Abstract: As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia […]

Abstract: This paper argues that the resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ citizenship orders can be informed in part by tenets of Indigenous customary adoption.  The paper considers registration as an Indian under Canada’s Indian Act as having conflated being “Indian” with a Eurocentric property-holder identity, which First Nations now internalize through band membership practices.  As such, […]

Abstract: This article follows the critical theory that Canadian wilderness painting exists only when the artist disavows their presence at the scene of capture, and suggests that it is due time the theory be applied to Canadian sound pieces such as Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North (1967). A contrapuntal radio piece that marked Glenn […]

Abstract: This thesis employs Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law to argue that the doctrine of Canada’s duty to consult with indigenous communities is based on extra-legal communicative presumptions that fail to reflect the basic norm of communicative equality. It derives a set of communicative norms from discourse theory and demonstrates their dovetailing with discursive […]

Review by Mark Caprio.

From the Introduction: Circassians are an indigenous ethnic group that originates in the northwestern Caucasus Mountains. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire enacted a policy to eradicate Circassians from their ancestral homelands, effectively pushing almost all surviving Circassians throughout the diaspora. Russia recently hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the heart of Circassian […]

Abstract: This essay examines my work as expert witness in the case of U.S. v. Michigan, a Indigenous use-rights case. I was charged with parsing the intention of a specific article of the 1836 Treaty of Washington compelling land cession by Anishinaabe peoples and with writing a history of land use in the area from […]

Abstract: Since the 19th century, Canadian culture has been rife with Mountie lore, and since the 1970s, many critics have deconstructed the Mountie myth, showing how this police force was romanticized in both non-fiction and fiction alike. This paper explores one example of such cultural mythmaking: a fictional television script about law and order involving […]

Abstract: In this article I draw on a long history of successive transatlantic “displacements” and “returns” that have shaped and reshaped Liberian diasporan identities. Proposing that diasporicity is above all an identity discourse, the first part of this article documents and compares dramatic differences in that discourse across historical generations while also examining arguments about […]

Abstract: In several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, Puritan New England becomes a metaphor for Eden. In developing this metaphor, Hawthorne expresses his desire for Utopia and laments its loss, even as he expunges his guilt for his Puritan ancestry. Several examples of Hawthorne’s writings will be used to support this position.