For the twentieth anniversary of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, we are centering the histories, cultures, and literatures of Native American and Indigenous Peoples/Pueblos Originarios/Povos Originários/First Nations of Abya Yala/las Américas, inclusive of Afro-Indigenous peoples of the continent and of the Caribbean. While this call focuses on land, labor, and desire, essays or critical interventions on any themes, issues, or methodologies centering Indigenous Peoples/Pueblos Originarios/Povos Originários/First Nations are welcome. Our very title indicates the difficulty in translating modes of Indigenous identification and epistemologies, as “Indigeneities” itself is a lacuna, with no appropriate translation into Spanish or Portuguese, much less the multitude of Indigenous languages across the hemisphere. We hope to provide an occasion for a transnational discussion of the translatability and untranslatability of Indigenous theories, categories, modes of belonging, cosmologies, histories, and historicity, across Abya Yala/las Américas. While concepts of Indigenous belonging, consciousness, and political identification may not cross borders easily, Indigenous people, against all odds, do cross imperial borders at great costs to themselves and the communities they leave behind. The hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Peoples from Latin America and the Caribbean who are now living permanently in the United States and Canada challenge the national boundaries and bureaucratic procedures for corroborating “Native American” or Indigenous identity. This adds new urgency for the transnational interrogation of imperial nations determining who and who does not count as “Indian.”

Land is central to Indigenous cosmovisions, poiesis, and modes of belonging. Land is also key to modes of political organization: autonomy in the south, sovereignty in the north. Thus, we invite scholarship focused on land in its epistemic, religious, ritualistic, rhetorical, poetical, historical, and/or political function as a nexus of belonging, being, and identification. Land is also material and political, providing sustenance and nourishment for communities. Papers engaging with these aspects, including agricultural production, are also welcome. With the recent heightened activity of extractive industries, Indigenous Peoples/Pueblos Originarios/Povos Originários/First Nations are facing the biggest land grab since the 19th-century liberal period, and thus we also welcome scholarship on this latest period of dispossession, as well as or in comparison to colonial dispossession beginning as early as the fifteenth century.

Under the rubric of labor, we do not limit the term to its productive meaning. Instead, we invite scholarship on Indigenous labor in all its guises: reproductive labor and feminist takes thereof; sexual labor and queer takes thereof; figurative forms of labor, including but not limited to the work of “Indianness” and its transitive properties; futuristic forms of labor, as imagined in Indigenous cultural practice and speculative literature; capacious modes of Indigenous production, including, but not limited to, food production as an expression of freedom from or alternatives to the capitalist mode of production. Indigenous peoples are finally being recognized as engineering the biodiversity of their regions, and we invite participation by any scholars of biodiversity, food security, and battles over the intellectual property rights and knowledge of Indigenous peoples. We also recognize that productive Indigenous labor, like land, has also been the target of colonial dispossession and exploitation, and thus also welcome scholarship on the exploitation and extraction of Indigenous labor, from the beginning of the colonial period to the present.

Desire refers to scholarship on all manner of Indigenous desire: for sovereignty, for autonomy, for the Other, for each other, for alternative epistemologies, for alternative methods of historiography, for alternative models of community and subjectivity, for alternative futures, for alternative structures of gender and sexuality, for alternative modes of belonging on and to the planet.

We also welcome Indigenous-centered critiques of colonialism, as well as anti-colonial and decolonial theorization. The “indigenismo/mestizaje” dyad continues to be a focus of power/knowledge in Hispanophone Latin America, and we welcome all critiques and revisions of these operative terms. In Anglophone North America, the white settler colonialism paradigm has had a transformative influence on Native American Studies, and we invite scholarly engagement with the paradigm, including engagement with its applicability to the Hispanophone and Lusophone worlds. In Latinx and Chicanx scholarship, theories of Indigenous origin, such as Aztlán, continue to generate scholarship as well as modes of political belonging, and we similarly invite critiques and revisions of such scholarly approaches. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the myth of racial democracy is yet another method of erasing its Indigenous population. We invite scholarship on the erasure and survivance of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous peoples of Brazil. We also welcome proposals that address the relationality of Indigenous Peoples/Pueblos Originarios/Povos Originários/First Nations with other socio-cultural identities, such as Afro-Latin Americans and Afro-Latinxs; critiques of the definition and abuse of “ethnicity” by paternalist nation-states and the politics of capitalist multiculturalism.