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On an imperial form that includes settler colonialism: On John Darwin’s The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970, with papers by Antoinette Burton, Alan Lester, Kirsten McKenzie, Duncan Bell and a reply by John Darwin

09Sep15

Abstract: In an age when both the traditional book form and the world that the British Empire made are arguably in crisis, it is remarkable that big books on British imperialism abound. Contributors to this roundtable assess scale and genre as well as content in their discussion of the claims and impact of John Darwin’s tome, The Empire Project. John Darwin’s response is also included.


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Where the struggle is: Unist’ot’en Camp

09Sep15

Sooner or later, you have to say no.


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Identifying the ‘settler problem’: Emma Battell Lowman, Adam J. Barker, Settler Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada, Fernwood, 2015

09Sep15

Description: Canada has never had an “Indian problem”— but it does have a Settler problem. But what does it mean to be Settler? And why does it matter?

Through an engaging, and sometimes enraging, look at the relationships between Canada and Indigenous nations, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada explains what it means to be Settler and argues that accepting this identity is an important first step towards changing those relationships. Being Settler means understanding that Canada is deeply entangled in the violence of colonialism, and that this colonialism and pervasive violence continue to define contemporary political, economic and cultural life in Canada. It also means accepting our responsibility to struggle for change. Settler offers important ways forward — ways to decolonize relationships between Settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples — so that we can find new ways of being on the land, together.

This book presents a serious challenge. It offers no easy road, and lets no one off the hook. It will unsettle, but only to help Settler people find a pathway for transformative change, one that prepares us to imagine and move towards just and beneficial relationships with Indigenous nations. And this way forward may mean leaving much of what we know as Canada behind.


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Internal settler colonialism and history textbooks (the case of Japan): Nicholas Henck, ‘History from Below Japan’s Junior High School History Textbooks and the colonisation of Hokkaidō’, electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, 15, 2, 2015

06Sep15

Abstract: The scholarly attention that has hitherto been devoted to discussion of Japan’s Junior High School History Textbooks (JJHSHT) has tended to focus almost exclusively on their treatment of the colonisation of Korea and China. Indeed, it appears that the issue of the JJHSHT’s description of the Japanese government’s imperialist ventures in East and South-East Asia has almost completely eclipsed that of these same textbooks’ coverage of the Meiji government’s colonisation of Hokkaidō. This paper then seeks to address one of the most blatant, but least discussed, examples of “victor’s history” concerning Japan—namely, what the JJHSHT euphemistically dub the ‘development’ of Hokkaidō. A textual analysis of all eight government-approved JJHSHT yields interesting results: first, it reveals that they exhibit a degree of variation in their treatment of this subject that is perhaps not commonly associated with these textbooks; and secondly, it exposes both a repeated emphasis on ‘development’ to describe what was in fact colonization, and also a consistent pattern of ignoring, or severely underplaying, the extremely detrimental impact this process had on the indigenous Ainu who experienced it. Indeed, the JJHSHT’s reluctance to heed the alternative perspectives of the minority Ainu fosters historical amnesia by producing historiographies of oblivion, and constitutes a classic example of cultural imperialism. The result is a highly sanitised version of events which substitutes historical reality for a contrived, cosmetic narrative of ‘development’ that lends a veneer of legitimacy to what was in effect plunder. Consequently, what Japanese pupils are being exposed to is a partial, ‘official’ version of history, rather than a nuanced account that finds resonance with the perspective of the Ainu, the testimony of contemporary Japanese eyewitnesses, or the historical narrative produced by modern scholarship.


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Explaining settler committment to a war that was not theirs: Steve Marti, Embattled Communities: Voluntary Action and Identity in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, 1914-1918, PhD Deissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2015

06Sep15

Abstract: This dissertation examines voluntary mobilization during the First World War to understand why communities on the social and geographical periphery of the British Empire mobilized themselves so enthusiastically to support a distant war, fought for a distant empire. Lacking a strong state apparatus or a military-industrial complex, the governments of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand relied on voluntary contributions to sustain their war efforts. Community-based voluntary societies knitted socks, raised funds to purchase military equipment, and formed contingents of soldiers. By examining the selective mobilization of voluntary participation, this study will understand how different communities negotiated social and spatial boundaries as they attempted to project their communal identity through wartime patriotism.

The process of voluntary mobilization allowed communities to organize their efforts in a manner that reflected and projected their collective identity. By deciding the scale and scope of voluntary efforts, controlling who was included or excluded in these efforts, advertising the community’s achievements, regulating who would benefit from these contributions, the organizers of voluntary patriotic work determined how these efforts would fit into the national and imperial war effort. The records and
correspondence detailing the coordination of voluntary contributions reveal the terms by which communities defined themselves through their patriotic efforts.

Yet the extent to which communities could project their identity through their voluntary contributions was mediated by dominion governments, which authorized and accepted voluntary efforts. State authorities determined which communities could mobilize independently, which should be mobilized into an existing effort, and which communities should be prevented from contributing to the war altogether. A comparative study of mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand will reveal how categories of space, ethnicity, and race factored both in the constructions and negotiations of communal identities, as well as the effacement of marginalized communities.


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Analysisng comparatively justifications for land grabs: Economic dysfunction or land grab? Hazel Petrie, ‘Assaults on the 19th- century Māori economy and their Native North American parallels’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 11, 3, 2015

06Sep15

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.


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On indigenous sovereigns, demonstrating that it is a complex story but that the drafters of treaties were willing to recognise rights only if they could be surrendered: Jeffrey Glover, Paper Sovereigns Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604-1664, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014

04Sep15

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.


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On settler colonialism as a relation: Avril Bell, ‘Entangled Worlds: ontology and relationality in a settler society’, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 2015

04Sep15

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.


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Solidarities? Dana M. Olwan, ‘On Assumptive Solidarities in Comparative Settler Colonialisms’, Feral Feminisms, 4, 2015

04Sep15

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.


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Reporting on a recent conference: Biopolitics – Geopolitics – Sovereignty – Life: Settler Colonialisms and Indigenous Presences in North America, 2015

04Sep15

The review.


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