Editorial of "International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies Volume 5, Number 1, 2012"

The first two articles of this edition of the journal testify to the lengthening reach of the discipline of Critical Indigenous Studies that is, remarkably, still in its nascence. Emiel Martens examines the development of Maori filmmaking since the 1980s and takes the opportunity to explore this Indigenous cinema in the context of developments in the New Zealand film industry generally. Shifting from cultural production to renewable energy, Steven M. Hoffman and Thibault Martin remind us that in the effort to satiate the demands for energy, it is often Indigenous peoples who bear adverse consequences. Using a social capital framework, the authors examine the impact of the development of hydroelectric power upon a displaced Aboriginal community and conclude that displacement has resulted in an erosion of cohesive social bonds that once ensured a sustainable way of life.

Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations

With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars. Aileen Moreton-Robinson's introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice. Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.