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Description: Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that Indigenous and African-descended peoples articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the […]

Excerpt: The US American West is often referred to as “the geography of hope.” Many people came to the Great Plains looking toward a better future for themselves and their children. Among these was a thirteen-year-old boy named John Talcott Norton, who moved from Mason City, Illinois, to Larned, Kansas, in 1877. Much can be learned […]

Description: Global conservation efforts are celebrated for saving Guatemala’s Maya Forest. This book reveals that the process of protecting lands has been one of racialized dispossession for the Indigenous peoples who live there. Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land, and […]

Abstract: In the United States, extra-tribal adoption policies have typically been studied in relation to the enactment and enduring viability of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which aims to prevent indigenous children from being removed from their communities. However, little critical attention has been paid to those who were adopted out, and the ways in […]

Abstract: From the Zapatista’s “netwar” to the “hashtag activism” of Idle No More, Indigenous peoples have pioneered digital media for global connectivity and contestation. This chapter explores the promise and the pitfalls of social media for First Nations protest in Australia. Overall, we find new opportunities for disruption and ongoing challenges with regard to significant social […]

Description: When William F. Cody introduced his Wild West exhibition to European audiences in 1887, the show soared to new heights of popularity and success. With its colorful portrayal of cowboys, Indians, and the taming of the North American frontier, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West popularized a myth of American national identity and shaped European perceptions of […]

Description: This book draws on over twenty years’ investigation of scientific archives in Europe, Australia, and other former British settler colonies. It explains how and why skulls and other bodily structures of Indigenous Australians became the focus of scientific curiosity about the nature and origins of human diversity from the early years of colonisation in […]

Abstract: This dissertation investigates the meaning and function of ‘masculinity’ among Algonquin peoples in contemporary and historical contexts in lands claimed by Canada. As an Algonquin scholar, I examine historical sources alongside interviews with other Algonquin people to consider the relationship between ‘roles,’ as discussed by the interview participants, and the erroneous identity politics and status/non-status […]

Abstract: Since its publication in 1938 critics have generally read Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia as a nationalist novel, even when its nationalism is seen to be structured by contradiction. But little attention has been given to the ways in which Herbert’s complex, multifarious and heteroglossic novel exceeds and challenges the very possibility of coherent national space and […]