Description: In Unsustainable Empire Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state. Hawai‘i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai‘i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but […]

Abstract: Standard accounts of the ideological origins of the American Revolution tend to emphasise the centrality of republican or constitutionalist ideas in the struggle for sovereignty within the British Empire. This chapter takes an alternate approach and seeks to recover how the process and ideas of conquest functioned in articulations of settler sovereignty. This requires that […]

Abstract: Qualitative research in Tucson, Arizona reveals limitations to coalition building based on activists’ distinct positions and experiences, as well as their disparate understandings of the meaning of solidarity. Nonetheless, in the context of increasing militarization in the United States-Mexico borderlands/occupied O’odham territory, there is a history of coalition building to challenge the violence, at times […]

Abstract: In 1826, in Mexican Texas, a coalition of American Indians and Anglo settlers declared its short-lived independence in the name of the Fredonian Republic. This article introduces John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America, from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen (1823) as a key source for understanding the […]

American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting Washington, DC, April 3-7, 2019 Organizers: Rhys Machold (University of Glasgow), Stepha Velednitsky (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sara Salazar Hughes (USC) Both interest in settler colonial studies and critiques of that field (Simpson 2017; Snelgrove et al 2014; Macoun & Strakosch 2013; Svirsky 2017) have been on the rise in the last […]

See what the BBC makes of it.

Abstract: Liberia, the West African nation, whose name connotes freedom, was the creation of the American Colonisation Society (ACS) whose initial aim was to rid the United States of a growing population of ‘free people of colour.’ Yet it became a unique imaginative space on to which were projected the hopes, dreams and fears of various […]

Abstract: Despite the growing national interest and body of literature concerning the Indian Residential School System, there has been little acknowledgement of the history of hockey within these schools. This thesis is an examination of hockey programs at three Protestant-run Indian residential schools in northwestern Ontario and western Manitoba during the middle of the twentieth century. […]

Abstract: This position paper offers a reflection on Edmundo O’Gorman’s seminal La invención de América as a critique of the New World exceptionalism underwriting much of twentieth-century hemispheric American studies. It suggests that the paradigm of New World exceptionalism emerges, as a state of exception, from the modern Western (Protestant) idea that America was discovered by […]

Abstract: This article examines the telling of ghost stories of Indigenous Australians who were removed from their families during Australia’s assimilation era. Known as the Stolen Generations, this group of people were subjected to institutionalisation, adoption, and forced removals from their families, communities and Aboriginal country. In many of my ethnographic encounters with Stolen Generations, I […]