C. Richard King, Unsettling America: The Uses of Indianness in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

Unsettling America explores the cultural politics of Indianness in the 21st century. It concerns itself with representations of Native Americans in popular culture, the news media, and political debate and the ways in which American Indians have interpreted, challenged, and reworked key ideas about them. It examines the means and meanings of competing uses and understandings of Indianness, unraveling their significance for broader understandings of race and racism, sovereignty and self-determination, and the possibilities of decolonization. To this end, it takes up four themes: false claims about or on Indianness, that is, distortions, or ongoing stereotyping; claiming Indianness to advance the culture wars, or how indigenous peoples have figured in post-9/11 political debates; making claims through metaphors and juxtaposition, or the use of analogy to advance political movements or enhance social visibility; and reclamations, or exertion of cultural sovereignty.

Joyce Dalsheim, ‘Anachronism and Morality: Israeli Settlement, Palestinian Nationalism, and Human Liberation’, Theory, Culture & Society (2013).

This article is concerned with how the idea of anachronism can interfere with our thinking about social justice, peace, and human liberation. In the case of Israel/Palestine the idea of anachronism is deployed among liberals, progressives and radical theorists, and activists seeking peace and social justice who express animosity toward religiously motivated settlers and their settlement project. One of the ways in which they differentiate themselves from these settlers is by suggesting that settler actions belong to the past. They also pity Palestinians conceived of as stuck in an oppressive system of settler colonialism that also belongs to the past, preventing them from moving forward. Both perceptions of anachronism limit the ways we can think about human liberation and peace. This article sheds light on a conundrum about who or what belongs to the past, and how thinking in such terms can contribute to the production of a particular moral collective and to the production of enmity. Both perceptions of anachronism frame history as a kind of progress in which peoples or groups might be ranked according to their levels of civilizational attainment, an idea we abandoned long ago as an analytical tool, but seem to have retained as a matter of practical political sympathy and judgment. This temporal conditioning can interfere with the thinking of even some of the most progressive social theorists, and mimics a colonial impulse.

Forrest Wade Young, ‘Rapa Nui’, Contemporary Pacific 25, 1 (2013).

Bit in lieu of abstract:

“¡Fuera la Schiess! ¡Fuera! ¡Fuera Platovsky! ¡Fuera! ¡Fuera Chilenos! ¡Fuera! ¿Cuándo Immigracion? ¡Ahora! ¡Horo te henua! ¡Horo te henua! ¡Horo te vaikava! ¡Horo te vaikava!” (Get out Schiess [family]! Get out! Get out Platovsky! Get out! Get out Chileans! Get out! When immigration [laws]? Now! Demand the island! Demand the island! Demand the ocean! Demand the ocean!) These exclamations, first yelled by leaders and then collectively yelled by more than a hundred Rapa Nui people in cars and on foot, were repeated, with some variation, over and over for more than an hour during a march along the main streets of Hanga Roa town on 23 July 2011. They are symbolic of many of the sociocultural and political concerns articulated in Rapa Nui during the year under review.

On the first and second days of August 2011, international and national organizations concerned with indigenous peoples and local groups met at the auditorium of the public school Lorenzo Baeza in Rapa Nui for two days to discuss indigenous human rights issues and social problems confronting the Rapa Nui people. The majority of the Rapa Nui community was in attendance. The meetings, officially entitled “Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights: Implications for the Rapa Nui People,” were sponsored locally, independently of the Chilean state-organized municipality and governor’s office, by leaders of Rapa Nui hua’ai (clans/extended families), Parlamento Rapa Nui, Consejero Nacional Indígena Pueblo Rapa Nui ( CONADI), and Makenu Re’o Rapa Nui Women’s Organization. At the request of the local sponsors, two nongovernmental organizations helped facilitate and develop the proceedings: Observatorio Ciudadano (which is concerned with Chile’s indigenous peoples) and the Indian Law Resource Center of Washington DC (which provides legal representation for indigenous groups throughout the Americas). Jose Alywin, Consuelo Labra, and Nancy Yañez were the leading representatives of Observatorio Ciudadano. The Indian Law Resource Center was represented by its founder and executive director, attorney Robert “Tim” Coulter, and by Leonardo Crippa, the center’s attorney who filed precautionary measures at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights amid the 2010-2011 occupations and political demonstrations of Rapa Nui against Chile. In addition to myself, there were three official international observers of the proceedings: Clem Chartier, president of the National Council of Mètis Aboriginal Peoples of Canada; Alberto Chirif, a Peruvian anthropologist affiliated with the Indigenous Work Group for Indigenous Affairs ( IWGIA); and Dr Nin Thomas, a Māori professor of law at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Following the meetings in Hanga Roa, members of the local, national, and international organizations continued the discussion of the plight of Rapa Nui with Chilean state officials in Santiago and Valparaiso. The delegation ended with a public discussion at the Universidad de Chile.

Gregory Ablavsky, ‘The Savage Constitution’, Duke Law Journal (Forthcoming 2013).

Conventional histories of the Constitution largely omit Natives. This Article challenges this absence and argues that Indian affairs played a key role in the Constitution’s creation, drafting, and ratification. It traces two constitutional narratives about Indians: a “Madisonian” and a “Hamiltonian” perspective. Both views arose from the failure of Indian policy under the Articles of Confederation, where explicit national authority could not constrain states, squatters, and Native nations. Nationalists agreed that this failure underscored the need for a stronger federal state, but disagreed about the explanation. Madisonians blamed interference with federal treaties, while the Hamiltonians argued the federal military was too weak to overawe the “savages.”

Both accounts resulted in constitutional remedies. More important than the Indian Commerce Clause, provisions declared federal treaties supreme law, barred state treaty-making, and provided exclusive federal power over western territories. But expansionist states won concessions guaranteeing federal protection and western land claims, while other provisions created a fiscal-military state committed to western expansion.

The two narratives fared differently during ratification. Few embraced centralization, while the Federalists repeatedly invoked “savages” to justify a stronger federal state and a standing army. This argument swayed Georgia, which ratified to secure federal aid in its ongoing war with the Creeks. But it also elevated dispossession of Natives into a constitutional principle. The Article concludes by exploring this history’s interpretive implications. It suggests the Indian affairs context unsettles conventional understandings of the Constitution as intended to restrain the power of the state, and challenges both originalist and progressive assumptions about constitutional history.

This project will focus on where, how, and why settler colonies developed in these locations and will allow users to explore the regions’ geography, how the landscape and demographics changed over time due to the influx of settlers, and how colonial administrators, settlers, and Indigenous communities experienced these changes.  Using the geospatial and temporal visualization capabilities of either Omeka/Neatline or VisualEyes, the interface will be an interactive temporal map of the focus regions with a narrative text and underneath, collections of primary sources, including sketches, news articles, treaties, transcribed speeches, correspondence, and selections from military reports and memoirs. It is my hope that this site will eventually serve as a repository for oral histories from colonized Indigenous populations so that their voices may be heard (literally and figuratively) alongside text-based sources that have historically been produced primarily by the colonizers. Thus, this project will be one step toward decolonizing historical memory and present the story of settler colonialism as it unfolded in two significant regions from multiple perspectives to encourage users to think critically about the past, especially that which feels most familiar, and develop informed perspectives about present socio-political debates.

Settler Colonialism Uncovered: Beginnings, a web-based project on settler colonialism aimed at high school and university students.

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘”Settler Colonialism”: Career of a Concept’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History iFirst.

In a necessarily selective way, this paper explores the historiographical evolution of ‘settler colonialism’ as a category of analysis during the second half of the twentieth century. It identifies three main passages in its development. At first (until the 1960s), ‘settlers’, ‘settlement’ and ‘colonisation’ are understood as entirely unrelated to colonialism. The two do not occupy the same analytical field, pioneering endeavours are located in ‘empty’ settings and the presence and persistence of indigenous ‘Others’ is comprehensively disavowed. In a second stage (until the late 1970s), ‘settler colonialism’ as a compound identifies one specific type of diehard colonialism, an ongoing and uncompromising form of hyper-colonialism characterised by enhanced aggressiveness and exploitation (a form that had by then been challenged by a number of anti-colonial insurgencies). During a third phase (from the late 1970s and throughout the first half of the 1980s), settler colonialism is identified by a capacity to bring into being high standards of living and economic development. As such, settler colonialism is understood as the opposite of colonialism and associated underdevelopment and political fragmentation. It is only at the conclusion of a number of successive interpretative moments that ‘settler colonial’ phenomena could be theorised as related to, and yet distinct from, colonial ones. On the basis of this transformations, beginning from approximately the mid-1990s, ‘settler colonial studies’ as an autonomous scholarly field could then consolidate.

A group of indigenous Brazilians has been evicted from the building they had been occupying in Rio de Janeiro for more than six years. Police used tear gas and rubber bullets to dislodge the indigenous people from the former museum. The building is next to the famous Maracana football stadium. The Maracana will stage the final match of next year’s Football World Cup, and the authorities want to turn it into an Olympic Museum. The indigenous community, known as Aldeia Maracana (Maracana Tribe), said it wanted to use the building to showcase its way of life to tourists during the World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games.

‘Brazil police evicts Rio indigenous museum protesters’, BBC News.

North America was one of the first early-modern settler colonies, and this study examines its evolution from a European settler colony into an American settler empire and argues that the United States also became an important model for modern settler colonialism and Indigenous policy. Likewise, Algeria has long been considered a model for settler colonialism but the process of its formation as such has not yet been studied in depth. It is hoped that the comparison of these two archetypes, then, will yield powerful insights into how and why they formed that may also help us understand the development of other settler colonies.

Colonialism Through the Veil (blog), ‘Setting up a Comparison: Settler Colonization in the American Midwest and French Algeria’.

Alain Beaulieu, ‘“An equitable right to be compensated”: The Dispossession of the Aboriginal Peoples of Quebec and the Emergence of a New Legal Rationale (1760–1860)’, Canadian Historical Review 94, 1 (2013).

At the conquest of New France, the British had already built a long tradition of purchasing Aboriginal land. This policy, made official in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, was implemented in an extensive portion of the Canadian territory, but not in the Saint Lawrence Valley, heart of the former French empire in America, and what is now the province of Quebec. The British, followed by the Canadian government, adopted a policy of unilateral land appropriation in that area, dispossessing the Aboriginals without reliance on a treaty system. This particularity of the Indian land policy in Quebec has given rise to divergent interpretations that rest on the same implicit premise that a structuring legal framework existed, which, when reconstituted, gives meaning to history, either by legitimizing the unilateral dispossession process or by stigmatizing it. This article attempts to locate the process of dispossessing Aboriginal land outside the normative framework imposed by the law. The objective is not to identify a standard to explain why the British did not conclude treaties, but rather to follow a process of legal standardization, in which colonial practice is inscribed, through trial and error, detours, shifts in meaning, and improvisations into a legitimizing framework.