Excerpt: But how is it that conserving a particular food could be so closely entwined to collective self-determination? Is it not also the case that, philosophically, suggesting that certain foods define Indigenous collective self-determination freezes Indigenous peoples in time in ways that Indigenous leaders and scholars typically resist (Cornell & Kalt, 2000; Goeman & Denetdale, 2009; Lyons, 2010; Mihesuah, 2009)? I will argue that Indigenous peoples’ claims about the connections of particular foods to collective self-determination are much more complicated (Huambachano, 2015). The claims are more about how colonial domination, in contexts such as U.S. settler colonialism, is organized to undermine certain human institutions that are pivotal to Indigenous peoples’ capacities to exercise collective self-determination, food sovereignty being a significant part of that. Some food injustices against Indigenous peoples are best understood, I will show, as violations of Indigenous food sovereignty that colonial societies, such as the U.S., inflict on Indigenous peoples as strategies in the larger project of undermining Indigenous collective self-determination.

Thursday, March 09, 2017 to Friday, March 10, 2017

At a time of heightened awareness of the enduring challenges of race in America, this conference will highlight transnational insights on the historiography of race that have emerged from the study of settler colonialism. The similarities that connect the histories and displacements of indigenous populations from Hawaii and Australia to North America, South Africa and Brazil, are rarely connected to broader questions of race. Yet interdisciplinary study of indigenous peoples in the context of settler colonialism has given rise to important new scholarship on the operation of race as a conceptual category and as a structure of subordination.

Seminal insights in this area were developed by the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe (1949-2016), to whose memory the conference is dedicated. His work centered on indigenous histories in Australia and the United States to develop grounded insights into the present crises faced by African-Americans, Afro-Brazilians, and Palestinians. The conference will gather scholars from around the world to explore new approaches to race and indigeneity inspired by Wolfe’s recent research, which explored settler colonialism to offer a compelling new analysis of race. Drawing the distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism, Wolfe launched a rich field of inquiry, enabling researchers to develop new paradigms for the study of race that contribute to political theory, constitutional theory, historical understanding and new ethnographies and sociologies of indigeneity. His untimely passing has created a moment to bring these many strands of inquiry into conversation.

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Conference Program

DAY 1: Thursday, March 9

1 PM
Welcome and Opening Remarks: Asli Bali (UCLA)

1:15 PM
PANEL 1: Remembering Patrick Wolfe
Moderator/discussant: Lorenzo Veracini (Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia)
Pamela Grieman (UCLA)
Ghassan Hage (University of Melbourne)
Saree Makdisi (UCLA)
Aziz Rana (Cornell Law School)

2:45 PM
Break

3:00 PM
PANEL 2: Patrick Wolfe’s Elementary Structures of Race
Moderator: Asli Bali (UCLA)
Cheryl Harris (UCLA)
Jemima Pierre (UCLA)
Aziz Rana (Cornell Law School)
Shannon Speed (UCLA)

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DAY 2: Friday, March 10

9:30 AM
PANEL 3: Settler Colonialism in Comparative Perspective 1: Palestine and North America
Moderator: Cheryl Harris (UCLA)
Jessica Cattelino (UCLA)
Sherene Razack (UCLA)
Sherene Seikaly (UCSB)
Gershon Shafir (UCSD)

11:15 AM
Break

11:30 AM
Keynote: Lorenzo Veracini (Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia)

12:45 PM
Lunch Break

2:00 PM
PANEL 4: Settler Colonialism in Comparative Perspective 2: Australia, South Africa, Algeria, Ireland
Moderator: Susan Slyomovics (UCLA)
Sung Choi (Bentley University)
David Goldberg (UC Irvine)
Ghassan Hage (University of Melbourne)
Muriam Haleh Davis (UCSC)
David Lloyd (UC Riverside)

4:00 PM
Break

4:15 PM
ROUNTABLE: Bringing the Threads Into Conversation
Moderator: Saree Makdisi (UCLA)
Pamela Grieman (UCLA)
David Lloyd (UC Riverside)
Aziz Rana (Cornell Law School)
Shannon Speed (UCLA)
Lorenzo Veracini (Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia)

Johanna Romero
310-825-1181
cnes@international.ucla.edu

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of History

Abstract: This study addresses the relationship between intergenerational trauma of ongoing United States and Canadian colonialism as it impacts Native American and Aboriginal First Nations Peoples and ways global football contributes practices of intergenerational healing. I argue that Indigenous soccer operates as a mechanism of decolonization and re-membering for Indigenous Peoples who inherit colonial traumas. Indigenous soccer directly challenges hegemonic sports culture as typically marked by Indian mascotry and Native invisibility. While cultural historians have shown how American sports are used as colonial technologies of assimilation, violent gendering, labor and militarism, the story of Indigenous soccer has not been studied. As a Lummi footballer, I utilize Native voices from Coast Salish Tribes of Washington State and British Columbia, Mohawk and Cree First Nations Canada, Southwest tribes from New Mexico Pueblos  and Navajo Nation, and Kiowa Territories in Oklahoma to illustrate Indigenous soccer identities and schelangen, or way of life in Lummi. As soccer in North America challenges hegemonic ideologies of nationalism, instrumental Indigenous footballers are demanding visibility, like the late Canadian Hall of Fame First Nations Aboriginal footballer Snuneymuxw Harry Xulsimalt Manson and U.S. World Cup participant Kiowa Native Chris Bau Daigh Wondolowski. Using the theoretical framework of Tulalip scholar Stephanie Fryberg’s “theory of invisibility,” I tell and analyze Indigenous soccer stories as evidence that Indigenous visibility, in soccer or otherwise, provides intergenerational healing. I begin to fill the gap in the sports culture and U.S.-Canada colonialism discourse, with the goal of making Indigenous soccer locally accessible as an instrument of decolonial healing for generations of Indigenous North American Peoples.

Excerpt: Despite the fundamental problems faced by the United States government during the 1780s, the American greed for Native lands in Ohio after the conclusion of the American Revolution reflected settler colonialism, a term that refers to a history in which settlers drove Native inhabitants from the land to construct their own ethnic and religious communities. At the heart of settler colonialism is the ability for the colonizing power to gain vast tracts of land at the expense of the indigenous populations. In addition, racial hierarchy—the depiction of Native peoples as savage and inferior—inhered in settler colonialism. Settler societies include Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the United States, among others.

Abstract: This essay explores ways Native Pacific activists enact Indigenous futurities and broaden the conditions of possibility for unmaking settler colonial relations. When settler colonial relations are built on the enclosure of land as property that can then be alienated from Indigenous peoples, as well as demarcated to privilege certain racialized, classed, and gendered groups of settlers, then such unmaking requires different ways of relating to land. I highlight two instances of “blockades”—the Pacific Climate Warriors at Newcastle Harbor in Australia and the protectors on Mauna a Wākea in Hawai‘i. While colonial discourses frame such direct actions as obstructions on a march toward a narrowly imagined and singular “future,” I argue that this activism works to open space for multiple futures in which Indigenous epistemologies and practices renew intergenerational connections and in which the possessive, jurisdictional borders of private property can be reimagined as zones of compassionate engagement. This kind of futures-creation is not only in the interest of Indigenous people. Indigenous resistance against industrial projects that destroy or pollute our territories concerns the health of multiple communities of humans and nonhumans.

Abstract: This dissertation illustrates how settler colonialism is reproduced in present-day Canada through the governance of crime, and how political struggles against policing, imprisonment, and colonialism are linked. It focuses on the politics of crime in the Province of Manitoba from 1999–2016, during which the left-of-center New Democratic Party (NDP) government engineered a significant expansion of the carceral state, overseeing unprecedented increases in policing and jail growth. In Manitoba, the vast majority of prisoners are Indigenous. This dissertation explores the logic through which the NDP integrated their support for policing and imprisonment into their “progressive” value system, packaging their carceral expansion as a project of protecting poor people from victimization. The central argument of this dissertation is that carceral expansion in Manitoba was made to fit into a “progressive” agenda by appealing to a contemporary colonial common sense: that Indigenous communities are suffering from the legacy of a colonial past, and that policing and imprisonment are necessary but not sufficient responses to violence that originates within those damaged communities. Through interviews with NDP politicians, political advisors, bureaucrats, policy researchers, and people who work at community-based organizations (CBOs) recruited to participate in crime prevention, this dissertation documents how colonial logic structured both the NDP’s crime-prevention programming, and their punitive tough-on-crime initiatives.

Excerpt: The story that settler societies like the United States, Canada, and Australia tell about themselves is that they are new, that they are beneficent, and that they are virtuous. They arrive at this story and this version of themselves through discourse and practices like law—because in law, and through law, they render justice. They are with law, they are governed by law, they are thus lawful, and, by extension, take on a “fair” character. These are not, “savage states” ruled by magic, pure belief, or unregulated emotionality. These states have institutions like law that regulate activity, guard against excess and abuse. Further, in each of these settler societies, there are democratic mechanisms in place whose functions guarantee that individuals and their property may be protected, so that goods may be distributed properly and so that they may prosper as well.

Abstract: Indigenous people from West Papua, a territory under Indonesian rule, are foraging for food in spaces by the side of the road, in the ruins of recently logged forests. Living on the margins of market economies and transportation infrastructures comes with opportunities as well as risks. Emergent ecosystems are teeming with grasshoppers, katydids, praying mantises, and other edible insects, as well as marsupial game animals. Children are finding happiness in the hap of what happens in these multispecies worlds. At the same time, plans by technocrats in distant metropolitan centers to turn nomadic hunter-gatherers into a governable population have gone awry. Infrastructures and modern medical practices protect some people in Indonesia from tropical diseases like malaria, while Papuans die. Black lives matter. But some black lives matter more than others. The case of one black boy who was shot dead along the side of the road in June 2015 while hunting with friends is part of an ongoing process of genocide in West Papua. Race, nationality, and class all help determine who has full personhood before the law. In pursuing the elusive promise of justice in West Papua, indigenous people are pushing back against powerful assemblages and infrastructures, creating the conditions for continued life in multispecies communities.

Abstract: Existing scholarship on colonial anxieties works on the idea that certain kinds of ill-ease, discomfort and distress accompanied ‘the colonial situation’. But little of this work considers how different colonial situations engendered different kinds of anxiety for different kinds of people. This chapter populates the world of colonial anxieties with mental patients in one settler colony: Kenya in the 1950s. Their anxieties only vaguely resemble the kinds of anxieties that historians have described as characteristically colonial. More revealing is the biographical context in which anxieties were embedded. At a moment when the colonial order was on the cusp of disappearing, the lives of the settler insane give a novel counter-narrative to Britain and its empire in the twentieth century. They also place in new perspective the more overt forms of mental breakdown that the settler community in Kenya performed in response to the violence of Mau Mau.

Description: The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites’ authority to define the South’s past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.