To assert Indigenous worldviews as indispensable countermeasures to the flattening processes of globalization, all the while avoiding falling into the trap of reproducing modern/colonial forms of epistemological, cultural, and aesthetic extractivism.

 

To understand Indigenous knowledges as perspectival and affective, value-laden and inherently political (Semali & Kincheloe 1999) while recognizing that not all Indigenous knowledges can be lumped together into a homogenous whole. Rather, following Semali and Kincheloe (1999), we understand Indigenous processes of knowledge production in relation to historical setting, cultural situatedness, and the moral needs of the reality their cultural agents confront.

 

To go beyond the modern/colonial discourse of indigenism or indianness that Byrd (2011) has theorized as producing othered and abjected peoples excluded from the metanarrative of Western modernity. Instead, we champion indigeneity as a form of subjectivity that makes visible the intrinsic and continuing asymmetrical power relations born of historical processes of coloniality. Further, we understand indigeneity as the continuous resistance to the ongoing condition of coloniality. Our goal is to operate on the level of building alliances between indigeneities while avoiding falling into the traps of indigenism.

 

To visibilize and facilitate Indigenous communities’ fundamental right to represent themselves (Tuhiwai Smith cited in Rickard, 2017). Following Rickard’s theorization of visual sovereignty (2017), we maintain that an intellectual, cultural, artistic, and visual expansion of the concept of sovereignty can facilitate intersectionality across indigeneity, colonization, and decolonization towards an emancipatory cultural policy that can effectively deconstruct the colonial gaze and the colonizing image or text.

 

To “contribute to a greater appreciation by non-Indigenous society of Indigenous knowledge as a valuable contribution to world knowledge that can lead to productive cross-cultural philosophical alliances” in a bid to construct a shared resistance to the damaging effects of capitalist anthropocentrism (Bignall et al, 2016).