Social Systems and the Indigenous Lifeworld

Abstract

Much of the research on Indigenous Peoples engaged in street lifestyles focuses on pathologized and deficit approaches. Such approaches ignore how individuals make specific and innovative decisions to help them survive. To challenge this approach, this chapter focuses on Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance as an applied theory to reread Indigenous street spaces. The chapter shows how survivance is an ever-active presence that challenges settler colonialism, where Indigenous Peoples continuously negotiate strategies of survival and resistance to their erasure. Specific actions of taking up space, which at specific times and in specific contexts may be read as violent or destructive, are ways to resurge and remake their lives in violent urban colonial spaces challenging settler colonialism. This chapter focuses on a life history narrative to show how survivance needs to be taken up within sociology as an applied theory to better understand the ways in which Indigenous Peoples engaged in street lifestyles engage in acts of survivance to survive, resist, and resurge their lives.