Perhaps the name as well as the seal should go. ‘Whitesboro’, after all, means ‘autonomous walled town for whites’, which is what settler colonialism is all about (i.e., a sovereign self-defensive capacity that is exercised by a racially defined community, which is something you do by eliminating indigenous peoples).

Check the New York Times approach and note the distance: the logo is ‘called’ racist, and it only ‘seems’ to show a white man choking an indigenous person. The image the NYT used was distant too, so I added a clearer one below. The defenders of the logo’s point about ‘historical accuracy’ is factually correct.

Excerpt: For European scholars, the discourse surrounding the nature of relationships between Australian settlers and Indigenous population, particularly in relation to the legitimacy of belonging in the land, holds an intriguing aura. As cultural and spatial outsiders, we may feel overwhelmed by the intensity of some Australian public intellectuals’ responses to what might be variously termed “spatial anxiety,” “postcolonial/white guilt,” or “disturbed” sense of belonging (Slater n.pag.). The period of the late 1990s and early 2000s in Australia certainly offered an interesting moment in which this intensity was particularly visible and vocal.

Abstract: Historical Treaties entered into with Indigenous peoples are often a source of conflict. This conflict is connected to treaty implementation, which tends to be at the sole discretion of the domestic jurisdiction. Accordingly, a one-sided interpretation of a two-sided agreement is a problematic approach. This thesis will explore key concepts of Indigenous law, in relation to the historical Treaties made with the Crown. Particular emphasis will be on the Anishinaabe in Treaty No. 3 in Turtle Island, the State now known as Canada. Indigenous law will be grounded in widely accepted international law principles, which may allow for further insight by the Treaty partners. Through grounding the Indigenous perspective of the true spirit and original intent of the Treaties, explanation can be drawn out and further understanding between the parties will occur. Mutual understanding, along with respect, is part of the foundation to the reconciliation process of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

We, traditional Indigenous food producers, knowledge holders, spiritual leaders, Indigenous Peoples, tribal nations and organization leaders, human rights and food sovereignty activists, community members, youth and elders from the Diné, Acoma, Laguna and Tesuque Pueblos, Hopi, Yaqui, Opata, Comanche, Cheyenne and O’odham Nations attending the Southwest Tribal Nations Food Sovereignty Conference from August 8 – 9, 2015 in Shiprock New Mexico, Diné Nation, resolve by consensus the following:

1.  We thank the Shiprock chapter of the Diné Nation, Diné College and the International Indian Treaty Council for coordinating and hosting this gathering which was of great importance in building our unity and sharing information to defend our food sovereignty, human rights, land and water, seeds, sacred places and traditional ways of life.

2.  We affirm, endorse and adopt the Okmulgee Declaration from the 2nd International Indigenous Corn Conference in Muscogee Creek Nation, September 8th, 2014, and the “Declaration of a GMO- and Pesticide-Free Zone, Diné Nation Territory, from the Indigenous Peoples “Corn is Life” Gathering September 19 – 21, 2013.

3.  We express our outrage and profound concern for the impacts, including many human rights violations, of the toxic gold mining tailings spill and its effects on the rights to water, health and food sovereignty of the Diné and other Indigenous Nations that will be affected, as well as the plants, fish, animals and ecosystems of the area in the San Juan River basin system.  This contamination of waste from the King Gold Mine near Silverton, Colorado spilled into the upper tributaries of the Animas River on August 5, 2015 and is continuing to contaminate the entire watershed in the four corners area of the United States of America where the communities of at least seven federally recognized Indigenous Nations are now suffering the effects of the spill.  The effects of this contamination are multi-generational and will have drastic effects on the reproductive health and the health of future generations of these Nations.  We commit to support the Diné Nation Shiprock Chapter and other impacted Indigenous Peoples in their efforts to prevent any future spills, address the damages and other efforts needed to address this critical issue.

4.  We commit to continue meeting, communicating and coming together to share information and mutual support through the formation of a Southwest Indigenous Food Sovereignty Network, which we have initiated at this gathering.

5.  We call upon our Tribal governments, the United States, other countries and the United Nations to implement strong and effective solutions and responses to climate change through strong actions that respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples, protect our food sovereignty and reduce greenhouse gasses by moving away from fossil fuel extraction, production and use towards a just transition towards sustainable practices and forms of development.  We also commit ourselves to protect, use and apply our traditional knowledge and practices, our seeds, medicines and animals, our ceremonies and the teachings of our spiritual leaders and knowledge holders, to implement solutions and ways to adapt to climate change within our own Nations and communities in keeping with our sacred responsibilities for the survival of our Peoples, ways of life and future generations.

Resolved by consensus August 9th, 2015, International Day of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples, Shiprock New Mexico, Diné Nation, Diné bikeya.

Description: An unprecedented number of emigrants left Britain to settle in America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the Victorian period. Utilizing new digital resources and methodologies alongside more traditional modes of scholarship, British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832-1877 presents the first book-length study of the periodical print culture that imagined, mediated, and galvanized this important stage of empire history. It presents extensive new research on how settler emigration was registered within Victorian periodicals and situates its focus on British texts and contexts within a broader, transnational framework. The book argues that the Victorian periodical was an inherently mobile form which had an unrivalled capacity to both register mass settler emigration and moderate its disruptive potential. Part one focuses upon settler emigration genres that featured within mainstream, middle-class periodicals, incorporating the analysis of emigrant voyage texts, emigration themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about settlement. These genres are cohesive, domestic, and reassuring, and thus of a different character from the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. Part two examines a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often challenged dominant settler ideologies. Alongside its examination of ephemeral emigration texts, the book offers fresh readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and others. Ultimately, the book shows how periodical settler emigration literature transforms our understanding of both the culture of Victorian empire and Victorian literature and culture as a whole. It also makes significant intersections into debates about periodical form and the role of digitization within Victorian Studies.

Excerpt: In June 2015, a group of thirty-seven Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers climbed to the roof of Muhammad Abu Haya’s house near Hebron, in occupied Palestine, brushing aside Abu Haya’s protests and his dismayed children, in order to get a group photograph, in the best tradition of what Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein term “digital militarism” (2015). The recent proliferation of Israeli social media accounts of the occupation, according to Kuntsman and Stein,

render the occupation at once palpable and out of reach. . . . On the one hand, mobile technologies have made a spectacle of state violence instantly available, often in real time in the palm of the hand on smartphone screens . . . [extending] Israel’s occupation into the most private Israeli spaces and times. . . . At the same time, the patina of the digital everyday can minimize and banalize this violence, obscuring its visibility and mitigating its impact.

(Kuntsman and Stein 2015, 8)

Reporting the Abu Haya incident, Israeli political activist Hagai Matar (2015) argues that although far worse things happen in the context of Israeli settler-colonialism, there is something in “the banality, the casual day-to-day aspect” of the video recording of this incident that captures an essential component of the occupation, and the apparent oblivion by the fully armed soldiers heading to the roof of Abu Haya’s home, simply because they felt like posing for a “groupie” against the background of colonized Palestine.

One is tempted to theorize this and similar incidents as epitomizing “the banality of the occupation,” commensurate with Michael Billig’s “banal nationalism” concept, which, he argues, enables the everyday reproduction of the nation. As Billig writes, “daily, the nation is ‘flagged’ in the lives of its citizenry” (1995, 6). In Israel-Palestine, the nation increasingly manifests itself through everyday militarized hashtags, “selfies,” and “shares,” absorbed into the most banal acts of digital militarism. However, starting from a critique of Hannah Arendt’s by now somewhat hackneyed concept of the “banality of evil” (1977), this article argues that Israel’s war against the Palestinians performs more than banalization: rather, it amounts to the routinized racialization of millions of Palestinians by the settler-colonial Israeli state.

The temptation to theorize war and genocidal atrocities as “banal” owes to Arendt’s report on the 1960 Jerusalem trial of the mastermind of the Nazi deportations, Adolf Eichmann, whom she immortalized as epitomizing “the banality of evil.” The lasting influence of Arendt’s journalistic depiction of Eichmann as a technocratic bureaucrat who presented himself at the trial as a self-effacing servant of the German state dutifully following orders has endured, even though this misrepresents the fullness of her understanding of both totalitarianism and of Eichmann’s role as a faithful “joiner” of the Nazi cause (Berkowitz 2013).

Eichmann’s more than banal motivation became a topic for public debate with the 2014 publication of Bettina Stangneth’sEichmann Before Jerusalem, which reproduces a series of interviews the Nazi journalist and Holocaust denier William Sassen conducted with him in 1965 in Argentina, exposing Eichmann’s full cynicism and zealous commitment to the Nazi cause. Based on a pretrial report by Israeli psychiatrists that demonstrated that Eichmann’s motives were contradictory and calculated rather than banal (Kulcsar and Kulcsar 1966), and on a memoir Eichmann wrote while in jail, Jose Brunner writes that the banality thesis negates the possibility that perpetrators of atrocities (including occupation, siege, and ethnic cleansing) are complex human beings performing intentional acts, rather than obedient or banal creatures (Brunner 2004, 104).

My argument here is that theorizing the Israeli occupation in terms of banalization posits a circular truism that masks the realities of settler colonial wars, which can more persuasively be understood as a routinized resort to what Giorgio Agamben calls the “state of exception” (2005), and what David Theo Goldberg depicts in the specific Palestinian context as the “racial state” (2009).

Description: This volume examines dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness and risks of nature. It does so in diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers for agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing. Historical resource frontiers are understood in terms of commercial knowledge systems organized as projects to transform landscapes and environments. The book asks: how were environments traded, and with what environmental and landscape consequences? How have environments been engineered, standardized and transformed within past trading systems? What have been the successes and failures of economic knowledge in dealing with resource production in complex environments? It considers cases from northern Europe, North and South America, Central Africa and New Zealand in the period between 1750 and 1990, and the contributors reflect on the effects of transnational commodity chains, competing economic knowledge systems, environmental ignorance and learning, and resource exploitation. In each case they identify tensions, blind spots, and environmental learning that plagued commercial projects on frontiers.

Abstract: Ongoing colonial violence, I argue in this paper, operates through geographies of Indigenous homes, families, and bodies that are too often overlooked in standard geographical accounts of colonialism. Contiguous with residential school violence and other micro-scale efforts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, colonial power continues to assert itself profoundly through intervention into and disruption of intimate, ‘tender’ (Stoler, 2006), embodied, ‘visceral’ (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010), and biopolitical (Morgensen, 2011a) geographies of Indigenous women and children. Drawing on feminist and decolonizing theories, along with the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011), I offer in this paper a grounded account of spatial forms of governmentality in ongoing colonial relations in British Columbia, Canada. I critique dominant geographic inquires into colonialism as being primarily about land, natural resources, and territory. These inquiries, I suggest, risk perpetuating colonial violence in their erasure of Indigenous women and children’s ontologies, positing this violence as something ‘out there’ as opposed to an ever-present presence that all settler colonists are implicated in.

Access the volume here.

Description: Kenya’s white settlers have been alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers or hedonistic bed-hoppers or crude racists. The souls of white folk examines settlers not as caricatures, but as people inhabiting a unique historical moment. It takes seriously – though not uncritically – what settlers said, how they viewed themselves and their world. It argues that the settler soul was composed of a series of interlaced ideas: settlers equated civilisation with a (hard to define) whiteness; they were emotionally enriched through claims to paternalism and trusteeship over Africans; they felt themselves constantly threatened by Africans, by the state, and by the moral failures of other settlers; and they daily enacted their claims to supremacy through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation and violence. The souls of white folk will appeal to those interested in the histories of Africa, colonialism, and race, and can be appreciated by scholars and students alike.