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This chapter examines the politics, aspirations and antagonisms that grew out of the curatorial process underlying the exhibition, The Potosi Principle (Madrid 2010, Berlin 2011, La Paz 2011), and compare them to other Andean exhibitions including Bolivian Worlds (London 1987) and Luminescence: The Silver of Peru (Vancouver 2012, Toronto 2013). The chapter questions the category of contemporary art and examines its avowed potential as radical critique and the claims that it and other exhibition strategies have marginalised indigenous epistemologies and obfuscated historical agency. The implications of this conflict between western and indigenous curators and curatorial collectives on the right of self-expression and the freedom of interpretation and critique; associated ethical conundrums and the viability of epistemological pluralism will be clearly articulated as problems requiring serious museological attention.

Chapter Two provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which knowledge – its production and dissemination – provides the basis for the suppression of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial contexts. It discusses Indigenous critiques of the ways in which criminologists marginalise Indigenous knowledge, and seek to maintain hegemony over the construction and dissemination of knowledge about Indigenous experiences of settler colonial crime control policies and interventions. Utilising case studies from Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada, the chapter demonstrates the added value that Indigenous approaches to social harm can have in alleviating the negative impact of settler colonial criminal justice.

Javier Garcia Liendo analyzes how the comic book, La Chola Power, functions as a repository of memory, safeguarding the history of Peru’s violent past as well as redeploying Indigenous epistemologies and linguistic codes (untranslated Quechua) to critique current contexts of exploitation and oppression.

As many large-scale protests by Indigenous people have articulated, lands inhabited by Indigenous communities (such as desert margins, small islands, lakes and rivers, high-altitude zones, and the circumpolar Arctic) are particularly vulnerable to the dramatic shifts in climate currently underway. The delicate ecosystems upon which Indigenous communities rely are in flux, and the accelerating rate of climate change—outpacing the direst scientific projections—amounts to a crisis that is every bit as threatening as the legacy of European colonialism. Fortunately, for millennia Indigenous communities have cultivated an intimate awareness of their ecology and have remained, throughout the era of world-wide industrial devastation, adept at adapting to environmental change. This awareness and adaptive power has been discussed within the framework of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Using traditional stories and songs in Indigenous communities as a touchstone, this chapter will explore three interrelated aspects of TEK: (1) its role in assisting Indigenous communities in adapting to the effects of climate change; (2) its potential to inform and influence Western-generated climate science; and (3) its promise as a unifying thread tying Indigenous communities together, strengthening global self-determination.

This commentary engages with the book’s chapters on colonial linguistics by highlighting that in their struggles to maintain their ancestral sovereignty, Indigenous peoples remind all of us that, for most of our histories as human beings on the Earth, we have exercised and cultivated our individual and collective powers to set in motion dynamic relationships of well-being and mutual benefit. The commentary argues that Indigenous peoples also remind us that it has only been in the last few millennia and in a few aberrant cultures that systems of domination such as patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and accumulation of wealth have sought to assure that our deployment of what Foucault refers to as the ‘awesome materiality’ of these powers no longer serves the life-seeking interests of ourselves, our communities, and humanity, but instead serves the death-seeking interests of processes of domination, such as colonization.

Aboriginal Australia is facing a time like no other. This chapter reflects on our ever-adapting culture, as we are lamenting the passing of our cultural custodians, each of whom is a library of profound knowledge. It articulates how a global groundswell of creative work, controlled and created from an Aboriginal and/or first peoples perspective, works to retain language and revitalize ritual forms. Our creative practices have enabled Indigenous arts industry workers across all genres a relevant voice, better employment prospects, community outcomes, and, most important, the control of how we are perceived. Viewers of museum exhibitions now have more awareness of the sophisticated and complex societal structures we have developed and lived for thousands of years. But what of the continuing cultural obligations and clan/nation responsibility, the cultural inheritance of the oldest living race? While the author believes it is vital for the next generations of first peoples to build bridges, develop indigenous capacity, generate employment, and ensure the health and well-being of their communities, she asks how we are ensuring our youth are experiencing the old ways of traditional, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and how relevant we consider it in the twenty-first century.

In the past few decades, new forms of collaborative ethnography have continued to expand and grow. Though collaborative ethnography arguably has a long tradition in ethnographic fieldwork, developments surrounding, among other things, the explicit co-conceptualization and co-theorization of collaborative inquiry; the diverse and dynamic co-commitments of practice (be they moral, ethical, political, or otherwise); and the joint productions of ethnographic forms (be they texts, exhibits, actions, etc.) have yielded new opportunities for collaborative research and action. With this in mind, this chapter explores how recent forms of collaborative ethnography are helping to chart more critical and complex understandings of both collaboration and collaborative research in field-based disciplines such as anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology.