Description: During the Second World War the cattle industry in northern Australia was under stress. It was a boom time for business, in particular for the large international firms like Vesteys, selling beef to the allied armed forces. At the same time they lost stockmen, especially Aboriginal labourers to the defence forces, where Aborigines were paid proper wages.

In this crisis of labour shortage Vesteys, resistant to pressure by government to improve working conditions, took an unprecedented measure. They engaged two young anthropologists – Ronald and Catherine Berndt – as liaison and welfare officers to tackle the labour problem. The Berndts were to assist in increasing the Aboriginal workforce by investigating, so they believed, on ways to improve the treatment and working conditions of Aboriginal pastoral workers. Vesteys, however, as it gradually transpired, had different priorities.

Abrogating Responsibility analyses the complex political and personal relations between representatives of the cattle industry, northern territory and commonwealth governments, anthropologists and Aboriginal people. With the exception of A.S. Bingle, General manager of the Australian Investment Agency (the Australian subsidiary of the British based Vestery Brothers) each of the main protagonists – A.P. Elkin, professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney, E.W.P. Chinnery, director of the Northern Territory Native Affairs Branch, and the Berndts – were possessed of the best intentions and actively sought ways to ameliorate and advance the position of Aboriginal people. As the the Berndts’ survey drew to an end the director of the Natives Affairs Branch in the Northern Territory wondered:

‘Is it a practical proposition to employ two anthropologists to observe conditions on your stations with a view to suggest improvements, and then to treat any comments, impressions and suggestions they make as negligible?’ 

Abrogating Responsibility seeks answers to the question: how was it possible, with so much knowledge about the horrendous conditions Aboriginal people labored and lived in, and so many well-intentioned agencies and individuals, that nothing changed? Ensuing the laying of blame the book’s careful and detailed analysis opens up new insights into a system that placed Aborigines at the end of the line in a series of relationships on a local, state, and national level.

Abstract: In this article I explore two novels, Written in the Sky and Up Among the Stars, by Matthew Kaopio, as instances of indigenous futurism from a Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) writer. Although Kaopio’s work must be considered in relation to the body of Hawaiian literature, this article looks at insights that emerge from treating the novels as instances of indigenous futurism and reading with an eye for the ways that Kaopio constructs and imagines an Indigenous world by subverting settler–colonial expectations, drawing instead on Indigenous conceptions of reality, literacy, and history. I argue specifically that Kaopio connects Hawaiian ideas about ʻāina-based Indigenous literacy with an appropriation of the Mormon revelatory tradition in order to elaborate for readers a syncretic yet thoroughly Kanaka Maoli spiritual order and philosophical foundation for resurgence. Within this worldview, the figure of the Indian is reappropriated and claimed as ancestor to Native Hawaiians, serving not as what Jodi Byrd calls a “transit of empire” but rather as a transit of resurgence (10). The paper also attempts to perform what Chadwick Allen has called “ purposeful Indigenous juxtapositions,” but from my own position as a settler–scholar (xviii). I juxtapose Kaopio’s novels with both Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the postcolonial sf of Vandana Singh in order to examine the authors’ different treatments of the land, the space of the home, and homeless figures of abjection.

Abstract: In contemporary mainstream science fiction victims are frequently the ultimate heroes, and white men are often (astonishingly) the ultimate victims. To occupy the position of the victim is often to be absolved of guilt and invested with the moral authority of retributive agency, and science fiction repeatedly offers agents of privilege an invitation to occupy the position of victims. In sharp contrast to this embrace of imperial masochism within mainstream science fiction, one of the most striking aspects of indigenous speculative fictions is a consistent refusal to sanctify victimry. Despite centuries of genocidal violence and extraordinary hardship within enduring settler–colonial regimes, indigenous sf narratives deconstruct victimization and eschew imperial masochism in favor of what Gerald Vizenor refers to as survivance paradigms. This essay examines key indigenous science fictions that reject victimization in favor of survivance narratives. Vizenor’s own “Custer on the Slipstream” (1978), for example, rejects the American imperial narrative of George Armstrong Custer as a victim–hero and exposes him as an agent of colonial oppression. Vizenor frames resurrection as a literal transmission of imperialist ideologies, and his hero, a reborn iteration of Sitting Bull and/or Crazy Horse, rejects the notion that Indigenous Americans have been defeated in war and reveals that white Americans are corrupted with a self-defeating spiritual sickness. Vizenor’s emphasis on spiritual illness mirror’s Leslie Marmon Silko’s portrayal of “witchery” in Ceremony (1977) and Dianne Glancy’s description of deadening cold in “Aunt Parnetta’s Electric Blisters” (1990). In both of these narratives, biskaabiiyang is achieved not through embracing the role of victim but rather by rejecting paradigms of oppositional duality in favor of a sacred recognition of alterity and creativity.

Abstract: Following the annexation of Aotearoa/New Zealand by the British in 1840, Māori, as the Indigenous people of that country, experienced loss of sovereignty through the imposition of and application of new and transformative policies, including the law and unfamiliar legal and social codes. This paper considers the state and the influential legacy of an imposed, Settler-state social welfare and criminal justice system on Māori. An explicit, insider narrative will highlight how suppression, disconnection and abandonment, made manifest through particular and abusive state policies, has informed and constructed the life pathway of a member of a culturally and socially-submerged population, the Mongrel Mob gang.

Abstract: The theory of securitization—the so-called Copenhagen school—centers the concept of security on various identified threats. Security based on the collective identity by which a society preserves its essential characteristics has been defined as community security, or societal security. The underlying principle of the Copenhagen school is that state-based, sovereignty-oriented security is ineffective unless the other components of security threats are addressed. The concept of human security, developed nearly simultaneously to that of securitization, identifies threat components at the sub-state level which are not traditionally understood as security concerns. Both schools of security thought are similar as they offer nontraditional approaches to understanding the concept of security. In this article, I explore securitization theory and the concept of human security to elaborate community perspectives in the understanding of security. In a case study, I investigate the security concerns of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. The transformation of the Arctic by climate change and its impacts has resulted in new challenges and opportunities, so I explore how indigenous peoples in general and the Sámi in particular understand security which promotes their societal security. Although I show that this group of people deserves recognition and the ability to exercise greater authority, I conclude that diverse concepts of security do not by any means undermine the core traditional concept of security. These aspects of security remain subject to scrutiny by states and exist in a vertical structure. The Sámi, therefore, rely on affirmative actions by states to enjoy greater rights to maintain their community security.

Abstract: In this paper, I aim to investigate the migration of Indigenous youth from the reserve to the urban environment. I will investigate the implications of an arts-based programme for youth and how they utilized my programme as a resource for learning. The goals of this paper are to provide a nuance thinking of and theorizing land as related to Indigenous communities. Indigenous young adults have had to figure out how to deal with these injustices from residential school and have taken up the call to fight for in their communities against state/nation desires for annihilation. To carry out this study, I conducted a critical ethnography and used arts-based methods to collect data. The stories of the IYAs became vital to learning about the challenges they faced and obstacles they have overcome, including fighting for recognition under the Indian Act, border politics within Canada and the United States, not knowing one’s traditional land and barriers to migrating to the city independently of one’s family. The data collected reveal the resilience of Indigenous young adults in the ways they are overcoming obstacles and speaking out using cultural production and innovative means of communication.

Abstract: In 2014, Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson connected #BlackLivesMatter and #MMIWG2S by highlighting their existence in “a similar place.” Here, I interpret this as a space of shared emotion and geography, emphasizing the land on which anti-Black and colonial violences occur. I argue that this provides a methodology for the study of multiethnic literature in a way that reckons with the interrelatedness of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism without conflating them under the auspices of “multiculturalism.” I read memoirs by Deborah Miranda and Jesmyn Ward to explore how they articulate the relationship between personal and spatial history.  

Abstract: Access the special issue here.

Description: My thesis examines the possibility for decolonization in the aftermath of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and proposes settler-shame as both generative and necessary to decolonizing and disrupting the patterns of ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous bodies. I specifically focus on how sound and performance can be used to critically engage and educate on both historical and ongoing colonial violence prevalent in settler-colonial society. I elaborate on how my own performances are an embodied form of settler-shame and put forward a sound technique I’ve called time-stretched witnessing. I draw on encounters within my own practice as an electronic artist/producer as a means of addressing the degree to which it might be possible to create space for meaningful knowledge sharing, memorialization, social transformation, and decolonization. To decolonize is to work towards a reconciliation that refuses ‘reconciliation’ as we have known it thus far, one that refuses settler innocence and encourages settler-shame, and centres Indigenous leadership, the return of land and an end to gender-based violence.

Description: Most California histories begin with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century and conveniently skip to the Gold Rush of 1849. Noticeably absent from these stories are the perspectives and experiences of the people who lived on the land long before European settlers arrived. Historian William Bauer seeks to correct that oversight through an innovative approach that tells California history strictly through Native perspectives. Using oral histories of Concow, Pomo, and Paiute workers, taken as part of a New Deal federal works project, Bauer reveals how Native peoples have experienced and interpreted the history of the land we now call California. Combining these oral histories with creation myths and other oral traditions, he demonstrates the importance of sacred landscapes and animals and other nonhuman actors to the formation of place and identity. He also examines tribal stories of ancestors who prophesied the coming of white settlers and uses their recollections of the California Indian Wars to push back against popular narratives that seek to downplay Native resistance. The result both challenges the “California story” and enriches it with new voices and important points of view, serving as a model for understanding Native historical perspectives in other regions.