via Native American Legal Update
The Government of Canada today formally endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. John McNee, Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations, met with the President of the United Nations General Assembly to advise him of Canada’s official endorsement of the United Nations Declaration.
Filed under: Canada, law, Political developments | Closed
In 1637, the land that is now known as the town of Mystic, Connecticut was the site of a fierce battle between the Pequot Nation and English settlers resulted in an historic massacre that shaped future relations between Tribes and colonists. Today, researchers are combing the site with metal detectors and archaeological tools to unearth the history behind one of the pivotal events of pre-American history in the region.
Filed under: United States | Closed
In 1787, the First Fleet was dispatched from the British Isles to find a penal settlement at Botany Bay, Australia. By this time, the British government had already experimented with convict transportation for over 160 years. The aim of this article is to place the history of transportation to Australia within the context of the wider flow of convict labour from the British Isles in the period 1615 to 1870. Using data from a range of sources it attempts to chart and explain fluctuations in the number of convicts transported over time. It also seeks to explore how the integration of convict labour within the transatlantic market in unfree labour-shaped British penal policy in the long-run. Such an analysis is useful in explaining the differing impacts that transportation had on the prisoners who experienced it and the intensity with which it was opposed in the 19th century by the British anti-slavery movement. Geographically the article explores these issues in relation to transportation to the New World (especially Barbados, Jamaica, Maryland and Virginia), West Africa, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Western Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar.
Filed under: Africa, Australia, Empire, Pacific, Scholarship and insights | Closed
As many of you will know, in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Chief Justice John Marshall declares the sovereignty of the United States government over American Indian property. According to Marshall, the government had inherited this dominion from Great Britain, which had acquired it through the doctrine of “discovery.” The case granted American Indians a “right of occupancy,” but no more. I was familiar with the Johnson case largely through teaching it in my first-year property course. Among property professors Marshall is praised for having created at least a modicum of rights for Native Americans and for protecting native land from incursions by white settlers (since Indians could only sell to the U.S. government under his ruling, not to individual citizens). The case later served in the mid-twentieth century as a precedent for American Indian land claims. But as I prepped for the workshop, I discovered that recent work in legal history paints a different view, one that brings into question Chief Justice Marshall’s motivations and also demonstrates his own questionable use of history. [… P]roperty professors view the case as good law, in the sense of having created a leg, albeit a weak one, for Indian property rights to stand on; whereas legal historians view the case as bad law, in the sense of being based on inaccurate history (and guided by suspect motivations). So one question that comes to mind for me is this: can bad history make good cases? Does inaccurate history make a case any less legally legitimate?
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
pin the racist tag on the pomo
One half of a debate in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian on white supremacy and understanding racist discourse:
We are told that Cliff is not a “conscious racist”, in other words, that nothing Cliff could possibly say would persuade Mngxitama that his analysis is false. We are informed that what might appear (to someone less tuned-in to reality than Mngxitama, perhaps) to be “humanist concerns for good governance” are in fact evidence of Cliff’s racism.
But I have, of course, already fallen into one of Mngxitama’s cunning rhetorical snares by using the word “we” in the paragraph above. This word (when used by Cliff and probably by other white men like myself), is in itself racist because it erases the “differential realities of blacks and whites”.
One cannot speak of a reality one does not live in, according to Mngxitama’s argument, and “blackness” in itself defines a reality, whether we’re talking about Tokyo Sexwale or a township dweller with no education. They are the same — and Cliff has a slave-holder’s mentality with respect to both of them.
[…]
I regret that I’ve never drunk as deeply from the well of postmodernism as Mngxitama has, because this decoding appears to fall outside of my sphere of competence, leaving me with only the suspicion that he’s talking nonsense.
It’s certainly true that there are “differential realities” and that many South Africans might be incapable of and/or unwilling to understand the reality of someone else’s life. It’s also true that many of these breakdowns of understanding are manifested in race, because race is still our best proxy for class difference, with class difference being the true cause of such mutual misunderstanding.
But these differential realities do not preclude communication or understanding across racial lines, neither do they preclude the possibility that when Cliff says “we”, he actually means “all South Africans”. He could perhaps be fully aware of the historical reasons whites are (generally) richer than blacks, and the exploitation that this inequality is premised on.
I’m amazed that ‘race’ continues to make South Africans expend so much hot air. But I’m more amazed that they do so to a degree of sophistication that would simply not be reached by writers in Australia’s media (and nor, do I suspect, by writers in New Zealand’s, Canada’s, or the USA’s).
And we might ask why.
Filed under: media, Southern Africa | Closed
peter coclanis reviews belich
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, 3 (2010)
[O]ne cannot gainsay the fact that Replenishing the Earth is a relatively comprehensive, highly original, largely convincing, and always fascinating account of Greater Britain’s will to power, with which account scholars perforce will grapple for years to come.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Ngati Porou’s chief negotiator is going to Australia to get iwi there to vote on a unique Treaty settlement which he says would set the record straight for the iwi which has had to battle against the label of “kupapa” – or traitors – for fighting alongside the Crown in the land wars in 1865.
Ngati Porou, the second largest iwi, recently signed a Deed of Settlement with the Crown, which includes $110 million in cash for financial and cultural redress.
It also includes the largest amount of conservation land ever handed over in a settlement, and a unique recognition of Ngati Porou’s role both in the land wars and for the armed forces in wars such as World War II.
Filed under: law, New Zealand, Political developments | Closed
Lisi Krall, Proving Up: Domesticating Land in U.S. History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
Krall uses the interdisciplinary approach of evolutionary economics to explore the history of land domestication in the United States.
On July 9, 1920, William Krall, a coal miner in Wyoming, was shot by his neighbor in a dispute over water as he attempted to “prove up” and gain title to his homestead. Attempting to understand her grandfather’s passion and determination for making his own 160 acres of land in dry, sagebrush country, Lisi Krall embarked on a unique journey through the interconnections of economy, culture, and land in the history of the United States. She tells the story of the domestication of land in the United States, a story that hinges on the market economy and the agrarian and wilderness ethos as foundational land institutions. Drawing on institutional or evolutionary economics, Proving Up explores in detail the rich and ever-changing intermingling of cultural, economic, and material conditions through American history. Untangling the complicated history of Americans’ experiences with nature, Krall provides a critical focus and a timely contribution to the current debate surrounding our relationship to land and nature.
Michelle Mart’s H-Net Review here.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Cole Harris, ‘The Spaces of Early Canada’, Canadian Historical Review 91, 4 (2010)
Abstract:
This article considers the relationship between the increasingly humanized spaces of early Canada and the patches of settlement that, at Confederation, were assembled into a country. It suggests that Harold Innis correctly identified some of the essential spaces of early Canada as, in his American way, did Frederick Jackson Turner. Both, however, offer limited perspectives: Innis because his analysis ill fit the areas of agricultural settlement where most people lived, Turner because of the imprecisions of his analysis and also because, in early Canada, the bounded nature of agricultural settlement severely constricted the westward expansion on which his analysis turned. But Innis was right about staple trades in non-agricultural areas, and Turner was right that areas of recent agricultural settlement were loci of particularly rapid cultural change. Both analyses can be filled in, and that, particularly with regard to Turner, this article attempts to do. In so doing, it considers the extent to which the early rural societies in Canada, the loci of most lives, can be considered to have been ideologically liberal. It also considers the particular patterns of secondary migration in and beyond bounded settlements, and their relationship to the construction and maintenance of social and cultural difference. Overall, the article suggests that the receptacles within which countries develop are important, that the Canadian and American receptacles were strikingly different, and that the spaces of early Canadian life have their continuing legacies in an ongoing engagement with sparsely settled land and with very different ways of being.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Dean Itsuji Saranillio, ‘Colliding Histories: Hawai‘i Statehood at the Intersection of Asians “Ineligible to Citizenship” and Hawaiians “Unfit for Self-Government”’, Journal of Asian American Studies 13, 3 (2010)
Abstract:
This essay examines competing narrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Hawai‘i statehood by tracing two mutually constitutive but opposing projects in the post-World War II period—the racial project seeking the liberal inclusion of Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans, into a U.S. national polity and a Native Hawaiian project that sought autonomy from the United States. U.S. ambitions for global hegemony during the Cold War found a discursive alliance with selected narrations of Japanese American racial persecution, setting these narratives to public memory through global circulation and publicity, while narrations of Native Hawaiian colonial oppression were designated for historical deletion, through intimidation and containment.
Filed under: Hawaii, Scholarship and insights | Closed
