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.

Empire and Colonies in Northeastern North America. Thursday, March 21, 2013 7:00 pm Atrium Room 101, Saint Mary’s University.

Panelists: 

JERRY BANNISTER: Department of History, Dalhousie University. Author of The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832, and Co-editor of The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era. EDWARD CAVANAGH: Department of History, University of Ottawa. Author of Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River, and Editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies. ELIZABETH MANCKE: Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies, University of New Brunswick. Author of The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760-1830, and Co-editor of Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550-1850.

Suren Pillay, ‘Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp’, Social Dynamics iFirst (2013).

Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.

Ariel Bultz, ‘Redefining Apartheid in International Criminal Law’, Criminal Law Forum (2013)

This article asks: to what extent is Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute—the crime of apartheid—a tenable crime in international criminal law? It will be argued that despite the obligations incumbent on states not to intentionally discriminate against social groups, there is no customary legal norm of apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity. This is premised on the distinction between state obligations as different from norms demanding individual liability in international criminal law, as well as inadequacies of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) and the absence of case law relying on apartheid as a crime against humanity. Further, the weaknesses hindering the formation of a customary norm of apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity will be assessed with regard to the Rome Statute. Also it will be shown that the lack of coherence of Article 7(1)(j) demonstrates that the crime of apartheid is subsumed by the crime of persecution. Finally, two suggestions are offered on how the crime of apartheid could be established as a distinct offence in international criminal law. The central thesis of this paper is that the crime of apartheid is ambiguous and inoperable. In order for Article 7(1)(j) to be relevant in international criminal law, the offence must be reworked and clearly articulated.

David MacDonald and Graham Hudson, ‘The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 45, 2 (2012).

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating the array of crimes committed in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Genocide is being invoked with increasing regularity to describe the crimes inflicted within the IRS system, the intent behind those crimes, and the legacies that have flowed from them. We ask the following questions. Did Canada commit genocide against Aboriginal peoples by attempting to forcibly assimilate them in residential schools? How does the UN Genocide Convention help interpret genocide claims? If not genocide, what other descriptors are more appropriate? Our position might be described as “fence sitting”: whether genocide was committed cannot be definitively settled at this time. This has to do with polyvalent interpretations of the term, coupled with the growing body of evidence the TRC is building up. We favour using the term cultural genocide as a “ground floor” and a means to legally and morally interpret the IRS system.