Abstract: This paper places geographies of responsibility on stolen and occupied Indigenous lands in settler colonial Canada. Responsibilities to Indigenous lands and peoples are contextualized within the spectacle of reconciliation in Canada. In drawing on a range of critical analyses of reconciliation led by Indigenous scholars, I examine how the truth and reconciliation process has […]

Abstract: This paper focuses on CitéMémoire, a multi-year outdoor exhibit located throughout historic Old Montreal. Organized around the confluence of Montreal’s 375th birthday, Canada’s Sesquicentennial, as well as Expo 67’s 50th anniversary, CitéMémoire uses large-scale interactive projections and augmented reality to tell the city’s history from the time of European contact onward. The exhibit’s technologies […]

Abstract: This article explores the imbrication of history, fiction, and biopolitics in a variety of specific confrontations between the Canadian state and the Anishnaabeg in Michel Noël’s teen novel Nipishish (2004). Situated in Southwest Québec during the second half of the 20th century, the novel lends itself readily to a biopolitical reading which gleans from […]

Abstract: During the first century of Australia’s colonization, settler thanatopolitics meant both casual killing of individual Natives and organized massacres of Aboriginal clans. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Aboriginal Protection Boards sought to disappear their charges by more covert means. Thus, biopolitics of biological absorption, cultural assimilation, and child removal, designed to bring about the […]

Abstract: This response addresses aspects of biopolitical regulations by Canada, El Salvador, Australia, and the United States, as critically analyzed in the special issue. Each piece offers much to illuminate different modalities of regulating Indigenous lifeways and Indigenous peoples’ resistance to them on myriad grounds, and this response engages three particular themes that emerge from […]

Abstract: Drawing on recent Australian historiography, two works of Indigenous fiction, and the latest staggering figures on Indigenous incarceration and child removal, this article develops two main ideas. Firstly, a seamless ideological continuity exists between the biopolitics settler colonial Australia pursued in previous centuries and the striking resurgence today of those earlier biopolitical practices of […]

Abstract: All research is guided by a set of philosophical underpinnings. Indigenous methodologies are in line with an Indigenous paradigm, while critical and liberatory methodologies fit with the transformative paradigm. Yet Indigenous and transformative methodologies share an emancipatory and critical stance and thus are increasingly used in tandem by both Western and Indigenous scholars in an attempt to decolonize […]

Excerpt: the inter-state system as a particular form of organizing authority is especially important for contemporary settler colonial states such as Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Canada and the United States. Indeed, this distribution of authority in the world has allowed these settler states to establish their own legitimacy through the imposition of state borders on top […]

Abstract: Research shows that the institutionalization of legitimacy criteria has created contested meanings of being indigenous to the United States, which leads to an unrelenting debate about authentic indigeneity among indigenous people and between indigenous communities. While instituted through colonizing federal Indian policy, the “real Indian” trope is now a social fact for American Indians. […]

Abstract: The controversy over the lands in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania has been the stuff of legend (in stories of the Battle of Wyoming) and the historical record. Scholars in recent years have presented the history of the region as a contest between empires, between monied classes and common people seeking to eke out […]