Abstract: Broadly taking up themes of violence and colonialism, this paper was first presented as a roundtable at the Decolonizing Cascadias?: 2013 Critical Geographies Mini Conference at the University of British Columbia. Framed as a
roundtable conversation among the three authors, the paper critically examines the material and ideological relations through which certain types of violence are made invisible in the context of ongoing colonialism in white settler society. In dialogue
across their various academic, activist and personal experiences, the authors argue for a critical decolonizing geography of violence that examines how spaces and subjects are constructed relationally through social, material and legal processes of
racial violence and its gendered and sexualized politics. How do certain forms of violence come to be naturalized within civilizing and modernizing discourse, such that the violence of development or colonialism come to be erased? How do some
lives become constructed as inherently violent in order to deny the violence against them? Disrupting and examining the settler colonial thinking and practices that persist within diverse social movements and academic disciplines, including
geography, the dialogue explores who has the authority to name what forms of violence are seen as legitimate. As activist-scholars engaged in knowledge production and legitimization, the authors are interested in envisioning new
possibilities for how they understand violence and resistance, particularly by centering Indigenous ontologies and by naming lived realities which are not accounted for in dominant discourses of violence and colonialism.

Synopsis: There is no question that European colonization introduced smallpox, measles, and other infectious diseases to the Americas, causing considerable harm and death to indigenous peoples. But though these diseases were devastating, their impact has been widely exaggerated. Warfare, enslavement, land expropriation, removals, erasure of identity, and other factors undermined Native populations. These factors worked in a deadly cabal with germs to cause epidemics, exacerbate mortality, and curtail population recovery.

“Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America” challenges the virgin soil hypothesis that was used for decades to explain the decimation of the indigenous people of North America. This hypothesis argues that the massive depopulation of the New World was caused primarily by diseases brought by European colonists that infected Native populations lacking immunity to foreign pathogens. In “Beyond Germs,” contributors expertly argue that blaming germs lets Europeans off the hook for the enormous number of Native American deaths that occurred after 1492.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians come together in this cutting-edge volume to report a wide variety of other factors in the decline in the indigenous population, including genocide, forced labor, and population dislocation. These factors led to what the editors describe in their introduction as systemic structural violence on the Native populations of North America.
While we may never know the full extent of Native depopulation during the colonial period because the evidence available for indigenous communities is notoriously slim and problematic, what is certain is that a generation of scholars has significantly overemphasized disease as the cause of depopulation and has downplayed the active role of Europeans in inciting wars, destroying livelihoods, and erasing identities.

Abstract: Focusing on the writings of state and local promoters, this article traces how water-based characteristics formed a fundamental differential in the rivalry between California and Florida for settlers and tourists in the Gilded Age. In crude terms California and Florida presented as environmental opposites: while the Pacific state—its southern part, especially—was associated with a scarcity of water, Florida, with its many rivers, lakes, springs, and swamps, appeared to host a troubling abundance of the stuff. An important element of truth underpinned these conceptions. But in their competition to sell their states as “paradises” for Americans, land and tourism boosters accentuated this environmental dichotomy and its potential developmental consequences. “Dry” California was set against “watery” Florida as promoters repeatedly attacked the other’s supposed environmental deficiencies. Ultimately, while both states succeeded in becoming leading tourist destinations, Southern California’s proponents seemed to hold the upper hand over their Florida counterparts in selling an American homeland. Their championing of irrigation as a “civilizing” process that converted desert into prosperous garden soothed widespread anxieties over living in such an arid land and contrasted with the persistent struggles of Florida’s advocates to convince Americans to relocate permanently to the supposedly water-logged peninsula.

Abstract: This paper discusses Dakota-Anishinabe Brian Wright-McLeod’s graphic novel Red Power (2011), which tells a story of land conflict surrounding a Native American reservation and of a group of Native activists involved in it. Based on an interview with Wright-McLeod and with several references to Jason Aaron and R.M Guéra’s reservation-based graphic novel Scalped (2007-2012), it focuses on the politics of space and identity. Drawing on propositions from cultural geography about the interdependency of social and spatial structures and their mutually constitutive relationship, the paper analyzes how Red Power makes use of the visual aspect of the graphic novel to rearticulate the colonizer-colonized dichotomy of identity politics and expose the mechanisms through which power structures continue to restrict, disrupt, and exploit indigenous spaces. The paper then proceeds to examine how the novel seeks out possibilities of unsettling the spatial order imposed upon indigenous people by focusing on resistance organized by Native activists. It also explores how the novel suggests ways of experiencing and being in space that escape both colonial ways of knowing and conceiving it and, more importantly, colonial control over it. 

Abstract: This paper describes the intersection of the cooperative movement and Indigenous communities in Canada. The paper brings a lens of nation and race to an analysis of the cooperative movement in Canada, a perspective that has received limited attention in published literature. Cooperatives have had a dual role in Indigenous communities. The history of Indigenous cooperative development in Canada is inseparable from historical government colonization policies. In the current context, cooperatives have been utilized by Indigenous communities as a tool for economic and social development. Indigenous cooperatives demonstrate innovative combinations of “quadruple bottom line” business approaches, including financial, social, environmental and cultural goals. The extraordinary growth of Indigenous cooperatives in Canada, particularly in Inuit communities in the North, has also been supported by government policy implementation including financial and technical management support. A pan-Arctic comparison of government policies affecting development of cooperatives is provided as counter examples against the hypothesis of “cultural fit” between cooperatives and Indigenous communities. Ultimately, cooperatives are explained as an organizational form that can be co-opted for colonization or decolonization, capitalism or
socialism, settler or Indigenous communities for their own specific purposes.

Abstract: This dissertation demonstrates performance as a mode of knowledge transfer, cultural continuity and intercultural influence that connects people – Indigenous as well as settlers and newcomers – to land. In it I engage with performance studies theory in light of Indigenous conceptions of land, performance and place naming held within the hən’q’əmin’əm’ language, while using case studies to explicate histories based on archives and repertoires. Two of my dissertation case studies critically engage with the City of Vancouver Archives. The first deconstructs the use of reenactment to create an origin narrative of benevolent “whiteness” in settler society and the second examines possible Indigenous interventions in the archive through cultural restriction. A third study demonstrates how Aboriginal Tourism of BC’s Klahowya Village, located in Stanley Park 2010-14, presents an enterprise which asserts a connection to land while enabling some intra-nation Indigenous transfer of knowledge. In aiming to rectify the absence of Indigenous women in the archival work that I have undertaken, this dissertation also features performance responses to contemporary theatrical works written and/or performed by Indigenous women in Vancouver between 2012 and 2014. Research methodologies include semiotic and phenomenological analyses enabled by an engagement with Indigenous research methodologies supported by language learning, interviews, as well as archival and field work. This research puts forth a careful examination of the influence of Vancouver’s first archivist, James Skitt Matthews, making note of limitations of the city’s archival collection with regard to Indigenous knowledge and activities. Through analyses of the performative knowledge contained within hən’q’əmin’əm’ and colonial place names this research proposes further critical consideration of existing Vancouver place names. I also develop two terms, grounded practices and eddies of influence, which are employed to create a fuller understanding of the significance of land, language and reciprocity, as well as the strategic and tactical methods through which the Indigenous peoples of this area have used performance to contribute to cultural continuation and the maintenance of Indigenous places.

Abstract: Brazil has presided over the most comprehensive agrarian reform frontier colonization program on Earth, in which ~1.2 million settlers have been translocated by successive governments since the 1970’s, mostly into forested hinterlands of Brazilian Amazonia. These settlements encompass 5.3% of this ~5 million km2 region, but have contributed with 13.5% of all land conversion into agropastoral land uses. The Brazilian Federal Agrarian Agency (INCRA) has repeatedly claimed that deforestation in these areas largely predates the sanctioned arrival of new settlers. Here, we quantify rates of natural vegetation conversion across 1911 agrarian settlements allocated to 568 Amazonian counties and compare fire incidence and deforestation rates before and after the official occupation of settlements by migrant farmers. The timing and spatial distribution of deforestation and fires in our analysis provides irrefutable chronological and spatially explicit evidence of agropastoral conversion both inside and immediately outside agrarian settlements over the last decade. Deforestation rates are strongly related to local human population density and road access to regional markets. Agrarian settlements consistently accelerated rates of deforestation and fires, compared to neighboring areas outside settlements, but within the same counties. Relocated smallholders allocated to forest areas undoubtedly operate as pivotal agents of deforestation, and most of the forest clearance occurs in the aftermath of government-induced migration.

No abstract available; check the review essay.

Special Issue: Self-determination—A Double-edged Principle. See especially:

Oded Haklai, ‘From Independent Statehood to Minority Rights: The Evolution of National Self-determination as an International Order Principle in the Post-State Formation Era’, Ethnopolitics,14, 5 , 2015, pp. 461-469.

Abstract: The principle of self-determination has evolved considerably over the past century. Whereas in the twentieth century, it provided the premise for independent statehood, in the twenty-first century, the focus has shifted to minority rights within existing states. This article traces and explains the reasons for this evolution.

Mark R. Beissinger,’Self-determination as a Technology of Imperialism: The Soviet and Russian Experiences’, Ethnopolitics,14, 5 , 2015, pp. 479-487.

Abstract: For a man who has lived through almost one third of New Zealand’s modern history, Prime Minister John Key seems to know very little about it. ‘New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the world that were settled peacefully,’ he said a few months ago. ‘Maori probably acknowledge that settlers had a place to play and brought with them a lot of skills and a lot of capital.’ Many New Zealanders will nod gently while whispering to each other in conceited agreement: ‘Yes, we were not nearly as savage as those Australian settlers.’