The Canadian government recently concluded a series of land claim and self-government agreements with many First Nations in the Yukon Territory. A result of First Nation claims to land and sovereignty in the region, these modern treaties grant First Nations some real powers of self-governance. They are framed in the idiom of sovereignty, but they also compel First Nation people to accept—in practice if not in theory—a host of Euro-American assumptions about power and governance that are implicit in such a framing. This article focuses on a central premise of the sovereignty concept: territorial jurisdiction. The Yukon agreements carve the Yukon into fourteen distinct First Nation “traditional territories.” Although many assume that these territories reflect “traditional” patterns of land-use and occupancy, indigenous society in the Yukon was not composed of distinct political entities each with jurisdiction over its own territory. Thus, the agreements do not simply formalize jurisdictional boundaries among pre-existing First Nation polities; rather, they are mechanisms for creating the legal and administrative systems that bring those polities into being. The powers these agreements confer come in the territorial currency of the modern state, and territorialization processes they engender are transforming First Nation society in radical and often unintended ways. One significant aspect of this transformation is the emergence of multiple ethno-territorial identities, and corresponding nationalist sentiments. I examine these processes by focusing on two cases of contemporary boundary making among Yukon First Nations.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty | Closed
McGregor offers a holistic interpretation of the complex relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians during the middle four decades of the twentieth century. Combining the perspectives of political, social and cultural history in a coherent narrative, he provides a cogent analysis of how the relationship changed, and the impediments to change.
McGregor’s focus is on the quest for Aboriginal inclusion in the Australia nation; a task which dominated the Aboriginal agenda at the time. McGregor challenges existing scholarship and assumptions, particularly around assimilation. In doing so he provides an understanding of why assimilation once held the approval of many reformers, including Indigenous activists.
He reveals that the inclusion of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation was not a function of political lobbying and parliamentary decision making. Rather, it depended at least as much on Aboriginal people’s public profile, and the way their demonstrated abilities partially wore down the apathy and indifference of settler Australians.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
From 1887 to 1946, the administrative apparatus known as the indigénat provided French administrators in New Caledonia with a set of exceptional measures to streamline the governing and summary repression of persons defined as indigènes (‘natives’). This paper examines the place of the indigénat, the role of colonial administrators in defining one or more communities of race and the variable status of the category of indigène in New Caledonia in the period to 1946. Particular consideration is given to the influence (or absence thereof) of the science of race on administrative thinking about native policy in New Caledonia, the distinctions drawn between different categories of indigène, the extent to which cultural and political divisions between the Grande terre (mainland) and the Loyalty Islands were imagined or constructed in racial terms and the situation of métis (‘half-castes’). The paper argues that an incipient definition of the indigène as a person of Melanesian, Polynesian, mixed or Oceanian race must be understood in the context of the development of the indentured labour and immigration regimes (the importation of workers from Asia and other parts of Oceania) as well as the ways in which the indigénat was differently applied and experienced between New Caledonia’s mainland and its dependencies (notably the Loyalty Islands), as well as by métis.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Hummus is to Palestine as wild rice is to Native America. But of course, this is insufficient. There is so much more I could try, and fail, to say.
Settler colonialism is criminalization: Drunks, drug addicts, and terrorists. It is the miscreant, the danger and the distrust in Lid, in Sabra, and on the Bad River Reservation. It is how these spaces open up to others where the good native and the good Palestinian reside. It is minority scholarships given to those who have maybe been once to a reservation, but have the requisite blood quota to allow a university to claim diversity points.
Settler colonialism is an inherited silence where you know memories are supposed to be. It is knowing that these memories have been purposely excised due to pain and the hope for a better future, if only the next generation could just forget. It is a man aging into regret for having shut out his children and grandchildren from his life and the lives of his loved ones. It is his granddaughter wanting to go back in time to beat up whoever called him names in grade school. It is finding papers, land allotments and photos of relatives who “look Indian” that you have never seen because they were in a locked suitcase for decades. It is watching these photos, wondering the names of these people and knowing that even if you knew the names you would not know how to pronounce them or understand what meaning they were supposed to impart. It is understanding that these family documents and photos could belong to a museum, and that they would tell the twinned story of genocide and nation building. It is thinking that your brother has the same shaped eyes as a great-great grandmother, and then admonishing yourself for seeing things that are not, and cannot be, there. It is waiting to feel something beyond anger and guilt, and feeling consumed by the weight of waiting.
[…]
Settler colonialism is being unable to fill in the blanks. It is the history of a family split between natives and settlers. It is the logic of superiority, of primacy, of genocide. It is the colonization of memory and of events that come to be known as “History.” It is visiting a reservation or a refugee camp and wondering how this could have been your life. It is being thankful that this is not your life, that this is only a visit or a passion, a choice to be here. It is realizing that this confidence in one’s place has been bought with the logic and practice of settler colonialism. It is wanting answers to inquiries you cannot yet, and probably will never, articulate. It is seeking epiphany through writing and finding only the proliferation of questions, of doubts, and of histories. Like these questions, and more than anything, settler colonialism is ongoing.
Maya Mikdashi, in an incisive piece entitled ‘What is Settler Colonialism?’, in Jadaliyya. Definitely worth a look.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Between 1876 and 1945, thousands of Japanese civilians—merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and adventurers—left their homeland for a new life on the Korean peninsula. Although most migrants were guided primarily by personal profit and only secondarily by national interest, their mundane lives and the state’s ambitions were inextricably entwined in the rise of imperial Japan. Despite having formed one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century, these settlers and their empire-building activities have all but vanished from the public memory of Japan’s presence in Korea.
Drawing on previously unused materials in multi-language archives, Jun Uchida looks behind the official organs of state and military control to focus on the obscured history of these settlers, especially the first generation of “pioneers” between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated the colonial management of Korea as its grassroots movers and shakers. By uncovering the downplayed but dynamic role played by settler leaders who operated among multiple parties—between the settler community and the Government-General, between Japanese colonizer and Korean colonized, between colony and metropole—this study examines how these “brokers of empire” advanced their commercial and political interests while contributing to the expansionist project of imperial Japan.
Filed under: Asia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States remains one of the most influential books and widely read books about race. Racial Formation in the 21st Century, arriving twenty-five years after the publication of Omi and Winant’s influential work, brings together fourteen essays by leading scholars in law, history, sociology, ethnic studies, literature, anthropology and gender studies to consider the past, present and future of racial formation. The contributors explore far-reaching concerns: slavery and land ownership; labor and social movements; torture and war; sexuality and gender formation; indigineity and colonialism; genetics and the body. From the ecclesiastical courts of seventeenth century Lima to the cell blocks of Abu Grahib, the essays draw from Omi and Winant’s influential theory of racial formation and adapt it to the various criticisms, challenges, and changes of life in the twenty-first century.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Americans have been showing their independent streak for thousand of years. Samples of fossilized faeces from caves in Oregon show that two distinct tool-making cultures lived side by side more than 13,000 years ago. And a genetic analysis of living Native Americans from dozens of cultures indicates that, in prehistory, North and South America were settled by at least three waves of migrants from Asia.
Together, the studies — published this week in Science and Nature — support the idea that humans settled the continents along the Pacific coastline first, fast and furiously, and moved inland later.
Ewan Callaway, Nature online, citing ‘Reconstructing Native American Population History’.
Filed under: Ancient History, Canada, Scholarship and insights, Science, United States | Closed
This article explores the making of segregated space in Bundaberg as revealed by an 1891 trial for the killing of Charlie Eureka, an Aboriginal man of the area. The article reveals the ways settler anxieties regarding race, possession and settlement manifested in the built environment of colonial space. While historians haved looked at the policing of Queensland’s settler towns with racial curfews and surveillance, less have considered the lived experiences of the marginalised communities themselves. I argue that these communities exerted their own spatial presence and that available records provide glimpses of their economic and cultural agency.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
When compared with other reconciliation processes, Australian reconciliation and its acts of official remembrance have received relatively little academic attention, and yet the case raises many important questions for settler societies struggling to come to terms with past misdeeds and the burden of the past in the present. This article places Australian reconciliation in the political context of the campaign for a treaty between Indigenous peoples and the settler state that emerged in the 1980s, the institutionalization of common law Indigenous land rights during the 1990s, and the current ‘intervention’ in the Northern Territory. The nature and trajectory of these political events are at odds with two highly lauded official acts of remembrance made under the rubric of reconciliation, Paul Keating’s Redfern Park speech in 1992, and Kevin Rudd’s formal state apology in 2008. The article argues that such settler state acts of official remembrance and acknowledgement of past injustices, while far from devoid of value, are considerably diminished by the positively colonial, and inherently unjust, contemporary political context in which they were made.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This article examines how the dichotomy of the colonizer/colonized was elastic, but sustained by people’s everyday existence in the Japanese colony by examining experiences of Okinawan migrants in colonial Taiwan. While Taiwanese struggled to become ‘Japanese’ by mastering Japanese language and practicing Japanese customs in their daily lives, Japanese migrants in Taiwan also tried to become ‘Japanese’ in distinguishing themselves from the colonized subjects. Although Okinawan people were legally categorized into ‘Japanese’ and enjoyed some privileges such as a colonial bonus for public officials, ‘Okinawans’ were seen as the ‘other Japanese’, and were likely to be marginalized in the Japanese community. Thus, the micro-politics of ‘becoming Japanese’ and ‘distinguishing from Taiwanese’ was critical to their everyday lives. On the basis of my own oral interview records of the former migrants from the Yaeyama Islands, which sent a number of migrants to Taiwan in the 1920s and the 1930s, this article examines why they migrated to colonial Taiwan, and in what way they struggled to become the ‘colonizer’ in their daily lives. This article demonstrates colonial modernity matters not only to those who were ‘colonized’ in the Japanese empire, but also to the Japanese colonizer. Indeed, colonial modernity matters on the point that the boundary between the ‘colonizer/colonized’ was produced and re-produced at different political fields in the empire.
Filed under: Asia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
