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.

Abstract: This article examines the cultural identifications of doctors of French origin working for the colonial medical service in Algeria at the end of the nineteenth century. As representatives of the state, doctors were expected to uphold the gendered values of civilisation which underpinned the French Third Republic and its empire. Yet they also formed part of a mixed European settler community which insisted upon its own racial and cultural specificity. Faced with a series of centralising reforms to the service from 1878, doctors tied their pursuit of professional freedom to a wider settler movement for autonomy. In so doing, they came to embody a self-proclaimed ‘new white race’ which sought to physically regenerate the empire. In tracing these doctors’ mediation between their governmental employers and their settler patients, this article exposes tensions within French medical culture in Algeria and reflects on the consequences for the operation of colonial power.

Abstract: Soon after the settlement of Iceland in the late 9^th and early 10^th century, an extensive system of turf walls was erected and was functional for about 200 years. After its collapse in the 12^th century, few if any walls were built until the late 18^th century. The remnants of this Viking Age fence system have been mapped in northeast Iceland, revealing enclosures with a characteristic geometry, broadly reflecting property boundaries. The fences are the product of a pastoral society, which then as now was based on dispersed farmsteads subsisting on animal husbandry. There was a strong seasonal component, most notably a need for harvesting and storing winter fodder. The short-lived fence system offers a rare snapshot of the division of a newly colonized landscape into functional units. This paper presents a framework for evaluating those units based on current thinking in behavioral ecology. The settlement of Iceland by the Viking Age colonists may be described by principles of habitat-selection theory, and the configuration of fences may be understood by factors governing division of spatial resources by territorial organisms. These factors include density, predictability and dispersion of resources, habitat geometry, intruder pressure, and economic defendability. Finer-scale fence patterns emerge from the interaction of territorial boundaries and a need to restrict livestock movements within the farmstead. Illustrative examples are drawn from the author’s own studies of settlement patterns and configuration of defended space in wild ducks and also from the medieval Book of Settlements, which describes the early colonization of Iceland.

From the introduction: As we set out to write our Call for Papers for this issue, we, the editors, were not certain about where to begin or head. We knew that we wanted Issue 4 of Feral Feminisms to engage with questions of the anti-colonial and/or decolonial and anti-racist scholarship of diasporic people of colour living in white settler-colonial nation-states. However, we wanted to engage with these questions in a language that did not homogenize all bodies of colour, that was careful about respecting the different histories and presents of Black bodies, and that showed a critical understanding of the different histories and presents and different bodies and different power relations that organize our bodies here along multiple axes of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, religion, citizenship, language, and countries of birth. This was a difficult task and one at which we very successfully failed. The failure was not just ours, though. It was the failure of our political imaginations and theoretical conceptualizations, which are not that of any one individual. This was the failure of language, of the terms and bodies from which we began. It was the failure of our anti-racist and anti-colonial politics. One thing we learned through writing the Call for Papers is that what we learn in graduate school is less about our research in terms of content or how we learn to frame our questions. It is more important to begin to engage with the limits of our knowledge and of learning how to live within those limits. Our failure and recognition of power and limits were many. There was a lot we did or did not do in in terms of ethical or critical engagements with violent erasures.

Abstract: In French Polynesia and New Caledonia, the “indigenous strategy” in reference to the world indigenous movement and UN indigenous rights instruments is a relatively new one in the struggle to recover sovereignty. Individuals and volunteer associations only began to explore the possibilities of this strategy in the mid-1990s, and it continues to hold a marginal place in the political field of the French territories in Oceania. This article explores how indigeneity and indigenous rights are understood and enacted locally, drawing on local voices and actions within a local and national context. It shows how the framework for the struggles of the indigenous peoples in the French territories in Oceania differs radically from those of other peoples who have been seen as emblematic of the category “indigenous peoples”.

Link to the book.