Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces

Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces applies Indigenous frameworks and epistemologies to online cultural movements through four case studies, including hashtags, memes, cryptocurrency, and digital artistry, and develops decolonizing practices for digital rhetoric, online identity work, and digital literacy practices.

Tekobbe’s methods for analyzing and understanding Indigenous knowledges online center Indigenous storytelling and ＂thick＂ (broad, deep, and complex) Indigenous meaning-making. Employing this thickness to interpret Indigenous knowledge ways resists the settler-colonial logics that tend to flatten complex Indigenous concepts into one-note representations of racial stereotypes. Native Americans’ use of social media and digital platforms to support social movements uniquely constructs Indigenous identities as living, producing, and culture-making people, which confronts the commonplace, one-dimensional narrative that Indigenous North Americans either live in isolation or are people of history resigned to the long-forgotten past. Tekobbe’s methods are applicable to additional online research to break through Western paradigms of oppositional critique, the colonial power matrix embedded in hierarchical and taxonomical classification systems, and participant objectification.

Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces offers new methodological and epistemological opportunities to explore digital communities and technologies, problematizing conventional Western critique. This book is useful to instructors in Indigenous studies, internet studies, digital literacies, cultural studies, and communications, as well as Indigenous and internet studies researchers.

Cindy Tekobbe is assistant professor of critical feminist science and technology at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she is co-appointed in Gender and Women’s Studies and Communication. She is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a feminist media scholar, and her interdisciplinary research includes feminist, digital, environmental, and Indigenous rhetorics; media and communication studies; and social justice. She serves as a co-chair of the American Indian Caucus for National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and her work appears in several academic publications.