Indigenous Futures: What Makes Indigenous Resurgence Possible?

This dissertation is about Indigenous resurgence amongst six First Nations communities in the Nicola Valley, British Columbia. The Nicola Valley is home to both the Syilx and Nłeʔkepmx. Drawing from the work of Indigenous theorists, I conceptualize resurgence as the regeneration of an Indigenous cultural system and the simultaneous turning away from relationships that reproduce settler-colonial power dynamics. I investigate the conditions of possibility for resurgence through a theoretically informed empirical study of 1) Indigenous organizations; 2) Indigenous self-help cultures; and 3) Settler and Indigenous thinking about the future. I undertook this study using what I call a resurgent methodology. This methodology takes resurgence as its ethical, epistemological, and analytical standpoint to doing research with Indigenous communities collaboratively. I conducted five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Indigenous organizations and 54 qualitative interviews with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers in Indigenous organizations. I argue that Indigenous resurgence is made possible through the weaving together of different forms, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to create an institutional and cultural infrastructure for resurgence, principally through strategic organizational practices, self-help cultures, and a culture of vision. This toolkit enables the rebuilding of Indigenous societies. Indigenous communities in the Nicola Valley fuse Indigenous cultures with organizational forms to create resurgence, providing an institutional infrastructure through which Indigenous communities create space and time for their cultural practices, reconnect with the Land, limit whiteness as a credential, transform Indigeneity into a credential, and reject practices that perpetuate settler-colonial power dynamics. Self-help cultures are deployed by communities to reconnect their members with traditional language, spirituality, and culture, enabling the valuable work of rebuilding their worlds. Finally, Indigenous communities in the Valley combine different temporalities, including their own culture of vision with modern time, to create historical cognition or an enhanced awareness of the past and the future that reshapes the capacity for Indigenous agency in the present. This cultural toolkit, comprised of elements from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources, makes resurgence possible.