Picking up a settler fight (on the outside): Steve Marti, For Home and Empire: Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War, UBC Press, 2019

20Sep19

Description: For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization across the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. It draws together case studies from the dominion home fronts to build a history of nations and empire in wartime.

In the First World War, dominion governments relied heavily on voluntary efforts to support the expansion of their skeletal peacetime armies into formidable expeditionary forces. Communities organized to raise recruits, donate funds, and provide supplies ranging from a pair of socks to an airplane. Their efforts strengthened communal bonds, but they also reinforced class, race, and gender boundaries. Which jurisdiction should provide for a soldier’s wife if she moved from Hobart to northern Tasmania? Should Welsh women in Vancouver purchase comforts for local soldiers or for Welsh soldiers in the British Army? Should Māori volunteers enlist with their home regiment or with a separate battalion? Voluntary efforts reflected how community members understood their relationship to one another, to their dominion, and to the Empire.

Steve Marti examines the motives and actions of those involved in the voluntary war effort, applying the framework of settler colonialism to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.


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The settler search for indigeneity: David Chandler, Julian Reid, Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

20Sep19

Description: Representations of indigenous peoples, while never static, have always served the interests of settler-colonialism. Historically, the dominant framing marginalised indigenous practices as legacies of the distant past. Today indigenous approaches are demanded in order for settler-colonialism itself to have a future. Becoming indigenous, we are told, is a necessity if humanity is to survive and cope with the catastrophic changes wrought by modernist excess in the Anthropocene. 

Becoming Indigenous provides an agenda-setting critique, analysing how and why indigeneity has been reduced to instrumental imaginaries of perseverance and resilience. Indigenous ‘alternatives’ are today central to a range of governing discourses, which promise empowerment but are highly disciplinary. Critical theorists often endorse these framings, happy to instrumentalise indigenous peoples as caretakers of the environment or as teaching the moderns about their ‘more-than-human’ responsibilities. 

Chandler and Reid argue that these discourses have little to do with indigenous struggles or with challenging settler-colonial power. In fact, instrumentalising indigeneity in these ways merely reinforces neoliberal hegemony, marginalising critical alternatives for both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike.


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For settlers, ‘home’ is literally an extraction: Clinton N. Westman, Tara L. Joly, Lena Gross (eds), Extracting Home in the Oil Sands: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change in Subarctic Canada, Routledge, 2019

20Sep19

Description: The Canadian oil sands are one of the world’s most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multi-species relations within a critical political ecology framework, and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.


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Indigenous-settler collaborations augments reality: Rob McMahon, Amanda Almond, Greg Whistance-Smith, Diana Steinhauer, Stewart Steinhauer, Diane P. Janes, ‘Sweetgrass AR: Exploring Augmented Reality as a Resource for Indigenous–Settler Relations’, International Journal of Communication, 13, 2019, pp. 4530-4552

20Sep19

Abstract: Augmented reality (AR) is increasingly used as a digital storytelling medium to reveal placebased content, including hidden histories and alternative narratives. In the context of Indigenous–settler relations, AR holds potential to expose and challenge representations of settler colonialism while invoking relational ethics and Indigenous ways of knowing. However, it also threatens to disseminate misinformation and commodify Indigenous Knowledge. Here, we focus on collaborative AR design practices that support critical, reflective, and reciprocal relationship building by teams composed of members from Indigenous and settler communities. After a short history of Indigenous media development in Canada, we describe how we operationalized a participatory AR design process to strengthen Indigenous–settler relations. We document a series of iterative design steps that teams can use to work through ethical, narrative, and technical choices made in the creation of culturally appropriate AR content, and draw attention to the potential and limitations of this emerging medium.


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It’s not the European heritage; it’s the settler heritage: Joshua Cheetham, Frances Mao, ‘The countries grappling with their European heritage’, BBC News, 19/09/19

19Sep19

Excerpt: Next month, a fleet of ships will circumnavigate New Zealand to mark 250 years since the arrival of European settlers.

Their journey is part of Tuia 250, a NZ$13.5m ($8.5m; £6.8m) government initiative to celebrate New Zealand’s “Pacific voyaging heritage”.

Among the flotilla is a replica of Captain James Cook’s HMS Endeavour, which landed in the country in 1769 and led to the first contact between Europeans and indigenous Māoris.

But not all plans have proved to be plain sailing.

After complaints by Māoris, this week organisers cancelled HMS Endeavour’s scheduled stop in the North Island village of Mangonui.

Anahera Herbert-Graves, head of the Northland Ngāti Kahu iwi, told the BBC that the idea was “historically confusing and quite rude”.

“The celebration is a renewal of the colonial myth that they discovered us,” said Ms Herbert Graves. “We’re looking at people who behaved like barbarians wherever they went in the Pacific”. […] 

In neighbouring Australia, where Captain Cook also landed, many Aboriginal groups have spoken out against the celebration of Australia Day, which marks the anniversary of British settlement. Some critics have dubbed it as Invasion Day.

“Nobody is denying that Cook arrived,” said Ms Herbert Graves. “What we’re saying is why commemorate Cook to lead on the story? You wouldn’t commemorate Adolf Hitler’s contribution to modern motorways in order to tell the story of Jewish endurance.”

 


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The business ethics of settler colonialism: Jurgen Poesche, ‘Business Ethics and Sovereignty in Settler Colonial States’, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 2019

18Sep19

Abstract: The objective of this conceptual article is to make the case that Indigenous Cemānáhuacan nations’ sovereignty is valid throughout all of Cemānáhuac (the Americas), thus rendering settler colonial laws illegitimate and illegal. This in turn means that firms need to abide by Indigenous Cemānáhuacan nations’ laws. Theories relating to business, business ethics, compliance, and sustainability reflecting the assumptions of settler colonial sovereignty need to be reworked to take into account the ethical and legal reality of Indigenous Cemānáhuacan nations’ sovereignty. Without coercion-free recognition from Indigenous Cemānáhuacan nations, firms cannot accept any claim of government authority, ownership, or sovereignty made by settler colonial states. This article closes a gap in the literature between Indigenous sovereignty and business ethics in a settler colonial context.


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Settler-colonial governmentality is not normal governmentality: Mark B Salter, ‘Arctic Security, Territory, Population: Canadian Sovereignty and the International’, International Political Sociology, 2019

18Sep19

Abstract: Canada’s policies to assert and maintain sovereignty over the High Arctic illuminate both the analytical leverage and blind spots of Foucault’s influential Security, Territory, Population (2007) schema for understanding modern governmentality. Governmental logics of security, sovereignty, and biopolitics are contemporaneous and concomitant. The Arctic case demonstrates clearly that the Canadian state messily uses whatever governmental tools are in its grasp to manage the Inuit and claim territorial sovereignty over the High North. But, the case of Canadian High Arctic policies also illustrates the limitations of Foucault’s schema. First, the Security, Territory, Population framework has no theorization of the international. In this article I show the simultaneous implementation of Canadian security-, territorial-, and population-oriented policies over the High Arctic. Next, I present the international catalysts that prompt and condition these polices and their specifically settler-colonial tenor. Finally, in line with the Foucauldian imperative to support the “resurrection of subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 2003, 7), I conclude by offering some of the Inuit ways of resisting and reshaping these policies, proving how the Inuit shaped Canadian Arctic sovereignty as much as Canadian Arctic sovereignty policies shaped the Inuit.


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Settler occupations in unexpected places: Borys Babin, Olena Grinenko, Anna Prykhodko, ‘Legal Statute and Perspectives for Indigenous Peoples in Ukraine’, in Liat Klain Gabbay, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Fugitive and Ethnic Groups Around the Globe, IntechOpen, 2019

18Sep19

Abstract: In this chapter the specific issues of legal statute and perspectives of the development of Indigenous Peoples in Ukraine are highlighted. The situation of occupation and attempt of annexation of the Crimean peninsula as the native land of three Indigenous Peoples (Crimean Karaites, Crimean Tatars, and Krymchaks) in conditions of the ongoing interstate conflict and internal displacement are determined. The aspects of recognition of the indigenous statute in Ukrainian, Russian, and international jurisdictions for those Indigenous People will be researched, as the reparations and reconciliations for such peoples as victims of international crimes of the Soviet times.


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Dispossession in the settler city: Elya Lucy Milner, ‘Devaluation, erasure and replacement: Urban frontiers and the reproduction of settler colonial urbanism in Tel Aviv’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2019

15Sep19

Abstract: This paper examines the continuity of the Israeli settler colonial project into the contemporary moment – as manifested in the city of Tel Aviv – and its transfiguration into current socio-political and spatial processes in the urban arena. It offers a close reading of a case study from which such continuity emerges, exposing the settler colonial terms of production of Tel Aviv in current entrepreneurial real-estate projects. The case study under analysis is of the Giv’at-Amal neighbourhood, established on the emptied Palestinian village of Jamassin in the war of 1948, now facing eviction by private entrepreneurs constructing a luxurious residential compound. The paper aims to expose the ways in which the urban entrepreneurialism in Giv’at-Amal reproduces the settler colonial logic of devaluation, erasure and replacement of existing inhabitants of the land. It further conceptualises the area as an urban frontier, in which current neoliberal restructuring plays an active role in the ongoing production of the settler colonial urban space. By so doing, it aims to undermine the notion that settler colonial projects of replacing existing people and geographies are completed historical events, and to re-articulate them as ongoing contemporary processes.


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The gender of (Canada’s) settler (Indian) act: Martin J. Cannon, Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act, University of British Columbia Press, 2019

13Sep19

Description: Canada’s Indian Act is infamously sexist. Through many iterations of the legislation a woman’s status rights flowed from her husband, and even once it was amended to reinstate rights lost through marriage or widowhood, First Nations women could not necessarily pass status on to their descendants.

That injustice has rightly been subject to much scrutiny, but what has it meant for First Nations men? In an original complement to studies focused on the implications of the act for women, Martin J. Cannon challenges the decades-long assumption of case law and politics that the act has affected Indigenous people as either “women” or “Indians” – but not both. He argues that sexism and racialization must instead be understood as interlocking within the law. This double discrimination has been used to disrupt gender complementarity between Indigenous men and women, and to undercut the identities of Indigenous men through their female forebears.

By restorying historically patriarchal legislation and Indigenous masculinity, Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act encourages Indigenous men to begin to articulate the complex ways in which their life’s journey is shaped by discrimination directed at Indigenous women. Only then can a transformative discussion about Indigenous nationhood, citizenship, and reconciliation take place.

Scholars and students of Indigenous studies and gender studies will find this book of interest, as will activists, legal practitioners, and others concerned with Indigenous rights, feminism, nationhood, identity, and the Indian Act.


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