Global Indigeneities and Life Narratives: Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

A Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

Guest Editor:

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Eric and Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies and Anthropology, Princeton University

Submit: 400-word abstracts to kauanui@princeton.edu by December 1, 2025

Biography will arrange (with logistical and funding support) for those selected to contribute to the volume to present drafts of their papers for a workshop in Honolulu, from August 19-21, 2026, at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. As such, for those with accepted proposals there will be a set of deadlines that contributors will be expected to meet.

Life Narratives—which can include biographies, autobiographies, social media posts, legal testimonials, personal essays, memoirs, blogs, confessional poetry, and more—are an important site to explore the concept of and identification with indigeneity. This special issue of the journal Biography explores the substance of indigeneity and significance of Indigenous identities across global geographies and representations of embodied, lived experiences. 

What makes Indigenous life narrative distinct from other life narratives? What are the cultural contours of claiming indigeneity in relation to land-based cultures? How do life writings of indigeneity account for violent structural realities while also highlighting Indigenous agency? How do the political valences of Indigenous autonomy and/or nationhood shape life writing focused on sovereignty and self-determination? How do life writings that focus on Individual subjectivity also speak to the collectivity of distinct peoplehood? How might we think about Indigenous flourishing and revitalization in everyday lived experience, and how is that represented in life writing? How can life writing studies enable us to contend with (different) understandings of indigeneity?

The keyword “Indigenous” has varied genealogies across global geographies. For example, in the parts of Abya Yala—how the Kuna people of Panama and Colombia refer to North and South America—that have Spanish colonial histories, the concept of indigena offers a sharp departure from the derogative “Indio.” In North America, the terms “Indian” (American Indian) and “Native” (Native American) are most often used to refer to Indigenous peoples subject to U.S. authority, yet the term “Indian” is not apt in the U.S. occupied Pacific. In other settler colonial societies with English (and British) colonial legacies—including Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand—the term “Native” is often still considered degrading. And, although “Aboriginal” is sometimes used as an alternative, “First Nations” is now more commonplace. Throughout many parts of Africa and Asia, the term “Indigenous” is contentious due to distinct histories of colonialism and complex notions of ethnicity, as well as (postcolonial) government pushback, such as claims that all people from those continents can arguably be considered Indigenous to them, which makes for fraught political struggles for Indigenous minorities therein to secure social and legal recognition and protection. Comparable dynamics also play out in Northern European contexts, particularly for Indigenous peoples encompassed by the Nordic states. Then, there are diverse iterations of indigeneity across Eastern Europe and North Asia with the relatively new states formed after the fall of the Soviet Union. One can also see the challenges to Indigenous status in disputed geopolitical contexts, including West Asia, such as the case for Palestinians. 

Yet, the terrain of indigeneity goes far beyond the (often colonial) baggage of nomenclature; there is the substance of what counts as Indigenous, especially in the face of erasure and denial as part of ongoing violent dispossession. And still, indigeneity itself is enduring; Indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist, even as they endure multifaceted forms of social domination. 

This special issue aims to get at the materiality of that endurance through a focus on life writing and iterations of Indigenous identity and lived realities. ‘Indigenous’ (whether as adjective or noun) and ‘indigeneity’ (as a category of analysis) are socially constructed concepts often associated with an underlying and unchanging ‘essence.’ But for Indigenous peoples and individuals, indigeneity is more commonly understood as rooted in land and the rest of the natural world. Sometimes referred to as radical relationality, Indigenous worldviews that center kinship obligations to all living entities—as engaged practices of caretaking/caregiving—shape an ethics of responsibility and accountability. In turn, these commitments can serve as forms of Indigenous resurgence—a crucial component of resistance.

We invite work that explores representations of indigeneity in life narratives from across the globe, including comparative studies. Accordingly, the special issue sets out to offer theoretical and critical examinations of a variety of narrations of lives lived under structures of settler colonial and other forms of encroachment and domination. Some sample questions (to suggest the breadth of possible topics and approaches):

• How do life narratives reveal or veil the interrelations of indigeneity and other social categories such as race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality? 
• How and to what ends do diasporic life narratives represent or efface indigeneity or vice versa?
• Can one discern shifts or divergent strands in life narratives about indigeneity that envision Indigenous futures?
• What do some genres allow for in thinking about indigeneity or Indigenous lives that others do not? What do different life writing genres make possible in understandings of indigeneity or Indigenous lives? 
• How can life writing contribute to the creation of coalitions or solidarity or alliances among Indigenous people? 
• How do life writing texts allow for understandings of indigeneity that cross time and place while leaving room for specificity, and/or illuminating tensions among competing understandings of indigeneity that are context specific? 

This issue aims to demonstrate the heterogeneity of Indigenous identities and the varying concepts of indigeneity—while grounded in common precepts based on deep connections between land, water, people and cultures—in a way that illuminates definitional challenges and the ways Indigenous lives are narrated.