Daniel Rosenblatt, ‘Art and Biculturalism: Innovative Maori Meeting Houses and the Settler Nation’, Visual Anthropology Review 29, 2 (2013).

 Two recent carved Maori meeting houses, one in a museum and the other on a polytech campus, manage to break down the boundaries between “contemporary” and “traditional” Maori art. Both houses also attempt to represent the whole of the institutions of which they are a part rather than only the Maori members of those institutions. This article argues that these innovations are connected, and that they reflect and help propagate a larger refiguring of the meaning of “biculturalism” in the settler state of New Zealand. As part of looking at the significance and effects of these houses, the article draws on ideas about genre and artistic practice to make an argument about how cultural and political change happens.

Yanna Yannakakis, ‘Indigenous People and Legal Culture in Spanish America’, History Compass 11, 11 (2013).

This article reviews recent literature on indigenous people and the legal systems in colonial Mexico and the Andes, with special emphasis on legal engagement as a form of politics and the making of legal culture. Through mastery of alphabetic writing systems, literacy, and Spanish language, native peoples used colonial courts as an arena in which to resolve conflict within and among Indian municipalities, and with Spanish officials, both civil and ecclesiastical. In this way, the legal system facilitated the negotiation of colonial rule, including the growth and transformation of legal institutions and practices, and the relationship between Indian and Spanish jurisdictions. The legal system also provided an arena for cultural encounter in which Spanish and native forms of law and knowledge were circulated and constructed. Scholarship on these topics is growing fast, putting ethnohistory into an exciting dialogue with comparative studies of law and empire.

Ever since its colonial project was set in motion, Zionism has insisted that it seeks to colonise Palestine “peacefully”, indeed that its colonisation of the country will not only not harm the native population, but that it would be of benefit to them.

The movement’s founder, Theodor Herzl himself, provided two visions of this future: A fictional, public vision, advertised in his futurist novel Altneuland, where Palestine would become a Jewish state allowing coexistence with the native Arabs who would be happy and grateful for being colonised and civilised by European Jews; and a secret, logistical and practical strategy to evict the Arab population out of the country, which he spelled out in his Diaries.

Joseph Massad, ‘Peace is war: Israeli settler-colonialism and the Palestinians’, Al Jazeera.

Botswana’s president, Ian Khama, internationally recognised conservationist, seems to feel that the Bushmen, who live by killing game, must be prevented from doing so. But he didn’t stop King Juan Carlos of Spain shooting elephants in Botswana last year.

Increasingly within Botswana people are asking why their government, moderate and successful in other ways, should court international disapproval by treating the Bushmen so appallingly.

And perhaps, as they sip their poolside gin-and-tonics, some tourists will ask why the Bushmen, who are such a part of Botswana’s enduring attraction, should not be allowed even water to drink.

Times Live.

In short, Ryswyk’s comments may have made her more popular, and her comments clearly resonate with many Canadians.  Others (including the BC Liberals and NDPers) have insisted her comments were racist, offensive, and inappropriate.  Van Ryswyk and her supporters have insisted that Van Ryswyk was just saying what most politicians won’t, because of political correctness.  So is Van Ryswyk racist, or is she just cutting through the bullshit of Canadian political correctness?

Both.  

Worth a read at cultivatingalternatives.

Fiji’s mainly indigenous party is backing a call for the word “Fijian” to be reserved only for the nation’s Indigenous people.

Three years ago, the coup-installed military government ruled that all citizens be referred to as “Fijian” regardless of ethnicity. Since then, the word “iTaukei”, which doesn’t distinguish between Indigenous Fijians and other Fijians, has been used in all official documents.

[…]

But Fiji’s biggest Hindu religious organisation disagrees, saying the rights of Indigenous people are entrenched in Fiji and there is no need for them to insist on exclusive use of the term “Fijian”. “”Fijian” is for every citizen of this country and this is what it should be. They should not try to own that word. […] All Fijian citizens should be known as “Fijian””, the general secretary of the Sanatan Dharam, Vijendra Prakash said.

ABC News.

This is the structure of settler colonialism. One of the basic assumptions of your editorial—and virtually all other mainstream media coverage of Elsipogtog—is that colonialism happened sometime in the past, and since then Canada has done a lot to “right our historical wrongs.” When do you imagine colonialism stopped happening in Canada? When the last piece of land was mapped, surveyed, and appropriated for the Crown? When government officials first broke their treaties with indigenous nations so that settlement and resource exploitation could continue? When the last residential school was closed? When Stephen Harper issued an official apology five years ago? When he declared that Canada has no history of colonialism a year later? Of course, Canada has changed, and so have settler attitudes. But the structure of settler colonialism is still very much intact.

More here.

The Insular Empire is a one-hour PBS documentary about America’s colonies in the western Pacific. Six thousand miles west of California, the Mariana Islands include the U.S. Territory of Guam and the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (or CNMI). Although most Americans don’t believe the US is an empire, by many standards, these “insular areas” are American colonies. And most Americans know nothing about them.

The Insular Empire will change this.

From the beaches of Guam to the White House, from the CIA to the Peace Corps, from beauty pageants to the UN – The Insular Empire follows four indigenous island leaders, to discover what it means to belong to America’s ‘insular empire’ in the Pacific. Ultimately, it is a story of loyalty and betrayal, about a patriotic island people struggling to find their place within the American political family.

Check out the website here.

Lisa Slater, ‘Anxious Settler Belonging: Actualising the Potential for Making Resilient Postcolonial Subjects’, M/C Journal 16, 5 (2013).

Bit in lieu of abstract:

When I arrived in Aurukun, west Cape York, it was the heat that struck me first, knocking the city pace from my body, replacing it with a languor familiar to my childhood, although heavier, more northern. Fieldwork brings with it its own delights and anxieties. It is where I feel most competent and incompetent, where I am most indebted and thankful for the generosity and kindness of strangers. I love the way “no-where” places quickly become somewhere and something to me. Then there are the bodily visitations: a much younger self haunts my body. At times my adult self abandons me, leaving me nothing but an awkward adolescent: clumsy, sweaty, too much body, too white, too urban, too disconnected or unable to interpret the social rules. My body insists that this is not my home, but home for Wik and Wik Way people. Flailing about unmoored from the socio-cultural system that I take for granted, and take comfort from – and I draw sustenance. Anxiety circles, closes in on me, who grows distant and unsure, fragmented. Misusing Deborah Bird Rose, I’m tempted to say I’m separated from my nourishing terrain. Indeed it can feel like the nation (not the country) slipped out from under my feet.

I want to consider the above as an affective event, which seemingly reveals a lack of fortitude, the very opposite of resilience. A settler Australian – myself – comfort and sense of belonging is disturbed in the face of Aboriginal – in this case Wik – jurisdiction and primacy. But could it be generative of a kind of resilience, an ethical, postcolonial resilience, which is necessary for facing up to and intervening in the continence of colonial power relations in Australia? Affects are very telling: deeply embodied cultural knowledge, which is largely invisible, is made present. The political and ethical potential of anxiety is that it registers a confrontation: a test. If resilience is the capacity to be flexible and to successfully overcome challenges, then can settler anxiety be rethought (and indeed be relearned) as signalling an opportunity for ethical intercultural engagements (Latukefu et. al., “Enabling”)? But it necessitates resilience thinking to account for socio-cultural power relations.

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Why settler Australia needs refugees’, Arena Magazine 125 (2013).

Australia’s newest refugee policy, like its predecessors, is ostensibly designed to address the refugee ‘problem’. However, in this article I argue that despite concerns about ‘national interest’, ‘security’, and ‘border protection’, asylum seekers – dehumanised people piled up in different configurations outside of Australia’s borders – are useful, indeed necessary, to settler Australia. Here I adopt the specifically Australian definition of refugee: someone who must not be allowed to enter a particular space no matter how urgent his or her human right to do so, and someone who is not entitled to protection unless he or she is ‘processed’ first. It is a definition that only makes sense in the context of Australia’s public debate, and a definition that is not consistent with that of international law. Focusing on the ways in which a specifically settler-colonial understanding of Australia’s sovereign capacities informs public sensitivities can shed light on a particularly Australian process of paranoid abjection. (Not only are the two definitions different; one is the exact complement of the other: if a refugee is normally someone who must depart, in the Australian definition he or she is someone who must not arrive; in the one case, one can be anywhere but an original location; in the other, one can be anywhere but the hoped-for final one.)