Description: During the nineteenth century, white Americans sought the cultural transformation and physical displacement of Native people. Though this process was certainly a clash of rival economic systems and racial ideologies, it was also a profound spiritual struggle. The fight over Indian Country sparked religious crises among both Natives and Americans.

In The Gods of Indian Country, Jennifer Graber tells the story of the Kiowa Indians during Anglo-Americans’ hundred-year effort to seize their homeland. Like Native people across the American West, Kiowas had known struggle and dislocation before. But the forces bearing down on themsoldiers, missionaries, and government officialswere unrelenting. With pressure mounting, Kiowas adapted their ritual practices in the hope that they could use sacred power to save their lands and community.

Against the Kiowas stood Protestant and Catholic leaders, missionaries, and reformers who hoped to remake Indian Country. These activists saw themselves as the Indians’ friends, teachers, and protectors. They also asserted the primacy of white Christian civilization and the need to transform the spiritual and material lives of Native people. When Kiowas and other Native people resisted their designs, these Christians supported policies that broke treaties and appropriated Indian lands. They argued that the gifts bestowed by Christianity and civilization outweighed the pains that accompanied the denial of freedoms, the destruction of communities, and the theft of resources. In order to secure Indian Country and control indigenous populations, Christian activists sanctified the economic and racial hierarchies of their day.

The Gods of Indian Country tells a complex, fascinating and ultimately heartbreaking tale of the struggle for the American West.

Description: By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain celebrated its possession of a unique “empire of liberty” that propagated the rule of private property, free trade, and free labor across the globe. The British also knew that their empire had been built by conquering overseas territories, trading slaves, and extorting tribute from other societies. Set in the context of the early-modern British Empire, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism paints a striking picture of these tensions between the illiberal origins of capitalism and its liberal imaginations in metropolitan thought.

Onur Ulas Ince combines an analysis of political economy and political theory to examine the impact of colonial economic relations on the development of liberal thought in Britain. He shows how a liberal self-image for the British Empire was constructed in the face of the systematic expropriation, exploitation, and servitude that built its transoceanic capitalist economy. The resilience of Britain’s self-image was due in large part to the liberal intellectuals of empire, such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and their efforts to disavow the violent transformations that propelled British colonial capitalism. Ince forcefully demonstrates that liberalism as a language of politics was elaborated in and through the political economic debates around the contested meanings of private property, market exchange, and free labor.

Weaving together intellectual history, critical theory, and colonial studies, this book is a bold attempt to reconceptualize the historical relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and empire in a way that continues to resonate with our present moment.

Abstract: In this article, I argue that popular representations of Tanya Tagaq, an Indigenous Canadian musician, shore up a reconciliatory project by mobilizing voice ideologies within densely poetic texts. I trace how commonly held presuppositions and fantasies about Indigeneity in the Canadian multicultural context emerge through and are reinforced by formal aspects of music-critical discourse. By analyzing how discourse on cultural production figurates reconciliation at various scales, this article contributes to critical understandings of liberal multicultural politics of reconciliation. In so doing, it offers insight into an entanglement of voice, language, and media ideologies in popular journalistic discourse on cultural difference.

Abstract: This article, focusing on the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil, demonstrates how members of Latin America’s largest social movement perform the diverse compacts of obligation and reciprocity that characterise an MST occupation. MST encampments seek to enact a transformation of the land on which members are situated, but also emphasise a transformation of the human subject itself, from unproductive to productive. Performing this transformation and becoming truly ‘landless’, however, goes beyond merely being a willing new member: equally as important is the creation and maintenance of an ‘aesthetics of orderliness’ which makes visible the moral connotations that structure or undermine one’s right to become sem terra, landless. Through an analysis that foregrounds the temporality and territoriality of how the MST occupy and drawing a distinction between the precariousness of an MST encampment and the relative stability of an MST settlement, I suggest that movement members are content to perform in the former, but increasingly seek to issue performative acts in the latter. Building on Judith Butler’s distinction between performativity and performance, I argue that individual MST members, embedded in relational spheres, ultimately seek not only to transform themselves but also the wider movement by reconfiguring the very moral framework that structures their social movement from the ground up.

From the Editor’s note: For many Americans, the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline served as an introduction to the Indigenous peoples’ movement. Over the course of more than a year, activists and members of various Native communities assembled at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota to prevent the destruction of natural resources and sacred lands, while people around the world followed their progress. Photographer Josué Rivas was there for much of that time, documenting the evolution of the protests as seasons changed and political tensions rose and fell. His captivating images of Standing Rock, featured in this issue, evoke questions of development, environmental justice, and conflict and peace—demonstrating, in short, how the Indigenous peoples’ movement is not only one of the most significant social-justice movements of our time, but also among the most multifaceted.

Access the special issue here.

Abstract: Canada, like all representative democracies, apportions representation to individuals; also, like all federal states, it accords polity-based representation to federal subunits. But Canada is additionally a consociational state, comprising three constitutionally recognized “national groups”: anglophones, francophones and Indigenous peoples. These groups share power and bear rights beyond the bounds of the federal system. In recent decades, Indigenous peoples and francophones have appealed for representation as “national groups,” leading to constitutional challenges. Courts have either failed to address the constitutionality of “national group” representation or have rejected it as irreconcilable with individual voting rights. I suggest the former is unnecessary and the latter procedurally illogical. Drawing on the liberal principles of individualism, egalitarianism and universalism, I develop a framework contextualizing such representation within liberal theory. I then deploy this framework to analyze recent Canadian case law. I show that appeals for “national group” representation should be approached not through the lens of individual rights, but rather through the “constitutionally prior” lens of universalism.

Abstract: Henry Hospers (1830-1901) was the leader of the Dutch kolonie (colony) of Sioux County, Iowa. When Hospers named and platted Orange City in 1870, Hendrik P. Scholte of the Pella, Iowa colony was dead and Albertus C. Van Raalte of the Holland, Michigan colony was nearing the end of his life. Compared to the more famous Scholte and Van Raalte (who settled their respective Midwestern colonies in 1847), Hospers has received little critical attention as a significant Dutch American immigrant leader. Hospers’ relative historical obscurity is understandable. Scholte and Van Raalte were clergy, while Hospers was a layman. Moreover, he was a second-generation leader. Further, the surviving records related to Hospers are spottier than those related to Scholte and Van Raalte. Even so, there is plentiful evidence of Hospers’ significance. This study of Hospers as a colony leader documents that he was a tireless promoter of the colony in particular and Sioux County more generally, particularly as a land broker, banker, and owner of the weekly De Volksvriend (The People’s Friend). He was also an office holder representing all settlers, especially as Chair of the Sioux County Board of Supervisors and as a member of the Iowa House and then the Senate. Finally, he was a founder of “church and school” (kerk en school) for the colony in his work to organize Northwestern Classical Academy (later Northwestern College) and First Reformed Church of Orange City. His experience helps fill out the tapestry of Dutch Protestant settler acculturation: retaining Dutch identity and becoming American amidst the fluidity of modernity.

Excerpt: Part I investigates the trans-imperial linkages between Japan and the United States during Japan’s colonization of Hokkaidō around the 1870s. Chapters 1 – 3 consider the role of three American professors, William Smith Clark, William Wheeler and David Pearce Penhallow, who were hired to establish an agricultural college as part of the colonial development of Hokkaidō. I argue that these American professors contributed to Japan’s colonial expansionism in at least three ways: by helping the Kaitakushi physically transform Hokkaidō into a Japanese settler colony, by spreading a colonial worldview according to which the Ainu were portrayed as a primitive, dying race similar to Native Americans, and finally by acting as propagandists for Japanese expansionism after their return. Chapter 4 considers continuing links to American technologies of settler colonialism in the next generation through the writings of Satō Shōsuke on Hokkaidō’s colonial status. Satō graduated in Sapporo Agricultural College’s first class and later studied land policy in America before returning and becoming president of his alma mater.

Abstract: In this article I examine how, in their novels The Boy Next Door and The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, Irene Sabatini and Andrea Eames, respectively, allow us to reflect on questions of whiteness, home, and belonging in Zimbabwe. I argue that in these novels the experiences, behaviours, and attitudes of whites towards Africa and black people contest and subvert their belonging to Zimbabwe and highlight their failure to accept the end of Rhodesia. White people’s resistance to integration into Zimbabwe, their continued racializing of space, and their attempts to maintain white power and privilege bring whiteness sharply before the scrutiny of the black gaze and provoke anti-white rhetoric as well as a discourse on white unbelonging to Zimbabwe that becomes more strident and violent from the late 1990s.

Abstract: This article provides a critical overview of consultation, impact assessment, and traditional land use research as these methods of extracting knowledge intersect in the oil sands region of northern Alberta. Based on our experience as anthropologists working in policy analysis, consultation, impact assessment, and community-engaged ethnographic research with impacted communities, we examine public participation and risk assessment procedures, including those conducted through documents and those conducted through personal or group interviews − primarily with Crees. Alberta’s oil sands industry has expanded exponentially in recent decades; however, consultation, impact assessment, and accommodation of Cree, Dene, and Métis interests in the region have not kept up with best practices established during the same timeframe. We point to a number of examples where consultation and impact assessment processes have supported an overall political economic push to develop the oil sands as quickly as possible. We argue for improved participatory processes to inform more open political and scientific debate.