Abstract: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, or Bamewawagezhikaquay, wrote brilliantly fashioned Ojibwe stories. Focusing on four of her contributions to the Muzzeniegun, including a letter to the editor (her husband, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft), the author argues for Schoolcraft’s adherence to Ojibwe aesthetic traditions. This approach is important because three of the stories above were republished by H. R. Schoolcraft (Indian Agent for the Andrew Jackson administration) in his anthropological Algic Researches (1839) and Oneóta (1844). In these works, Schoolcraft’s husband provides an interpretive lens for his wife’s stories that construes change as indicative of the tragedy and victimization associated with the Euro-American myth of the “vanishing Indian.” Read within their original publication and (multi)cultural context, however, Schoolcraft’s stories emphasize an active and dynamic sense of native presence through the use of liminality. As such, her stories express resistance to the categorical distinctions of settler colonialism and embrace liminal transformation as a means of survival.

Abstract: Conservation discourses tend to portray invasive species as biological entities temporally connected to colonial timelines, using terms such as “alien”, “colonizing”, “colonial”, and “native”. This focus on a colonial timeline emerges from scientific publications within conservation biology and invasion ecology and is enacted through invasive species management by state and NGO actors. Colonialism is influential for indigenous nations in myriad ways, but in what ways do indigenous understandings of invasive species engage with colonialism? We conducted ethnographic research with indigenous Anishnaabe communities to learn about the ways Anishnaabe people conceptualize invasive species as a phenomenon in the world and were gifted with three primary insights. First, Anishnaabe regard plants, like all beings, as persons that assemble into nations more so than “species”. The arrival of new plant nations is viewed by some Anishnaabe as a natural form of migration. The second insight highlights the importance of actively discovering the purpose of new species, sometimes with the assistance of animal teachers. Lastly, while Anishnaabe describe invasive species as phenomenologically entangled with colonialism, the multiple ways Anishnaabe people think about invasive species provide alternatives to native–non-native binaries that dominate much of the scientific discourse.

Description: In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

Excerpt: It is no secret that the Indigenous community in Winnipeg has faced many challenges. The Indigenous peoples and Settler Canadians alike are aware of the stereotypes and prejudice that surrounds and plagues this community. As Settler Canadians have attempted to grapple with this social issue, they have labelled it the Indian Problem, all the while neglecting to acknowledge the more concerning Settler Problem.

Abstract: Settler colonialism, a process by which settlers take control of and transform both the land and people who live in a region into the settlers’ image, was a defining force in Oklahoma’s formation and remains pervasive in Oklahoman memory. To contextualize the idea’s impact in Oklahoma history, this thesis explores settler colonialism’s expressions on the Southern Great Plains, such as the Boomer movement – a fanatical settler colony based in Wichita, Kansas. The Boomers were at heart a settler colonial organization, but they were not unique. Hundreds of smaller colonies attempted to seize land in Indian Territory (modern day Oklahoma) between 1879 and 1901; in examining these organizations through the lens of settler colonialism, it is clear that the impact of the Boomers must be balanced within the broader context of settler colonialism on the Southern Plains; that Indigenous people in Indian Territory shaped the forces of settler colonialism; that the Boomers and their compatriots largely failed to make their dreams into a legal reality; that the subsequent state of Oklahoma Territory was fundamentally a far more aggressive settler colonial institution than the Boomers; and that settler colonialism remains an extremely pervasive force in Oklahoman identity and thought. To undo the historiographical and memorial damage created by settler colonialism in Oklahoma, a complete autopsy of the Boomers, Oklahoma history, and Southern Plains settler colonialism is necessary.

Abstract: In Latin America, ethnicity is equated with indigenity. It is an objective of this article to review the legacy of Anthony Smith regarding the vitality of the ethnic past and the myth of origin, as the core of his theory of nationalism based on the weight of ethnocentrism. To this end, we address two routes, the use of the ethnic past and ethnicity by nationalists and founders of the state and, how indigenous intellectuals, on the other, have found a reinvention of their identities through various myths of Amerindian origin. Ethnic myths and the use of the ethnic past have been accepted, denied or rejected by nationalists, while indigenous peoples adhere to their own myths or seek to reinvent them. Mythical information is a component of identity but also requires institutions to disseminate such information among the group.

Description: This book analyses the development of the coffee sector in colonial Zimbabwe within the broader context of agrarian capitalism in settler economies. It unpacks the central philosophy of statecraft based on the desire to develop Southern Rhodesia as a permanent white settler colony. The development of the coffee sector was designed to fulfil the objective of expanding economic opportunities for white settlers and to increase their incomes in order to inspire immigration and discourage emigration. Expanded incomes were similarly vital in sponsoring the highly eulogised civilised standards of living. The book casts the development of the coffee sector as an alternative prism through which the nature of the anatomy of colonial Zimbabwean political economy can be unpacked. The book departs from the dominant macro-approach in detailing the development of colonial Zimbabwean agrarian capitalism to the micro-twist which analyses sector specificities important in enhancing our understanding of the Southern Rhodesian economy. It will appeal to economic historians, historians and political economists, and explores various themes including labour, marketing and the role of the state in allocating productive forces.

Description: Towards a New Ethnohistory engages respectfully in cross-cultural dialogue and interdisciplinary methods to co-create with Indigenous people a new, decolonized ethnohistory. This new ethnohistory reflects Indigenous ways of knowing and is a direct response to critiques of scholars who have for too long foisted their own research agendas onto Indigenous communities. Community-engaged scholarship invites members of the Indigenous community themselves to identify the research questions, host the researchers while they conduct the research, and participate meaningfully in the analysis of the researchers’ findings.

The historical research topics chosen by the Stó:lō community leaders and knowledge keepers for the contributors to this collection range from the intimate and personal, to the broad and collective. But what principally distinguishes the analyses is the way settler colonialism is positioned as something that unfolds in sometimes unexpected ways within Stó:lō history, as opposed to the other way around.

Description: “I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you.” So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy’s deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe’s Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories.

Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

Description: When the US Army Corps of Engineers began planning construction of The Dalles Dam at Celilo Village in the mid-twentieth century, it was clear that this traditional fishing, commerce, and social site of immense importance to Native tribes would be changed forever. Controversy surrounded the project, with local Native communities anticipating the devastation of their way of life and white settler-descended advocates of the dam envisioning a future of thriving infrastructure and industry.

In In Defense of Wyam, having secured access to hundreds of previously unknown and unexamined letters, Katrine Barber revisits the subject of Death of Celilo Falls, her first book. She presents a remarkable alliance across the opposed Native and settler-descended groups, chronicling how the lives of two women leaders converged in a shared struggle to protect the Indian homes of Celilo Village. Flora Thompson, member of the Warm Springs Tribe and wife of the Wyam chief, and Martha McKeown, daughter of an affluent white farming family, became lifelong allies as they worked together to protect Oregon’s oldest continuously inhabited site. As a Native woman, Flora wielded significant power within her community yet outside of it was dismissed for her race and her gender. Martha, although privileged due to her settler origins, turned to women’s clubs to expand her political authority beyond the conventional domestic sphere. Flora’s and Martha’s coordinated efforts offer readers meaningful insight into a time and place where the rhetoric of Native sovereignty, the aims of environmental movements in the American West, and women’s political strategies intersected.