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.’

Abstract: I critique Glenn’s article on settler colonialism and Bonilla-Silva’s article on critical race analysis from Indigenous perspectives, including racial genocide and world-systems analysis, to cover five centuries of global systemic racism during the conquest of the Americas, by Spanish and English colonizers and United States imperialism. I also propose macro-structural, comparative-historical analysis of racism including the destruction, resistance, and revitalization of Native Nations and American Indians.http://sre.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/08/05/2332649215598158.abstract

Abstract: Scandinavians constantly left their homelands during the Viking Age, and some of them settled new islands in the North Atlantic. The settlers in Iceland and Greenland attempted to create an idealized version of society, much of which was based on their experiences in Norway. Both countries faced different challenges as they developed, and ultimately Iceland survived while Greenland failed sometime in the fifteenth century. Each country, though unique, developed along the same pattern and had many similar characteristics. Iceland and Greenland both dealt with the introduction of Christianity, an overbearing Norwegian king who succeeded in the thirteenth century of annexing both countries, and the effects of environmental and climactic changes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Society also flourished in the North Atlantic as did travel and trade, with Icelanders and Greenlanders reaching as far as the Byzantine Empire. The Greenlanders also continued to travel west, reaching the shores of North America around the year 1000, the effects of which are still trying to be understood. The settlement of Iceland and Greenland offers an analysis of two countries that shared much in common, but only one survived.

Abstract: In this essay, the authors respond to several of the papers included in this special issue. First reflecting on the relation between waters, ‘First law’, and settler law, the authors then draw connections between some of the contributions to the issue. Water, the authors contend, is a productive site for thinking through the organs and processes of settler law, though such attention, they argue, also reveals how the ‘constitutional’ question of waters is occluded by the presence and dominance of settler law. The final section turns to Aotearoa/New Zealand as a negative example of this situation, one in which the constituting force of waters is nullified by the incorporation of indigenous politics within the processes and institutions of the settler legal order.

Abstract: This paper examines the temporality of urban planning in contemporary London, especially with regard to the 2012 Olympic Games. I argue that planners and officials deployed a rhetoric of permanence to validate not only the Games themselves, but also the costly development and infrastructural changes in the city as well as human displacements. Specifically, a decentralized network of planners, officials, consultants, and administrators used temporal concepts such as ‘legacy’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘regeneration’ in describing the benefits of hosting the Games, all of which purposely ignored the temporary and unsustainable nature of the two-week sporting event. I further argue that this rhetoric could be sustained only through an implication that the Olympic site—and East London as a whole—was in a state of ruin, a state which could be ameliorated through the production of this sporting ‘mega-event’. Above all, the Olympics attempt to rhetorically mitigate their own temporary, ‘pop-up’ quality for the sake of an urban settler colonialism.

Abstract: Expansion of the oil sands industry in Canada has caused land destruction and social friction. Canada could become a leader in climate governance by honouring treaty commitments made with indigenous peoples.