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Human rights are not about the rights of humans (II): Warren Cariou, ‘Indigenous Rights and the Undoomed Indian’, European Romantic Review, 27, 3, 2016, pp. 309-318

01May16

Abstract: This essay examines the rise of human rights discourses in the Romantic period as they are deployed in relation to colonial violence against North American Indigenous people in the same era. While Indigenous people become associated with freedom, human rights and liberal politics in much Romantic literature and philosophy, they are also at the same time portrayed as inevitably doomed to become extinct in the face of a putatively superior Western culture. I argue that this stereotype of the “doomed Indian” is not merely a discursive formation, but a reflection of the genocidal intent and actions of colonization. Through detailed examination of the genocide perpetrated against the Beothuk people of Newfoundland from the 1780s until 1827, this essay reveals how colonial culture utilizes the rhetoric of human rights as a way of performing what Daniel Coleman calls “White Civility,” thereby attempting to retain the moral authority to exert power throughout the colonies. Key in this rhetoric is the use of the Romantic-era museum as a venue to capture and preserve the culture of a disappearing people. Drawing on the work of Glen Coulthard, I argue that the discourse of human rights is thus of questionable value in struggles for Indigenous sovereignty.


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Human rights are not about the rights of humans (I): Tymothy Wyman-McCarthy, (Ref)Using Human Rights: Indigenous Activism and the Politics of Refusal in Settler Colonial Contexts, MA dissertation, Columbia, 2016

01May16

Abstract: This thesis is a critical history of ideas—or a history of repressed and repressive ideas (and histories)—that analyses how liberal internationalism, in the form of human rights, presses upon, covers over, brushes against, interacts with, or is used instrumentally by Indigenous activism and political life. By situating these interactions between human rights and Indigenous political life in the context of settler colonialism, it aims to bring out the complexity of a politics of (ref)usal that permeates this relationship, in this context. First, the thesis reads critiques of human rights against emerging literature in settler colonial studies, showing how the irreducible element of an eliminatory drive for land, which characterizes settler colonialism, is not accounted for in the existing critical literature on human rights. Second, it presents a critical history of the normative evolution of the right to self-determination in both law and discourse as these relate to Indigenous peoples, showing how the norm is constructed both to make illegible other forms of Indigenous political life and to reify anthropological tropes about Indigenous culture. Third, it tests proposals for ‘saving’ human rights from its colonial-hegemonic past—by repoliticizing it—against writing on settler decolonization, to ask about the role of human rights in/as decolonial politics. The thesis, finally, considers how the normative and historical terrain it has mapped might help us think through the politics of human rights and Indigenous activism (namely, the Idle No More movement) in Canada in light of Justin Trudeau’s election as Prime Minister in October, 2015. Ultimately, the aim of this work is to interrogate the normative political optics of the settler state—what it can and cannot make legible—as it makes use of liberal internationalist discourse to make illegible (to eliminate from view) other, Indigenous, modes of political life which stubbornly (politically) refuse this imposition.


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Settler frontiers are gender frontiers: Susanah Shaw Romney, ‘“With & alongside his housewife”: Claiming Ground in New Netherland and the Early Modern Dutch Empire’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 73, 2, 2016, pp. 187-224

01May16

Abstract: Gender relationships fundamentally supported the Dutch seaborne mercantile empire. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, housewives and households anchored the civic world on which commerce depended. As Dutch traders, planners, and merchants sought to build profitable footholds around the world, they repeatedly turned to the idea that colonial outposts needed female inhabitants; transatlantic migrants similarly sought to further their own interests through family settlement and individual territorial claims. On the mid-Atlantic coast of North America, these ideas created an early and consistent emphasis on female migration and the creation of homes and villages along contested frontiers. The consequent creation of New Netherland’s physical “gender frontier” gave martial significance to women’s presence and family homes. Indigenous women’s agricultural fields became principal targets of Dutch forces as the colony expanded by relying on the establishment of immigrant households and villages. The women of New Netherland thus provide the opportunity to assess the key role of gender in the establishment of early modern settler colonies and the extension of imperial land claims.


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The humanities now (and, if one looks, thanks to Edward Said, the question of settler colonialism in thinking them): Rosi Braidotti, Paul Gilroy (eds), Conflicting Humanities, Bloomsbury, 2016

01May16

Description: How might we reinvent the humanities? This is the question at the heart of this provocative volume. It is a difficult mission and definitely one which needs to be addressed with increasing urgency. There is no better cast to confront and problematize this question than the contributors to Conflicting Humanities. They are world-renowned thinkers who can tackle the problem as researchers and teachers but also as prominent public intellectuals.


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On the relationship between women and Indian history: John M. Rhea, A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941, University of Oklahoma Press, 2016

28Apr16

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.


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Multilevel governance: decolonisation in action? Martin Papillon, André Juneau (eds), Canada: The State of the Federation 2013, Aboriginal Multilevel Governance, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016

28Apr16

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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Stealing indigenous children: Margaret D. Jacobs, ‘Entangled Histories: The Mormon Church and Indigenous Child Removal from 1850 to 2000’, Journal of Mormon History, 42, 2, 2016, pp. 27-60

26Apr16

Access the article here.


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Education sovereignty: Rowan Steineker, The Struggle for Schools: Education, Race, and Sovereignty in the Creek Nation, 1820-1907, dissertation, Oklahoma University, 2016

26Apr16

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.


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Settler colonialism is peer review: Sam Grey, Alison James, ‘Truth, Reconciliation, and “Double Settler Denial”: Gendering the Canada-South Africa Analogy’, Human Rights, 2016

26Apr16

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.”


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Aboriginal labour and its exploitation: Geoffrey Gray, Abrogating Responsibility, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016

23Apr16

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.


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