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Resettlements: Simon Romero, ‘A Slice of the Confederacy in the Interior of Brazil’, New York Times, o8/05/16

09May16

Excerpt: On a stage festooned with Confederate flags, a singer was belting out “Dixieland Delight” by Alabama near an obelisk honoring the Americans who fled to this outpost in the aftermath of the Civil War.

“We’re not racists,” said Cícero Carr, 54, an engineer whose great-great-grandfather hailed from Texas. Wearing a fedora featuring the rebel battle flag, he explained in Portuguese, “We’re just revering our ancestors who had the good sense to settle in Brazil.”

At the annual celebration of Brazil’s self-described Confederados one scorching Sunday in April, Confederate flags adorned the hoop-skirted gowns of young belles and the trucker caps worn by beer-guzzling bikers, as well as the graves of pioneers with surnames like McAlpine, Northrup and Seawright.


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Dancing as resistance: a special issue of Dance Research Journal on Doing Indigenous Dance Today

07May16

Access the special issue here.


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Alliances: Gregory Lowan-Trudeau, ‘Protest as pedagogy: Exploring teaching and learning in Indigenous environmental movements’, The Journal of Environmental Education, 2016

07May16

Abstract: This article reports on a recent study into the experiences of Indigenous and allied environmental activists with teaching and learning during and as a result of Indigenous environmental movements. This inquiry is grounded in a theoretical framework informed by decolonization and cultural revitalization, social movement learning, and repressive tolerance. Interviews with 10 participants across Canada produced rich insights related to significant life experiences, the tensions encountered by activist educators, the complexity of inter-activist relationships, interaction with police agencies, the plurality of protest, and the revitalization and sharing of Indigenous traditions as the ultimate form of resistance.


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Reproduction as decolonisation: Jade Le Grice, Virginia Braun, ‘Mātauranga Māori and reproduction: Inscribing connections between the natural environment, kin and the body’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 12, 2, 2016

07May16

Abstract: The reproduction of Indigenous people, who have experienced ongoing cultural and ethnic marginalization, has long been a source of contention in colonizing contexts. There is scope to further decolonize and reinvigorate traditional Indigenous knowledge that has relevancy and utility in contemporary lives. The present article engages a pūrākau (narrative) methodology (Lee, 2009) to construct a culturally relevant PhD literature review and synthesize a range of source materials to develop an account of traditional Māori knowledge (mātauranga Māori) pertaining to reproduction in a New Zealand context. Three areas are explored based on their novelty and distinctiveness from Western accounts of reproduction: connections between humans, spiritual domains and the natural environment; contextualization within social and familial structures; and a unique and refreshing view of masculine and feminine embodiment. Conclusions are drawn on novel implications of this knowledge for research and health services.


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Appropriating indigeneity from the couch: Curtis Nash, Cultural Appropriation, Postcolonial Fetishism, and Indigenous-Settler Relations in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, MA Dissertation, University of Guelph, 2016

07May16

Abstract: Few studies have examined the cultural appropriation of North American Indigeneity in video games. This thesis therefore investigates whether such appropriations occur in one of the most popular video games made, World of Warcraft, and considers how such appropriations might affect Indigenous-Settler relations. I undertook a discourse analysis of 85 forum discussions in which 682 players discussed the perceived similarities between the ‘races’ in Warcraft and real world ethnocultural groups. An open-ended online survey was also used, which received 29 responses. The results revealed that players believe, first, that Warcraft engages in the appropriation of Indigeneity and, second, that the Tauren most appropriate elements of Indigeneity. By using postcolonial fetishism, I theorize that the Tauren might serve as a fetish ‘object’ for those Settlers who play World of Warcraft, which transforms the Indigenous ‘Other’ into a fixated form that might mask its more foreboding revelations and thereby stabilizes Indigenous-Settler relations.


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A special issue on urban indigeneity: Natacha Gagne, Benoit Trepied (eds), Colonialism, Law, and the City: The Politics of Urban Indigeneity, City & Society, 28, 1, 2016

03May16

Access the table of contents here.


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Indigenous constitutionalism: John Borrows, Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism, University of Toronto Press, 2016

03May16

Description: Indigenous traditions can be uplifting, positive, and liberating forces when they are connected to living systems of thought and practice. Problems arise when they are treated as timeless models of unchanging truth that require unwavering deference and unquestioning obedience. Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism celebrates the emancipatory potential of Indigenous traditions, considers their value as the basis for good laws and good lives, and critiques the failure of Canadian constitutional traditions to recognize their significance.

Demonstrating how Canada’s constitutional structures marginalize Indigenous peoples’ ability to exercise power in the real world, John Borrows uses Ojibwe law, stories, and principles to suggest alternative ways in which Indigenous peoples can work to enhance freedom. Among the stimulating issues he approaches are the democratic potential of civil disobedience, the hazards of applying originalism rather than living tree jurisprudence in the interpretation of Aboriginal and treaty rights, American legislative actions that could also animate Indigenous self-determination in Canada, and the opportunity for Indigenous governmental action to address violence against women.


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The repressed returns; the indigenous returns: “Something in Between”: David Randall Gaertner, ‘Monkey Beach and the Haisla Return of the Return of the Repressed’, Canadian Literature, 225, 2016

03May16

Abstract: The return of the repressed is a pervasive trope in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and it has been well theorized in the criticism surrounding the novel—from a Freudian perspective. However, in order to fully understand the aesthetics and politics of this important text more work is needed to develop the ways in which readers can engage with repression and its return from an Indigenous—and more specifically—Haisla, point of view. Via close reading and historical analysis, this essay locates the return of the repressed in relation to settler colonialism and traditional Haisla storytelling and fundamentally reframes arguments concerning psychoanalytic critique and Indigenous literature.


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Indigeneity is disability (in a settler colonial context): H-S. E. Wong, ‘”The brains of a nation’: The eugenicist roots of Canada’s mental health field and the building of a non-white disabled nation’, Canadian Review of Social Policy/Revue Canadienne de Politique Sociale, 75, 2-16, pp. 1-29

03May16

Abstract: This paper examines the literature published by the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene (CNCMH), a precursor to the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), from 1918-1921, and its connection to eugenicist social policies. Specifically, this study involves a critical discourse analysis of the Canadian Journal of Mental Hygiene (CJMH) published by the CNCMH, which illustrates how the roots of Canada’s mental health field are linked to a nation-building project deeply intertwined with eugenicist notions of race and disability. Foundation myths that reinforce the Canadian nation were also imbued in the literature, including: Canadian identity as linked to white non-disability, Canada as tabula rasa, and eugenicist fears of the ‘over-population’ of ‘undesirables’. On the basis of these foundation myths, the CNCMH considered mental hygiene discourse and practice as a means to further Canada as a white nondisabled nation. The desire to further the Canadian nation in this manner led to the promotion of eugenicist social policies. Many of these policies – especially, immigration controls – were put into place by the Canadian government and remain to this day.


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Aboriginal sovereignty has a geopolitical dimension: Joseph Pugliese, ‘Geopolitics of aboriginal sovereignty: Colonial law as “a species of excess of its own authority”, aboriginal passport ceremonies and asylum seekers’, Law Text Culture, 19, 2016, pp. 84-115

02May16

Abstract: In her trenchant critique of the manner in which settler-colonial law, in its seemingly progressive manifestation through the Mabo Native Title legislation, in fact operated as a ‘particularly problematic form of neocolonial practice’, Penny Pether (1998: 130) demonstrates how this assertion of contemporary neocolonial practice was predicated on the High Court’s refusal to address the charged issue of Aboriginal sovereignty – with all the attendant foundational ramifications that this would have entailed. In adjudicating on this issue, Australian settler-colonial law was, in Pether’s (1998: 124) memorable phrase, acting as ‘a species of excess of its own authority’. If, Pether (1998: 116) argues, Mabo was marked by what ‘the judgment refuses to do’ (that is, acknowledge Aboriginal sovereignty), then it is also inscribed, paradoxically, by what it ‘makes imaginable’: that Aboriginal sovereignty has never been extinguished – despite over two hundred years of colonial rule (of law).


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