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On developing settler orders (the British world, for example): Amanda Behm’, Settler Historicism and Anticolonial Rebuttal in the British World, 1880-1920′, Journal of World History, 26, 4, 2015, pp. 785-813

07Aug16

Abstract: This article seeks to recast the break-up of the British Empire in the light of the longer duel between settler and native, or so-called dependent, interests over the legitimate nature of British connection. It starts from two premises. First, although “Greater Britain” was never a formal political reality, the historical construct of a homogeneous global Anglo-Saxondom attained widespread credibility in late nineteenth century British settler and Anglo-American worlds. Second, such a fact demands an examination of “Greater Britain’s” real work within the fractious politics of the vast, multipolar late British Empire. This article explains why, after 1880, public intellectuals and emerging academic historians working from Britain divided the British Empire into two parts temporally and politically and championed the self-governing colonies at the expense of the non-white, authoritarian empire. It locates an emerging moral consensus at the confluence of late Victorian policy lobbying and historical theorizing, which not only gave the world Greater Britain, but also the exclusionary policies that scholars recognize today as the global color line. It then explores the emergence of a pitched contest between proponents of an increasingly segregated British Empire and those of a more integrated and equal system. While both camps initially staked their claims as part of a broad, multisited, and contested Anglophone network that trafficked in a shared political idiom of liberty, rights, and constitutional development, the repeated betrayal of integrationists by the imperial center opened the way for more radical anticolonial activisms by the 1920s.


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On developing settler orders (India and Van Diemen’s Land, for example): Felicity Barry, ‘“Home Allies”: Female Networks, Tensions, and Conflicted Loyalties in India and Van Diemen’s Land, 1826–1849’, Journal of World History, 26, 4, 2015, pp. 757-784

07Aug16

Abstract: Using two women and their private social networks as a case study, this article expands the scope of the well-established field of Anglophone networks by considering the role women played in forming and operating within them. The reasons for including and excluding others in and from these networks illuminate these women’s highly personalized and politicized ideas about belonging, loyalty, and affiliation to home. Ultimately, this article suggests that while they operated alongside—but outside—of male-centered official and elite networks, these women and their networks still played a role in strengthening or severing particular discourses, connections, and alliances at the local and global level and that they did so in a way that warrants further attention from scholars of the British world and beyond.


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On developing settler orders (in Florida for example): Laurel Clark Shire, The Threshold of Manifest Destiny: Gender and National Expansion in Florida, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

07Aug16

Description: In “The Threshold of Manifest Destiny,” Laurel Clark Shire illuminates the vital role women played in national expansion and shows how gender ideology was a key mechanism in U.S. settler colonialism.


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Per(forming) authenticity: Pamela Lee’, Journey Through the Third Space: Performing Aboriginal Identity Through Historic Re-Enactment Sites’, in Lori G. Beaman, Sonia Sikka (eds), Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp 19-28

07Aug16

Abstract: This chapter reads anthropologist Laura Peers’ Playing Ourselves (2007) through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural performance. Playing Ourselves showcases First Nations interpreters playing their historic ancestors in living history sites run by North American state-owned heritage agencies. This focus on First Nations performers highlights the ‘toured’ rather than the tourist, inverting our theme of the traveller to elsewhere seeking authenticity. In the cultural tourism scholarship, Aboriginal performers are generally interpreted as passive victims, forced to stereotype themselves as primitive ‘Indians’ to satisfy the tourist gaze. Through Bhabha, I follow Peers in arguing against this assumption. These performers speak as creative subjects constructing identity within the constraints of the ‘Wild West’ frontier myth, reshaping the colonial imaginary through the subterfuge of ‘play’ performances.


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Unfinished business: Michael Elliott, ‘Participatory Parity and Indigenous Decolonization Struggles Authors’, Constellations, 2016

07Aug16

Access the article here.


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Settler environmentalism is settler colonialism: La Paperson, ‘A ghetto land pedagogy: an antidote for settler environmentalism’, Environmental Education Research, 20, 1, 2014, pp. 115-130

05Aug16

Abstract: A ghetto land pedagogy begins with two axioms that align it with land education more broadly, and that distinguish it from the general umbrella of environmental education. First, ghetto colonialism is a specialization of settler colonialism. Second, land justice requires decolonization, not just environmental justice. A ghetto land pedagogy thus attends to an analysis of settler colonialism, offers a critique of settler environmentalism, and forwards a decolonizing cartography as a method for land education. This article discusses ‘storied land’ as a critical cartographic method for land education, illustrated through a discussion of land in the San Francisco Bay Area.


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An indigenous heartland? Doug Kiel, James F. Brook, ‘Introduction: Reframing and Reclaiming Indigenous Midwests’, Middle West Review, 2, 2, 2016, pp. vii-x

05Aug16

Excerpt: Like the pictograph we feature on our cover, which speaks to ties among peoples and places in the region, this special issue of the Middle West Review explores a diverse range of Indigenous experiences in a variety of locations in what has come to be known as the American Midwest. “The Midwest,” however, is not an Indigenous marker of place, but rather a US spatial category that is defined, in part, by the national project of replacing Indigenous societies. Framing Indigenous peoples within this geographical construct, then, opens a discursive space for grappling with the issues of settler colonialism that lie at the heart of this collection of essays.

An Indigenous sense of place, by contrast, is expressed in the cover image of an Ojibwe pictographic petition, copied by artist Seth Eastman. The birch bark original was carried by a delegation of Lake Superior Ojibwe leaders to Washington, dc, in 1849. The delegation traveled from Wisconsin to the US capital to formally request that Congress and the president guarantee their right to remain permanently in their Wisconsin homelands. Each of the animal figures—the catfish, the man-fish, the bear, the three martens, and the crane—represents the Ojibwe clans to which members of the delegation belonged. The lines connecting the hearts of the other animals to the heart of the crane signify the clans’ unity, while the lines connecting their eyes to the crane’s eye indicate that the representative of the Crane Clan is leading the delegation. The pictograph also illustrates the strong connection between the Ojibwe people and Lake Superior as well as the wild rice lakes. The petition’s depiction of an Indigenous geopolitical reality helps to destabilize monolithic notions of the American Midwest by illustrating how one Native people visualized their relationship to their homelands.


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An indigenous reservation in a settler domain: David Hugill, ‘Metropolitan Transformation and the Colonial Relation: The Making of an “Indian Neighborhood” in Postwar Minneapolis’, Middle West Review, 2, 2, 2016, pp. 169-199

05Aug16

Excerpt: East Franklin Avenue emerged as one of South Minneapolis’ principal commercial corridors at the end of the nineteenth century. Early residents tend to remember the area affectionately. One who spent her youth on East Franklin in the first decades of the twentieth century described it as the attractive center of a tightly knit urban community, a place that “came alive” with the bustle of salubrious commerce in and around meticulously maintained family-run shops. Yet such fond reminiscences jar with the descriptions of East Franklin that began to appear in local publications in the decades following World War II. By the mid-1950s, mass suburbanization had begun to hasten the decline of vast stretches of the city’s urban core and East Franklin had begun to suffer some of the most deleterious effects of metropolitan reorganization.

Local journalists took note of these changes and were soon filing dispatches that described the area as an emergent urban slum, teeming with conspicuous signs of economic insecurity and decline. Indigenous people were often at the center of these reports, increasingly associated with the area and counted among the ranks of an inner-city population that had been largely excluded from the spoils of postwar prosperity. In the period following 1945, the Twin Cities Indigenous population grew substantially; while the number of Indigenous people living in Minneapolis and St. Paul numbered only a few hundred at the start of the war, it mushroomed to more than six thousand by the formal end of hostilities in Europe and the Pacific.


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The lumber frontier is a settler frontier: Theodore J. Karamanski, ‘Settler Colonial Strategies and Indigenous Resistance on the Great Lakes Lumber Frontier’, Middle West Review, 2, 2, 2016, pp. 27-51

05Aug16

Excerpt: The geographic and economic setting of the nineteenth century Upper Great Lakes region created unique challenges to American settler colonialism and encounters with the Indigenous people of this land of lakes and forests. Many Anishinaabeg bands responded creatively through the use of Christianity, education, and American law in an attempt to fortify their presence in the region. European Americans, who sought to appropriate the wealth of the Upper Midwest’s vast stands of hardwood and pine forests, only seldom needed to resort to guns to take control of the land. Instead of a war of conquest they entangled Anishinaabeg property owners in a bewildering legal and extralegal thicket that facilitated the plunder of the region’s most marketable resource. The initial phase of pine logging laid waste to Anishinaabeg property rights but left the Indigenous population remaining on their traditional lands. The ill treatment of Anishinaabeg landowners should have been a warning signal to policymakers in the 1880s seeking to reform national Indian policy through severalty.

In his 2012 study of Great Lakes Indian history in the colonial and early national periods, historian Michael Witgen emphasizes the transregional society shared by the Anishinaabeg while at the same time documenting the “flexibility” and autonomy of action reserved to local bands. This essay is concerned with the Indigenous response to the lumber frontier’s variation of settler colonialism in the Upper Great Lakes region—the heartland of the Anishinaabeg.


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Settler fictions set in a settler fiction: James Joseph Buss, ‘Appealing to the Great Spirit: Foundational Fictions and Settler Histories in Middletown America’, Middle West Review, 2, 2, 2016, pp. 143-167

05Aug16

Excerpt: In 1929 Bertha C. Ball and her children placed a life-size copy of Cyrus Dallin’s statue, Appeal to the Great Spirit, in a small park at the intersection of Walnut Street and Granville Avenue in Muncie, Indiana. The figure—a generalized Great Plains warrior on horseback with outstretched arms and head tilted toward the heavens—may be one of the most recognizable images associated with the trope of the nineteenth century vanishing Indian. Dallin himself arrived in May of that year to install the work. It was the second full-size casting made of the piece, and the only such copy made during his lifetime (a posthumous version was commissioned for the city of Tulsa in the 1980s). Dallin was hired by the Ball family to erect the work in honor of Edmund Burke Ball, who had died in 1925. The Ball family, owners of the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company, moved their factory from Buffalo, New York, to Muncie, Indiana, in the 1880s in order to take advantage of natural gas fields discovered there. By the 1920s the Ball Brothers had become incredibly wealthy as their fruit canning jars became staples of the average American household. When Edmund died in 1925, he and Frank—the two brothers who originally started the company—occupied palatial homes on the northern bank of the White River (they had named the family compound Minnetrista). Bertha Ball placed the copy of Appeal to the Great Spirit on the eastern edge of the sprawling family estate, where passersby might notice it as they crossed the White River. While the statue’s initial placement in Muncie has its own interesting story, it is not the focus of this essay. 


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