From peoples without history to peoples without nostalgia: Martin Deuerlein, ‘Indigenous Nostalgia’, in Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia, Routledge, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

From peoples without history to peoples without nostalgia: Martin Deuerlein, ‘Indigenous Nostalgia’, in Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia, Routledge, 2024

06Sep24

Abstract: This chapter explores the relationship between indigenous peoples and their historical and cultural connections to the past. It critically examines the concept of “indigenous nostalgia”, demonstrating how indigenous groups are often seen as communities where nostalgia is expected to be found. Established concepts like “imperial nostalgia” focus on indigenous peoples as objects of remembrance by settlers who express nostalgia for an idealized, but supposedly vanishing indigenous population. To describe how indigenous communities themselves relate to the past, however, “nostalgia” is rarely used. The negative connotations of the term, characterized as romantic and emotionalized longing for an irretrievable past, threaten to delegitimize the aspirations of indigenous activism and conflict with indigenous temporalities. One response is to use alternative terms like “memory”, “heritage”, and “tradition” which not only avoid the sentimentality of nostalgia but are also more in tune with the insistence that the past persists as an integral part of the present. Efforts to reconceptualize the idea of nostalgia from the perspective of indigenous peoples are another response. Here, the past and expressions of “healing nostalgia” serve as a set of cultural resources that continue to inform the present and help to develop a positive vision for the future.

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