Abstract: Despite vocal opposition from the indigenous people, public hearing processes in Canada play an important part in determining whether or not oil and gas pipeline development projects will be approved. Attention to hearing as an aesthetic and political practice has been theorized by the Canadian composer and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer as a fundamental […]

Description: In Florida, land and water frequently change places with little warning, dissolving homes and communities along with the very concepts of boundaries themselves. While Florida’s landscape of saturated swamps, shifting shorelines, coral reefs, and tiny keys initially impeded familiar strategies of early U.S. settlement, such as the establishment of fixed dwellings, sturdy fences, and cultivated […]

Description: In Perishing Heathens Julius H. Rubin tells the stories of missionary men and women who between 1800 and 1830 responded to the call to save Native peoples through missions, especially the Osages in the Arkansas Territory, Cherokees in Tennessee and Georgia, and Ojibwe peoples in the Michigan Territory. Rubin also recounts the lives of Native […]

Abstract: The exponential growth of temporary migration to Australia since the late 1990s has unsettled the model of permanent migration, state supported settlement and multicultural citizenship on which Australia has been built. This article draws attention to the emergence of a gulf between Australia’s immigration policies and social policy frameworks for migrant integration in the course […]

Excerpt: Any consideration of what sovereignty has come to mean in Native North America, as a conceptual framework that names a particular kind of lived indigenous experience, has to be understood within the context of settler colonialism. Yet anthropology has been slow to take up settler colonialism as a key analytic, even though the discipline has […]

Abstract: Familiar to most anyone with knowledge of U.S. history, antebellum Indian removal likely evokes a drama comprised of two roles: on one hand, Indian peoples as represented by elite Cherokee activists, and, on the other, their political antagonists in the nascent states’ rights movement, among whom the infamous Andrew Jackson stands both as agent and […]

Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnography of the body as medium in the North American Spiritualist tradition. With its origins in the “burned-over district” of upstate New York, Spiritualism is a homegrown religious movement rooted in the radical Protestant milieu of “Great Awakenings,” which evolved into an international religious movement with a distinctly secular bent. Spiritualists, […]

Abstract: Escalating environmental controversies are placing Indigenous peoples and First Nation communities at the front lines of protests, opposing unjust government policies and corporate actions. Yet, many environmental educators are not actively engaged or affectively learning about Indigenous Land struggles against Canada’s colonial oppressions. Environmental education has a strong record of research to promote ecological, place-conscious […]

Abstract: My dissertation, “Empire’s Imagination: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in ʻLocal’ Hawaiʻi Narratives,” addresses the history of U.S. empire in Hawaiʻi, arguing that empire persists into the present through the structuring of contemporary literary representations of Asian migrants and Kanaka Maoli, the Indigenous population. This project intervenes into postcolonial studies, American studies, and ethnic studies […]

Abstract: During the first half-century of Britain’s presence in Canada, the Aboriginal policy was largely shaped by strategic and military matters. This policy, however, changed rapidly and radically in the early nineteenth century. The new official objective of Britain’s policy quickly became civilizing the Aboriginal peoples. Focusing particularly on the period during which the Aboriginal civilization […]