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Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA)
Oral Presentation Session
Carolyn Smith-Morris
Associate Professor
Southern Methodist University
Sylvia Rodriguez (Urban Inter-Tribal Center of Texas)
Rose Soto (Urban Inter-Tribal Center of Texas)
Morningstar Spencer (Urban Inter-Tribal Center of Texas)
Indigenous peoples resist settler and post-colonial destruction in both public and hidden assertions of communal rights. One under-recognized and under-theorized area of hidden resistance is in the health and bodily lifeways of Indigenous community members. The courteous refusal, a grateful decline - personal acts of resistance in health care do not always reach a political platform. And their hidden tactics of collective identity may be ignored because they, unlike self-immolation or suicide-bombing, kill the protestor slowly rather than quickly. Yet the survival of Indigenous communities in the face of agile (“shape-shifting” in Corntassell 2012) ideological colonialism has required them to overcome not only tactics of oppression and discipline, but also the ideologies of medical and bodily control emanating from market, media, and legal landscapes. I’ll discuss 3 contentious cases of Indigenous and small-scale community resistance to medicalized oppression, and consider anthropology’s complicity in medicalized racism.