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Videogames as sites of survival? Krzysztof Ząbecki, ‘Promoting and Preserving Indigenous Languages and Cultures in the Americas Through Video Games’, in S. D. Brunn, R. Kehrein (eds), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, Springer, 2019

31May19

Abstract: Recently, video games have become one of the fastest growing and most important forms of entertainment. Their popularity among young people makes them a potentially useful tool in education, prompting research on the possibilities of implementing video games in teaching. This chapter discusses the potential of video games in promoting and preserving autochthonous languages and cultures in the Americas. Indigenous peoples of the Americas appear in video games for decades, but in most cases the depiction is strongly stereotyped and racialized. At the same time, in official versions of mainstream games, there are no indigenous language versions. However, there are possibilities to change this negative situation. Examples of possible actions include influencing and exposing developers who present indigenous peoples in a negative, oversimplified way, making indigenous-language versions of already existing games, as well as developing new ones that show autochthonous inhabitants of the Americas as subjects, and not objects. Such games may serve to promote indigenous cultures by changing the prevailing image among nonautochthonous players. However, they can also help to preserve these cultures and restore feeling of self-esteem and dignity within indigenous peoples, especially from younger generations. This chapter discusses the history of depicting native inhabitants of the Americas in video games, different forms of actions taken up to now to change their stereotypical image and help implementing indigenous languages in games, as well as economical, technical, and legal issues with putting these solutions into practice.


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With a chapter entitled ‘The Ground Beneath Our Feet: Poetry and Settler Colonialism’, by Sheila Stewart: In Sandra L. Faulkner, Abigail Cloud (eds), Poetic Inquiry as Social Justice and Political Response, Vernon Press, 2019, pp. 65-75

31May19

Access the chapter here.


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The settler colonisation of water: Nicole J.Wilson, ‘”Seeing Water Like a State?” Indigenous water governance through Yukon First Nation Self-Government Agreements’, Geoforum, 2019

28May19

Abstract: Yukon First Nations and the waters within their traditional territories face a variety of socio-political and environmental pressures including the effects of historical and ongoing settler colonialism, global environmental change and mining activity. These communities are in the process of implementing Self-Government and Modern land claim agreements, which contain powerful acknowledgements of Indigenous rights and authorities, including the right to unaltered “water quality, quantity and rate of flow” on Settlement lands (∼10 percent of their traditional territories). Self-governing Yukon First Nations have real, although limited, legal authorities on Settlement Lands including the ability to enact laws that supersede territorial legislation. Through research conducted in partnership with four Yukon First Nations (Carcross/Tagish, Kluane, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and White River First Nations), I examine how these Indigenous governments are engaging the authorities acknowledged in Modern Land Claim and Self-Government Agreements to assert their rights and responsibilities to water as a more-than-human relation. In particular, I analyze the potential for the creation of legislation pertaining to water on Settlement Land. I engage with critical Indigenous scholarship to examine the challenges facing these communities and to reveal emerging approaches to Indigenous water governance. More specifically, I analyze the “state-like” bureaucracies that First Nations must develop to assert their sovereignty in this context. While these forms of governance are critiqued for bearing little resemblance to traditional forms of governance, I demonstrate how First Nations exercise self-determination as they strategically navigate these opportunities in order to protect water in a manner, they deem consistent with the values, principles and relationships of Indigenous water governance.


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The two faces of settler decolonisation: Patrick Belanger, Rhetoric and Settler Inertia: Strategies of Canadian Decolonization, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

28May19

Description: Rhetoric and Settler Inertia: Strategies of Canadian Decolonization explores how communication might accelerate decolonial actions in Canada. Tracing a middle path between essential Indigenous-focused calls for resurgence, and idealistic appeals to settler conscience, Patrick Belanger identifies communication forms that can generate settler support for decolonization. Accenting the importance of both Indigenous and settler audiences, this book suggests the promise of decolonial rhetoric framed in the language of mutual benefit.


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Bordering as decolonisation: Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘”Come out and live on your land again”: sovereignty, borders and the Unist’ot’en camp’, International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 5, 1-2, 2019

28May19

Abstract: Borders are often understood as ‘tools’ of sovereign power and as establishing the very possibility for authority in the international system of sovereign states (Salter, 2012). This paper seeks to problematise this perspective by looking at the case of the Unist’ot’en Action Camp in northern British Columbia, which has engaged bordering practices including having established a checkpoint on the roadway into the Unist’ot’en territory and actively policing helicopter traffic into the territory. Looking at the Camp, this paper argues that such bordering practices draw upon traditional Indigenous ways of being in order to contest and undo settler sovereign authority, in contrast to the traditional understanding of borders as working to organise settler authority. Understood this way, the paper argues that when inscribed with Indigenous knowledge and when relying on Indigenous authorities, borders and bordering practices can be read as gateways to ‘meaningful decolonisation.’


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Beware of the apology (excusatio non petita accusatio manifesta): Anige Wong, ‘A Sorry State of Affairs: Chinese Arrivants, Indigenous Hosts, and Settler Colonial Apologies;’, The Canadian Society for Study of Practical Ethics / Société Canadienne Pour L’étude De L’éthique Appliquée — SCEEA, 5, 2019

26May19

Abstract: We make and give gestures of apology every day, Canadians doubly so. Yet, grand acts of apology for more serious and sustained matters, such as historical and contemporary injustice against those with the least amount of social power, require far more ethical consideration and transformation than simply saying, “I am sorry.” Since the early 2000s, several political parties of the Canadian government have taken up the trend of making a spectacle out of national apologies to historically oppressed groups. Engaging with the concept of the settler colonial triad to theorize the histories of early Chinese arrivants’ experience, this work departs from the 2006 House of Commons apology made to Chinese Canadians on behalf of former PM Stephen Harper and explores the paradoxical operations behind state-sanctioned apologies, including the use of benevolence and hospitality as crisis management tactics resultant of Canada’s settler colonial configuration. Within this contradictory relation, those who identify as Chinese Canadian may find themselves questioning their belonging, given the historically- fraught social strategies used for the making of Canadian subjecthood. State-sanctioned apologies function to consolidate settler colonial reality and constitute a return to normalcy, which is why critical race scholars and scholars of settler colonial studies must look beyond unilateral relationships with the state.


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‘What’s yours is ours’: Allison M. Dussias, ‘The Reports of Our Death Are Greatly Exaggerated – Reflections on the Resilience of the Oneida Indian Nation of New York’, BYU Law Review, 2019

26May19

Excerpt: This Article examines the historical and contemporary experiences of the Oneida Indian Nation of New York in its dealings with New York State and its non-Indian citizens. Three themes, apparent at different times and taking shape in different ways, emerge from this examination. These themes resemble musical refrains—oftrepeated messages, conveyed by the State and its citizens to the Nation, like discordant sounds from a broken record:

1. What’s yours is ours.

2. Surrender your sovereignty—resistance is futile.

3. By surviving as a people, you are spoiling our plans.

Boiling down the Nation’s legal and political encounters with New York State to this basic level serves to highlight the blatant self-interest, and the settler colonialism, that are at the heart of it all, regardless of how much the State—at times aided and abetted by the Supreme Court—tries to hide behind legal niceties.


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Marxist theory and settler colonialism: Amir Locker-Biletzki, ‘Class, Capital and Colonies in India and Palestine/Israel’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 21, 2, 2019

26May19

Excerpt: In recent years the use of settler-colonialism as an analytical concept of scholarship critical of the history and social structure of Palestine/Israel has become prevalent. Mainly scholars such as Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe have developed the study of settler-colonial societies (“Introducing” 1-12; Settler; “Settler” 313-33; Wolfe). Their scholarly debate describes colonial societies as ones where white settlers attempted to eliminate the natives (not in all cases by physical annihilation). In such places the settlers created a settler nation-state, animated by the practice of invasion and removal of the native. A more explicit rendering of Zionist colonial logic is to be found in the seminal work of Israeli critical sociologist Gershon Shafir, justly regarded as one of the founders of settler-colonial studies. His groundbreaking work Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict outlines a sophisticated theory that defines the link between Zionism and settler colonialism. Land, Labor portrays the rise of Zionist colonialism out of the needs of the Eastern European settlers of the Second Aliya (literally “Ascending”: the Zionist concept of Jewish emigration into Palestine) and their encounter with Palestine and its inhabitants (Shafir). The aim of this text in not to disprove the settler-colonial rendition of Zionism, but to show its intellectual “prehistory” in the words of Communist ideologues from the 1920s to the 1950s and the way Marxists in present-day Israel think about the colonial formation of the country.

One distinguishing characteristic of past and present settler-colonial theory is its distance from Marxist theoretical debate. In the case of Palestine/Israel, Marxist anti-Zionists were the first to describe the Zionist project as a colonial one. As will be detailed in the following pages, Israeli Marxists associated with the Communist Party (CP) theorized about Zionist colonialism. Working from within a Marxist tradition – which amalgamated Karl Marx’s writings about European expansion together with V.I. Lenin’s explanation of imperialism – they described the way capital accumulation and class formation drove the Zionist settler project. This article will trace a Marxist intellectual lineage that starts with Marx and Lenin, proceeding through such Indian colonial thinkers as M.N. Roy and R.P. Dutt, and ending with Israeli Marxists like Moshe Sneh, Eliyahu (Alyosha) Gozansky, Meir Vilner and Tamar Gozansky. For these Marxists, the colonial project was driven by two main motivations: class formation and capital accumulation.


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An apology is just the beginning: Chih-Wei Tsai (Awi Mona), ‘National Apology and Reinvigoration of Indigenous Rights in Taiwan’, in Jerome A. Cohen, William P. Alford, Chang-fa Lo (eds), Taiwan and International Human Rights: A Story of Transformation, Springer 2019, pp. 609-623

24May19

Abstract: There has been a huge debate about the protection of indigenous rights in the context of legal reform. One of the focal points of the debate is how and to what extent the state’s legal system and social transformation construct indigenous cultural development and needs. On 1 August 2016 Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen delivered a National Apology to Indigenous Peoples, which laid out a comprehensive scheme to restore historical and transitional justice for indigenous rights. In brief, this chapter focuses on the deliberation of law and legal pluralism amongst indigenous diversity. By way of empirical research, this chapter demonstrates the legal web of the state’s legal system and its influence on local indigenous communities. Also, it explores how and to what extent indigenous customary laws have been incorporated and implemented through the state’s legal system. To conclude, the theoretical emphasis on ontology framing distinctive bodies and processes of indigenous jurisprudence, together with the possibility of collaboration and translation between indigenous knowledge and academic disciplines, will create space for postcolonial indigenous legal consciousness, ongoing dialogues and relationship-building of self-determination and indigenous justice paradigms.


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The violence of humanitarians: Rachel Standfield, ‘Colonial violence, humanitarianism and the colonial present’, Law & History, 6, 1, 2019, pp. 175-191

23May19

Access the article here.


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