Resurgents Create a Moral Landscape: Indigenous Resurgence and Everyday Practices of Farming in Okinawa
Megumi Chibana
Abstract
Located at the territorial border of powerful states in the world, Okinawa has been a politically contested place because of the long and disproportionate hosting of the US military installations in Japan. Historically, the effects of military occupation and control of land appeared in the dispossession of Indigenous land, a transition of the local economy, and furthermore, environmental destruction of agrarian space. This essay examines everyday acts of Okinawans making Indigenous space and making the land a more livable place, despite having long been dominated and militarily occupied. More specifically, this essay explores the correlation between land-based practices of farming and (a)political activism in the community. Drawing upon ethnographic research in Okinawa, I share various stories of people engaged in active Indigenous resurgence, whom I have termed “resurgents.” Stories of these resurgents show their commitment to the land-based farming and community-based activism of restoring the Indigenous landscape and foodways. I argue that the everyday act of farming, while perhaps seemingly apolitical and personal, has been and becomes a form of sociopolitical action that not only acts to resist settler-military space but also to sustain firmly and to call forth resurgent Okinawan Indigeneity from the ground.