Abstract: Over the past several decades, anthropologists and historians have recognized the diversity and fluidity of the cultural interactions in the Great Lakes region during colonization and settlement. These studies have focused either on the social processes of Indigenization, assimilation, or acculturation on the part of Indigenous communities, or the incorporation of Indigenous political alliances into European colonization. However, little scholarly attention has been given to a critical examination of the social, economic, and political processes which led settler communities such as Anabaptists to appropriate, re-appropriate, or generate new meanings of the Indigenous places they settled. The Amish community of LaGrange and Elkhart counties, Indiana, provides an excellent case study for examining the human agency involved in varying epistemologies and ideologies producing and reproducing diversity within the Great Lakes region during settlement.

Using a framework which draws from landscape, social memory, and diasporic studies, this dissertation examines the formation of the Anabaptist community located in northern Indiana. By exploring the competing histories found in the relevant archives and the built landscape, I consider the discursive processes of place-making which shaped this Anabaptist community. Since they shared pacifist ideologies and a collective memory involving displacement and oppression, how did Anabaptists understand and interact with the people and places where they settled? How did Anabaptists incorporate the changes they encountered into previous understandings of how the world should be? How do competing histories provide a fuller understanding of the formation of Anabaptist communities? How did the Anabaptist placemaking practices contribute to transforming the environment from an Indigenous landscape to a landscape dominated by European technology and agriculture?

Abstract: This article examines Alaska Native citizenship, civil rights, land, and sovereignty in territorial Alaska from the Indian Reorganization Act to Termination. I argue that during this key shift in Indian policy, territorial and federal officials, lawmakers, and corporate interests wielded the rhetoric of citizenship, equal rights, and “reverse discrimination” as tools of dispossession against Alaska Native land and sovereignty rights. I show how Alaska Natives challenged non-native assumptions that equal U.S. citizenship and native rights to land, sovereignty, and economic self-determination were mutually exclusive. Instead, Alaska Natives advanced a vision of citizenship in which their rights as native people and ownership of the land guaranteed their rights as citizens to participate fully in the social, political, and economic life of the territory and the nation.

Excerpt: How are Indigenous and settler relationships structured, and how is conflict addressed? In settler-colonial societies, complex patterns exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities who share the same territory, but whose relationships have been characterized by harm and violence. This violence is not just a matter of history,¹ but exists for as long as the Indigenous and settler communities are in conflict – potentially hundreds of years. Moreover, the harm is not solely acute, for example in the form of physical acts of violence; it also takes the form of less visible but nonetheless highly structured and systemic violence. These forms of violence might include discrimination, socioeconomic inequality, poorer health outcomes and denial of meaningful self-determination.

Abstract: By exploring the themes of settler colonialism and modernity in Australian commentary about Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, this paper sets out to consider Italy’s war in north Africa as an international crisis with significance for Australian progressive narratives about Aboriginal conditions, status and rights important to Australia’s international reputation. Thus, Australia’s role as a member of the League and a mandatory power will be read in the context of international debate about Italy, modernity, race and violence.

My case study draws from the experiences of Bessie Rischbieth, alternate delegate for Australia to the League of Nations in 1935, who observed the Abyssinian protest being made before the Assembly. Rischbieth was seemingly persuaded by Italy’s claims to the right to land and territory in the context of immigration restrictions into the United States (and we might add, in relation to Australia) and was provided evidence of slavery in Abyssinia mobilised by Italy and earlier by the Anti-Slavery Society in London in defence of the civilising influence of Europe upon a fellow (non-European) member of the League. However, Rischbieth was also an activist within liberal humanitarian networks critical of Aboriginal policy in Australia in this same era. Her responses to the crisis in African and League affairs offer some insight into the proximities between settler colonialism in Australia and the ‘race’ issues raised by the annexation of Abyssinia by Italy, and its implications for collective security and global governance.

Abstract: This research examines two contemporary Alaskan works of literature: Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child and Don Rearden’s The Raven’s Gift. I have engaged with (post) colonial theoretical frameworks to describe the settler colonial dynamics at work in each text. By comparing these two works I find that each narrative seeks autochthonous belonging for settler colonial protagonists, which is predicated upon the elimination of indigeneity from the land. I focus on the divergent rhetorical methods of indigenous erasure in each text, and the interaction between race and gender in settler colonial identity construction. Examining the relationship between race and gender highlights the underappreciated significance of the complicity of white women in the settler colonial process and demonstrates the crucial role that indigenous women play as gatekeepers to settler colonial belonging. Within the narratives, I find examples of the formation of private property under settler colonial thought, which paved the way for the dismissal of indigenous land claims. I also look at the way that each text employs the metaphorical language of ghostliness and the supernatural to weaken indigenous presence and bring indigeneity to the precipice of extinction. Both narratives ultimately avoid active dispossession in the settler colonial quest for land by creating and landscape in which indigeneity is already gone.

Abstract:  Field nurses, primarily white women, encountered diverse cultures when they arrived on reservations in the American West between 1924 and 1955. Diseases were rampant, and many Native Americans had little knowledge of so-called modern medicine, frequently relying upon a combination of natural and spiritual remedies associated with various Indigenous traditions. White field nurses witnessed firsthand the devastating impact numerous illnesses had on Native Americans, and there is no doubt that the majority of the women in this study genuinely sought to relieve suffering associated with illnesses. Still, most field nurses intended to replace Indigenous curing with what they regarded as the superiority of white scientific medicine, thus assimilating Native Americans, a prominent feature of the broader settler colonial project.

Enriching Native American health went hand in hand with biomedical assimilation. While field nurses worked to meet the need for better healthcare, they concluded that Indigenous models were inferior to Western medicine. At the same time, many Native Americans valued traditional healing, and were slow to adopt scientific medicine. Divergent cultural perspectives toward healthcare created tension between the two groups, fostering negotiations and resistance on both sides. White nurses in this study sometimes attempted to restrain Indigenous curing while Native Americans equally drew lines designed to restrict the invasion of white medicine. Still, until the early 1940s, field nurses were more likely to employ persuasion and public health teaching to meet their objectives. World War II fostered a sense of national unity, and after the United States entered the conflict, white nurses, physicians, and even tribal councils grew increasingly likely to employ coercion and force to attain compliance with biomedicine. During the early 1950s, medical services declined, and field nurses played a less active role in managing healthcare. Simultaneously, an uneven mixture of rising Native American authority over bodily care coexisted with repressive measures aimed at containment of contagious diseases.

Description: This book unveils an ignored aspect of the Brazilian history: how the colonization of the country shaped the sexuality of its indigenous population. Based on textual research, the authors show how the government and religious institutions gradually imposed the family model considered as “normal” to Brazilian indigenous gays through forced labor, punishment, marriages with non-indigenous and other methods.  

However, such disciplinary practices didn’t prevent the resistance of the natives whose sexuality operates out of the hegemonic model, and the book also analyzes the impact of these forms of dissent on the development of indigenous movements, interethnic relations and indigenous policies in Brazil.

Building upon Post-Colonial and Queer theories, the authors present a historical overview of the ideas and practices employed by the religious and governmental authorities to repress homosexuality among indigenous peoples since the beginning of the colonization process, on the 16th century. They also show how this process of colonization of indigenous sexualities goes beyond the formal colonization period, which ended with the Brazilian Independence in 1822, and is part of a wider process of compulsory heterosexualization and heteronormativity of native peoples, based on scientific, theological, social and cultural assumptions that inspired religious, civilizing, academic and political practices throughout Brazilian history.

Description: The American and Latin American independence movements emerged from distinctive settings and produced divergent results, but they were animated by similar ideas. Patriotic political theorists throughout the Americas offered analogous critiques of imperial rule, designed comparable constitutions, and expressed common ambitions for their new nations’ future relations with one another and the rest of the world. This book adopts a hemispheric perspective on the revolutions that liberated the United States and Spanish America, offering a new interpretation of their most important political ideas. Simon argues that the many points of agreement among various revolutionary political theorists across the Americas can be attributed to the problems they encountered in common as Creoles – that is, as the descendants of European settlers born in the Americas. He illustrates this by comparing the political thought of three Creole revolutionaries: Alexander Hamilton of the United States, Simón Bolívar of Venezuela, and Lucas Alamán of Mexico.

Abstract: Through a discourse analysis of newspaper reports on the deaths of Indigenous women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver during the 1960s, this article provides a historical framework to expand our understanding of pervasive violence experienced by Indigenous women in the community. This analysis reveals that in attempting to raise the profile of the deaths of Indigenous women in the neighbourhood, journalists constructed a new trope – the “Skid Road Girl” – that re-inscribed old stereotypes and framed the city as non-Indigenous space. While reporters advocated for social reform, and provided a discursive context in which Indigenous activists could make their voices heard and gain support for their community and social service initiatives, their words reinforced damaging racist and sexist ideas and contributed to the normalization of violence against Indigenous women.

Abstract: The goal of my research was to contribute to the decolonization of education by demonstrating how the practice of Indigenous storywork, according to Principles of Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit by JoAnn Archibald, Q’um Q’um Xiiem (2008), can be used as a pedagogical tool. For this study, I have focused on the Mi’kmaw People of Atlantic Canada and their traditional Mi’kmaw territory known as Mi’kma’ki. The Indigenous storywork approach opens the door for non-Indigenous people to become allies with Indigenous Peoples by “restorying,” or retelling from an Indigenous perspective, the historical narratives that have dominated the official view of the region’s history. This technique introduces decolonizing space to make room for the inclusion of the history and narrative of the L’nu or Mi’kmaw People (Regan, 2010). For this research, general historical Mi’kmaw and settlers (non-Indigenous people who settled Mi’kmaw territory) versions of a specific Eurocentric oral narrative known as “The Island with The Bloody Hand” have been collaboratively shared and analyzed. Through this Indigenous storywork, a truer, more balanced, and just story has emerged. My investigation has demonstrated how specific components of Eurocentric traditions, as well as stereotypical perceptions of Indigenous Peoples, are heavily tied to the roots of colonization in Canada (Regan, 2010). My work included an examination of the myths and stereotypes common in the 18th century, as perpetuated by Europeans, who portrayed the Mi’kmaq as savage warriors in need of civilizing by benevolent settlers (Paul, 2008). As with Battiste (2013, p. 92), my ultimate objective was to provide a basis for “educational reform that synergistically combines Mi’kmaw and Eurocentric epistemologies, ontology, methodology, and axiology.