Aloha Kakou Na Hoapapa:

Allen's "Blood Narrative."

The use of blood memory is articulated by Chadwick Allen who explains,
Indigenous minority writers and activists in the early contemporary period developed a range of narrative tactics that enabled them to define an enduring indigenous identity “blood”) in terms of narratives of connection to specific lands (“memory”), and to use narratives of connection to specific lands (“memory”) to assert an enduring identity (“blood”), (220).
 
     Allen’s blood/land/memory complex was especially constructed to disrupt the colonial inscribed identities assigned to indigenous Native Americans and the Maori within treaty discourses and activist texts. This blood/land/memory complex facilitates  the way in which the Maori and Native Americans define their own indigeneity against definitions of legitimacy prescribed and imposed by colonizers and non-indigenous settlers.
     Allen makes reference to George Manuel, the Shuswaparchitect of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples stating, “Manuel describes the global Aboriginal World as having in common four general characteristics. These engage the blood/land/memory complex in recognizable ways, defining indigenous racial identity (“blood”) largely in terms of “land” and “memory.” In this complex, blood memory serves as the underlying process for the recovery of Native American memories and the re-articulation of their indigenous identities. Kanaka `oiwi have similar traditions to both the Maori and Native Americans in the memory configuration of their `oiwi identity, an imparted memory recordation through oral traditions using chants, songs and dance. Within the context of these devices are accounts of mo`olelo or history, such things as genealogies, events, chiefly exploits, births, deaths, transitions of life, love, and politics. Within those genealogies are the blood/memory componets, of which Allen refers to as "narrative tactics" that define and solidify the connection between blood, land, and memory.
     Perhaps a thought as to how similar or different are those articulations between regional indigenous peoples are. Another question might be, how has Manuel's initial "World Council of Indigenous Peoples," (now the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples and various Working Groups) managed, under the indigenous identitfication description, to bring their nationals toward a meaningful and collective vision that allows for national autonomy (sovereignty) and facilitated as premised in the "Solemn Declaration's insistence on self-determination within that international arena?

 

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