Abstract: Based on a metanarrative analysis of the self-reflexive process I undertook during my research into the “solidarity encounter” between Indigenous women and White women in a contemporary Canadian context, I argue that self-reflexivity is a fraught mechanism for grappling with and dismantling structural privilege. I recount how, despite my best self-reflexive efforts and expectations to the contrary, I could not completely forestall some of the ways in which my subjectivity and hence power would infuse the research—specifically, in how the specter of the liberal subject would haunt it. This haunting, I contend, is indicative of the limits of self-reflexivity when it is underpinned by modernist/liberal ideologies of subjectivity. In short, I convey the perils and promises of self-reflexivity as a mechanism for revealing researcher impact on and for leveling power relations in social justice research (and beyond). Specifically, I identify in my own practice elements of the “validated reflexive strategies” critiqued by Wanda S. Pillow. I conclude that self-reflexivity is most valuable when approached as a window into structural oppression and privilege and not only into the power of researchers as individuals. Building on Sara Ahmed’s reflexive “double turn,” I argue that radical reflexivity is a better model for avoiding the vortex of a self-reflexivity performed by modernist/liberal subjects. I propose that radical reflexivity can assist researchers to identify the ways in which our structural positions overdetermine (though never absolutely or seamlessly) the contours of our scholarly and political commitments.

Abstract: The approximately 18,000 imperial troops who arrived in New Zealand with the British regiments between 1840 and 1870 as garrison and combat troops, did not do so by choice. However, for the more than 3,600 non-commissioned officers and rank and file soldiers who subsequently discharged from the army in New Zealand, and the unknown but significant number of officers who retired in the colony, it was their decision to stay and build civilian lives as soldier settlers in the colony. This thesis investigates three key themes in the histories of soldiers who became settlers: land, familial relationships, and livelihood. In doing so, the study develops an important area of settler colonialism in New Zealand history. Discussion covers the period from the first arrival of soldiers in the 1840s through to the early twentieth century – incorporating the span of the soldier settlers’ lifetimes. The study focuses on selected aspects of the history of nineteenth-century war and settlement.

Land is examined through analysis of government statutes and reports, reminiscences, letters, and newspapers, the thesis showing how and why soldier settlers were assisted on to confiscated and alienated Māori land under the Waste Lands and New Zealand Settlement Acts. Attention is also paid to documenting the soldier settlers’ experiences of this process and its problems. Further, it discusses some of the New Zealand settlements in which military land grants were concentrated. It also situates such military settlement practices in the context of the wider British Empire.

The place of women, children, and the regimental family in the soldier settlers’ New Zealand lives is also considered. This history is explored through journals, reminiscences, biography and newspapers, and contextualised via imperial and military histories. How and where men from the emphatically male sphere of the British Army met and married women during service in New Zealand is examined, as are the contexts in which they lived their married lives. Also discussed are the contrasting military and colonial policies towards women and marriage, and how these were experienced by soldier settlers and their families.

Lastly, the livelihood of soldier settlers is explored – the thesis investigating what sort of civilian lives soldier settlers experienced and how they made a living for themselves and their families. Utilising newspapers, reminiscences, biography, and government records the diversity of work army veterans undertook in the colony is uncovered. Notable trends include continued military-style roles and community leadership. The failed farming enterprise is also emphasised. Going further, it offers analysis of the later years of life and the different experiences of soldier settlers in their twilight years, particularly for those with and without family networks in the colony. The thesis challenges the separation between ‘war’ and ‘settlement’ by focusing on a group whose history spanned both sides of the nineteenth-century world of colony and empire.

Abstract: U.S. citizens rarely feel implicated in the harm caused by the U.S.’s widespread use of drones, and both drones’ opponents and proponents focus on value calculus of their usage. Nasser Hussain’s “Phenomenology of a Drone Strike” looks at the problem from the wider angle of the harm continuous use of drones wages on affected communities. This article links inattention to drones’ effects to a related blind spot, “settler common sense”: the way non-native settler colonial subjects rely on framings of the world that normalize settlement as the background truth against which experience of the world is interpreted – and thereby render invisible other possible framings of justice and resistance. If U.S. citizens do not feel implicated in ongoing injustice toward Native Americans, how did that denial become possible? Looking at this problem may help us understand something about our capacity to ignore the use of drones as instruments of terror. In turn, Hussain’s points about how drones are experienced on either side of their usage may help us understand something about settler common sense and indigenous resistance.

Abstract: Inspired by postcolonial and feminist scholarship and new work on the law and British humanitarian governance, along with recent considerations of the maritime and ‘oceans connect’ approaches, this article examines the apparent ’emancipation’ acts of colonial officials and Quakers who turned to the law to retrieve high-status Aboriginal women from sealers on both sides of the Bass Strait oceanic frontier. Foregrounding issues of Indigenous law and political diplomacy alongside those of Europeans, and attending to questions of intimacy, gendered governance, protection and the law, the article considers how these variously intersected in an ‘anomalous legal zone’ – the watery Bass Strait world stretching between Van Diemen’s Land and the Australian mainland. In paying attention to Bass Strait as one oceanic and colonial legal field, and the appeals to law to address the problem of abduction, the article argues that higher orders of diplomacy were at play in a precarious period when the rapid colonisation of Aboriginal lands, negotiation and the stabilisation of incendiary frontier violence were necessary. Here, the attempted legal regulation of intimacies on colonial peripheries was directly connected to issues of land, invasion, diplomacy and treaty making.

Abstract: A large body of scholarship has explored how interracial marriages and informal sexual contracts alike became the target of state regulation in settler colonial societies, as categories of racial identity and their classifications in law became increasingly fixed through the late nineteenth century. In late colonial western Canada and Western Australia, settler governments deployed different legal strategies to manage the shared perceived problems of Indigenous prostitution and interracial cohabitation. As part of a wider program of Aboriginal governance, these governmental interventions were tied not only to late colonial ideologies about racial purity but also to an objective to contain Indigenous people’s mobility and their access to settler cities and towns. In both countries, however, authorities were confronted with the limits of the law in regulating interracial contact.

Abstract: China’s three northeastern provinces (Fengtian, Heilongjiang, and Jilin) were transfigured by Japanese imperialism in the opening decades of the 20th century. South Manchuria and the Kwantung Leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula in particular became the site of a railway imperialism that would, beginning in 1905, allow Japan to claim a sphere of influence in the northeast and profit from the export of soybeans, coal, lumber, and other raw materials from the region. The South Manchuria Railway Company (or “Mantetsu”), which held the dual mantle of joint stock-owning company and governmental national-policy company, was the central organ in Japan’s so-called management of Manchuria. The expansion of Mantetsu’s rail network (originally built by Czarist Russia in the late 1890s) in the post–World War I years allowed for greater extraction of resources and greater wealth for company stockholders, while giving rise to an upswell of protest from a burgeoning nationalist movement in mainland China as well as in the northeast itself. Throughout the preconquest period (pre-September 1931), bureaucrats, Mantetsu employees, doctors, teachers, and economic sojourners of every stripe made a home for themselves in Japanese Manchuria, parts of which were transformed to replicate the modern conveniences and amenities of the metropole’s urban centers.

The Manchurian Incident, which began on September 18, 1931, with a plot by renegade officers from the Kwantung Army (a division of the Japanese Imperial Army) to destroy Mantetsu track and blame it on Chinese brigands, led to the military takeover of the three northeastern provinces by January 1932. The establishment of the army-led state of Manchukuo in March 1932 gave way to a new kind of Japanese power and influence on the continent—one that operated independently from Tokyo and at the pleasure of the Kwantung Army. Despite repeated proclamations of pan-Asian unity and the harmony of the five races by the state’s propaganda agents, Manchukuo existed for the purpose of strengthening Japan’s war machine, as well as for planning a total renovation of the domestic Japanese state in line with army objectives.

Abstract: In the post-World War Two period, the federal government of Canada initiated a series of food subsidy programs (the Food Mail Program and Nutrition North Canada) and nutrition and health education initiatives that were officially intended to address hunger and malnourishment in Northern Indigenous communities by imposing settler foodways on Indigenous people. Interrogating food subsidy programs and nutrition and health education initiatives as part of a broader settler colonial project of Indigenous elimination, this paper reveals the ways in which the Canadian federal state employs contemporary discourses of development and humanitarianism to legitimise and normalise its presence and actions in Northern Indigenous territories.

Access the article at: www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal

Abstract: Contributing to recent research into settler colonialism, this paper takes an on the ground look at how this system manifests today. This research turns its lens on the white settler, unmasks settler myths of innocence and contributes to an understanding of how whiteness and white supremacism shape settler colonialism in what is now called the United Sates. This is a placed based study, focusing on the Klamath and Salmon Rivers. Consequences and complexities of the “back to the land” movement are looked at, and the question of “back-to-whose-land?” is asked? A convivial research approach, which is a back and forth interplay of analysis and action, has been utilized for this project. Also examined are efforts by settlers to engage with unsettling, both as individuals and through a collective settler effort at organizing, under the name “Unsettling Klamath River.” Unsettling can be described as the work of white settlers within the broader movement to decolonize, that is led by Indigenous People. Some false narratives have begun to shift and yet, this population of white settlers remains largely in a state of paralysis due to; a fragile settler identity, a reliance on a false entitlement and a debilitating fear of what will happen if truth-telling occurs. Building upon lessons learned, this paper concludes by offering ways that white settlers can begin to chip away at oppressive structures and move forward out of a state of complicity into a sense of responsibility, that is long overdue.

Excerpt: On November 3, 2016, a ritual burning of the Doctrine of Discovery (the European legal concept that justified the dispossession of native lands by Europeans) was held at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in North Dakota. Episcopalian Reverend John Floberg, who was acting at the invitation of the Standing Rock Sioux, held a copy of the Doctrine of Discovery (presumably the Papal Bull titled “Inter Caetera” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493) and invited a committee of native elders to, if so moved, authorize the burning of the document. After a series of speeches and rituals, the document was burned to the applause and cheering of hundreds of native and nonnative water protectors (as many prefer to be called over “protestor”) and about five hundred clergy members. This interfaith campaign has gathered steam in the last five years and calls on churches and governments to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery. The campaign has resulted in official pronouncements from the World Council of Churches, Episcopal House of Bishops, Quakers, United Methodist Church, and Unitarian Universalists. The effort by indigenous activists received its most international notoriety when the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (where I have been conducting fieldwork since the first session in 2002) declared it the official theme of the Eleventh Session of the Permanent Forum in 2012.

I examine the anti–Doctrine of Discovery campaign at the UN, particularly the Eleventh Session, and other related contexts for two reasons. First, the movement highlights the challenges and possibilities of what I call Pan-American indigenous activism because it has been embraced by a diverse group of indigenous activists from Latin America and North America, and it frames historic grievances in a uniquely pan-hemispheric way. Although it focuses on Papal Bulls generated under Iberian colonialism and what is now Latin America, it traces the connections and continuities of the colonialist and [End Page 823] imperialist ideologies that underpinned both English and Spanish aggressions in the Americas. Second, I argue that an examination of this movement is particularly apt in the context of the analytic possibilities and limitations of the concept of settler colonialism across the indigenous Americas. In the words of Patrick Wolfe, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” This destruction and its aftermath create a unique dilemma for activists and others who attempt to redress it. This is the dilemma of (perceived) irreversibility—the larger (and more destructive) the damage, the less practical and realizable redress seems.

I demonstrate the ways indigenous activists in the United States and Latin America strategically use institutions like the UN and the news media in unexpected ways to create what Kevin Bruyneel, focusing exclusively on the United States, calls a “third space of sovereignty” that “resides neither simply inside nor outside the American political system but rather exists on these very boundaries, exposing both the practices and the contingencies of American colonial rule.” Indigenous participants have used the symbolic capital of the United Nations to put pressure on national governments and corporations that are active in their territories and communities in a way that transcends the narrow mandate the United Nations gives to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (and other venues for indigenous participation within the UN system). The Dakota Access Pipeline case is a recent example of an emergent Pan-American indigenous activism that to some extent is lodged in global governmental institutions but also defies the constraints inherently accompanying this positioning.

Settler colonialism describes a process that unmistakably has played out differently, if at all, in Latin America and North America. Surely there has been “destruction and replacement” in both hemispheres during the colonial period, but it is widely acknowledged that the North American process was oriented less toward exploitation of native labor than toward the removal of native people to make way for English settlers and other imported and forced laborers from the Old World.

Excerpt: The Los Angeles Central Library’s exhibition “Visualizing Language: A Zapotec Worldview,” which opened this past September, features a series of murals produced by the Oaxacan artists collective Tlacolulokos. The murals are envisioned as providing a “counter-narrative” to existing ones painted by Dean Cornwell, in 1933, depicting a history of California in four stages: Era of Discovery, Missions, Americanization, and Founding of the City of Los Angeles. In these paintings Native people are depicted as marginal and subservient figures within grander visions of colonization. The new murals are thus intended to provide a new voice by putting “a different protagonist in the center of the story.” What is of interest for the present essay is who gets to tell this story. It is not Native artists on whose land the library is built, but Oaxacan Indigenous people. In this way, this project continues a legacy of erasure embedded in current discourses of multiculturalism that reinforce settler colonial dispossession and hegemony.

Taking Indigenous Mexican migration as a point of departure, this essay joins critical scholarship on settler colonialism exploring the role of the migrant in settler processes. Following Patrick Wolfe’s theorization of settler colonialism as a structuring force rather than as a historical passage, we ask: How might a comparative framework on settler colonialisms help us articulate theoretical discussion beyond the dominant settler–Native racial binary? And in which ways does the settler colonial theoretical framework render visible the ways in which distinct bodies are racialized within and beyond national boundaries? We understand settler colonialism as the complex reverberations originating from Indigenous dispossession and white possession. As a global and transnational phenomenon, settler colonialism is a structuring force that in coproduction with the transatlantic slave trade, indentured labor, and other forms of racial ordering enables particular racial logics and forms of exclusions integral to global capital and empire.