Abstract: To quantify associations of the dietary share of ultra-processed foods (UPF) with the overall diet quality of First Nations peoples.

A cross-sectional analysis of data from the First Nations Food, Nutrition and Environment Study, designed to contribute to knowledge gaps regarding the diet of First Nations peoples living on-reserve, south of the 60th parallel. A multistage sampling of communities was conducted. All foods from 24 h dietary recalls were categorized into NOVA categories and analyses were performed to evaluate the impact of UPF on diet quality.

Western and Central Canada.

First Nations participants aged 19 years or older.

The sample consisted of 3700 participants. UPF contributed 53·9 % of energy. Compared with the non-UPF fraction of the diet, the UPF fraction had 3·5 times less vitamin A, 2·4 times less K, 2·2 times less protein, 2·3 times more free sugars and 1·8 times more Na. As the contribution of UPF to energy increased so did the overall intakes of energy, carbohydrate, free sugar, saturated fat, Na, Ca and vitamin C, and Na:K; while protein, fibre, K, Fe and vitamin A decreased. Diets of individuals who ate traditional First Nations food (e.g. wild plants and game animals) on the day of the recall were lower in UPF.

UPF were prevalent in First Nations diets. Efforts to curb UPF consumption and increase intake of traditional First Nations foods and other fresh or minimally processed foods would improve diet quality and health in First Nations peoples [sic].

Abstract: In this article, Isaac argues that since 1948, Israel’s control of water resources has been the result of military actions that forced between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinians into exile and claimed the most fertile part of the disputed territory for the state. It thereby paved the way for subsequent military occupation. Isaac maintains that the Israeli occupation has violated the Palestinian right to the equitable and reasonable utilization of shared water resources. In his view, from the end of the 1967 war, Israel initiated its occupation of the territories of Palestine and quickly imposed military order with a view to achieving full control over land and water resources. To Isaac, these military orders served to dissolve the pre-1967 legal systems and which consisted of Ottoman, British, Jordanian (West Bank) and Egyptian (Gaza Strip) laws. This critical review article concentrates on the concept of justice tourism as a response to these assumed Israeli violations of Palestinian rights to equitable and reasonable utilization of shared water resources. The article sheds light on why and how justice tourism conceivably contributes to the Palestine host communities’ transformation and hence to the development of higher level self-consciousness about their rights as “a sovereign nation.”

Abstract: Some contrasting views exist about the prospective benefits of contemporary food tourism for indigenous communities. Some commentators view food tourism as a potential mechanism for reducing tourist stereotyping, bias, and negative images. Increased economic opportunities, employment, and development are commonly cited as potential benefits. However, critics have viewed these same experiences as a colonial revival. An unquestioned assumption that the food traditions, dishes, and cuisines of (usually economically and culturally marginal) indigenous populations should be available and presented for consumption evokes the colonial legacy. These colonial type assumptions, images, and experiences are being challenged deliberately and in a targeted manner. An increasing number of indigenous communities, including the New Zealand Māori, have chosen to rearticulate and re-present their culture in the context of the postcolonial period. For contemporary indigenous people, the culinary cultural field is often wider than simply supplying the touristically “exotic” or “authentic.” It may provide a location to engage with various strategies for indigenous self-determination and the reappropriation of cultural capital. Such strategies may lead to outcomes catering to culinary tourist demands. Tourists seeking out Māori food will have difficultly gaining access, except in the case of the Wharekai (the Māori social space and part of the Marae meeting complex). This research note considers the relationship between the postcolonial legacy, culinary tourism, and indigenous selfdetermination, as it applies to first nation peoples’ foodways, and specifically to the Māori. In doing so, it may contribute to developing new perspectives on food tourism and indigenous self-determination. 

Abstract: A vast body of research has characterised urban Indigeneity as a novel phenomenon. In response, this paper historicises the presence of Indigenous people in settler-colonial cities. I argue that although Indigenous people have always been a part of the urban landscape, their presence has remained largely unheeded due to their positioning as transients. Insufficient critical engagement with Indigenous urban histories has obfuscated a shift in their status from transients to residents in cities. As transients, Indigenous groups were denied access to decision making and their presence was confined and conditional. Positioned as residents, Indigenous peoples now constitute subaltern counterpublics who partake in political processes. Adopting a comparative approach, I use archival and ethnographic material to explore narratives of policy makers, bureaucrats and urban planners in two settler-colonial cities: Karmiel in Israel/Palestine and Townsville in northern Queensland, Australia. In each location I examine the top-down (settler) positioning of Indigenous people within the city space and the contemporary manifestations of Indigenous political mobilisation. Findings show that while settler-colonial urbanism was initially predicated upon the exclusion of Indigenous people, it necessitated their provisional and restrictive inclusion. This structure inadvertently led to the emergence of Indigenous counterpublics in the city.

Description: Twelve companies of American missionaries were sent to the Hawaiian Islands between 1819 and 1848 with the goal of spreading American Christianity and New England values. By the 1850s American missionary families in the islands had birthed more than 250 white children, considered Hawaiian subjects by the indigenous monarchy and U.S. citizens by missionary parents. In Hawaiian by Birth Joy Schulz explores the tensions among the competing parental, cultural, and educational interests affecting these children and, in turn, the impact the children had on nineteenth-century U.S. foreign policy.

These children of white missionaries would eventually alienate themselves from the Hawaiian monarchy and indigenous population by securing disproportionate economic and political power. Their childhoods—complicated by both Hawaiian and American influences—led to significant political and international ramifications once the children reached adulthood. Almost none chose to follow their parents into the missionary profession, and many rejected the Christian faith. Almost all supported the annexation of Hawai‘i despite their parents’ hope that the islands would remain independent.

Whether the missionary children moved to the U.S. mainland, stayed in the islands, or traveled the world, they took with them a sense of racial privilege and cultural superiority. Schulz adds children’s voices to the historical record with this first comprehensive study of the white children born in the Hawaiian Islands between 1820 and 1850 and their path toward political revolution.

Abstract: Susquehannock Indians and Virginia colonists had a long history of friendship and alliance, but they unexpectedly went to war in 1675 over a misunderstanding about stolen pigs. That war, which has seldom attracted attention from historians except as the spark for the colonial insurrection known as Bacon’s Rebellion, remains poorly understood. The Susquehannock-Virginia War lasted longer than the short-lived rebellion it spawned and produced more far-reaching transformations among both peoples, above all the growth of racialized divides in Virginia and the forging of new bonds between Susquehannocks and their indigenous neighbors. The key to understanding the causes and consequences of this conflict is an appreciation for Susquehannocks’ and Virginians’ distinct cultures of emotional experience and expression. These cultures were epitomized by the paradoxical fusion of grief and violence in the Susquehannocks’ practice of mourning war and by the tangled relationship between fear and love embedded in the Virginians’ patriarchal ideal. Such emotions were foundational to both peoples’ conceptions of political and social order, and they shaped the pattern of conflict that continued for a decade. The fateful clash between emotional cultures reveals the centrality of grief and fear to the violent unfolding of settler colonialism.

Abstract: In this essay, I identify and examine the legal-rhetorical mode of reasoning that justifies colonial-transformative occupations by legitimizing the repression of indigenous resistance via appeals to self-defense. The discretionary power authorized by the law of occupation in defence of the occupant’s security becomes, in the hands of a prolonged occupying power with territorial ambitions, the door through which an entire cart and horses of colonial apparatus can be driven. The essay traces this mode of reasoning since the early modern period, and exemplifies it in the case of Israel-Palestine. 

Access the article here.

Access the special section here.

Gerardo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo talk convincingly about ‘biological annihilation’ (‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines‘, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, 2017). They don’t mince words and outline a catastrophe that is already happening. Winter is not coming, winter is already here: Earth is facing mass extinction and humans are responsible, even if these catastrophes are not necessarily unprecedented. The authors rehearse how extinctions are happening at a fierce rate (something that is already known), but offer important evidence on the geographic distribution of species. The range of populations is diminishing at an even faster rate. Species are becoming extinct, but the habitats, and the populations and their diversity and therefore the resilience and adaptability that they sustain are being annihilated at an exponential rate. In sum: ‘today’s planetary defaunation of vertebrates will itself promote cascading catastrophic effects on ecosystems, worsening the annihilation of nature’.

A focus on geography allows them to see things that a focus on species per se would not allow. Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo focus on ‘range contraction (implying population extinctions)’, that is, on geography, populations, and on the relationship between the two, a relationship they find compromised. They note a ‘major contraction’, and conclude that the ‘range contractions and declines we document here imply a considerable loss of intraspecific genetic diversity’. ‘Imply’ is repeated and key: if range contraction is the problem globally, the implication is that range expansion may be the solution: new ranges, new populations, new places. This is a powerful, timely and very, very significant intervention. Settler colonialism as a mode of domination is about thinking about range expansion and specific populations. Settler colonial projects are always born in the perception of a coming catastrophe (catastrophic thought is catastrophic thought irrespective of whether a catastrophe is actually coming, like in this instance, or a result of paranoid anxiety). Settler colonial studies should pay attention.

This expansion includes humans. Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo focus on ‘vertebrates’ (even though through vertebrates they then consider other animals and plants, which is the true meaning of husbandry, a typically human-centered ideology). This is the beginning of the argument. We (i.e., humans) can identify with vertebrates. But the coming catastrophe is ultimately a catastrophe for ‘civilization’:

Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume. The massive loss of populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization.

‘Civilization’ is the end of the argument. Humans are at the beginning and at the end of the whole argument.

This is Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo’s diagnosis:

The likelihood of this rapid defaunation lies in the proximate causes of population extinctions: habitat conversion, climate disruption, overexploitation, toxification, species invasions, disease, and (potentially) large-scale nuclear war—all tied to one another in complex patterns and usually reinforcing each other’s impacts. Much less frequently mentioned are, however, the ultimate drivers of those immediate causes of biotic destruction, namely, human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich. These drivers, all of which trace to the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet, are themselves increasing rapidly. Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most. All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life.

Again, ‘human life’ is the final concern. This is a compelling argument about ‘population range’ and ‘human life’ – that the populations Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo focus on are not human is lost in an attempt to highlight connectedness. Settler colonialism as a political project is always about new collective life in a new range. I am becoming suspicious.

What does this evidence compel us to do? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo note that there is a ‘window for effective action’, but do not instruct us on what is to be actually done (perhaps Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences would not publish explicitly political calls to action). They do not say that we should reduce our range, that we should not settle elsewhere. As the ‘drivers’ are producing range contractions’, the drivers should be removed in order to promote range expansion. But if human populations are part of the picture, and Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo insists we are or we may be, then, humans may also alter their range as a response to crisis. This is settler colonialism. I am suspicious.