Q&A: HumIn Focus series asks what it means to be Indigenous

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — What does it mean to be Indigenous, and what would a world that broadly integrates Indigenous perspectives and knowledge look like? The next episode of HumIn Focus, a web series from Penn State’s Humanities Institute, will try to address these questions as they relate to the history and experiences of native peoples in the United States and South Africa.

The show premieres on WPSU TV tonight (Feb. 22) at 9 p.m. and will be available for streaming on the HumIn Focus website.

Penn State News spoke with Gabeba Baderoon, a South African researcher featured in the episode and associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, of African studies and of comparative literature, and Julie Reed, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and associate professor of Native American and American history, about how their experiences as Indigenous scholars inform their thinking about Indigenous peoples and their work. We also spoke with Matt Jordan, executive producer of HumIn Focus and associate professor of film production and media studies, about why it is important for the series to address issues of heritage and history.

Q: How does your experience as an Indigenous scholar inform your thinking about Indigenous peoples and your research?

Baderoon: It’s interesting to be asked this question. I am Muslim and of slave descent in South Africa. This identification means I am of extremely mixed descent. Because there was a contiguity between the extreme violence of enslavement of people brought to the Cape from different territories around the Indian Ocean region, including East Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia and the brutal conditions of enserfment and genocide to which Indigenous people were subjected at the colonial Cape, there was a high rate of conversion to Islam among Indigenous people. Being Muslim offered a realm of belief and community outside of the control of slaveowners and colonizers. I am therefore also of Indigenous descent.

However, “Malay” people — this word for Muslims of slave descent in South Africa does not mean people with an origin in Malaysia, but instead is derived from the fact that the Behasa Melayu language was a lingua franca, or bridge language, for enslaved people at the Cape,  — like other people in South Africa, learned from dominant society to despise their Indigenous roots. So, many Muslim families strenuously evade or deny such relations and even their enslaved origins, instead tending to emphasize their Asian or European roots or the idea that they are descended from royalty and not enslaved people.

I recognized this as complicity with colonial ideas and refused to do so myself. But I had a problematic approach to identity, too. I have always emphasized my African roots and underplayed my Asian ones. I even felt that attending to my Asianness was to deny my Africanness. However, this is clearly not the case and I’ve rethought my view on the issue. Clearly, I am of partly Asian descent, probably even majority Asian descent, but being anxiously emphatic about my Africanness does not make me more African. I’m trying to live up to my own conviction in the value of complexity and relation. It was a beautiful thing for enslaved Africans and Asians to make community with enserfed Indigenous Africans during a time of extreme violence. My mixed Asian and African and even European origins — I know of at least one European ancestor who converted to Islam and married a Muslim ancestor — testify to the survival of my people during a time of pervasive brutality.

Today, I think of myself as a Muslim South African of enslaved descent of diverse origins, part of a fully recognized, valued and integrated community who have made it through apartheid, post-apartheid and Covid. No wonder a prominent Muslim anti-apartheid activist called Muslim South Africans the “luckiest Muslims in the world.”

Reed: My relationships with my family and my community have always guided my research questions. My first book was about how and why the Cherokee Nation chose to build social welfare institutions during the nineteenth century. Both my parents, my Cherokee father and white mother, worked for and committed themselves to institutions –– the military, public schools, churches –– for most of my life. My dad descends from Cherokee people who built Cherokee-controlled institutions and later committed themselves to institutions that were not always working for the best interests of Indigenous peoples. These tensions intrigue me. My second book examines core Cherokee educational practices over 400 years. Many of the questions I asked stemmed from having my daughter with me at archaeological sites. I wanted to write a book that acknowledged the value Cherokee people have always placed on education, even as how education defined by both Cherokee and non-Cherokee people was changing over time. I did this by foregrounding a girl in each chapter and chronicling what each girl would have learned in various classrooms over half a century pre- and post-forced removal. This book enabled me to honor the questions I asked of these sites as a mother to a Cherokee daughter and foreground Cherokee-centered definitions of education over time.

Q: How does your community and heritage affect or influence your day-to-day life?

Reed: My great-uncle once wrote to me, "May your search for knowledge bring you home." Another uncle counseled me that I should work where I can be of the most service to Cherokee people and that that might not be in a Cherokee community. These pieces of advice may seem at odds, but they aren't. My work at Penn State can still be in service to Indigenous communities, including Cherokee people, and yet, my work at Penn State shouldn't keep me from returning to the Cherokee homelands in the southeast or the post-removal Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. If I am not making my way home, what is my search for knowledge for?

Baderoon: I am an intellectual and a poet, so my daily life includes thinking, imagining, researching, reading and writing complex realities and histories into being. It’s a delight to be able to create scholarship and art that does this.

In practical ways, I love gardens and how they enable one to grow roots in abandoned places or places you’ve been abruptly moved to, to the ocean as a connecting tissue to the past, to making food and how it encodes relations of hospitality, and to creativity wherever I can find it.

Q: What do you do to find a sense of community here in central Pennsylvania?

Baderoon: Even when I first came to State College in 1999 for the fall semester as a SHARE Fellow –– a longstanding fellowship established by Penn State during apartheid as a form of solidarity with South Africans –– I cooked and hosted large meals for my fellow internationals, somehow intuiting that my need to find ways to belong here, even when I was only visiting for three months, was shared by all of us. Many State Collegians come from elsewhere and make deep friendships here, and I also feel that we need to pay attention to whose land this is and has been. To live with painful histories and make new practices of acknowledgement and repair.

My colleague, Scott Burnett, and I have started a reading group on indigeneity that reads material from Southern Africa and North America, to learn from one another and make new forms of relation.

Lastly, I lived in Cape Town at the time of a dangerous drought that almost emptied the dams that provide water to the city — at one point, we had to queue to collect spring water under the eyes of soldiers. As a result, even today, I cannot waste a drop of water, and I bring that feeling that the landscape is precious and must be respected and treated with tenderness to the way I live in State College, where we do not suffer from drought, and yet we are all part of the same planet.

Reed: Thankfully, I arrived at a moment when Tim Benally, who was an undergraduate at the time, but will be graduating with a master’s degree this year, was forming the Indigenous Peoples Student Association (IPSA). Tracy Peterson and Hollie Kulago formed the Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance (IFSA) shortly thereafter. There is a small but mighty group of Indigenous students, faculty and staff on campus. Fawn Patchell and Kathy Pletcher have been on this campus for decades collectively. I also have three colleagues in history who specialize in Native American history and supportive colleagues in my department. I also remind myself the Appalachian Mountains connect to the homelands. 

Q: What do you want people to take away from this episode of HumIn Focus?

Baderoon: I’d love people to feel that the stories of relation to land and one another, stories of resilience and sharing that were part of our very painful pasts can show us a way to live in the future: with deep relation and being together, with creativity and tenderness. Avoiding the pain of the past doesn’t help, and being insistently anxious about one’s identity isn’t a nourishing way to live either. How about we try facing that past honestly, learning from one another and weaving together what we bring into something collective and lasting.

Jordan: My colleagues at HumIn Focus and I hope that this episode will expand the context for understanding why Penn State has a land acknowledgement statement, and that acknowledging the Indigenous communities who came before us in America also means learning with them about how to be better stewards of our world.

Q: Why is it important to address issues of heritage and history in the HumIn Focus series?

Jordan: We think that understanding the broader history and heritage of Native Americans involves placing what happened to Indigenous people here within the larger context of global colonization. Coming to terms with that history means reminding ourselves that just because settlers exerted dominion over Indigenous peoples in the past doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t include their perspectives now as we try to solve the problems of today.