Refusing tourism

In this chapter, we story some contours of “refusal” as an ethically and politically inspired reconfiguration of relationships associated with tourism development and Indigenous communities. The commodifying and colonizing weight of tourism’s discursive and material production and consumption continues to have grave consequences for people and planet, and often enrolls communities with promises of economic, cultural, and ecological stability. Against these forces, the refusal of tourism is not an undesirable void, but rather a space inhabited by the richness of love, self-determination, autonomous cultural practices, healing, and caring for community and country/land. Refusing tourism is, in effect, a refusal of colonization. Weaving ideas and practices from Indigenous and decolonial scholars, and storied encounters and memories of Indigenous knowledge holders who have shaped each of us personally, we illuminate how refusal rejects hegemonic powers, perceptions, and practices of tourism space, and restories both tourism development and tourism research as ancillary - if not inconsequential - to the vitality of relational principles, pedagogies, and practices based on Indigenous worldviews.