Relational Agency: Right Relations as Socio-Political Power | CU Experts

Abstract; Critical Indigenous methodologies center Indigenous epistemologies and thus perspectives. From this perspective, it is clear that while non-Indigenous scholars can engage with Indigenous thought it is only Indigenous peoples who can generate it (Moreton-Robinson 2016, 4–6). A critical Indigenist approach to Indigenous religious life, then, invites non-Native scholars to think with Indigenous analytics. Native scholars like Vine Deloria, Jr. and Gregory Cajete frame Native engagements with the immaterial world as existential opportunities to understand human embeddedness in the greater world. In this article, I engage their thought and theory to discuss Native stewardship discourse and praxis at Standing Rock as a form of relational socio-political power. When scholars take a critical Indigenist, and thus decolonial, approach to understanding Indigenous religious life, the links between religious agency and political agency are made legible.

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