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

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

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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.

According to Bolivia’s foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, the horological initiative is intended to help Bolivians rediscover their indigenous roots.

“We’re in the south and, as we’re trying to recover our identity, the Bolivian government is also recovering its sarawi, which means ‘way’ in Aymara,” he said. “In keeping with our sarawi – or Nan, in Quechua – our clocks should turn to the left.”

Sam Jones and Sara Shahriari for The Guardian.

Sug-In Kweon, ‘Japanese Female Settlers in Colonial Korea: Between the “Benefits” and ‘Constraints’ of Colonial Society’, Social Science Japan Journal (First published online: June 19, 2014).

This paper explores the gendered configurations and practices within the Japanese settler community in colonial Korea. More specifically, it focuses on the experiences of urban middle-class Japanese women. Existing data show that Japanese settler women, as citizens of the metropole, reaped benefits in arenas such as lifestyle, education, occupation, and family life. Their status as women, however, simultaneously subjected them to strict patriarchal and conservative standards. While privileged as colonists, they were publicly marginalized and silenced by the peculiar dynamics created by colonialism and modernity. Based on in-depth interviews and personal memoirs, as well as official archives and statistics, this research examines the forms of modernity that Japanese women experienced in colonial Korea, highlighting both the benefits and constraints that the colonial context offered to the women. These insights will complicate the existing historiography of Japanese colonialism in Korea by unveiling the history of a social group that has rarely been discussed by scholars.

Ivan Sablin, ‘Rearrangement of Indigenous Spaces: Sovietization of the Chauchus and Ankalyns, 1931–1945’, Interventions 16, 4 (2014).

This essay addresses the period when Chukotka, a distant region in the Northeast of the USSR, was incorporated into the state. This was done primarily by rearrangement of indigenous people’s spaces. The establishment of new centres of domination and collectivization was accompanied by a major shift in the official attitude towards the indigenous population of the region, and by the depreciation of their role in the exploitation of natural resources. The reconfiguration of spaces was carried out by means of repressive measures and produced major grievances and resistance among the indigenous population. The Second World War further aggravated the situation. The incorporation of Chukotka into the Soviet state resulted in the disruption of indigenous economies and a major decline in population. The essay relies on the methodology of colonial and postcolonial studies, employing and developing the notion of space reorganization used by Gray, Crush, Neumann and other authors, and Bhabha’s concept of ‘third space’.