in specific circumstances (Kaur), but also constitute a telling instance of settler entitlement as the activists, many of whom were non-Indigenous, sought to dictate how tribal lands should be used. Indigenous commentators were also quick to point out that as Castro-Huerta had opened the doors for states to prosecute non-Indians for crimes committed against Indians, state entities could quickly seize on this ruling to pursue legal action against non-Indian doctors performing abortions on tribal members or for operating abortion clinics on tribal lands (Thompson), thereby rendering the demand moot.

But unlike Dobbs, the court’s decision in Castro Huerta barely registered outside of Indigenous communities. Although the judgment appears benevolent on its face as it increases the chances of prosecuting non-Indigenous who commit crimes against Indians,³ tribal nations and activists were justifiably worried about its impact on tribal sovereignty as the judgment creates a legal precedent that could be used to gradually enlarge the jurisdiction of states and other settler entities over Indigenous people. As the Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. noted in a press release issued soon after the decision: “the Court failed in its duty to honor this nation’s promises, defied Congress’s statutes, and accepted the ‘lawless disregard of the Cherokee’s sovereignty’” (“Statement from Cherokee Nation Principal Chief on Supreme Court Decision in Oklahoma v. Castro Huerta”).

We open this introduction by drawing attention to these two judgements as they illuminate the central goal of this anthology. Why, we may ask, has Dobbs evoked widespread criticism not just in the U.S. but across the globe, while Castro-Huerta scarcely produced a murmur, even though it has overturned the very foundations of federal Indian law (Nagle) and, ipso facto, U.S. law? We proffer that the uneven reactions the judgements evoked exemplify how Indigeneity and its repression under settler-colonial logics continue to be situated in the “position of the unthought” (Day) in our political analysis. The central goal of this anthology is to interrupt this phenomenon by drawing upon the insights of critical Indigenous studies, especially American Indian studies, and, secondarily, settler-colonial studies to complement critical intercultural communication scholarship committed to social justice. Towards this end, the essays assembled here and authored by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, demonstrate how a turn to Indigeneity and settler-colonialism is indispensable to intercultural communication scholars as it can transform the questions that we ask and seek to answer in our work.

In positing that Indigeneity constitutes the “position of the unthought” within critical intercultural communication, we take our lead from Iyko Day. While the phrase is originally used by Afropessimist Jared Sexton who draws upon a conversation between Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson to argue that any politics of recognition leaves the Black slave in the “position of the unthought,” Day notes that it is often Indigeneity rather than Blackness that is consigned to this position. This is because institutional politics in the U.S. has for long ignored Indigeneity as a foundational category of analysis as the concepts that animate projects such as U.S. ethnic studies—which many intercultural communication scholars, including ourselves, draw upon—are often anchored in “race, citizenship, war and labor migration, and transnationalism and diaspora, to name only a few” (118). While Day is careful not to minimize the role of racial logics but seeks to supplement an analysis of racialization, especially anti-Blackness, with critical Indigenous studies’ critiques of settler colonialism, we find her point about the decentering of Indigeneity especially pertinent in the context of intercultural communication.

Take, for instance, the important conversations that #CommunicationSoWhite (Chakravartty et al.) evoked among communication studies scholars. Published in 2018 in the Journal of Communication, the essay presented with empirical evidence what many scholars of color knew instinctively and had talked about among ourselves for years: the foundational role of whiteness in structuring the discipline of communication studies, efforts towards diversity notwithstanding. Through an examination of the racial composition of authors whose articles were published and cited in leading journals between 1990 and 2016, the authors drew attention to how non-white scholars continued to be underrepresented as primary authors, under cited, and rarely invited to serve in editorial positions of leading communication journals, highlighting a structural phenomenon that needed urgent attention.

While we welcome the publication of such works that illuminate the continued hold of whiteness over the discipline, the occlusion of Indigeneity and settler colonialism in intercultural communication scholarship looks especially jarring to us when juxtaposed against this phenomenon. Put differently, while critical approaches in intercultural communication studies have increasingly explored inequalities structured by race, gender, sexuality, disability, and religion, among others, Indigeneity and settler colonialism are still largely absent from such analysis. In fact, except for rhetorical studies scholars (Lake, “Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric”; Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric”; Tiara R. Na’puti; Tiara R Na’puti; Black; Kelly; Kelly and Black; Lechuga), the field of communication studies as a whole lags behind in this regard. As such, the essays here explore the importance of Indigeneity and settler colonialism for critical intercultural communication scholars. To be clear, we are not offering these as additives but as central analytics that can transform the very onto-epistemological foundations of intercultural communication studies.

In the next section, we present our conception of Indigeneity and settler colonialism by primarily drawing upon the works of scholars in critical Indigenous studies and settler-colonial studies. This section highlights the central intellectual, political, and activist projects that animate critical Indigenous studies which, we believe, intercultural communication scholars should also take seriously. We then survey critical intercultural communication scholarship as it centers an analysis of power as foundational to a study of culture, before identifying some ways in which attention to Indigeneity and its repression under settler colonialism could inform the work happening in the field. The last section introduces readers to the essays contained in the anthology and elaborates on how the contributors bring Indigeneity and settler colonialism to bear on intercultural communication scholarship.

Before we move further, we want to present our own identities and subject positioning here to render transparent the political, ideological, and ethical interests we bring to this project. Santhosh is a middle-class, lowered-caste, male-passing queer scholar from Bengaluru, India, who lived in Albuquerque comprising the unceded homelands of the Pueblo peoples and other southwestern tribes, before moving to Denver, which is located on the unceded territories of the Cheyenne, the Arapahoe, the Ute, and many other tribes that have traversed these lands. Santhosh’s work engages Indian American racialization in the U.S. as structured at the intersection of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, caste/ism, and Islamophobia. His experiences in the U.S. of being enumerated as a person of color for diversity purposes, often at the cost of domestic Indigenous and Black people, has played a significant role in envisioning this anthology. Bernadette Marie Calafell is a middle-class, cisgender femme queer Chicana scholar from Phoenix, Arizona, which comprises the unceded homelands of the O’Odham and Piipaash peoples. She currently resides in Spokane, Washington which is located on the unceded territories of the Spokane, Pend d’Oreille, and Ktunaxa peoples. Bernadette’s scholarship is focused on women of color feminisms, queer of color theory, performance, monstrosity, and critical rhetoric. As a Chicana who has white privilege, and a mestiza, Bernadette recognizes her complicated relationship with indigeneity.