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
I wish that there were a more diplomatic way to say this, but the plain fact is that Obama, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, lied to the Tribal Nations Summit Conference, and to the world, on December 16. I do not relish raining on the parade of those who took Obama at his word, or to dash Indian country’s optimism that finally someone in the White House is going to change the fundamentals of U.S. indigenous policy. It is necessary, however, to face a tough reality. The United States has not, does not now, and likely will never honestly support the Declaration in its current form.
And so, the United States is ‘still lying after all these years’, according to a recent article in Indian Country.
An interesting, and angry piece, but nevertheless one that overlooks the reality that UN Declarations only mean as much as the sovereign-nation which signs them want them to mean. This, quite rightly, is shocking to indigenous activists across the settler world, who have just realised that all the hard work and energy invested into the UNPFII will produce results that fall quite short of the redress they all expected; but it shouldn’t really surprise international lawyers. The UN is a toothless tiger in matters like this — matters affecting first world (settler) states.
Overly negative, perhaps?
Filed under: media, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
reading group in melbourne
A new reading group is starting next week at the University of Melbourne for postgraduates, early career researchers and faculty. The group is named the Critical Postcolonialisms Reading Group and is beginning its program this year next Tuesday, March 1st. Details are available on their blog – http://criticalpostcolonialisms.wordpress.com/ – and through signing up to their newsletter.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
I consider myself always available to acknowledge the wrongs of settler colonialism in Australia, but I do not like being cornered in this way. I can already tell that I won’t get along with this amnesic, misinformed, green-eyed git. The matter is serious, though. I sigh in brief repose, and then my beer glass goes down – expressive hands will come in handy to push through all the irony and the irksomeness of the interchange that’s about to ensue.
Of course I know enough about apartheid-era South Africa to offer a superb rejoinder. I could cane him with just the ‘a-word’ alone, and proceed to recount – as so many latte-drinking lefties of all backgrounds love to do here – a particular rendition of South Africa’s recent history: you know, a story in which terrible white racists are cast as antagonists, and Mandela and the African National Congress play the heroes; a story full of all those nasty bits (wrongful imprisonments, torturings, assassinations, bombings, beatings, etc.); a story winding off neatly in 1994.
But this is not what I do.
Filed under: Australia, media, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
Dear all,
We are pleased to announce that the first issue of settler colonial studies is now available for your viewing.
In this stage of its life, settler colonial studies is an online, open-access journal. There are may benefits of such a medium (among them, universally free access, and immediate registration with google and google scholar). We understand, however, that library recognition may take some time. With your help, it might become catalogued faster than it otherwise might — so, if possible, be sure to pass it onto your librarians.
Thanks and happy reading!
Filed under: Africa, art, Asia, Australia, Éire, Call for papers, Canada, Empire, Europe, gender, Genocide, Hawaii, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, law, literature, media, middle east, New Zealand, outer space, Political developments, postcolonialism, public lecture, Quote, Scholarship and insights, Science, Seminar, Southern Africa, Sovereignty, United States, wacky, Website | Closed
This article explores the contemporary politics of global violence through an examination of the particular challenges and possibilities facing Palestinians who seek to defend their communities against an ongoing settler-colonial project (Zionism) that is approaching a crisis point. As the colonial dynamic in Israel/Palestine returns to its most elemental level—land, trees, homes—it also continues to be a laboratory for new forms of accelerated violence whose global impact is hard to overestimate. In such a context, Palestinians and international solidarity activists find themselves confronting a quintessential 21st-century activist dilemma: how to craft a strategy of what Paul Virilio calls “popular defense” at a time when everyone seems to be implicated in the machinery of global violence? I argue that while this dilemma represents a formidable challenge for Palestinians, it also helps explain why the Palestinian struggle is increasingly able to build bridges with wider struggles for global justice, ecological sustainability, and indigenous rights.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This essay cautiously compares the dispossession of Native lands in the United States with the enclosure of the English commons, in light of the transfer of political sovereignty that occurred in the case it explores. The federal policy of dividing American Indian nations’ tribal lands into privately owned parcels led to the loss of Native lands and obscured the colonial nature of federal power. Following the implementation of this late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century program, known as allotment, non-Indian people gained ownership of millions of acres of Indian territory. Two neglected shifts accompanied this commonly noted loss of land. First, allotment eroded the sovereignty of Native nations while extending the authority of the colonizing power, the federal government. Second, the program indirectly reinforced a tendency to think that it was race, rather than political difference, that defined Indian people and Indian nations. Placing Native people into the schema of U.S. race relations obscured their status as colonized subjects and members of sovereign nations. Allotment thus simultaneously expanded federal power and veiled its colonial nature.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
ethnohistory 58, 1 (2011)
killer new issue of ethnohistory; check it out here
Coll Thrush: ‘Vancouver the Cannibal: Cuisine, Encounter, and the Dilemma of Difference on the Northwest Coast, 1774–1808’:
Food is fundamental. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto has written, food “has a good claim to be considered the world’s most important subject. It is what matters most to most people for most of the time” (Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food [New York, 2002], ix). We are what we eat, both materially and discursively, both in terms of the ecological networks that provide us with sustenance and the identities that define who we are as social, cultural, and historical beings. This article examines early contacts on the Northwest coast, using food as a lens on cultural and environmental encounter. Drawing on oral tradition and on accounts of explorers such as George Vancouver, this article treats the newcomers ethnographically, setting their behavior within the context of European cultural practices, and treats aboriginal societies historically, showing them as active participants in processes of change. Across tables and hearths, aboriginal people and the newcomers created a space in which static notions of race played a surprisingly small role. Instead, differences were seen as having to do with subtler concepts like generosity, cultivation, and taste. As with the belief, shared by Europeans and aboriginal people alike, that the strangers they encountered might be cannibals, these early encounters created what Gananath Obeyesekere calls a “dialogical misunderstanding” upon which would be laid the shaky foundations of empire (Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas [Berkeley, CA, 2005]). By using food to ground the face-to-face encounters between native and newcomer and by placing indigenous understandings of encounter at the center of the story, this article seeks to describe some of the specific mechanisms, material and rhetorical, by which colonialism dispossessed.
Chris Andersen: ‘Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes Ethnohistory’
Scholars have long noted the central place of racialization in the last five centuries of colonial rule and likewise the crossracial encounters and eventual colonial intimacies regulated in its shadow. In the conceptual terrain posted by these demarcations, this article explores how, in the absence of extensive documentation on historical self-ascriptions, contemporary ethnohistorians examining upper Great Lakes fur trade settlements have attempted to come to terms with the historical social ontologies that long preceded official attempts to regulate them. Specifically, we examine the racialized logics governing the retrofitting of these settlements as “métis” and “Métis” and, secondarily, the recent creep of juridical logics into ethnohistorical conversations. Rather than challenging ethnohistorical conclusions that these settlements were/are Métis, this article challenges how they are ethnohistorically imagined as such, and in doing so it appeals for a Métis “counter-ethnohistory” alternatively anchored in an analytics of peoplehood.
Timothy H. Ives: ‘Reconstructing the Wangunk Reservation Land System: A Case Study of Native and Colonial Likeness in Central Connecticut’
This article brings land systems into dialogue to explain the successful coexistence of the Wangunks, a native community of central Connecticut, and their English neighbors during the colonial period. Using the interpretive research focus of likeness, structurally similar aspects of Wangunk and English land tenure are compared, including diversified landholdings extending from a village center, cooperation of individual and common rights, and a gendered proprietorship. This discourse suggests that the character of Wangunk ethnicity resonates from the values that motivated their land system more than from its structures. Furthermore, distinctive elements of the Wangunk Reservation land system, as hereby reconstructed, contribute to an emerging sense that articulations of native and English land systems are not only dynamic but locally distinct across New England.
Tom Arne: ‘Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley’
Frightening rumors of conspiracies and plots were a prominent feature of relations between Native Americans and Europeans in the colonial Hudson Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While these alarming reports usually had no foundation in reality, they nevertheless shed light on several aspects of Indian political and diplomatic relationships in this area. This article holds that the spread of rumors and tales from one people to the next represents only the most visible of a great variety of interactions among the Indian groups of the valley, and therefore stands as indirect evidence of a vast native social and political world largely hidden from modern eyes. By plotting the career and distribution of particular rumors, one may get a sense of channels of communication and networks of exchange among the native peoples in the Hudson Valley as well as of the ties these Indians had to native groups in both adjacent regions and more distant locales. In particular, rumors of an Indian conspiracy against the Europeans in 1712 provide evidence of how the outbreak of the Tuscarora War in North Carolina reverberated in the Hudson Valley, which indicates that even small groups of Indians living close to centers of European settlement might be participants in extensive Indian exchange networks and thus be part of a larger Native American world.
Kevin Mulroy: ‘Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation’
This is a story of two hidden identities. It focuses on the family history of Phil Wilkes Fixico (aka Philip Vincent Wilkes and Pompey Bruner Fixico), a contemporary Seminole maroon descendant of mixed race who lives in Los Angeles. Phil is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-quarter Seminole freedman, one-eighth Creek freedman, one-quarter Cherokee-freedman, and one-quarter African-American-white. His family history records that his paternal grandfather was the offspring of a Seminole Indian woman and a Seminole freedman, but that this “intermarriage” was kept secret from the Dawes Commission and the boy was enrolled as a “fullblood” Indian. This one union and the subsequent history of the family tell us a great deal about relations between Seminoles and freedmen in the Indian Territory and Oklahoma and about status and identity issues among individuals of mixed race within American society. With tragic irony, Phil’s parents also hid the identity of his biological father, echoing the story of his grandfather. Sensing family secrets and lies, young Phil experienced an identity crisis. Eventually discovering his father’s identity and his family history, Phil turned his life around. He has embraced his mixed-race heritage, connected with the Seminole maroon communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico, and become a creative and energetic tribal historian.
Filed under: Canada, Empire, Pacific, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
