Join the Centre for the Study of the Inland for a two-day symposium exploring connections between sovereignty, survivance and occupation of place. With speakers from around Australia and the globe, we will present panels and roundtable discussions examining a range of topics including: the opportunities that space and mobility frameworks offer settler colonial histories; ways of centring the experiences of marginalised peoples and places; and the impact of Indigenous studies research and methodologies.

Held on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in central Victoria, the symposium aims to move discussion away from a traditional focus on coastal metropoles and bring new insight into connections joining inland spaces with other ‘peripheries’ across the world.

Symposium program

Keynote speakers: Professor J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Wesleyan University (US); Professor Alan Lester, University of Sussex (UK)

Abstract: This chapter probes the underlying class, race, and colonial dynamics of transborder Indigenous adoption in North America in the late twentieth century. It focuses on the 1970s case of three Métis foster children in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, who had been living with their foster parents for eight years when provincial authorities removed them and placed them with a white adoptive couple in Michigan. These three children were among thousands of Indigenous Canadian children whom authorities scooped up in the 1960s and 1970s and placed in non-Indigenous homes both within Canada and over the border in the United States. This removal was different, however. It became very public and generated fierce resistance from the local Métis community, which led to an investigation by a provincial Ombudsman. The Ombudsman’s report provides a rare glimpse into the official reasoning behind Indigenous child removal. Saskatchewan Social Service administrators considered the Métis children’s foster family to be fit and loving but justified removal on the grounds that the children lacked “stimulation” and needed “permanency.” The chapter analyzes how these ill-defined concepts served as a code for unexamined class, racial, and colonial biases that enabled authorities to intervene in and undermine Indigenous families and communities.

Abstract: Students of colonialism know well that the stories we tell have the capacity to make, maintain, or transform our relationships as well as our material futures. As earlier work has shown, Indigenous and settler peoples encountered and apprehended one another through story at first contact and in all subsequent contact moments, reaching right up to present-day mechanisms for negotiating conflicts over rights, resources, sovereignty, and historical injustice. In this dissertation, I explore in depth the role of story as a social practice in Indigenous-state relations, examining a series of key encounters over the last 150 years in which Indigenous peoples challenged and contested the state’s possession of their lands in what would become British Columbia. Informed by archival and community-based research with two Indigenous nations – the Stó:lō and the Haida – this study offers a history of Indigenous tactics in pursuit of the larger objective of decolonization, especially since the 1960s. Each of the four main chapters explores how Indigenous peoples have engaged distinct state-sanctioned mechanisms for addressing the state’s dispossession of their lands. The first chapter examines the dynamics of orality and literacy in a series of Stó:lō petitions from the late nineteenth century, a time when reserves were being reduced in order to accommodate a rapid influx of settlers seeking agricultural lands. Chapter 2 looks at Stó:lō experiences of treaty negotiation in the early twenty-first century, and how they are attempting to re-write the master narrative of Stó:lō -state relations. Chapter 3 focuses on the Haida blockade of logging in the mid-1980s, examining how the Haida acted into being what would become an iconic story of Haida nationhood. Finally, chapter 5 explores story and belief through a close study of the narrative dynamics of Haida participation in the Joint Review of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project between 2012-2014. In each of these encounters, Stó:lō and Haida people exceed the limited narrative spaces they are assigned for communicating who they are and how they relate to their territories and to the state, while attempting to shift the established narrative. Recent scholarship on Indigenous-state relations has focused on how liberal settler states continue to exclude Indigenous peoples even through their gestures at including them into the body politic. While such work on the state is critical, I suggest that it is equally important to understand Indigenous peoples’ demonstrated capacity for collective cultural endurance, and how it exists in tension with the forces acting to assimilate and subsume Indigenous difference within the normative structures of settler society. This study attempts to grasp the nature of this endurance, and demonstrates how narrative is as central to Indigenous peoples’ repossessions of their land as it was to the state’s original dispossession of it.

Abstract: “Ūkaipo,” she tells me. “Your place of contentment.” And there it is—a gift. The gift of a word to story my “belonging” to my place. The gift from my friend, a Māori scholar. The gift of an indigenous Māori word to a Pākehā, the descendent of a colonial New Zealander. I receive this gift as a taonga, a treasure. As a critical autoethnography, this article demonstrates the process of layering the personal story alongside the wider historical and social story, and alongside stories of other peoples, through a Critical Family History. As a strategy of decolonization, the stories are interrogated using critical theory. Cognizant of Smith’s seminal work on decolonizing methodologies, this work illuminates the power dynamics embedded in my family stories and indigenous stories and histories are central to the work. I create a factionalized script drawing on data generated through my critical family history research to provide a coherent story and generate the conditions for deep emotional understandings.

Excerpt: High atop Thunderhead Mountain in South Dakota, the Crazy Horse monument aims to commemorate America, the power of nature, and the greatness of Native Americans in general, if not Crazy Horse in particular. This memorial seems not only impressive due to its size but extravagant based on its claims to Native heritage, authenticity, and support. Included alongside the controversial sculpture is an Indian Museum of North America, Native American Cultural Center, and sculptor’s studio as well as a new 40,000-square-foot Orientation Center and theaters. Considering the expansiveness of the Crazy Horse Memorial it seems almost shocking that so little is known about the Lakota man, Henry Standing Bear, who was tied to the creation of this site within prominent scholarship about Native American history. It is equally striking that the other less-publicized aspects of Standing Bear’s life have remained on the margins of historical research, in some ways obscured by the published writings and public persona of his better-known older brother, Luther Standing Bear. This article aims to recover Henry Standing Bear. In the following biography I acknowledge, first, that he was a complicated figure who poses a series of hard-to-understand questions regarding the Native activism rooted in the social and political geographies of the Great Plains, and second, that as a resistant intellectual, he was a distinctive figure in shaping the different approaches to Native social and political activism that became necessary during the early twentieth century. Third, I delineate the ways in which his challenges to federal Indian policy pertaining to Native societies in the Great Plains lay bare the oppression and abuses inherent in these policies and some of the structures underlying settler logics, such as assimilation. Fourth, I examine how Native people educated at institutions like Carlisle could successfully use tools from their schooling to their advantage even if their actions were mischaracterized and misunderstood by government officials, agents, and other non-Natives who embraced ideologies that perpetuated settler colonialism in the United States.

Abstract: Between 1860 and 1890, several thousand migrants from Reunion Island settled in New Caledonia. Most were fleeing poverty after the collapse of the sugar industry. While local legend has it that these settlers comprised a handful of rich, white planters and a contingent of Indian coolies, recent research into this group has demonstrated that the migration was on a far greater scale and was racially and socially diverse. Indeed, most Reunionese migrants, both indentured and free, were of African, Malagasy or Creole ancestry. They had either been slaves themselves or were the descendants of slaves in Reunion. Welcomed by a new colony that was desperate for settlers and workers, the racial and social characteristics of these new French citizens were erased as was their presence in the New Caledonian historical narrative. The tradition of the non-dit (the unsaid or unspoken) teamed with French social structures and the needs of a settler colonial society facilitated this disappearing act as descendants melded into the local white settler population. Yet, there were cracks in this colonial whitewash (photographs, recipes, language, songs), traces of a hidden black migration to the Pacific. With reference to these traces and artefacts, and drawing on oral histories of descendants, I highlight in this article some of the voices, faces and stories of these settlers, while reflecting on their social transformation and the extent of their agency in constructing their whiteness in New Caledonia.

Description: This book considers the role played by co-operative agriculture as a critical economic model which, in Australia, helped build public capital, drive economic development and impact political arrangements. In the case of colonial Western Australia, the story of agricultural co-operation is inseparable from that of the story of Charles Harper. Harper was a self-starting, pioneering frontiersman who became a political, commercial and agricultural leader in the British Empire’s most isolated colony during the second half of the Victorian era. He was convinced of the successful economic future of Western Australia but also pragmatic enough to appreciate that the unique challenges facing the colony were only going to be resolved by the application of unorthodox thinking.

Using Harper’s life as a foil, this book examines Imperial economic thinking in relation to the co-operative form of economic organisation, the development of public capital, and socialism. It uses this discussion to demonstrate the transfer of socialistic ideas from the centre of the Empire to the farthest reaches of the Antipodes where they were used to provide a rhetorical crutch in support of purely pragmatic co-operative establishments.

Abstract: In this article, Tlingit language revitalization is approached through theories of decolonization, critiques of colonialism, and philosophies of liberation. Instructional programs for the endangered Tlingit language are urgently necessary, but the residual structures of colonialism make the successful implementation and reception of such programs extremely difficult. Patrick Wolfe’s notion of the “logic of elimination” is used to demonstrate the persistent nature of colonialism in the Tlingit context. Through that lens, the dispossession of Tlingit territory, culture, and language by the settler-colonial system can be viewed as ongoing processes rather than concluded past events. Concrete examples are used to demonstrate the empirical effects of colonial elimination campaigns in the Tlingit context. The work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres is also enlisted, as he articulates a notion of decolonization predicated on “the logic of the gift.” I bring together these “logics” of (de)colonization to advance a speculative theory of revitalization as a movement from the logic of elimination to the logic of the gift. This has implications for language revitalization in general and Tlingit language revitalization in particular. I argue that revitalization must begin in an affirmation of the Tlingit language based on critical, militant, and loving acts of listening.

Abstract: It’s hardly news that settler culture normalizes ecocide. Those of us raised as settlers who are nevertheless ecoconscious routinely blame ourselves for our failure to live up to our own best expectations when it comes to challenging the norms and practices of our culture. This leads us to overlook that we’re also—and, I think, much more so—among its victims. I outline five manifestations of victimhood routinely exhibited by the ecoconscious settler activists, scholars, and students with whom I interact. I then consider how we can transition from being victims to survivors of our culture, which is vital for ending ecocide. These two concepts, victimhood and survivorship, are regularly juxtaposed when discussing recovery for those subject to abuse, violence, and other trauma-inducing phenomena. Together they provide the basis for a clearer understanding of how we ecoconscious settlers should engage in the ongoing fight for our lives and our futures.

Description: Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse–Wenger calls it “religious freedom talk–that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire.

More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.