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.

Abstract: In his short story, Totem, Indigenous author Thomas King (1993) tells the strange tale of a Canadian museum director’s lost battle with the mysterious intrusion of noisy totem poles that refuse to allow their singing, chuckling, and other vocalising to be silenced. Yet historically, those in a dominant position have defined the space occupied by Indigenous peoples in Canadian museums. However, museums are increasingly engaged in processes of “contestation, negotiation, and reinvention” (Phillips, 2012, p. 22) and in recent decades, Indigenous struggles over narrative, representation, and authority have led to profound changes in museums.

Abstract: In this text, written in relation to my book The Black Pacific, I introduce the connections of the Black Pacific, especially those by which Māori and Pasifika struggles against land dispossession, settler colonialism and racism connect with the struggles of African peoples against slavery, (settler) colonialism and racism. Sociologically, historically and geographically speaking, these connections between colonized and postcolonized peoples appear to be extremely thin, almost ephemeral. But those who critically cultivate these connections know otherwise. In addressing how they might know otherwise, the text addresses the need for critical theory to account in good faith for its reproduction of colonial knowledge structures.  

Abstract: Although directed by a Francophone Québécois film-maker, Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992) presents a cinematic treatment of Italy that foregrounds exile as theorized by Hamid Naficy’s concept of ‘accented cinema’. Léolo also recasts the family romance trope, which Heinz Weinmann highlights as central to Quebec cinema. Meanwhile, commentators have stressed the deeply political dimensions of Léolo despite Lauzon’s disavowal of any nationalist intent. This film consequently provides insights into the ambivalent role of Italians in Quebec’s struggle to confront the challenges posed by immigration and by its own colonial history. The current article therefore explores Léolo through a framework combining accented cinema and the family romance, and juxtaposes this text with Caffè Italia Montréal, a film which epitomizes accentedness in the context of Quebec’s Italian community. This analysis thus reveals how, in Léolo, a cinematically unasserted Indigenous influence intertwines with overtly fantasized Italianness to complicate Lauzon’s position on national identity. In so doing, this article comes to affirm the centrality of Indigenous concerns for grasping intercultural relationships whether formed through colonialism or contemporary immigration.

Excerpt: On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and neighbouring municipalities swelled with the 90,000 residents forced to flee their homes, Postmedia News (Canada’s go-to media source for neo-liberal spin) ventured to lift the collective mood with a type of silver-lining headline: “Good news everyone! Wildfires deemed no threat to Fort McMurray radioactive waste site” (Graney). Good news indeed, although perhaps compromised in its goodness by some unsettling details in the accompanying story: for instance, that the waste site now deemed safe from fire holds 43,500 cubic metres of uranium ore residue and contaminated topsoil; or that the tomb of this waste, housed beneath the city’s centrally-located Beacon Hill neighborhood, is effectively in midtown; or that the construction of the site in 2003 served to contain spillage occurring all the way back in the 1940s and 50s, a fact and a timeline meaning that the atmosphere within which Fort McMurray grew exponentially in the second half of the twentieth century was literally one of unaddressed radioactive contamination. In this regard, one might read the exclamation mark in Postmedia’s headline as doubly punctual, driving home the affect requisite to the story itself while also demarcating sharply the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of radioactivity. Never mind the uncertainties of the radioactive past, the headline’s exclamation seems to say: trust instead in the security—the inviolability—of our collective radioactive future.

That the “good news” on offer in this story was genuinely news will not only index popular ignorance about the storage of radioactive waste in Fort McMurray—it will also prove symptomatic of profound historical amnesia: the widespread forgetting or indeed failure to know that this northern city, well before becoming a global centre for bitumen extraction, was once a key hub in the transport of uranium. The radioactive materials were sourced in the 1940s from the world’s first uranium mine, located at Port Radium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and after transport by train from Fort McMurray and refinement in Ontario, were shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico where they were used to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945 that bomb killed 100,000 people instantly in the city of Hiroshima and left tens of thousands to die of radioactive poisoning in the months that followed. The uranium mines were worked by members of the Sahtu Dene First Nation, who hauled and ferried the ore in forty-five kilogram burlap sacks, exposed to the radioactive dust that coated their lungs, contaminated their water, and infiltrated their homes. Declassified documents have since shown that the U.S. and Canadian governments never informed the workers of the risks involved (Nikiforuk); Deline, the nearby Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake, would become known as “the village of widows.”

We choose to begin our special issue on “Resource Aesthetics” with this amnesiac history because the prospect of Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site conjoins a host of concepts, issues, problems, and motifs that animate, variously, the essays to follow. The story turns on dynamics of visibility, of what can and cannot be seen. It highlights the inescapable entanglement of distinct energy sources and regimes under modernity—in this case, the overdetermined petro-system supplemented by nuclear-fuel residuals. It indicates the spatiotemporal complexities of extraction’s practices as of its legacies. It intimates a capacious repertoire of aesthetic figuration indispensable to the generation and deployment of energy as hegemonic resource. And it marks the inextricability of energy as power from social and political power, most significantly with respect to an ongoing capitalist history of settler-colonialism (crucial for us to acknowledge, writing as we do from Treaty 6 territory) in which resource extraction and the violent, even genocidal project of clearing away Indigenous peoples go hand in hand.