Craig Yirush Traces the emergence of a revolutionary conception of political authority on the far shores of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Based on the equal natural right of English subjects to leave the realm, claim indigenous territory and establish new governments by consent, this radical set of ideas culminated in revolution and republicanism. But unlike most scholarship on early American political theory, Craig Yirush does not focus solely on the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. Instead, he examines how the political ideas of settler elites in British North America emerged in the often-forgotten years between the Glorious Revolution in America and the American Revolution against Britain. By taking seriously an imperial world characterized by constitutional uncertainty, geo-political rivalry and the ongoing presence of powerful Native American peoples, Yirush provides a long-term explanation for the distinctive ideas of the American Revolution.
Filed under: Canada, Empire, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Filed under: Empire, Israel/Palestine, public lecture, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
In Perspectives on Politics 9 (2011), Andrea Smith reviews:
The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations. By Kevin Bruyneel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 320p.
Broken Landscape: Indians, Indian Tribes, and the Constitution. By Frank Pommersheim. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
a bit of it:
Both of these books provide helpful analytics and strategies for addressing the continued assault on tribal sovereignty in the short term. Pommersheim directs us to practical legal strategies though constitutional remedy that can stop the US Supreme Court’s erosion of tribal sovereignty. Bruyneel reframes the analytics by which we understand sovereignty struggles. He advocates that we reject simple binaries in which Native peoples must be either completely assimilated into US polity or solely outside it. Such a binary always positions Native peoples as a disappointment whenever they fail to escape colonial conditions completely. Given the continued and dire assaults on Native sovereignty brilliantly outlined by Pommersheim and Bruyneel, the strategies and analytics they proffer are critically important. To explore the writings of scholars who articulate a longer-term vision of ending settler colonialism, those of Waziyatawin, Jennifer Denetdale, Taiaike Alfred, Glen Couthard, Robert Nichols, Dian Million, and Jennifer Denetdale provide a helpful starting point.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
At a Lincoln lecture, a history professor will discuss the lasting consequences of the forced assimilation of American Indian and Australian aboriginal children into the dominant culture.
The lecture will be given by University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Margaret Jacobs. A university news release says her lecture will build on her book, “White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940.”
In the late 19th century, the U.S. and Australian governments moved the children to boarding schools as part of the assimilation effort. Tens of thousands of children were forced to leave their families and abandon their customs.
The free lecture is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. on April 14 in the Nebraska Union auditorium.
From newstimes
Filed under: Australia, public lecture, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Join your host, J Kēhaulani Kauanui, for Part I of a two-part episode that focuses on the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous people’s struggle. How is indigeneity contested in the Israeli state project? How do the frameworks of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide work in Zionist projects of occupation? What are the parallels between the colonization of Native North America and Palestine? What about Zionist Jewish bids for indigenous status? How might the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples be used to mobilize resistance? The show will feature community presentations made at a recent event in recognition of Israeli Apartheid Week, “Palestine and the Struggle of Indigenous Peoples” by Gale Courey Toensing (Palestinian American staff reporter for Indian Country Today Media Network) and Stan Heller (Chairperson of the Middle East Crisis Committee). Original air-date: 3-29-11.
from Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
The American Indian Quarterly 35, 2 (2011)
Patty Loew and James Thannum, ‘After the Storm: Ojibwe Treaty Rights Twenty-Five Years after the Voigt Decision’, pp. 161-191.
Arnold Krupat, ‘Chief Seattle’s Speech Revisited’, pp. 192-214.
Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘Indigenous Economies, Theories of Subsistence, and Women: Exploring the Social Economy Model for Indigenous Governance’, pp. 215-240.
Maria A. Kopacz and Bessie Lee Lawton, ‘Rating the YouTube Indian: Viewer Ratings of Native American Portrayals on a Viral Video Site’, pp. 241-257.
Elizabeth Archuleta, In the Presence of the Sun, and: The Journey of Tai-me (review)
Kristen A. Carpenter, Defying the Odds: The Tule River Tribe’s Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries (review)
Brendan Hokowhitu, The Rediscovered Self: Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice (review)
Maria Williams, Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska (review)
Fay A. Yarbrough, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (review)
Cathy Howlett, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (review)
Gregory A. Cajete, New World of Indigenous Resistance: Noam Chomsky and Voices from North, South, and Central America (review)
Jeffrey P. Palmer, Video Letters from Prison (review)
Filed under: Canada, law, literature, media, Political developments, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
chorus of crows
When she saw Top Camp
(humpies made of corrugated iron/slabs of bark
people and dogs living together
children discharge running from nostrils/ears
like sewage seeping from the broken pipes next door)
she didn’t wince.
She learnt to overlook the rubbish
caught on broken fences
blown by westerlies that brought the dust
and the haunting sound of crows through
every crack.When she met Topsy
(her husband used a star picket
punished her tribal way even though everyone knew
that whitefella contractor got the better of her)
she didn’t faint.
It wasn’t the first time she’d seen human flesh
open to the bone or held the hand of a woman
being stitched up.
Outside the clinic the crows seemed to sing
that white man
long gone.When the Land Council mob
said no to a drink in the back bar
(the publican would only lace
their beer with Worcestershire Sauce
customers would stare/whisper behind cupped hands)
she bought a carton.
They sat in the yard yarning and laughing
at the crows as they burnt their beaks
scavenging for scraps
on the barbecue
hot plate.
An extract from K A Nelson’s poem ‘Chorus of Crows’, winner of the 2010 Overland Judith Wright Poetry prize for New and Emerging Poets.
Hat tip, Mat A.
Filed under: Australia, literature, Quote | Closed
Citing precedents, prosecutors reached back into the Indian Wars in arguments at an appeals panel in Washington D.C. Specifically, they invoked an 1818 military commission convened by Gen. Andrew Jackson after U.S. forces invaded then-Spanish Florida to stop black slaves from fleeing through a porous border — then executed two British men for helping the Seminole Indians.
Navy Capt. Edward S. White also wrote this in a prosecution brief:
“Not only was the Seminole belligerency unlawful, but, much like modern-day al Qaeda, the very way in which the Seminoles waged war against U.S. targets itself violate the customs and usages of war.”
From Miami Herald
Hat tip Dave G
Filed under: media, United States, wacky | Closed
Norman Etherington,’Barbarians Ancient and Modern’, American Historical Review 116, 1 (2011).
from the intro:
Two noteworthy historical controversies have proceeded in parallel fashion since the early 1980s without the protagonists in either debate being aware of the other. One concerns warfare and migration among early-nineteenth-century African societies and their contribution to the ethnic divisions that flowered under South Africa’s apartheid regime. The other concerns the role of external barbarians and their migrations in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the founding of enduring European nations. Unquestionably these controversies differ substantially, both in the issues at stake and in their temporal and geographical scale. But they raise similar questions about concepts of tribes, barbarians, and mass migrations formulated by previous generations of historians. Nineteenth-century knowledge about the precolonial societies of Southern Africa was generated by methodologies and assumptions now known to be flawed, with many of them reflecting the legacy of classical studies in the West. Major errors stemmed from the application of inappropriate European models to African societies—models that owed much to the heritage of classical learning about Romans and barbarians. In a parallel development, encounters with exotic peoples on imperial frontiers since the sixteenth century had been reshaping classical scholars’ concepts of ancient barbarians. The result was a complicated process of intellectual interchange: modern conquerors viewed their newly acquired subjects and colonial neighbors through the distorting prism of Roman history, while historians of the classical world continually reinterpreted ancient sources in the light of present-day imperial experience. The critique of evidence developed during the debate on the so-called mfecane in South Africa applies with equal validity to the study of barbarian movements and identities in European late antiquity. It is perhaps not surprising that the two controversies developed along similar lines in the late twentieth century, when old certainties about colonial others and the nature of ethnicity were subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. The central points at issue transcend the disciplinary boundaries of both fields of study, bedeviling historical scholarship wherever national or ethnic movements claim connections to long-past migrations, vanished peoples, or defunct polities.
Filed under: Ancient History, Empire, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
