“Pan-Indianism and Authenti(city): Refusing Colonial Borders,” with Sydney Beckmann

Biography: Sydney Beckmann earned her PhD in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, where she was a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bolinski Fellow. Her research is interdisciplinary and intersects the areas of religion, race, and colonialism. She focuses on the legacy of colonial discourse and its effect on urban indigeneity particularly how government policies and rhetoric around urbanity perpetuate colonial ideologies designed to erase indigenous people and further entrench settler colonial domination of indigenous lands. Her teaching and research engage critical indigenous theory and center theories and methodologies around relationality. Her current book project, The Pan-Indian Problem, Relationality Within and Beyond Colonialism, explores the largely under-researched of pan-Indianism.Show Notes: Our conversation centers on Sydney Beckmann’s article, “Pan-Indianism and Authenti(city): Refusing Colonial Borders,” published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal Beckmann’s argument shows, that the term Pan-Indianism isn’t neutral, and it isn’t simply descriptive. It’s a label with a history—one that moves through anthropology’s mid-century acculturation studies, through federal policy in the Termination Era and relocation programs, and into the present as a lingering framework that still shapes how Indigenous presence in cities is narrated, measured, and too often pathologized.Along the way, we get into how pan-Indianism becomes a kind of catch-all signifier—sometimes used to critique appropriation and flattening, other times used to describe intertribal alliance and collective resistance. Beckmann pushes us beyond the gridlock question of “good or bad” and instead asks: Where did this term come from? What political work was it designed to do? And how does it keep doing that work today—especially in the settler-colonial “grammar” of urban space?We talk about the power of naming, the refusal of colonial categories, and the persistent “deficiency” narratives imposed on Indigenous life—particularly the assumption that urban Indigeneity must mean assimilation, loss, or longing. If you like what we do here please like a subscribe and share.Links: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09j929rj