Thinking Beyond Resilience: Indigenous (Hi)Stories of Continuity and Futurity
Etymologically, the term “resilience”--from the Latin re- and salire, “to leap in return”--refers to the capability of a thing, in response to some stimulus, to return to its original form or state. The term connotes a dual activity, simultaneously an undoing and a rebuilding. But in Indigenous contexts, under the realities of settler-colonialism, the aspiration to “return to original form” is a fraught enterprise, as it inevitably encounters the romanticized conceptual dichotomies of traditional / modern, sedentary / nomadic, cultural / political, and historical / mythical.