The problem of the concept of the right to self-determination under international human rights is that it is vague and imprecise. It has, at the same time, generated controversy as it leaves space for multiple interpretations in relevant international legal instruments. This paper examines if indigenous people and minority groups are eligible to the right to self-determination. If so, what is the appropriate interpretation of such right, in light of indigenous/minority groups at national as well as the international level?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
Studies of individuals or groups who might use violence or terrorism in pursuit of political goals often focus on the specific actions which these individuals or groups have taken and on the policies which defenders (that is, governments of states) against such actions may adopt in response. Typically, less attention is devoted to identifying the relevant preconditions of political action and possible escalation to violence and how or why potential actions may be obviated before they occur. In the context of democratic political systems, the present analysis addresses these issues via examination of indigenous peoples, who typically constitute tiny fractions of the population of the states or regions in which they reside, in terms of their past and present treatment by governments and the political actions, whether non-violent or violent, which individuals from these peoples have engaged or may engage. The specific peoples examined are Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia, Haudenosaunee of North America, Inuit of Canada, Maori of New Zealand, and Saami of Scandinavia.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
Indigenous peoples’ property rights are hotly debated in legal, policy, and academic circles across Canada. This article explores three such debates in which Indigenous peoples and lands are centrally implicated: debates over implementing fee simple ownership on Indigenous lands, over securing land rights through modern treaty making, and over matrimonial real property rights on Indian reserves. Each of these debates, we argue, revolves around a perceived “property gap”, a term we use to denote conflicting understandings of what property is (or should be), what it should accomplish, and a perceived absence or failure in property law. While such gaps are commonly identified as sites where Indigenous and Western ideas about property come into conflict, creating absences or discontinuities that need mending, they can also be understood as openings where taken-for-granted conceptions of property are “up for grabs”. The property debates examined here reflect ongoing struggles over geography, highlighting contention over who can legitimately claim “ownership” over certain spaces and who can control how lands are used and governed. More broadly, they reflect efforts to “locate” Indigenous peoples vis-á-vis the modern settler state of Canada. Rather than working to “fix” these property gaps through imposition of dominant Western property ideas and structures, we stress the need to explore a broader range of property options at these sites, including those shaped by Indigenous understandings of property and geography.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Carol Schick, ‘White resentment in settler society’, Race Ethnicity and Education (2012).
Teaching about the history and culture of aboriginal peoples in schools of white settler societies can serve as a counter to the dominant story that serves as the national narrative. Even though the actual teaching may well be among the least political and least disruptive type of curricular knowledge on offer, the inclusion of counter stories can meet with resistance and resentment. This article offers that the politics of resentment enacted in a white settler society complicates the potential for equitable schooling for aboriginal and racial minority students. Public acts of resentment on the part of white settler parents mark schools as white spaces even in the midst of claims of multicultural inclusion. The politics of resentment are used to normalize emotional belonging on the part of a white settler society that sees itself as beleaguered by its excessive generosity and inclusivity. This article examines the ways that white supremacy and white racial knowledge are reasserted through the effects of emotional belonging and resentment.
Filed under: pedagogy, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This article starts with a hanging and ends with the passing of a colony. It uses the first judicial public execution in King William’s Town in 1858 to explore how colonial processes played themselves out at local level. It examines three interrelated themes: the ad hoc nature of the establishment of colonial hegemony in British Kaffraria, especially with regard to the administration of law in dealing with ‘grave’ crimes; how the influx of white settlers, particularly German mercenaries, placed pressure on the rudimentary colonial legal system and resulted in further improvised measures to deal with them; and how efforts to establish more substantial institutions of government and attempts to foster a sense of Kaffrarian identity ultimately foundered on the incorporation of British Kaffraria into the Cape Colony.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Charles E. Orser Jr., ‘An Archaeology of Eurocentrism’, American Antiquity 77, 4 (2012).
The role of Europe and Europeans in the archaeology of post-1500 history has recently been critiqued. Some research has been pejoratively labeled Eurocentrism. This paper addresses the problems with adopting an emotional understanding of Eurocentrism and argues instead for its archaeological examination within the framework of an explicit multiscalar modern- world (historical) archaeology. An example comes from seventeenth-century Dutch settlements located in and around present-day Albany, New York.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
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
