Settler communters! Richard Edwards, ‘To Commute or Not Commute, the Homesteader’s Dilemma’, Great Plains Quarterly, 38, 2, 2018, pp. 129-150

25May18

Abstract: After a long hiatus, scholars are reassessing the Homestead Act of 1862. Most scholars see the Act as a failure, partly because they believe its operation involved massive fraud, for which they blame its “commutation” clause as a chief reason. This article provides a fresh look at homesteading commutations, reframing the question to consider under what conditions an “actual settler” might benefit from commuting his or her claim. The analysis shows that commuting was profitable (rational) when the homesteader was optimistic about the future, undermining most historians’ a priori identification of commutations with fraud. Since allegedly fraudulent commutations play such an outsized role in historians’ conclusion that homesteading was infected with pervasive fraud, this analysis puts their broader verdict in jeopardy as well.


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Indigenous justice against settler lawfare: Jennifer Hendry, Melissa L. Tatum, Miriam Jorgensen, Deirdre Howard-Wagner (eds), Indigenous Justice: New Tools, Approaches, and Spaces, Palgrave, 2018

25May18

Description: ​This highly topical collection of essays addresses contemporary issues facing Indigenous communities from a broad range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives. Drawing from across the social sciences and humanities, this important volume challenges the established norms, theories, and methodologies within the field, and argues for the potential of a multidimensional approach to solving problems of Indigenous justice.

Stemming from an international conference on ‘Spaces of Indigenous Justice’, Indigenous Justice is richly illustrated with case studies and comprises contributions from scholars working across the fields of law, socio-legal studies, sociology, public policy, politico-legal theory, and Indigenous studies. As such, the editors of this timely and engaging volume draw upon a wide range of experience to argue for a radical shift in how we engage with Indigenous studies.


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Settler colonialism is settler power + electrification of the whole country: Lauren Rickards, Elspeth Oppermann, ‘Battling the tropics to settle a nation: Negotiating multiple energies, frontiers and feedback loops in Australia’, Energy Research & Social Science, 2018

23May18

Abstract: Multiple forms and spaces of energy are enrolled in nation-building projects. In this cross-disciplinary paper, we outline how struggles to govern the relations between climate and the human body have shaped nation-building efforts and electricity infrastructure in the settler-colonial society of Australia. Focused on Australia’s tropical zone, notably the hot, recalcitrant, militarized region of the Northern Territory, we explore how questions of climate have slowed, undone and accelerated efforts to securely settle its capital city, Darwin. In doing so, we highlight the multiple links between electricity infrastructure and air-conditioning that have made it possible to hold ‘climate’ and ‘body’ together, co-producing indoor microclimates and habitable territory while contributing to the warming climate that is now raising questions about the limits of this electricity-enabled habitability. By examining the intersecting spatialities of electricity, we help advance more ‘thoroughly geographical’ (Bridge, 2018) accounts of the relation between energy infrastructures and nation-building, highlighting the multiple forms, frontiers and feedback loops through which energy – broadly defined, as foundational category – acts as hindrance, enabler and side-effect of nation-building projects. We show how this perspective reveals troubling paradoxes and tensions, including accelerating feedbacks between energy use and climate change extending far beyond Australia’s borders.


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Undoing repressive authenticity: Stephen Warren, Ben Barnes, ‘Salvaging the Salvage Anthropologists: Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, Carl Voegelin, and the Future of Ethnohistory’, Ethnohistory, 65, 2, 2018, pp. 189-214

23May18

Abstract: How should Native and non-Native scholars utilize the work of salvage anthropologists? In this study of Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, Carl Voegelin, and their research among the Shawnee, Stephen Warren and Ben Barnes suggest that Community-Engaged Scholarship (CES) offers a new path forward in examining the difficult legacy of the Boasians and their successors. Collaborative, team-based research can yield important new discoveries as tribal citizens rediscover and use the work of salvage anthropologists. For tribal communities working to recover dormant languages and cultural practices, CES methodologies offer a means of critical and concordant engagement with anthropological texts.


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Anticolonial solidarities straddling the indigenous-settler divide: Trevor J. Lee, Between Settlers and Sovereignty: Literary Solidarity and Anti-Colonial Discourse in Territorial Hawai’i, 1887–1959, PhD Dissertation, CUNY, 2018

23May18

Abstract: This project reclaims a history of anti-colonial discourse and collaborations among Asian settlers and Native Hawaiians between 1887-1959 in Territorial Hawai‘i, drawing from archival works, including King David Kalākaua’s poetry, correspondence, and speeches regarding the Hawaiian monarch’s responsibilities toward Asian laborers, Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana‘ole’s speeches about Hawaiian land rights and Asian farmers, and texts written by local Asian authors of the early 20th century, including Fred Kinzaburō Makino, Takie Okumura, James T. Hamada, Wai Chee Chun, and Noboru Itamura. Through this recovery of texts, I show how the racialization of Native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants by the U.S. territorial government obscured the denial of citizenship, state recognition, and civil rights. By bringing together legal, historic, and poetic texts in which authors confront the legacies of imperialism, this project tracks the development of an anti-colonial community through 1) the translation of language and transculturation of texts, 2) the circulation of mo‘olelo (stories) and histories, and 3) claims on land based on genealogy and labor relations.


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In denial (saying that mentioning someone’s indigeneity perpetuates conflict is like saying that we should not mention gravity because it may make things fall down): Ran Ukashi, ‘Zionism, Imperialism, and Indigeneity in Israel/Palestine: A Critical Analysis’, Peace and Conflict Studies, 25, 1, 2018, #7

20May18

Abstract: This article explores the similarities and differences between Zionism and archetypical European modes of settler colonialism to demonstrate the incongruence between the two phenomena. This analysis is contextualized around the recent discourse surrounding the competing claims of indigeneity to historic Israel/Palestine. The claims of both the Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities are explored to demonstrate that both communities can rightfully claim degrees of Indigenous connection to the territory, but that Palestinian Arab claims of being the sole Indigenous inheritors of the land are dubious. The analysis utilizes Burton’s unmet human needs theory, and Kriesberg’s theories on identity and conflict intractability to demonstrate how perpetuating such claims serves to exacerbate inter-group conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Furthermore, the relationship between Ottoman and British imperialism in the development of both nationalisms is expounded to illustrate the contributory factors of imperial policies to the development of the national aspirations of both social groups.


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Catholics as exogenous others (i.e., ‘Britishers, Protestants and settlers’): Géraldine Vaughan, ‘”Britishers and Protestants”: Protestantism and Imperial British Identities in Britain, Canada and Australia from the 1880s to the 1920s’, Studies in Church History, 54, 2018, pp. 359-373

20May18

Abstract: This article explores the links between the assertion of British imperial identities and the anti-Catholic discourse and practices of a network of evangelical societies which existed and flourished in Britain and in the dominions from the halcyon days of the empire to the late 1920s. These bodies shared a broad evangelical definition of Protestantism and defended the notion that religious beliefs and their political implications formed the basis of a common British heritage and identity. Those who identified themselves as Britons in Britain and in the dominions brought forward arguments combining a mixture of pessimistic interpretations of British history since the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act with anxieties about ongoing Irish Catholic immigration and an alleged global papist plot. They were convinced that Protestantism was key to all civil liberties enjoyed by Britons. Inspired by John Wolffe’s pioneering work, the article examines constitutional, theologico-political and socio-national anti-Catholicism across Britain and its dominions.


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Settlers appropriate – indigenes reappropriate: Simone J. D. Anter, ‘I See You – A Story from the Haudenosaunee’, American Indian Law Journal, 6, 2, 1, 2018

17May18

Excerpt: Stories matter. They are a way of disrupting the status quo and adding a voice in a room of silence. As Native scholars and  critical race theorists have emphasized, who tells the stories, who listens to them, and what they say are crucial. Tell any Indian a story of how something was created and they will tell you a story back about how Indians invented that very same thing. America tells a story about Indians; it tells the tale of an anachronistic figure, one that is no longer in the modern world: the vanishing Indian. If something or someone is no longer there, then the unauthorized use of their very image, their very culture, is not problematic. If Indians are in fact gone, then there is no harmful consequence in taking Native cultural property and appropriating it. There is a clear dissonance in society’s mind between the image and culture of Indians and actual real Indian people. As people smoke their Spirit cigarettes, drive their Jeep Cherokees, cheer on the Washington Redskins, fly military missions with Apache helicopters, launch Tomahawk missiles from warships at sea, chew their bubblegum, and play lacrosse, they ironically almost never think about actual Native people.


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Ignorance is settler colonial: Laura Schaefli, Exposing the Colonial Mind: Epistemologies of Ignorance and Education in Ontario, PhD Dissertation, Canada, Queens University, 2018

16May18

Abstract: This dissertation weaves Indigenous and decolonial scholarship together with recent work on ignorance to consider the constraints and possibilities of decolonizing education in the current Canadian context of reconciliation. While the study of knowledge and its nature has been the focus of Western thought since ancient times, it is only recently that scholars have begun to grapple with ignorance as a social and political phenomenon in its own right. Ignorance, as these scholars use the term, is not a neutral or incidental absence of knowledge, waiting to be filled. Rather, it is epistemological, a powerful organizing logic that emerges from and works to sustain strategic methods of not knowing that, consciously or not, function to perpetuate the status quo, privilege, and domination. Ignorance in this sense is deeply tied to settler colonialism. To survive as a political and economic system, settler colonialism requires normalization of the ways of thinking that legitimate denigration and subjugation of Indigenous nationhoods. This dissertation elucidates the role of formal education in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, in encouraging the formation of political subjects with deep, and often unacknowledged, investments in the maintenance of settler colonial relations of power. My colleagues and I worked with over 200 Indigenous educators to develop a research tool that seeks to assess how Ontario high school graduates are learning to think about colonialism and its relationship to First Nations, Métis and Inuit people(s) and Canadian society. This co-designed questionnaire was then disseminated to the first-year cohorts at 10 Ontario universities (over 42,000 students). Results from this study, together with findings from analysis of the most recent generation of Ontario K-12 curricula and textbooks, demonstrate the endurance of colonial modes of thought and their role in undermining the epistemological and affective orientations necessary for the development of decolonizing relations. I argue the importance of epistemic responsibility to enacting the decolonizing promise of new educational emphases. Moving racism and colonial violence to a different place in Canadian public consciousness requires disrupting the economies of value and attention that work to perpetuate colonial ignorance and legitimate ongoing Indigenous dispossession.


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Better a palliative: Shaouli Shahid, Emma V. Taylor, Shelley Cheetham, John A. Woods, Samar M. Aoun, Sandra C. Thompson, ‘Key features of palliative care service delivery to Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States: a comprehensive review’, BMC Palliative Care, 2018, pp. 17-72

13May18

Abstract: Background: Indigenous peoples in developed countries have reduced life expectancies, particularly from chronic diseases. The lack of access to and take up of palliative care services of Indigenous peoples is an ongoing concern.

Objectives: To examine and learn from published studies on provision of culturally safe palliative care service delivery to Indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand (NZ), Canada and the United States of America (USA); and to compare Indigenous peoples’ preferences, needs, opportunities and barriers to palliative care.

Methods: A comprehensive search of multiple databases was undertaken. Articles were included if they were published in English from 2000 onwards and related to palliative care service delivery for Indigenous populations; papers could use quantitative or qualitative approaches. Common themes were identified using thematic synthesis. Studies were evaluated using Daly’s hierarchy of evidence-for-practice in qualitative research.

Results: Of 522 articles screened, 39 were eligible for inclusion. Despite diversity in Indigenous peoples’ experiences across countries, some commonalities were noted in the preferences for palliative care of Indigenous people: to die close to or at home; involvement of family; and the integration of cultural practices. Barriers identified included inaccessibility, affordability, lack of awareness of services, perceptions of palliative care, and inappropriate services. Identified models attempted to address these gaps by adopting the following strategies: community engagement and ownership; flexibility in approach; continuing education and training; a whole-of-service approach; and local partnerships among multiple agencies. Better engagement with Indigenous clients, an increase in number of palliative care patients, improved outcomes, and understanding about palliative care by patients and their families were identified as positive achievements.

Conclusions: The results provide a comprehensive overview of identified effective practices with regards to palliative care delivered to Indigenous populations to guide future program developments in this field. Further research is required to explore the palliative care needs and experiences of Indigenous people living in urban areas.


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