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Indigenous alterity produces settler normality: Maximilian Viatori, ‘Defending White-Mestizo Invisibility through the Production of Indigenous Alterity: (Un)Marking Race in Ecuador’s Mainstream Press’, Anthropological Quarterly, 89, 2, 2016, pp. 485-514

27Jul16

Abstract: This article demonstrates the central role that discursively marked Others play in the defense and maintenance of white-mestizo unmarkedness in Ecuadorian public discourse. It does so through an analysis of the circulation of public discourses of race in interviews with indigenous activists published in the newspaper El Comercio from 1992 to 2004. These interview texts provide critical insight into the discursive strategies employed by white-mestizo editors and reporters to mark indigenous voices, thus naturalizing racial inequalities in Ecuadorian politics and society. An analysis of this dynamic underscores the challenges that indigenous interventions face in upsetting this process of naturalization.


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Even ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilient indigeneity’ are transfer: Marjo Lindroth, Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, ‘The biopolitics of resilient indigeneity and the radical gamble of resistance’, Resilience, 2015

26Jul16

Abstract: This paper probes the current empathetic common ground on indigeneity in international politics and views the care for indigeneity as the loving embrace of biopower. First, we argue that indigeneity is a target of particular biopolitical aspirations that resonate with the resilience discourse. By engaging in a critical discussion of resilience
as a technique of neoliberal governance we identify adaptation, vulnerability and care as the building blocks of indigenous resilience. They entail a particular script on the proper indigenous subjectivity. Second, we discuss the ways in which resistance could be conceptualised in the context of this power that works through resilience. Resistance to biopower is a gamble that involves gains and losses that are impossible to assess beforehand. We ponder care, victimhood and hope as sites of resistance that could offer ways to view indigeneity in more political terms than those defined by resilience alone.


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On ancient Israel as a settler society: Pekka Pitkänen, ‘The ecological-evolutionary theory, migration, settler colonialism, sociology of violence and the origins of ancient Israel’, Cogent Social Sciences, 2, 1, 2016

24Jul16

Abstract: This paper looks at the question of the origins of ancient Israel from the perspective of four social-scientific based approaches. These are the ecological-evolutionary theory developed by Gerhard Lenski, theories of migration and settler colonialism and a sociological approach to violence developed by Siniša Malešević. It shows how the four theories fit together well and provide a comparative framework for interpreting both biblical and archaeological data, rendering it plausible to see early Israel as a settler colonial agrarian frontier society that was considerably based on migration from outside and where violence played a significant part in the formation and development of that society.


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Genocide and assimlation: Nichols, Bradley Jared, The Hunt for Lost Blood: Nazi Germanization Policy in Occupied Europe’, PhD Dissertation, University of Tennessee, 2016

23Jul16

Abstract: Throughout the Second World War, the National Socialist regime enacted a wide-ranging campaign to enhance the German nation by assimilating conquered populations into its demographic structure. At the axis of this multifaceted enterprise stood the Re-Germanization Procedure, or WED – a special program designed to absorb “racially valuable” foreigners into the German body politic by sending them to live with host families in the very heart of the Third Reich. The following dissertation provides the first ever study of the Re-Germanization Procedure and examines the momentous influence this initiative exerted over Nazi policy-making in occupied Europe. It is a story of the nexus between popular opinion on the home front and imperialism abroad, a fresh inquiry into the dynamics of German rule and their basis in the experiences of ordinary human beings, a kaleidoscopic portrait detailing a signature aspect of the National Socialist era that has largely eluded the scrutiny of historical analysis. The WED created a space where German and non-German civilians could articulate their understandings of race, community, and national belonging from within the settings of everyday life. Drawing on methodological tools from the fields of critical race studies and postcolonial theory, my research probes the extraordinary degree to which their interactions with state actors, and with each other, helped shape the classification of indigenous peoples across the length and breadth of Hitler’s empire – a place where identity politics often meant the difference between life and death. By situating this process within a global context of nation-building and colonialism, my project reveals an unfamiliar side of an infamous epoch in order to show how, under the wartime Third Reich, discourses of race came to function not just as an impetus for genocidal violence, but as a transformative framework of inclusion.


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Racialisation is a company matter: Michael Hughes, ‘Within the Grasp of Company Law: Land, Legitimacy, and the Racialization of the Métis, 1815–1821’, Ethnohistory, 63, 3, 2016, pp. 519-540

23Jul16

Abstract: By 1815 the Red River Métis were coalescing as a social and political group, asserting their rights to land as an indigenous community. Their opponents, the Hudson’s Bay Company, sought to establish a colony at Red River, while their allies, the North West Company, claimed access to these lands due to prior usage. After conflict between the parties erupted at the Battle of Seven Oaks, both companies waged propaganda campaigns to articulate their version of events. These publications sought to legitimate both companies’ rule through their specific constructions of jurisdiction, land rights, Métis family structure, and race.


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You cannot ‘repatriate’ a settler constitution: Madeline Rose Knickerbocker, Sarah Nickel, ‘Negotiating Sovereignty: Aboriginal Perspectives on a Settler-Colonial Constitution, 1975-1983’, BC Studies, 190, 2016

20Jul16

Abstract: In contrast to settler colonial legal understandings of Aboriginal rights and title as existing within the Canadian state, BC Aboriginal political actors in the 1970s and 1980s relied on philosophical notions of Aboriginal rights as stemming from the inherent, pre-colonial sovereignty and nationhood of First Nations peoples. These concepts run throughout the history of Aboriginal experience and remained foundational to the discourse of Aboriginal sovereignty in British Columbia during debates surrounding the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Existing Canadian historiography has located Aboriginal activists as key and yet marginal figures in the constitutional debates, while a broad range of interdisciplinary scholarship has helped us understand the concept of Aboriginal sovereignty in theory. Building on these insights, our work shifts Aboriginal people into the foreground and emphasizes their centrality in the patriation debates, which, as an example, grounds and historicizes the theoretical work on Aboriginal sovereignty. As we argue, between 1975 and 1983 Aboriginal peoples relied on oral histories and traditions of sovereignty and mobilized these in response to the settler colonial state’s push for constitutional patriation. In this sense, BC Aboriginal peoples who protested constitutional patriation were not ahistorical agents participating in an isolated movement, but were informed by both their knowledge of their communities’ embedded sovereignties, and generations of historically entrenched Aboriginal resistance.


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Is settler colonialism racist? Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘At the limits of the human: reading Postraciality from Palestine’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2016

20Jul16

Abstract: Drawing from David Goldberg’s attentiveness to racism and ‘postraciality’, I read the role of racial violence and terror in the making of Palestine and the Palestinians. The paper shows how Goldberg’s book unsettles racialized convictions of postraciality, and deconstructs the uncompromising global narrative of race. Following Goldberg’s analysis, this paper challenges racialized Zionist ideologies by considering how we might understand the marking of Palestinian homes, bodies, and lives that have become sites of racialized incarceration and brutality through the process of Israeli settler colonialism. I suggest that there is a need to pay close attention to mundane, everyday modes of suffering in order to understand the postraciality of racial suffering in the context of Palestine. I explore how the equation of Palestinians with non-humans requires them either to disappear or submit to racialized exercises of power. These questions allow us to critically analyze postraciality in the context of those living at the limits of humanity.


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Introducing a special issue on indigenous peoples and tourism: Anna Carr, Lisa Ruhanen, Michelle Whitford, ‘Indigenous peoples and tourism: the challenges and opportunities for sustainable tourism’, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2016

20Jul16

Abstract: The Indigenous tourism focus of the 16 papers in this special issue provides readers with an opportunity to explore the dynamics behind an array of issues pertaining to sustainable Indigenous tourism. These papers not only provide a long overdue balance to the far too common, negatively biased media reports about Indigenous peoples and their communities but also highlight the capacity of tourism as an effective tool for realizing sustainable Indigenous development. Throughout the papers reviewed in detail here, readers are reminded of the positive (capacity building) and negative (commodification) realities of Indigenous tourism development. Concomitantly, readers are privy to the practical and theoretical contributions pertaining to the management of cultural values and Indigenous businesses and the social and economic empowerment of Indigenous groups. The main contribution of this special issue, however, is a call for increasing research by, or in collaboration with, Indigenous researchers so that Indigenous authors and editors of academic journals become the norm in academia. Ultimately, Indigenous scholars and tourism providers should be the major contributors to, and commentators about, mainstream and niche approaches to Indigenous tourism management, whilst communities gain visibility not just as the visited “Other”, but as global leaders within tourism and related sectors.


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Settler colonialism is indigenous incarceration: Stephanie Lumsden, ‘Reproductive Justice, Sovereignty, and Incarceration: Prison Abolition Politics and California Indians’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 40, 1, 2016, pp. 33-46

17Jul16

Access the article here.


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On genocide and settler colonialism: Walter L. Hixson, ‘Policing the Past: Indian Removal and Genocide Studies’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2016

17Jul16

Excerpt: For scholars Gary Clayton Anderson, John Mack Faragher, and Guenter Lewy, among many others, genocide appears to be a term reserved for Turks, Nazis, Cambodians, Rwandans, and other truly evil peoples but is unsuitable for application to American history.

Anderson has decided that the correct term to apply to the history of American Indian policy is ethnic cleansing, and that the 1998 Rome Statute provides the singularly correct bureaucratic entity to determine such matters. He glosses in passing that “[t]he Rome Statute does not specifically outline the crime of ‘ethnic cleansing,’” his own preferred term. He also incorrectly states that the United States has “accepted” the International Criminal Court; in fact, the United States continues to reject the jurisdiction of the ICC as a matter of state policy.

The historian’s task is to interrogate, frame, and contextualize terminology rather than assert (or dismiss) terms as if the meaning of these representations was precise or self-evident. I heartily concur with Anderson that ethnic cleansing is an excellent term to describe what happened in the colonial encounter. In American Settler Colonialism: A History, I employed it liberally, but I also argued that the United States “pursued a continuous ‘foreign-policy’ of colonial genocide targeting indigenous North Americans.” I added that, through centuries of borderland conflict, Americans “internalized a propensity for traumatic, righteous violence, and a quest for total security, which came to characterize a series of future conflicts.


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