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Decolonisation as strategy: Jonathan Crossen, ‘Another Wave of Anti-Colonialism: The Origins of Indigenous Internationalism’, Canadian Journal of History, 52, 3, 2017,

13Dec17

Abstract: The global Indigenous rights movement, born in the mid-1970s, found its primary inspiration in the Third-Worldism espoused by anti-colonial leaders over the previous decades. The leadership of both the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (wcip) and the International Indian Treaty Council (iitc), the two flagship organizations of the movement, drew on Pan-Africanism and decolonization in order to promote the rights of Indigenous peoples to self-determination. The two organizations, however, applied the logic of decolonization in different ways. The iitc consciously adopted the discourse of decolonization in order to seek leverage from the Third World voting bloc and gain recognition for new and independent nations at the United Nations. The wcip wished to adapt the decolonization movement, not only by extending it geographically, but also by shifting it conceptually, in order to challenge the use of the nation state as the basic structure of global politics.


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If you resist, you must be a monster: Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Postracial Times Susana Loza, Lexington Books, 2017

13Dec17

Description: Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Postracial Times explores the (settler) colonial ideologies underpinning the monstrous imaginings of contemporary popular culture in the Britain and the US. Through a close examination of District 9, Avatar, Doctor Who, Planet of the Apes, and steampunk culture, Susana Loza illuminates the durability of (settler) colonialism and how it operates through two linked yet distinct forms of racial mimicry: monsterization and minstrelsy. Speculative Imperialisms contemplates the fundamental, albeit changing, role that such racial simulations play in a putatively postracial and post-colonial era. It brings together the work on gender masquerade, racial minstrelsy, and postcolonial mimicry and puts it in dialogue with film, media, and cultural studies. This project draws upon the theoretical insights of Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said, Philip Deloria, Michael Rogin, Eric Lott, Charles Mills, Falguni Sheth, Lorenzo Veracini, Adilifu Nama, Isiah Lavender III, Gwendolyn Foster, Marianna Torgovnick, Ann Laura Stoler, Anne McClintock, Eric Greene, Richard Dyer, and Ed Guerrero.


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Indigenous people survive even in video games: Deborah L. Madsen, ‘The Mechanics of Survivance in Indigenously-Determined Video-Games: Invaders and Never Alone’, Transmotion, 3, 2, 2017

13Dec17

Excerpt: Survivance as a legal concept names the right to inheritance and more specifically the condition of being qualified to inherit a legacy. In his essay “Aesthetics of Survivance” (2008), Vizenor describes survivance as “the heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate” (1). This aspect of survivance is overlooked by those scholars of Vizenor’s work who focus rather on the conjunction of the terms “survival” and “resistance,” terms that are important most fundamentally as they intersect with the capacity to transmit and to accept the inheritance of the past that is itself the intersection of survival and resistance. That is to say, acts of resistance and survival form the axiology (or ethical action) of survivance; the preservation of tribal languages, for example, or the transmission of traditional stories, are acts that ensure the continual availability of the tribal values of knowing and being in the world that are encoded in those words and stories. These Indigenous lifeways constitute the inheritance that motivates survivance. Thus, survivance is not a static object or method but a dynamic, active condition of historical and cultural survival and also of political resistance, practiced in the continual readiness of Indigenous communities to accept and continue the inheritance passed on by elders and ancestors. In this sense, claims made by recent Indigenous video-game developers to speak to youth through digital media by creating games that transmit tribal legacies of language, stories, ontologies, and ways of knowing and being in the world, speak to the practice of survivance. Indeed, the particular capacity of video games to engage active participation in the making of stories offers a powerful means to encourage and sustain survivance. In what game designer Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe/Métis) refers to as “Indigenously-determined” video-games, then, survivance is both a substantive dimension of the experience of playing a game and also the underlying structural principle that governs the game mechanics that are determined by Indigenous epistemologies.


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Refusing settler memory: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Creolizing Collective Memory: Refusing the Settler Memory of the Reconstruction Era’, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy – Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, XXV, 2, 2017, pp. 36-44.

13Dec17

Excerpt: It is with attention to the unthought, in those times and in ours, that I seek to creolize collective memory through deconstructing the work of what I call settler memory. I do so with attention to a particular era of U.S. history, that of the Reconstruction period, as I consider the collective memory of it to be a good example of creolization that could also do with further creolizing by refusing the influence of settler memory.


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Decolonising requires respectful relations: Ambelin Kwaymullinain, ‘You Are on Indigenous Land: Ecofeminism, Indigenous Peoples and Land Justice’, in Lara Stevens, Peta Tait, Denise Varney (eds), Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 193-208

10Dec17

Abstract: For thousands of years, the many diverse environments of Australia were sustained by the cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations. Integral to these cultures are the law- and life-ways of Indigenous women. Then came the colonial apocalypse. Non-Indigenous ecofeminists—like all non-Indigenous peoples in a colonized land—are the continuing beneficiaries of the violent dispossession of the women who were here before from the homelands they had managed for centuries. How, then, can non-Indigenous ecofeminists ethically advocate for justice in relation to women and the environment from this fraught position? This chapter suggests that non-Indigenous scholars must respect Indigenous sovereignty and meaningfully enact this respect, including through the layered process of listening to the voices of Indigenous women.


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New Deal, old representations: Denise Neil-Binion, Representation and Misrepresentation: Depictions of Native Americans in Oklahoma Post Office Murals, PhD Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2017

10Dec17

Abstract: This dissertation addresses the depictions of Native Americans in public works of art. More specifically, I am concerned with murals that were commissioned by the Section of Painting and Sculpture (the Section); a program that was administered by the United States Treasury as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Era programs (1933-1943). These paintings were installed in post offices across the country, and they were generally well received by local community members. The Section embraced the art movement of Regionalism, which led artists to paint scenes of local history, culture, and industry. Interestingly, depictions of Indigenous cultures can be found in one-quarter of the more than 1600 works of art created for the program. These images were rarely based on realistic representations, but, instead, artists often relied on stereotypes of Indigenous people. The myth of the vanishing race was commonplace as was the romanticized view of the noble savage, and some artists painted views of the Indians as savages attacking white settlers. As the longest running, government- sponsored art program, it is not possible to discuss these representations in their entirety. Instead, I will use murals painted for Oklahoma post offices as a case study for my discussion of Native themes in these New Deal era paintings. The Oklahoma post office murals include the stereotypes so frequently associated with depictions of the American Indian. However, what truly sets Oklahoma apart is that Native American artists were awarded commissions as part of this art program. Therefore, my work provides an opportunity to compare depictions of the Indigenous people of Oklahoma by both Native American and non-Native artists. To understand the reception of these paintings, I rely on the theories of E.H. Gombrich and Hans Robert Jauss as well as the writings on history and memory by Pierre Nora. By using their methodologies to frame my analysis of these paintings, I call attention to the positive reception of the depictions of Indigenous cultures based on the viewer’s own perceptions of Native American history and culture. Finally, I consider the understanding of these paintings in the twenty-first century. Some of the images painted for the Section are disrespectful to the Indigenous people they depict. Appropriation and misrepresentation are issues that must be addressed. However, censorship of art can be dangerous. In my conclusion, I argue that these representations should be properly contextualized in order to teach the public about the long-standing tropes that developed in American art through the inaccurate yet widely accepted depictions of Indigenous people of the United States.


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Nation-to-nation literary relations! Rachel Bryant, The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017

10Dec17

Description: Can literary criticism help transform entrenched Settler Canadian understandings of history and place? How are nationalist historiographies, insular regionalisms, established knowledge systems, state borders, and narrow definitions continuing to hinder the transfer of information across epistemological divides in the twenty-first century? What might nation-to-nation literary relations look like? Through readings of a wide range of northeastern texts – including Puritan captivity narratives, Wabanaki wampum belts, and contemporary Innu poetry – Rachel Bryant explores how colonized and Indigenous environments occupy the same given geographical coordinates even while existing in distinct epistemological worlds. Her analyses call for a vital and unprecedented process of listening to the stories that Indigenous peoples have been telling about this continent for centuries. At the same time, she performs this process herself, creating a model for listening and for incorporating those stories throughout.

This commitment to listening is analogous to homing – the sophisticated skill that turtles, insects, lobsters, birds, and countless other beings use to return to sites of familiarity. Bryant adopts the homing process as a reading strategy that continuously seeks to transcend the distortions and distractions that were intentionally built into Settler Canadian culture across centuries.


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Settlers target children: Dale C. Spencer, Raven Sinclair, ‘Settler Colonialism, Biopolitics, and Indigenous Children in Canada’, in Xiaobei Chen, Rebecca Raby, Patrizia Albanese (eds), The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada, Canadian Scholars, 2017

10Dec17

Access the chapter here.


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Counter-Nativisms: Yael Ben-zvi, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories, University Press of New England, 2018

10Dec17

Description: Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that Indigenous and African-descended peoples articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logics of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers’ attempts to dispossess and disenfranchise them. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi analyzes nativity’s unsettling potentials and its discursive and geopolitical implications. She shows how rights were constructed in relation to American, African, and English spaces, and explains the obstacles to historic solidarity between Native American and African American struggles.


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Settler colonialism then and now: Scott Scheuerell, ‘Diary Notes from a Teenager: Insights into Life on the Great Plains in the Late 1870s’, Great Plains Quarterly, 37, 4, 2017, pp. 311-322

08Dec17

Excerpt: The US American West is often referred to as “the geography of hope.” Many people came to the Great Plains looking toward a better future for themselves and their children. Among these was a thirteen-year-old boy named John Talcott Norton, who moved from Mason City, Illinois, to Larned, Kansas, in 1877. Much can be learned from the insights he shared about the past. He provided a firsthand account of his journey from Illinois to Kansas and of his day-to-day experience living on the frontier. To one reading the words of this young man today, it is remarkable how many of the themes that emerge from his diary connect to contemporary life on the Plains, and, ultimately, to how topics such as social studies are best taught in schools today. Few other topics in today’s curriculum can be more important than social studies, since it draws on so many areas of inquiry, for example, anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, and on various aspects of the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences. This article takes the view that connecting the accounts from the writings of young people such as John Norton will significantly enhance the teaching of the story of westward settlement. Our pedagogy can be improved and our students can experience a life that is both very different from, yet remarkably similar to, their own. In other words, there really is much that can be learned from a teenager.

To encourage western settlement, the federal government passed both the Homestead Act, in 1862, and the Timber Culture Act, in 1873. The Homestead Act gave a settler 160 acres of land if he or she lived there for five years and improved the land by cultivating it. The Timber Culture Act gave a settler 160 acres of land if he or she planted trees, and for ten years maintained them.

It was the Timber Culture Act that inspired John Talcott Norton’s family to leave Illinois for Kansas in 1877. Fortunately for the sake of posterity, he was motivated to capture in his diary what he did, what he saw, and what he was thinking while growing up on the prairie in the 1870s.

John Talcott Norton provides social studies students today with unique insights that arguably cannot be replicated with any lecture or reading from the traditional American history textbook.


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