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The land must be empty: Alexandre Kedar, Ahmad Amara, Oren Yiftachel, Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev, Stanford University Press, 2018

03Mar18

Description: Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international-comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the “dead Negev doctrine” used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version of terra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state.Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice.


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Settler colonialism is a black snake that makes the land uninhabitable: Andrew Rome, ‘Black Snake on the Periphery: The Dakota Access Pipeline and Tribal Jurisdictional Sovereignty’, North Dakota Law Review, 93, 1, 2018, pp. 57-86

02Mar18

Excerpt: The Lakota had prophesied this: a great and evil black snake would someday descend and reap destruction, rendering their homeland uninhabitable to hunt and fish and their waters unsuitable for religious ceremony. The black snake would disrupt the Lakota’s sacred connection to their land.


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Shared spaces are spaces of resistance: Christopher James Wright, The Saugeen Ojibway Nation and Canada: Historical Relationships, Settler Colonialism, and Stories of a Shared Space, PhD Dissertation, King’s College, 2018

28Feb18

Abstract: This dissertation is a study of the relations of Saugeen Ojibway Nation in
Southwestern Ontario with British and other European settlers, the British
colonial state and Canadian nation. It is committed to an illumination of the
experience of Indigenous peoples as waves of migrants surrounded and enclosed
them in new ways of life.

The dissertation draws partially on unpublished sources, and some material
culture, in particular wampum, but is principally based on published primary
sources including government letters, documents, and reports; settler diaries;
newspaper articles; school texts books; and Indigenous created records,
testimonials, and collections of interviews.

The Anishinaabe ways of living made them appear to be an obstacle to the aims
of settlers, the British Crown, and later Canadian government. The sections of the
dissertation examine key episodes: initial engagements between the Saugeen
Ojibway Nation and early settlers (1830s-1880s), pre-confederation land
treaties and the discontent they engendered (1836-1861), and the tragedy of the
Residential Schools (1830s-1960s), seeking to map a the evolution of
relationships between Canada and the Saugeen Ojibway Nation as Canada
increasingly sought to remove Indigenous peoples by way of either assimilation
or extermination.

But there was also, from the outset, an alternative experience of peaceful and
respectful coexistence, and the dissertation attempts, in all these sections, to
make this visible. Today, the population within Canadian borders is comprised of
sovereign Indigenous peoples, the descendants of settlers, and newcomers. The
thesis is intended to be a contribution to a new history of Canada as a shared
space.


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Palestinians are indigenes: Ilan Pappe, ‘Indigeneity as Cultural Resistance: Notes on the Palestinian Struggle within Twenty-First-Century Israel’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 117, 1, pp. 157-178.

28Feb18

Abstract: This article examines closely the Palestinian cultural resistance in the Galilee as an antidote to the Israeli claim of Jewish indigeneity and policies of oppression. It begins by discussing the application of the term indigenous. to the Palestinians in Israel, an application that is to this very day contested by scholars who prefer to see the Palestinian community as a national group engaged with other Palestinian groups in a national liberation struggle. The article focuses on various projects and highlights in particular projects that reconstruct pre-1948 Palestine as means both to commemorate the Nakba and to accentuate and reaffirm Palestinian indigeneity. It concludes by arguing that this kind of cultural struggle complements, rather than demotes, the national struggle. Indeed, at times and on the face of it, this kind of struggle has a chance of prevailing given the lack of interest or ignorance of the settler-colonial state and its project of Judaization of the Galilee and the rest of Palestine.


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Settler colonialism is living bad: Roxanne Gould, Priscilla Day, ‘”You are here because the land called you”: Searching for vivir bien/living well’, Journal of Indigenous Wellbeing, 2, 3, 2017

28Feb18

Abstract: This paper provides an account of an education seminar titled “When Indigenous People Lead,” inspired by the decolonisation work being conducted by the first Indigenous president of a colonial nation-state in the Western Hemisphere, President Evo Morales of Bolivia. The purpose of the seminar was to bring Indigenous peoples and allies to Bolivia to examine the strategies used by the Morales government to dismantle the stranglehold that settler colonialism and capitalism have had on their country. Our goal was a single seminar to examine the implications of the Morales government for Indigenous peoples, who envision similar change in their homelands. This study examines our journey of searching for vivir bien – living well – through a theoretical lens of decolonisation and ecosocialism directed toward alternatives to socially and ecologically destructive systems. We chose ecosocialism as the framework to examine and deconstruct Morales’s work because ecosocialism strongly supports Indigenous ways of knowing, but it also argues that the alienation from nature is directly related to alienation from each other, and this in turn causes environmental degradation with capitalism at the core of this planetary issue.


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Settler colonialism sees a deficit: Tricia McGuire-Adams, ‘Anishinaabeg women’s stories of wellbeing: Physical activity, restoring wellbeing, and dismantling the settler colonial deficit analysis’, Journal of Indigenous Wellbeing, 2, 3, 2017

28Feb18

Abstract: The settler colonial lens deficit approach to Indigenous peoples’ health constructs us as ill, which sets the stage for our eventual erasure. In contrast to this deficit-based approach, in this paper I employed an Anishinaabeg research paradigm and followed Anishinaabeg protocols to understand how Anishinaabeg women are creating wellbeing for themselves, their families, and communities through engaging in physical activity. Based on seven interviews with Anishinaabeg women who are engaged in decolonized physicality, the Anishinaabeg women participants promote gwesayjitodoon indo bimaadiziiwin, which means to transform oneself into a better life. The participants showed how if one can apply the concept of gwesayjitodoon indo bimaadiziiwin to his or her physical activity, it has potential to enact broader community wellbeing that can confront the settler colonial deficit lens that requires Indigenous peoples’ erasure, and through which Aboriginal health research has for too long been examined. 


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The settler-colonial occupation of time: Julie Peteet, ‘Closure’s Temporality: The Cultural Politics of Time and Waiting’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 117, 1, 2018, pp. 43-64

28Feb18

Abstract: This article explores time as a lens through which to understand the lives of Palestinians under a colonial-settler occupation and policy of closure where time and mobility are weaponized as an integral part of expanding the state and winnowing the indigenous population. Time, like mobility, is a heavily marked category, objectified and subject to calculation and control, on one hand, and uncertainty and loss of control, on the other. In the prevailing “economy of suspended rights” for Palestinians, where autonomy over the body’s movements through space is severely curtailed, their humanity and agency are affirmed through the will to persist and move. Waiting is not a passive state but is rather an embodied state of active stasis, punctuated by movement; both occur in spatiotemporal zones characterized by particular configurations of power. Ethnographic encounters illustrate the power to impose waiting and appropriate time and, conversely, subversion and the refusal to acquiesce. When controls over mobility are differentially allocated to a population situated within a defined territory, differentiated temporal orders and their impact on subjectivities are put into relief. The calculated strategy of control mixed with uncertainty and arbitrariness engenders anxiety, subordination, and ultimately immiseration but subversion and resistance as well.


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But the settlers won’t get the ontology: Vanessa R. Lea, ‘Ontological Conflicts Concerning Indigenous Peoples in Contemporary Brazil’, ab-Original, 1, 2, 2017, pp. 151-175

25Feb18

Abstract: Inspired by Mauro Almeida’s (2013) notion of ontological conflict, this article examines the current situation of the Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Various concrete situations are examined to exemplify the ways in which, at best, they are denied a voice unless their leaders adapt their discourse to concerns that resonate with those of their non-Indigenous interlocutors. Native ontologies relating to reciprocity and the use of natural resources for subsistence, without concern for creating a marketable surplus, are systematically subordinated to the vested interests of corporate capital, exemplified by the construction of hydroelectric dams and mining activities. The state stands by as Indigenous lands are subjected to arson attacks, and the judiciary fails to take action against the encroachment of Indigenous lands. The situation in Southern Mato Grosso borders on outright genocide. The economic and political crisis has worsened the situation, with dwindling resources for monitoring deforestation and for providing adequate health and educational services. The crisis in the industrial sector has favored advocates of the merits of large-scale monoculture of crops like soya for export on the commodity market. The wisdom of adaptation to the environment by the Indigenous peoples is ignored and their shrinking land base, coupled with their growing population, serves to make them increasingly dependent of governmental welfare benefits. This is then interpreted as evidence of the inevitability of capitalist globalization with disparagement of anything other than capital-intensive monoculture. The gap is constantly widening between the Indigenous peoples and the economic elite whose interests the state unabashedly represents.


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The settlers will steal your land and the soul that dwells on it: Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country Religion and the Struggle for the American West, Oxford University Press, 2018

25Feb18

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.


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Liberalism reconciles colonialism and settler colonialism: Onur Ulas Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism, Oxford University Press, 2018

25Feb18

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.


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