Abstract: In December 2015, Megan Davis opened her article for The Monthly, ‘Gesture Politics’, with the following words: ‘Despair. In a word, this is the universal sentiment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders I have spoken to about the state of Aboriginal policy in Australia’. More recently, Jon Altman has written in The Guardian and on the ‘Arena’ blog on the Coalition government’s 2016 Budget and its damaging disregard for Indigenous affairs, alongside the continuing failures of the all-prevailing, all-pervasive policy approach of ‘Closing the Gap’.

Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the  Present

Studies of violence against Native peoples have typically focused  narrowly on war and massacre. These narratives often cast Indians as  simple and passive victims, become trapped by stale debates about the
definition of genocide, and consign violence to the safety of the past.  While recognizing the reality of war and massacre, this symposium invites paper submissions that take new approaches to the study of  violence. We particularly encourage papers that rigorously examine the  nature of violence in past and present-day Native communities and explore the intersections of violence with a broad array of themes such as:

o Historical memories, legacies, and mythologies of violence
o Theft and destruction of homelands and environments
o Appropriation of fine arts and cultural heritage
o Gendered and sexual assaults on bodies, families, and communities
o Enslavement and captivity
o Violence within and among Native communities

We urge our participants to address the resilience and agency of Native  peoples in the face of such violence. Our hope is to secure examples and  cases that help illustrate the complex nature of violent interactions  both within Indigenous communities as well as with mainstream society.

We hope that this seminar will provide a public, academic forum for new  interpretations of past and present events, from a Native perspective, and we plan to publish selected papers in a volume that will be geared toward classroom teaching. We hope to create an online repository of syllabi for faculty who teach courses in American Indian Studies, U.S. History, World History, and Genocide Studies so that all can draw from these examples when developing or revising similar courses examining violence and Indigenous communities.

Paper abstracts of 200-300 words and a one-page c.v. should be submitted  by September 1, 2016 to the D’Arcy McNickle Center, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois. Abstracts will be reviewed and all participants notified by October 1. Accepted papers of 7,000-10,000 words should be submitted on or before April 1, 2017 and will be distributed in advance to seminar participants. They will be presented at a scholarly colloquium on May 12-13, 2017. Limited travel stipends will be available. Following public presentation, papers will be revised and submitted for publication review on July 1, 2017.

Symposium Coordinating Committee:
Susan Sleeper-Smith, History Department, Michigan State University
Patricia Marroquin Norby, Director, D’Arcy McNickle Center
Jeffrey Ostler, History Department, University of Oregon
Joshua Reid, History and American Indian Studies Departments, University
of Washington

Please submit abstracts by September 1, 2016 to: Madeleine Krass
(krassm@newberry.org)

Sponsored by the department of history, Michigan State University, East
Lansing, Michigan

Abstract: This paper examines the inquest into the deaths by suicide of two
Manitoba Indigenous female youth while imprisoned in the Manitoba Youth Centre in
Winnipeg, Canada. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inquest as a discursive
space that relies primarily on expert knowledge from law and psychiatry. It studies
the inquest’s recommendations for preventing future deaths under similar
circumstances. Utilizing Heidi Rimke’s conceptualization of psychocentrism, this
analysis examines how suicide discourse in this inquest reduces various
manifestations of violence to racial defects and places responsibility on the deceased
girls for their inability to have coped with the tortuous conditions of imprisonment. I
argue that contemporary understandings of Indigenous suicide in custody
systematically erase histories of colonial violence and erroneously reduce suicide to
an issue of individual pathology that can be identified and treated through
medicalization, psychiatrization and criminalization.

Abstract: In 1988–1989 and again in 2012 Noongar Aboriginal groups occupied high profile riverside sites in close proximity to the centre of Perth, Western Australia. On both occasions they were claiming rights to land from which their ancestors had been removed in the early nineteenth century by British colonial settlers. During a relatively brief period of struggle and interaction between the Indigenous and settler groups following the proclamation of the Swan River Colony in 1829, the Noongar population of what is now the Perth Metropolitan Area were effectively dispossessed of their land. Indeed, from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century Aboriginal people were required to obtain written permits in order to enter the urban area of Perth. In spite of this, the local Noongar population has maintained an ongoing physical, emotional and spiritual connection to their traditional country and, in particular, to certain sites within it. Two of these sites, Goonininup/the Old Swan Brewery, in 1988–1989, and Matagarup/Heirisson Island, in 2012, have been occupied by Noongar groups asserting their rights to this land. This paper will describe and compare both sites of occupation with particular reference to the methods and motivations of the occupiers and the attitudes and responses of the wider metropolitan population to these events. It will also place them in the wider context of ongoing debates over the acknowledgement of Aboriginal claims to and rights over sites of Indigenous significance and of land occupations as a form of protest.

Description: An epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way—in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century—which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West—scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history—it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten.

Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. His first travel narrative, Flight of Passage, was hailed by The New Yorker as “a funny, cocky gem of a book,” and with The Oregon Trail he brings the most important route in American history back to glorious and vibrant life.

Traveling from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck is accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an “incurably filthy” Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water. The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. They also must reckon with the ghost of their father, an eccentric yet loveable dreamer whose memory inspired their journey across the plains and whose premature death, many years earlier, has haunted them both ever since.

But The Oregon Trail is much more than an epic adventure. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans. Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling U.S. Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants. Generous portions of the book are devoted to the history of old and appealing things like the mule and the wagon. We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development. Most arresting, perhaps, are the stories of the pioneers themselves—ordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it became.

At once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. It is a wildly ambitious work of nonfiction from a true American original. It is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses.

Access the rticle here.

Excerpt: If western history has a common thread, it is that conquest and violence went hand in hand. This is not to say that American history east of the Mississippi River is devoid of such a theme; the despicable treatment of black slaves in the South, the Irish in northern cities, or even specific Native groups themselves belies such an argument. But in the West, government officials, army officers, and common settlers often found themselves in disputes with American Indians, and this conflict is at the core of hundreds of books and studies. Indian tribes lost most of these contests, so it is crucial that historians look at the nature of the conflicts and try to understand what they meant—then and now. In many cases, if not most, non-Indians committed crimes against Indians. The question here is what should we call those crimes?

Abstract: Biography is a metaphor for this critical study of a major Australian archive that holds the records of government departments responsible for the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Western Australian from 1897 to 1972. This artefact of totalitarian state control is structured by western colonial ontologies of bureaucracy and legislative control of subject people. The project of decolonizing this archive was begun in the 1970s by Indigenous writers negotiating between the archives and their own cultural knowledge to produce major creative works combining both. These works show the passionate, rich storytelling that emerges when indigenous people release the stories captured in the archives and restore them as living cultural heritage.

Description: How are different concepts of nature and time embedded into human practices of landscape and environmental management? And how can temporalities that entwine past, present and future help us deal with challenges on the ground? In a time of uncertainty and climate change, how much can we hold onto ideals of nature rooted in a pristine and stable past? The Scandinavian and Australian perspectives in this book throw fresh light on these questions and explore new possibilities and challenges in uncertain and changing landscapes of the future.

Abstract: This article argues that William Henry Hudson’s novel The Purple Land figures Anglo-Argentine contact in the age of informal empire as constituted through narrative storytelling. Narrative structures encounters among people on local and global levels, and Hudson shows that narrative is simultaneously the most natural conduit and the most stubborn barrier to transnational hybridity on both personal and national scales. This argument locates Hudson, therefore, in the convergence between global exchange, in the specific form of British capital that precipitated Argentine dependence in the world system, and local interpersonal exchange as a site of narrative and nationalist self-fashioning.