Description: Since Justin Trudeau’s election in 2015, Canada has been hailed internationally as embarking on a truly progressive, post-postcolonial era—including an improved relationship between the state and its Indigenous peoples. Shiri Pasternak corrects this misconception, showing that colonialism is very much alive in Canada. From the perspective of Indigenous law and jurisdiction, she tells the story of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, in western Quebec, and their tireless resistance to federal land claims policy.

Grounded Authority chronicles the band’s ongoing attempts to restore full governance over its lands and natural resources through an agreement signed by settler governments almost three decades ago—an agreement the state refuses to fully implement. Pasternak argues that the state’s aversion to recognizing Algonquin jurisdiction stems from its goal of perfecting its sovereignty by replacing the inherent jurisdiction of Indigenous peoples with its own, delegated authority. From police brutality and fabricated sexual abuse cases to an intervention into and overthrow of a customary government, Pasternak provides a compelling, richly detailed account of rarely documented coercive mechanisms employed to force Indigenous communities into compliance with federal policy.

A rigorous account of the incredible struggle fought by the Algonquins to maintain responsibility over their territory, Grounded Authority provides a powerful alternative model to one nation’s land claims policy and a vital contribution to current debates in the study of colonialism and Indigenous peoples in North America and globally.

Rationale: The lands on which Australian urban centres continue to be built are located on the unceded territories of distinct, sovereign Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who continue to exert and practice their laws, cultures, rights and interests. Beyond such broad recognition statements as this, there has been remarkably little effort made to figure out what this means and how this acknowledgement fundamentally unsettles the categories and knowledges by which we claim to understand the Australian city.   Decolonising Settler Cities seeks to create a space to talk about issues that are difficult to define, but are also essential for justice and our collective futures. While it is clear that urban areas in settler colonial countries have always been Indigenous, the implications of this understanding for the future of our cities is unclear. We invite scholars and practitioners to share their questions and critiques, experience and knowledge of decolonising possibilities and obstacles in urban locations. Our hope is to find ways to think through and beyond ‘whitestream’ categories of knowing, thinking and imagining the Australian city, and appropriately centre Indigenous experiences, theories, knowledges and perspectives.    We are particularly interested in perspectives that draw on contemporary Indigenous experiences and knowledge to unsettle the categories that underlie urban governance and often make Indigenous peoples’ aspirations impossible to achieve.  These categories include but are not limited to property, health, development, education, work and family.  The corollary of this negative set of experiences is the way that Indigenous Australians find ways to claim rights, practice culture, enact laws and act in their interests in urban locations.  These are the practices of Indigenous urban citizenship.    We invite participants to contact us with a short statement explaining their interest in participating. For those participants wanting to make a presentation, please indicate the topic area and the type of medium (whether a paper, film, performance, reading, or another format).  We welcome approaches from people with a variety of backgrounds, experiences and expertise.  Decolonising Settler Cities will have a limited number of speakers and will seek a diverse set of presenters with a large Indigenous presence.

Principles: Our guiding principle for the symposium is to practice ways that support a decolonising politics by: 1. Finding ways to appropriately centre Indigenous experiences, theories, knowledges and perspectives on the Australian city; 2. Creating spaces for conversation and mutual learning that are respectful, honouring, critically aware and diverse; 3. Working to de‐centre colonialist whitestream categories of knowing, thinking and imagining the city; 4. Identifying how mutual learning and delicate, respectful, collaborative imaginings between different streams of understanding in cities (including Indigenous and whitestream) can be cultivated and encouraged; and   5. Co‐designing respectful methods for producing knowledge, teaching and learning about urban Australia. 6. Developing a set of practical outcomes and actions that participants in the symposium will take forward both individually and as a group.

Timeline: Submissions due (300 words): 1 June 2017.    Notification of acceptance: 15 June 2017 Materials (whether film, paper, photographs, art work or something else) due –17 July 2017 The materials will be circulated before the symposium. We will discuss publication of papers and other materials at the symposium.

Contacts: Please email your submissions to either Tod Jones at Curtin University (T.Jones@curtin.edu.au) or Libby Porter at RMIT (libby.porter@rmit.edu.au).

Abstract: This paper is an attempt to explicate a peculiar logic of government Israeli state apparatuses use to control the Palestinian population and colonize the West Bank; namely, the one of slowness, delay and waiting. To understand the operational logic of such governing, I suggest the conditions of recognizing Palestinian rights, their theatric performance by the Israeli state apparatuses, and the maintaining of precarity among Palestinians are the critical aspects to expand. By looking at the West Bank sites close to expanding Israeli settlements, I show how this mode of governing operates by recognizing the Palestinian right to claim justice, security and governance without actualization of these rights, therefore directing Palestinian resistance and sense of injustice to support the theatric functions of settler colonial state. Hence, theaters of recognition are created, the ones that ceremoniously keep administrative, legal and security processes functional, but through the slow processing, stalling and endless piling up of decisions, regulations, requirements and security exceptions do not alleviate the induced precarities.

Abstract: This dissertation develops a theory of sociological denial through an investigation of contested social problems. I begin by reviewing the literature on denial, both sociological and psychological, in order to situate the project and exemplify the relevance and need for a sociological theory of denial. Then, through examining three scales of the social, I account for multiple layers of the social structure and denial’s place in each. These scales are the sites at which denial happens: geographic, cognitive, and unconscious. I explore five contested social problems through varied paradigms that allow me to analyze each scale of the structural. I thus look at settler colonialism, Israeli apartheid, mass incarceration, industrialized animal slaughter, and environmental destruction, each through a sociospatial, sociomental, and psychosocial paradigm. I then turn to five organizations that seek to address these contested social problems. I explore their mission statements and campaigns to analyze how they are already engaging with sociological denial and how they could do more. The conclusion offers suggestions for how structural denial can be confronted, emphasizing the need for sociologists and social movement actors to give more weight to the psychosocial, alongside the already prevalent sociospatial and sociomental perspectives.

Abstract: This paper examines the ways Native women domestic workers negotiated and challenged – in subtle and overt ways – the Bay Area Outing Program. First, I examine federal Indian policy that paved the way for “outing” and illuminate the connections between outing, Allotment and Indian boarding schools. To this end, I historicize both the national and local forms of outing while revealing the gendered, settler colonial effects of this imposing domestic institution. To provide a point of comparison, I consider other forms of domestic service performed at the time, including those found in Americanization programs of the early twentieth century. Second, I elucidate the contours of the Bay Area Outing Program, describing its official operation and process while highlighting the policing and surveillance of Native women in the program. I then analyze Native women’s resistance in fighting for commensurate wages and fighting Indian child removal. My final section, informed by early 20th– century Bay Area newspapers, examines a series of articles on outing runaways. Here I consider runaways in early iterations of the program, while examining how localized rhetoric sought to justify the control of Native women. I thus examine how local social discourse shapes material conditions for Native women.

Abstract: What is a “settler-colonial city” and how does it differ from other forms of imperial urban spatial organization? This article seeks to answer these questions by attempting to urbanize recent insights in settler-colonial theory. It begins by considering well-established theorizations of the “colonial city”—particularly those developed by geographers and urbanists in the 1970s and 1980s—in order to assess their suitability for analyses of contemporary settler-colonial milieu. Building on this discussion, the paper asks if and how the insights of settler-colonial theory offer new opportunities to renovate earlier theorizations in ways that are more explicitly relevant to making sense of the urban process in North America and other societies where colonists have “come to stay” and no formal process of decolonization has unfolded.

Abstract: This article foregrounds story as a rhetorical mode of Indigenous leadership to argue for the value of local scholars working in place. Utilizing recent scholarship in Native rhetorics, educational leadership, decolonial theory, I offer my own experience as a Cherokee citizen and Indigenous researcher to illustrate the value of local cultural knowledge to the field and the academy. I suggest the reconsideration of cosmopolitan values and institutional practices that alienate Indigenous scholars from their communities.

Abstract: Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s artistic and philosophical manifesto of Brazilian cannibalism best enables readers to grasp Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s trilogy MaddAddam, in terms of its treatment of settler and Indigenous relationality in its satirical posthuman world. MaddAddam is a work of speculative fiction that satirically predicts possible outcomes of early 21st century neoliberalism. A survival tale, the trilogy articulates its angle of vision through motifs of literal and figurative cannibalism, highlighting settler and Indigenous relationality in the Americas. While situated in Canadian literary traditions, the work engages Brazilian anthropophagic (cannibalist) strategies to craft an ending that is ambivalent about settler futures.

Abstract: In North America, and globally, the topics of immigration and immigration policy have become among the most divisive fault lines of political struggle and debate. In this paper, we reflect upon the State of Arizona’s embrace of the “Attrition Through Enforcement” (ATE) doctrine as exemplary of contemporary U.S. anti-immigrant policies that target the social reproduction of non-citizens. Reflecting on ATE and movements against it, we argue for the inadequacy of scholarly and activist approaches that would normatively deploy frameworks of “citizenship” or demands for “no borders” to articulate the stakes and composition of contemporary immigration struggles. Borrowing from political scientist Joel Olson and his concept of “democratic Manichaeism,” we argue instead the imperative to radically confront and unsettle the normative divisions between citizen and non-citizen that anti-immigrant actors and policies would police. Through two case studies in Tucson, Arizona, we examine the possibilities and challenges related to mobilizing such a Manichaean framework through the quotidian spaces of everyday life. We conclude by proposing “community composition” as both a political agenda and a methodological framework through which to attend to everyday geographies of belonging and exclusion while confronting the normative political categories that structure the nation-state and justify its violence.

Abstract: On the Klamath River in northern California, Karuk tribal fishermen traditionally provide salmon for food and ceremonies, yet the region has sustained serious environmental degradation in recent years. What happens to Karuk masculinity when there are no fish? Using interviews and public testimony, the authors examine how declining salmon runs affect the gender identities and practices of Karuk fishermen. Gendered practices associated with fishing serve ecological functions, perpetuate culture in the face of structural genocide, and unite families and communities. The authors find that the absence of fish resulting from ecological damage affects both food availability and the quality of social connections, which in turn affects individual gender practices and symbolizes genocide to the community. Karuk men’s individual struggles to construct themselves as men are thus interwoven with struggles against racism and ongoing colonialism. The authors coin the term colonial ecological violence to describe these circumstances. They also describe how some men restructure masculine identities by transferring “traditional” cultural responsibilities to fish, community, and “collective continuance” to new settings as activists and fishery scientists. The authors call for a decolonized sociology that uses more theorizing of the particular and very real ways ecological relationships structure gender in traditional Native communities to understand the operation of gendered and racialized colonial violence in the form of environmental degradation, today.