Ethnoautobiography —

The Struggle for the Human Right of Visionary Sovereignty: An Introduction

Jürgen W. Kremer

Ethnoautobiograpy (EA) is both a practice of personal transformative inquiry as well as a research methodology that aims to establish decolonial islands in the midst of the horrors of our present challenges and crises. Today Indigenous peoples the world over are continuing to fight on behalf of their sovereignty, their traditions and rituals that embody their profound understanding of ecological entanglements. At the same time, “the West”, through the relentless forces of the capitalocene, has surrendered to separations and dissociations from intimate relationships with nature, from our other-than-human and more-than-human relations.

The critical issue here is not merely a difference in worldviews or ideologies, but practices which create radically different worlds. World making.

What is at stake is the freedom, the fundamental human right, to embody and practice visionary sovereignty, i.e., the right for all humans to live in a decolonial world that is structured by their intimate and intricate dialogues within the web of life and the stories and practices emerging from it. The right to envision their own cultural world in their ecological world. This how hope arises and is maintained.

The contrast between these two worlds humans are creating is becoming evermore searing. Despite the ongoing genocide and war against Indigenous peoples, the majority of places with high biodiversity remain in Indigenous hands as they continue to embody their decolonial worlds, however limited, hampered, or restricted. Despite its incredible wealth, technological capacities, and AI, non-Indigenous people are in a run-away addictive paradigm and to this day have failed to address crises and challenges that globally create tremendous personal suffering every day, whether by way of environmental destruction and climate catastrophe, or increasing economic inequality, or more recently: (self)destructive political polarization, to mention just a few obvious issues.

The horrors of the crises we are living in call upon us to stubbornly insist on the affirmation and remembrance of what it means to be an aware, entangled participant in livable, sustainable communities that celebrate the intra-active¹ balance of all beings that are part of our complex ecological weavings, manifesting in different dimensions, from the physical to the spiritual.

Such participation requires a sense of self that sees itself as part of a process embedded in larger sets of minds (or consciousness or spirits) and their mattering process (in the double sense of how they matter and how they manifest in matter). It requires the awareness and remembrance of relationality and interdependence in the most profound Indigenous sense as it is lived to this day by aboriginal peoples the world over. For those of us who have lost this quality of attention and presence, its remembrance calls for the assertion and embodiment—the enactment—of visionary sovereignty.

The measure of ethnoautobiography thus is its contribution to the persistence and rise of visionary sovereignty, i.e., a process that seeks to contribute to dismantling the continuing impact of colonial histories; the reversal of dissociative self-colonization (i.e., internal colonial relationships with those aspects of self that the Western discourse largely discounts—the body, emotions, etc.); and the re/connection with ancestral indigenous ways of being in the world, connections with practices that seek to embody hope.

Part of the EA process invites a complexification of the self through awareness of the multiple weavings that are part of the total self process. This is described in great detail in Ethnoautobiography—Stories and Practices for Unlearning Whiteness, Decolonization, Uncovering Ethniticities (Kremer & Jackson-Paton, 2014). The process of ethnoautobiography was initially inspired and guided by Apela Colorado’s work on Indigenous science and the recovery of indigenous mind (Colorado, 1994). The image below depicts some central qualities of EA inquiries.

In the final contribution to this issue, “Ethnoautobiograpy, Accountability, and Virtual Spaces,” Leny Mendoza Strobel, who midwifed the Ethnoautobiography book, describes this process of recovering indigenous mind as

1. connection to ancestors;
2. belonging to community;
3. knowing History and healing its shadows;
4. paying attention to dreams and imaginal realms;
5. cultivating a mythic imagination;
6. developing storytelling skills;
7. respecting gender fluidity and sexual orientations;
8. nurturing a faith or spiritual practice; and
9. reconnection with Nature.

She connects this process with the Filipino indigenous psychology of Kapwa, “The Self is in the Other” and the “Original Instructions” many Native peoples talk about.

The artist, scholar, and activist Lyla June points to the specific quality of our current historical moment in one of her songs: “And this time it isn’t just Indians vs. Cowboys / Now, this time, it is all the beautiful races of humanity / Together on the same side / And we are fighting to replace our fear – with love / And this time bullets & arrows & cannonballs won’t save us / The only weapons that will help us in this battle / Are the weapons of truth, faith, and compassion”²

Lyla June is descended from Diné, Tsétsêhéstâhese, and European lineages. She describes her process of becoming whole, after suffering prejudice and discrimination as “mutt” and “half-breed”, when she heard ancient European voices whisper: “See, our songs are not so different from your Diné songs.”³

She reminds us of the indigenous roots of all peoples, the precious and precarious process of visionary sovereignty, an aspiration central to indigenous beingknowing and presence.

“Sovereignty as motion and transmotion is heard and seen in oral presentations, the pleasures of native memories and stories, and understood in the values of human and spiritual motion in languages. Sovereignty is transmotion and used here in most senses of the word motion; likewise, the ideas and conditions of motion have a deferred meaning that reach, naturally, to other contexts of action, resistance, dissent, and political controversy. The sovereignty of motion means the ability and the vision to move in imagination and the substantive rights of motion in native communities” (Vizenor, 19XX, p. 182; italics JWK). Process (trans/motion), memory, multiplicity, imagination, and action in the world are markers of the human right to visionary sovereignty. It is a freedom very different from the freedom to click “like” among options presented by the digital economy.

Motion in imagination and as embodied action happens as part of intricate Indigenous networks across time and this is, as Simpson (2017) insists, As We Have Always Done, the title of her book on “Indigenous freedom through radical resistance.”

She describes her nation Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig as “the place where we all live and work together. Where Nishnaabeg are in deep relationship with each other. Our nation is a hub of Nishnaabeg networks. It is a long kobade [links in the chain between generations, J.W.K.], cycling through time. It is a web of connections to each other, to the plant nations, the animal nations, the rivers and lakes, the cosmos, and our neighboring Indigenous Nations.

Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig is an ecology of intimacy. It is an ecology of relationships in the absence of coercion, hierarchy, or authoritarian power” (p. 8). In such Indigenous worlds, dreams have been valued as part of the shimmering and porousness of their sense of self. Dreams are an active presence in the Indigenous web of selves entangled in community and nature, offering an altogether different quality of self-understanding and story contrasting what has emerged from the history of coloniality and Western scientific progress. These indigenous worlds are present to a sense of time that is multi-layered and grounded in ritual endeavors and natural observations—time has not yet been atomized into incoherent digital events populating the screen.

These descriptions of Indigenous presence and sovereignty, which circumscribe the meaning of ‘de/coloniality,’ inevitably pose challenges for those of us, like myself, who have not been socialized to embody such ecology of intimacy: How can we recover such practice of presence? What are our ways to assert visionary sovereignty? How do we discover practices for visionary sovereignty in non-indigenous contexts today? What are the challenges along the way? Ethnoautobiography provides one possible way to discover answers.

Leny Mendoza Strobel begins this issue by discussing some of her experiences with students when teaching the ethnoautobiographical process. She highlights how the young ones “center their Ethno in their autobiographies. They are finding and reconnecting with their Ancestors, sometimes even healing the trauma they have inherited. They are holding the Grief of unrepentant generations before them. And they rise up and learn to trust each other to up-end this modern life.”

She discusses war as unprocessed grief and underlines the importance of inviting the shadow of imperial/colonial and modern history, then, “when the Heart speaks and engages the Mind and Soul, Healing begins.”

James W. Perkinson’s profound and moving piece offers his “white man confession” as he struggles to learn “to live with blood on my hands.” He doesn’t permit himself shortcuts or excuses. He challenges us “not to stay put in white guilt (though guilt is a necessary moment in facing into any form of involvement with injustice).” Nature, our tree, animal, rock, mountain relations, can be important in our ethnoautobiographical inquiry, but so can the inner city. “Without question my most profound spiritual formation and emotional education has been ‘ghetto’ street life over the course of four decades.” He emphasizes that

in the process, I found myself gradually disabused of my white supremacist arrogance of presuming to help other people, and gradually began to be able to see the amazing survival skills and creativity of folk who could elaborate minimal physical resources into social relations of immense vitality and insight, and make the desperation of poverty yield astonishing beauty in spite of itself.

He has the courage to revision the biblical tradition and asserts that “in its inception it was merely one form of indigenous codification, relevant and true only to its very limited and particular ecological context. In its later claim to universal application, it becomes increasingly reprehensible and nearly insufferable.” The challenge to confront globalizing structures is impeded by “cognitive murk” that obstructs the critical perception of the destructive processes of modernity/coloniality. Supremacy is ingrained in our Western notions of civilization, modernity, and progress. In the face of protest movements that nonetheless have emerged and that so often have been digested by the capitalist system, he notes his fear that we might “end up developing rites of healing … within the digestive tract of what ‘already has us’. We will only feed the monster.” The depth of his inquiry sets an example of how to slay the monster breath by breath and step by step, patiently, relentlessly, compassionately, with open-heartedness.

Leny Mendoza Strobel’s “Elegant Disintegration” invites the reader “to look for the threads that connect your story to mine.” She hones in on an important quality of ethnoautobiographical inquiries: “the loosening of my grip on Certainty.” Without loosening the seams of our habitual notions of self, the boundaries of the masterful modern self, the emptiness at its center cannot be filled with nurturing connections. So she emphasizes not only the role of personal history, but also the importance of place for ethnoautobiographical inquiries:

I notice that over the three decades that I’ve lived in one place, there are fewer hummingbirds, no more murmurations of starlings, lesser buzzing from bees, the sadness of ancient trees as they are thirsty from this drought—I see this. I feel the grief sitting on my chest. I feel the tears welling up. Then I lay myself on the ground to look up at the blue sky, vast and limitless … and I disappear. I am Present. I am Presence. In my elegant disintegration, I Am and We Are.

With this comes profound self-acceptance: “I do not regret, disown, or forget all the parts of me—the good colonial child and all of her stories of dismemberment—all belong to my big and beautiful Self.” In the end, although her straight and narrow life has totally fallen apart, she notices: “I feel more whole and alive than I’ve ever been.”

Leta Kingfisher describes the intricacies of belonging as she suffers the consequences of colonial definitions of her identity, the insidious, genocidal impact of settler patriarchal practices, and then the process of asserting and claiming her powers as woman healer in the midst of adverse forces. Just like Lyla June, she was considered a ‘half-breed’, a derogatory term. Any traditional understanding of Indigenous belonging was limited by the changing Canadian legislation that determined who is an Indian and who is not.

Leta Kingfisher critically examines hypocrisies and cultural contradictions in Cree cultural taboos. She traces the patriarchal shifts in the understanding of a woman’s healing power while asserting her own connections with the Spirit World. “Once I made the decision to step outside the cultural confines of my gender role, the Spirits rushed in.”

She challenges the one-sided presumption that communal identification is the only way to be acknowledged as healer—as if “the Spirits play no part in who they choose, and that colonization and the Indian Act never happened.”

Anchored in the deep work with her Spirit Teacher she engages in a woman-based cosmology that contrasts with the common Plains Cree cosmology of male directional Spirits; part of her cosmology is a Celtic Ancestor. Leta Kingfisher describes the obstacles and challenges along her path, resulting at one point in a confrontation with a male Elder who represents the prevailing patriarchal paradigm; but then the Elder who had invited her rose to the challenge by asserting “We raised a Pipe, asking the Creator to send someone to help us… And she’s here! She’s one of us.”

She “felt the Spirits speak through the Elder that day, reminding me that I had a purpose.” While feeling that broad acceptance might never come, Leta continues to do what she has been called to do—there was “no other option.” “Now I am content in my life and with the way the Spirits guide me, protect me and counsel me.”

Ethnoautobiographical explorations inevitably encounter conundrums and paradoxes. “What does it mean to do “Indigenous “ work in the diaspora within a context where we find ourselves living on other native peoples’ lands?” is the beginning of a longer question S. Lily Mendoza asks as she recounts “Lessons from Ethnoautobiography—Conundrums of Indigenous Reclamation in Today’s World.” She acknowledges that EA work is “shadow work all the way down” as she confronts the deeper aspects of the history of colonization. Reclaiming tradition, she asserts, “requires, first and foremost, that we make ourselves responsible to the living Indigenous communities who are being streamrolled relentlessly by these processes—processes that ultimately benefit the likes of us who live modern, comfortable lifestyles, albeit decolonizing and indigenizing ‘wannabes’.”

In response to Alfred Taiaiake’s reminder that “it doesn’t matter whether your people were brought here to North America through historic colonization, as far as native peoples are concerned, you are still settlers,” she asks “what does it mean for me, a diasporic Filipina, and for our people, to take seriously my/our relationship to the land of our exile and her original people?” Ethno-accounting is the process of full awareness of the layers of histories of the places we live in, an accounting of colonial settlement.

Ethnoautobiography as a framework for doing Indigenous reclamation safeguards precisely against this pitfall (of spiritual bypassing). It does this by demanding that we do the hard work of taking up our collective shadow work both in regard to the colonizer’s imperial projections (and our own internalized versions of them) and in regard to our relationship with native/Indigenous folk and other non-human kin in our respective dwelling places.

It means acknowledging that any “claim to mastery and supremacy is nothing more than a compensatory substitute for the grief of loss”. Lily Mendoza quotes Apela Colorado commenting on EA as “ceremony of life. Through the process of ethnoautobiography we can become full participants around the sacred fire of Indigenous spirituality”. This is an image of visionary sovereignty and decolonial presence.

By now hundreds of students have used this process in undergraduate and graduate courses (and a number of doctoral dissertations applying EA as methodology have been completed).

Randy Sanda’s intermediate report, “Places Left Unfinished”, is the result of enrolling in a class using the EA approach. He describes a bow hunting experience and how his relationship with all the inhabitants of the forest shifted as a consequence of exploring his identity, his ancestral lines.

Toward the end of his contribution he states: “I am the hunter, and I am the arrow. I am myself. I had a pretty little view of the world before this class. That world has shattered, and below I see the pieces of not just my world, but others’ worlds as well. I see the world of the Native Americans, turned upside down by colonization. I see the racism others face daily, and the way others just take these events as commonalities in today’s world.” Randy’s essay opens a window into the nature of the EA process. It is a beautiful example, and it is important to keep in mind that the process works differently for each individual, the starting and ending points are always different, with ancestry as pivotal ingredient.

Leny Mendoza Strobel, in the final article of this issue, “Ethnoautobiography, Accountability, and Virtual Spaces.” discusses the call-out culture in diasporic Filipino communities and on college campuses as well as the commodification of spirituality, especially as it manifests in transformation festivals.

One of the important questions she asks is: “How can social media enable spaces for respectful dialogue instead of perpetuating the deeply flawed binary/dualistic ways of thinking and othering?” She gives examples of difficult, failed, and stalled dialogues.

In these situations, the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS) “takes the position of humble learners in the face of complex and layered issues around decolonization and re-indigenization that claim to be grounded in Filipino indigenous spirituality (to the extent that can be articulated) and embodied practices.”

The focus in any dialogue is on Kapwa, the centerpiece of Filipino/a psychology (the self in the other).“ This practice is “framed by Ethnoautobiography, the focus is on the practice of radical presence and participatory presence—both undergirded by critical humility.”

Leny Strobel stresses the importance of addressing historical shadow material and the personal and collective grief that arises once we embark on this difficult journey. Indeed, “Ethnoautobiography recommends that we make room for ritual-making, for storytelling, for remembering and honoring ancestors and the original instructions.

EA encourages work with dreams and mythic stories, with the imaginal realms; talks about responsibility and accounting, humility and compassion; about the importance of learning how to dwell in a Place.”

Virtual spaces and transformative festivals require ethno-accountability, the engagement with this subtle, complex, and so often anxiety-provoking and challenging process. Overcoming histories burdened by shadow material requires our courage, our open heartedness, our determination to step into polarized spaces with this kind of process map in hand, importantly with an openness to not knowing and knowing anew.

Ethnoautobiography has clear minimum assumptions (the nine qualities illustrated above), but just as with any recipe, it is the art of the exploration that matters, the courage to be present to conundrums and subtleties, to engage with shadow material, to face painful personal and ancestral memories as well as painful confrontations. Such presence entails self-love, compassion, and forgiveness. Our intimate intra-actions in the web of life and our creative imagination give birth to and rebirth a grounded practice of hope.

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Endnotes

1. Barad distinguishes interaction from intra-action; “interaction” is the term used for left-hemisphere dominated cognitive processes resulting in the creation of separate objects; “intra-action” “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad, 2007, p. 33; italics in original).
   
2. Lyla June, Rise Up and Sing, retrieved from https://www.riseupandsing.org/songs/all-nations-rise 2/11/24
   
3. Lyla June, Reclaiming our Indigenous European Roots, retrieved from https://moonmagazineeditor.medium.com/lyla-june-reclaiming-our-indigenous-european-roots-64685c7fc960 2/11/14

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References

Colorado, A. (1994). Indigenous Science and Western Science: A Healing Convergence. Presentation at the World Sciences Dialog I, New York City, April 15-17, 1994.

Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done. University of Minnesota Press.

Vizenor, G. (2000). Fugitive Poses. University of Nebraska Press.