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Avoiding the pitfalls of settler decolonisation (I): John Lowe, ‘Multiculturalism and its exclusions in New Zealand: the case for cosmopolitanism and indigenous rights’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 16, 4, 2015 , pp. 496-512

13Dec15

Abstract: In light of biculturalism’s prevalence as a power-sharing agreement between New Zealand Maori and the Crown, any attempts to establish a state-sponsored project of multiculturalism have been treated by Maori with suspicion and controversy. This article presents cosmopolitanism as an appropriate solution to citizenship and cultural diversity in New Zealand that can coexist in harmony with the country’s biculturalism that enjoys a constitutional-like status. A state-sponsored policy of liberal multiculturalism comparable to the legal species found in Western democracies, it is argued, would remain mutually exclusive and hostile towards biculturalism. This work concludes with a discussion on the theoretical applications of cosmopolitanism in New Zealand and how it could work empirically, in practice, without attenuating biculturalism.


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Against the ‘settler common sense’, a decolonial one: Christopher Clements, ‘Between Affect and History: Sovereignty and Ordinary Life at Akwesasne, 1929–1942’, History and Theory, 54, 4, 2015, pp. 105–124

13Dec15

Abstract: This essay seeks to recover the ordinary and its analytical and decolonial potential within the extraordinary conditions created by settler colonialism. To do so, it investigates moments when Mohawks at Akwesasne, a community that straddles the US–Canada border, refused to acknowledge settler authority, paying particular attention to the relationship between their refusals and the condition of ordinary life. This article also considers the historical challenge of how to preserve moments of experience and their complex meanings without enveloping them in broader narratives dominated, in this case, by questions of sovereignty. How do theories of sovereignty affect the production of history, and what constraints do they place on our ability to narrate Indigenous experiences? What if we cast away the two narratives that dominate tellings of Indigenous histories: that of a settler crisis over control and that of an age-old struggle for sovereignty? Is it possible, or useful, to differentiate between acts focused primarily on maintaining the contours of ordinary, everyday life—expressions of lateral agency less about the “long haul” than about the here-and-now—and deliberate acts of political engagement, consciously aimed at the structural inequality undergirding a particular situation? Through a deep historical treatment of several moments within Akwesasne’s early twentieth-century history, this essay proposes and attempts to execute a methodology that draws together multiple theories of affect and sovereignty.


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Reimagining unsettlement as a ‘true crime’: Rachel Franks, ‘A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines’, M/C Journal, 18, 6, 2015

13Dec15

Excerpt: Approximately 100 Proclamation Boards (the Board) were introduced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur (after whom Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula is named). The purpose of these Boards was to communicate, via a four-strip pictogram, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony that all people—black and white—were considered equal under the law. “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). This is reflected in the narrative of the Boards. The first image presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second, and central, image shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth images depict the repercussions for committing murder, with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man also hanged for shooting an Aborigine. Both men executed under “gubernatorial supervision” (Turnbull 53).


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Proclaiming one’s existence, appealing against removal: Samuel W. Rose, Richard A. Rose, ‘Outside the Rules: Invisible American Indians in New York State’, Wicazo Sa Review, 30, 2, 2015, pp. 56-76

11Dec15

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is, through an examination of the academic literature, to showcase what indigenous populations are known to have existed in the twentieth century (and into the present) in New York State beyond the officially recognized tribes. This essay thus discusses the nonrecognized indigenous communities within the state, and places a particular focus on the role that scholars have in shaping indigenous identity in relation to the colonial apparatus. It serves to bring back into the discussion of indigenous peoples those communities that for so many years have existed outside of mainstream discourse and consciousness, and outside of the existing colonial legal structure and its processes of recognition.


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Defending treaty traditions, appealing against removal: Claudia B. Haake, ‘Appeals to Civilization and Customary “Forest Diplomacy”: Arguments against Removal in Letters Written by the Iroquois, 1830–1857’, Wicazo Sa Review, 30, 2, 2015, pp. 100-128

11Dec15

Abstract: In this essay I argue that in order to persuade the U.S. government that it was unnecessary to remove them, members of the Iroquois Confederacy had to engage with the discourse of progress toward civilization the government used to justify the removal policy. In their appeals to remain within their ancestral homelands, the Iroquois referred to their own progress toward civilization by writing about agricultural advances and the existence of settlements, as well as by drawing attention to their progress in religion, morality, and educational achievements. Yet Haudenosaunees also drew on some of their own traditions to reject their proposed removal. A number of their written appeals followed in the tradition of wampum, strings of shell beads that had formerly been an essential element of diplomacy. Haudenosaunee representatives also used kinship terms of address reminiscent of those in use during the heyday of “forest diplomacy” in which the Iroquois had been known to Europeans as masterful diplomats. While at times the use of such customary elements from “forest diplomacy” were probably due to the way their appeals were composed, at other times they constituted Haudenosaunee efforts to renew proper diplomatic relations with the U.S. government and to find compromises between their respective positions, as they had been able to do during the colonial era and into the early republic.


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Is the off-country education of indigenous children always a strategy of elimination? Gregory D. Smithers, ‘”This Is the Nation’s Heart-String”: Formal Education and the Cherokee Diaspora during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Wicazo Sa Review, 30, 2, 2015, pp. 28-55

11Dec15

Abstract: On March 10, 1881, Walter Adair Duncan, the superintendent of the Cherokee Orphan Asylum between 1872 and 1884 and a leading Cherokee intellectual, made a bold declaration. Writing in the Cherokee Orphan Asylum Press, Duncan declared that the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory had developed a system of public education that had become “the nation’s heart-string. It is the jeweled chord that binds the people together into a national whole, attaching them to one another, to home and to the land in which they were born.” This essay examines Duncan’s bold assertion. It does so by recognizing that the Cherokees had become a diasporic people by the time Duncan made his lofty claim. As such, Cherokees did not just receive a formal education in the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory, but throughout the United States. Focusing on the Cherokee Nation’s system of public education in Indian Territory, this essay also tests Duncan’s declaration against Cherokee educational experiences at the Qualla Boundary reservation in North Carolina, and at the Sherman Institute, an off-reservation boarding school located in Riverside, California. Guiding my analysis are two interrelated questions: To what degree did the varied educational experiences of Cherokee children reinforce Duncan’s metaphor of a “jeweled chord” binding Cherokees together? Alternatively, did the range of institutional experiences of Cherokee children, scattered across the United States, work to sever the “heart-string” that Duncan insisted produced common feelings of nationalistic pride among a diasporic people?


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The high tide of removal is closer than you think: ‘”More Destruction to These Family Ties”: Native American Women, Child Welfare, and the Solution of Sovereignty’, Journal of Family History, 2015

11Dec15

Abstract: “More Destruction to These Family Ties” looks at the long history of non-Native intervention in the lives of Native American families. It maintains that the desire to educate and raise indigenous children culminated in the 1970s with a catastrophic quarter of Native American youth living away from their families and nations. This article argues that Native women activists were central to arresting the crisis; that they launched a multifaceted agenda to address challenges (rooted in colonialism) that indigenous families faced; and that they championed a framework that complicates existing narratives of women and activism in the United States during the 1970s.


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On settler anxiety and its consequences: ‘”I am frightened out of my life”: Black War, white fear’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

11Dec15

Abstract: British colonists treated Tasmanian Aborigines abominably during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, colonization resulted in the near annihilation of this ancient and unique people. Their fate, which understandably provokes feelings of sympathy and anger, has strongly influenced the literature on the ‘Black War’. The Aborigines are usually portrayed as the helpless victims of ruthless, even genocidal colonists. This dichotomy, however, is a gross over-simplification. By dehumanizing colonists as heartless murderers we enter an explanatory cul-de-sac. It is only by dispassionately interrogating colonists’ experiences of Aboriginal violence that we can begin to understand what precipitated this tragedy. Hence the purpose of this article, which focuses above all on the fear generated by Aboriginal violence, and the ways colonists responded to it. The essay will argue that fear – economic fear, fear for the safety of others, and fear for one’s own safety – dominated the wartime experiences of frontier colonists. It will also demonstrate the influence of fear on colonists’ attitudes and behaviour, as well as on the built landscape. In doing so, it covers new ground, revealing the potent anxieties of the colonizers, and the psychological impact of Aboriginal resistance.


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Settler invasion is an ecological structure: Norbert Finzsch, ‘”The intrusion therefore of cattle is by itself sufficient to produce the extirpation of the native race”: social ecological systems and ecocide in conflicts between Hunter–Gatherers and commercial stock farmers in Australia’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

11Dec15

Abstract: This contribution attempts to discuss unintended, neglectful, or willful manipulations of Social Ecological Systems (SESs) by commercial stock farmers as part of an attempt to drive Aboriginal people from their lands into the hinterland thereby accepting or condoning their annihilation or demographic reduction. By displaying the different ways in which commercial stock farmers have engineered changes in the ecological system I will show that traditional definitions of the term genocide fall short of applied techniques of decimation which consist of a combination of micro-practices and quotidian low-level violence. It is doubtful that given the complexity and the resilience of SES, however, a group of commercial stock farmers is able to operate the system (of which, after all, they are an element) in a controlled way. I argue nevertheless that the term ecocide should be applied to the way stock farmers changed the habitat of the Indigenous population, because the settlers had agency without understanding the totality of their actions.


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Decolonization vs inclusion: Erich W. Steinman, ‘Decolonization Not Inclusion Indigenous Resistance to American Settler Colonialism’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2015

08Dec15

Abstract: American Indians experience forms of domination and resist them through a wide range of decolonizing processes that are commonly overlooked, misidentified, or minimally analyzed by American sociology. This inattention reflects the naturalizing use of minoritizing frameworks regarding tribal members and ethnic rather than political conceptions of American Indian nationhood, membership, and identity. Drawing upon a settler colonial framework, the author uses an analytic typology to identify particular dimensions of settler colonialism, their manifestations, and indigenous action addressing those forms of power. Implications for race and ethnic scholarship and for indigenous participation in racial politics are considered.


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