The Global War on Tribes



Mapping, Indigenous Research Ethics, and the “Global War on Tribes”

Zoltan Grossman

Native peoples around Indian Country were perplexed and angered by the use of “Geronimo” as a code word for Osama Bin Laden during the raid that killed him.

Native leaders have expressed similar concern about the naming of military weapons systems and operations after Native peoples and leaders--from Apache helicopters to Operation Crazy Horse. Such terms, they assert, do not honor Native people, but designate them as “savage,” equate them with an “enemy,” and dishonor the many Native people who have served in disproportionate numbers in the U.S. armed forces.

The military use of Native imagery is nothing new, and reveals a much deeper and historic use of the Indian Wars as a template and justification for foreign wars. This pattern has been repeated since the earliest days of U.S. military expansion. Manifest Destiny has always been always template for overseas expansion, as a divine mission to occupy foreign lands, undermine the sovereignty of foreign nations, divide and “civilize” foreign peoples, and exploit their natural resources. The “Indian Wars” have always been the model for foreign military interventions, the “Army forts” a model for foreign military bases, and the “Indian scouts” the model for foreign proxy troops.

U.S. colonization of Native lands was justified by “liberating” Native people from “paganism.” As Richard Drinnon states in his 1981 classic Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-hating and Empire-building, “In each and every West, place itself was infinitely less important …than what the white settlers brought in their heads and hearts to that particular place. At each magic margin, their metaphysics of Indian-hating underwent a seemingly confirmatory ‘perennial rebirth.’ ….All along, the obverse of Indian-hating had been the metaphysics of empire-building….Winning the West amounted to no less than winning the world”

The connection between internal and external colonialism have been evident since the expansion of the frontier, and the annexation of northern Mexico. Secretary of State William Seward foresaw that expansion “must continue to move on westward” to Alaska, Central America, and beyond “the shores of the Pacific Ocean,” in order to complete Columbus’s original vision of reaching Asia.

To prepare Americans for an overseas empire, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows were often accompanied by Pawnee Bill’s Great Far East shows.

The key moment in imperial expansion into the Pacific and Caribbean came in the aftermath of the 1898 Spanish-American War, when the U.S. annexed the Philippines and other Spanish colonies, Hawai’i, Samoa, and the Panama Canal Zone. Secretary of State John Hay described the “splendid little war” as part of a “general plan of opening a field of enterprise in those distant regions where the Far West becomes the Far East.”

Most of the generals who conquered these territories were veteran commanders in the Indian Wars, such as General Nelson Miles.

Troops returning from the Philippines were in turn used to suppress the Leech Lake uprising in Minnesota.

The War Department set up the Bureau of Insular Affairs (or BIA) to govern the island territories.

The Philippines as “Indian Country”

Troops had been sent to “liberate” Filipinos from Spanish rule, but then colonized the islands in the Philippine-American War. Many Indian War techniques, such as torture

and mass execution of rebel fighters, burning villages and crops, and rounding up survivors into reservation-like stockades, were perfected in the Philippines.

In response, rebels said they would “withdraw to the mountains and repeat the North American Indian warfare.”

U.S. soldiers were told that Filipinos were “savages no better than our Indians,” and ordered to “Apply the chastening rod…until they come into the reservation and promise to be good ‘Injuns’” As U.S. companies took over vast areas for plantations, the military armed Philippine Constabulary scouts to fight the rebels.

Theodore Roosevelt asserted in 1900 that “The presence of troops in the Philippines…has no more to do with militarism and imperialism than had their presence in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wyoming during the many years which elapsed before the final outbreaks of the Sioux were…put down.”

Yet Governor-General William Howard Taft said of Filipinos in 1902 , “It is possible for us to govern them as we govern the Indian tribes.” Indigenous peoples from both North America and the Philippines were displayed like subhuman trophies of war at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair.

Despite opposition from anti-imperialists such as William Jennings Bryan and Mark Twain, the 14-year war left 4,000 US soldiers and a quarter-million Filipinos dead.

Throughout the 20th century, the connection between Manifest Destiny and overseas wars became abundantly clear, as Uncle Sam added more conquered peoples to his empire (in this racist cartoon, “His family is large and still getting bigger, the result of good work in snapping the trigger”),

US colonial authorities sought through residential-school style education to assimilate the new colonial subjects to capitalist values.

The concept of Asia as frontier was carried forward through the 20th century.

As General Douglas Macarthur stated (during the Korean War) at the 1951 Seattle Centennial, "To the early pioneer the Pacific Coast marked the end of his courageous westerly advance--to us it should mark but the beginning. To him it delimited our western frontier--to us that frontier has been moved beyond the Pacific horizon.”

Vietnam as “Indian Country”

Nowhere was “westward imperialism” as clear as in the Vietnam War, which U.S. leaders justified as “liberating” the people from Communism. One Admiral had a sign on his office door equating “Injun fightin’ and Counterinsurgency. U.S. Marines “considered all areas outside their small circular fortresses to be ‘Indian Country’.”

U.S. forces created “free-fire zones,” where they could open fire on anyone that moves,

and herded farmers within them into “Strategic Hamlets,” which were based on “the old stockade idea our ancestors used against the Indians.”

Agent Orange was described as the “U.S. policy of massive defoliation, crop destruction, bombing and plowing of Indochina…as a modern counterpart to the extermination of the bison in the American West.”

Many Native peoples recognized the similarity between the 1968 My Lai Massacre, in to the Wounded Knee Massacre. One of the infantrymen who carried out the shootings agreed he was motivated by “the Indian idea…the only good gook is a dead gook.” Has America’s historic driving wave westward crested?

Five years later, when Native fighters took a stand at Wounded Knee, some Native Vietnam veterans were among them.

The CIA armed highland indigenous peoples (such as Montagnards in South Vietnam and Hmong in Laos) to use as proxy troops and scouts against lowland rebels. In this divide-and-conquer process, the historic differences between the minority and majority ethnic groups were worsened, and the indigenous fighters were abandoned as the war went sour.

The Pentagon turned the fighting over to allied troops as part of President Nixon’s “Vietnamization” campaign to withdraw GIs out of harm’s way, to “change the color of the corpses,” but they lost in 1975.

Iraq as “Indian Country”

The frontier imagery was resurrected in the 1991 Gulf War, when U.S. forces were sent to “liberate” Kuwait from Iraq. General Neal wanted U.S. forces to be certain of speedy victory once they committed land forces to ‘Indian Country.’”

Soldiers were trained that Iraqis were “towelheads” or “hajis,” the new terms for “injuns” or “gooks.”

The U.S. also pit Kurds and Shi’a Arabs against Sunni Arab “tribes,” but then abandoned their rebellions. Like in previous wars, when oppressed peoples (with their very real grievances) are no longer needed, Washington quickly abandons its defense of their “human rights.” We love ‘em, we use ‘em, and then we dump ‘em.

After its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. created a new Iraqi government and privatized most industries, much as Native lands had been privatized and allotted in North America.

As that occupation went sour, it stimulated insurgencies among both Sunni and Shi’a Arabs, and the Pentagon began to divide and conquer tribal groups within the Sunni provinces. The Military Review reported that “Tribal engagement …reflects the enduring strength of the tribes.”

In a repeat of “Vietnamization” and earlier wars, the U.S. also begun turning the fight over to Iraqi proxy troops.

In the Wall Street Journal, analyst and author Robert D. Kaplan brazenly compared Iraq to “Indian Country”: “…the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians. …. Army and Marine field officers have embraced [the metaphor] it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century….The range of Indian groups, numbering in their hundreds, that the U.S. Cavalry…had to confront was no less varied than that of the warring ethnic and religious militias spread throughout Eurasia, Africa and South America in the early 21st century.”

Afghanistan/Pakistan as “Indian Country”

After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush repeatedly evoked the frontier, exclaiming “there's an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ” The NATO occupation has focused on the Taliban insurgency in the Pashtun ethnic regions in Afghanistan, which straddle the border with northwestern Pakistan “frontier provinces.” Bush commented in 2007, “Taliban and Al Qaeda figures do hide in remote regions of Pakistan. This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West.”

The U.S. media still consistently refers to this “frontier” as a “lawless” tribal region. But the New York Times admits, “Led by councils of elders, tribes provided their members with protection, financial support, a means to resolve disputes.” The Council on Foreign Relations reported that pitting Pashtun tribes against each other to defeat the Taliban “would renew tribal rivalries that had been dormant for years.”

Though American magazines describe the insurgents as “savages” in a lawless frontier, it is clear that the tribes have long exercised customary laws.

Of course, when Bin Laden was finally located, he was living in comfort far from the tribal “frontier.”

Tribal regions

Tribal regions are local areas where tribes are the dominant form of social organization, and tribal identities often trump state, ethnic, and even religious identities. Tribal peoples have a strongly localized orientation, tied to a particular place and clan kinship ties. Tribes are distinct from ethnic groups.

Ethnic group identity is based largely on language, such as Pashtun, Somali, and so on. In most countries, “tribes” refer to internal divisions within these ethnic nations, based on smaller and older regional clans and local dialects (such as Zubaydi in Iraq, Wazir in Pakistan, or Darod in Somalia). Within the U.S. itself, nations are downgraded as “tribes,” and tribes are often called merely “bands.” So the Wazir “tribe” within the Pashtuns is roughly equivalent to the Oglala “band” of the Lakota Nation, or the Nisqually within the Coast Salish Nation.

Tribes can be viewed as the building blocks for ethnic nations, but in many countries (even in Europe) the cement has never really dried. Tribal regions in the Middle East and Central Asia function as a layer below ethnic and religious territories, which in turn function as a layer below modern states and their colonial boundaries. Contemporary armed conflicts in the region can be best understood not as struggles between political ideologies, but between these different layers of collective identity. In Iraq, tribes can even straddle the divide between Sunni and Shi’a.

The New Battlegrounds

Tribal loyalties have become a key element in the expanding Long War, as the Pentagon is increasing missile and gunship attacks, Special Forces raids, and proxy invasions-- in the name of combating “Islamist terrorism.” First in Yemen, where the London Times reports the country’s “mountainous terrain, poverty and lawless tribal society make it a close match for Afghanistan as a new terrorist haven,”

and in Somalia (where clan or tribal identity still plays a role in the civil war),

in Libya, where Qadhafi and NATO-backed rebels competed for tribal loyalties, yet within all these countries, the main targets of the wars are predominantly “tribal regions,” and the old frontier language of Indian-fighting and alliances is becoming the lexicon of 21st-century counterinsurgency.

The “Global War on Terror” is fast morphing into a “Global War on Tribes.” Modern counterinsurgency doctrine only views tribal regions as festering cauldrons of lawlessness, and “havens” or “breeding grounds” for terrorism, unless the tribes themselves are turned against the West’s enemies. This threatening view of tribal regions is, of course, as old as European colonialism itself. In The Thistle and the Drone, Akbar Ahmed wrote that wars against such Tribal Islamic communities “may well bring about the destruction of one of the oldest forms of human society.”

As Dr. Daniel Wildcat states, “Given that the United States’ current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are often couched in terms of civilization versus tribalism, it may be hard for many Americans to imagine that something tribal or of indigenous origin could be anything other than primitive and uncivilized…” (p. 35).

In 2011, the U.S. submitted a brief in a military commission case reviewing the conviction of a War on Terror suspect, comparing Seminole resisters in the 1810s engaged “irregular warfare,” with al Qaeda.

Antiwar activist Tom Hayden traced back the language in new counterinsurgency manuals advocating divide-and-conquer strategies, directly to military training manuals from the Indian Wars.

John Hall’s 2009 book Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War, examines how the divide-and-conquer strategy of tribal nations in 1832 Wisconsin resonates with counterinsurgency planners today. One Army Brigadier General comments that this book “is instructive as the United States and its allies confront tribal societies in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan while endeavoring to defeat transnational enemies and shape the course of local conflicts that predated our involvement there.”

As Arundhati Roy commented after visiting Naxalite rebels in India, “If you look at Afghanistan, Waziristan…the northeast states of India, the entire thing is a tribal uprising. In Afghanistan, obviously, it’s taken the form of a radical Islamist uprising. And here [in India], it’s a radical left uprising. But the attack is the same. It’s a corporate attack…on these people. The resistance has taken different forms.” As Roy told me at a Seattle Town Hall, “Resistance is possible in those areas because they have an imagination outside this bar-coded capitalist society that everybody else lives in...that's why there's huge resistance there…a whole bandwidth of resistance that has actually managed for quite a few years now to stall the corporate onslaught.”

The Global War on Tribes has some common characteristics in all these countries. First, the war is most blatantly being waged to steal natural wealth under tribal lands, whether Iraqi oil or Alberta tar sands. The rugged, inaccessible terrain that prevented colonial powers from eliminating tribal societies also made accessing natural resources initially more difficult.

Second, the war is waged against the very existence of tribal regions that are not under the centralized control of states, and (in words of Victoria Tauli-Corpuz) are “obstacles to their progress.” The tribal regions still retain forms of communal social organization that has not been solely determined by global capitalism.

Third, their “community solidarity and collectivity” enables tribal peoples to fight back against state control and corporate globalization. That is why the “lawless tribal regions” have to be “tamed,” so as not to become a “festering sore,” and a source of resistance to the corporate state. The only way for tribal leaders not to be crushed by the counterinsurgency war is to accept its aims, its money, and its weapons.

During European colonial expansion, tribal peoples who could not muster large military alliances were more vulnerable to conquest and occupation. In most countries, the colonization process left them divided and fighting each other. In the 21st century-- just as many remaining pockets of exploitable resources are located in tribal regions--the only successful pockets of resistance may be found in the mountains, deserts and forests where tribal peoples refuse to die.

Indian Country as “Indian Country”

The story comes full circle back to Indian Country. In South and Central America, powerful and growing Indigenous tribal movements are increasingly being targeted by U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The National Intelligence Council projected in its report Mapping the Global Future 2020 that “the failure of elites to adapt to the evolving demands of free markets and democracy probably will fuel a revival in populism and drive indigenous movements, which so far have sought change through democratic means, to consider more drastic means” In a Military Review bibliography, the Foreign Military Studies Office or FMSO at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, lumped together “Insurgencies, Terrorist Groups and Indigenous Movements,” and in another article warned of Indigenous rebellions and other “insurgencies” in Mexico (5-6/97).

Since the Cold War, the Pentagon has funded established an alliance with U.S. universities. The U.S. military may have separate branches with different goals, it is not difficult to see how research funded by one branch can be used by another with a different intent.

After the start of the Iraq War, the FMSO sketched out the Human Terrain System as a collection of specially trained social scientists, particularly anthropologists, embedded with military units, to collect and analyze “human terrain information.”

The pilot project fit the philosophy of Leavenworth-based General David Petraeus, who concluded from his counterinsurgency experience in Iraq, that “cultural awareness is a force multiplier.” Petraeus wrote: “knowledge of the cultural ‘terrain’ can be as important as, and sometimes even more important than, knowledge of the geographic terrain.”

The project caused an enormous backlash within the discipline of anthropology, especially after embedded researchers were killed in the field, and the American Anthropological Association condemned the project.

Bowman Expeditions

The same year that the Human Terrain System began, over in geography a somewhat similar military-academic collaboration began more quietly. The Bowman Expeditions’ México Indígena Project was a partnership primarily of three men representing a larger collaboration between the American Geographical Society, the University of Kansas, and the FMSO next door at Fort Leavenworth. The Bowman Expeditions provides an ideal case study of the collaboration of geography in the Global War on Tribes.

The first figure was Peter Herlihy, (on the right) long a geography professor at the University of Kansas and a pioneer in indigenous participatory mapping projects in Honduras, Panama, Peru, and Mexico. He developed some of the earliest Indigenous participatory research mapping methodologies in Latin America in the early 1990s.

His stated goal in conducting the work was to establish tenure rights, land titling, which can be helpful for Indigenous peoples seeking to defend their territories from resource extraction companies.

But it can also be used, as it was in the allotment era in the U.S., to break up Native communal lands into privately helped tracts, or to identify areas that are still communally held as sources of instability.

The second figure was Jerome Dobson, president of the American Geographical Society or AGS, who left a position at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories to teach at KU in 2001. He had long dreamt of a series of AGS-backed open source research projects based on The Inquiry by AGS President Isaiah Bowman during World War I (drawing from earlier expeditions such as Lewis and Clark). Dobson proposed a deployment of academic teams around the world for “a pittance compared to what the intelligence community typically pays for far less effective information.” Dobson continued, “I circulated the proposal and found allies at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. They marketed the idea and funded a prototype for the larger concept that, ideally, would reach every country in the world.”

The third figure was retried Army Lt. Col. Geoffrey Demarest, graduate of the School of the Americas, senior researcher at the FMSO, and later a KU Ph.D. student. Demarest spent 23 years in the Army in multiple positions in countries at the height of counterinsurgency wars, such as Guatemala and Colombia as commander, attaché, intelligence analyst. His analysis used the lens of property: “The success of a society depends on construction of formal, liberal property regimes.”

In his 1998 book Geoproperty, Demarest stated, “The coming center of gravity of armed political struggles may be indigenous populations, youth gangs…or insurgents” and that the Internet is increasingly being used by “Indigenous rebels, feminists, troublemakers...”

Geoproperty was published during the formation of Plan Colombia, and he applied its theories (with the Defense Intelligence Agency) to counterinsurgency in Medellín.

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Demarest’s key goal was to map cadastral land ownership to prevent and respond to grassroots rebellion. In his Colombia = study, he stated that “formal land ownership” is necessary for material progress and social peace, and that its absence favors “illicit land use and violence” and “outlaw political and military behaviors.”

Property information collected by new technologies can be used to support police, military, developmental, and diplomatic programs, and “uncover enemy whereabouts.”

The three men, and the three institutions, began collaborating on the global Bowman Expeditions, with its first national project in 2005 called México Indígena. They met with General Petraeus during an AGS board meeting at Fort Leavenworth, home not only of the Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars, of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command’s G-2 (Intelligence) unit, which houses (in separate departments) both the Human Terrain System and the Foreign Military Studies Office. The FMSO funded the Bowman Expeditions to gather “open source intelligence” on foreign countries. It was Dobson who recognized that Herlihy’s methods could recruit Indigenous peoples’ participation in mapping their own territory, eliciting far more accurate data than either satellites or spies, in the service of Demarest’s militarized land privatization agenda.

In the México Indígena project, Herlihy first worked with the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí in mapping communal land titling in the Huasteca Potosina in central Mexico, and then expanded to the Sierra Juárez in Oaxaca. He shared all data with Radiance Technologies, a military contractor known for generating intelligence databases. The 1910 Mexican Revolution guaranteed peasants’ title to ejido communal lands, and Indigenous traditional titles, until reversed in the NAFTA era of the 1990s by the government’s PROCEDE privatization program.

A Mexico Indigena report prepared by the Radiance Research Team claimed that “it is perhaps indigenous peoples’ demands for land tenancy and territorial sovereignty where they have presented the most radical challenges to neoliberal regimes and democracy itself.” The same study observed that “the ‘War on Terror’…requires a…commitment to geographic fieldwork and analysis with bold new initiatives”.

Even though the data on Indigenous communal spaces could be useful to the Mexican police and Army, the Sierra Juárez communities were not adequately informed of the Army connections to the project. This was especially an omission considering the military repression of the 2006 teachers’ strikes in Oaxaca City, and intensified repression against rural Indigenous communities. In 2009, they wrote letters accusing the project directors of “geopiracy,” and demanded that the data be returned to the control of the communities.

One of the mapped communities, Tiltepec, said in a letter that year,

They never told us that the data they collected in our community would be turned over to the FMSO, nor did they inform us that this institution was one of the sources of funding for the project. For this reason, we believe that the researchers deceived our General Assembly in order to take information from us that served their own purposes.

In 2011, municipal authorities from five other Sierra Juárez communities also cut ties to México Indígena:

We do not agree with the way in which the México Indígena team conducted its research …. The team did not inform the communities of the source of the funds used to support the project, expressly hiding the Army’s role in the project, in violation of our right to free, prior, and informed consent recognized by the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Melquiades Cruz, a resident of one of the five communities, wrote in Political Geography:

“we have always seen a strong link between geography and the interests of the military industrial complex, especially in the recent attempts to create worldwide property databases….We cannot forget that this mapping occurs in the midst of the debate over a package of military financing known as the Mérida Initiative. The control and displacement of indigenous communities is intended to prevent potential conflicts in ‘hot spots,’ contribute to the military control of the region, and finally free up natural resources for the benefit of the government and its transnational allies.”

The Mérida Initiative was a security cooperation agreement signed between the U.S., Mexico, and several Central American states in the context of the narcogang wars, which ties very closely to Demarest’s theory of uncontrolled zones without property rights.

As the Bowman Expeditions scandal erupted in 2009, I was co-chair of the AAG Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group, with Renee Pualani Louis, At the AAG that year in Las Vegas, we sent letters to Tiltepec supporting their stance, and to the AAG demanding an investigation and tighter protocols in working with Indigenous communities.

We met with Joe Bryan and Joel Wainwright on their critiques of the project, which they eventually turned into the books Weaponizing Maps, and Geopiracy. I later met with activist filmmaker Simon Sedillo, whose documentary The Demarest Factor documented the Oaxacan viewpoints on the Bowman Expeditions.

I also set up a clearinghouse of documents from both sides about the Bowman Expeditions on my faculty website. More importantly the IPSG used the scandal as an opportunity to move geography in the same direction as anthropology, to condemn military infiltration into our discipline, and establish long-needed research ethics protocols with Indigenous communities.

At the 2014 AAG in Tampa, we were shocked to discover military personnel in many of our sessions. They were there for the Geoint conference (Orwellian for “Geographic Intelligence”) held immediately afterwards, and were encouraged to attend the AAG earlier to familiarize themselves with geography’s academic community.

Controversies about the research ethics of individual academic projects cannot be separated from the larger political, socioeconomic and cultural contexts. This is particularly true where Indigenous peoples have played a central role in toppling and replacing governments (such as in Bolivia and Ecuador), and in leading rebellions against corporate globalization (such as in Mexico and Guatemala), or have been repressed by U.S.-aided militaries and police (such as in Colombia and Peru). Indigenous movements mistrust a U.S. military that with one hand funds academic studies of their communities, while with the other hand provides training and weapons to governments suppressing their rights.

Much of the debate around research ethics focuses on the intentions of the researcher. But it is not the intentions of the research but its effects that cause damage in Indigenous communities. Without full Indigenous self-determination in the research process and full control over the finished datasets and maps, unintended consequences become more likely. These consequences may include geographic data being used by government forces against Indigenous peoples and their collective lands, even if they participated themselves in acquiring the data. They may include the increased privatization or allotment of Native lands in the name of building economic stability.

In extreme cases of “geopiracy,” Indigenous sharing of their geographical knowledge may profit corporate and academic interests who do not share the credit or profit for the knowledge. Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes that in western research, Community and indigenous rights or views in this area are generally not recognized and not respected.” including the right to have “final authority over and responsibility for the contents and conclusions of their documents.”

The intervention of academic researchers in Indigenous communities (as the past experiences of anthropologists have taught us) can also pit Native peoples against each other, as they are split into the camps of those who oppose and support a particular project. This process resembles too closely the colonial tactic of “divide-and-conquer,” with intertribal and intratribal rivalries being exacerbated by the presence of outsiders. The support of some Native people for a project is not a sufficient retort to criticism of a project by other Native people. The best way to avoid these conflicts in the first place is to involve the communities in determining the purpose and scope of the project from its conception.

Some geographers have expressed concerns that even the perception of unethical behavior may complicate future geographic research. Members also expressed concern for the well - being of Indigenous communities in conflict zones, who may be tarnished by inadvertent affiliation with a military - funded project. It is ironic that military and intelligence agencies are seeking to harness the great success of Indigenous participatory mapping (which yields data superior to their research) to use it for their own purposes.

Positive research models

Intense controversies over research ethics may lead some geographic researchers to avoid working with Indigenous peoples, in fear of causing offense or misunderstanding. But it would be a mistake to avoid working with Native communities due to the sensitivity of this relationship. These are maps of Native nations I made while co-producing a Wisconsin historical atlas. If anything, building mutually beneficial relationships with Indigenous nations are a challenge for geography as a discipline to overcome its colonial and imperial past, and a unique opportunity to remake itself. It is the arrogance of powerful academic institutions that generates most of the friction with Native peoples. Individual researchers may make mistakes, but honest mistakes can be forgiven. If we don’t assume we’re guests, we may be welcomed, but if we assume we’ll be welcomed, we’re no longer guests.

Academic researchers have the option to go beyond simply researching Indigenous peoples and cultures. Non-Native researchers can take responsibility for studying the actions of their own communities and governments, and help Native nations remove obstacles and barriers to the full exercise of self-determination.

Certain principles can guide the relationship between researchers and Indigenous communities. The primary purpose of such guidelines in academia should not be to protect institutions from legal recriminations of research, but to protect the rights of Indigenous communities involved in research. The Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group established discussion points to begin developing indigenous research ethics protocols with Indigenous nations. We met to forge a collective statement at the 2010 AAG in D.C., meeting at a hotel near the Pentagon, to draft a Declaration of Key Principles About Research Ethics with Indigenous Communities, particularly for starting researchers to ask themselves these questions, even before they approach others for guidance.

First, researchers need to form partnerships with Indigenous communities, rather than presenting these communities with a formulated research plan. Researchers can approach communities first with their capabilities, but the communities need to shape the ultimate purpose of the research, and receive full information on the form, methodology, and sponsors, in negotiations prior to the start of the project. Full and informed consent needs to be secured from Indigenous partners, individuals and communities participating in or affected by the research. This is my field trip to the former bombing range island in Hawai’i.

Second, benefits of the research should flow to the Indigenous partners, including acknowledgement, fair return and royalties. Researchers should reciprocate for this knowledge with appropriate service to the community, and by not flaunting the knowledge that has been shared with them. Indigenous communities and individuals should have control over what aspects of their traditional knowledge is shared or is kept in their possession.

Third, Indigenous partners should have the opportunity to review and revise drafts of the findings, and have access to the final product. Agreements on the confidentiality or nonconfidentiality of sources, and protection of sacred places and knowledge, must be maintained even after the research project is complete. Researchers should maintain a relationship to the community, even after it no longer serves their funding or career interests, such as in the case, through environmental justice activism. This is my forthcoming book on Native/non-Native unlikely alliances, based on 120 interviews with tribal leaders and community organizers.

Fourth, relationships with Indigenous peoples should be maintained not simply within the confines of Western ethics or legal principles (including concepts such as “intellectual property”) but also within Indigenous cultural frameworks. This may mean forming lifelong bonds of service, and lasting relationships with First Nations in our area. This is the Asserting Native Resilience book I co-edited on Indigenous peoples and the climate crisis.

Traditional protocols--specific to local circumstances--may include reciprocity or diplomatic gifting, mutual assistance outside of the boundaries of academic studies, and discussion of personal and family perspectives. Native and non-Native researchers alike should remember that our partners are looking as much at our hearts as at our minds. This is one of our students at a Maori marae in New Zealand, who didn’t know he’d be carving a tribal canoe until he arrived.

As geographic researchers on Indigenous peoples and places, we may acquire funding, institutional support, publications, and the respect of our academic colleagues. But without respect and integrity in our interactions with Native communities, we actually would have very little. Conversely, even a poor and obscure geographer can have a fulfilling career, and a rich life, through learning from Indigenous peoples around a fire or at a kitchen table.

As the IPSG stated in our “Declaration of Key Questions,”, in the 21st-century context of the Global War on Tribes and global Indigenous decolonization, “there is a larger purpose to the re-examination of ethics protocols with Indigenous peoples. Geography--and geographers--are being tested. Will we as a community pass the test, in the eyes of Indigenous peoples? Our academic work is often full of moral ambiguities, complexities, and contextualizations. There is, however, also a time and a place for moral clarity. We feel that the 2010s are the time, and Indigenous nations are the place.”

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