Dramatically different beliefs about justice will produce dramatically different methods for achieving justice. The beliefs underlying the traditional Indigenous restorative justice systems, systems that dramatically differ from the European-based system practiced in the USA are presented. The discussion highlights the legacy of colonialism for tribal communities and the resilience and creative resistance that have continued to characterize the spirit and ingenuity of Indigenous peoples.
Filed under: law, United States | Closed
bit of article in lieu of abstract:
Historians have recently returned to explorations of the continuities in German history that seek to link its National Socialist period to the Kaiserreich and even earlier periods. Enriched by criticisms of the liberal modernization theory implicit in the German Sonderweg thesis, the new students of German continuities have avoided grounding their narratives in characterizations of the German bourgeoisie as pathological deviants from a supposedly more democratic “Western” norm. The study of colonialism, both in Germany’s eastern territories and in its overseas empire, has offered this recent scholarship a set of promising possibilities for connecting Kaiserreich and Third Reich. Bearing a subtitle that includes the phrase “from Bismarck to Hitler,” a kind of byname for the once defunct Sonderweg narrative, Shelley Baranowski’s most recent book contributes to this historiographical turn.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
This article contains the first comprehensive empirical account of the history of geographic information systems (GIS) development within the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an account founded in part on a previously unused source of archival data. It also demonstrates the importance of linking a standard technical and institutional history of GIS with a topic neglected in most such histories, the history of the resource application crucial to GIS deployment. The main finding is that across four decades of effort, the BIA’s pursuit of GIS is better understood as an effort to perpetuate its internal colonial agenda and its own bureaucratic existence during an era of rapid technological upheaval rather than as a trustee’s effort to better manage resources for the greater good of American Indians. The BIA’s quest involves various time-honored colonial practices: creating new forms of dependence, imposing complex bureaucratic procedures, misusing funds, distributing free commodities, developing obligatory points of control, and outsourcing both management and labor to a private sector with long experience exploiting Indian resource economies. We conclude that rather than revolutionizing institutions and setting them on new trajectories toward self-improvement as some have suggested, GIS development is often merely a part of a broader and historically consistent pattern of policymaking and behavior.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
crosby and monaghan on the governance of canadian indigenous groups and the logic of elimination
In September 2009, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared to the global media that Canada had ‘no history of colonialism’. Such expressions of the post-colonial Canadian imaginary are common, despite Canada’s dubious legacy of settler colonialism. This article uses Canada’s Access to Information Act to examine how mechanisms of security are mobilized against members of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake (ABL), whose persistent calls for sovereign control of their land and customary governance system have been translated by Canadian authorities into a security threat to settler society. Contributing to the literature on postcolonialism, as well as works on critical security studies and colonial governmentality, this article suggests that distinct rationalities underline colonial activities in settler states. The authors contend that the term ‘settler governmentality’ is more appropriate for settler states such as Canada, and they present the case study of the ABL to argue that (in)security governance of indigenous groups in Canada incorporates techniques that are necessarily grounded in a logic of elimination. The authors detail how an analysis of the interventions in the traditional governance of the ABL contributes to understanding recent security trends regarding ‘Aboriginal extremism’ and indigenous ‘hot spot’ areas in Canada, which are often framed as matters of ‘national security’.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
stephen howe on zobritish worlds, settler worlds, world systems, killing fields, and zooids.
a bit of the conclusion in lieu of abstract:
It was suggested at the outset here that the study of British imperialism has in recent years, and in an almost unprecedented way, spawned a series of new or revived con- cepts, presented as alternatives, supplements or correctives to the ideas of the British Empire. I have sought to track a number of these, from Belich’s ‘Anglo- world’, through Darwin’s ‘British world system’ and ‘unfinished empire’ or Stern’s ‘company state’, to Mantena’s refigured and broadened notion of ‘indirect rule’. One could, naturally, extend the inventory considerably further yet, with multiple concep- tual (re)coinages which have been suggested or elaborated in recent work on the British and other imperial systems. Let me, however, instead finish, tongue again slightly in cheek, with (as they used to say on the children’s TV programme Blue Peter) one I just made earlier. Literally just the day before beginning work on this essay, I came across the concept of the zooid—from biology, though actually I found it via one of the great jazz composers, Henry Threadgill. A ‘zooid’ is a living cell or organism that is within another organism, but which has independent freedom of movement: zooids are often part of biological ‘colonies’—conglomerations of organisms that function collectively: a near-perfect description, I think, as a term for many bits of and actors within what we can, maybe, just about still call the British Empire.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Voltairenet.org reports of a poster campaign that has been up and running in New York subways for the last month. ‘This operation is promoted by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a pro-Israel organization that attempts by various means to stoke fear of Islam’. On her blog, the AFDI’s executive director insists this is ‘FANTASTIC!’ and asks for donations to allow her ad campaign to ‘go national’.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, media, Political developments, United States | Closed
Through an analysis of an inquiry into the death of an Aboriginal man in custody, I argue that the contemporary colonial relationship between white settlers and those whom they have dispossessed is spatially and racially organized as one between modern subjects and those who must be assisted into modernity. Law, in the form of an inquiry, serves to confirm these arrangements. In Part One, Redemption, I begin with the inquiry’s conclusion that Frank Paul was intrinsically vulnerable. In Part Two, Memorializing, I unravel Frank Paul’s story, showing the imprinting of colonial power on his body. In Part Three, Cleansing, I show that the Aboriginal body must be repeatedly evicted from the civilized spaces of the settler. In Part Four, Abandonment, when the cleansing ritual proves lethal, death is declared comprehensible, given the body’s incompatibility with modern life. In Part Five, Death Worlds, I suggest that the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, Canada where Frank Paul lived is maintained as a death world where humans are reduced to the status of the living dead. Throughout, I argue that Frank Paul must be understood and remembered as an Aboriginal man whose body bore the imprint of an ongoing colonialism.
Filed under: Canada, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
How have intersections between nation states, extranational corporations (exercising sovereignty) and indigenous communities responded to the increasing demand for natural resources, and the globalization of both corporations and movements for indigenous justice? This commentary responds to three case studies and offers broader ideas about competing sovereignties in the era of globalization.
Filed under: Africa, Canada, law, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
The Ju/’hoansi are a poor people with few resources living in the Kalahari Desert along the border between Namibia and Botswana. In Namibia, 200 of them occupy their traditional lands in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, living under customary law with some measure of control over their lands. Diamond exploration occurs in many parts of Namibia but includes substantial instrusion on Ju/’hoansi lands, with almost no legal protections. Namibia, as a developing nation with its own problems, relies extensively on diamond exports and has a mining law that encourages these explorations. In a world with increasing demands on natural resources, existing legal regimes to protect indigenous peoples are inadequate.
Filed under: Africa, law, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
rebecca hamlin on refugee status and international law in australia, canada and the united states
International law provides nations with a common definition of a refugee, yet the processes by which countries determine who should be granted refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with many institutional, cultural, geographical, and political similarities. This article compares the refugee status determination regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations—the United States, Canada, and Australia. Despite these nations’ similar border control policies, asylum seekers crossing their borders access three very different systems. These differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy than with the level of insulation the administrative decision-making agency enjoys from political interference and judicial review. Bureaucratic justice is conceptualized and organized differently in different states, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and nonrefugee.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
