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Conservation is not decolonisation (‘my land, your national park’): Megan Ybarra, Green Wars Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest, University of California Press, 2017

08Dec17

Description: Global conservation efforts are celebrated for saving Guatemala’s Maya Forest. This book reveals that the process of protecting lands has been one of racialized dispossession for the Indigenous peoples who live there. Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land, and how this is part of a larger national effort to make Indigenous peoples into neoliberal citizens. Even as Q’eqchi’s participate in conservation, Green Wars amplifies their call for material decolonization by recognizing the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land itself.


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Adopting out, opting in: Joseph M. Pierce, ‘Adopted: Trace, Blood, and Native Authenticity’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 3, 2, 2017, pp. 57-76

06Dec17

Abstract: In the United States, extra-tribal adoption policies have typically been studied in relation to the enactment and enduring viability of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which aims to prevent indigenous children from being removed from their communities. However, little critical attention has been paid to those who were adopted out, and the ways in which those children and subsequent generations negotiate essential questions of belonging, community, and return. This article argues that federal policies of extra-tribal adoption have constrained how adoptees are able to narrate the possibilities of relating with and returning to indigenous communities. It takes the author’s own history with adoption as a point of departure for exploring both the affective and narrative problems that arise when a child is adopted out, claiming that this process is fundamentally queer. The text focuses on three central issues: the archival trace of genealogy, the relational possibilities of blood, and the difficulty of performing authenticity in such cases. In doing so, the article proposes that only through the intersection of all three of these central issues is it possible to narrate the queerness of extra-tribal adoption as an interface between the self and collective belonging.


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Online contestation of settler colonial orders: Tanja Dreher, Lisa Waller, Kerry McCallum, ‘Disruption or Transformation? Australian Policymaking in the Face of Indigenous Contestation’, in Esther Peeren, Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet, Thomas Poell (eds), Global Cultures of Contestation Mobility, Sustainability, Aesthetics & Connectivity, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 215-240

06Dec17

Abstract: From the Zapatista’s “netwar” to the “hashtag activism” of Idle No More, Indigenous peoples have pioneered digital media for global connectivity and contestation. This chapter explores the promise and the pitfalls of social media for First Nations protest in Australia. Overall, we find new opportunities for disruption and ongoing challenges with regard to significant social and political transformation. The argument is illustrated with two exemplars. Firstly, the “Recognise” campaign is a state-sponsored public information and awareness campaign with a well-developed social media and branding strategy. Dissenting Indigenous voices have been highly successful in disrupting this campaign and asserting an alternative agenda including Treaty and Land Rights. Secondly, the #IASLottery campaign responded to the new Indigenous Advancement Strategy, with less success in impacting policy debates.


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Representing the settler colonial frontier across transnational frontiers: Frank Christianson (ed.), The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture, Oklahoma University Press, 2017

06Dec17

Description: When William F. Cody introduced his Wild West exhibition to European audiences in 1887, the show soared to new heights of popularity and success. With its colorful portrayal of cowboys, Indians, and the taming of the North American frontier, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West popularized a myth of American national identity and shaped European perceptions of the United States. The Popular Frontier is the first collection of essays to explore the transnational impact and mass-cultural appeal of Cody’s Wild West.

As editor Frank Christianson explains in his introduction, for the first four years after Cody conceived it, the Wild West exhibition toured the United States, honing the operation into a financially solvent enterprise. When the troupe ventured to England for its first overseas booking, its success exceeded all expectations. Between 1887 and 1906 the Wild West performed in fourteen countries, traveled more than 200,000 miles, and attracted a collective audience in the tens of millions.

How did Europeans respond to Cody’s vision of the American frontier? And how did European countries appropriate what they saw on display? Addressing these questions and others, the contributors to this volume consider how the Wild West functioned within social and cultural contexts far grander in scope than even the vast American West. Among the topics addressed are the pairing of William F. Cody and Theodore Roosevelt as embodiments of frontier masculinity, and the significance of the show’s most enduring persona, Annie Oakley.

An informative and thought-provoking examination of the Wild West’s foreign tours, The Popular Frontier offers new insight into late-nineteenth-century gender politics and ethnicity, the development of American nationalism, and the simultaneous rise of a global mass culture.


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On the indigenous dead and settler collection: Paul Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave, 2017

06Dec17

Description: This book draws on over twenty years’ investigation of scientific archives in Europe, Australia, and other former British settler colonies. It explains how and why skulls and other bodily structures of Indigenous Australians became the focus of scientific curiosity about the nature and origins of human diversity from the early years of colonisation in the late eighteenth century to Australia achieving nationhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The last thirty years have seen the world’s indigenous peoples seek the return of their ancestors’ bodily remains from museums and medical schools throughout the western world. Turnbull reveals how the remains of the continent’s first inhabitants were collected during the long nineteenth century by the plundering of their traditional burial places. He also explores the question of whether museums also acquired the bones of men and women who were killed in Australian frontier regions by military, armed police and settlers.  


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Settler colonialism is gendered (resistance is gendered too): Ian Fanning, Ininí Ádisókán (Man Stories): Masculinities Among the Mámíwininí (Algonquin People), PhD Dissertation, Queen’s University, 2017

04Dec17

Abstract: This dissertation investigates the meaning and function of ‘masculinity’ among Algonquin peoples in contemporary and historical contexts in lands claimed by Canada. As an Algonquin scholar, I examine historical sources alongside interviews with other Algonquin people to consider the relationship between ‘roles,’ as discussed by the interview participants, and the erroneous identity politics and status/non-status debates emergent in Algonquin realities via the Indian Act and the current land claim process. The purpose of this study is to explore and examine modes of Algonquin masculinity and their reinvigoration alongside understandings and articulations of other Indigenous masculinities. As such, the research question is: How do Algonquin people view masculine identities among our people, and how do these identities interact with identity politics and the gendered process of settler colonialism? The response to the research question is three-fold. First, selected theoretical positions are considered as lenses of analysis for the literature and interview responses which inform the work in the dissertation. Second, the complexities of identity politics impacting Algonquin masculinities are examined. Finally, it is argued that the roles and responsibilities of Algonquin people are formative and central to modes of Algonquin masculinity. The results of this study indicate that the crucial focus of the participants on “roles” and “responsibilities” functions to liberate individual Algonquin people from the colonial (and colonizing) discourse of status/non-status by producing understandings of self-worth through ethics of behaviour rather than imposed identities. By focusing on “roles” and “responsibilities,” Algonquin individuals move away from the erroneous gender binaries that perpetuate hetero-patriarchy. It is not just those who identify as men who can take on protectorship and provision. A “role” is something you enact, you perform; “status” is something that is assigned. In this way, the discussion of Algonquin masculinities in this dissertation pushes toward greater openness at the same time that it binds understandings of ethical behaviour back to the community and to the land.


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On settler cosmopolitics (Xavier Herbert was a settler colonial intellectual): Ellen Smith, ‘Remapping Capricornia: Xavier Herbert’s Cosmopolitan Imagination’, Cultural Studies Review, 23, 2, 2017, pp. 126-140.

04Dec17

Abstract: Since its publication in 1938 critics have generally read Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia as a nationalist novel, even when its nationalism is seen to be structured by contradiction. But little attention has been given to the ways in which Herbert’s complex, multifarious and heteroglossic novel exceeds and challenges the very possibility of coherent national space and a coherent national story. This essay considers moments and spaces in Herbert’s novel where the national is displaced and unravelled. Drawing on Rebecca Walkowitz’s idea of cosmopolitan style and Suvendrini Perera’s work on Australia’s insular imagination I identify a critical cosmopolitanism that inheres in the novel’s geographical imagination and its literary form, particularly the narrative voice which retains a critical distance from the nationalist sensibility of various characters and plot lines, performing a detached and restless homelessness that I identify with the cosmopolitan. Ultimately, I ask how the novel’s spatial and environmental imagination displaces its nationalist agenda, making space for a different kind of social imagination—one that does not confine itself to the terms of the nation or organise itself around a central figure for the nation.


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On settler interracial sexuality (Xavier Herbert was a settler colonial intellectual): Liz Conor, ‘Blood Call and “Natural Flutters”: Xavier Herbert’s Racialised Quartet of Heteronormativity’, Cultural Studies Review, 23, 2, 2017, pp. 70-86

04Dec17

Abstract: National belonging for Xavier Herbert was intimately tied to interracial sexuality. ‘Euraustralians’ (‘half-castes’) were for Herbert a redemptive motif that could assuage the ‘awful loneliness of the colonial born’ by which he hinted at the land claim of settler-colonials as spurious. Herbert’s exposure of the spectrum of interracial sex—from companionate marriage to casual prostitution to endemic sexual assault—in his novels Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) was unprecedented and potentially game-changing in the administration of Aboriginal women’s sexuality under the assimilation era. But his deeply fraught masculinity was expressed through a picaresque frontier manhood that expressed itself through this spectrum of relations with Aboriginal women. For all his radical assertions of a ‘Euraustralian’ or hybrid nation, Herbert was myopic and dismissive of the women attached to the ‘lean loins’ he hoped it would spring from. He was also vitriolic about the white women, including wives, who interfered with white men’s access to Aboriginal women’s bodies. In this article I examine how Herbert’s utopian racial destinies depended on the unexamined sexual contract of monogamy and the asymmetrical pact to which it consigned white men and white women, and the class of sexually available Indigenous women, or ‘black velvet’, it rested on in colonial scenarios of sex.


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Reproducing settler colonial systems of oppression: Miranda Sophia Leibel, Reproductive Narratives: Settler-Colonialism and Neoliberalism in Alberta’s Child Welfare System, MA dissertation, University of Alberta, 2017

01Dec17

Abstract: This thesis examines the contemporary crisis of Indigenous children in child welfare services in Canada, taking as its case study the Province of Alberta. I take a historical approach to this analysis, and consider the contemporary institutions that govern and manage Indigenous bodies through welfare services and their continuity in relation to historical iterations of child apprehension and intervention. For the purposes of this thesis, one historical iteration is highlighted in-depth: the residential school system. This comparison is made by presenting a document analysis of both the residential school system, and the child welfare system and considers the ways the systems are interconnected. This thesis notes that the two are connected not only institutionally, but also through the governance of bodies, families and precarity through rendering Indigenous children’s lives ‘ungrievable.’ I further argue that the influence of neoliberal political rationalities has created important distinctions between the two institutions. Rather than arguing that neoliberalism is entirely distinct and separate from settler-colonialism, however, my thesis treats them as intersecting systems of oppression that create the unique circumstances we see today in Alberta’s child welfare system. In addition to considering these continuities, this thesis also highlights the activism and agency of Indigenous women, highlighting the role of Indigenous mothering as resurgence and sovereignty.


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Settler jokes are not funny (note the ‘you’ and ‘we’): Julie Hirschfeld Davis, ‘Trump Again Derides Warren as “Pocahontas”, This Time at Event Honoring Navajo Veterans’, New York Times, 27/11/17

28Nov17

Excerpt: ‘You were here long before any of us were here’, Mr. Trump said to the veterans, ages 90 and older, who wore their military uniforms for the occasion, juxtaposed with turquoise and silver, hallmarks of Navajo culture. ‘Although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas’.


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