Theory & Method
Indigenous (Anishinaabe) scholar Gerald Vizenor coined the term survivance to denote the “action, condition, quality, and sentiments of the verb survive.” Indigenous survivance is a testament to the perseverance and creative desire to uphold community and maintain pride in culture. Survivance stories renounce “dominance, tragedy, and victimry.” Vizenor describes the dynamic power of storytelling to argue that Native survivance “is a continuance of stories” (Vizenor, 1, 45).
Building on this, we argue that what holds a society together is its ability to envision a future, expressed through cultural manifestations. Ceremonies and celebrations, and narratives contained in stories and material objects, constitute the engine that propels the cycle of human life. The skills involved in telling stories, dancing, making objects, farming, and hunting can be passed on in a variety of settings and through different methods. The loss of these skills and the individuals who possessed them – as when elders die, or children are taken to boarding schools and forced to abandon languages and cultural practices – had devastating consequences.
Recording and displaying culture, as Hendry notes, is vital to Indigenous people, “not as a salvage exercise, but as a blueprint for the future of their descendants” (Hendry, 4). Ceremonies constitute a form of remembering ahead – a memory that contains the future. Maintaining traditions means looking forward as much as defending the past, attempting to retain “maps” that make it possible to find one’s way in a new environment (Fur 2009).
We work with historical sources, such as written narratives, court records, maps and land management records, letters, petitions, and in addition material objects and photographs. When appropriate we utilize Indigenous archives that include visual, oral, and ecological sources. This allows us to make an argument about a more capacious understanding of history and the meaning of archives as it relates to climate change and survivance. To analyze these diverse materials, we employ emerging methodologies of NAIS (Native American and Indigenous Studies) (Mt. Pleasant et al; Andersen & O’Brien) alongside more established ethnohistorical methods of critical textual analysis (Galloway; Strong), and tools for investigating oral narratives as complex cultural performance (Cruikshank; Fixico; Gaski).
The program links to the ongoing global turn in the humanities (Denecke). Ideas, practices, and peoples traveled across borders when empires measured themselves against one another, contributing to what Kamissek & Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud,” a globally shared reservoir of knowledge, practices, and norms (166). While studies of transnational connections and movements have typically focused privileged white travelers, or forced migrations of non-white labor, SUN shifts the focus to Indigenous networks, parallels, exchanges, and worldviews. It does so by employing a concurrent methodology, that recognizes the need for reciprocity in the whole chain of knowledge-formation, from the formulation of research questions, through collaboration and translation between different modes of preserving and sharing knowledge, to dissemination that returns knowledge to different communities (Fur, 2017, 53)
Photo credit: Gunlög Fur
