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More on indigenous sovereignty: James S. Phillips, ‘The rights of indigenous peoples under international law’, Global Bioethics, 2015

10May15

Abstract: International law guarantees rights to indigenous peoples regarding traditional lands, knowledge, cultural preservation, and human security. This paper will examine the sources of these rights and legal remedies for violations of law. Protection of indigenous peoples’ cultures and resources contribute to the protection of the global environment.

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On indigenous sovereignties: Ulf Mörkenstam, ‘Recognition as if sovereigns? A procedural understanding of indigenous self-determination’, Citizenship Studies, 2015

10May15

Abstract: In the last two decades we have witnessed a growing global acknowledgement of indigenous rights – manifested in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – challenging the traditional nation-state-centred understanding of political rights and democracy. In this paper, the author argues that indigenous self-determination is to be understood as a way to level the balance of power between indigenous peoples and the nation-states in which they live. Without a solid legal foundation for indigenous peoples to define self-determination in their own languages and to negotiate the conditions of their relation with the nation-states on their own terms, the colonial past (and present) of violent conquest and domination might continue. Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination ought in this perspective to imply recognition of indigenous peoples as having a standing equal to nation-states, i.e. as if they were sovereigns. What self-determination means in political practice would thus be the outcome of negotiations between two (or more) equal political entities. In this way, the right to self-determination has to be interpreted procedurally rather than substantially.

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Seeing a settler ‘New World’? James Casteel, ‘Searching for the “New World”, Finding “Asia”: The Rhetoric of Colonization in Interwar German Travel Accounts of the Soviet Union’, Cultural and Social History, 12, 2, 2015, pp. 255-272

09May15

Abstract: Using travel accounts to the Soviet Union as a source, this article explores the ambiguous position of Russia in Germans’ global imaginary between the wars. The article first discusses the ways in which German travel accounts redefined Russia’s location between Europe and Asia in the interwar years. It then focuses on travellers’ fascination with Soviet internal colonization and attempts to mobilize society. Finally, it turns to the ways in which stereotypes about the Soviet rulers’ and people’s ‘Asiatic’ nature shaped German travellers’ observations about violence and coercion in the Soviet state.

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Challenging settler nationhood through music: Stephanie B. Guy, ‘Bodies, Myth and Music: How Contemporary Indigenous Musicians are Contesting a Mythologized Australian Nationalism’, eSharp, 2015

09May15

Abstract: This article focuses on two Australian myths: terra nullius and the „noble savage‟. These myths have their nexus with the absence and presence (respectively) of Indigenous beings. This article argues that these myths formed the foundation of colonial nationhood, and that their repercussions are reverberating within post-colonial imaginings of Indigenous Australians today. The myth of terra nullius, empty land, enabled the construction of a nation at the expense of the Indigenous „other‟. Furthermore, the ways in which colonisers repressed Indigenous subjectivities was to essentialise them as „noble savages‟; a figure who is relegated into mysticism and obscurity, consolidated into a “melancholic anthropological footnote” (La Nauze 1959) of Australia‟s colonial triumph. Grounded in this understanding, this article will consider the ways in which these myths are being broken down by dynamic, engaging and distinctly visible Aboriginalities through the case study of contemporary Indigenous musicians. Contemporary Indigenous musicians occupy mainstream stages and screens with diverse, meaningful, accessible and modern Aboriginal identities. These didactic and exigent bodies are revoking the myth that Australia was vacant prior to 1770, and that its First Peoples are incapable of being modern. As such, this essay explores the deconstruction of terra nullius and the „noble savage‟, as a result of Indigenous presence within contemporary public realms.

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Railways and the remaking of settler orders: Brett André, ‘Dreaming on a railway track: public works and the demise of New Zealand’s provinces’, The Journal of Transport History, 36, 1, 2015, pp. 77-96

05May15

Abstract: The demise of New Zealand’ s provinces in 1876 demands explanation. I argue that public works policy undermined the provinces and that railway development provided the impetus for abolition. The failure of the six original provinces to meet hinterland settler demands for public works led to the creation of new provinces in 1858, destabilising the system. Reckless investment in railways in the 1860s robbed the provinces of popular support and led to a prohibition on borrowing. This created a developmental vacuum until the central government acquired public works policy in 1870. The provinces thus lost their primary reason for existence. New Zealand’s provinces are a valuable case study in how railways and other forms of transportation can shape political systems.

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Settler colonialism as trauma: William Aguiar, Regine Halseth, ‘Aboriginal Peoples and Historical Trauma: The processes of intergenerational transmission, National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2015

05May15

Excerpt: The current reconciliation process in Canada involving Aboriginal residential school survivors, their families, the Canadian government, and the churches is finally promoting awareness in Canadian society about the emotional costs Aboriginal families and communities have endured spanning a period of five generations.

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The right to settler colonise as a human right: Nicola Perugini, Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate, Oxford, 2015

03May15

Description: At the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged: conservatives, who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture, began to embrace human rights in order to advance their political goals. In this book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights — generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices — are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of human rights and mirror each other’s political strategies. Indeed, Perugini and Gordon demonstrate the multifaceted role that this discourse is currently playing in the international arena: on the one hand, human rights have become the lingua franca of global moral speak, while on the other, they have become reconstrued as a tool for enhancing domination.

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John J. Buchkoski, Spider in the River: A Comparative Environmental History of the Impact of the Cache La Poudre Watershed on Cheyennes and Euro-Americans, 1830-1880, MA Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2015

03May15

Abstract: This thesis is a case study of the Cache la Poudre watershed in Colorado in the mid-nineteenth century and how it contributed to cultural transformations of both Cheyennes and Euro-Americans. This research follows the relationship that developed between Cheyennes and rivers since they inhabited Mille de Lacs in Minnesota in the seventeenth century. It examines the creation of settler-colonialism through the formation of boundaries and colonies in Colorado through the use of rivers. This further illustrates the connectedness of both Euro-Americans and Cheyennes to the rivers and argues that there were battles over these rivers and not only over the land. Finally, this thesis examines how the colonists that settled Colorado also disputed between themselves over the right to these rivers, by committing themselves to the idea of the mythic West. Some were disillusioned and left, but founder of Union Colony, Nathan Meeker, propagated and promoted the mythic West, and by committing themselves to the rivers, survived in that region.

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Facing a settler colonial order: Ala Alazzeh, ‘Seeking popular participation: nostalgia for the first intifada in the West Bank’, Settler Colonia Studies, 2015

03May15

Abstract: This article analyzes Palestinian nostalgia in the West Bank for the first intifada and anxiety over the lack of mass participation in anti-colonial resistance following the Oslo Accords. I attribute three reinforcing components to explain the lack of popular resistance: shifts in the mechanisms of colonial control, structural sociocultural changes, and discursive representations of popular resistance. Understanding the changes in the post-Oslo period in the West Bank can help us to reflect on why the experiences of the first intifada have not effectively informed political resistance practices.

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On new Pacific histories: ‘Review Forum: Pacific Histories: ocean, land, people’, Journal of Pacific History, 2015

03May15

Reviewing David Armitage, Alsion Bashford (eds), Pacific Histories: Ocean Land, People, Palgrave, 2014.

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