Bring it Back, Move it Forward: Indigenous Resurgences in the Upper Mekong
Micah F. Morton
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies
Northern Illinois University.
Date: Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Time: 4 pm
Place: Sabin Hall G-90, UWM, 3413 North Downer Avenue, Milwaukee WI
Abstract:
In this talk, I tell a story of defiance and resurgence, a story of one Indigenous community’s efforts to decolonize and reclaim the Ancestral domain of their collective identity. I draw on long-term fieldwork and sustained relationships with certain member of the Indigenous Akha community whose Ancestral territories are centered on the Upper Mekong and divided by the borders of Thailand, Myanmar/Burma, Laos, and China. I highlight the community’s work to ensure their Ancestors remain always living, and thus a meaningful and dynamic part of their and their descendants’ everyday lives and vice versa. A key part of the community’s decolonizing methods entails a concerted effort to rework their Ancestral Ways in a manner that makes them lighter to “carry” yet more relevant to their everyday lives and aspirations. I argue that via their work of cultural reappropriation and resurgence, Akha, not unlike many other Indigenous Peoples, can be seen as “going backward into the future.” Through their cultural work, Akha are sustaining and regenerating relationships with their Ancestors and their Ancestral practices, which are better conceived of not as the “past” but as a renewed and renewing source of a present and future that are recurrent and generative.