Abstract: Income management, which reduces the control that benefit recipients have over social security income by quarantining a percentage for approved expenses, was introduced in both Australia and New Zealand in the late 2000s. In Australia, income management explicitly targeted Indigenous communities, being initiated as part of the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007, then later extended to other benefit recipients. In New Zealand, all 16- and 17-year-old benefit recipients and 18-year-old parents on a benefit became subject to income management in 2012 as a means to inhibit future ‘welfare dependency’ amongst young people. Despite the absence of an explicitly racialised framing in New Zealand, this article contends that both income management programmes represent a form of institutional racism, disproportionately affecting Indigenous peoples and significantly limiting Indigenous opportunities for self-determination.

Abstract: Self-determination for Indigenous peoples across the globe continues to be a controversial and widely debated topic. In Canada, the language of recognition has been increasingly utilized to frame Indigenous claims for self-determination resulting in policies and initiatives that have often been deemed progressive and empowering. In response, an increasing number of scholars and activists have argued that land claims, self-government models, and economic development initiatives implemented by the Crown under the guise of recognition continue to reproduce colonial Indigenous-state relations in Canada. In this article, I juxtapose the spatiality of colonial governance reproduced through recognition-based strategies with the relational geographies lived through everyday practices of self-determination that are rooted in place-based Indigenous ontologies. Specifically, I examine Omushkegowuk Cree ontologies of self-determination expressed through the law of awawanenitakik and lived through the process of ceremonial regeneration. In doing so, I aim to cultivate further dialogue in geography on the diverse ways Indigenous peoples think about and live self-determination outside and/or alongside formal state and intergovernmental structures, while simultaneously complicating the way we think about place, land, and responsibility.

Excerpt: There is now a burgeoning scholarship at the intersection of new imperialism and the history of humanitarianism. Scholars have not only pointed to the continuing need to historicise humanitarian developments, but, importantly, argued for more consideration of humanitarian developments outside of Europe and the “Third World.” As Alan Lester and Fae Dussart have recently argued, we must reassess entrenched understandings of the development of humanitarianism as originating from an “anti-slavery mother” and “European battlefield father,” especially in the “light of trans-imperial governmental experiments in violently colonised settler colonial spaces.” The diverse forms of imperial humanitarian history, and their entanglements with violence in colonised regions such as Australia, New Zealand, North America, India and the Pacific, demand attention.

This special collection takes up this challenge to consider the diverse and contested relationship between humanitarianism and violence in the Anglophone colonies, and the experiences and impact of humanitarians from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries who sought to ameliorate various forms of colonial violence, advocate for non-violence and/or engage in anticolonial and humanitarian activities. We are particularly interested in exploring the various conceptualisations of colonial conflict by humanitarians: their written accounts “on the ground” and assessments of both epistemological and physical violence; their appeals, strategies and interventions to arrest violence and protect suffering subjects; the local and transnational protests against violence; the politics of witnessing; and the economies of affect and sentiment, and narratives of humanitarianism and violence that circulated with personnel and though text within imperial networks. Interrogated here too are the ways that humanitarians, protectors and others could simultaneously be implicated in or oversee various forms of violence; indeed, the refutation of outright conflict or brutality could sometimes lead to other forms of harm and organised coercion of colonised, unfree and convicted peoples alike. Early cross-cultural contact resulted in explicit and undeniable physical conflict and indeed acts of colonial terror, associated with the classic frontier of European invasion, but a consequence of colonial state formation and the extension of European-style laws and other “civilising” regimes was that while violent interpersonal conflict may have subsided (or have been more easily hidden), methods for identifying, representing and managing Indigenous and unfree populations rose with the development of colonial state infrastructure. Over time, such tensions only increased in many colonial cultures. These forms of social management, which may be described as infrastructural or bureaucratic violence, could have highly destructive effects upon Indigenous communities, even if the everyday practices of protection and surveillance were apparently benevolent in intention.

“The history of humanitarianism importantly is also the history of those who suffer,” writes Michelle Tusan. Crucially important, therefore, are the experiences of humanitarianism’s recipients—Indigenous peoples, enslaved and convicted peoples, and other unfree labourers—and their political engagement with or refutations of colonial humanitarian endeavours. Scholarship which posits humanitarianism as a unilinear, beneficent alleviation of the suffering of its putative objects can also be delimited. As Tusan remarks, comprehending the humanitarian response to violence, atrocity and genocide “necessarily requires considering the relationships of power that inevitably shadow any thinking about intervention on behalf of persecuted populations.” In analysing these complex imperial and multidirectional power relations, we seek to foreground subversions of power on the ground and also the ways that the precepts and rhetoric of liberal humanitarianism might be received and actively reworked by colonised peoples. Further, as Sean Scalmer’s essay in this collection shows, such discourses could be effectively harnessed to anticolonial struggle, despite the implicit limits and disjuctures of an imperial humanitarian discourse of nonviolence.

Excerpt: A team of archaeologists say they’ve made a potentially “seismic” discovery in Canada that could “rewrite the history of Vikings in the New World” — and they did it with the help of medieval sagas and the latest satellite technology.

Description: Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use of ‘honour’ in two colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the early British settlements in Australia, between 1750 and 1850. The mobile populations of emigrants and sojourners, sailors and soldiers, merchants and traders, slaves and convicts who surged into and through these regions are not usually associated with ideas of honour. But in both societies, competing and contradictory notions of honour proved integral to the ways in which colonisers and colonised, free and unfree, defended their status and insisted on their right to be treated with respect. During these times of flux, concepts of honour and status were radically reconstructed.

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William Cullen Bryant, ‘The Bee’ (1832)

The bee,
A more adventurous colonist than man,
Fills the savannas with his murmurings,
And hides his sweets, as in the golden age,
Within the hollow oak. I listen long
To his domestic hum, and think I hear
The sound of that advancing multitude
Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground
Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice
Of maidens, and the sweet solemn hymn
Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain
Over the dark-brown furrows. All at once
A fresher wind sweeps by, and breaks my dream,
And I am in the wilderness alone.

Abstract: Behind every colonial and imperial project laid a persistent constellation of ideas in which rights, obligations and duties were specified to justify colonialism and establish ownership of land. This constellation of ideas provided the reasons for European expansionism, in addition to forming part of the ideological practices of the land-centred settler colonial project of founding new political orders. In this article, I explore the ideologies of land appropriation in colonial South Africa, paying particular attention to the idea of ‘empty land’ and ‘trusteeship’. As well as attending to this partly neglected aspect of South Africa’s colonial history, I argue that land restitution today continues to be informed by norms that were used to justify occupation and the appropriation of lands inhabited by indigenous peoples.

Abstract: This article concerns the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women from its formation in 1919 to its closure in 1964 upon the withdrawal of the Treasury grant that provided the bulk of its funding. Describing the imperial network of voluntary organisations and migrants, through which the Society operated, it shows continuity in its activities, geographical remit and personnel from the interwar period despite efforts, especially by the 1960s, to reframe the Society’s imperial mission with the rhetoric of Commonwealth and development. It highlights the persistence of imperial institutions and networks after the Second World War.

Abstract: Based on interviews with thirty women, this article examines white attitudes to the coming of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. As it details, many of the interviewees construct problematic versions of the past, foregrounding what Annie E. Coombes has termed the ‘deceptively benign’ nature of settler colonialism. Through an examination of the context in which the interviews were conducted, the article comments on the mobilisation of certain post-colonial narratives regarding Zimbabwe’s recent past. By examining the voices of some of Southern Africa’s ‘orphans of empire’, it engages with existing literatures on white women and empire, settler colonialism and diaspora studies.

Abstract: Using media coverage of the withdrawal of OxyContin in Canada in 2011 and 2012 as an example, this article describes a systematic analysis of how news media depict First Nations peoples in Canada. Stark differences can be seen in how First Nations and non-First Nations individuals and communities are represented. In First Nations communities, problematic substance use is discussed without considering the context of pain management, broad generalizations are made, and language of hopelessness and victimization is employed. An analysis of the differences in language, tone, sources of information, and what is left unsaid, makes visible the ways in which misinformation about First Nations peoples and communities is constructed and perpetuated in media discourses.