Mark Munsterhjelm, ‘Corporate protectors of state sovereignty: Mitsubishi’s and a Taiwan affiliate’s accounts of relations with Taiwan Aborigines’, Asian Ethnicity 15, 3 (2014).

This paper compares two related corporations’ accounts of enacting sovereignty with Taiwan Aborigines. First, Mitsubishi corporate webpage histories constitute mythic origin narratives about how their patriotic founder, Yataro Iwasaki, helped the Japanese government transport munitions and troops to Taiwan in 1874 and the government rewarded him with 30 ships, starting their close relationship. These narratives about this state-centred assemblage omit why Japan sent the military expedition, which ostensibly was a punitive expedition against Paiwan Aborigines for the 1871 massacre of 54 Ryukyu Islanders, but was actually part of the new Meiji state’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands. Second, it analyses the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines which was founded in 1994 by the wealthy chair of the Shung Ye Group, a Taiwan-based Mitsubishi-affiliated conglomerate. The museum is a private assemblage organized around hero narratives in which the chair demonstrates his patriotism by rescuing Taiwan Aborigines and their cultures. The museum contributes to the Taiwan-centred identity project which challenges One-China sovereignty claims over Taiwan.

Libby Porter and Janice Barry, ‘Bounded recognition: urban planning and the textual mediation of Indigenous rights in Canada and Australia’, Critical Policy Studies (Published online: 02 Jun 2014).

While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urban planning is produced and reproduced through texts. Discursive processes serve to bound and limit the recognition of Indigenous rights and interests, allowing only very small and shallow zones of contact in each place. Our findings from these cases show that these processes arise from quite different orders of discourse, and two social fields: Indigenous recognition and urban planning. The discourses present in both fields really matter for how the contact zone is persistently bounded to established territorial, political and administrative orders. In identifying these boundaries, our paper opens up new ways of thinking about, and engaging in, boundary-crossing work in planning.

Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2014) 

is now available on Taylor & Francis Online. 

Lucas Bessire, ‘The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality: Native Culture as a Neoliberal Politics of Life’, Current Anthropology 55, 3 (2014).

Scholars have suggested that the current era of indigenous citizenship in Latin America is characterized by a postmulticultural political order that effectively reverses the historical marginality of native populations in the region. This conception, however, minimizes the established insight that the social apertures of neoliberal culturalism depend on the creation of new exclusionary regimes based on the very same mechanisms of celebrating cultural difference. Drawing on a decade of field-based inquiries into indigenous experiences of marginality in South America’s Gran Chaco, this article identifies how the widespread political empowerment of an indigenous majority is structurally predicated upon the hypermarginality of a stigmatized few. I describe the general features of hypermarginality as lived experience and emergent political regime, in relation to three properties of the stratifying craft of the neoliberal state: the contraction of authorized culture, the culturalization of legitimate indigenous life, and the state management of a global economy of cultural preservation. This essay illustrates how hypermarginality is a concrete political quandary that holds significant implications for social analysis and policy, including the need to rethink the relationships between the neoliberal and the indigenous in Latin America.

Nicole Gombay, ‘”Poaching” – What’s in a name? Debates about law, property, and protection in the context of settler colonialism’, Geoforum 55 (August 2014).

Framed within debates about political ontology, this paper explores how, in a settler colonial context, state-governed wildlife management reflects a complex set of assumptions and power relations that structure understandings and enactments of law, property, and notions of protection. Drawing upon the statements of Inuit research participants, the paper examines the definition of ‘poaching’, and underscores the conceptually controversial assumptions underlying this word. The paper demonstrates how the term represents a culturally and historically specific set of beliefs and practices by the state that are unintelligible from an Inuit frame of reference, because the ontological, epistemological, and teleological assumptions upon which they rest are fundamentally incommensurable with their own. Critiques of political ecology and political economy claim that such forms of analysis have naturalized the assumption that there is one nature which different peoples understand differently. Instead the concept of political ontology stresses that there are many natures whose meanings are opaque and subject to negotiation. But ontological differences are only part of the puzzle. To understand the encounters between Indigenous peoples and the settler colonial state, it is not only the existence of different natures that are important, but also the ways of knowing these natures and the ends that people seek in ‘managing’ them. Ontology, epistemology, and teleology are intertwined; each fashions the other.

Rauna Kuokkanena, ‘Gendered Violence and Politics in Indigenous Communities: THE CASES OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE IN CANADA AND THE SÁMI IN SCANDINAVIA’, International Feminist Journal of Politics (Published online 20 May 2014).

This article examines the depoliticization of violence against women in indigenous communities. It argues that there is a pressing need to examine the ways in which gendered violence is explained, addressed and often sanctioned in indigenous communities. The article draws on Crenshaw’s concept of political intersectionality and examines responses to gendered violence in indigenous communities through two groups: Aboriginal women in Canada and Sámi women in Scandinavia.

Vasilis Grollios, ‘Philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology in J.S. Mill’s views on colonialism’, Journal of Political Ideologies (Published online: 20 May 2014).

The article aims to bring to light the philosophical background of J.S. Mill’s views of colonialism. His philosophy of history and his philosophical anthropology are strongly connected to his theory of democracy in this area of Mill’s social theory. Although he was undoubtedly radical according to the standards of his day, Mill adopts the anti-democratic logic of the capitalist mode of production and uses it as a gauge of cultural development. For the first time, this article aims to show that behind Mill’s adoption of a Eurocentric logic lies a fear of democracy that is ultimately based on the fact that, for Mill, private property, enterprise, industry, accumulation of wealth and the work ethic are the main pillars of capitalism and are used by Mill as the essential determinants of cultural progress. Even the key tenet of his philosophy, utility, bears a meaning that is determined by these values. The article attempts to prove that Mill’s ethical philosophy was formed on the basis of the social logic of capitalism and set the framework for Mill’s analysis of the hierarchy of civilizations, since his utilitarianism was not applicable to those who did not abide by the values of the industrial ethic.

John Gledhill, ‘Indigenous Autonomy, Delinquent States, and the Limits of Resistance’, History and Anthropology (2014).

This paper focuses on struggles by Mexican indigenous communities to defend their patrimony and guarantee their own security in an environment dominated by the parallel power of organized crime, paramilitary violence, impunity, and a neo-extractivist economy. After reviewing the relationships between the radicalization of indigenous autonomy demands and transformations of the Mexican state, analysis focuses on recent developments involving a Nahua community on the Pacific coast of Michoacán state that has a long history of successful defence of its communal lands, alongside a Purépecha community in the central highlands that has been its longstanding ally. The violence of external actors reflects the penetration of all levels of government by organized crime, but violence is not a new historical experience in this region. What has changed is that the capacity of these communities to resist has been affected by their internal disarticulation by the same forces.

Katherine Fobear, ‘Queer Settlers: Questioning Settler Colonialism in LGBT Asylum Processes in Canada’, Refuge 30, 1 (2014).

Refugee and forced migration studies have focused primarily on the refugees’ countries of origin and the causes for migration. Yet it is also important to also critically investi- gate the processes, discourses, and structures of settlement in the places they migrate to. This has particular signifi- cance in settler states like Canada in which research on refugee and forced migration largely ignores the presence of Indigenous peoples, the history of colonization that has made settlement possible, and ways the nation has shaped its borders through inflicting control and violence on Indigenous persons. What does it mean, then, to file a refugee claim in a state like Canada in which there is ongoing colonial violence against First Nations communities? In this article, we will explore what it means to make a refugee claim based on sexual orientation and gender identity in a settler-state like Canada. For sexual and gender minority refugees in Canada, interconnected structures of col- onial discourse and regulation come into force through the Canadian asylum and resettlement process. It is through this exploration that ideas surrounding migration, asylum, and settlement become unsettled.

Les études sur les réfugiés et les migrations forcées ont porté principalement sur les pays des réfugiés d’origine et les causes de la migration. Pourtant, il est également important d’aussi étudier de manière critique les proces- sus, les discours et les structures de peuplement dans les endroits vers lesquels ils migrent. Cela a une signification particulière dans les états coloniaux comme le Canada où la recherche sur les réfugiés et la migration forcée ignore en grande partie la présence des peuples autochtones, l’histoire de la colonisation qui a rendu le peuplement possible et les moyens par lesquels la nation a façonné ses frontières en usant de pouvoir et de violence sur les populations autochtones. Quel est le sens, alors, de déposer une demande d’asile dans un état comme le Canada où persiste la violence coloniale contre les communautés des Premières Nations? Dans cet article, nous allons explorer ce que cela signifie de faire une demande d’asile fondée sur l’orientation sexuelle et l’identité de genre dans un état colonial comme le Canada. Pour les réfugiés d’orientation sexuelle et d’identité de genre minoritaires au Canada, les structures interconnectées du discours colonial et de la réglementation entrent en vigueur dans le cadre de processus d’asile et de réinstallation. C’est grâce à cette étude que les idées entourant la migration, l’asile et le peuplement sont déstabilisées.

Jean Dennison, ‘Whitewashing Indigenous Oklahoma and Chicano Arizona: 21st-Century Legal Mechanisms of Settlement’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37, 1 (2014).

This article interrogates the various tactics settler colonial legal systems use in establishing and entrenching authority over territories. By comparing a recent Osage Nation reservation court case with Arizona House Bill (HB) 2281, enacted into law as Ariz. Rev. Stats. § 15–112, which has been used to ban Mexican American/Raza Studies (MARS) from the classroom, it is possible to illustrate the varied processes by which legal systems attempt to render U.S. control of land an indisputable norm. In the context of both Oklahoma and Arizona, settler authority over territory is entrenched through the outlawing of institutions that contest its neutrality and universality. This article challenges U.S. settlement by making visible some of the legal processes by which it operates.