The town is the latest addition to a vast network of such communities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China’s biggest province by land area and also its most ethnically troubled. Neighbouring Tibet has long been roiled by ethnic tension, too, but rarely has it witnessed the kind of violence that has troubled Xinjiang: a low-level insurgency involving ethnic Uighurs whose Muslim faith and Central Asian culture and language set them apart from the Han Chinese who dominate places like 38th Regiment. On April 23rd, 21 people were killed near Kashgar during an encounter between police and alleged separatists. An explosion of inter-ethnic violence in 2009 in the regional capital, Urumqi, that left nearly 200 dead, by official reckoning, exacerbated the divide. The expansion of the settlement network is deepening it further.

To use its full name, the 38th Regiment of the 2nd Agricultural Division is part of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. This state-run organisation, usually referred to as the bingtuan (Chinese for a military corps) controls an area twice the size of Taiwan, broken into numerous parts scattered around the province (see map). A few bits are city-sized. Most are more like towns or villages. Of their total population of more than 2.6m people, 86% are ethnically Han Chinese. In Xinjiang as a whole, in contrast, Han officially make up just over 40% of the 22m inhabitants. The rest are Uighurs and a few other ethnic groups.

[…]

In southern Xinjiang, where Uighurs are still usually in the majority, the bingtuan is extending its reach: creating new settlements or upgrading existing ones. In 2004 it formed 224th Regiment in the desert about 75km (45 miles) west of Khotan, a city regarded by officials as a hotbed of Uighur separatism. The regiment now has a permanent population of 12,000, of whom 98% are Han (though Uighurs help pick its red dates at harvest-time). In 2010, 38th Regiment was launched. The town’s population has already grown from nothing to more than 4,800. Its aim is to triple that number. New residents come from the central province of Henan and from communities in neighbouring Gansu province whose villages were damaged by an earthquake in 2008. Some are given a new flat and land as an incentive to move. The bingtuan has spent hundreds of millions of dollars bringing water from the Molcha River 80km away. “I hope to live here for another 20 years,” says a young Han teacher with kibbutznik zeal. No Uighurs are to be seen.

The 38th Regiment (which also plants dates) describes itself as strategically located on a route into southern Xinjiang. In August it formed a militia battalion, which has been conducting counter-terrorism drills. It might do better to consider the impact of resettling Uighur nomads into a separate cluster of new houses a kilometre away. Even in the vastness of the Taklimakan desert, the divide is growing.

‘Settlers in Xinjiang’, The Economist (China Edition).

Seminar and launch in Ottawa on Thursday 6 June.

Our black brothers and sisters drive nice cars and live in nice houses and we are lower down the scale. We want to be equal with them.

‘Don’t Call Us Coloureds’, Times Live.

American Indian Quarterly 37, 1-2, Special Issue: Native Adoption in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia (Winter/Spring 2013), ed. Margaret D. Jacobs.

Special Issue Introduction: The Politics of History and the History of Politics(pp. 129-135). Laura Briggs and Karen Dubinsky

Remembering the “Forgotten Child”: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s(pp. 136-159). Margaret D. Jacobs

“In Family Way”: Guarding Indigenous Women’s Children in Washington Territory(pp. 160-177). Katrina Jagodinsky

Forced Child Removal and the Politics of National Apologies in Australia(pp. 178-202). Denise Cuthbert and Marian Quartly

“Homes Are Sought for These Children”: Locating Adoption within the Australian Stolen Generations Narrative(pp. 203-217). Shurlee Swain

Vibrations across a Continent: The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act and the Politicization of First Nations Leaders in Saskatchewan(pp. 218-236). Allyson Stevenson

History of Transracial Adoption: A New Zealand Perspective(pp. 237-257). Erica Newman

The interloper is the harlequin ladybird (Harmonia axyridis), one of the world’s most invasive insects. From its homelands in central Asia, H. axyridis was introduced to Europe and North America to control aphids. Since then, however, it has become a serious pest that has put native ladybird species under threat by outcompeting or even eating them.

Entomologist Andreas Vilcinskas of Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany, suggests that the harlequin’s success partly hinges on the presence of a single-celled parasite that he and his colleagues found living inside the ladybirds. The parasite does no harm to the harlequin, but if it infects other ladybird species, such as the native seven-spot ladybird (Coccinella septempunctata), it invariably kills them.

Ed Yong for Nature.

Heather Castleden, Kiley Daley, Vanessa Sloan Morgan & Paul Sylvestre, ‘Settlers unsettled: using field schools and digital stories to transform geographies of ignorance about Indigenous peoples in Canada’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education (2013).

Geography is a product of colonial processes, and in Canada, the exclusion from educational curricula of Indigenous worldviews and their lived realities has produced “geographies of ignorance”. Transformative learning is an approach geographers can use to initiate changes in non-Indigenous student attitudes about Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. This study explores non-Indigenous student perspectives concerning a field school and digital storytelling as transformative experiences within the context of an “Indigenous Perspectives on Environmental Management” course; they were asked to reflect on their course experience. Findings indicate that students found both to be effective and important steps in the transformation of their own worldviews.

Bonny Ibhawoh, ‘Cultural Negotiations and Treaty Making in Upper Canada and British West Africa’, Ife Journal of History 6, 1 (2013).

Historians often refer to the British Empire, focused primarily eastward after the loss of the American colonies, as the “second empire.” Unlike the “first empire,” this second empire of the nineteenth century ceased to be an empire largely composed of communities of free peoples of British origin with political and economic ties to Britain. It was now an empire of peoples who were not British in origin, incorporated into the empire by conquest and ruled without representation. In spite of this difference, however, both the first and second British empires shared a common character in the ways that colonists engaged with indigenous people. Central to this engagement were treaties that supposedly created legal agreements between European powers and indigenous people. These treaties represent a historical phase in which colonial powers purported to deal with indigenous people as autonomous partners rather than as subjects or conquered peoples. They are therefore crucial to understanding the nature of colonial encounters. This paper explores some of the salient parallels and contrasts in colonial treaty making in Canada and West Africa. Focusing on colonial treaties with the Yoruba people of West Africa and aboriginal communities in Upper Canada, it investigates the conditions and contingencies that shaped the role of indigenous people in treaty making. It examines how native agents, in different contexts, found means to empower themselves. While some of these processes were unique; others were similar in both contexts. It argues that fruitful comparisons must attend carefully to specifics — the differing processes and outcomes of treaty making in each colonial context was the result, not only of disparate imperial agendas, but also of the initiatives and responses of indigenous people.

Timothy C. Winegard, Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

This pioneering comparative history of the participation of indigenous peoples of the British Empire in the First World War is based upon archival research in four continents. It provides the first comprehensive examination and comparison of how indigenous peoples of Canada, Australia, Newfoundland, New Zealand and South Africa experienced the Great War. The participation of indigenes was an extension of their ongoing effort to shape and alter their social and political realities, their resistance to cultural assimilation or segregation and their desire to attain equality through service and sacrifice. While the dominions discouraged indigenous participation at the outbreak of war, by late 1915 the imperial government demanded their inclusion to meet the pragmatic need for military manpower. Indigenous peoples responded with patriotism and enthusiasm both on the battlefield and the home front and shared equally in the horrors and burdens of the First World War.

Daryl Stump, ‘On Applied Archaeology, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Usable Past’, Current Anthropology 54, 3 (2013).

Several recent discussions within archaeology refocus attention on the relationship between western knowledge and “indigenous knowledge”: one arising from the question of local ownership of land, technologies, and archaeological materials; another responding to the continued interest within development, conservation, and ecology in the potential efficacy and sustainability of local resource-use strategies; and a third that explores the possibility of producing archaeological interpretations that incorporate local conceptions of the past. In addition to an interest in indigenous knowledge (whether technical or conceptual), these various lines of inquiry are related by the desire to give due respect to local beliefs, practices, and property, and by the ambition to define ways in which archaeological research can provide benefits to society in general or, more specifically, to the communities that play host to archaeological field projects. These shared goals account for the fact that these discussions are sometimes conflated, but they can nevertheless be separated into distinct projects by examining the criteria by which their proponents are likely to judge success. Doing so permits an assessment of the feasibility of these approaches, referred to here as applied archaeology, hybrid archaeologies, and the production of a “usable past.”

Sarah Keenan, ‘Property as Governance: Time, Space and Belonging in Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention’, Modern Law Review 76, 3 (2013).

This article analyses two cases brought by aboriginal Australians against the Australian government acquisition of long leases of their land under the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007. These leases are conspicuous, particularly in that the government always made it clear that it would not take up its right to exclusive possession of the leased land, and has not done so. The leases have not been used to evict residents, as some feared; nor to pursue mining or agricultural activity. Socio-legal theories centered on the right to exclusive possession cannot account for these leases. The article explores the use of property under the 2007 Act, the legal geographies of the areas subject to the leases and the political potency of property beyond exclusive possession, and suggests an understanding of property as a spatially contingent relation of belonging. Specifically, the article argues that property is productive of temporal and spatial order and so can function as a tool of governance.