It’s called mazacoin, and the man who developed it, Payu Harris, wants to make it the official currency of the Lakota Nation, a semi-autonomous North American Indian reservation in South Dakota. Officially launched in February, its market cap of $3.3 million places it 20th among alternative currencies (there are more than 200 “alt-coins,” although most have marginal significance).

Official adoption by the Lakota Nation would be a big development in the world of virtual currencies, because until now, the storyline for bitcoin alternatives has been  about a small group of technophiles playing with a shiny new toy. But to Mr. Harris, the idea of a national currency represents something for which he’s been striving for a long time: independence.

“I’ve been studying tribal sovereignty since I was 16,” said Mr. Harris, the Lakota who developed and is promoting mazacoin. “To be a truly independent state you have to have your own issued currency.”

Paul Vigna for Wall Street Journal.

Nationalism and Ethnic Politics Volume 20, Issue 1, 2014. Special Issue: The Politics of Indigenous Identity: National and Global Perspectives.

Stephanie Lawson, ‘The Politics of Indigenous Identity: An Introductory Commentary’

Braden Hill, ‘Searching for Certainty in Purity: Indigenous Fundamentalism’

Dominic O’Sullivan, ‘Indigeneity, Ethnicity, and the State: Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand’

Katherine Smits, ‘The Neoliberal State and the Uses of Indigenous Culture’

Margaret Forster, ‘Indigeneity and Trends in Recognizing Māori Environmental Interests in Aotearoa New Zealand’

Jeanne Simon & Claudio J. González-Parra, ‘International Norms and National Indigenous Politics: Mapuche Demands for Territory in Chile’

Nameirakpam Bijen Meetei, ‘Ethnicity, Colonial Legacies, and Postindependence Issues of Identity Politics in North-East India’

Lailufar Yasmin, ‘The Tyranny of the Majority in Bangladesh: The Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts’

Adrian Guelke, ‘Northern Ireland’s Flags Crisis and the Enduring Legacy of the Settler-Native Divide’

Tim Rowse, ‘“Rooted in Demographic Reality”: The Contribution of New World Censuses to Indigenous Survival’, History and Anthropology 25, 2 (2014).

One of the most powerful narratives deployed by colonists in the nineteenth century was that the colonized natives were inherently too weak to survive contact with those who were colonizing them—the Dying Native story. I argue that to understand the history of this story, we should differentiate between three senses in which it could be taken as true or false: physical destruction, genetic adulteration and loss of distinct culture. The physical destruction version of the “Dying Native” was contested by some settler-colonial governments as they developed the capacity to manage and measure the numbers of those whom they classified as “Indian” or “Māori” or “Aboriginal”. However, the “Dying Native” story persisted as a narrative of these peoples’ loss of genetic and/or cultural distinction. One strategy of Indigenous intellectuals has been to assert that they have survived as “populations” by adapting as “peoples”. In this paper, I show how an authoritative demography of colonized Indigenous populations in North America and New Zealand afforded discursive opportunities to some Indigenous intellectuals.

Clint Carroll, ‘Native enclosures: Tribal national parks and the progressive politics of environmental stewardship in Indian Country’, Geoforum 53 (2014).

This article discusses the recent proliferation of North American Indigenous conservation efforts in the form of tribal national parks. To varying degrees, tribal parks offer alternative perspectives to conservation studies by accounting for land-based epistemologies and practices. They also raise pressing questions: To what extent are tribal natural resource managers in North America assuming the role of state authorities in their ability to restrict citizen access to tribal lands? How do tribal conservation areas differ from state-sanctioned enclosures throughout the globe that often disenfranchise customary use by local peoples? In dialog with political–ecological studies of conservation enclosures, I argue that Indigenous nations are transforming the concept of enclosure in their systemic reclamations of Indigenous sovereignty and territory through environmental stewardship. The analysis is based on a survey of tribal parks in the United States and Canada.

Gustav Muller, ‘The legal-historical context of urban forced evictions in South Africa’, Fundamina : A Journal of Legal History 19, 2 (2013).

The aim of this article is to place forced evictions in their legal-historical context by analysing the rural and urban land tenure measures used during apartheid to limit the nature and duration of black people’s tenure. The hypothesis of this article is that the homelessness and extensive housing crisis in present-day South Africa have their origins in the apartheid era, when government’s rural and urban land tenure measures, together with private owners’ common-law remedies, led to large-scale forced evictions. A renewed appreciation of the legal-historical context of forced evictions should enable the courts to understand the social and historical context of section 26 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 and the Prevention of Illegal Evictions from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act 18 of 1998. This limited historical study places forced removals and the demolition of homes in the context of apartheid land law. The description and analysis of legislation and case law are limited to the period between 1913 when the Black Land Act was enacted and 1994 which marked the official end of apartheid.

Stefano Liberti (ed.), Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism, trans. Enda Flannelly (London: Verso Books, 2013).

A shocking exposé of how modern-day corporations and governments are raiding the Third World

To the governments and corporations buying up vast tracts of the Third World, it is ‘land leasing’; to its critics, it is nothing better than ‘land grabbing’ – the engine powering a new era of colonialism.

In this arresting account of how millions of hectares of fertile soil are stolen to feed wealthy westerners thousands of miles away, journalist Stefano Liberti takes readers on a tour of contemporary exploitation. It is a journey encompassing a Dutch-owned model farm in Ethiopia; a conference in Riyadh, where representatives of Third World governments compete to attract Saudi investors; meetings in Rome where the fate of nations is decided; and the headquarters of the Movement of Landless Workers in São Paulo.

Since the food crisis of 2007–8, when the cost of staples such as rice and corn went through the roof, the race to acquire land in the southern hemisphere has become more intense than ever. Land Grabbing is the shocking story of how one half of the world is starved to feed the other.

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Indigenes and Settlers (Fourth World)’, A Companion to Global Historical Thought (2014).

This chapter focuses on the reasons why history-writing remains so controversial in the settler national historiographies. The author argues that embracing a historical methodology or rejecting it altogether is part of a dilemma that is specific to the settler colonial “situation”. In doing so, he claims that the structuring relational distinction between “indigenous” peoples and settlers is ultimately a distinction between historical and ontological relations to land. The writing of history, however “history” may be defined, was bound to be crucial. If indigenous ontological relations to the land are often premised on emergence myths/creation stories, one crucial device for the denial of indigenous title and/or special rights is the so-called “tide of history” argument. Here is Waldron’s logic: Indigenous claims are based either on the principle of first occupancy or on the principle of prior occupancy; the two principles are not the same.

Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, ‘Discursive manipulations of names and naming in Kate Grenville’s “The secret river”‘, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 36, 1 (2013).

This article stems from two observations arising from my reading of Kate Grenville’s three-part exploration of Anglo-Australia’s frontier history. The first is that, contrary to Grenville’s averred commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about the modern nation’s shameful origins, her recent historical fiction betrays a refractory tendency to portray Australia’s past in a sentimental light. The second is that names and the act of naming constitute a dominant strand in the narrative weave of each of the novels. In the discussion that follows I seek to demonstrate the existence of a causal link between these two apparently unrelated observations by showing that a recurrent narratorial emphasis on the affective importance that names of places, people and things assume in the life of the colonial subject constitutes a vital element in the “empathetic history” (Gall 95) of Australia’s frontier era that Grenville is intent on creating. Although this analysis can be applied to all three of Grenville’s colonial novels, the present article will focus solely on the trilogy’s opening volume, The Secret River – the work in which the author’s discursive manipulation of names is most transparent and the ideological direction the rest of her frontier saga will follow is clearly signposted.

Nadine Attewell, Better Britons: Reproduction, Nation, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).

In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his famous novel about a future in which humans are produced to spec in laboratories. Around the same time, Australian legislators announced an ambitious experiment to “breed the colour” out of Australia by procuring white husbands for women of white and indigenous descent. In this study, Nadine Attewell reflects on an assumption central to these and other policy initiatives and cultural texts from twentieth-century Britain, Australia, and New Zealand: that the fortunes of the nation depend on controlling the reproductive choices of citizen-subjects. 

Better Britons charts an innovative approach to the politics of reproduction by reading an array of works and discourses – from canonical modernist novels and speculative fictions to government memoranda and public debates – that reflect on the significance of reproductive behaviours for civic, national, and racial identities. Bringing insights from feminist and queer theory into dialogue with work in indigenous studies, Attewell sheds new light on changing conceptions of British and settler identity during the era of decolonization.

Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Review: Between Indigenous and Settler Governance’, Journal of Global History 9, 1 (2014).

Comparative settler colonialism as a scholarly field is relatively recent. The foundational works evinced critical interest in the white settlers and only indirectly in the indigenes, even if the critique was radical. They insisted that the dispossession and elimination of the native societies were not extrinsic ‘things’ that the settler nations once did but what those settler nations intrinsically are.