From Melbourne’s The Age.

Abstract: During the mid-nineteenth century, the advent of multiple gold rushes swept foreign populations into what is now known as the British Columbia Interior, bringing a variety of European languages to the homeland of a multitude of Indigenous languages. In order to bridge communication gaps between these populations, Chinook Jargon, a composite trade pidgin, quickly spread. […]

Abstract: Indigenous peoples and settlers engaged in innumerable conflicts in the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia between 1849 and 1871. The constant threat of violent Indigenous resistance to settler colonization in the Pacific Northwest—both real and imagined—produced feelings of anxiety for settlers, especially state officials, that shaped colonial strategy and statecraft. To buttress colonial […]

Abstract: South Australia’s reputation for progressive reform extends back to its origins in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s scheme for imperial systematic colonisation. Wakefield’s grand plans, which inspired followers and shaped several colonies in Australasia, aimed to rid Australia of convict transportation and to assist respectable free settlers. While land policy would limit the expansion of the frontier […]

Abstract: This project examines how these two differing land preserves with opposite goals were promoted and defended in similar ways and run in similar manners. It examines the reservations and the park through the governmental language used to discuss each at the times of their creations. Though founded on vastly different purposes—a site of preservation […]

Abstract: Canada is in a liminal space, with renewed struggles for and commitments to indigenous land and food sovereignty on one hand, and growing capital interest in land governance and agriculture on the other. While neoliberal capital increasingly accumulates land-based control, settler-farming communities still manage much of Canada’s arable land. This research draws on studies of […]

Description: Passed by Congress in July 1787, the Northwest Ordinance laid out the basic form of government for all U.S. territory north of the Ohio River. That summer, the Constitutional Convention drafted the defining document of the American Republic as a whole. A bargain struck between Congress and the Convention outlawed slavery north of the Ohio, […]

Excerpt: Indigenous people and police have clashed in Brazil’s capital city, as officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas while tribe members shot arrows in return during a protest against planned government changes to reservation legislation. The Tuesday demonstration was peaceful until police blocked some protesters, their bodies painted and carrying colourful headdresses, from climbing […]

Abstract: This essay offers a critique of a set of responses to neoliberalism that emphasize liberal democracy and class solidarityy (worker identity) as the paramount sites today for productive collective struggle and creation of democratic life. Drawing on the insights of Indigenous critical theory and Afro-pessimist theory, I argue that theories of liberal democracy and worker-centered […]

Excerpt: Iyko Day is here to warn us about the seductions of romantic anti-capitalism. This is a romance with the notion of concrete labor over and against the abstractions of exchange, the role of the producer over the financier, and that of ennobled, naturalized Indigeneity over the hyper-rational and manipulative alien—once Jewish, now Asian. The romantic […]