It’s called mazacoin, and the man who developed it, Payu Harris, wants to make it the official currency of the Lakota Nation, a semi-autonomous North American Indian reservation in South Dakota. Officially launched in February, its market cap of $3.3 million places it 20th among alternative currencies (there are more than 200 “alt-coins,” although most […]

Nationalism and Ethnic Politics Volume 20, Issue 1, 2014. Special Issue: The Politics of Indigenous Identity: National and Global Perspectives. Stephanie Lawson, ‘The Politics of Indigenous Identity: An Introductory Commentary’ Braden Hill, ‘Searching for Certainty in Purity: Indigenous Fundamentalism’ Dominic O’Sullivan, ‘Indigeneity, Ethnicity, and the State: Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand’ Katherine Smits, ‘The Neoliberal State and […]

Tim Rowse, ‘“Rooted in Demographic Reality”: The Contribution of New World Censuses to Indigenous Survival’, History and Anthropology 25, 2 (2014). One of the most powerful narratives deployed by colonists in the nineteenth century was that the colonized natives were inherently too weak to survive contact with those who were colonizing them—the Dying Native story. […]

Clint Carroll, ‘Native enclosures: Tribal national parks and the progressive politics of environmental stewardship in Indian Country’, Geoforum 53 (2014). This article discusses the recent proliferation of North American Indigenous conservation efforts in the form of tribal national parks. To varying degrees, tribal parks offer alternative perspectives to conservation studies by accounting for land-based epistemologies […]

Gustav Muller, ‘The legal-historical context of urban forced evictions in South Africa’, Fundamina : A Journal of Legal History 19, 2 (2013). The aim of this article is to place forced evictions in their legal-historical context by analysing the rural and urban land tenure measures used during apartheid to limit the nature and duration of […]

Stefano Liberti (ed.), Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism, trans. Enda Flannelly (London: Verso Books, 2013). A shocking exposé of how modern-day corporations and governments are raiding the Third World To the governments and corporations buying up vast tracts of the Third World, it is ‘land leasing’; to its critics, it is nothing better […]

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Indigenes and Settlers (Fourth World)’, A Companion to Global Historical Thought (2014). This chapter focuses on the reasons why history-writing remains so controversial in the settler national historiographies. The author argues that embracing a historical methodology or rejecting it altogether is part of a dilemma that is specific to the settler colonial “situation”. In […]

Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, ‘Discursive manipulations of names and naming in Kate Grenville’s “The secret river”‘, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 36, 1 (2013). This article stems from two observations arising from my reading of Kate Grenville’s three-part exploration of Anglo-Australia’s frontier history. The first is that, contrary to Grenville’s averred commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about […]

Nadine Attewell, Better Britons: Reproduction, Nation, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his famous novel about a future in which humans are produced to spec in laboratories. Around the same time, Australian legislators announced an ambitious experiment to “breed the colour” out […]

Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Review: Between Indigenous and Settler Governance’, Journal of Global History 9, 1 (2014). Comparative settler colonialism as a scholarly field is relatively recent. The foundational works evinced critical interest in the white settlers and only indirectly in the indigenes, even if the critique was radical. They insisted that the dispossession and elimination of the native […]