Do Not Use Indigeneity as a Tool of Separation, and Try Not to Inadvertently Misrepresent Liberia

A Relationship of the Minds

Leymah Gbowee’s Nobel lecture presented an opportunity to look into the world from a Liberian standpoint. The more we dive into the discourse of different cultures, the more I see this disconnect that occurs between “outsiders” and the cultures they are looking into. The concept of indigeneity is so broad. It implies that a culture is felt the same way by all people within that culture. But culture can be expressed in many different ways. For instance, when looking up key terms within the text of Gbowee’s speech, it was obvious the Internet was filled with so many sources attempting to convey a message behind every term that it was hard to choose hyperlinks to link to each term.

If I wanted to talk about Liberia as a country, I could go to the official Liberian government’s site to gain information [ http://www.emansion.gov.lr/ ] or the Liberia Wikipedia page [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia ] or a seemingly endless number of links that showed up from a simple Google search. The thing I could not do was be a citizen of Liberia from birth, because I already exist as a U.S. citizen by birth. So, this complicated things tremendously. But it cannot stop there, because all those links from Google came from different places, they could not possibly be 100% connected to each other. They are separate. To take it one step further, I rely on a hypothetical.

Say, in a perfect world, every link about Liberia had to come from a Liberian writer or else it would never be accepted as a credible source about Liberia, and Google would not allow any links from “outside” writers to surface on the Internet. In such a world, would every writer have the same experiences as all the other writers? Absolutely not. It is impossible, even in that “perfect” world, because there is one thing that keeps every human from completely understanding every other human: a disconnection of the minds.

What then is this indigeneity? Does it actually exist? No and yes. It does not exist in its implication of “sameness” throughout the peoples of one culture or place. But indigeneity does exist if it is considered a relationship between several people of one culture or place.

Indigeneity and Liberia

So, I argue that indigeneity is a product of relationships between people in a culture or place. If you move those people to a different place—together—they still form a community of ideals. If you take over their lands, they still have each other. I do not want to focus on how colonization uses the concept of indigeneity to create “others” out of the colonized, but rather focus on how indigeneity can be used by people of a certain culture or place to build a community that supports each other. That form of indigeneity is positive, because it comes from the communities that have made themselves a community based of the place they have lived in or formed their culture in. The other form is created by the “outsiders”—the ones that use indigeneity as a tool of separation, furthering the disconnection of the minds.

In Chapter 7 of Rhetorics of the Americas (Baca & Villanueva), “Rhetoric and Resistence in Hawai’i: How Silenced Voices Speak Out in Colonial Contexts”, Georganne Nordstrom wrote:

Since history is most often written by the victor, the experiences of indigenous peoples and other marginalized ethnic groups in colonized locations are frequently portrayed in such a way so as to cast the colonizer in a specific favorable light and downplay oppressive practices. (Nordstrom 117)

Nordstrom’s words show us how indigeneity can be used by colonizers to manipulate a culture by leaving facts out or creating descriptions of indigenous peoples that do not stand in truth. How this relates to Exploratory 3 is how Ashley, Stephanie, and I chose our sources to link to different terms in Leymah Gbowee’s Nobel Prize speech. Being “outsiders”, we were determining which sources to use to build the context of the speech, and even though we were trying our best to find sources to create the context of the speech, that was the problem: We were creating the context, and we were leaving some things out and choosing what we thought was important in terms of context. Even though our goal was not to marginalize any sources nor to misrepresent the Liberian culture, it was inevitable; we could not help it, because there are too many factors going into what should be used as a source or not be used as a source, and because we are not even a part of the Liberian culture, we are not responsible for representing that culture.

All we could do is try to understand the context of the speech by looking at sources on our own, which is fine. But once we decided to pick certain sources for terms, we were inadvertently attempting to represent the culture based on our own perceptions and understandings. I even added some songs to coincide with certain abstract ideals in the speech (i.e. “’…peace, social justice and equality.’ [“Wonderful Everyday”] [Lyrics] [Original]”), which was an attempt by me to help guide any readers towards showing empathy for the struggles of the Liberian women (and other people) Gbowee mentions in her speech, but the songs were not really directly related to the speech. So, I was creating something that was coming from my own perception of their struggles. The song at the end of our contextualization (“[ ( : VIDEO : ) ]”), however, is a more proper representation of the struggles of West African women (and other West African people), but only in its own context. In the context of our contextualization, the song became what we thought properly represented the West Africans’ struggles.

Insights

When reading anything, especially something written from the perspective of someone from a culture outside of your own, it is important to remember you cannot fully represent another person’s thoughts or culture based on your own research, but you can try to take in your own understanding of their text/discourse/rhetoric to bring it some importance to your own life, which is a positive way to listen to a culture instead of speaking for it. Having said that, I believe our Exploratory’s contextualization can be useful as we remember it is only one way to look at the culture of Liberia through Gbowee’s speech. The speech itself is another way to see her struggles and the struggles of West African women and women (and other people) of other countries she mentioned in her speech. But the possibilities for representation are endless, and no single representation should be used as a model of what Liberian culture (or any other culture) is or is not.