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It’s not a binary: Jason Scott Cooke, Indian Fields: Historicizing Native Space and Sovereignty in the Era of Removal, PhD Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2017.

23Aug17

Abstract: Familiar to most anyone with knowledge of U.S. history, antebellum Indian removal likely evokes a drama comprised of two roles: on one hand, Indian peoples as represented by elite Cherokee activists, and, on the other, their political antagonists in the nascent states’ rights movement, among whom the infamous Andrew Jackson stands both as agent and symbol. What may be surprising, however, is that Americanist scholarship on Native removal similarly reduces it to an overarching Indian-Anglo binary. As against a two-worlds model that frames removal writ large in terms of a single political dualism, I argue that regionally specific forms of Native dispossession around the time of the Indian Removal Act (1830) yield different narrative assemblages of Indian identity. Further, these assemblages correspond with differences in the historical conditions of settler colonialism in different parts of the country, conditions irreducible to a single narrative premised on the territorial claims of the United States. Combining work in the field of Native studies by scholars such as Gerald Vizenor and Jodi Byrd with poststructuralist insights into the relationship between narrativity and historicism, this dissertation develops a geographic paradigm that emphasizes the ways in which both Native and settler actors use linear narratives of history to fashion claims to territory. Each chapter situates the work of an Indigenous activist of the period (the Cherokee spokesperson Elias Boudinot, the Pequot minister William Apess, and the Sauk warrior Black Hawk) in relation to non-Native political and literary texts that lay claim, whether implicitly or explicitly, to lands otherwise held by these activists’ respective nations. Accordingly, the project argues for a change in the conceptualization of Indian identity. Rather than a vexed yet essentially referential signifier for Native peoples, Indianness as a narrative construct marks the point at which uneven and at times competing territorial claims by different settler actors gives way to a portrait of the historical necessity of a given claim. What is more, this narrativity becomes available to Native peoples themselves as these regional struggles unfold. Insofar as it renders a linear historicity in the service of land claims, narrating Indianness gives Native activists a means to represent place-based Indigenous sovereignty to audiences not inclined to make sense of this concept.


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On the settler religious experience (when the ‘displaced body of the settler becomes the central placeholder of religious experience’): Erin D. Yerby, Spectral Bodies of Evidence: The Body as Medium in American Spiritualism, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2017

23Aug17

Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnography of the body as medium in the North American Spiritualist tradition. With its origins in the “burned-over district” of upstate New York, Spiritualism is a homegrown religious movement rooted in the radical Protestant milieu of “Great Awakenings,” which evolved into an international religious movement with a distinctly secular bent. Spiritualists, unlike Pentecostals and Evangelicals, de-emphasize faith or belief and understand the spirits as present to the “natural” senses and thus demonstrable as “evidences, ” complicating the dialectics of faith and skepticism. Situated within North American “metaphysical” traditions, 19th century and contemporary Spiritualism foregrounds the centrality of mediumship and thus the spirit medium’s sensorium, through its practices of spirit communication. The medium is a figure of mediation, one who communicates the spectral presence of the dead—or as the Spiritualists’ say, “There are no dead!”—to the living. This dissertation looks at how this emphasis on spiritual evidences draws out modern antinomies between secular and religious experience, and the certainty and doubt engendered by the medium’s attention to ephemeral affects, sensations and images that define spirit presence. As such, it takes as its point of departure the Spiritualist medium’s discernment of the spirit world as a practice of making the body a media, or instrument, for the visual, auditory, and haptic sensation of the spirits of the dead. Based upon over three years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this anthropological study was conducted in Spiritualist Churches, home circles, training courses, and in mediumship centers in New York City, upstate New York, New Jersey and London, including many summers spent in the long-standing Spiritualist camp of Lily Dale, in northwestern New York State. As this dissertation proposes, a focus on bodily mediation allows us to think the body not only as a specific kind of media in the common technological sense, but as a sensory instrument for mediation in the originary ontological sense, as religious mediation across thresholds—between people and spirits, the living and the dead, God and creation, human and nonhuman forces. This work argues that Spiritualism places secular and religious notions of experience within an immanent frame, making visible the problem of a body affected—in this case, by “clouds” of spirits—and, more fundamentally, the problem of the body’s doubleness: as if always already shadowed by its own spectrality. Mediumship, it argues, addresses itself to a kind of evidence, where what is sought is a kind of experience: an experience in which the spirits become discernible, and are figured into a verifiable state to become evidence for others. By making the body the central instrument for mediating invisible forces of spirit, history, and affect, North American Spiritualism—it proposes—opens onto a set of problems connecting image, settlement and experience, laced together as a problem of the body. If mediumship concerns the fact of sensation, the fact of being-affected, affects are the foreground, not the background, against which everything else takes place: to speak of the experience of mediumship is to speak of attunements to overlooked images and affects and the way these are concretized into more enduring spirit figures. It is to this cloudy realm of fugitive images and affections that this work tries to attend. Specifically, and in light of Spiritualisms’ focus upon spiritual experience as the unmediated ground of divine apprehension, this dissertation situates Spiritualism within a broader stream of Protestant iconoclasm, albeit at the margins, as a syncretic “metaphysical” movement of diverse spiritual and occult influences. This work suggests affinities between the Spiritualist medium’s mediation of spirit images, and a Puritan iconoclasm at the foundation of North American settler spirituality—where the displaced body of the settler becomes the central placeholder of religious experience and sacred image, the body itself figured as the sacred image or icon of God. Drawing upon these inheritances, Spiritualism is here situated within a spiritual geography of settlement. In particular, this concerns a geography connecting 19th century and present-day practices of spirit communication with spectral “Indians” and North American settlement’s iconoclastic foundations: a history of violence haunted by spectralized others. This dissertation would be of interest to readers of religious/mystical experience, philosophy of religion, media theory, affect theory, settler colonialism, Native American studies, gender studies, and ethnographic writing.


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Environmental education must include an understanding of settler colonialism: Lisa Korteweg, Emily Root, ‘Witnessing Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug’s Strength and Struggle: The Affective Education of Reconciliation in Environmental Education’, Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 21, 2016

21Aug17

Abstract: Escalating environmental controversies are placing Indigenous peoples and First Nation communities at the front lines of protests, opposing unjust government policies and corporate actions. Yet, many environmental educators are not actively engaged or affectively learning about Indigenous Land struggles against Canada’s colonial oppressions. Environmental education has a strong record of research to promote ecological, place-conscious pedagogies that build socio-emotional connections to nature, but it can also perpetuate settler colonialism by avoiding or ignoring Indigenous (Land) title. This article calls on settler environmental educators to shift towards decolonizing and Land-based reconciliation, by bearing witness as support to Indigenous struggles for jurisdiction and protection of Land. We focus on our own settler affective processing towards decolonizing as we witnessed the strength of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation, whose Chief and Council were jailed for protecting their territory from mining in Ontario’s Far North.


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‘Localism’ is settler colonialism: Leanne Day, Empire’s Imagination: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in ‘Local’ Hawaiʻi Narratives, PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 2017

19Aug17

Abstract: My dissertation, “Empire’s Imagination: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in ʻLocal’ Hawaiʻi Narratives,” addresses the history of U.S. empire in Hawaiʻi, arguing that empire persists into the present through the structuring of contemporary literary representations of Asian migrants and Kanaka Maoli, the Indigenous population. This project intervenes into postcolonial studies, American studies, and ethnic studies as I rely on the optic of U.S. empire to reveal the concurrent processes of Asian and Indigenous racialization historically and in cultural memory. Through a comparative approach to Asian American studies and Indigenous studies, I demonstrate how Hawaiʻi operates as an opportunity to reckon with the determinative force of U.S. empire in the imaginative realm of aesthetic production. Contrary to the belief that contemporary literature’s imaginative force can transcend or repair the violence of U.S. empire restoring voice to those whom empire violated, I theorize the desire for literary representation as a legacy of empire. Furthermore, I argue for a more contradictory understanding of contemporary literature, one in which the history of U.S. empire remains coercive and determinative. By examining narratives about and by Hawaiʻi based writers, commonly referred to as “local” writing, I argue that “local” writing often functions as a “resolution” to the past. While it makes visible the history of empire through the stories it tells, “local” writing often positions itself as evidence of contemporary Hawaiʻi as a multicultural paradise of universal belonging. Yet, I demonstrate how “local” writing can only “resolve” the violence of empire by perpetuating the erasure of Kanaka Maoli colonization in the present. I argue the genre of “local” writing both critiques and perpetuates the violence of Indigenous dispossession and liberal racial formation. This leads me to also argue for the limitations of literary narrative to reconcile or resist the violences of U.S. empire. Thus, “local” writing produces Asian migrants as “local” subjects, substitutes for Kanaka Maoli, in order to maintain U.S. settler colonial hegemony. My dissertation examines specific flashpoints of U.S. empire in Hawaiʻi in the 19th and 20th century with post-2000 literary and cultural production that reimagines these moments. Together, these cultural texts demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of “local” fiction to reckon with the history of colonization and its legacies in the colonial present. Thus, in order to resist the paradigm of U.S. empire and to reimagine alternatives to colonized spaces, I propose the possibility of a material politics that accounts for how imperial epistemologies constitute the realm of the historical and literary imaginaries. In refusing to collapse Kanaka Maoli and Asian settler into a false political and racial equivalence, I instead argue for the necessity of reorienting the figure of the “local” Asian settler reveals the continuation of U.S. nationalist and imperialist knowledge production in the present. This relationality between history and narrative conveys how imaginative practices undergo continual colonization. This situates my project at the juncture of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and ethnic studies where my theoretical interventions identify how Hawaiʻi’s history and literary production reveals the limits of current Asian American and postcolonial studies. Thus, my project calls for alternative strategies of decolonization where the aesthetic imagination becomes a material site of decolonizing politics. As such, I theorize how this form of decolonial and anti-imperial politics needs to account for how the imaginative realm is structured by the history of U.S. empire.


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Integration via segregation: Alain Beaulieuin, ‘”Gradually Reclaiming Them from a State of Barbarism”: Emergence of and Ambivalence in the Aboriginal Civilization Project in Canada (1815–1857)’, in Damien Tricoire (ed.), Enlightened colonialism: Civilization narratives and imperial politics in the Age of Reason, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 159-177

19Aug17

Abstract: During the first half-century of Britain’s presence in Canada, the Aboriginal policy was largely shaped by strategic and military matters. This policy, however, changed rapidly and radically in the early nineteenth century. The new official objective of Britain’s policy quickly became civilizing the Aboriginal peoples. Focusing particularly on the period during which the Aboriginal civilization program emerged, this article situates the economic, political and military factors that initiated the change and influenced its specific form. It also examines the ambiguities within the civilization project. Although its three main elements – sedentarism, education, and Christianization – were initially intended to fully integrate the Aboriginal peoples into the colonial world, the new program, as it was implemented in the nineteenth century, instead upheld segregation.


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Assimilation via integration: Lía Quarleri, ‘New forms of colonialism on the frontiers of Hispanic America: Assimilationist projects and economic disputes (Río de la Plata, late eighteenth century)’, in Damien Tricoire (ed.), Enlightened colonialism: Civilization narratives and imperial politics in the Age of Reason, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 93-110

19Aug17

Abstract: By the end of the eighteenth century, intense transformations had taken place in the Americas in relation to both local processes and to more general circumstances that affected the population, economy, and politics. Accordingly, the Spanish Crown expressed a vigorous interest in its American colonies through economic goals formulated in the framework of a general plan regarding fiscal, administrative, and geopolitical reforms. In the Río de la Plata area, in particular, a policy fostering the territorial annexation of strategic regions was implemented. These zones had remained, until that moment, peripheral and marginal areas because of their proximity to Lusitanian domains, to resistant indigenous populations, or to the lack of direct state intervention. Areas inhabited by Guarani Indians that had been under the administration of the Jesuits are a case in point. The colonial expansion in the territory of the missions was part of a bigger plan, which can be termed “frontier reformism.” This chapter aims, therefore, to analyze the specificities of the new assimilationist policy applied to former Jesuit missions in the Río de la Plata area. The period under study extends from the Jesuit expulsion in 1767 to the “exemption” of the communal obligations project implemented by Viceroy Avilés in 1801. Particularly, it focuses on the internal contradictions of the Bourbon policies regarding the well-being and happiness of the people, and the disputes over power and economic resources.


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Indigenous birth: Aaren Adams, Shannon Faulkhead, Rachel Stanfield, Petah Atkinson, ‘Challenging the colonisation of birth: Koori women’s birthing knowledge and practice’, Women and Birth, 2017

16Aug17

Abstract: The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination for social and cultural development. This fundamental right has been impeded worldwide through colonisation where many Indigenous peoples have had to adapt to ensure continuation of cultural knowledge and practice. In South East Australia colonisation was particularly brutal interrupting a 65,000 year-old oral culture and archives have increasing importance for cultural revival.

The aim of this research was to collate archival material on South East Australian Aboriginal women’s birthing knowledge and practice.

Archivist research methods were employed involving a search for artefacts and compiling materials from these into a new collection. This process involved understanding the context of the artefact creation. Collaborative yarning methods were used to reflect on materials and their meaning.

Artefacts found included materials written by non-Aboriginal men and women, materials written by Aboriginal women, oral histories, media reports and culturally significant sites. Material described practices that connected birth to country and the community of the women and their babies. Practices included active labour techniques, pain management, labour supports, songs for labour, ceremony and the role of Aboriginal midwives. Case studies of continuing cultural practice and revival were identified.

Inclusion of Aboriginal women’s birthing practices and knowledge is crucial for reconciliation and self-determination. Challenging the colonisation of birthing, through the inclusion of Aboriginal knowledge and practice is imperative, as health practices inclusive of cultural knowledge are known to be more effective.


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Decolonising the decolonisers: Craig Fortier, ‘Unsettling methodologies / decolonizing movements’, Journal of Indigenous Social Development, 6, 1, 2017, pp. 20-36

16Aug17

Abstract: As movements for social justice within settler colonial states like Canada and the United States begin to centralize Indigenous struggles for sovereignty as foundational to liberation, non-Indigenous movement participants are challenged to contend with what it means to decolonize within their respective movements. This article explores the potential to engage in decolonizing research methodologies among non-Indigenous anti-authoritarian activist groups. Based on an ethnographic and qualitative research with activists, this paper highlights three core themes emerging out of an attempt to assert a decolonizing methodological approach to research in non- Indigenous activist communities, including: identity and belonging, accountability and consent, and responsibility and appropriation.


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Milking settler Antartica: Elizabeth Leane, Hanne E. F. Nielsen, ‘American Cows in Antarctica: Richard Byrd’s polar dairy as symbolic settler colonialism’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 18, 2, 2017

16Aug17

Abstract: Few people are aware that dairy cows form part of Antarctic exploration history. Richard Byrd’s second expedition of 1933–35 took with it three Guernseys, ostensibly to provide milk for the men. We outline the cows’ Antarctica experience, discussing the way in which their celebrity benefited the expedition and its sponsors. Contextualizing the episode within the cultural history of milk in the US, we suggest some lenses through which the Guernseys can be read. These cows, we argue, enabled Byrd to enact a form of symbolic settler colonialism on the Antarctic continent.


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The juridical fantasy of assimilation: Shelby Johnson, ‘Histories Made Flesh: William Apess’s Juridical Theologies’, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, 2017

13Aug17

Excerpt: Between 1977 and 1979, the Wampanoag Mashpee of Massachusetts attempted to reclaim ancestral lands as a source of geographical unity, cultural heritage, and economic support. The Mashpee alleged that in violation of the Indian Nonintercourse Act (1790), “tribal land was taken from [the Mashpee tribe] between 1834 and 1870 without the required federal consent.” The jury, however, found that “what was a tribe in 1842 had voluntarily assimilated into the general society by 1869” and denied the Mashpee land claim in the initial trial (28 February 1977). The First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the original ruling (13 February 1979).


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