TRANDCENDING SOVEREIGNTY? A LITERATURE REVIEW OF THE IDENTITY COMMUNITY'S DESCRIPTIONS AND PRESCRIPTIONS OF THE FRACTURED SELF
Upon further investigation my research moved away from a postmodernist emphasis focused on language and began to question agendas of transcendence and fluidity. Following, this essay examines the literature that discusses the formation of identity by interrogating both essentialist and postmodern theories. The ultimate goal of this examination is to set a foundation for further research that acknowledges that fractured or fluid identities are not the result of “too many choices” arising out of current consumerist globalization trends, but the result of historical colonial traumas and continued subjugation of indigenous peoples.
THE OCCUPTATION OF AZTLAN, OUR HEARTS: THE TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO AND ITS INFLUENCE WITHIN THE CHICANO CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Presented during the Annual Chicano History Celebration at Eastern Washington University, 2011. This paper disrupts the relationship between the dominate American and Chicano nationalist narratives and the foundational philosophy of El Moviemiento by focusing attention on the alternative histories and experiences of Native peoples, Chicana and Native women, and land itself.
DEFINITION BEGETS DEFICIENCY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CREATION OF A CONTESTED INDIGENOUS IDENTITY
Contested identities are often regulated by naming. Naming is an act of defining, and defining an act of legitimizing or delegitimizing those who find themselves marginalized. This paper examines the formulation of identity and seeks to challenge the dominate discourse that states identity formulation is a linear progression from placeless to placed and that other must be used in the creation of self. Those pushed out into the corridors between regulated spaces such as race, culture, and gender, recognize that those spaces have become policed by both members and structures within and outside of the bordered space. For Indigenous people we have fought for many years to be considered human beings, now we fight to be Indians. Those who do not meet the criteria, whether through location, language, blood-quantum, or skin color, are marginalized within the community. Identifying self through name or experience or moving identity from static to dynamic still dehumanizes. If identity is reconfigured as a fluid space through the critical and integrated texts – it cannot be tied by static definition nor defined experience.