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Abstract: The rapidly expanding digital ecosystem has placed Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS) in high relief. The context of what, how, when, why, and by whom data is collected and controlled determines social narratives. Colonised data and data over which Indigenous people have sovereignty can produce vastly different results in decision-making, policy development, outcome assessment, and accountability. The authors, while at the Research for Indigenous Community Health (RICH) Center, recognised that while health information is available, it is currently dispersed, disconnected, and difficult to access. Thus they proposed the development of a Food Wisdom Repository (Repository), with support from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, to provide an abundance of meaningful data, resources, and information sharing opportunities emerging from Indigenous health efforts. Drawing from the existing health needs, extant literature, and guidance from their external advisory committee, the authors proposed the development of an online digital repository of wise food practices that is grounded within Indigenous knowledges (IK) and IDS. The theoretical framework underlying the Repository is explained, including IDS that centres and privileges an Indigenous worldview, IK, and wise practices in order to reverse the wave of biased or omitted data affecting Indigenous communities. Future plans for the online digital Repository include ongoing needs assessments, and hosting strengths-based data and stories that resist, recollect, and reclaim Indigenous ways of health, wellness, as well as innovations to address challenges in the field of Indigenous food, nutrition, health, and wellness. 

Abstract: Little is known about the school choice practices of Aboriginal families in settler-colonial societies, where they have been removed from their ancestral lands and/or have been subjected to discriminatory educational policies. Through the lens of settler-colonial theory, this study elucidates the spatially positioned school choice practices of Aboriginal families in a Canadian city. It explores their desires to choose schools and identifies their sociospatial constraints that result from historical marginalization and racism. It delineates how racial segregation in schools increased, as Aboriginal families’ school choice has been limited primarily to low-income, racialized parts of the city that face school closure due to low enrollment. In addition, this article analyzes the exclusion of Aboriginal students from prestigious schools-of-choice programs in the public education system. The study concludes that the neoliberal policy of school choice offers limited options to Aboriginal families, especially given the settler-colonial context of the city where they reside.

Abstract: Self-determination for Aboriginal people in Australia has been a long sought after yet difficult objective to reach. The recently concluded Noongar Settlement in the state of Western Australia opens new opportunities and could potentially set a new benchmark for non-territorial autonomy and self-government for an Aboriginal community. The Noongar Settlement exceeds the more traditional settlements of a native title claim since it provides elaborate institutions for self-government albeit by way of private bodies corporate. The bodies corporate for the Noongar people would enable them to make and administer decisions; offer services; undertake management of public conservation areas; and advocate for the best interests of their community. This privatised form of self-government may not only provide new impetus to other land claim processes in Australia, it may also address the often-heard demands from Aboriginal people for a treaty to be entered into between themselves and the government of Australia.

Abstract: In 1954, two red faced operas where created in British Columbia by white women: Barbara Pentland’s The Lake imagines the Okanagan from the point of view of Susan Alison, the first white women settler in the region while Lillian Estabrooks and Mary Costley’s Ashnola: A Legend of Sings Water offers a Gilbert and Sullivan cross-dressed version of pre-European contact Aboriginals. This article analyzes these operas and other 1950s texts like newspaper articles and populist histories of British Columbia to demonstrate how invader settlers seek to control the Other semiotically via red face and thus gain a sense of identity that ameliorates their settler status to make them “native.” Red face in these operas betray an imperial sense of melancholy as white women use it to trouble patriarchy while enforcing white privilege. The paper concludes by considering the persistence of neo-colonial red face in the Canadian national imaginary.

Excerpt: As such, Atwood’s novel inevitably rehearses the expedient disavowal of Second World cultural nationalism: ongoing colonizing acts are obscured by the text’s privileging of a settler subject-position imagined as beset by the imperium of modernity.

Excerpt: Contemporary Afro- and Indo-Guyanese claims to sovereignty are based on [an] intimate historical labour relationship with the land, but that relationship is so recent in epochal time that the new Guyanese rulers must invoke continuity with the effaced indigenous “Amerindian” presence to establish legitimacy while simultaneously denying the indigenous inhabitants their land rights and very identities.

Excerpt: Of all the critical and theoretical keywords and practices that have devolved from poststructuralism — decentering, deconstructing, dismantling, disrupting, disturbing, problematizing, resisting, troubling, undoing, and others — at least in Canada at the present time the most important such keyword might be “unsettling,” both in the sense of creating a disturbance within the hegemony of the moment but also in the more direct and applied sense of un-settling settlement. 

Abstract: This article engages with the views of prominent leaders from the First Intifada to evaluate the possibility of a Palestinian uprising under existing circumstances. It provides insight into the past and present to establish a basis for contemporary struggle. In acknowledging the fragmentation of Palestinian land and population, the article argues that many of the features that made popular struggle possible during the First Intifada are now clearly absent, requiring a new praxis of resistance.

In the Guardian Afua Hirsch concludes that ‘Whenever Trump says ‘infested’, we know he’s talking about people of colour‘. She is spot on, but there’s more than racism. Settler colonialism is a mode of domination that reproduces a specific sociopolitical body in the place of another. Unwanted and uncontrolled reproduction is the end of settler colonialism. Like an infection (the terms share the same etymology), an infestation’s primary characteristic is an ability to reproduce. That’s when the settler-colonial mind flips out.