Teaching Imazighen in “Indigenous Ecologies”

Brahim El Guabli
Johns Hopkins University

I designed and taught my course “Indigenous Ecologies: Thinking with Indigenous Worldviews” at Johns Hopkins University during the academic years 2024/2025 and 2025/2026. Taking a broad approach to the notion of ecologies, which spans a wide range of approaches, practices, methodologies, geographies, disciplines, and traditions, the courses aimed to center Indigenous peoples’ perspectives by examining salient questions related to indigeneity through literature, translation, extraction, law, environmentalism, activism, and social justice. Instead of taking ecology in its literal meaning, the course invited the students to use it creatively as a complex and interactive landscape in order to have a grasp of the ways their connections to land and physical environments fashioned Indigenous peoples’ positions vis-à-vis marginalization, dispossession, and displacement. By engaging with a rich corpus of materials produced by mostly Indigenous thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and scholars, the course allowed the enrolled students to gain a deeper understanding of knowledge production, climate change, indigenous methodologies, and many other relevant issues from their indigenous-centric lenses. The end goal of the course was to equip students to develop a nuanced awareness as well as in-depth knowledge of the manner indigeneity challenges the anti-indigenous status quo. By the time they finished the course, I anticipated the students would develop appreciation of the alternative worldviews that are expressed through indigenous practices, languages, rituals, storytelling, and engagements with the world.

Indigenous Ecologies was the culmination of my own decolonial awareness as an Amazigh Indigenous scholar who realized that the study of his people, Imazighen, the indigenous people of Tamazgha, cannot be divorced from the transnational context of all Indigenous peoples. Imazighen’s experience of erasure and invisibilization, coupled with cultural oppression after independence, can only be understood productively when its examination is undertaken in conjunction with other Indigenous people’s survival of myriad forms of colonialism. Contextualizing our postcolonial de-Amazighization within the longue durée, systematic pillage of and segregation against Indigenous communities in the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Polynesiareveals a grammar of indigenous oppression that undergirds the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples that Imazighen have not entirely explored. For this exploration to happen,  we, Imazighen, need to realize that we are part of a wider Indigenous humanity. This realization will facilitate  the rationalization of our experiences of de-indigenization through linguicide and culturicide within this grammar. This fact alone puts our condition in dialogue with 500 million Indigenous people, who live in a variety of environments, speak thousands of languages, occupy different positionalities, produce knowledge in their  idioms, and sustain their beliefs through land-based cultural and spiritual practices that they forged through millennia.

Although the category “indigenous” continues to raise many questions, Indigenous peoples self-define as such. They decolonized the term and upended its initially racializing meaning to convey their pride in their identity as well as their rootedness in their ancestral homelands. However, it would be reductive to merely perceive Indigenous peoples’ struggle as solely focused on  resolving their own issues alone. In reality, the Global Indigeneity Movement (GIM) they unleashed, while seeking to render justice to Indigenous communities worldview, has also been at the helm of global movement that mobilized both scholarship and activism in search of social justice, environmental sustainability, and an alternative world that diverges from or even stands in opposition to predominant capitalistic practices that have routinized de-indigenization, displacement of Indigenous people, and extraction of their resources across the globe. The GIM’s intersectionality is clearly demonstrated in the central role the Zapatista Movement has played in the Alter-Globalization Movement starting in 1994, which coincided with the rise of the Internet.[1] Probably the most known Indigenous group, the Zapatista’s helped shape both the discourse and action of the anti-globalization movement to counter neoliberalism’s destructive socio-economic, political, ecological, and cultural impacts.[2] The intersection of their rise in Mexico with the rise of human rights in the 1990s created points of convergence that allowed Indigenous people to receive a much-needed attention, culminating in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP).[3] The UNDRIP opened up the category “Indigenous” and gave it inter-indigenous ramifications, allowing communities, like Tamazgha’s who were prevented from gaining their rights as a result of systematic barriers and institutionalized policies, to join this global family of fighters for indigenous rights.

In the Tamazghan specific context, the circumstances of their struggle did not foster Imazighen’s integration into the GIM until the 1990s.[4] Partly because of the postcolonial consensus that elevated Arabic and Islamic into tenets of the post-independence nations, Imazighen were unable to claim their indigeneity, which would logically contradict the nationalist fiction of harmonious and unified nations throughout time. The fiction of harmony between the invading Arabs and Indigenous Imazighen disseminated through school curricula and official media created a fake consciousness that alienated Tamazghan youth from their reality.[5] Because of the political and sociological situation in which they emerged, the founders of the Amazigh Cultural Movement (ACM), which emerged in the 1960s, could not even think of indigeneity as a framework for their struggle to rehabilitate Amazigh linguistic and cultural rights. It was beyond their horizon of thought because the notion evoked the Native Americans they saw in Western movies and, most importantly, they never pretended to be radical as the “unity within diversity” indicated.[6] The horizon for the early generation of Imazighen in Morocco, for instance, was not to radically re-indigenize the country but to inscribe their demands within the democratic process. Of course, we have to remember that the founders of the ACM were mostly left-leaning, and it is possible to understand how framing identity through an indigenous lens would not work for their politics. This said, the 1990s would witness a major change when  lawyers Ahmed Degherni and Hassan IdBalkassam discovered indigeneity at the Vienna World Human Rights Conference and embraced it as a tool for their advocacy.[7]

Given this context, one wonders what teaching Imazighen would look like. Structurally, Amazigh indigeneity fits perfectly within the arch of Indigenous Ecologies. My syllabus started by addressing very basic questions related to the very definition of “indigenous people” and analyzing the various criteria that have been established to stake out the category, which, I always insisted, students should understand as fluid and entirely porous across time and space. The reports of José Martínez Cobo, who served as the Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities,[8] provided students with the data they needed to grasp both the complexity and the versatility of the criteria that were discussed in the process of defining Indigenous people. Once students are exposed to these definitions, they read, among many other things, Patrick Wolfe’s seminal article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,”[9] which is a passage obligé for understanding the dispossession and displacement experienced by Indigenous people globally. From land grabbing to racialization, Indigenous people have as a common denominator the experience of multilayered dispossession being stripped of their resources and cultures, which has major ramifications for their very humanity. Given my own positionality, the question that kept poking its head from the materials was how to extend the logic underlying the many articles we read to encompass and account for the Amazigh context.

I structure the course thematically in a manner that fosters both breadth and depth in student learning about Indigenous peoples. I dedicated weekly sessions to topics, such as “Settler Colonialism,” “The Trans-Indigenous,” “Indigenous Struggles and Intersectionality,” “Indigenous Feminism,” and “Indigeneity and Translation,” among others. This thematic approach facilitates a comparative engagement with different materials. Instead of merely learning about and discussing one very specific context, the different book chapters, films, articles, and interviews as well as weekly assignments I assigned are intentionally curated to stimulate students' curiosity about the larger arch of indigenous existence and how indigenous contexts are in conversation with each other. This comparative methodology reveals to students that Indigenous cultural producers may have never spoken to each other and may not even know about each other’s location on the map, but the grammar and condition of indigeneity run through their work. Both the indigenous grammar, which is the structure that governs how Indigenous people have been mistreated, and the Indigenous condition, which reflects the state of Indigenous people’s disempowerment, are essential for students to fully grasp that invasion, colonization, settler colonialism, and unbridled rush to exploit indigenous peoples’ resources have had similar consequences for all Indigenous people independently of their location. It is true that some indigenous experiences were characterized by genocide while others were not as bad. However, the difference is one of degree, but not of nature. In this regard, there has been a strive to deactivate indigeneity’s potential application the Amazigh context by downplaying the history of violence survived by Imazighen as a result of Arab-Islamic invasion. However, the post-independence period throughout Tamazgha witnessed a true process of de-Amazighization that reflects both the grammar and the condition of indigeneity. While one has to nuance the historical context, the grammar and the condition that ensues from it are obviously at work in Tamazgha.

Amazigh activism emerged in its essence as a response to the state of erasure of Amazigh language and culture after independence in the 1950s and the 1960s. Living under explicit conditions of “internal colonialism,” Imazighen were subjected to their respective states’ linguicidal power that aimed to unify the postcolonial nation by shifting demographics through de-Amazighization. Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and, to a lesser extent, Niger and Mali instituted policies that marginalized their Amazigh populations. While the entire Amazigh homeland of Tamazgha experienced a degradation of the Amazigh condition, it was the northern part that witnessed the gravest and most systematic de-Amazighization at the hands of self-defined Arab-Islamic states. Nevertheless,  reading Elsa Stamatopoulou, the Former Chief of the Secretariat, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, helps us understand the indigenous condition is almost the same globally:

The situation of Indigenous cultures in many parts of the world continues to be dire. Of the 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, 6,700 are Indigenous, and it is precisely these that are most threatened. Most of these languages are spoken by very few people, while most of the world’s population speaks only a handful of languages. About 97 percent of the world’s population speaks 4 percent of its languages, while only 3 percent speaks 96 percent of them. A great majority of these languages are spoken by Indigenous Peoples, and many of them are in danger of becoming extinct. Roughly 90 percent of all existing languages may become extinct within the next one hundred years. One can therefore imagine what the percentage of Indigenous languages this statistic represents.[10]

The onslaught on indigenous languages is underlain by the same logic of domination and dispossession. Writing like Stamatopoulou’s demonstrates that the nationalist disregard for Amazigh language and culture in Tamazgha after independence was just a symptom of a larger  system of settler colonialist or internal colonialist mentality that has endangered all manifestations of indigenous identities. Accordingly, Imazighen’s condition becomes legible within a longer period and through a more nuanced approach that elucidates its various aspects without either exaggerating or downplaying its implications.

I fit the Amazigh Indigenous condition within Indigenous Ecologies in a dialogical manner that challenges any strive for uniqueness. In a unit I dedicated to Indigenous feminism and its liberatory potential,  I taught sociologist Zakia Salime’s article“A Gendered Counter-archive: Mining and Resistance in Morocco” in conjunction with Nadir Bouhmouch’s film Amussu.[11] I paired these readings “What it Takes to Be Counted” by Ruby Hembrom, who is an Adivaasi Indigenous woman from India,[12] and  “Why Am I a Feminist?” by Emma Laroque,[13] a Native Canadian of Cree and Métis ancestry. Thinking through the roles Indigenous women play in their communities and the contributions to both domestic and external politics illustrates continuities that one may not have noticed between the different contexts. One year, I taught Fadma Ferras’s poem “Tomorrow I Will Celebrate Myself” alongside Ali Sadqi Azaykou’s “My Language” and Ruby Hembrom’s “What it Takes to Be Counted.”[14] Teaching these works in light of the critical writings of Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu on indigenous translation opened up the horizons of meaning for Amazigh content to transcend the physical boundaries of Tamazgha as well as the disciplinary borders of the disciplines that focus on Amazigh issues. Accordingly, Amazigh content enters into meaning-making relationships that broadens its transdisciplinary and transregional significance.

While there is no need to stress the relevance of the wider discourses of indigenous intellectuals and theorists to the Amazigh context, highlighting dispossession as a foundational aspect of Indigenous experience is crucial. International companies have used their agreements and business schemes with governments to occupy large swaths of indigenous lands in order to exploit both the underground and above ground resources without their rightful owners’ informed consent. In the Tamazgha context, Amazigh tribes lost their most fertile land to French conquest but post-independence governments never restituted the lands to the tribes. Instead of redistributing the land, governments found ways to keep it in their hands or pass it on to powerful politicians. As a result, Indigenous Imazighen have had to contend with the fact that their states have either prevented them from accessing their resource-rich lands or have used colonial-era laws to confiscate the lands and rent them out to transnational companies, which then extract and market the resources. The end result is the same for Indigenous people. Dispossession has many facets, but its most fundamental aspect that links together Indigenous experiences is the theft of land and its consequences for Indigenous people.

The course would only be a litany of grievances if one does not pay attention to Indigenous people’s agency and their proactive endeavors to transform their condition. Throughout the semester, I emphasize the different ways Indigenous groups have harnessed opportunities to advocate for the recognition of their rights. Advocacy differed amongst Indigenous groups and communities depending on their context, their education, the standards of living, and the degree of historical injustice meted out to them. For instance, tribes in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States had treaties with settler governments. Although these treaties were not honored by the settlers in the most part, their existence furnished Indigenous communities with some legal protections that have no equivalents in other contexts. The existence of these treaties was perhaps a factor in the early emergence of a sharp indigenous theory in these contexts. Exposure to these variegated contexts allowed students to perceive how treaties reified categories in some areas while their absence made indigeneity a more inclusive notion. Comparing North America and the Pacific to Tamazgha reveals the major differences that exist in experiences and outcomes of indigeneity. Unlike the distinction in North America and the Pacific between settlers and Natives, Amazigh activists refrained from using such terminology and extend indigeneity to anyone who claims it. The historical and societal contexts are different, but Tamazgha cannot be understood without theorizing the impactful role Islam has played in cementing identities in this region. For instance, the nuances of the different situations helps explain why individuals who claim indigenous status in North America continue to get into trouble while such moral and legal issues do not arise in other Indigenous spaces.

Teaching Indigenous Ecologies cannot be complete without initiating the students to questions of cultural, methodological, and theoretical production. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith and others have asserted, knowledge production has been the locus of indigenous erasure.[15] Decolonizing the way we ask questions and the manner in which answer them as well as decolonizing what counts as knowledge and who counts as knowledge producer are sine qua non to liberation from settler and internal colonial hegemonies. The centering of indigenous terminologies, concepts, toponymies, knowledges, epistemologies, and worldviews is essential for a decolonized Indigenous futurity. Throughout their millennial histories, Indigenous people developed knowledge, practiced surgery, healed illnesses, and reflected on their surroundings and the worlds beyond. What they could not solve practically, they encoded in mythologies and other-worldly explanations to make sense of their world. This is all knowledge that various colonial enterprises dismissed, cheapened, or simply removed from the realm of scientificity. What students learn through the discovery of indigenous worldviews is not which one is more accurate or more truthful, but rather the pluralism that hegemonies of all sorts attempt to erase. They may or may not agree with indigenous practice craniotomy, but merely learning that they practiced it changes their perceptions of them and plants doubt in their minds about the histories that they learned. Examples abound, but the lesson is the need to center indigenous knowledge production and its processes.

A final aspect of Indigenous Ecologies is the very productive detour the class makes via literature. I teach two important texts that open us students' horizons to have a better understanding of the role of imagination in undergirding the transnational functions of indigeneity across the globe. Reading Ibrahim al-Koni’s The Bleeding of the Stone alongside Markoosie’s Hunter with Harpoon charts a path for reflecting on uncharted territories that have not been explored before.[16]The Bleeding of the Stone tells the story of Asouf as he tries to have a full life in the desert while Hunter with Harpoon is about a young man who goes after a rabid bear and ends up losing several members of his tribe. Both novellas unfold in inclement weather, one in the desert and the other in the Arctic snow, but they reflect the indigenous condition. If there is anything that common to these two works is the harshness of the environment and the closeness of death. The Canadian arctic weather freezes the characters where the desert heat melts them in a figural sense. All characters in these novellas meet their death. While this may not be the prevalent condition among Indigenous people globally, death is a constant that waylays indigenous groups as a result of structural racism and various exclusions that they experience. These two novellas facilitate these comparative reflections.

Teaching Indigenous Ecologies also comes with a set of challenges. Translation would be the first challenge one should expect when trying to teach materials across indigenous contexts. While there is an abundance of materials in English about the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, the same cannot be said about the rest of the world. As a result, there is a risk that one may overcoat other contexts with the theorizations of these scholarship-rich contexts. Similarly, the asymmetry in terms of theoretical engagement with issues of capitalism, extraction, and neoliberalism, which have received significant attention in some contexts, particularly in Latin America, while they are absent from conversations in other contexts. The issues of under-theorization of indigeneity and the challenges of translation are acutely felt when trying to include Tamazgha in the conversation. Local production is very limited, and Imazighen’s intervention in global theoretical debates is not as rich as it could have been. This said, recent publications are steadily filling up these gaps.

Retrospectively, I consider teaching Indigenous Ecologies an important milestone in my pedagogical practice. This course allowed me to think comparatively about the Amazigh indigenous condition across different geographical, cultural, and political situations by exploring how Tamazgha and Imazighen relate to the grammar of indigeneity. The most important takeaway for me is that this indigenous framework is extremely promising as a critical pathway for Imazighen’s decolonization from the fettering residues of decadeslong, nationalist hegemony and its consequences.

Bibliography

Akhiate, Brahim. al-Nahḍa al-amāzīghiyya kamā ‘ishtu mīylādahā wa-taṭawwuraha (Rabat: Mashūrāt al-Jam‘iyya al-Maghribiyya li-al-Baḥth wa-al-Tabādul al-Thaqāfī, 2012), 115.

al-Koni, Ibrahim. Trans. May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley. The Bleeding of the Stone. (Northampton, MA:  Interlink Books, 2002).

Alex Khasnabish. Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (Lanham, MD: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013)

Bailey, David J.. Protest Movements and Parties of the Left: Affirming Disruption (Lanham, MD: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)

Bouhmouche, Nadir.  “Amussu,” https://vimeo.com/782124244.

Cobo, José Martínez. The Problem of Discrimination  Against Indigenous Populations: Volume V Conclusions, Proposals and Recommendations (New York: United Nations, 1987).

El Guabli, Brahim. “From Minoritized to Indigenous: Imazighen and the Global Indigeneity Movement,” POMEPS, https://pomeps.org/from-minoritized-to-indigenous-imazighen-and-the-global-indigeneity-movement.

El Guabli, Brahim. “Translation and Rehabilitation: An Introduction to Indigenous Amazigh Literary Output,” Words Without Borders,n“https://wordswithoutborders.org/contributors/view/brahim-el-guabli/.

El Guabli, Brahim.“Medieval Anti-Amazigh Racism: An Amazigh-Conscious Reading of Racial Prejudice in Tamazgha” (forthcoming).

Hembrom, Ruby. “What it Takes to Be Counted,” Meridians (2024): 235-258.

Laroque, Emma. “Why Am I a Feminist?” in Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, ed. Gina Starblanket,  52-71 (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2024).

Markoosie, Patsauq. Trans. Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu. Hunter with Harpoon (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021)

Salime, Zakia. “A Gendered Counter-archive: Mining and Resistance in Morocco,” Development and Change 53:5 (2022):1035-1058.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books LTD, 2021).

Stamatopoulou, Elsa. Indigenous Peoples in the International Arena: The Global Movement for Self-Determination (New York: Routledge, 2025).

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, https://www.un.org/development/desa/Indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf.

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006): 387-409.

Footnotes

[1] David J. Bailey. Protest Movements and Parties of the Left: Affirming Disruption (Lanham, MD: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 156.

[2] For more details about the Zapatistas, see Alex Khasnabish. Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (Lanham, MD: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013).

[3] United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, accessed June 13, 2026, https://www.un.org/development/desa/Indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf.

[4] Brahim El Guabli, “From Minoritized to Indigenous: Imazighen and the Global Indigeneity Movement,” POMEPS, accessed June 2, 2026, https://pomeps.org/from-minoritized-to-indigenous-imazighen-and-the-global-indigeneity-movement.

[5] Brahim El Guabli, “Medieval Anti-Amazigh Racism: An Amazigh-Conscious Reading of Racial Prejudice in Tamazgha” (forthcoming).

[6] Brahim Akhiate. al-Nahḍa al-amāzīghiyya kamā ‘ishtu mīylādahā wa-taṭawwuraha (Rabat: Mashūrāt al-Jam‘iyya al-Maghribiyya li-al-Baḥth wa-al-Tabādul al-Thaqāfī, 2012), 115.

[7] El Guabli, “From Minoritized to Indigenous.”

[8] José Martínez Cobo. The Problem of Discrimination  Against Indigenous Populations: Volume V Conclusions, Proposals and Recommendations (New York: United Nations, 1987).

[9] Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006): 387-409.

[10] Elsa Stamatopoulou. Indigenous Peoples in the International Arena: The Global Movement for Self-Determination (New York: Routledge, 2025), 6, 

[11] Zakia Salime, “A Gendered Counter-archive: Mining and Resistance in Morocco,” Development and Change 53:5 (2022):1035-1058; Amussu by Nadir Bouhmouche, https://vimeo.com/782124244.

[12] Ruby Hembrom, “What it Takes to Be Counted,” Meridians (2024): 235-258.

[13] Emma Laroque, “Why Am I a Feminist?” in Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, ed. Gina Starblanket,  52-71 (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2024).

[14] To access Fadma Ferras’s and Ali Sadqi Azaykou’s poems, see Brahim El Guabli, “Translation and Rehabilitation: An Introduction to Indigenous Amazigh Literary Output,” Words Without Borders, accessed June 12, 2026, “https://wordswithoutborders.org/contributors/view/brahim-el-guabli/.

[15] Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books LTD, 2021)

[16] Ibrahim al-Koni. Trans. May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley. The Bleeding of the Stone (Northampton, MA:  Interlink Books, 2002);  Patsauq Markoosie. Trans. Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu. Hunter with Harpoon (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021)