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On the declonization of settler colonial forms: Carolyn J., Stirling, ‘Decolonize This – Settler Decolonization and Unsettling Colonialism: Insights from Critical Ethnographies with Indigenous and Allied Educator-Activists in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the United States of America and Canada’, Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York, Buffalo, 2015

14Mar15

Abstract: Colonization is the most powerful and destructive practice in humanity as Indigenous Peoples are brutality oppressed so that colonizers can exploit their land, labor and resources. Settler colonialism is a fundamental part of settler colonial societies; but this does not mean it cannot be opposed. Decolonization seeks to deconstruct colonialism and dismantle colonial structures. However, nonindigenous settlers who oppose colonization are caught in political and practical conundrums as they attempt to engage in decolonization.

This study explores the role of nonindigenous people in decolonization from the perspective of 70 Indigenous and Allied educator-activists in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the U.S.A. and Canada. Decolonizing, Western and Indigenous methodologies are used in this study to develop an allied methodology, which is used to conduct critical ethnographic research and collect qualitative data through individual and group interviews.

The three main themes emerging from this study are that Indigenous and nonindigenous identities are political, decolonization is a verb and Indigenous languages are the heart of decolonization. In the findings of this study Indigenous People implore nonindigenous peoples to understand the pain of colonization and not to appropriate Indigenous identities, emphasize the importance of nonindigenous participation in decolonization, and assert that learning Indigenous languages is the most effective way for nonindigenous people to participate in decolonization. In contrast, nonindigenous people are struggling to develop their identities and address colonial privilege, are seeking practical and meaningful ways to engage in decolonization, and are learning Indigenous languages for political and practical reasons.


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On triangular relations in settler socities, on contemporary Australian debates: Mitchell Rolls, ‘”Are There any Poor People Here?”: Immigrants, Aborigines, and Multicultural Perceptions’, The Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia, 5, 1, 2014, pp. 36-44

14Mar15
Abstract: This overview paper highlights the urgent need for research in an area of national significance. The often disputatious debate vis-à-vis the history and legacy of contact and conflict between colonists, settlers and Aborigines is for the most part framed in ways that serve to exclude a significant proportion of Australian’s post World War II non-Anglo immigrant population. Terms characteristic of the debate — such as black/white, coloniser/colonised, Anglo/Aborigine, invader/invaded — are not inclusive of more recent immigrants, who for a range of disparate reasons fall outside the delimiters of these terms. Addressing Aboriginal disadvantage, achieving proposed constitutional reform, and establishing the foundations upon which mutual understandings and empathy can be built necessitates a more inclusive approach and language than that taken to date. In order to progress beyond the bluff binaries and stagnation of the dominant discourse, a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between all cross sections of the immigrant population and Aboriginal affairs is required. This paper sketches this need.

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Being indigenous on one’s land is a ‘lifestyle choice: the BBC’s Marie McInerney’s ‘Australia’s remote indigenous communities fear closure’, 12/03/15

14Mar15

Excerpt: Derby Aboriginal elder Lorna Hudson was a child when government authorities in the 1960s moved her people from tiny Sunday Island off the remote north-west coast of Western Australia to the mainland.

For a time most of the Sunday Island “saltwater” people lived on a reserve in the outback town of Derby, recalls Ms Hudson.

Later many moved to the coastal community of One Arm Point, 200km north of the resort town of Broome, where they resumed traditional hunting and fishing.

Their dislocation is an experience shared by many Indigenous Australians who were forced off their land, last century, either because of changes in government policy or lack of employment.

“That’s how people lost their culture,” says Ms Hudson. “It put us in a different environment, away from our country.”

In the wake of plans by the West Australian government to close many small indigenous communities, the people of One Arm Point and other remote indigenous communities fear history might soon be repeated.

Comments earlier this week by Prime Minister Tony Abbott that people had made a “lifestyle choice” to live in these communities have intensified local fears people will be forced out of their homes, many of which are on ancestral land.

Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett last year announced that up to 150 of the state’s estimated 250 remote indigenous communities might be closed.


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On the dialectice between civic and communal belonging in a settler society: J. Olaf Kleist, ‘A political body of civic and communal belonging: political memories in the creation of the Australian immigrant society’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015

11Mar15

Abstract: Any notion of political belonging is highly contested. Ultimately though, the political body of a society is shaped by contestation of two modes of belonging: civic and communal. In Australia, the relationship between these two modes of belonging has been negotiated through political conflicts, not least in reference to immigration, since the early years of European settlement. This article traces the trajectory of these conflicts by analysing political memories, specifically those of Australia Day commemorations, to engage with the underlying tension that constitutes the country’s political body. Engaging with the long-standing civic/ethnic debate, it is argued that the actual relationship between civic and ethnic/communal belonging, rather than any separate references to them, is crucial to the specific constitution of sovereign political bodies, their particular form of social and political conflicts, and the ensuing implementation of policies, not least regarding migration.


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Normalising settler belonging in education: Andrew Webb, Sarah Radcliffe, Whitened Geographies and Education Inequalities in Southern Chile, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 36, 2, 2015, pp. 129-148

11Mar15

Abstract: In this paper, we draw on critical geographies and sociologies of race and education to explore ways in which the meanings and conducts of whiteness are reproduced in and through Chilean secondary education in an indigenous-majority area. We focus on links between socio-economic, geographical and racial criteria to understand how the privileges of whiteness are naturalised in the region’s educational provision and among Mapuche indigenous pupils. Although socio-economic inequalities are widely recognised to structure inequality between young people in Chile, we highlight the pervasiveness and unmarked nature of whiteness in the educational system in relation to the socio-spatial segregation of Mapuche pupils, secondary teachers’ attitudes and young peoples’ self-positioning in the nation. These combine to marginalise and disempower Mapuche populations across the landscape of rural secondary schools in the Araucanía region of Chile.


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Old and New Worlds: CFP

09Mar15

In the course of recent years, Rural History (broadly defined) has begun to move away from both its predominantly national or local focus and its interpretation bias towards Europe and the Western world. This is a very healthy shift, which we mean to uphold by choosing the relations between old and new worlds as the core subject for this Conference.

Such relations between civilisations and cultures across the globe have had multiple effects over the last 500 years on agriculture, property, natural resources and rural societies. They brought about the circulation of people, plants, animals and diseases; transfers of techniques, knowledge, institutions and juridical norms; changes in diet habits, land uses and landscapes; extensive appropriation and expropriation of landholding, land use and property rights; and changes in produce and factor markets (land, capital, labour) at a global scale.

The growing keenness to research these global dynamics also drives some of the major theoretical, methodological and historiographical challenges now facing rural history. On the one hand, because such studies call for a wider dialogue among historians of several continents. On the other, because it tends to widen rural history from a specific disciplinary area into a broad research field, on which converge the interests of several other disciplines: from environmental to cultural history, from social to legal history, from economic history to the history of science, among others.


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On Victorian settler narratives: Terra Walston Joseph, ‘”Saving British Natives”: Family Emigration and the Logic of Settler Colonialism in Charles Dickens and Caroline Chisholm’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 2015

05Mar15

Abstract: As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain’s empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”


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Adoption and settler orders (and their reversal): Damien Lee, ‘Adoption is (not) a Dirty Word: Towards an Adoption-centric Theory of Citizenship’, The First Peoples Child & Family Review, 10, 1, 2015

05Mar15

Abstract: This paper argues that the resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ citizenship orders can be informed in part by tenets of Indigenous customary adoption.  The paper considers registration as an Indian under Canada’s Indian Act as having conflated being “Indian” with a Eurocentric property-holder identity, which First Nations now internalize through band membership practices.  As such, I argue that adoptees and customary adoption are seen as suspect because they challenge the blood and property-based conceptions of what it means to be “Indian.”  Anishinaabeg customary adoption is taken up here in an analytical approach to re-thinking how citizenship could be discerned in anti-colonial ways; specifically, I consider “caring for others” and the concept of “controlling our associations” in developing an adoption-centric theory of Anishinaabeg citizenship.


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On settler colonial music: Mickey Vallee, ‘Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North: The Cultural Politics of Benevolent Domination’, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 32, 2014

05Mar15

Abstract: This article follows the critical theory that Canadian wilderness painting exists only when the artist disavows their presence at the scene of capture, and suggests that it is due time the theory be applied to Canadian sound pieces such as Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North (1967). A contrapuntal radio piece that marked Glenn Gould’s baptism into experimental documentary, The Idea of North explores how the North is placed in the Canadian imaginary as an ambivalent object of national identity. In this article, I argue that the aesthetic procedures of The Idea of North create a narrative space through which the Other is constructed as a savage who is subsequently saved by the benevolent welfare state. Thus, The Idea of North idealizes the North by virtue of (1) its distantiation from the North, and (2) its Othering of Canada’s Inuit as savage and helpless, reflective of (3) a new benevolent racism that made up assimilationist ideology, a requisite for post-World War II Northern resource development. The Idea of North is, thus, an aesthetic example of ‘differential racism,’ which proceeds through perceived cultural rather than biological differences, and works to include the targeted social group rather than exclude them. Given The Idea of North’s nar- rative of the North’s future, I argue that the future is a convenient temporal sche- matic through which the present remains governed. I maintain that we must add benevolent racism to the cultural theory of exploitation and domination in order to understand the contemporary structure of racism that haunts any cultural denials of colonialism.


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On hierarchy and communication in setter orders: Matthew J. Glass, ‘Canada’s Duty to Consult: Communicative Equality and the Norms of Legal Discourse’, MA Dissertation, Universit y of Western Ontario, 2015

05Mar15

Abstract: This thesis employs Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law to argue that the doctrine of Canada’s duty to consult with indigenous communities is based on extra-legal communicative presumptions that fail to reflect the basic norm of communicative equality. It derives a set of communicative norms from discourse theory and demonstrates their dovetailing with discursive norms found within the intersocietal communicative practices associated with treaty-making in at least selected indigenous legal orders, such as in the establishment of the Great Peace of Montréal (1701). Finally, after providing a critical analysis of the duty to consult’s key discursive elements (historical narrative, justification, reconciliation, and the “honour of the Crown”), it argues for normative revisions of the duty to consult more appropriate to Canada’s intersocietal legal order.


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