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On indigenous nationalism, indigenous nations, and their reconstitution: Simone Poliandri (ed.), Native American Nationalism and Nation Re-building, SUNY Press, 2016

18May16

Description: Presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the recent developments of Native American nationalism and nationhood in the United States and Canada.

Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, this book provides an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging discussion on Indigenous nationhood. The contributors argue for the centrality of nationhood and nation building in molding and, concurrently, blending the political, social, economic, and cultural strategies toward Native American self-definitions and self-determination. Included among the common themes is the significance of space—conceived both as traditional territory and colonial reservation—in the current construction of Native national identity. Whether related to historical memory and the narrativization of peoplehood, the temporality of indigenous claims to sovereignty, or the demarcation of successful financial assets as cultural and social emblems of indigenous space, territory constitutes an inalienable and necessary element connecting Native American peoplehood and nationhood. The creation and maintenance of Native American national identity have also overcome structural territorial impediments and may benefit from the inclusivity of citizenship rather than the exclusivity of ethnicity. In all cases, the political effectiveness of nationhood in promoting and sustaining sovereignty presupposes Native full participation in and control over economic development, the formation of historical narrative and memory, the definition of legality, and governance.


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Assuaging settler anxieties: May Chew, ‘Mooring subjects of heritage: proprioceptive emplacement at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2016

18May16

Abstract: This article examines how visitors to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (HSIBJ) in Fort Macleod, Alberta, are physically and affectively situated within an immersive heritage landscape. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, HSIBJ is inextricably tied to regional Blackfoot and settler-colonial histories, as well as the tensions that emerge between the two. HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre is organised to plunge audiences inside the ‘live’ archaeological scene and an evocative heritage landscape. It does so through technologies, including motion-triggered projections, which locate and secure visitors within official national – and universal – heritage narratives. The central argument of this article is that HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre beckons subjects of heritage through proprioception, the awareness of the body’s position in and movement through space. Extending beyond the physiological sensation of one’s own body, proprioception also works alongside the two other substantiating buttresses of archaeology and heritage to provide a gravitational ground upon which the visitor is located and their subjectivity confirmed. Proprioceptive grounding emplaces a body within an expanded and ‘ancient’ narratology of nation, and in this way, also becomes the mechanism through which exogenous settlers assuage anxieties about their latecoming status.


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On indigenous futures: Karyn Recollet, ‘Gesturing Indigenous Futurities Through the Remix’, Dance Research Journal, 48, 1, 2016, pp. 91-105

15May16

Excerpt: This article offers a spatial and gestural analysis of Vancouver-based multi-media art collective Skookum Sound System’s digital remixed video Ay I Oh Stomp (2012). Specifically, I will explore how this remixing intervenes in settler colonialism’s disappearances and erasures, to illustrate the ways the video (particularly its activations of dance, movement and gesture) mobilize ongoing Indigenous presencing into futurity. Inspired by Mar-abe (2015)’s writings on the “black imaginary,” I argue that Indigenous futurity decolonizes the Indigenous imaginary. Ay I Oh Stomp’s (2012) remixing creates a future imaginary attentive to the past as it critiques the present, and ventures forward into the beyond. I illustrate how the video, as it holds space within the collective imaginary, is a form of radical imagination tantamount to social change, expressing, as Mar-abe (2015) writes, the “unalienable right to be that radical, to create new worlds in the place of the ones that oppress us.” As I will describe within this article, the mechanisms through which we spatially and temporally gesture “otherwise,” that is—bodily embrace this map to tomorrow, comes out of a process of “jumping scale” (Harjo 2014). Gestures of futurity are choreographies of possibilities and hope—not residing so much in an unattainable dreamscape, but rather they are in constant figuration and reconfiguration all around us. I illuminate instances where futurity is activated or glyphed (Recollet 2014) through the decolonial gesturings3 of dancers and cultural producers’ visual/aural archiving. Indigenous motion, through glyphing, I suggest, produces maps to tomorrow as a result of mobilizing multiple geographical/territorial scales. By glyphing I am referring the ways that music, dances, and other forms of persistent Indigenous motion activate specific spatial/temporal cartographies in much the same way that pet-roglyphs activate Indigenous presence on land/ sky spaces. This work is rooted in the premise that we build a relationship with the land through activating it. What then, are the lexicons of land and territories, and how can we activate (re)mapping to explore the futuristic narrative of complex land histories?


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Appropriating the appropriation: Katy Young Evans, ‘The People’s Pageant: The Stage as Native Space in Anishinaabe Dramatic Interpretations of Hiawatha’, MELUS, 2016

15May16

Access the article here.


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A special way of surveying: Marcus Gallo, ‘ Land Surveying in Early Pennsylvania Access this article + Tax (if applicable) A Case Study in a Global Context’, Journal of Early American History, 6, 1, 2016, pp. 9-39

15May16

Abstract: By the end of the seventeenth century, Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the importance of surveying to any system of land ownership. Most historians of colonial British have similarly taken colonial surveying practices as a given. This article complicates these assumptions through an examination of Pennsylvania in a wider context. In fact, land policy in colonial Anglo-America differed significantly from practices elsewhere in the early modern world. English colonizers embraced a model of settler colonialism that created a market for land, thus encouraging the proliferation of modern surveying practices.


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Reading on settler colonialism: Christie Toth, ‘Review: Seeing Settler Colonialism’, College English, 78, 5, 2016, pp. 496-510

15May16

Excerpt: I read the books I review in this essay throughout the summer of 2015, right after I finished teaching a writing course at a tribal college on the Navajo Nation where I have periodically taught and researched over the last several years. The topics my students chose to write about offer a snapshot of key concerns facing the Navajo Nation today: the environmental impact of uranium mining on Diné lands; mental health issues on the reservation; the experiences of LGBT youth in Diné Christian communities; Navajo Nation police responses to domestic violence; and the challenges of economic development in the reservation’s “checkerboard” area, where federal allotment policies have resulted in patchwork patterns of tribal landholdings. All of these issues relate in one way or another to the historical legacy and persistent structures of ongoing US settler colonialism.


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Indigeneity as psychic disorder: Susan Burch, ‘Disorderly Pasts: Kinship, Diagnoses, and Remembering in American Indian-U.S. Histories’, Journal of Social History, 2016

12May16

Abstract: “Disorderly Pasts” centers on life stories from South Dakota’s Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric hospital for American Indians. Between 1902 and 1933, the Asylum detained nearly four hundred Indigenous men, women, and children from more than fifty Native nations. Focusing especially on the experiences of Menominee people collectively stolen from their homes in Wisconsin to Canton in November 1917, this article exposes contested understandings of kin, diagnoses, and remembering. Complex relationships between the three concepts also emerge: medical diagnoses were used to undermine Indigenous kinship, and they complicate remembering. At the same time, remembering—recalling and repopulating the past—offers a way to challenge pathological diagnoses and affirm Native self-determination.

Motivated by disorder, the desire to “disrupt the systematic functioning or neat arrangement of” historical work, this project unsettles the projected objectivity and commonsense logic of U.S. medical diagnoses and institutionalization. It brings to light the violent entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, ableism, and patriarchy and their impact on Native sovereignty, Indigenous kinship, and remembering. Collaborating with relatives of those incarcerated at Canton, and drawing on decolonizing and disability studies methodologies, this work seeks to generate meaningful historical knowledge and new theoretical strategies and perspectives.


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Utopia’s contemporaneity: Susan Bruce, ‘Utopian Justifications: More’s Utopia, Settler Colonialism, and Contemporary Ecocritical Concerns’, College Literature, 42, 1, 2015, pp. 23-43

12May16

Abstract: This deliberately presentist essay uses More’s Utopia to contribute to the debate over the relationship between environmentalism and postcolonialism; explore the relationship between a text’s contexts and “meaning(s)”; and illustrate how utopian thinking can expose contradictions underlying other forms of imagining better worlds. Contextualizing Utopia with two different twenty-first-century comparators, it interrogates assumptions that Utopia has an unproblematic relation to colonialism and that it ignores environmental concerns. In illustrating how different contextualizations of the same passage can produce radically different readings of the text in which it appears, this essay foregrounds issues of interpretation that may be of use to scholars and teachers of literary texts. It concludes that although Utopia can help us acknowledge that environmental and colonial arguments sometimes share similar ethical premises, “Utopian” thinking, in its foregrounding of the difficulties, contradictions, and irresolutions of human interactions, is indispensable to a politics that seeks to imagine a better world.


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Old settlements and new settlers: Benjamin Klein, Irwin Klein and the New Settlers: Photographs of Counterculture in New Mexico, University of Nebraska Press, 2016

11May16

Description: Dropouts, renegades, utopians. Children of the urban middle class and old beatniks living alone, as couples, in families, or as groups in the small Nuevomexicano towns. When photographer Irwin Klein began visiting northern New Mexico in the mid-1960s, he found these self-proclaimed New Settlers—and many others—in the back country between Santa Fe and Taos. His black-and-white photographs captured the life of the counterculture’s transition to a social movement. His documentation of these counterculture communities has become well known and sought after for both its sheer beauty and as a primary source about a largely undocumented group.

By blending Klein’s unpublished work with essays by modern scholars, Benjamin Klein (Irwin’s nephew) creates an important contribution to the literature of the counterculture and especially the 1960s. Supporting essays emphasize the importance of a visual record for interpreting this lifestyle in the American Southwest. Irwin Klein and the New Settlers reinforces the photographer’s reputation as an astute observer of back-to-the-land, modern-day Emersonians whose communes represented contemporary Waldens.


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The labour of indigenised immigrants: Jason L. Newton, ‘“These French Canadian of the Woods are Half-Wild Folk”: Wilderness, Whiteness, and Work in North America, 1840–1955’, Labour / Le Travail, 77, 2016, pp. 121-150

11May16

Excerpt: In 1853 the Brown Company was a small water-powered sawmill in Berlin, New Hampshire, but by the turn of the century it had become a highly successful lumber and paper-processing company which made some of the largest timber cuts in the Northeast US. Its success depended largely on the French Canadian immigrant labourers employed to cut and drive logs. The company found that these workers could be hired cheaply, worked long hours, and, perhaps most importantly, it regarded them as innately suited for logging work. According to company officials, French Canadians were of a “hardy type, accustomed to the work in the bush, such as portaging, running rapids, etc., … [and were] as a rule, pretty high-grade men.” The French Canadian affinity for logging work was recognized all over North America. Adirondack scholar Alfred Donaldson wrote in the 1920s that these people “seemed naturally endowed with the agility, recklessness, and immunity to exposure that must combine to make them expert. They have always predominated as a race in the lumbering operations.” The French from “the settlements,” one Canadian sociologist wrote, “[have] the lure … of the woods tingling in their blood down through the generations.”

From 1850 to 1930 one million Québécois migrated to the US, pushed by rapid population growth, a shortage of good agricultural land, and slow industrial development in their home country. By the 1870s, new rail lines, specifically the Grand Trunk, Québec Central, and the Canadian Pacific accelerated their immigration. By 1901 almost one quarter of the entire population of Québec moved to New England. Ninety-two per cent of these immigrants settled in urban areas in the “border states or in states immediately south of them.” Even though most settled in urban areas, in the forests along the border and in inland lumber regions of New England and New York there were logging camps composed entirely of French Canadian workers. By 1890, a congressional report found that “American farmers’ sons no longer follow wood chopping for a business, and their places have been filled by the French Canadians.” In 1900, 33.6 per cent of New England “woodchoppers, lumbermen [or] raftsmen” were French Canadian immigrants and the percentage was much higher in the northern portion of the region. Their affinity for the woods made them useful for specific tasks in other rural industries as well. On railroad grades, one sociologist found, the French “prefers to be in the vanguard. The space and freedom of the trail and water routes appeal to him … assisting with ready axe to erect the big log company camps.” When it came to technical work, however, the experts claimed they were useless. These comments on French Canadian loggers are evidence of how the perceived racial hierarchies that were constructed in the US by academics, government, and business officials pushed immigrant workers into specific industries based on their perceived racial characteristics.


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