Abstract:
The Doctrine of Discovery, viewed through the lens of six hundred years of international law, has shaped Brazil’s legal history and laws ever since 1500 when Portugal claimed first discovery of the territory. A comparative law examination of the Doctrine’s long history in Portuguese and European law demonstrates that Portugal’s domination of Brazil was founded on feudal, religious, racial, and ethnocentric justifications. The adaptation of many of the Doctrine’s elements into Portuguese and Brazilian laws and policies for over five hundred years has had profound implications for Indigenous peoples. Brazil’s attempts to create a more positive and equal future for all of its citizens, just as similar efforts in all settler/colonizer societies, must begin with an enlightened recognition of this history and the Doctrine of Discovery. Only then can serious efforts to eradicate the Doctrine from Brazilian law and international law provide some resolution to deeply-rooted issues in a place of justice and healing.
Filed under: Latin America, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In his inaugural lecture on Tuesday 8 March, Professor Richard Boast will argue that there were many more ‘treaties’ in colonial New Zealand than just the 1840 document, and that an examination and debate about their significance is needed.
“It is often assumed that the Treaty of Waitangi was the only Treaty between the state and New Zealand’s indigenous population, making New Zealand unlike ‘multi-textual’ jurisdictions such as the United States.”
Filed under: law, New Zealand | Closed
a bit of it:
The structure of the book combines a regional and thematic approach. The four opening chapters deal with the three major destinations for British migration: Canada, Australia and New Zealand – plus ‘Africa South of the Sahara’. For experts on any of these particular regions, there will be much here that is already known; what is novel is the conceptual framing, the organising lens. The next half-dozen chapters are thematic, dealing with, in order: non-white migration; immigration into Britain; women; children; the emigration business and ‘homecoming’. Crucially, by placing all sorts of different kinds of migration between the covers of a single book, what the authors achieve is a study that not only draws meaningful comparative analysis according to those staple criteria of gender, race and class but can also incorporate a host of other variables as well – religion, nationality, culture, work – and very much else besides. While migration provides the thematic ‘way in’, however, it is also offered as something of a ‘grand narrative’ of its own. Whether the authors would agree with Niall Ferguson that the British Empire ‘made’ the modern world is doubtful, but they are certainly in no doubt as to the lasting impact of migration within that empire. The unlocking of natural resources; the development of international trade; the spread of English language and culture – all this was due in no small part to the movement of the British overseas. That many emigrants saw themselves not as migrants at all but as participants in a project of ‘overseas settlement’ is itself instructive: migration implied the movement to foreign lands; settlement, by contrast, meant the populating of a wider British world. Their descendants may have come to see themselves not as British but as Canadians, Australians or New Zealanders but this is not to detract from the formative historical significance of these earlier migrant flows.
The new imperial history has been, at least in part, about complicating direction. Movement was not unilinear. Change was not one way. Nor is the binary model of metropole-periphery sufficient to capture the multifarious, multi-directional movement of people, materials and ideas whose itinerant trails sprawled and stuttered across (and beyond) the British imperial world. There are two obvious inflections here. One is the influence of maritime history upon the history of empire; the other is the poststructuralist stress upon the haphazard.To some extent, we might contend, historians of imperial migration are still ‘writing back’ to J. R. Seeley’s 1883 treatise, The Expansion of England, a manifesto for forward motion and a foundational conceit. But if complexity is what defines migration, what on earth can be said of it that does not detract from that complexity? What can pull together what seems to be, by definition, moving incessantly apart?
Filed under: Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Empire, New Zealand, Pacific, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Tying up forever a large territory for the use of Kafirs in small bits each big enough to support a man and his family … to tie up the man whose labour is worth more elsewhere .. Does it not strike you as rather a waste of both the man and the ground? … Why give him legal title? And how will you dispossess him afterwards?
The evidence of Commissioner Hamilton to the South African Native Affairs Commission, 1903-5 (quoted in Martin Chanock, The Making of a South African Legal Culture, 2001, p. 379).
Filed under: Quote, Southern Africa | Closed
hosts and their unwanted guests
“This so-called zombie or brain-manipulating fungus alters the behaviours of the ant host, causing it to die in an exposed position, typically clinging onto and biting the adaxial surface of shrub leaves,” the study authors write.
The fungus then grows out of the head of the ant, releasing spores into the air, which rain down onto unsuspecting ants and the forest floor.
from abc.
Filed under: Science | Closed
interventions 13, 1 (2011)
Between Subalternity and Indigeneity, ed. Bird and Rothberg
Jodi A. Byrd; Michael Rothberg, ‘BETWEEN SUBALTERNITY AND INDIGENEITY: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies’.
This introductory essay addresses the conditions for possible exchange between subaltern studies and indigenous and American Indian studies. It highlights the special significance of Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ as an inaugurating moment of postcolonial studies in the US with important implications for those working in indigenous studies. Scholars in postcolonial and indigenous/American Indian studies share an interest in challenging the logics of colonialism and deploying incommensurability as a critical tool. However, the essay also points to tensions between postcolonial and indigenous studies that derive from indigenous people’s sense of living under ongoing colonial projects – and not just colonial legacies – and from postcolonial studies’ over-reliance on models of colonialism in South Asia and Africa that do not necessarily speak to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Besides tracing the convergences and tensions that mark the relation between indigenous and postcolonial critical tendencies, this essay introduces the contributions to this special issue and seeks to prompt further dialogue that continues the project of interrogating subalternity.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘THE GOVERNANCE OF THE PRIOR’.
This essay asks how critical indigenous theory might intervene in the field of critical theory. What originates here that does not in other disciplinary phrasings and phases and cannot without doing some violence to the tasks indigenous critical theory sets for itself? It begins to answer this question by introducing a form of liberal governance – the governance of the prior – that critical indigenous theory illuminates. And it argues that rather than referencing a specific social content or context, social identity or movement, critical indigenous theory disrupts a network of presuppositions underpinning political theory, social theory and humanist ethics (obligation) which are themselves built upon this form of liberal governance.
Jodi A. Byrd, ‘BEEN TO THE NATION, LORD, BUT I COULDN’T STAY THERE: American Indian Sovereignty, Cherokee Freedmen and the Incommensurability of the Internal’.
This essay takes as its case study the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s 2007 vote to disenfranchise approximately 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen (African-Cherokee descendents of slaves once held by members of the Cherokee Nation) in violation of the treaty the Cherokee Nation signed with the United States in 1866 to end the Civil War. Arguing that indigenous sovereignty and political status is incommensurable with the ‘internal’ to the United States, the essay provides a genealogy of ‘internal colonialism’ in order to track how it has emerged as descriptor within postcolonial theory for indigenous peoples’ relations with the United States. In order to place indigenous critical theory into conversation with subaltern studies, the essay argues that disaggregating processes of racialization from colonization makes the ongoing settler colonization of indigenous nations visible in conversation with subaltern studies at the same time that it reveals the persistent racisms that have continued to inflect Cherokee nationalism.
Gaurav Desai, ‘BETWEEN INDIGENEITY AND DIASPORA: Questions from a Scholar Tourist’.
This essay proposes the category of subalternity as a tool to adjudicate between the often conflicting claims of diaspora and indigeneity. Written in the context of two itineraries on the part of the author – one a combined lecture/tourist trip to Ecuador and the second a talk presented at a symposium on indigeneity and postcoloniality in Urbana-Champaign – the essay begins by tracking the various knowledge claims that arise out of the experience of travel. It goes on to record a travel narrative to an indigenous community in Ecuador in which many of the concerns of representation, language and political recognition that colonized communities face are raised. The essay then moves on to a discussion of the risks of unilaterally privileging either the claims of indigeneity or the claims of diaspora.
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, ‘NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEXICANS: The Collision of Empires on the Texas Frontier’
This essay pairs documents dating from 1758 on the settlement of central Texas with the 2007 film No Country for Old Men to offer a comparative analysis of the competing racial geographies that emerged from Spanish and Anglo-American colonialism in the Southwest. These modes of European empire each produced distinctive racial geographies with lasting consequences for contemporary indigenous peoples. Settlers under the Spanish Crown represented the Texas territory as teeming with indigenous peoples, including the Apache and Comanche nations. Spanish coloniality, she suggests, was predicated upon indigenous presence. Without Indians, there could be no settlement. Meanwhile, Anglo-American colonization required not only the dispossession of indigenous peoples (and mestizo Mexicans) for the expansion of the US, but also the banishment of the figure of the Indian from the national imagination. Consequently, the Cohen brothers’ film is able to represent the very same Texas territory as barren and completely devoid of any Native Americans 250 years after the Spanish settlers penned their documents. It is suggested that the displacement of the Indian from the American landscape comes at great psychic cost. Thus, even a seemingly anti-war and anti-imperialist film like No Country operates under the shadow of this US colonial violence, registering the trace of the Indian as terrorist. The essay offers a revision of postcolonial methodology, and particularly of subaltern studies, to allow for the analysis of the complex relationship evident in the Spanish colonial archive between white settler and indigenous populations. Rather than a perpetual antagonism, it finds an attenuated set of relations between Spanish settlers and indigenous inhabitants of Texas, offering a broader interpretative framework for indigenous agency.
Robert Warrior, ‘THE SUBALTERN CAN DANCE, AND SO SOMETIMES CAN THE INTELLECTUAL’.
Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ emerged in and helped shape a specific moment in the development of literary theory in the US, and it continues to challenge Native American studies in significant ways. Spivak captures in Gramscian terms the dilemma that scholars and intellectuals from the colonized world face in positing their work as engaging in meaningful change of the conditions of colonization. Her reflexive approach becomes most meaningful for Native studies when the indigenous world is understood as featuring two forms of subalternity, one focused on economic depravation, the other more focused on the maintenance of the social and cultural forms of traditional cultural practitioners. The conclusion focuses on one place where intellectuals meet up with both these forms of subalternity, an Osage dance society. This is an example of one setting where subalterns and intellectuals can, in fact, meet each other and communicate.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This article examines the impact of the application of apparently impartial principles of procedural fairness and natural justice on the construction of “authentic” and “inauthentic” knowledge of Aboriginal culture. It discusses the progression of the Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) court cases and the legal construction of public participation in the making of political decisions affecting Aboriginal interests in land. In examining the politics of competing interests in land, this article reflects on the tension between Indigenous interests in land and settler developmentalism in relation to the Australian jurisprudence of procedural fairness and natural justice. The arguments running through the article concern the questions of the ways in which the liberal restraint on power is embodied in the impartial principles of administrative law, where that power creates rather than infringes upon rights, why it generates a particular legal construction of Aboriginal interests in land and cultural heritage, and the extent to which this plays a role in the maintenance of relations of settler-colonial dispossession.
Filed under: Australia, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This is very intriguing, called the ‘Free Knowledge Project’. The words of Marc Pinkoski, founder:
The linked concepts of “reconciliation” and “decolonization” are taking leading roles in conversations about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. In particular, they have become a central focus of recent interpretations of Constitution Act, 1982 and Indigenous and non-Indigenous jurists conclude that if significant progress towards reconciliation is to be made, it will require work beyond the courtroom and particularly within the public at large. The importance of such a focus is articulated specifically, for example, in the recent Aboriginal title case Tsilhqot’in Nation where Justice Vickers of the BCSC recognizes in his judgment that “Tsilhqot’in people have survived despite centuries of colonization. The central question is whether Canadians can meet the challenges of decolonization.”
The necessity of a process of reconciliation connected to wider projects of decolonization is further underscored in the work of Indigenous political scientist Kiera Ladner, who notes that there is much the general public needs to address in preparation for a robust form of reconciliation. She states:
While many Canadians may not be cognizant of their history and may choose to ignore the realities of the present, reconciliation is necessary. It is a necessity for Indigenous peoples as they seek to realize their goals of self-determination, cultural renewal, and economic independence; it is also a necessity for Canadians as they grapple with the demands for a new, or renewed, relationship between Indians peoples and settler nation(s).
At a minimum, true reconciliation and decolonization will require new approaches to conveying information to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. In order to foster these new methods, a small group of us has formed the Cheechacko Partnership* with an eye to offering existing courses and developing and delivering teaching materials about the Canadian state, including representations of Indigenous peoples , law, policy, research and options. It is important to note that the materials are intended to inform Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences about the actions and attitudes of the Canadian state and its approaches to the issues being raised, not to offer information about Indigenous cultures per se.
Our first venture began in May 2010 when I taught a five-week series of lectures on the topic of Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples in Canada. Offered for free in a downtown Victoria café to a diverse audience comprising Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, I drew on courses I had been teaching at the University of Victoria over the past decade. I offered this class in this way to answer calls from students to make the information from the classes more widely available. In the class I addressed topics including anthropological representations of Indigenous peoples, anthropological science, the role of these representations and methods have in Aboriginal rights litigation, and the history of the Canadian state’s and BC’s engagement with Indigenous peoples. In October 2010 I offered the class again, but expanded it to six classes.
Presently, we are very fortunate to have Dr. Michael Asch offering a free class entitled Indigenous-State Relations – a six week class being framed as “Canadian Studies.” These lectures are based on a number of experiences, but in particular Michael’s many years of teaching and his voluminous research at the University of Alberta and UVic. And, next up is Dr. Rob Hancock, who will be offering a five week series of lectures on Aboriginal Rights, Anthropology, and Development in the North slated for the end of March 2011. He will focus on the emergence of Aboriginal rights law in the context of Indigenous resistances to resource development in their homelands, and examine the role played by anthropologists in this process. Rob is currently teaching in Indigenous Studies at UVic and has recently returned home from the University of Western Ontario, where he completed a post-doctoral fellowship teaching and writing on anthropology and Indigenous political history.
Seems a very good initiative; if I were in victoria again, I’d be checking it out.
A big hat-tip to marc, and we wish him all the best.
(my apologies for an earlier post in which I made a few errors — ed)
Filed under: Canada, public lecture, Scholarship and insights | Closed
