“A New Indian Intelligentsia”: Archie Phinney and the Search for a Radical Native American Modernity

Abstract

This chapter considers the thought of midcentury Nez Perce activist and anthropologist Archie Phinney, which offers a glimpse into Native practices of modernity through the lens of Marxism and Soviet policy. Phinney posited that a modern Native sovereignty could arise and be realized via a dialectical engagement with the very forces by which Indians experienced their dispossession. He argued that indigenous people had no choice but to take the ideas imposed upon them by modernity and convert them to their own purposes. He contended that Indians must claim for themselves and proudly inhabit their modern racial identity. What distinguished Phinney from other pan-Indian intellectuals was his insistence that modernity is not simply a possession of industrial society. For him, modernity is a historical inheritance, a form of belonging to which indigenous people may lay claim and which they must refashion in their own image to survive.

Pushing the limits of urban research: Urbanization, pipelines and counter-colonial politics

“…Sustaining such links requires work but is not impossible, not least because of the rounds of engagements between autonomously defined Indigenous approaches and non-Indigenous critical traditions that define cutting-edge native studies (see Simpson and Smith, 2014). My paper builds thus not only upon past and current arguments about the importance of Indigenous liberation in historical materialism (Mariátegui, 1971; Webber, 2011), but also, crucially, Indigenous conversations with Marxist and other counter-colonial traditions (Balthaser, 2016; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). In today’s ‘Canadian’ context, Yellowknife Dene scholar Glen Coulthard is the most-well known contemporary Indigenous communist.…”