American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, 2 (2013). The Settler Complex. Guest editor: Patrick Wolfe.

The Settler Complex: An Introduction. Patrick Wolfe.

What Is Settler Colonialism? (for Leo Delano Ames Jr.). Maya Mikdashi.

“Aloha ‘Oe”: Settler-Colonial Nostalgia and the Genealogy of a Love Song. Adria L. Imada.

All the Eagles and the Ravens in the House Say Yeah: (Ab)original Hip-Hop, Heritage, and Love. Lauren Jessica Amsterdam.

Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy. Beenash Jafri.

A Global Potlatch: Identifying the Indigenous Influence on Western Thought. Isaiah Lorado Wilner.

Stitching Osage Governance into the Future. Jean Dennison.

Challenging Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Queer Politics: Settler Homonationalism, Pride Toronto, and Two-Spirit Subjectivities. Cameron Greensmith and Sulaimon Giwa.

“There’s Something in the Water”: Salmon Runs and Settler Colonialism on the Columbia River. Lindsey Schneider.

“The Last Bastion of Colonialism”: Appalachian Settler Colonialism and Self-Indigenization. Stephen Pearson.

An Account of the Dakota-US War of 1862 as Sacred Text: Why My Dakota Elders Value Spiritual Closure over Scholarly “Balance”. John Peacock.

Driving with the Driven: A Re(-)view of the Trail of Tears in the Roadside Montage. Ken Whalen.

Marcus Banks, ‘Post-Authenticity: Dilemmas of Identity in the 20th and 21st Centuries’, Anthropological Quarterly 86, 2 (2013).

This article draws upon some recent repatriation claims for Tasmanian human remains in British and European museums to examine debates concerning the authenticity of identity in the 21st century, and to reflect on the construction and representation of Indian identities in the colonial period. I discuss how authenticity can be seen as a process, used instrumentally, rather than a static quality, focusing on how authenticity is asserted, negotiated, performed, or rejected through social and political interaction. The negotiations of the Tasmanian Aboriginal groups for recognition of their status as authentic Aborigines provides a kind of prism or lens through which we can take a fresh view of the competing claims to authorship of India’s filmic heritage.

Seif Da’Na, ‘Israel’s Settler-Colonial Water Regime: The Second Contradiction of Zionism’, Holy Land Studies 12, 1 (2013).

This paper questions the ecological sustainability of the Zionist colonial scheme in Palestine. It outlines an ecologically-based narrative of the Arab-Israeli struggle by juxtaposing colonial Zionism and ecological Zionism to re-narrate the Arab-Israeli conflict using a recent interpretive mode that assumes as a principle concomitant environmental and colonial histories. Examining both the role of water in the history of the Zionist colonial scheme and Zionist agricultural practices, it argues that, similar to previous colonial European ventures, the sustainability of colonial Zionism is challenged by both Palestine’s scarce hydrological resources and their mounting exploitation, spawning what I call the ‘inner tension of Zionism’. Given this dialectic of Zionism – that considering, among other things, the nature of Zionist colonial agriculture and settlers’ Western life style, the necessary increasing exploitation of Palestine’s scarce resources challenges the sustainability of the colonial venture – the hydrological challenge, entwining with nationalist conflict, constitutes Zionism’s second contradiction

Massacres in Old and New Worlds: Special Issue of the Journal of Genocide Research 15, 2 (2013).

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.