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
Frauen in den deutschen Kolonien expands the breadth and depth of our understanding of women’s roles and positions in the colonial endeavor. This edited collection builds upon previous works that have dealt exclusively with German women active in the colonial field.[1] It goes beyond previous books, however, by bringing together the experiences of women, European and non-European, from across Germany’s overseas empire and the metropole into a single volume that covers not just the period of effective German colonialism but also the subsequent interwar period. The multifaceted comparative aspect of the collection offers the reader great potential to draw significant conclusions about the role of women in German colonialism.
Filed under: Empire, gender, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In The Deaths of Hintsa, Premesh Lalu argues that South African history remains trapped by colonial modes of thinking. As a necessary consequence, he claims that the field needs a post-colonial moment, suggesting that historians engage with a deconstructionist strand of subaltern studies so as to sever the field from colonial epistemologies. In this essay, I review the book and then locate Lalu within a broad overview of South African historiography in order to offer a critical response to his proposals. I highlight radical and social historians because I think that they have more to offer the field today than Lalu is willing to admit. In a final section, I briefly explore Jonathon Hyslop’s idea of an epistemological middle ground and Clifton Crais’s engagement with subaltern studies. Both scholars provide useful alternatives to Lalu’s work. I conclude that South African history does not need Lalu’s post-colonial moment because it would privilege creativity at the expense of coherence and promote dismantling at a time when we may want to seek some stability.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
carel boshoff III
This is one of the more readable pieces I’ve read on the recent passing of Professor Carel Boshoff, the visionary Afrikaner nationalist.
Paradox trailed Carel Boshoff through his whole life. Before he devoted himself to building an all-white paradise, he worked for three years as a missionary in Soweto, the vast black labor reserve south of Johannesburg. Only some 2 or 3 percent of his neighborhood’s residents were Christians then, he told me when I interviewed him in Orania a year and a half ago. He longed to share with the rest the light of divinity.
But at the same time, through the 1980s, Boshoff — who married Verwoerd’s daughter Anna — was rising through the ranks of the conservative Afrikaner intelligentsia. This group worried about the preservation of the Afrikaner language and traditions after the anticipated end of white rule, as well as whites’ physical safety. Steeped in the writings of communitarian philosophers and early Zionists, Boshoff began to float the idea of a much tinier Afrikaner state, one which whites dominated not by forcibly subduing a black majority but by barring blacks altogether. In 1990, his dream became a reality when an old mining town in the country’s sparsely populated northwest went onto the auction block. Boshoff and a crew of supporters bought the whole thing, requiring the handful of blacks who lived there to leave. (Boshoff didn’t apologize for the relocations: “When you buy a used car,” he told a reporter, “you don’t buy the car’s occupants.”) He explained to the curious press that Orania was a “radical solution to a radical problem,” claimed 12,000 families had signed up to settle there, and predicted the number would expand exponentially.
From the pen of Eve Fairbanks, writing for Foreign Policy.
Filed under: media, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
The oral narratives and personal accounts given by the /Xam of the northern Cape, and recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, have played a key role in interpretations of rock art and of southern San culture, recent and ancient, generally. However, the validity of the account that relates the /Xam texts to supposed shamanic practices is an issue requiring attention. The texts are open to other readings that do not support the notion that ‘altered states’ are central in the thought of diverse San groups. Insofar as its methods and ‘neuropsychological’ foundations produce an account of a unified and largely uniform San cultural identity, the shamanistic reading sacrifices historicity and a more nuanced understanding of San pasts and lived experiences. As an alternative to positivist and structuralist accounts, phenomenology is an approach that is of relevance to under-explored issues regarding the writing of San (cultural) histories by archaeologists, anthropologists and other scholars.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
This article identifies a theoretical nexus between indigeneity and liberal democracy in three post-colonial contexts. Like democracy, the politics of indigeneity asks questions and makes assumptions about where power ought to lie and how it ought to be shared in relation to political inclusion and national sovereignty. The interaction of indigeneity with democracy highlights the limitations of liberal theory as well as the opportunities it provides to meet indigenous claims and conceptions of justice. Exploring the ideological tensions and commonalities between democracy and indigeneity allows a contrast, in comparative context, of the proposition that in Fiji, for example, democracy is “a foreign flower” unsuited to the local environment with the argument that liberal representative democracy can, in fact, mediate power in favour of an inclusive national polity.
Filed under: Australia, Pacific, Scholarship and insights | Closed
