« Older posts
Newer posts »

Decolonising local relationships; an example? Janelle Young, Reimagining Mi’kmaq-State Relations: Facing Colonialism at the Mi’kmaq-Nova Scotia-Canada Tripartite Forum, MA thesis, Dalhousie University, 2015

30Aug15

Abstract: To date, the literature on Canadian Indigenous-state relations has paid little attention to more localized, informal approaches to dispute resolution. Through ethnographic research on the Mi’kmaq-Nova Scotia-Canada Tripartite Forum, my thesis explores past and current Tripartite Forum members’ perspectives on how it has impacted relations between the Mi’kmaq and federal and provincial governments. I argue that, on the surface, the Tripartite Forum occupies a critical role in ensuring that government policies better meet the needs of Mi’kmaw communities. At the same time, Tripartite Forum members are required to confront a legacy of colonialism that, for the Mi’kmaq, cannot be solved through the creation of culturally relevant programs and services alone. That often reproduces the very colonizing power relations that the Tripartite Forum is meant to undo. By contrast, Mi’kmaw members of the Tripartite Forum envision a relationship based on the values of equality and sharing that are contained within the peace and friendship treaties signed by their ancestors. Improving relations between Mi’kmaw communities and the Canadian and Nova Scotian States will ultimately require a significant reordering of power beyond the current mandate of the Forum.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On US Settler Colonial Landscapes: Ellen-Rae Cachola, ‘Reading the Landscape of U.S. Settler Colonialism in Southern Oʻahu’, Feral Feminisms, Complicities, Connections, & Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism, 4, 2015

26Aug15

Abstract: This study used a walking tour to examine Filipino diasporic settler awareness of the structural violence that Kanaka ʻŌiwi endure in Hawaiʻi. Military infrastructures and hotels in Waikīkī evidence the Westphalian state that occupies indigenous commons, recruiting natives and immigrants to participate in the settler-colonial state as dehumanized subjects. Naming settler colonialism as a Westphalian governing system illuminates how local occupation is integral to occupations in other parts of the world. This framework offers a common language for indigenous and diasporic settlers to create new models of local and
international relationality.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Decolonising settler and gendered colonialisms: Andrew Allsup, Queer Indigenous Rhetorics: Decolonizing the Socio-Symbolic Order of Euro-American Gender and Sexual Imaginaries, MA Thesis, Kansas State University, 2015

26Aug15

Abstract: This thesis explores the rhetorical function of creative writing being written by queer/two-spirit identified indigenous authors. The rhetorical function being the way these stories politicize the various ways gender and sexuality were foundational tools of settler colonialism in de-tribalizing and assimilating indigenous folks. The literary perspective often elides politics in favor of deconstructing aspects of creative writing such as genre, syntax, and themes instead of the socio-political potential such works produce. The three works I examine all have something to teach rhetorical scholars about the need to politicize the socio-sexual and gendered imaginaries of settler colonialism in discourses of the founding fathers, manifest destiny, westward expansion, land purchase. statehood, American exceptionalism, democracy promotion, and many more. They fundamentally challenge rhetorics that posit static notions of American identity and/or purpose that represses the historical and ongoing genocide of indigenous culture and life. In this way, they intervene in the very notion of communicability itself within the socio-symbolic economy of settler colonialism and its attendant heteropatriarchal gendered and sexual imaginaries.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

German settlers in Brazil; Germanness, Brazilianness, freedom, unfreedom: Eugene S. Cassidy, ‘The Ambivalence of Slavery, The Certainty of Germanness: Representations of Slave-Holding and Its Impact Among German Settlers in Brazil, 1820–1889’, German History, 33, 3, 2015, pp. 367-384

24Aug15

Abstract: While there is a growing interest regarding Brazil’s connection to the development of German nationalism, the topic of how Germans in Europe and Brazil related to slavery there remains mainly unexplored. This is startling, considering that Brazil was both the second-largest recipient of German immigrants and the largest slave-holding society in the world. This article examines how claims regarding German settlers’ relationship with Brazilian slavery were central in constructing the image of the German abroad as industrious and civilizing.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Nation-building, ‘Western institutionalism’ and theimplementation of ‘indigenous self-government’ in Greenland after 2009: Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘”To See What State We Are In”: First Years of the Greenland Self-Government Act and the Pursuit of Inuit Sovereignty’, Ethnopolitics: Formerly Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 2015

24Aug15

Abstract: This article examines the implementation of Greenland’s self-government (commonly referred to as self-rule) through an analysis of the Greenland government in the first four years of the Greenland Self-Government Act (SGA). Greenland and its government are numerically dominated by the Inuit, one of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. The article begins with an overview of Greenland as a country and its political development, from a Danish colony to the 2009 Greenland SGA. After explaining Greenland’s governance structure and the role of Inuit governance in Greenland’s parliamentary system, it analyses the implementation process of the self-government agreement. It is argued that the SGA with its main focus on modern nation-building within the framework of Western institutionalism constitutes a unique means of implementing indigenous self-government. It revisits the norm of the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination understood primarily as a collective human right and sets a precedent within the framework of indigenous rights in international law.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Reflecting on the invisibility of violence under settler colonialism: Cindy Holmes, Sarah Hunt, Amy Piedalue, ‘Violence, Colonialism, and Space: Towards a Decolonizing Dialogue’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14, 2, 2014, pp. 539-570

24Aug15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Blaming colonialism (and settler colonialism) rather than immune systems: Paul Kelton, Alan C. Swedlund, Catherine M. Cameron (eds), Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, University of Arizona Press, 2015

22Aug15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Promoting alternative settler paradises: Henry Knight Lozano, ‘Water in Paradise: California, Florida, and Environmental Rivalry in the Gilded Age’, Environmental History, 2015

22Aug15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Reflecting on the decolonisation of settler colonialism one graphic novel at a time: Kristina Aurylaite, ‘Spatial Politics and a Native American Reservation: Reading Red Power: A Graphic Novel with Author Brian Wright-McLeod’, European Journal of American Studies, 10, 2, 2015

18Aug15

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. 


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Co-operatives as decolonising agents? Ushinesh Sengupta, ‘Indigenous Cooperatives in Canada: The Complex Relationship Between Cooperatives, Community Economic Development, Colonization, and Culture’, Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, 4, 1, 2015, pp. 121-152

18Aug15

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »