ABSTRACT
This chapter specifically draws on indigenous movements on land rights, water rights, and river rights, working from the culture-centered approach and claims to recognition. The CCA notes that communicative inequalities are intertwined with structural inequalities, therefore suggesting that social change processes among subaltern communities are fundamentally struggles for voice. Through comparisons of indigenous social movements in New Zealand, the United States, and India, we depict the ways in which the struggles for sovereignty among indigenous movements are fundamentally struggles for owning communicative infrastructures where indigenous voices are heard and where indigenous communities control the processes of knowledge production. Noting that indigenous social movements form the frontiers of contemporary activism, we note that the centering of indigenous voice lies at the heart of dismantling the capitalist-colonialist project of modernization that fundamentally threatens human existence through climate change, persistent and entrenched inequalities, and mobilization of forms of oppression to entrench elite control.
