Abstract: Thomas Hobbes was the first major thinker to locate an imagined pre-political State of Nature in the Americas. Even his critics such as Locke and Rousseau followed him in seeing native Americans as living in a world which they imagined existed in pre-historic Europe and, most importantly, beyond meaningful dialogue. These and other thinkers used America as a […]

Description: A gift from the Creator – that is where it all began. The game of lacrosse has been a central element of many Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation – then reclamation – of Indigenous identities. Focusing on the history of lacrosse in Indigenous […]

Abstract: American Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land started within a historical and ideological context shaped by American territorial expansionism. The settler-colonial impulses informing that expansionism were carried to Palestine, where Palestinians were encountered as “savages” compared explicitly to American Indians. Erasure of the Holy Land’s Indigenous inhabitants is thus sanctioned. Herman Melville’s Clarel and Mark […]

Abstract: During the twentieth century some Australian states and the U.S. federal government enacted comparable policies that demonstrate how the discourse of protection continued to survive in an era when settler nations were focussed on “assimilating” Indigenous populations. The Australian policy of exemption and the U.S. policy of competency did not represent a true change in […]

Abstract: This article considers how shifting programs of Aboriginal protection in nineteenth-century Australia responded to Indigenous mobility as a problem of colonial governance and how they contributed over time to creating an emergent discourse of the Aboriginal “vagrant.” There has been surprisingly little attention to how the legal charge of vagrancy became applied to Indigenous people […]

Abstract: Sydney, Australia, is rarely seen as an Indigenous place, yet over 52,000 Indigenous people live here. “Indigeneity” persists in educational discourse as a remote phenomenon, but the research reveals otherwise for many Indigenous people who continue to live in Sydney. This is reflected in the contemporary lives of seven Dharug women who constitute the basis […]

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Abstract: While William Morris was creating the narrative poem based on his translations of the Icelandic tales of Sigurd the Volsung, in the 1870’s, groups of Scandinavian settlers were encouraged to come to New Zealand as part of a grand scheme of borrowing money from Britain to develop the new world country for further settlements. These […]

Abstract: In light of recent calls to decolonise curricula at South African universities there has been a renewed interest in what decolonisation might specifically imply for particular academic disciplines. Art history in South Africa has long struggled to move away from its settler colonial origins towards a more Afrocentric focus and its art world has frequently been criticised for […]

Abstract: Fred D’Aguiar’s book-length poem, Bill of Rights (1998), imagines the life of a survivor of the November 18, 1978 mass suicide and killing that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana. Using a multi-voiced persona to reflect on both the traumatic events of Jonestown and the problematics of surviving trauma, the poem enacts a ritual performance of remembering […]