Description: The Land Is Our History tells the story of indigenous legal activism at a critical political and cultural juncture in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the late 1960s, indigenous activists protested assimilation policies and the usurpation of their lands as a new mining boom took off, radically threatening their collective identities. Often excluded from legal recourse in the past, indigenous leaders took their claims to court with remarkable results: for the first time, their distinctive histories were admitted as evidence of their rights. Miranda Johnson examines how indigenous peoples advocated for themselves in courts and commissions of inquiry between the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, chronicling an extraordinary and overlooked history in which virtually disenfranchised peoples forced powerful settler democracies to reckon with their demands. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with leading participants, The Land Is Our History brings to the fore complex and rich discussions among activists, lawyers, anthropologists, judges, and others in the context of legal cases in far-flung communities dealing with rights, history, and identity. The effects of these debates were unexpectedly wide-ranging. By asserting that they were the first peoples of the land, indigenous leaders compelled the powerful settler states that surrounded them to negotiate their rights and status. Fracturing national myths and making new stories of origin necessary, indigenous peoples’ claims challenged settler societies to rethink their sense of belonging”–Provided by publisher

Description: The demise of apartheid was one of the great achievements of postwar history, sought after and celebrated by a progressive global community. Looking at these events from the other side, An African Volk explores how the apartheid state strove to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a post-colonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy.

Drawing upon archival research across Southern Africa and beyond, as well as interviews with leaders of the apartheid order, Jamie Miller shows how the white power structure attempted to turn the new political climate to its advantage. Instead of simply resisting decolonization and African nationalism in the name of white supremacy, the regime looked to co-opt and invert the norms of the new global era to promote a fresh ideological basis for its rule. It adapted discourses of nativist identity, African anti-colonialism, economic development, anti-communism, and state sovereignty to rearticulate what it meant to be African. An African Volk details both the global and local repercussions. At the dawn of the 1970s, the apartheid state reached out eagerly to independent Africa in an effort to reject the mantle of colonialism and redefine the white polity as a full part of the post-colonial world. This outreach both reflected and fuelled heated debates within white society, exposing a deeply divided polity in the midst of profound economic, cultural, and social change.

Situated at the nexus of African, decolonization, and Cold War history, An African Volk takes readers into the corridors of white power to detail the apartheid regime’s campaign to break out of isolation and secure global acceptance.

Abstract: Colonialism remains active in Indigenous communities across the world, dominated by western value systems that continue to have devastating impacts on communities and aspirations. These impacts have stifled the realisation and practice of self-determination, prompting new ways of doing things. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide Indigenous communities with unique opportunities to express and action different modes of self-determination and become a space for establishing and developing online Indigenous citizenship (OIC). OIC is an innovative approach to addressing self-determination, enabling communities to discuss and debate issues, express identity, practice culture and values, mobilise political agendas and be self-determining as individuals, groups and communities. In this presentation, I will discuss the notion of online citizenship in ways that work for Indigenous communities and how online experiences of empowerment and self-determination shape and are shaped by Indigenous advancement and transformation.

Abstract: This thesis explores how an inter-tribal coalition in Southern Utah is strategically mobilizing environmental ethics in order to guarantee access to tribal homelands. Facing serious threat from Anglo communities in Utah who use race and religion to produce themselves as the authentic local population, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition forges new kinds of alliances with environmental groups and appropriates conservation and preservation ethics in order to reclaim the land. Indigenous articulations of environmentalism at Bears Ears disrupt the colonial temporal and spatial logics that undergird dominant American imaginaries of wilderness and antiquity, reattaching Native peoples to the land by centering Native American relationships to the natural world as indispensable to the future of preservation and conservation in the U.S. I employ a critical indigenous studies lens to critique how tribal governments contending with settler colonial politics of recognition strategically engage environmentalist rhetoric and align with conservation groups to assert an authentic indigeneity and guarantee their access to the land.

Abstract: In the late 1930s a novice fieldworker from the University of Chicago wrote in his field notes that his collaboration with a Ho-Chunk interpreter had failed because of the interpreter’s “aggressions” in the struggle for “white class status.” The notes exhibit a pattern of perceptual failure that I call “settler agnosia,” elements of which have been noted in research on the obstacles facing Indigenous activists. The case shows that the tendency of older anthropological accounts of contemporary American Indian life to obscure evidence of both colonial oppression and Indigenous action may have originated as consequences of a form of functional ignorance triggered by interpersonal struggles over position in the everyday relations of settler society. An ethnographic investigation of the links between settler agnosia and the practice of settlerness connects perception in everyday interactions to larger issues of knowledge production in and of settler societies. [settler colonialism, field theory, Bourdieu, race, ignorance, indigeneity, Native North America]

Excerpt: Columbus’ words in describing the first Indigenous inhabitants that he encountered in the Western Hemisphere laid the groundwork for what would become the structures of settler colonialism. Like laying the first stem of irises in a flower bed, the words Columbus used set in motion the myths and structures that would grow, just like the rhizome stem of an iris into multiple flowering parts of the flower bed of settler The growth of settler colonialism’s myths and structures was much like the horizontal growth of rhizome irises as each segment of the plant links it to all other parts and each flower that shoots up depends on all of the other shoots for its health and success. Each new horizontal segment of the plant is representative of the differing segments of settler colonialism that have worked together to create the tactics that provide for the overall strategic attack on Indigenous peoples and even on Indigeneity itself.

Abstract: The unprecedented enfranchisement of Venezuela’s indigenous population is partly a result of the formation of a state-sponsored indigenous movement. This movement prioritizes access to social services, economic development, and political participation in state structures over certain goals of free determination. Other forms of collective action with different priorities are evidence of the existence of diverging interests and goals among indigenous people. These divergences are a reflection of the way in which the indigenous population partakes in the shaping of contemporary Venezuelan politics.

Excerpt: Refusal was a stance but also a theory of the political that was being pronounced over and over again. It emerged in my own writing through observation of Kahnawà:ke action, but also through their words. I would hear “enough is enough,” “it’s not us, it’s them,” “the white man put that there, not us”—on the international border. The people of Kahnawà:ke used every opportunity to remind non-Native people that this is not their land, that there are other political orders and possibilities. This meant longer waits at borders, awkward (to say the least) interactions with cashiers, as well as difficult personal decisions. I also saw that these matters of moral and political habit were articulated quite perfectly to larger actions by the Iroquois Confederacy through time, to broader efforts to demand recognition of existing agreements, as well as refusals to play various games. Among these games is citizenship: voting, paying taxes—actions that would move Mohawks out of their own sovereignty into settler citizenship and into the promise of whiteness.³ All of this pointed analytically to the deeply unequal scene of articulation that people were thrown into and remaking through the quotidian and the grand. This deeply unequal scene of articulation that I am describing may be understood as the settler-colonial present.⁴ How, then, do those who are targeted for elimination, those who have had their land stolen from them, their bodies and their cultures worked on to be made into something else articulate their politics? How can one articulate political projects if one has been offered a half-life of civilization in exchange for land? These people have preexisting political traditions to draw from—so how do they, then, do things? They refuse to consent to the apparatuses of the state. And in time with that, I refused then, and still do now, to tell the internal story of their struggle. But I consent to telling the story of their constraint.

Abstract: In 2011, thirty-six-year-old Cindy Gladue, a Cree woman, bled to death in a hotel bathtub in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. On the night she died, Gladue had contracted for sexual exchange with Bradley Barton, a white man who worked as a trucker. In 2015, Barton was tried for the murder of Cindy Gladue. With more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women, there is compelling reason to focus on the violence Barton inflicted on Gladue, understanding it as a part of a history of the sexual brutalization and attempted annihilation of Indigenous women. To show that Gladue’s death and the trial of Barton for her murder are part of a history of colonial terror, it is necessary to unpack the framework utilized by the court, a framework that revolved around the ideas of consent and contract. I propose that we utilize a framework of disposability instead, focusing on the Indigenous woman’s expendibility in settler colonialism. Sexualized violence is key to disposability, and flesh is the site at which racial and sexual power are both inscribed. I emphasize the excessive violence that is meted out to Indigenous women as evidence of colonial power imprinted on their bodies.

Abstract: This article looks at settler colonialism and the manufacturing of food insecurity in Indigenous communities located in present-day northern Canada after 1945. The federal government undermined the foodways of Indigenous peoples and sought to make them reliant on a southern market based food economy through the criminalization of Indigenous hunting and harvesting practices and the imposition of government programs like Family Allowance, Foodmail, and Nutrition North Canada. Examining how these events and policies worked together shows how food serves as a regulatory project of assimilation and governance whereby Indigenous peoples are seemingly ‘encouraged’ to adopt European-Canadian foodways.