Description: When the US Army Corps of Engineers began planning construction of The Dalles Dam at Celilo Village in the mid-twentieth century, it was clear that this traditional fishing, commerce, and social site of immense importance to Native tribes would be changed forever. Controversy surrounded the project, with local Native communities anticipating the devastation of their […]

Excerpt: From the dawn of history Al-Quds (Jerusalem) has been shaped by withstanding various conquests and regimes, all of whom exerted their influence on the city and society of Jerusalem. Yet, throughout its tumultuous lifespan, Jerusalem has maintained its ability to captivate — and perhaps even hold captive — those who have tried to harness its […]

Abstract: The primacy accorded individual civil and political rights is often touted as one of the United States’ greatest achievements. However, mass incarcerations of indefinite duration have occurred consistently throughout US history and have primarily targeted people of color. The dominant narrative insists that the United States is a political democracy and portrays each instance of […]

Excerpt: This is called settler colonialism. Shift the model from a colonial to a settler colonial model, and that means that you do not end it by a partition—you can’t end settler colonialism and its power by partition. You have to end it by eliminating settler domination.

Excerpt: The idea for this issue of Transmotion came from the bottom of the sea. While watching the 2014 film Godzilla, I was struck by ways in which the famous lizard’s battle with a flying, radiation-eating monster resembled the dynamic relationship between the Anishinaabe creatures of Mishebeshu (water monster) and Animiki (thunder beings). I wrote up my thoughts then […]

Description: Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books […]

Abstract: In contrast to narratives by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the United Nations, and some scholars that international police assistance is a relatively recent phenomenon, we argue that Canada’s Mounties have always been international. To develop this argument, we examine three dimensions of police power in international relations historically and with respect to the role […]

Abstract: The recent global financial crisis and related sovereign debt crises in Ireland, Greece, Iceland, Puerto Rico and beyond have highlighted the pressing task of understanding how such crises reshape the spaces we live in. Geographers, most notably David Harvey, have traced the historical roots of the current crisis to the transformation of global financial capitalism […]

Abstract: Over the past two decades, a substantial literature has developed probing Robert Warrior’s idea that we can trace a written Indigenous intellectual tradition back to the mid‐eighteenth century. Focused on Indigenous peoples who wrote fairly extensively, much of this literature has tended to treat the same individuals: Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Peter Jones, William […]

Abstract: At the close of the twentieth century, the related fields of American Indian, environmental, and western history produced the discipline’s most dynamic historiographies. For all their collective insights, however, these works rarely crossed into the twentieth century to examine modern Indians in the American West. This is no longer the case. This essay, thus, first […]