Abstract: In the late 1930s a novice fieldworker from the University of Chicago wrote in his field notes that his collaboration with a Ho-Chunk interpreter had failed because of the interpreter’s “aggressions” in the struggle for “white class status.” The notes exhibit a pattern of perceptual failure that I call “settler agnosia,” elements of which […]

Excerpt: Columbus’ words in describing the first Indigenous inhabitants that he encountered in the Western Hemisphere laid the groundwork for what would become the structures of settler colonialism. Like laying the first stem of irises in a flower bed, the words Columbus used set in motion the myths and structures that would grow, just like the […]

Abstract: The unprecedented enfranchisement of Venezuela’s indigenous population is partly a result of the formation of a state-sponsored indigenous movement. This movement prioritizes access to social services, economic development, and political participation in state structures over certain goals of free determination. Other forms of collective action with different priorities are evidence of the existence of […]

Excerpt: Refusal was a stance but also a theory of the political that was being pronounced over and over again. It emerged in my own writing through observation of Kahnawà:ke action, but also through their words. I would hear “enough is enough,” “it’s not us, it’s them,” “the white man put that there, not us”—on […]

Abstract: In 2011, thirty-six-year-old Cindy Gladue, a Cree woman, bled to death in a hotel bathtub in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. On the night she died, Gladue had contracted for sexual exchange with Bradley Barton, a white man who worked as a trucker. In 2015, Barton was tried for the murder of Cindy Gladue. With more […]

Abstract: This article looks at settler colonialism and the manufacturing of food insecurity in Indigenous communities located in present-day northern Canada after 1945. The federal government undermined the foodways of Indigenous peoples and sought to make them reliant on a southern market based food economy through the criminalization of Indigenous hunting and harvesting practices and […]

Abstract: Global citizenship has emerged as a key objective of liberal education. Because the status of Indigenous Peoples worldwide is inextricably linked to globalization and imperialism, mainstream culture students’ attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples can be taken as an index of global citizenship. The items comprising the Measure of Attitudes Toward the Rights […]

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Abstract: In December 2015, Megan Davis opened her article for The Monthly, ‘Gesture Politics’, with the following words: ‘Despair. In a word, this is the universal sentiment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders I have spoken to about the state of Aboriginal policy in Australia’. More recently, Jon Altman has written in The […]

Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the  Present Studies of violence against Native peoples have typically focused  narrowly on war and massacre. These narratives often cast Indians as  simple and passive victims, become trapped by stale debates about the definition of genocide, and consign violence to the safety of the past.  While recognizing […]