Access the book here.

Access this book here.

Excerpt: Native Americans have for months led protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, a $3.8 billion, nearly 1,200-mile construction project that will transfer oil across several states. Thousands of activists from around the country have traveled to North Dakota to support the indigenous resistance at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

Now, Native groups in the U.S. have support from the other side of the ocean, too.

Palestinian artists in Gaza released a video and letter this week expressing solidarity with the NoDAPL demonstrations.

Abstract: An historical analysis of reproductive politics in the Canadian North during the 1970s necessitates a careful reading of the local circumstances regarding feminism, sovereignty, language, colonialism, and access to health services, which differed regionally and culturally. These features were conditioned, however, by international discussions on family planning that fixated on the twinned concepts of unchecked population growth and poverty. Language from these debates crept into discussions about reproduction and birth control in northern Canada, producing the state’s logic that, despite low population density, the endemic poverty in the North necessitated aggressive family planning measures.

Abstract: My research traces the evolution of the French vision of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by establishing a genealogy of mythic paradigms which frame how French and Quebecois authors understand the Amerindian from 1534 to present. Myth informs French visions of the Amerindian from the earliest periods of contact until the present day. My research reveals the existence of a mythic representational genealogy in the history of French (and Quebecois) letters. Through the written word, reiterations of mythologies of the Native lead to the creation of a crystallized French cultural imaginary of the Amerindian which circumscribes possibilities for reciprocal understandings between French (European) and Native peoples. The Noble and Ignoble Savage, the Ecological Savage (which I also refer to as the nexus of Nature and Native), the Vanishing Indian, and Going Native are the mythologies and narrative technologies that have mediated (and continue to mediate) French thinking about the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Not only have these mythic paradigms determined literary representation, but they have also inordinately influenced the articulation of scientific truth about the Amerindian and the concretization of Native ontological difference from a Eurocentric perspective. The inextricable link between representation and praxis, confirmed by my insights into the mythic origins of scientific discourses (Buffon, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss), cannot be underemphasized.

Abstract:

Purpose of review: To provide an update on recent studies on suicide prevention in indigenous populations with a focus on recently colonised indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Recent findings: There have been several recent reviews on suicide prevention in indigenous populations with high suicide rates. However most of them describe the problem and there is little new that is available on effective interventions. One randomized controlled trial of a package of measures focusing on cultural identity in Maori who had recently self-harmed compared to usual care found little effect on suicidal behavior but it did significantly reduce presentations to hospital for any reason after one year.

Summary: The reasons for the limited evidence include a lack of ring fenced funding and a lack of research infrastructure; the problem of high rates of suicide but small numbers; and the difficulty in creating effective collaborations between researchers and communities. Potential solutions include identifying specific research funding; improving capacity in indigenous research; putting effort into accurate identification and recording of ethnicity; and thinking about the problem of suicide in recently colonised populations as a global problem to enable large scale high quality studies to take place.

Abstract: This dissertation highlights the responses of Indigenous leaders and communities to the emergence of the colonial order on the Canadian prairies between 1870 and 1890. The complexities of their actions reveal significant points of weakness in the colonial order. Colonial governance strategies for the administration of Indigenous populations in western Canada intersected with Indigenous tactics in the face of the overwhelming economic transitions and other pressures of settler colonialism, and this resulted in unexpected outcomes. Paylist data, contextualized by other historical sources, reveal the various ways in which Indigenous peoples used both mobility and manipulation of status categories as forms of tactical resistance to the implementation of government administrative strategies. Indigenous contestation of the colonial order was intertwined with elements of adaptation to new economic, political and social realities of the mid to late nineteenth century.

The construction of ‘Indian’ and ‘Metis’ status categories were negotiated by both Indigenous peoples and colonial administrators in various ways, which resulted in unintended/unforeseen consequences for Indigenous familial and community identities. Indigenous peoples, both First Nations and Metis, were forced to choose between these racialized categories during and after Treaty negotiations, and it is evident that the historically contingent creation of the Metis status category challenged a particular bureaucratic understanding of Indigenous identities. Indeed, treaty commissioners barely muddled their way through instances of Metis communities agreeing to self-identify as ‘Indian’ in the early Numbered Treaties. The result was an ad-hoc colonial administration that failed to reflect the very circumstances of the peoples those policies were meant to ‘assist.’ Between 1876 and 1884, the Canadian government was fearful of losing control of the various Indigenous groups that made up Treaty 6. Consequently, people in this territory had some power to influence the administration of policy. Indigenous communities employed tactics of mobility and the negotiation of identities to expose the porous realities of Canadian policy and to subvert, at least for a time, the actions and intentions of Indian agents and their superiors. As the colonial order gained strength following the military victory of 1885, government officials could more effectively constrain the tactics of individuals and communities. Yet even then Indigenous tactics often resulted in outcomes unanticipated by both colonial administrators and Indigenous peoples.

Given the contemporary efforts of Indigenous communities and settler-allies to de-colonize Canadian policy, this study serves to underscore the historical points of Indigenous resistance tactics in response to ill-conceived state strategies. It is my hope that the exposure of colonialism’s malleable moments, the instances of weakness, will encourage scholars to continue the search for ways in which Indigenous communities actively contested powerful structural and repressive forces.

Abstract: The Norse lived in Greenland beginning in 985 C.E. and ending around 1450 C.E. But why they disappeared after that, with few clues as to their fate, has remained a mystery since. Now, new archaeological clues are painting a fresh picture of the Norse. Instead of a society focused on dairy farming, and poorly adapted for the Arctic climate, as previously thought, the new findings imply a community centered instead around hunting and trading. Precise new dates of settlement, established from large surveys of archaeological sites, show more centrally planned movement, bolstering the case for a communal hunting effort versus a loose federation of farm stands. Meanwhile, new finds of walrus ivory show that this valuable commodity may have driven the rise and fall of the community.

Access the chapter here.

This could be called an anti-Federalist election. The geography of the vote makes it so (the cities vs the backblocks, but the uncompromising antagonism that accompanied it makes a reference to the chaos of the 1790s especially pertinent). Widespread resentment against the cities took most observers by surprise; it seemed to emerge out of nowhere. It was not on the record, and it seems important to note that while Federalist positions were generally visible and documented, anti-Federalist sentiment typically left little trace.

Many have pointed out that Washington politics circa 2016 has run out of ideas. Like Hollywood. When the latter runs out of ideas, it thinks about remakes. This season’s political remakes included Sanders re-run of the New Deal. Clinton went way back. Her compact would have been one where important men would conduct important business as usual and away from the spotlight, while a strong woman would run a big white house with the help of some trusted people of colour. This type of arrangement is a very, very old one in America. I am not suggesting that it was not the best one on offer. Yet again, for many the prospect of business as usual was not acceptable. For many the crisis never went away. 2008 is 1929, Obama is Hoover with an enormous bailout for the banks and charisma, the people that have walked away from their homes following foreclosures are those who walked away from their farms in the 1930s (without John Steinback writing The Grapes of Wrath, literati these days are busy writing blog posts like this one). The guy who was thinking of a new New Deal was not allowed to compete.

As noted, the Trumpists also went back. Way back. In the imagination of many of them, Jim Crow back. In some ways, as many have also pointed out, they expressed a rejection of political economy, and this election saw the Hamiltonians of the Clinton camp face a type of anti-Federalist rage. This time the Shaysts have taken over; at least they think they’ll have their man in Washington. But a rejection of political economy is what settler colonialism is often about (I have written elsewhere about the political traditions of settler colonialism as ‘the world turned inside out’ and how they differ from the revolutionary traditions that Christopher Hill had called the ‘world turned upside down’). Facing contradictions, young men had to ‘strike west’. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who was a serial founder of settler colonies in the British Empire broke the consensus of the liberal orthodoxy and was never forgiven. Those who voted for Trump rejected the outcome of capitalism as they embraced capitalism. They are often called insane because all those who reject what is hegemonic are by definition insane. It is supposed to be REALITY (even if we know that it is only an ideology effect), and denying reality is a sign of insanity.

Renowed philosopher Slavoj Žižek approved (see Slavoj Žižek ‘On Clinton, Trump and the Left’s Dilemma: to Paraphrase Stalin, they are both worse’, In These Times, 06/11/16, and , Channel 4, ‘Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek says he would opt for Donald Trump as the apparently less dangerous choice in the US election’, 03/11/16). He sees Trumpism as an anti-establishment phenomenon and therefore, at least potentially, a development that will lead to revolutionary possibilities. Similarly, former minister in the left-wing Greek government Yanis Varoufakis focuses on progressive possibilities that this election ostensibly portends (Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Trump victory comes with a silver lining for the world’s progressives’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14/11/16). Whether something good may come of this is REALLY hard to foresee. The point is to see where something bad has come from.

Žižek knows revolutionary traditions (that’s perhaps why he is so successful in these parts: he is telling American liberals exotic stories they do not know), and Varoufakis’s political project focuses on Europe. Neither has time for the political traditions of the world turned inside out. On the contrary, settler colonial studies can help making sense of a determination to change the world by changing worlds and of its political outcomes. Patrick Wolfe explains in his recent Traces of History that the racial formations that characterised the US during the twentieth century should be understood in the context of emancipation. It was a ‘response to the crisis occasioned when colonisers are threatened with the requirement to share social space with the colonized’ (Verso 2016: 14). A particular form of racism follows the end of slavery; it is one trace of history. Likewise, Trumpist racism should be seen as a response to a very similar crisis. The emergence of a Black middle class demands the same sharing of social space. Faced with crisis, settlers and their political descendants move out (they enact, for example, a white flight, which is as much a displacement as taking up a homestead somewhere in the prairie). Except that the Trumpists have nowhere to go.

Settlers usually displace to other locations or dream of doing so. There is a physicality about their displacements. The Trump constituency, however, has enacted a type of psychological displacement, not a spatial one (for an unforgiving account that evokes ‘white flight from political sanity, white flight from reality, and white flight from responsible citizenship’, see David Masciotra, ‘White flight from reality: Inside the racist panic that fueled Donald Trump’s victory’, Salon, 13/11/16). The Trump voters are activating displacement as a defense mechanism. The fantasy of being persecuted, which is especially typical of this constituency, is especially conducive to defense mechanisms.

The political descendants of settlers have gone insane. Expect to see things.