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Genocidal and sympathetic (like most settlers): Hunter Liguore, ‘Sympathy or Racism’? L. Frank Baum on Native Americans’, Great Plains Quarterly, 37, 2, 2017, pp. 77-82

05Jun17

Excerpt: Some might say there is nothing more American than the children’s classic The Wizard of Oz or its author, L. Frank Baum. More than a hundred years after the book’s first printing in 1900, it’s still popular and beloved, with new additions to the franchise appearing in movies, books, an upcoming biopic, and even a casino.

Recently, the Oneida Nation in Chittenango, New York, announced plans to build a twenty-million-dollar casino that will honor the late author’s birthplace, an endeavor that will provide jobs and economic growth in the area. Yet the decision has warranted public criticism due to Baum’s 1890 editorials in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, calling for the “annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” While many historians and readers see the editorials as resounding evidence of Baum’s racist views toward Native Americans, others believe his fiction demonstrates that he was sympathetic to their plight, especially their loss of land, religion, and culture.

L. Frank Baum’s nonfiction writing and editorial work serve as a resource for understanding his position on politics and race. Baum moved his family from Chittenango to the Great Plains, hoping to find open space and a newfound freedom, one that the “city life” couldn’t offer. Hardly settled, he opened Baum’s Bazaar and quickly made a name for himself selling fancy goods, like Chinese lanterns and music boxes, to Aberdeen’s wealthy decision makers.

With business doing well, Baum bought the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer and filled it with news and entertainment for his readers, including the “Editor’s Musings” and “Our Landlady” columns. A staunch supporter of women’s rights, Baum devoted a considerable amount of space voicing his opinions on the subject, advocating for a women’s right to vote. His mother-in-law, Matilda Gage, was a cofounder of the National Woman Suffrage Association with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and she not only encouraged him to write but is said to be the influence behind the feminist themes found in the Oz books. Gage was also “adopted” into the Mohawk Nation in 1893.

Around this time, relations between Native Americans and European settlers had been one of conflict. The General Allotment Act of 1887 sought to relocate the Sioux onto reservations. Within two years, North and South Dakota were formed. While settlers feared a Sioux uprising, they would’ve also witnessed suppression of Native culture and religion, and even loss of hunting lands, leading some to starvation. Meanwhile, settlers were dealing with their own struggles, including economic hardships and food scarcities, as the area faced continued drought—another topic Baum covered fiercely.

Eventually, Baum was forced to close the store. He then focused solely on the newspaper, reporting on the issues of his day, including the relationships between the Sioux and settlers. One story he’s credited with publishing was written by Aberdeen resident Hamlin Garland, who attempted to reach common ground between the two sides. In The Real Wizard of Oz, Rebecca Loncraine explains, the settler in Garland’s story, burdened by labor and loneliness, gets emotional when “for the first time in his life he got a glimpse of the infinite despair of the Indian.” The settler approaches “Drifting Crane,” a reference to the Sioux chief Drifting Goose, and tells him that the war is “all wrong . . . there’s land enough for us all, or ought to be.” The settler doesn’t understand why it can’t be shared.


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Can reconciliation lead to reverse racism? Of course not: Danielle Lorenz, ‘Reversing Racism in the Time of Reconciliation? Settler Colonialism, Race, and Alberta Teachers’, Canadian Journal for New Scholars in Education, 8, 1, 2017

05Jun17

Abstract: With Alberta Education planning new policies and curricula that focus on Indigenous content, it is important to see how educators recognize and explain racism. This quanti-qualitative study examines the ways in which Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) members understand and articulate racism through their responses to an anonymous online survey. This is investigated through an interrogation of the idea of “reverse racism.” Utilizing settler colonialism as a theoretical framework, this article uses the history of race as a concept and an exploration of terms related to racism to refute the possibility of white people experiencing racism in Canada. The article concludes that settler colonialism and racism are coexisting and oppressive systems that prohibit reconciliatory thinking for settlers. 


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‘Fourth’ (indigenous) cinema is not ‘first’ (settler) cinema: Joanna Hearne, ‘Native to the Device: Thoughts on Digital Indigenous Studies’, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 29, 1, 2017, pp. 3-26

30May17

Excerpt: In studies of Indigenous film and video, the camera has been a powerful metaphor for Indigenous struggles over control of the image. This is articulated most vividly in Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s invocation of the camera’s contrapuntal position, embedded in the mechanics of shot / reverse shot, to characterize Indigenous and settler filmmaking in his seminal essay “Celebrating Fourth Cinema.” He imagines the settler perspective—“First Cinema”—represented by “the camera of the ship’s deck,” while an Indigenous perspective—“Fourth Cinema”—arises from the “camera ashore” (8–9). Barclay visualizes this staged encounter, from ship to shore, in terms of lines of sight—the eyeline match edit—and the politics of conquest. It is a metaphor with geographic specificity (in Aotearoa) that is also global, connecting lands, peoples, and representation through the articulated positionalities of encounter. Barclay applies it broadly, asserting that Fourth Cinema exists “outside the national orthodoxy” altogether while tracing the transnational heritage of dominant film storytelling to the originary scene of settler colonialism (9). He illustrates the camera of the ship’s deck with examples from the film Mutiny on the Bounty. To show the global relevance of his vision of the camera ashore, we might take up the example of Abenaki director Alanis Obomsawin’s 2002 documentary Is the Crown at War with Us?, in which we see home videos of Mi’gmaq tribal members’ confrontation with the Canadian federal fishery office over fishing rights in Miramichi Bay. From the shore, Mi’gmaq cameras capture evidence of Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ boats violently running over the much smaller boats of the Mi’gmaq fishers of Burnt Church, New Brunswick.


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Indefinite detention is settler colonialism: Harry Blagg, Tamara Tulich, Zoe Bush, ‘Indefinite Detention Meets Colonial Dispossession Indigenous Youths With Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders in a White Settler Justice System’, Social & Legal Studies, 2017

30May17

Abstract: Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is a non-diagnostic umbrella term encompassing a spectrum of disorders caused by prenatal alcohol exposure. This article reports on a qualitative research project undertaken in three Indigenous communities in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, intended to develop diversionary pathways for Indigenous young people with FASD at risk of enmeshment in the justice system. Rates of FASD in some parts of the West Kimberley are comparable to the highest identified internationally. A diagnosis of FASD amplifies the chances of Indigenous youth being caught up in the justice system in Western Australia, including indefinite detention in prison if found unfit to stand trial. A fresh diversionary paradigm is required. Employing a postcolonial perspective, we explore issues surrounding law and justice intervention – and non-intervention – in the lives of Indigenous children and their families. The FASD problem cannot be uncoupled from the history of colonial settlement and the multiple traumas resulting from dispossession, nor can solving the problem be isolated from the broader task of decolonizing relationships between Indigenous people and the settler mainstream. The decolonizing process involves expanding the role of Indigenous owned and place-based processes and services embedded in Indigenous knowledge.


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Numbers as a settler colonial story: Pekka Pitkänen, A Commentary on Numbers Narrative, Ritual, and Colonialism, Routledge, 2017

30May17

Description: This book provides a new reading of the biblical book of Numbers in a commentary form. Mainstream readings have tended to see the book as a haphazard junkyard of material that connects Genesis–Leviticus with Deuteronomy (and Joshua), composed at a late stage in the history of ancient Israel. By contrast, this book reads Numbers as part of a wider work of Genesis–Joshua, a carefully crafted programmatic settler colonial document for a new society in Canaanite highlands in the late second millennium BCE that seeks to replace pre-existing indigenous societies. In the context of the tremendous influence that the biblical documents have had on the world in the last 2,000–3,000 years, the book also offers pointers towards reading these texts today. This volume is a fascinating study of this text, and will be of interest not only to biblical scholars, but to anyone with an interest in the history of the ancient Levant, and colonisation and colonialism in the ancient world more broadly.


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Lorenzo Veracini in Conversation with Magid Shihade: ‘The Settler Colonial Present’, Monday, June 5th, 5:00 – 7:00 (hosted by the Centre for Palestine Studies and the London Middle East Institute)

27May17

Location: SWLT (Senate House, Paul Webley Wing), SOAS, University of London


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Indigenous law is law: Stephen Muecke, ‘Earthbound Law: The Force of an Indigenous Australian Institution’, Law and Critique, 2017

27May17

Abstract: Australian Native Title law is critiqued in three moves: 1. Analysing the kinds of knowledge used in Australian Native Title law to make cases for Indigenous land tenure; 2. Analysing how a Nyikina elder narrates a legal matter of concern from his point of view; 3. Speculating about how an Indigenous ‘legal’ institution called the bugarrigarra was mobilised to resist extraction colonialism. These are all experimental moves in that they are partially composed around matters of concern, rather than displaying matters of fact. They are experiments that stage a learning process as they describe (that is, write about in order to add reality to) a number of different events.


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A settler colonial story, the settler colonial story: Dustin Michael Naegle, ‘Go Up (Again) to Jerusalem in Judah’: The Settler Colonial Mythology of ‘Return’ and ‘Restoration’ in Ezra 1-6, MA Dissertation, Brite Divinity School, 2017

27May17

Excerpt: Within Ezra 1–6 (E1-6) resides a story, a narrative of related events, ostensibly in historical sequence. While this may sound simple enough—so much so that many have assumed that the story/narrative in E1-6 is synonymous with the actual events of the past—postmodern scholarship has argued convincingly that narratives are far from simple. Rather than an objective account, the narrative in E1-6 reflects what Foucault described as “discourse,” a particular set of ideas, beliefs, practices, and biases—an ideology—that conditions how an author constructs the subjects and the world of the narrative. E1-6 is a story driven by a view of the world whose purpose is to draw the reader/hearer into this particular ideology. E1-6 is one particular representation of certain events told in hopes of persuading people that this “history” is real history, and that it is theirs. There is, in other words, a mythic quality to this historicizing discourse. 

This current study is an attempt to explain part of the discourse embedded in E1-6 by utilizing the theoretical framework found in settler colonial studies, a relatively new field that attempts to understand and explain how settler societies function differently than, but also within the context of a larger colonial enterprise.


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Recognition is not sovereignty: Michael Gordon, ‘Indigenous summit rejects ‘minimalist’ recognition, pushes for treaty and voice in constitution’ Sydney Morning Herald, 26/05/17

27May17

Excerpt: In a stunning repudiation [of current proposals], the convention rejected acknowledging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the constitution, instead backing the Indigenous voice. It also called for a road map to a treaty.

It has called for a “Makarrata Commission” to supervise agreements between Indigenous groups and government and a period of truth-telling about the treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.


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Indians in the family makes indigenising settlers: Dawn Peterson, Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion, Harvard University Press, 2017

26May17

Description: During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America. Indians in the Family shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building.

As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United States’ “national family.” White households who adopted Indians—especially slaveholding Southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jackson—saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges U.S. attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and racial hierarchy.

U.S. whites were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of U.S. governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.


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