Description: One hundred and forty years before Gerda Lerner established women’s history as a specialized field in 1972, a small group of women began to claim American Indian history as their own domain. A Field of Their Own examines nine key figures in American Indian scholarship to reveal how women came to be identified with Indian history and why they eventually claimed it as their own field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, the magnitude of their research, the reach of their scholarship, the popularity of their publications, and their close identification with Indian scholarship makes their invisibility as pioneering founders of this specialized field all the more intriguing.

Reclaiming this lost history, John M. Rhea looks at the cultural processes through which women were connected to Indian history and traces the genesis of their interest to the nineteenth-century push for women’s rights. In the early 1830s evangelical preachers and women’s rights proponents linked American Indians to white women’s religious and social interests. Later, pre-professional women ethnologists would claim Indians as a special political cause. Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 publication, A Century of Dishonor, and Alice Fletcher’s 1887 report, Indian Education and Civilization, foreshadowed the emerging history profession’s objective methodology and established a document-driven standard for later Indian histories.

By the twentieth century, historians Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel, in a bid to boost their professional status, established Indian history as a formal specialized field. However, enduring barriers continued to discourage American Indians from pursuing their own document-driven histories. Cultural and academic walls crumbled in 1919 when Cherokee scholar Rachel Caroline Eaton earned a Ph.D. in American history. Eaton and later Indigenous historians Anna L. Lewis and Muriel H. Wright would each play a crucial role in shaping Angie Debo’s 1940 indictment of European American settler colonialism, And Still the Waters Run.

Rhea’s wide-ranging approach goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women’s century-long predominance over American Indian scholarship. In the process, his thoughtful study also chronicles Indigenous women’s long and ultimately successful struggle to transform the way that historians portray American Indian peoples and their pasts.

Description: Traditionally associated with the federal government, Aboriginal policy has arguably become a far more complex reality. With or without formal self-government, Aboriginal communities and nations are increasingly assertive in establishing their own authority in areas as diverse as education, land management, the administration of justice, family and social services, and housing. The 2013 State of the Federation volume gathers experts and practitioners to discuss the contemporary dynamics, patterns, and challenges of Aboriginal multilevel governance in a wide range of policy areas. Recent court decisions on Aboriginal rights, notably on the duty to consult, have forced provincial and territorial governments to develop more sustained relationships with Aboriginal organizations and governments, especially in the management of lands and resources. Showing that Aboriginal governance is, more than ever, a multilevel reality, contributors address questions such as: What are the challenges in negotiating and implementing these bilateral and trilateral governance agreements? Are these governance arrangements conducive to real and sustained Aboriginal participation in the policy process? Finally, what are the implications of these various developments for Canadian federalism and for the rights and status of Aboriginal peoples in relation to the Canadian federation?

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Abstract: This dissertation analyzes the relationship between education and nationhood in the nineteenth-century Creek Nation. Over the course of the century, Creeks adapted schools as part of a larger nation-building effort to shape their own society and defend their sovereignty. Creeks built an extensive primary and secondary school system, financed, legislated, and managed by their national government. Education became an important political institution, produced new cultural expressions, and reinforced Creek identity. While the Creek government designed these national schools to privilege Native children, they simultaneously segregated Afro-Creek students and excluded Euro-American youths. By the 1890s, however, the forces of settler colonialism and white supremacy drastically altered the state of education in Indian Territory. When Oklahoma entered statehood in 1907, the federal government dissolved the Creek national school system, mandating that Native students attend newly formed public schools with white children or federally controlled boarding schools. Meanwhile, Afro-Creeks and African American settlers became subject to Jim Crow segregation. Although federal policies had dissolved the state apparatus that facilitated public schools, education persisted as an important component of Creek life during the twentieth century.

Abstract: Appeals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) haunt most post-1990s institutional attempts to address historical injustice. Comparing Canada and South Africa, Nagy (2012) notes that “loose analogizing” has hampered the application of important lessons from the South African to the Canadian TRC—namely, the discovery that “narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence.” Taking up her important specification of the Canada-South Africa analogy, we expand Nagy’s recent findings by gendering the continuum of settler colonial violence in both locations and by outlining the implications of these TRCs for Indigenous and Black women in particular. In both the Canadian attempt to grapple with the legacy of residential schools and the South African effort to deal with a history of apartheid, institutional approaches to truth have been both narrow and androcentric. The simultaneous historical bounding and social consolidation of Indigenous experiences of abuse and injustice has thus produced a “double settler denial.”

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.