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The ‘myth of friendship’? Lucy Taylor, ‘Welsh–Indigenous Relationships in Nineteenth Century Patagonia: ‘Friendship’ and the Coloniality of Power’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 2016

03Aug16

Abstract: This article discusses the colonial encounter of the Welsh and Tehuelche/Mapuche in the Welsh colony (Y Wladfa Gymreig), founded 1865. The Welsh sought to create a Welsh-speaking utopia in the ‘empty’ lands of Patagonia, paradoxically using this colonisation as a way to resist disparagement of the Welsh language and culture by an English-dominated state. The article deploys a ‘coloniality of power’ perspective and explores archive materials that reveal how both the Welsh and the indigenous communities whose land they colonised were caught up in coloniality and expanding capitalist modernity. I conclude that exploring the ambiguous relationship which results from this encounter complicates and deepens our understanding of how the coloniality of power works. Particularly, I argue that stripping away the ‘myth of friendship’ between the Welsh and indigenous is vital, not to diminish moments of genuine mutual affinity but rather to show how these are caught up in processes of colonialisation.


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The age of apology reaches Taiwan: ‘Taiwan president apologizes to aboriginals for suffering’, AP News, 01/08/16

02Aug16

Excerpt: Taiwan’s president on Monday apologized on behalf of the government to the island’s aboriginal peoples for 400 years of conquest and colonization, saying the facing of difficult historical facts was necessary for society to move forward.

Tsai Ing-wen said her government wished to “take a further step” and offer its “fullest apology.”

“If we wish to declare ourselves as a country of one people, we need to face these historical facts. We have to face the truth. Most importantly, the government must truly reflect on itself and that is why I’m standing here today,” Tsai said at a ceremony at the presidential office building in the capital, Taipei.

A “justice and historical justice commission” would be established to deal with the problems of the past, Tsai said. She was speaking on Taiwan’s official aboriginal people’s day before representatives of the island’s 16 officially recognized native tribes.

Taiwan was inhabited by a variety of tribes for thousands of years before Dutch colonizers began importing Chinese laborers in large numbers during the mid-17th century.

The Dutch were expelled from the island by Chinese privateer Koxinga, whose successors were then defeated by the Manchu Qing dynasty as part of their conquest of most of China. It was loosely administered from the mainland until becoming a province in 1885 under foreign pressure and was made a colony by Japan in 1895.

At the end of World War II, Taiwan was handed to Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China, whose government relocated to the island in 1949 after being driven from China by Mao Zedong’s communist forces.

Tsai was elected by a landslide in January elections that have thrown a shadow over the island’s relations with China, which claims Taiwan as a part of its territory from ancient times. Her view of Taiwan as a colonial society clashes with Beijing’s claim that the island has always been an inherent part of China, which must eventually be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.


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Indigenous sovereignty as a manageable risk: Anna Stanley, ‘Resilient Settler Colonialism: “Responsible Resource Development”, “Flow-Through” Financing, and the Risk Management of Indigenous Sovereignty in Canada’, Environment and Planning A, 2016

31Jul16

Abstract: This essay interrogates aspects of the recent reconfiguration of Canadian environmental resource governance in relation to Indigenous sovereignty, rights, and struggles for self-determination in the context of mining and mineral exploration. I am especially interested in the targeting of expressions of Indigenous sovereignty as threats to the “resilience” of the national economy and attempts to “manage” Indigenous sovereignty and rights through mechanisms of resource governance. I focus primarily on a set of changes made to “flow-through share” financing arrangements that allow mining firms to raise capital on the basis of tax credits for expenditures incurred in relation to engaging Indigenous rights in the mineral exploration process. I suggest that flow-through financing is a method for “risk managing” exposure to the threat of Indigenous sovereignty in the interests of mining capital and the state that produces effects of crown sovereignty. In closing, the essay considers relationships between the neoliberalization of Canadian environmental governance and settler colonialism.


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Genocide? Russell Thornton, ‘On Demography and Genocide’, Reviews in American History, 44, 2, 2016, pp. 210-216

31Jul16

Excerpt: It is only relatively recently that “genocide” has been used to describe what happened to Native Americans, and determined efforts to end the term’s usage in this regard are a testament to the power of the term. The three volumes considered here address whether the history of American Indians north of Mexico may be called genocide. They do so in different ways and come to various conclusions.


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On the settler ‘heritage’: Deborah Gewertz, Frederick Errington, ‘From intensive agriculture to prairie heritage: a paradox of land repurposing in Eastern South Dakota, USA’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016

31Jul16

Abstract: In this paper we take up Tania Li’s question ‘what is land’. While her interest is in how land becomes inscribed so as to make it investable, ours is in reversing the sequence so as to make long-inscribed land de-investable. We focus on a family farm in Eastern South Dakota which was bequeathed to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in order that its tilled fields of industrially produced corn and soybeans be replaced with native, tallgrass prairie. The process – one of de-inscription – involved evocations of settler heritage which, ironically, provided a prairie-friendly justification for massive prairie destruction.


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On the political traditions of settler colonialism (Australia, for example): Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream and Australia’s “settler transition”’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2016

27Jul16

Abstract: Focusing on radical labour historian Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream (1968), this article reflects on the evolution of Australia’s settler colonial imagination. During a few crucial decades in the nineteenth century, colonial traditions were overcome by settler colonial ones. The former espoused a system where British rulers would paternally manage a colonial environment and all its populations (pastoralists, free settlers, convicts, emancipated convicts, and Indigenous peoples); the latter advocated the establishment of self-reliant agricultural communities of free settlers. In Replenishing the Earth (2009), James Belich distinguished between settler “transition” and settler “revolution”, and emphasised the imaginative elements that underpin and precede the shift to settler self-government. As the global settler transition took hold, locales usually associated with the perception and expectation of degenerative processes were reconfigured as propitious sites for experimenting in sociopolitical regeneration. Following and expanding on Belich’s framework, this article links Australia’s settler transition with its historiography.


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Defining settler colonialism between crimes: Margaret D. Jacobs, ‘Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing? Are These Our Only Choices?’, The Western Historical Quarterly, 2016

27Jul16

Excerpt: Gary Clayton Anderson has boldly instigated a conversation on the nature of Indian-white conflict in the American West—in a nutshell he asks, was it genocide or ethnic cleansing? Anderson answers this emphatically: ethnic cleansing, which he defines as “forced dislocation with the intent to take away lands of a particular ethnic, religious, or cultural group.” He argues that we should not label what happened in the West in the late nineteenth century as genocide because relatively low numbers of Indians were killed and there was no official intent to eliminate Indians. His most intriguing argument is that government officials engaged in one crime against humanity—ethnic cleansing through forced deportation and confinement to reservations—to actually prevent the more heinous crime of genocide.

Anderson’s formulation of Indian-white conflict in the West as an either/or choice strikes me as an oversimplification of what is actually a both/and phenomenon. Scholars such as Brendan C. Lindsay and Benjamin Madley have shown—pretty incontrovertibly—that it is entirely appropriate to use the term genocide to represent what happened in California in the late nineteenth century.1 Anderson has shown that ethnic cleansing may be a more accurate term for what transpired in other instances.2 In this brief commentary, I intend to critique both genocide and ethnic cleansing as limiting concepts and discuss alternative means of understanding a broader history of Indian-white conflict that puts women and children at the center rather than at the periphery of our historical inquiry.


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‘Indigenous peoples are not indigenous’ (Settler colonial rationales III): Oren Yiftachel, Batya Roded, Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, ‘Between rights and denials: Bedouin indigeneity in the Negev/Naqab’, Environment and Planning A, 2016

27Jul16

Abstract: The paper examines the nature of indigenous identity among Bedouin Arabs in Negev/Naqab, Israel, against a background of conceptual, legal and political controversy. It traces theoretically and comparatively the rise of indigeneity as a relational concept, deriving from colonial and postcolonial settings. The concept is shown to be part of the globalization of human rights struggle, with a potential of the indigeneity discourse to empower colonized and exploited minorities, as well as provide a platform for transitional justice. The heart of the paper provides a rebuttal of several arguments made by a group of scholars associated with the Israeli state, named here “the deniers”, who have worked to reject Bedouin (and general Palestinian) claims for indigenous status, thereby denying their entitlement to a range of human and communal rights. The paper offers a systematic examination of historical and geographic evidence and reveals that “the deniers” have raised several relevant questions and dilemmas. However, these do not undermine the typical indigenous characteristics of the Naqab Bedouin Arabs. Research shows clearly that Bedouins belong within the group of indigenous societies according to accepted international definitions and norms. This understanding obliges the Israeli state to protect Bedouin Arabs from further removals, dispossession and marginalization, as well as correct, where possible, the profound damage caused by their past dispossession, eviction and marginalization.


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‘Indigenous peoples have no rights’ (Settler colonial rationales II): Cathrena Narcisse, Indigenous perspectives on the outstanding land issue in British Columbia: “we deny their right to it”, PhD Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2016

27Jul16

Abstract: Arising from and sustained within the context of colonialism, the outstanding indigenous land issue in British Columbia has long been a source of significant conflict between indigenous people and settler governments. Due to its significantly complex political and legal background, it is difficult to reach a clear and comprehensive understanding about this matter, and gaining insight into the indigenous perspective about it is even more challenging. Explicitly considering the broader framework of colonialism in exploring the outstanding indigenous land issue in British Columbia, this dissertation places its focus upon detailing the indigenous perspective in relation to opposing political and legal government positions. Such a study is important in order to adequately understand the perpetuation of the conflicts between indigenous peoples and governments over the outstanding land issue. The research approach relies upon the examination of archival data, along with representations of indigenous oral history narratives, and attendance at indigenous political gatherings. In particular, this research project relies upon information gathered from both indigenous elders and political representatives through interviews and political meetings to form the basis of indigenous perspectives on the outstanding land issue. The findings from this research provide evidence that a discernible pattern of denial and disregard has been established and maintained by successive settler governments and that these patterns are purposefully perpetuated. The political, legal, and regulatory systems devised for power and control over indigenous peoples have effectively shaped the ‘taken for granted assumptions’ of the outstanding land issue. Indigenous perspectives on the ownership of their territories have been consistently maintained through oral history narratives over several generations. The central contribution that can be drawn from this research rests upon the revelation of how indigenous perspectives on the outstanding land issue were actively and continuously suppressed as part of the dispossession process. The significant findings include an in-depth disclosure of how purposeful political and legal procedures accompanied by expansive regulatory mechanisms have served to control how the outstanding indigenous land issue in British Columbia has been actively shaped, understood, and maintained over time through deliberate processes and procedures of colonialism.


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‘Indigenous peoples have rights, but they can be bypassed’ (Settler colonial rationales I): Martin Papillon, Thierry Rodon, ‘Proponent-Indigenous agreements and the implementation of the right to free, prior, and informed consent in Canada’, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 2016

27Jul16

Abstract: Indigenous peoples have gained considerable agency in shaping decisions regarding resource development on their traditional lands. This growing agency is reflected in the emergence of the right to free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) when Indigenous rights may be adversely affected by major resource development projects. While many governments remain non-committal toward FPIC, corporate actors are more proactive at engaging with Indigenous peoples in seeking their consent to resource extraction projects through negotiated Impact and Benefit Agreements. Focusing on the Canadian context, this article discusses the roots and implications of a proponent-driven model for seeking Indigenous consent to natural resource extraction on their traditional lands. Building on two case studies, the paper argues that negotiated consent through IBAs offers a truncated version of FPIC from the perspective of the communities involved. The deliberative ethic at the core of FPIC is often undermined in the negotiation process associated with proponent-led IBAs.


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