In The Political Uncommons, Kathryn Milun presents a cultural history of the global commons: those domains, including the atmosphere, the oceans, the radio frequency spectrum, the earth’s biodiversity, and its outer space, designated by international law as belonging to no single individual or nation state but rather to all humankind. From the res communis of Roman property law to early modern laws establishing the freedom of the seas, from the legal battles over the neutrality of the internet to the heritage of the earth’s genetic diversity, Milun connects ancient, modern, and postmodern legal traditions of global commons. Arguing that the logic of legal institutions governing global commons is connected to the logic of colonial doctrines that dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land, she demonstrates that the failure of international law to adequately govern the earth’s atmosphere and waters can be more deeply understood as a cultural logic that has successfully dispossessed humankind of basic subsistence rights. The promise of global commons, Milun shows, has always been related to subsistence rights and an earth that human communities have long imagined as ‘common’ existing alongside private and public domains. Utilizing specific case studies, The Political Uncommons opens a way to consider how global commons regimes might benefit from the cross-cultural logics found where indigenous peoples have gained recognition of their common tenure systems in Western courts.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
A group of economists says remote Indigenous communities can earn money by protecting their land.
Professor Owen Stanley from Charles Darwin University wants companies and governments to offset their carbon footprints by paying communities to rehabilitate and protect land across northern Australia.
Some similar programs already exist but professor Stanley says they are underfunded.
“I think we all agree that it would be good if there were a lot more of those programs definitely,” he said
“And that would not only be good for the environment, it would also be good for the communities.”
The discursive convergence of climate change and indigenous issues is a source of great fascination for me.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
kafka’s wish
If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reigns, for there needed no reigns, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly short heath when horse’s neck and head would already be gone.
Filed under: literature | Closed
Abstract
This article examines attempts to negotiate a perceived residual dominance of settler populations in South Africa and Zimbabwe by means of developmental and cultural policies deemed necessary to restore sovereignty to Africans. Indigenisation has become a preferred strategy for reconstructing post-colonial states in Africa: indigenisation of the economy as part of a Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe and Black Economic Empowerment in the socio-cultural context of Ubuntu in South Africa. These are issues arising from the regional legacy of contested and uneven transitions to majority rule. Identifying how governments frame the ‘settler problem’, and politicise space in doing so, is crucial for understanding post-colonial politics. Indigenisation in Zimbabwe allows the government to maintain a network of patronage and official rhetoric is highly divisive and exclusivist although couched in terms of reclaiming African values and sovereignty. Revival of Ubuntu as a cultural value system in South Africa facilitates a more positive approach to indigenisation, although Black Economic Empowerment displays elitist tendencies and cultural transformation remains controversial and elusive. The perceived need to anchor policy in socially acceptable (i.e., ostensibly indigenous/traditional) contexts has become a prominent feature of post-colonial politics and is indicative of an indigenous turn in Southern African politics.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
It is however, still a matter, of doubt and perplexity; it is a book sealed to the eyes of man, for the time has not yet come when the Great Ruler of all things, in His wisdom, shall make answer through his inscrutable ways to the question which has puzzled, and still puzzles the minds of the learned civilized world. How came America to be first inhabited by man?
This quote from William Whipple Warren invites us into the topic of this essay: the ways American Indian authors, particularly three contemporary Anishinaabeg writers, engaged with the question of Native American origins during the racially polarized project of “imagining” the nation of the United States throughout the nineteenth century. Answering the question of origins was central to continued colonization in North America; quite simply, Native people had to be explained to be superseded. Since first contact, European Americans have presented myriad answers to the question, How came America to be first inhabited by humans? With the rising importance of print capitalism in postrevolutionary America, explanations of Native origins became widely disseminated and consumed by the public and politicians alike. The accessibility of these theories directly influenced nineteenth-century popular sentiments about American Indians and colonial policies regarding their future. This was most notable with regard to removal policies, which were aimed at accomplishing one of the essential components of the colonial project of the United States, the territorial dispossession of Indian lands. This process was vital to the colonial project, and it stood in stark opposition to the fact that it was on the well-being of indigenous lands that the very survival of indigenous peoples depended. Having answers to the question of Native origins that challenged the magnitude, duration, and even the very legitimacy of Native Americans’ presence and tenure in America offered powerful colonial tools for furthering tribal land dispossession.
In this essay I argue that American Indian authors had a keen understanding of the political and racial implications the varied answers European Americans were offering about their origins held for their communities. By tackling dominant origin theories, they interrupted the white-supremacist discourse surrounding the topic. Their answers were crafted delicately so as to be salient to their predominantly white audiences and yet also actively promote indigenous sovereignty, a sovereignty inherent in peoplehood. This peoplehood was “inseparably linked to sacred traditions, traditional homelands, and a shared history as indigenous people.” With the ongoing colonial project of the United States attempting to strip indigenous groups of key aspects of their peoplehood, including language, sacred history, religion, and land, through “the means of territorial dispossession, assimilation, religious conversion, or outright extermination,” we can understand their answers, which sought to protect this peoplehood, as bold acts of resistance.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
- Held at Newberry Library, Chicago
In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.
What is the value or perceived necessity—for an Indian or for a white man—of changing Northern Cheyenne history? How are a reader’s conclusions affected by her perception of the race of the person altering that history? Why is it acceptable to sell but not tell American Indian history? An examination of the visual and discursive rhetoric of “The Black Horse Ledger,” a Northern Cheyenne ledger book history recorded in the late nineteenth century and later defaced, gives us the opportunity to engage these questions. Native American histories have long been contested ground in both the dominant culture and academia, but “The Black Horse Ledger” provides a rare opportunity to see that battle overtly waged on its pages as unknown parties disfigured the original images and made editorial remarks that serve to reinforce the marred history rather than the original record. The coexisting yet competing accounts contained within the ledger embody the unreconciled Indian and Anglo literacies and histories of the American West. The juxtaposition of these opposing literacies and histories forces readers to negotiate the competing economies of meaning that clash in both form and subject.
“The Black Horse Ledger” not only foregrounds conflicts within academia’s treatment of Native American history but also highlights key points of tension and debate in the study of ledger art. In a discussion of the so-called descriptive texts that have been added to some of the Fort Marion ledgers, Edwin L. Wade and Jacki Thompson Rand argue that multiple handwriting styles are present, many of which do not match known prisoner writing, and warn: “We must be vigilant in questioning whether these captions are relevant to the intent of the artist.”
Filed under: art, media, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
In Arena Magazine no. 107, Andrew Lattas and Barry Morris attribute to me the view that the current situation of Indigenous people, however one interprets it, is due to their ‘culture’. Nowhere have I said anything vaguely similar to this. One of my concerns has been precisely to show how totalising, bounded and fixed notions of ‘culture’ fail to help us understand the relations and outcomes of Indigenous Australians with others. Another has been to argue (for example, in my book Caging the Rainbow) that to hold Indigenous people to imagined standards of ‘authenticity’ is to impose double jeopardy upon them: to colonise them and radically alter the conditions of their existence, then also demand that they remain as they were.
Concerning the NT Intervention, my experience in remote, as well as not so remote, Aboriginal social settings is that certain unwelcome conditions are widespread. These include alcohol and substance abuse, and related violence; and their consequences for child and youth welfare. Health conditions are notorious. In many remote communities very few people survive to old age, while younger ones have multiple bypasses, complex operations, ongoing dialysis, and batteries of pills to swallow every day. There are other kinds of problems that do not lend themselves to such clear-cut description, including social involution and disoccupation in the face of what are often overwhelmingly difficult social conditions. None of these problems can be simplistically attributed to Indigenous ‘culture’. But there is a question, once one has had experience of these concentrated forms of neglect, problems and special vulnerabilities, whether one thinks that action should be taken. Many Indigenous people do. And so, in my own way, do I.
[…]
Lattas and Morris are ‘scandalised’ by what they see as the use of anthropology’s familiarity with Indigenous cultures to legitimise the ‘legal alterity’ of Indigenous people. This refers to my statement that ‘universalist understandings of rights can be problematic in their application to people whose social lives differ from the mainstream’. I should have gone further and said that the application of universal human rights is often contentious with respect to the mainstream as well—but perhaps particularly contentious with respect to people, like many Indigenous Australians, who do not themselves think in terms of universal human rights, and who may act and propose kinds of solutions to concerns in their lives that do not conform to universalist principles. This is not to say that we should not have and value human rights; and it is certainly not to advocate relegation of Aboriginal people outside their reach. However, there are often complex questions around the realisation of rights, and the reconciliation of certain rights with others. For example, how, in practice, is equality of right to life, liberty and security of person (as per Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to be realised? There are regulations in mainstream communities to support and prioritise certain kinds of value and activity over others; so, for example, the rights of children to be tended may have to be prioritised over the rights of parents to do as they want. This is familiar territory: we all recognise obligations to protect the vulnerable. But my point is that ways in which Indigenous people may choose to identify and realise norms may differ from those in wider Australian society.
Part of Francesca Merlan’s impressive response to Andrew Lattas and Barry Morris’s astute (though, it could be said, erratically condemnatory) critique of cultural determinism, the ‘neo-liberal’ predicament, and everything else under the Aboriginal sun.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Consisting of an introduction and ten chapters, Exclusionary Empire examines the transfer of English traditions of liberty and the rule of law overseas from 1600 to 1900. Each chapter is written by a noted specialist and focuses on a particular area of the settler empire – Colonial North America, the West Indies, Ireland, the early United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa – and on one non-settler colony, India. The book examines the ways in which the polities in each of these areas incorporated these traditions, paying particular attention to the extent to which these traditions were confined to the independent white male segments of society and denied to most others. This collection will be invaluable to all those interested in the history of colonialism, European expansion, the development of empire, the role of cultural inheritance in those histories, and the confinement of access to that inheritance to people of European descent.
TOC:
Introduction: empire and liberty Jack P. Greene
1. The languages of liberty in British North America, 1607–1776 Elizabeth Mancke
2. Liberty and slavery: the transfer of British liberty to the West Indies, 1627–1865 Jack P. Greene
3. ‘Era of liberty’: the politics of civil and political rights in eighteenth-century Ireland James Kelly
4. Liberty and modernity: the American revolution and the making of Parliament’s imperial history Eliga Gould
5. Federalism, democracy, and liberty in the new American nation Peter S. Onuf
6. Liberty in Canada, ‘multiple subjects, multiple freedoms’ Philip Girard
7. Contested despotism: problems of liberty in British India Robert Travers
8. ‘… a bastard of tyranny under the guise of liberty’: liberty and representative government in Australia, 1788–1901 Richard Waterhouse
9. How much did institutions matter?: cloning Britain in New Zealand James Belich
10. The expansion of British liberty overseas: the South African case Christopher Saunders.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Empire, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Matt Kaplan for the National Geographic:
As in cities today, the earliest towns helped expose their inhabitants to inordinate opportunities for infection—and today their descendants are stronger for it, a new study says.
In areas of ancient urbanization, it turned out, “we found very high frequency” for the TB-resistance gene, study co-author Thomas said. But, for example, “the Saami people from northern Scandinavia and the Malawi people from Africa, who have little history of urban living, did not have this frequency. (See our interactive Genographic atlas of ancient human migrations.)
Squint your way through it, but herein lies another explanation of ‘how the natives got smashed’ (see also Crosby, Diamond).
That link to the ‘interactive genographic atlas of ancient human migrations’ is worth a click too.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
