Abstract: This article considers some key themes in messages promoted to New Zealand Māori by European colonists. With a focus on the period prior to 1870 when a number of factors came together to end Māori economic dominance, it considers whether the promoters of those messages were correct to claim that Indigenous peoples were not interested in material benefit or that individual ownership and individual endeavour for personal advantage were a greater spur to labour and productivity. Evidence pertaining to Māori is set against similar evidence from North America to argue that claims of laziness, incompetence, and inefficient land use were not merely incorrect but served to justify the transfer of land ownership from Māori to settlers in a process which appears to have parallels in North America and elsewhere.

Description: “A nuanced narrative of Anglo-Native interactions in the early years of British colonialism. Jeffrey Glover crafts a persuasive story that draws on much of the best historical work, and rigorously avoids romanticizing (or demonizing) any of the involved parties, showing how indigenous leaders used the tools and strategies available to them to advance their individual and communal interests.”—Sandra M. Gustafson, University of Notre Dame

In many accounts of Native American history, treaties are synonymous with tragedy. From the beginnings of settlement, Europeans made and broke treaties, often exploiting Native American lack of alphabetic literacy to manipulate political negotiation. But while colonial dealings had devastating results for Native people, treaty making and breaking involved struggles more complex than any simple contest between invaders and victims. The early colonists were often compelled to negotiate on Indian terms, and treaties took a bewildering array of shapes ranging from rituals to gestures to pictographs. At the same time, Jeffrey Glover demonstrates, treaties were international events, scrutinized by faraway European audiences and framed against a background of English, Spanish, French, and Dutch imperial rivalries.

To establish the meaning of their agreements, colonists and Natives adapted and invented many new kinds of political representation, combining rituals from tribal, national, and religious traditions. Drawing on an archive that includes written documents, printed books, orations, landscape markings, wampum beads, tally sticks, and other technologies of political accounting, Glover examines the powerful influence of treaty making along the vibrant and multicultural Atlantic coast of the seventeenth century.

Abstract: Settler colonialism involved joint processes of destruction and substitution by which colonists set out to replace indigenous worlds with European/western worlds. But indigenous worlds continue to exist in numerous spaces, moments and interactions where distinct ontologies and ways of being-in-the-world persist. In Aotearoa New Zealand these spaces of the indigenous/Māori world are largely invisible to the mainstream settler society, persisting most obviously on marae, the complex of buildings located on Māori land that are at the heart of community life. Māori and western worlds also briefly come together in public contexts where Māori protocols are used to mark openings of various sorts, temporarily governing public space and sociability. In this paper I explore a different case where, I argue, Māori and western worlds are entangled or knotted together in the atrium space of a community building in a small rural community. In this atrium stand a circle of seven carved posts (pou), each representing one of the seven peoples of the community – five Māori tribes, Pākehā (settlers) and Dalmatians (descendants of migrants from Croatia). With reference to work on indigenous ontologies, new materialism and Lévinasian ethics, I follow various threads of how these pou do more than simply mark the identity and belonging of each of these peoples, but entangle Māori and western worlds. The pou enact a reclamation of public space for Māori, long marginalized within the community. More profoundly they bring Māori ontology into the building, an ontology with its own space-time relationality evident when Māori address the ancestors carved on the pou. Finally, the co-existence of Māori and western ontologies is a provocation to the non-Māori community to consider their own relationship to the Māori world, a provocation I explore by considering what it means to have one of my own ancestors carved on the Pākehā pou.

Abstract: On December 23, 2012, a large group of Palestinians from occupied Palestine and diasporic Palestinians from the settler-colonial states of Canada and the United States issued a statement in support of the Idle No More Movement and Indigenous rights to sovereignty and self-determination. This article explores the assumptions and politics of solidarity that inform this statement and what they reveal about the current historical conjuncture of alliance and coalition-building amongst Palestinian and Indigenous people. By pointing to shared histories of settler colonialism between Indigenous peoples and Palestinians, it situates alliance politics within a broader context of critical relatedness, mutuality, and reciprocity. It thus explores what assumptive relationship between these two peoples has meant for movements and struggles against the settler-colonial state of Canada and what type of challenges this interpretive and political framework may pose to anti-colonial pursuits that seek to create more just worlds across varying but interconnected contexts of occupation, coloniality, and settlement.

The review.

Abstract: This project investigates the legacies of shifting land tenure and stewardship practices on what is now known as the Ottawa Valley watershed (referred to as the Kitchissippi by the Omamawinini or Algonquin people), and the effects that this central colonization project has had on issues of identity and Nationalism on Canadians, diversely identified as settler-colonists of European or at least “Old World” descent and First Nations, Métis and Inuit (Lawrence 2012). Beginning with the partition of their territory into the jurisdictions of Upper and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), and continuing through the institution and increased surveillance of Algonquin Provincial Park, the Canadian Nation-State has remained an obstacle barring unification efforts made by various First Nations, local and descendant groups in the area (Lawrence 2012). Now often pit against one another during land claims disputes and over access to resources, these First Nations, local and descendant communities are simultaneously involved in factional resistance to one another’s overt dominance, and in unifying “Nationalist” projects enacted implicitly on local scales and through explicitly “traditional” representations.

Focusing on historical and contemporary political and social issues related to Algonquin Provincial Park and its establishment, this project explores; 1) Competing claims levied by First Nations People, local and descendant communities as well as representatives of the Canadian settler-colonist Nation-State regarding proper relationships to the environment and its stewardship; 2) Popular discursive and practical approaches to conservation, tourism, naturalism, and heritage management; and 3) The complicated entanglements of First Nations, settler-colonist, local and descendant communities and shifting identifications made evident by changes in economic relationships to the territory in and around the Park and in some people’ legal status vis-a-vis the Nation-State.

This dissertation draws on public history and traditional narrative as sources for a reconsideration of history, ethnohistory, and ethnography in relation to studies of the complex contemporary Canadian Nation-State. Contributing to a specifically Canadian
anthropology, I develop vocabulary through which to engage the perpetuation of Traditional Indigenous Knowledge regarding the environment, health and relationality, and to counteract Intergenerational Trauma related to dispossession and the breakdown of identity, personal and collective, under settler-colonial pressures.

Abstract: How did Norwegian immigrants imagine they belonged in and to America during the first thirty years of emigration? This study investigates expressions and perceptions of belonging among Norwegian immigrants in the American Midwest. Operationalizing belonging as an analytical concept for historical research, the study defines three main ways of how immigrants perceived they belonged during the antebellum era and beyond. They acquired a sense of belonging, as may be observed in discussions and expressions of homesickness and longing. They imagined that their role as settlers gave them reason for belonging in America. And whereas they perceived clear limits to belonging to an American nation at present, they imagined that they would eventually become part of it through a future process of amalgamation. After exposing antebellum perceptions of belonging, the study proceeds by relating these perceptions to the postbellum development of homemaking myths. The vernacular pluralism of the antebellum era established ways of imagining belonging to an American nation which outlasted the Civil War. Reviewing two Norwegian-American scholars ideas of America as a settler empire and their ideas of American nationality during the late nineteenth century, the study suggests a continuity in perceptions of belonging from the 1850s to at least the 1890s.

Excerpt: There is an empty space in the written history of Canada. In monographs, textbooks, and articles alike, narratives of Indigenous peoples fade out following the Indian Act (1876) and the Numbered Treaties (1871-1921). Coll Thrush expressed this as a phenomenon where Indigenous peoples “exit stage left after treaty or battle.” [1] With the exception of residential schools and the decades of the World Wars, Indigenous peoples do not re-enter the Canadian historical narrative until the 1960s civil rights era.

This empty space is especially stark in histories of urban spaces, despite their rich Indigenous histories. With a few recent exceptions, greater historical memories of urban spaces across Canada remain largely confined by colonial ideologies.

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Imperial Expectations and Realities: El Dorados, Utopias and Dystopias, with a chapter on Welsh Patagonia (Trevor Harris, ‘A Place to Speak the “Language of Heaven”? Patagonia as a Land of Broken Welsh Promise’, pp. 125-144), a chapter on the German Templer colonies in Palestine (Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Felicity Jensz, ‘Between Heaven and Earth: The German Templer Colonies in Palestine’), and a chapter on Italy as a ‘Promised Land’ (Giuseppe Finaldi, ‘Dreaming in the Desert: Libya as Italy’s Promised Land’, pp. 191-209).

Check out the Reuters release.