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.

Abstract: Global citizenship has emerged as a key objective of liberal education. Because the status of Indigenous Peoples worldwide is inextricably linked to globalization and imperialism, mainstream culture students’ attitudes toward the rights of Indigenous Peoples can be taken as an index of global citizenship. The items comprising the Measure of Attitudes Toward the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (MATRIP) draw directly from the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Twenty-three statements about Indigenous Peoples’ rights—as explicated in the UN Declaration—were transformed into Likert-type items measuring five dimensions: Preservation ofCulture, Lands & Resources, Self-Governance, Restitution, and Services and Representation. Surveys were administered to 226 undergraduates. MATRIP measurement properties were tested using confirmatory factor analysis. Results indicate that a final scale consisting of 20 items adequately measures the hypothesized dimensions.

Access the article here.

Abstract: In December 2015, Megan Davis opened her article for The Monthly, ‘Gesture Politics’, with the following words: ‘Despair. In a word, this is the universal sentiment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders I have spoken to about the state of Aboriginal policy in Australia’. More recently, Jon Altman has written in The Guardian and on the ‘Arena’ blog on the Coalition government’s 2016 Budget and its damaging disregard for Indigenous affairs, alongside the continuing failures of the all-prevailing, all-pervasive policy approach of ‘Closing the Gap’.

Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the  Present

Studies of violence against Native peoples have typically focused  narrowly on war and massacre. These narratives often cast Indians as  simple and passive victims, become trapped by stale debates about the
definition of genocide, and consign violence to the safety of the past.  While recognizing the reality of war and massacre, this symposium invites paper submissions that take new approaches to the study of  violence. We particularly encourage papers that rigorously examine the  nature of violence in past and present-day Native communities and explore the intersections of violence with a broad array of themes such as:

o Historical memories, legacies, and mythologies of violence
o Theft and destruction of homelands and environments
o Appropriation of fine arts and cultural heritage
o Gendered and sexual assaults on bodies, families, and communities
o Enslavement and captivity
o Violence within and among Native communities

We urge our participants to address the resilience and agency of Native  peoples in the face of such violence. Our hope is to secure examples and  cases that help illustrate the complex nature of violent interactions  both within Indigenous communities as well as with mainstream society.

We hope that this seminar will provide a public, academic forum for new  interpretations of past and present events, from a Native perspective, and we plan to publish selected papers in a volume that will be geared toward classroom teaching. We hope to create an online repository of syllabi for faculty who teach courses in American Indian Studies, U.S. History, World History, and Genocide Studies so that all can draw from these examples when developing or revising similar courses examining violence and Indigenous communities.

Paper abstracts of 200-300 words and a one-page c.v. should be submitted  by September 1, 2016 to the D’Arcy McNickle Center, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois. Abstracts will be reviewed and all participants notified by October 1. Accepted papers of 7,000-10,000 words should be submitted on or before April 1, 2017 and will be distributed in advance to seminar participants. They will be presented at a scholarly colloquium on May 12-13, 2017. Limited travel stipends will be available. Following public presentation, papers will be revised and submitted for publication review on July 1, 2017.

Symposium Coordinating Committee:
Susan Sleeper-Smith, History Department, Michigan State University
Patricia Marroquin Norby, Director, D’Arcy McNickle Center
Jeffrey Ostler, History Department, University of Oregon
Joshua Reid, History and American Indian Studies Departments, University
of Washington

Please submit abstracts by September 1, 2016 to: Madeleine Krass
(krassm@newberry.org)

Sponsored by the department of history, Michigan State University, East
Lansing, Michigan

Abstract: This paper examines the inquest into the deaths by suicide of two
Manitoba Indigenous female youth while imprisoned in the Manitoba Youth Centre in
Winnipeg, Canada. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inquest as a discursive
space that relies primarily on expert knowledge from law and psychiatry. It studies
the inquest’s recommendations for preventing future deaths under similar
circumstances. Utilizing Heidi Rimke’s conceptualization of psychocentrism, this
analysis examines how suicide discourse in this inquest reduces various
manifestations of violence to racial defects and places responsibility on the deceased
girls for their inability to have coped with the tortuous conditions of imprisonment. I
argue that contemporary understandings of Indigenous suicide in custody
systematically erase histories of colonial violence and erroneously reduce suicide to
an issue of individual pathology that can be identified and treated through
medicalization, psychiatrization and criminalization.

Abstract: In 1988–1989 and again in 2012 Noongar Aboriginal groups occupied high profile riverside sites in close proximity to the centre of Perth, Western Australia. On both occasions they were claiming rights to land from which their ancestors had been removed in the early nineteenth century by British colonial settlers. During a relatively brief period of struggle and interaction between the Indigenous and settler groups following the proclamation of the Swan River Colony in 1829, the Noongar population of what is now the Perth Metropolitan Area were effectively dispossessed of their land. Indeed, from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century Aboriginal people were required to obtain written permits in order to enter the urban area of Perth. In spite of this, the local Noongar population has maintained an ongoing physical, emotional and spiritual connection to their traditional country and, in particular, to certain sites within it. Two of these sites, Goonininup/the Old Swan Brewery, in 1988–1989, and Matagarup/Heirisson Island, in 2012, have been occupied by Noongar groups asserting their rights to this land. This paper will describe and compare both sites of occupation with particular reference to the methods and motivations of the occupiers and the attitudes and responses of the wider metropolitan population to these events. It will also place them in the wider context of ongoing debates over the acknowledgement of Aboriginal claims to and rights over sites of Indigenous significance and of land occupations as a form of protest.