Indigenous resurgence is the regeneration of Indigenous practices, governance, knowledge systems, and relationships to land as acts of freedom — not as performances for settler audiences or applications for state recognition. The framework is associated with Leanne Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) and Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), among others.
Resurgence is distinguished from the politics of recognition. Recognition asks the settler-colonial state to acknowledge Indigenous rights, title, and identity; resurgence practices Indigenous life without waiting for that acknowledgment. Coulthard argues in Red Skin, White Masks that recognition, when granted by the colonizer, reproduces the colonial relationship by making Indigenous freedom conditional on settler approval. Resurgence refuses this conditionality.
In practice, resurgence includes the revitalization of Indigenous languages, the renewal of land-based practices (harvesting, ceremony, governance on the land), the transmission of knowledge through Indigenous pedagogical forms, and the rebuilding of governance structures that operate outside and sometimes against the settler state. Simpson describes resurgence as “generative refusal” — it is not primarily reactive (opposing the colonial state) but productive (generating Indigenous life on Indigenous terms). This connects to the relational framework: resurgence is the reconstitution of relations — to land, to community, to knowledge — that settler colonialism sought to sever.