Where do indigenous economies fit? Sarah A. Radcliffe, ‘Geography and Indigeneity III: Co-articulation of Colonialism and Capitalism in Indigeneity’s Economies’, Progress in Human Geography, 2019

10Feb19

Abstract: In this final report of three, I examine Indigenous peoples’ dynamic co-constitution with contemporary political economy in its manifestations of neoliberalism, resource extractivism, reordering production and labour relations. Indigenous subjects and spaces are not reducible to the status of capitalism’s side-effects, necessitating analytical attention to the co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in particular, variegated ways. Debates around extractivism, neoliberalism and economic want are hence recent manifestations of 500-year-old disputes over monetary and normative values, resources and livelihoods. Whether as corporations, labourers, welfare recipients, or ambassadors for culturally distinctive forms of livelihoods-exchange, Indigenous peoples occupy complex, relational positions across economic spheres. The paradox of indigeneity’s economies is that Indigenous populations have been constituted as Other to homo oeconomicus, yet their embeddedness within the economic flows, labour processes and forms of accumulation that make the modern world belie any separation. The report ends by raising questions about decolonising accounts of indigeneity’s economies.


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Breaking the settler contract one duck at a time: Miranda Johnson, ‘The Case of the Million-Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract’, The American Historical Review, 124, 1, 2019, 56–86

10Feb19

Abstract: In settler states such as Canada, indigenous peoples’ claims for sovereignty in the late twentieth century became matters of intense public and political debate. Provoked by widespread indigenous rights activism of the 1970s, the Canadian state embarked on a large-scale examination of claims for rights and restitution. By focusing on the 1962 case of a duck hunter who insisted on his treaty right to hunt as he pleased in a Canadian borderlands region that was becoming more tightly woven into the fabric of the settler nation, this article argues for the value of recovering the discursive strategies of indigenous peoples in making sovereign claims prior to 1970s activism. I suggest that such claims were effective in bending the “settler contract,” which refers to the founding of settler states in dispossession and the silencing of indigenous actors. My approach brings to the fore a distinctive form of non-elite politics, what I call “treaty talk,” or the vernacular stories, civic rituals, and political disputes concerning the treaty promises that Canadian authorities made to northern indigenous communities earlier in the twentieth century. Although treaty talk did not break the settler contract, it posed a significant challenge to settler law and led one judge to reinvent a Canadian myth of benevolent empire.


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Indigenous water and indigenous life: Christina Boyles, Hilary E. Wyss, ‘Water Is Life: Ecologies of Writing and Indigeneity’, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 30, 3-4, 2018, pp. 1-9

10Feb19

Access the article and the articles in the issue here.


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The responsibility of teaching the history of settler colonialism: James Miles, ‘Teaching History for Truth and Reconciliation: The Challenges and Opportunities of Narrativity, Temporality, and Identity’, McGill Journal of Education, 53, 2, 2018, pp. 294-311

10Feb19

Abstract: This paper argues that history educators and teachers are uniquely implicated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action through their responsibility to teach Indigenous and Canadian history, including the injustices of settler colonialism. After examining the politics of Canada’s ongoing truth and reconciliation process, this paper articulates three conceptual challenges for history education in pursuit of reconciliation: narrativity, temporality, and identity. This paper concludes by suggesting possible pedagogical opportunities for each of these challenges, taking into consideration a historical thinking approach to teaching and learning now embedded in most provincial and territorial curricula.


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Settler colonial modernism in the face of revolution: Bradley Flis, Border Ends: Anti-Imperialism, Settler Colonialism, And The Mexican Revolution In U.S. Modernism, PhD Dissertation, Wayne State University, 2018

10Feb19

Abstract: From 1910-1920, the Mexican Revolution became a source of anxiety, interest, and inspiration to those who paid attention to its political turmoil as reported in the popular press. It would lead to the reinvigorating of a debate about U.S. intervention in the political affairs of Mexico, indeed, for some, the question was one of annexation. Responding to a growing imperialist culture in the U.S., William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, John Reed and Max Eastman of The Masses were among those who looked to modernist aesthetic practice to critique military and economic expansionism in Mexico.

This dissertation explores that discursive interplay between U.S. modernism and anti-imperialism through representations of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), in writing itself conceptualized as “revolutionary.” While the writers that I take up in this study each, though in different ways, represented Mexico as a site of revolutionary modernity that points to a shared, transnational cultural affinity toward constructions of “the new” as the basis of an anti-imperialist politics, each also, confronts in their writing the disrupting presence of the American Indian within this anti-imperialist vision. Each of these writers in their own way explicitly connects an interest in the aesthetics of the “new” with the colonial history of the “New World.”

At the same time, they register self-consciously in their texts the contradiction of using an anti-imperialist discourse to consolidate national identity in the face of ongoing settler colonialism: the appropriation and occupation of native land, the genocide of native peoples, and the erasure of native culture. In key texts about Mexico written by Stein, Williams, Reed, and Eastman, references to a history of U.S. settler colonialism and the presence of the American Indian emerge as a limit to their anti-imperialist poetics and a challenge to their desires for the construction of a “new,” modernist national culture.


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Culture and water protectors: Edwin López, ‘Race, Culture, and Resistance at Standing Rock: an Analysis of Racialized Dispossession and Indigenous Resistance’, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 18, 1-2, 2019

05Feb19

Abstract: This article examines role of culture in the struggle to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. To better frame this analysis, I introduce the concept of “racialized political cultures of opposition.” I turn to the Lakota prophecy of the “Black Snake” to show how water protectors refashioned an old folkloric belief to 1) name the source of the problem, 2) connect their immediate concerns to the centuries long history of colonialism, and 3) mobilize resistance. Important to this analysis is how an assemblage of cultural elements enabled water protectors to connect their struggle to non-Lakota and non-Indigenous peoples.


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A settler-colonial history prompts a geography of responsibility: Michelle Daigle, ‘The spectacle of reconciliation: On (the) unsettling responsibilities to Indigenous peoples in the academy’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2019

03Feb19

Abstract: This paper places geographies of responsibility on stolen and occupied Indigenous lands in settler colonial Canada. Responsibilities to Indigenous lands and peoples are contextualized within the spectacle of reconciliation in Canada. In drawing on a range of critical analyses of reconciliation led by Indigenous scholars, I examine how the truth and reconciliation process has naturalized and fetishized Indigenous suffering and trauma while cultivating settler colonial spectacles whereby white settler Canadians engage in hollow performances of recognition and remorse. These spectacular spaces, I argue, become centered and severed from a larger terrain of settler colonial dispossession and violence that Indigenous peoples continue to resist on an everyday basis. I specifically focus on settler colonial spectacles and reconciliation mandates taking shape in Canadian postsecondary institutions. In doing so, I focus on how Canadian universities located on stolen Indigenous lands (actively supportive of the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands) continue to be a crucial site of settler colonial relations and a constitutive part of the settler colonial state.


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The settler’s ‘dreamwork’: May Chew, ‘Phantasmagoric City: Technologies of Immersion and Settler Histories in Montreal’s CitéMémoire’, Public, 29, 58, 2018, pp. 140-147

03Feb19

Abstract: This paper focuses on CitéMémoire, a multi-year outdoor exhibit located throughout historic Old Montreal. Organized around the confluence of Montreal’s 375th birthday, Canada’s Sesquicentennial, as well as Expo 67’s 50th anniversary, CitéMémoire uses large-scale interactive projections and augmented reality to tell the city’s history from the time of European contact onward. The exhibit’s technologies of immersion guide audiences through a spectacularized historical landscape, rendering notions of heritage and nation into palpable archives that audiences encounter directly through their bodies. This article demonstrates how archival and cultural technologies, which choreograph audiences’ bodily, imaginational, and affective positionalities, prove central to the ‘dreamwork’ of settler coloniality. 


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Still on settler-colonial biopolitics and its failures: James Boucher, ‘Neoliberal Biopolitics in Michel Noël’s Nipishish: Market Logic and Indigenous Resistance’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42, 2, 2018, pp. 77-96

03Feb19

Abstract: This article explores the imbrication of history, fiction, and biopolitics in a variety of specific confrontations between the Canadian state and the Anishnaabeg in Michel Noël’s teen novel Nipishish (2004). Situated in Southwest Québec during the second half of the 20th century, the novel lends itself readily to a biopolitical reading which gleans from and expands on the theories of Foucault, Agamben, and Pratt. Focusing on deconstructing biopolitical strategies of the settler colonial state and agentive Native practices, the analysis underscores how Noël’s depiction of Indigenous lifeways and resistance constitute an invaluable political message to Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth alike.


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Settler-colonial biopolitical control against Indigenous refusal: Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, ‘Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Resistance: The Refusal of Australia’s First Peoples “to fade away or assimilate or just die”’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42, 2, 2018, pp. 11-38

03Feb19

Abstract: During the first century of Australia’s colonization, settler thanatopolitics meant both casual killing of individual Natives and organized massacres of Aboriginal clans. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Aboriginal Protection Boards sought to disappear their charges by more covert means. Thus, biopolitics of biological absorption, cultural assimilation, and child removal, designed to bring about the destruction of Aboriginal peoples, came to be represented as being in the victims’ best interests. Even today, coercive assimilation is framed in the now-threadbare terms of welfare discourse. Yet, Australia’s Indigenous peoples have survived the genocidal practices of the frontier era and continue to resist the relentless succession of normative policies deployed to eradicate their “recalcitrant” lifeways. This essay presents a brief historical overview of settler Australia’s biopolitics and analyzes the sociocultural factors enabling Aboriginal Australians both to survive the devastating impact of settler biopower and to resist the siren call of assimilationist rhetoric. Drawing on Kim Scott’s Benang and Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise, I discuss how that resistance is reflected in contemporary Indigenous life-writing and fiction.


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