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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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A ghost among other ghosts: Kyle T. Mays, ‘Pontiac’s Ghost in the Motor City: Indigeneity and the Discursive Construction of Modern Detroit, Middle West Review, 2, 2, 2016, pp. 115-142

05Aug16

Excerpt: To local Detroiters and throughout the United States, the name Pontiac holds many meanings. Most know about the name of the now discontinued General Motors automobile. A quick Google search of “Pontiac” reveals, first, the General Motors brand and, then, the city Pontiac, Michigan. The third “Pontiac” subject that emerges is the Odawa war chief who helped stage an epic battle against the British in 1763. Perhaps it sounds bizarre to state the obvious, but Pontiac the man, the historical figure, preceded the vehicle and the city. On the eve of an auto revolution, Detroiters in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century knew about Pontiac the historical figure, in the form of “Pontiac’s conspiracy.”

For instance, in 1872 an article proclaimed that Pontiac “made himself so prominent that his name will be remembered by Detroiters for a hundred years to come.”1 Similarly, in 1899, one local wrote, “Before the white man’s foot had trodden the wilderness where now stand thriving and populous cities and while the red man still held undisputed sway over the territory in the region the great lakes, the name Pontiac was a familiar and honored word.”2 An article in 1913 wrote of Pontiac’s importance to local Detroit legends, “a name, next to a mound of earth, is one of the most persistent things in the world.”3 Pontiac was an important part of Detroit’s presence in the late nineteenth century and beyond. But now, Pontiac the man exists mostly as a ghost of Detroit’s past. What accounts for this?

In contemporary Detroit, one would be hard-pressed to find any traces of Indigenous people and their history.


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The shifting politics of memorialisation: Deborah Edwards-Anderson, ‘From Reconciliation to Resurgence Dakota Commemorations of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862’, Middle West Review, 2, 2, 2016, pp. 85-114

05Aug16

Excerpt: Our proximity to the sesquicentennial of the U.S.-Dakota War provides an opportunity to examine how this conflict is remembered by the descendants of those most impacted by it—the Dakota Oyate, the confederation of large extended family groupings that claimed Minnesota as traditional territory and homeland for thousands of years. Dr. Kim TallBear (Dakota), whose anthropological research examines genetic science’s intersection with notions of race and indigeneity, wrote in 2012, “As Dakota people, 1862 may be our most important origin story today. We refer daily to 1862 whether at family gatherings, at community events, anywhere we gather and talk. It is always there even when we are silent.”1

Although Dakota communities include sharply divergent perspectives about the effectiveness of the 1862 war, there is a shared conviction that the U.S. government treated their ancestors unjustly by expelling all Dakota from Minnesota in 1863, breaking treaties made with Dakota nations, effectively seizing Dakota reservation land to make it available to American settlers, and placing bounties on the heads of Dakota people found within Minnesota’s boundaries after the war. TallBear describes 1862 as a defining moment that “re-circumscribed present-day Dakota geography, political economy, family relations, governance, and identity. This marked a bloody re-mapping of Dakota life.”2

This essay holds that in the past half-century, commemorations of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 within Dakota communities have been increasingly grounded in, and fueled by, efforts to revitalize the Dakota language, traditional culture, and connection to traditional territory.


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A settler reservation! Ryan Eyford, White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West, University of British Columbia Press, 2016

05Aug16

Description: In 1875, the Canadian government created a reserve for Icelandic immigrants on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg. Hoping for a better life in Canada, many of the New Iceland colonists found only hardship, disappointment, or death. Those who survived scurvy and smallpox faced crop failure, internal dissension, and severe flooding that nearly ended the project only six years after it had begun. This innovative book looks beyond the experiences of these Icelandic immigrants to understand the context into which their reserve fits within the history of settler colonialism. Ryan Eyford juxtaposes the Icelanders’ experiences with those of the Cree, Ojibwe, and Metis people they displaced. By analyzing themes such as race, land, health, and governance, he draws out the tensions that punctuated the process of colonization in western Canada and situates the region within the global history of colonialism.


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A settler colonial disaster, not a natural one: Hannah Holleman, ‘De-naturalizing ecological disaster: colonialism, racism and the global Dust Bowl of the 1930s’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016

03Aug16

Abstract: This paper reinterprets the Dust Bowl on the US Southern Plains as one dramatic regional manifestation of a global socio-ecological crisis generated by the realities of settler colonialism and imperialism. In so doing, it seeks to deepen historical-theoretical understandings of the racialized division of nature and humanity making possible the global problem of soil erosion by the 1930s and forming the heart of the ecological rift of capitalism. The framework developed here challenges prevalent conceptions of the Dust Bowl, in which colonial and racial-domination aspects of the crisis are invisible, and affirms the necessity of deeper conceptions of environmental (in)justice.


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Violence and settler colonialism: Jennifer Nez Denetdale, ‘”No Explanation, No Resolution, and No Answers”: Border Town Violence and Navajo Resistance to Settler Colonialism’, Wicazo Sa Review, 31, 1, 2016, pp. 111-131

03Aug16

Excerpt: Dakota Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s scholarship has been influential in shaping Indigenous studies for at least four decades. She has steadfastly criticized how scholarship in Native studies has been hijacked by American exceptionalism so that the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples and our present dilemmas continue to be erased, sanitized, and denied as the United States poses to the rest of the world as a multicultural nation that treats all of its citizens equally across race, class, and gender. Against scholarship that sustains such U.S. claims, Cook-Lynn insists that our responsibility as scholars is “to the tribal nations that have survived terrible wars, that have signed solemn treaties with our enemies, that possess vast resources, the rivers people live by, the lands where our relatives are buried. This legacy is our constituency.” As a Diné woman who struggles with academia precisely because of the kinds of challenges that Elizabeth Cook-Lynn speaks of, I take her writing to be inspiring first for my own efforts to sustain the criticism of American imperialism that is founded on the genocide and disappearance of Indigenous peoples and second as sources that can be built on to move the conversation in ways that are productive and regenerative.

Cook-Lynn’s insistence that Indigenous scholarship must be devoted to the support of tribal nations, sovereignty, and self-determination has been taken up in various ways and sometimes in ways that have limited our definitions of what sovereignty and self-determination mean. By limitations, I mean that Indigenous studies has been slow to take up the historical and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in what is marked as urban and non-reservation or non-tribal lands. Because of land dispossession, the processes of capitalism, and ethnic cleansing, Indigenous peoples’ defining experiences have included displacement, relocation, and migration into urban spaces. Yet discursive practices connected to federal Indian policies have cast Indigenous peoples who reside in urban spaces and off legally recognized Indian lands as somehow less “traditional” and as instead “modern” or “progressive.” Although Native people’s experiences in urban spaces and border towns have been studied, there remains much to understand about how land dispossession and U.S. policies of ethnic cleansing have shaped the contours of movement from U.S.-designated tribal lands to urban spaces and border towns and how Indigenous people are endlessly cast as the outsiders and aliens in formerly recognized Indigenous spaces.

This essay, then, presents Diné historical and lived experiences in towns that border the Navajo Nation, with a focus on Gallup and Farmington, New Mexico, but with the recognition that other towns like Winslow, Holbrook, Flagstaff, and Page, Arizona, also have histories of violence against Navajos that have everything to do with the United States as a settler nation whose thirst for Indigenous land and resources remains unabated. A history of Navajo and Native protest against the violence in border towns momentarily disrupts and unsettles, and concessions are made. Very few studies have been undertaken of border town violence, even though this violence is pervasive and a feature of Native life in these communities. Further, most of the understanding of border town violence pathologizes Navajos as both the victims and perpetrators from a health risk perspective. This violence against Navajos is evident across decades and usually is only remarked on when the violence appears extraordinary or spectacular. For the most part, settlers remain innocent in the narratives that are created about their relationships with Navajos in border towns.


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Claiming biblically: Judith H. Newman, ‘Tracing the Use of the Bible in Colonial Land Claims in North America’, in Frances Flannery, Rodney A. Werline (eds), The Bible in Political Debate What Does it Really Say? Bloomsbury, 2016

03Aug16

Access the book here.


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Tautology is comparative work: Timothy Seidel'”Occupied territory is occupied territory”: James Baldwin, Palestine and the possibilities of transnational solidarity’, Third World Quarterly, 37, 9, 2016, pp. 1644-1660

03Aug16

Abstract: In his 1966 essay ‘A Report from Occupied Territory’, James Baldwin wrote that ‘occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered’. Though written 50 years ago, Baldwin’s observations continue to resonate, indicating historical trends across geographical experiences affected by the legacy of colonialism. A growing theme in development and peace building studies relates to a kind of boundary crossing that sees academics and activists drawing linkages across spatial and temporal divides. The situation in Palestine–Israel has taken an increasingly central role in mobilising transnational solidarities that cross such boundaries. By examining James Baldwin’s analysis of Harlem’s ‘occupation’ – as well as drawing from a range of voices such as Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Toni Morrison and Laleh Khalili – this paper will explore the shared experiences of racism, colonialism, military occupation and dispossession that separate and divide, and the possibilities for transnational solidarities that defy those separations.


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