Abstract: This dissertation project serves as an inquiry into Canadian representational practices and discourses surrounding colonialism, wilderness, nature and nationhood. The written thesis presented here is part of a multidisciplinary project that also comprised of an art exhibition held at Western’s McIntosh Gallery, from June 3rd to Junes 25th, 2016. This paper, alongside the drawing, […]

This piece discusses Jeremy Campbell’s Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2015).

Abstract: This commentary reflects upon the major Māori land reforms in te Ture Whenua Māori Bill (2016). The reforms implement more bureaucracy and replace some mechanisms used by the Māori Land Court to protect against Māori land loss. The Waitangi Tribunal, which has dealt with Māori grievances over land loss for over 30 years, issued […]

Introduction: The ver sacrum ritual remains a riddle in the early history of the Apennine peninsula. Several ancient Roman as well as Greek sources use the ritual in explaining Samnite movements across the peninsula, as ritual group expulsion of settlers sent out to colonize new lands. In short, this becomes the narrative ‘plot’ of archaic […]

Abstract: Recent work in black and indigenous studies has made claims to exceptionalism that leave the two fields at an impasse. This article argues that since the nineteenth century, US colonial projects have relied upon a simultaneous logic of anti-blackness and settlement. It further argues that social movements have been able to capitalize on radical […]

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life and death. In it, I examine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder of Loretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public that […]

Abstract: Indigenous resistance in the 19th century was recast as criminal activities, enabling the US and Canada to avert attention from their own illegality. The imposition of colonial law, facilitated by casting Indigenous men and women as savage peoples in need of civilization and constructing Indigenous lands as lawless spaces absent legal order, made it […]

Abstract: Colonial unknowing endeavors to render unintelligible the entanglements of racialization and colonization, occluding the mutable historicity of colonial structures and attributing finality to conquest and dispossession. Colonial unknowing establishes what can count as evidence, proof, or possibility—aiming to secure the terms of reason and reasonableness—as much as it works to dissociate and ignore. This […]

Abstract: Drawing on the traditions and perspectives of ethnic studies, history and anthropology, I examine historical roots of U.S. settler colonialism and how they shape contemporary tribal issues in the U.S. Driven by the forces of territoriality and occupation, colonial strategies and derivative mechanisms have fostered misconceptions about the unique socio-political status of tribal nations […]

Abstract: This perspective article describes the problem of Canadian indigenous suicide from a non-Canadian viewpoint. In particular, the article compares both similarities and differences in suicide prevention between Māori in New Zealand and indigenous peoples in Canada. It emphasises that the problem of indigenous suicide is not being indigenous but coping with losses secondary to […]