Prime Minister Tony Abbott says we have all benefited from Britain’s original foreign investment because Australia was “unsettled” before the British arrived.

[…]

“As a general principle we support foreign investment. Always have and always will,” he said.

“Our country is unimaginable without foreign investment.”

“I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely-settled, Great South Land,” he said.

Gareth Hutchens for SMH.

Nicola Perugini, ‘The Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism: Israel and the “Evacuation Trauma”‘, History of the Present 4, 1 (2014).

The evacuations of settlements in a colonial situation can represent moments of potential rupture and reversal of a political order rooted in dispossession. In the case of Israel and Palestine, however, such moments are characterized by the re-articulation and re-legitimization of the settler colonial enterprise. This takes place through the development of a specific settler moral economy founded on the political mobilization of trauma. I utilize the notion of moral economy of settler colonialism in order to define the way in which, within the settler colonial polity, evacuations are couched as a national trauma and the evacuated dispossessor as a traumatized victim of injustice. Through the analysis of this moral economy, I maintain, we can grasp one of the dominant imaginaries in Israel’s settler colonial model. The underlying question of my investigation, how settler colonialism provides a moral sense of justice within the settler colonial polity and how decolonization is perceived as a threatening injustice, may seem like an old one. Nevertheless, it is curious that this question remains relatively unexplored in the case of Israel and Palestine.

For the first time, the court recognized the existence of aboriginal title on a particular site, covering a vast swath of the British Columbia interior. The court also spelled out in detail what aboriginal title means: control of ancestral lands and the right to use them for modern economic purposes, without destroying those lands for future generations.

[…]

Government still has a right to intrude but only if it can reconcile aboriginal interests with wider public purposes – which can include mining and logging projects and, though the court didn’t say so specifically, the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the B.C. coastal community of Kitimat.

[…]

The case involved the Tsilqhot’in Nation (pronounced Sil-KO-tin), a semi-nomadic people whose elders had testified about customs and practices in a remote valley west of Williams Lake, B.C., for the 400 people who lived there – in an area more than half the size of Greater Vancouver – when the British Crown asserted its sovereignty in 1846. The province had argued the population was too small to be in control of such a wide space. And the B.C. Court of Appeal had said title was a matter of small, specific sites such as rocks from which aboriginals had fished.

Sean Fine for Globe and Mail.

Darryl Leroux, ‘Entrenching Euro-Settlerism: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Nationalism in Québec’.

Malinda S. Smith, ‘Commissioning “Founding Races” and Settler Colonial Narratives’.

in

Canadian Ethnic Studies 46, 2 (2014).

Ravi de Costa, ‘Descent, Culture, and Self-Determination: States and the Definition of Indigenous Peoples’, aboriginal policy studies 3, 3 (2014).

Canada’s concept of “status” – the definition of who is an Aboriginal person under the Indian Act – has its analogies in the administrative practices of many countries. However, the European colonial expansion produced great variety, with contemporary states now relying on multiple categories of definition; descent from an enrolled historical population is often arbitrarily combined with particular cultural or demographic attributes. Effective activism has, in recent decades, pushed states towards policies of Indigenous self-definition. However, this remains constrained and uneven. While the initial goal here is a critical survey of definitions of Indigenous status in the “settler states” of Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa and the US, the paper examines practices in Latin America, Scandinavia and Russia as well as Asia and Africa. It concludes with a discussion about ongoing challenges for state practices of definition, including the implications of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Darren Peter Parker, ‘An aboriginal jurisprudential examination of constitutional recognition’, Griffith Law Review 22, 2 (2014)

Situating ourselves as a site of law through an Aboriginal jurisprudential modality is unequivocally required to even begin to understand the Aboriginal jurisprudential feeling of lawfulness. However, we must do so a priori, to even begin to understand the necessary feeling required for lawfulness to commence its emergence from within. It will be shown how experiencing this feeling represents the cosmological inheritance of feeling lawful through the paradigm of an Aboriginal jurisprudential modality and though represented in corporeal form, it internally galvanises a person’s relationships with other life forms, inter alia. This is the first step in understanding an Aboriginal jurisprudential examination for the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) peoples in Australia. It will then be our task to recognise this feeling of lawfulness and how it is intrinsic to the law of relationship. Further then, it will be demonstrated how the law of relationship provides for balancing energies. It is at this point, where the feeling of legality rather than the governance of men is crucial to as much as a result of, the enactment(s) of the law of relationship. Following this, we will then be introduced to the law of diplomacy along with its intrinsic model for rights and responsibilities and view how these diplomacies work in an equal triumvirate manner – a triadic organising – with the laws of feeling and relationship. With an understanding of the interrelatedness of these three laws – these legal doctrines – it will be demonstrated how Anglo-Australian ATSI constitutional recognition, without greater ATSI jurisprudential instruction, is simply another exercise in ideological and racial parsimony in Australia. It is ultimately the purpose of this article to present an exemplar of an Aboriginal jurisprudential model(s) to critique current proposals for constitutional recognition of ATSI peoples as lacking true and proper engagement with ATSI jurisprudence and concepts of lawfulness.

Angela Riley, ‘Native American Lands and the Supreme Court’, Journal of Supreme Court History 38 (2013).

The Supreme Court has been instrumental in defining legal rights and obligations pertaining to Indian lands since its first path-making decision in the field in Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823. But the groundwork for the Court’s contemplation of such cases predates Supreme Court jurisprudence, and it in fact predates the formation of the Court and the United States itself.

When Europeans first made contact with this continent, they encountered hundreds of indigenous, sovereign nations representing enormous diversity in terms of language, culture, religion, and governance. For those indigenous groups — as is a common attribute of indignity of similarly situated indigenous groups around the world — this land was and is holy land. Indigenous creation stories root Indian people in this continent — Turtle Island to many — as the focal point of life, creation, religion, culture, and language. In the settlement of the country, the colonial powers initially — and the United States subsequently — treated with Indian nations to negotiate the transfer of lands from Indians to Europeans, often in exchange for peace or protection.

Lori Garcia-Alix and Robert K. Hitchcock,  ‘A Report from the Field: The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—Implementation and Implications’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 4, 1 (2014).

Over nearly two-and-a-half decades, indigenous peoples and their supporters expended enormous energy on developing a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples that both protects and promotes their individual and collective rights. The debates surrounding the declaration focused on issues ranging from self- determination to the rights of indigenous peoples to practice their cultures and to participate in decision making. The declaration establishes the requirement for fair and adequate compensation for violations of rights and directly addresses the issues of ethnocide and genocide. The United Nations General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on 13 September 2007, with 143 votes in favor, four votes against, and eleven abstentions. Notably, the votes against were cast by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Implementation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will be a complex process, especially given that many indigenous communities today are located in places where states, private companies, and individuals are competing for resources, sometimes with deadly results.

Brendan Kane, ‘Introduction: Human Rights and the History of Violence in the Early British Empire’, History 99, 336 (2014).

Specialists on early modern violence and on human rights history have much to gain through collaboration, or at least mutual awareness. Human rights historians are increasingly drawing on studies of early modern violence. However, as contended here, early modernists tend to approach the subject framed by their own geographical areas of interest. As such, we lack an overarching sense of violence and its meanings across the Tudor and Stuart realms and colonies, something that would be of great utility in understanding how developments in the early modern period relate to later ones. In the interests of promoting such broader investigation and comparison, the present essay briefly surveys important aspects of the approach to violence in the English, Irish and Atlantic historiographies, and in the literatures of massacre and of human rights. In doing so, it sets the essays included in this special edition in their historiographical contexts and highlights crucial interventions. It concludes with thoughts not only on how a more comprehensive understanding of violence in the early British empire might be of value to human rights historians, but how the new meta-narrative of human rights history might spur greater comparative work amongst early modernists.

Ben Kiernan, ‘Is “Genocide” an Anachronistic Concept for the Study of Early Modern Mass Killing?’, History 99, 336 (2014).

Is it anachronistic to apply the term ‘genocide’, coined in 1943, to ancient or early modern mass killings, even to those that might fit the mid-twentieth- century definition? Historians must analyse actions and events of the pre-modern era in the context of cultural stipulations discussed at the time, and of knowledge paradigms then available. To assess people’s actions by standards understood in that era, it is important to determine whether a pre-modern understanding of the concept of genocide existed. Long before that term, earlier terms such as ‘general massacre’ conveyed similar meanings, along with four much older, related terms – holocaust, extermination, crimes against humanity, and war crimes – which also conveyed pre-modern concepts of the crimes involved. This essay traces the historical lineage and usage of those terms in European and transnational contexts, and argues that conceptions of genocide long pre-dated the coining of the term. Genocide did occur in early modern times, though it was neither normal practice nor universally permitted and often provoked dissent. The essay concludes that a grasp of the concept and its moral implications long preceded both our word for it and its 1950 legal codification as an international crime. The essay then critiques common misunderstandings of that legal definition: that it refers to the crime’s effect rather than the perpetrator’s intent; that it is too broad for historians to use; that only a state can commit genocide; that it must involve the participation of an entire ethnic group; and that it must be complete, not partial.