Description: Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable health care, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. Inventing the Thrifty Gene examines the relationship between science and settler colonialism through the lens of “Aboriginal diabetes” and the thrifty gene hypothesis, which posits […]

Abstract: Grand Portage National Monument preserves the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century site for and history of the fur trade between the Anishinaabeg and Britain’s North West Company. The Monument’s remote location means tourists’ travel experiences getting there are an important part of their total heritage tourism experience of the site. The 150-mile drive up Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior is dotted with historic and popular state parks, […]

Abstract: Global Indigenous history is on the rise. Increasing numbers of scholars and writers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are examining and articulating the ways in which Indigenous peoples have engaged, and even co-created, the larger processes we call globalisation and globalism. From studies of diasporic Indigenous populations and communities to accounts of Indigenous exploration and […]

Abstract: In 1913, government representatives from around the world gathered in Berne, Switzerland, to attend the First World Conservation Conference. Its convenor, the anthropologist Paul Sarasin, called for new global protocols that would govern the world’s evident capacity for inhumanity, greed, and destruction. The urgency of such an intervention, he advised, was no more evident […]

Abstract: The topic of colonialism has a rich scholarly history. Many scholars, with some success, have declared themselves postcolonial or developed theories such as neo-colonialism to describe the current international structure. The question of colonial structures, however, still plays a major role in current politics. This study looks specifically at expressions of sovereignty within the […]

Abstract: This paper explores the rhetoric of the Fort restaurant, located in Morrison, Colorado. The Fort conveys a rhetorical phenomenon I refer to as “frontier authenticity rhetoric” and embodies the rhetorical characteristics of a museum to (re)present a historical 1833 fur trading post, the Old Bent Fort. Using components of the frontier myth, authenticity, commodification, […]

Abstract: This paper builds on the work of critical environmental justice scholars. I argue that the understanding of environmental injustice requires an expansion beyond conceptualizing environmental injustice as toxic pollutants and external environmental harms being inflicted on marginalized and/or racialized peoples by the settler-colonial state and corporations. Built environments include structures that people work, live, […]

Abstract: As Mapuche land reclamations threaten corporate profits, the Chilean state and forestry industry double down on repression.

Abstract: This paper explores how racial discrimination and agro-industrial development undermine the right to food of Indigenous communities in the West Papuan district of Merauke. Traditional forest foodways express the cultural and territorial identity of Marind and affirm their intimate and ancestral relations with each other and with the sentient forest ecology. Yet these foodways […]

Excerpt: It took a long time for the swimming pool to close in the Village of Masset. The pool had been the single most important feature of Masset’s recreation center, which the community had inherited when the military base was decommissioned in 1997. But the only way to heat the pool was with diesel fuel, […]