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Per(forming) authenticity: Pamela Lee’, Journey Through the Third Space: Performing Aboriginal Identity Through Historic Re-Enactment Sites’, in Lori G. Beaman, Sonia Sikka (eds), Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp 19-28

07Aug16

Abstract: This chapter reads anthropologist Laura Peers’ Playing Ourselves (2007) through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural performance. Playing Ourselves showcases First Nations interpreters playing their historic ancestors in living history sites run by North American state-owned heritage agencies. This focus on First Nations performers highlights the ‘toured’ rather than the tourist, inverting our theme of the traveller to elsewhere seeking authenticity. In the cultural tourism scholarship, Aboriginal performers are generally interpreted as passive victims, forced to stereotype themselves as primitive ‘Indians’ to satisfy the tourist gaze. Through Bhabha, I follow Peers in arguing against this assumption. These performers speak as creative subjects constructing identity within the constraints of the ‘Wild West’ frontier myth, reshaping the colonial imaginary through the subterfuge of ‘play’ performances.


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Unfinished business: Michael Elliott, ‘Participatory Parity and Indigenous Decolonization Struggles Authors’, Constellations, 2016

07Aug16

Access the article here.


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Settler environmentalism is settler colonialism: La Paperson, ‘A ghetto land pedagogy: an antidote for settler environmentalism’, Environmental Education Research, 20, 1, 2014, pp. 115-130

05Aug16

Abstract: A ghetto land pedagogy begins with two axioms that align it with land education more broadly, and that distinguish it from the general umbrella of environmental education. First, ghetto colonialism is a specialization of settler colonialism. Second, land justice requires decolonization, not just environmental justice. A ghetto land pedagogy thus attends to an analysis of settler colonialism, offers a critique of settler environmentalism, and forwards a decolonizing cartography as a method for land education. This article discusses ‘storied land’ as a critical cartographic method for land education, illustrated through a discussion of land in the San Francisco Bay Area.


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An indigenous heartland? Doug Kiel, James F. Brook, ‘Introduction: Reframing and Reclaiming Indigenous Midwests’, Middle West Review, 2, 2, 2016, pp. vii-x

05Aug16

Excerpt: Like the pictograph we feature on our cover, which speaks to ties among peoples and places in the region, this special issue of the Middle West Review explores a diverse range of Indigenous experiences in a variety of locations in what has come to be known as the American Midwest. “The Midwest,” however, is not an Indigenous marker of place, but rather a US spatial category that is defined, in part, by the national project of replacing Indigenous societies. Framing Indigenous peoples within this geographical construct, then, opens a discursive space for grappling with the issues of settler colonialism that lie at the heart of this collection of essays.

An Indigenous sense of place, by contrast, is expressed in the cover image of an Ojibwe pictographic petition, copied by artist Seth Eastman. The birch bark original was carried by a delegation of Lake Superior Ojibwe leaders to Washington, dc, in 1849. The delegation traveled from Wisconsin to the US capital to formally request that Congress and the president guarantee their right to remain permanently in their Wisconsin homelands. Each of the animal figures—the catfish, the man-fish, the bear, the three martens, and the crane—represents the Ojibwe clans to which members of the delegation belonged. The lines connecting the hearts of the other animals to the heart of the crane signify the clans’ unity, while the lines connecting their eyes to the crane’s eye indicate that the representative of the Crane Clan is leading the delegation. The pictograph also illustrates the strong connection between the Ojibwe people and Lake Superior as well as the wild rice lakes. The petition’s depiction of an Indigenous geopolitical reality helps to destabilize monolithic notions of the American Midwest by illustrating how one Native people visualized their relationship to their homelands.


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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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