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Indigenous politics as ‘a state of reclamation’: Robin R. Gray, Ts’msyen Revolution: The Poetics and Politics of Reclaiming, PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 2015

15Nov15

Abstract: As a result of the settler colonial project in North America, Ts’msyen have been thrust into a state of reclamation. The purpose of this study was to examine the distinctiveness of what it means for Ts’msyen to reclaim given our particular history and experiences with settler colonialism. Utilizing the poetics and politics as a theoretical, methodological and practical framework, this dissertation synthesizes the motivations, possibilities and obstacles associated with Ts’msyen reclamation in the contemporary era. Further, as a contribution to the literature on decolonization, Indigenous nationhood, Indigenous subjectivity, Indigenous methodologies and repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, I report on two multi-sited, auto-ethnographic, and community-based research initiatives: (1) a repatriation case study focusing on the legal and ethical dimensions associated with reclaiming Ts’msyen songs from archives, and (2) a case study focusing on embodied sovereignty and heritage reclamation with an urban Ts’msyen dance group. To contextualize the information generated from my engagements with over 200 Ts’msyen, I also offer my own experiences as a Ts’msyen hana’ax (woman), and as a dancer and a
singer. Primary data are derived from a series of listening gatherings, translation workshops and talking circles from the repatriation case study; and a Photovoice project, talking circle and dance ethnography from the dance group study. Secondary data are derived from Ts’msyen lived social realties in the third space; academic literature; current affairs and archival research. Key findings show (a) the ways in which Ts’msyen laws and systems of property ownership are enacted when Ts’msyen sing and dance, (b) how an Indigenous research paradigm develops organically based on an ethos of relational accountability, (c) how Indigenous standpoints alter ethnographic form and disrupt objectified knowledge production, (d) and where to put the theories of decolonization into praxis in settler colonial contexts. Ultimately, this dissertation is representative of a Ts’msyen manifesto. It is a call for a renunciation of contemporary ethics, policies, laws, discourses and practices that continue the work of structured dispossession and Indigenous elimination, while it is also an active assertion of Ts’msyen nationhood, sovereignty, precedent, laws and ways of knowing, being and doing.


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And what about repressive authenticity? Eric March, ‘An Alaska Native group decided to make a video game. It’s like nothing you’ve ever played before’, Upworthy, 02/11/15

13Nov15

Access the article here.


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On white supremacy and settler orders: Anne Bonds, Joshua Inwood, ‘Beyond white privilege: Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism’, Progress in Human Geography, 2015

13Nov15

Abstract: This paper builds from scholarship on whiteness and white privilege to argue for an expanded focus that includes settler colonialism and white supremacy. We argue that engaging with white supremacy and settler colonialism reveals the enduring social, economic, and political impacts of white supremacy as a materially grounded set of practices. We situate white supremacy not as an artifact of history or as an extreme position, but rather as the foundation for the continuous unfolding of practices of race and racism within settler states. We illustrate this framework through a recent example of a land dispute in the American West.


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On the gendered dimension of settler colonial orders: Kate Law, Gendering the Settler State: White Women, Race, Liberalism and Empire, Routledge, 2015

13Nov15

Description: White women cut an ambivalent figure in the transnational history of the British Empire. They tend to be remembered as malicious harridans personifying the worst excesses of colonialism, as vacuous fusspots, whose lives were punctuated by a series of frivolous pastimes, or as casualties of patriarchy, constrained by male actions and gendered ideologies. This book, which places itself amongst other “new imperial histories”, argues that the reality of the situation, is of course, much more intricate and complex. Focusing on post-war colonial Rhodesia, Gendering the Settler State provides a fine-grained analysis of the role(s) of white women in the colonial enterprise, arguing that they held ambiguous and inconsistent views on a variety of issues including liberalism, gender, race and colonialism.


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On settler sentimentalities: Melissa Bellanta, ‘His Two Mates Around Him Were Crying: Masculine Sentimentality in Late-Victorian Culture’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 20, 4, 2015, pp. 471-490

11Nov15

Abstract: Commentators on late-Victorian culture often tell us that two interrelated developments took place. First, there was a shift away from Victorian sentimentality; second, there was a growing insistence on toughness and emotional reserve as desirable for white men. Commentators on late-Victorian Australia often suggest that these developments were unusually conspicuous there. This is what the historian of mourning Patricia Jalland tells us in a discussion of the paradigmatic representation of death in Victorian Australian culture. In the Australian colonies, she writes, the paradigmatic death was the tough white man’s in the solitary bush. Representations of such deaths were legion, most often infused with ‘ironic realism’ rather than sentiment. In this article I challenge this view. Focusing on the work of popular Australian writer, Henry Lawson, I show that depictions of white men dying in the bush were profoundly sentimental in that they promoted pathos for white men’s suffering and grief in conventional ways. Representations of dying bushmen were indeed part of a specifically white, masculine sentimentality emerging throughout Anglophone culture in the late-Victorian years, part of a process through which white men insisted on the primacy of their emotional experiences and needs. In Australia and other settler colonies, this new masculine sentimentality also supported settler colonialism because promoting tenderness for hardy white frontiersmen diverted sympathy from the Aboriginal peoples they dispossessed. This article accordingly rethinks the dynamic between masculinity and sentiment in late-Victorian culture, paying particular attention to its relationship to power.


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On genetics as (possibly) a settler colonial technique: Emma Kowal, ‘Genetics and Indigenous Communities: Ethical Issues’, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 9, 2015, pp. 962-968.

11Nov15

Abstract: Indigenous people stand to benefit from advances in genomic technology, but genetic research in Indigenous communities has been controversial. This article reviews the ethical issues that Indigenous people and others have raised with reference to genetic research projects and biobanks. The ethical issues that apply to Indigenous people should be seen as additional to ‘conventional’ ethical issues that apply to all people, rather than replacing them. The additional ethical concerns discussed include group harm; cultural beliefs relating to biospecimens and human origins; community engagement and collective consent; benefit; ownership; and whether biospecimens can and should be ‘repatriated.’


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On visual resistance and domination: Jaafar Alloul, ‘Signs of Visual Resistance in Palestine: Unsettling the Settler-Colonial Matrix’, Middle East Critique, 2015

11Nov15

Abstract: This article contrasts historical and contemporary discourses and visualizations of the notions of Homeland, the Other and the Self that have been applied in the Zionist/Israeli project to colonize Palestine and displace its indigenous inhabitants. It actively connects theories of visual sociology and cultural studies (postmodern critical theory) with (1) various Israeli and Palestinian political discourses of Belonging (nationhood) while also (2) providing the reader with clear-cut, material examples of both exclusivist Zionist technologies of power and subaltern Palestinian techniques of counter-discourse, ultimately retracing historical continuity and unveiling resonant dialectics of modern nationalist doctrine across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries throughout both Europe and the Middle East. Critically tracing and decoding the altering semiotic identity of a set of politicized posters highlights the key importance and the ongoing use of abstract power (discourse) within Israeli strategies of occupation and siege while simultaneously disclosing innovative Palestinian forms of visual resistance that advocate ‘existence’ in an asymmetric configuration of ‘conflict’. In order to interpret the selected visuals fully, one needs foremost to be acquainted with the interwoven ‘migration’ of populations, ideas, and praxes through both time and space.


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On indigenous identities and settler colonialism: Sandy Grande, Timothy San Pedro, Sweeney Windchief, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Identity in the 21st Century: Remembering, Reclaiming, and Regenerating’, in Elizabeth Pathy Salett, Diane R. Koslow (eds), Multicultural Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity, NAWS Press, 2015, pp. 105-122

11Nov15

Excerpt: The broad aim of this chapter is to build deeper understanding about what it means to be Indigenous in both historic and contemporary contexts. For reasons of brevity, we focus on Indigenous peoples of Native North America and particularly the United States. Within this context, we map the production of Indigenous identity in a manner that accounts for the material effects of “forced incorporation”—namely, the current system of federal recognition and tribal citizenship—and for spaces of Indigenous resistance and resilience, both of which have significant implications for identity development.


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On comparisons, racisms, and settler colonialisms: Danika Medak-Saltzman, Antonio T. Tiongson Jr., ‘Racial Comparativism Reconsidered’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 1, 2, 2015, pp. 1-7

06Nov15

No abstract available.


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On development as settler colonialism: George Luna-Peña, ‘“Little More than Desert Wasteland”: Race, Development, and Settler Colonialism in the Mexicali Valley’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 1, 2, 2015, pp. 81-101

06Nov15

No abstract available:


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