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Is it a triangle (it would seem so)? Gregory Evans Dowd, ‘Indigenous Peoples without the Republic’, Journal of American History, 104, 1, 2017, pp. 19-41

28Jun17

Excerpt: The past several decades of scholarship offer two powerful themes touching on the relationship between the American Revolution and indigenous peoples. The first holds that on the eve of revolution, ordinary European settlers were already American Indians’ greatest danger, a danger only to be restrained by indigenous action, imperial intervention, or both. The second closely allied theme holds that the American Revolution greatly advanced Indian dispossession. These story lines weave a narrative that begins in the 1760s, when financially strapped Great Britain, facing powerful Indian resistance to British claims of conquest, extended meaningful protection to Native Americans from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Settlers, locally oriented in politics and anti-Indian in sentiment, scrapped such imperial plans, often by murdering Indians, precipitating war. Metropolitan officials and appointees endeavored to regulate expansion, commerce, and violence. They offered coexistence and prospective subjecthood to Indians. The American Revolution dashed this incipient accommodation. It unleashed land-seeking, racist, backcountry men backed by a responsive government. Overthrowing an empire of graded rank in favor of a white settlers’ republic, the Revolution endangered Native America.


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The transforming citizenships of settler societies (there are two meaning of ‘transforming’): Jatinder Mann (ed.), Citizenship in Transnational Perspective: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, Springer, 2017

26Jun17

Description: This edited collection explores citizenship in a transnational perspective, with a focus on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and offers historical, legal, political, and sociological perspectives. The two overarching themes of the book are ethnicity and Indigeneity. The contributions in the collection come from widely respected international scholars who approach the subject of citizenship from a range of perspectives: some arguing for a post-citizenship world, others questioning the very concept itself, or its application to Indigenous nations.


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Sharing public space: Avril Bell, ‘Co-existing Indigenous and Settler Worlds: Ontological Styles and Possibilities’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 24, 2017, 15-24

26Jun17

Abstract: Settler colonialism involves processes of destruction and substitution aiming to replace indigenous with European/western worlds. But indigenous worlds persist in numerous spaces, moments and interactions where distinct ontologies and ways of being-in-the-world prevail. In Aotearoa New Zealand these spaces of the Māori world persist most obviously on marae. Māori and western worlds also briefly come together in public contexts where Māori protocols are used to mark openings of various sorts, temporarily governing public space and sociability. In this paper, I explore a different case where, I argue, Māori and western worlds are entangled or knotted together in the carved pou in the atrium space of a new community building in Kaitaia.


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Data sharing and data withholding (it is not about the data): Emma Kowal, Bastien Llamas, Sarah Tishkoff, ‘Consent: Data-sharing for indigenous peoples’, Nature, 546, 474, 22/06/17

26Jun17

Excerpt: Broad-consent models for human studies, which leave decisions on data-sharing to the researchers, may not be appropriate for work with indigenous peoples. Making the sharing of data almost impossible is also problematic. Everyone stands to benefit from responsible data-sharing innovations that can be applied more widely.

The largest volume of genomic data amassed so far from Aboriginal Australians is deposited in the European Genome–phenome Archive. The Australian board for ethical review permits access to the data only for “verification” purposes, and subject to ethical approval. For any other use of the data, researchers must seek permission from the original researchers, obtain ethical approval and contact the donors individually for their re-consent. This becomes prohibitive because donors are spread all over the continent.

These hurdles may be intended to protect participants from the harms of data-sharing, but they also exclude them from the potential benefits. Other models better address the foundational principles of responsible sharing, as proposed by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, and the control of research by indigenous study participants.


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Decolonisation from the outside? Rosemary Nagy, ‘Can Reconciliation Be Compelled? Transnational Advocacy and the Indigenous–Canada Relationship’, Peace & Change, 42, 3, 2017, pp. 313–341

21Jun17

Abstract: Through an examination of transnational advocacy and the Indigenous–Canada relationship, this article advances a compliance model of reconciliation to suggest that reconciliation might be compelled through pressure upon states to comply with their human rights obligations. Drawing upon constructivism, conflict resolution theory, and social psychology, the article proposes that compliance and reconciliation converge as a result of behavioral adjustment and the internalization of values through enforced performance. The article uses four examples for illustration: (1) challenges at the UN Human Rights Committee against gender discrimination in the Indian Act, (2) Canada’s belated endorsement in 2010 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, (3) insider–outsider pressure that Canada comply with its human rights obligations with respect to its missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and (4) the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group’s land claim petition before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights. The article concludes that transnational advocacy in the Indigenous–Canada context has had slight to moderate effect in making reconciliation happen.


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The universities of a settler society are settler universities: Frances Henry, Enakshi Dua, Carl E. James, Audrey Kobayashi, Peter Li, Howard Ramos, Malinda S. Smith, The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities, UBC Press, 2017

16Jun17

Abstract: The university is often regarded as a bastion of liberal democracy where equity and diversity are promoted and racism doesn’t exist. In reality, the university still excludes many people and is a site of racialization that is subtle, complex, and sophisticated. While some studies do point to the persistence of systemic barriers to equity and diversity in higher education, in-depth analyses of racism, racialization, and Indigeneity in the academy are more notable for their absence. The Equity Myth is the first comprehensive, data-based study of racialized and Indigenous faculty members’ experiences in Canadian universities.

Challenging the myth of equity in higher education, this book brings together leading scholars who scrutinize what universities have done and question the effectiveness of their equity programs. The authors draw on a rich body of survey data and interviews to examine the experiences of racialized faculty members across Canada who — despite diversity initiatives in their respective institutions — have yet to see changes in everyday working conditions. They also make important recommendations as to how universities can address racialization and fulfill the promise of equity in higher education.

A landmark study on racism in Canadian universities, The Equity Myth shows how the goal of achieving equity in higher education has been consistently promised, but never realized for racialized and Indigenous faculty members. It further reveals that the policies and diversity initiatives undertaken so far have only served to deflect criticism of a system that is doing little to change itself.


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Settler nationalism? Dan Tout, ‘Neither Nationalists nor Universalists: Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks’, Australian Humanities Review, 2017

14Jun17

Excerpt: The Jindyworobak poetry movement, founded by Rex Ingamells in 1938, emerged in the context of a literary-cultural milieu split between those concerned with developing a uniquely ‘indigenous’ Australian tradition on the one hand, and those primarily concerned with defending and maintaining continuity with Australia’s European inheritance on the other. While the Jindyworobaks have typically been associated with the former tradition, this essay argues that they in fact sought to chart a new path that rejected both the straightforward traditions of anti-colonial nationalism and the ‘alien’ influence of imported European culture; that they rejected both extremes and sought instead to achieve a synthesis of the two. With this aim in mind, they turned towards Aboriginal Australians, as bearers of the spirit of the place, in an attempt to appropriate an imagined environmental essence and to thereby construct the conditions for an unmediated encounter between the settler and the land.


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On genocide and settler colonialism (again): Jared Farmer, ‘Bitterest Crop: Genocide in California’, Reviews in American History, 45, 2, 2017, pp. 187-197

14Jun17

Abstract: California is like America, only more so, Wallace Stegner has often been paraphrased as saying. His actual words: “Like the rest of America, California is unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive, and energetic—only more so.”1 Placed in the past tense, Stegner’s statement demands an adverb: only more violently so. During its formative period of “innovation,” the Golden State witnessed the most deplorable violence in U.S. history. Too often, the “American genocide debate” has been presented in yes-or-no format: Did the U.S. ever commit genocide? Bad questions produce stale arguments. Better to ask: Where and why did “normal” anti-Indian violence—that is, American settler colonialism—become genocidal?


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Indigenous jurisdiction is a problem (for the settler state): Shiri Pasternak, Tia Dafnos, ‘How does a settler state secure the circuitry of capital?’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2017

14Jun17

Abstract: Indigenous peoples interrupt commodity flows by asserting jurisdiction and sovereignty over their lands and resources in places that form choke points to the circulation of capital. In today’s economy, the state has begun to redefine its “resilience” in terms of its relative success in the protection and expansion of critical infrastructure. We find that there has been a political re-organization of governing authority over Indigenous peoples in Canada as a result, which is driven by greater integration of the private sector as national security “partners.” The securitization of “critical infrastructure”—essentially, supply chains of capital, such as private pipelines and public transport routes—has become the priority in mitigating the potential threat of Indigenous jurisdiction. New political and socio-temporal imperatives have led to shifts in risk evaluation, management, and mitigation practices of state administration, in cooperation with the private sector, to neutralize Indigenous disruption to supply chain infrastructure. In this paper, we examine two forms of risk mitigation: first, the configuration of Indigenous jurisdiction as a “legal risk” by the Department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada; and second, the configuration of Indigenous jurisdiction as a source of potential “emergency.” Built on the literal ground of historical patterns of land grabs and migration, logistical space configures new networks of infrastructure into circuitries of production that cast into vivid relief the imperfections of settler sovereignty and the vital systems of Indigenous law.


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They looked at the settlements of others: Patrick Bernhard, ‘Colonial crossovers: Nazi Germany and its entanglements with other empires’, Journal of Global History, 12, 2, 2017, pp. 206-227

14Jun17

Abstract: Nazi Germany’s place in the wider world is a controversial topic in historiography. While scholars such as Ian Kershaw argue that Hitler’s dictatorship must be understood as a unique national phenomenon, others analyse Nazism within comparative frameworks. Mark Mazower, for example, argues that the international concept of ‘empire’ is useful for comprehending the German occupation of Europe. Using an approach native to transnational cultural studies, my contribution goes a step further: I analyse how the Nazis themselves positioned their regime in a wider international context, and thus gave meaning to it. My main thesis is that, while the Nazis took a broad look at international colonialism, they differentiated considerably between the various national experiences. French and British empire-building, for instance, did not receive the same attention as Japanese and Italian colonial projects. Based on new archival evidence, I show that the act of referring in particular to the Italian example was crucial for the Nazis. On the one hand, drawing strong parallels between Italian colonialism and the German rule of eastern Europe allowed Hitler to recruit support for his own visions of imperial conquest. On the other hand, Italian colonialism served as a blueprint for the Nazis’ plans for racial segregation. The article thus shows the importance of transnational exchange for understanding ideological dynamics within the Nazi regime.


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