Abstract
Many of the cross-cultural intermediaries who figure in the New Zealand historiography operated in ‘middle ground’ situations. However, in New Zealand as elsewhere in the Pacific, intermediaries also had roles to play in settings where the authority of the colonial state was more or less assured. Working from government records and the 1920 diary of the Pakeha interpreter Ben Keys, this article examines the sorts of cross-cultural expertise involved in negotiating sales and leases of Maori land and probes the relationship between such instrumental uses of knowledge of Maori culture and the ethnographic interests that this work nurtured. For some settlers, Keys included, amateur ethnographic inquiry constituted the active intellectual work of being a New Zealander. By examining the work of an intermediary and amateur ethnographer in an age of automobiles and cinemas, I seek to demonstrate — in a modest, textured way — how the colonization of New Zealand was an ongoing, twentieth-century process in the sphere of economics and law as well as culture and identity.
Licensed Native Interpreter:
The Land Purchaser as Ethnographer in Early-20th-Century New Zealand
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Abstract
Filed under: New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract
This paper is a synoptic history of racial geography in the ‘fifth part of the world’ or Oceania — an extended region embracing what are now Australia, Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The period in question stretches from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, to focus on the consolidation of European racial thinking with the marriage of geography and raciology in the early 19th century. The paper investigates the naming of places by Europeans and its ultimate entanglement with their racial classifications of people. The formulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge is located at the interface of metropolitan discourses and local experience. This necessitates unpacking the relationships between, on the one hand, the deductive reasoning of metropolitan savants, and, on the other hand, the empirical logic of voyagers and settlers who had visited or lived in particular places, encountered their inhabitants, and been exposed, often unwittingly, to indigenous agency and knowledge.
Filed under: Australia, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Kenichi Matsui, Native Peoples and Water Rights: Irrigation, Dams, and the Law in Western Canada (M-Q UP 2010); Hnet review here.
Economic developments in irrigation, agriculture, and hydroelectric power generation in western Canada at the turn of the last century challenged the way Native peoples had traditionally managed the watershed environment. Facing rapidly expanding provincial and federal power as well as private industries, Native peoples saw opportunities to protect their self-governing rights and explore reserve-based economy.
Through a combination of field work and archival research, Kenichi Matsui offers an original and pioneering overview of the evolution of water law and agricultural policies in the Canadian west. By incorporating the history of water law philosophies, water development technologies, agricultural policies, and cross-cultural theories, Matsui constructs an interdisciplinary analysis of how both Native peoples and non-native stakeholders struggled for better rights and livelihood through litigation, political campaigns, and direct actions.
The dramatic stories of early cultural, legal, and political conflict in interior British Columbia and Alberta featured in Native Peoples and Water Rights enrich our understanding of current Native rights disputes throughout North America.
Filed under: Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Mapuche Prisoners on Hunger Strike to Demand Talks
The hunger strike is a product of “the desperation of the Mapuche community members, who see all of the doors closing and that there is no political will to engage in talks and recognise the existence of a conflict” over land, Fernando Lira, the head of Liberar, a non-governmental organisation that is providing the prisoners with legal aid, told IPS.
[…]
The Mapuche community’s ancestral territory spans the southern tip of South America across Argentina and Chile. The Mapuche — who make up 87 percent of indigenous people in Chile — number around one million in this country of 16 million.
The Mapuche lost most of their territory in the late 19th century. Later, under the Pinochet regime, forestry companies and other firms interested in operating in undeveloped parts of the country were offered incentives like land and subsidies. As a result, indigenous communities, who generally have no formal title to their ancestral property, continued to be forced off their land.
Filed under: Latin America, Political developments | Closed
crab colonialism
“one of the most arduous migrations on Earth”
crab colonisers on Christmas Island
Filed under: Political developments, wacky | Closed
How did the major European imperial powers and indigenous populations experience imperialism and colonisation in the period 1880-1960? In this richly-illustrated comparative account, Robin Butlin provides a comprehensive overview of the experiences of individual European imperial powers – British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, German and Italian – and the reactions of indigenous peoples. He explores the complex processes and discourses of colonialism, conquest and resistance from the height of empire through to decolonisation and sets these within the dynamics of the globalisation of political and economic power systems. He sheds new light on variations in the timing, nature and locations of European colonisations and on key themes such as exploration and geographical knowledge; maps and mapping; demographics; land seizure and environmental modification; transport and communications; and resistance and independence movements. In so doing, he makes a major contribution to our understanding of colonisation and the end of empire.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract
This paper creates a traditional, counterfactual, historical geography that proposes the rise of an American Empire in the 1800s instead of the British. The industrialization of the British world-economy of the early 1800s, victory in the Napoleonic Wars, and the consequent success of the British Empire fundamentally depended on cotton textiles, thus on American cotton agriculture. Cotton was, to the economies of the nineteenth century, very much like oil is to those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first enturies. The development of the American cotton South after 1800 was based heavily on the reproduction of slaves within the South. Had Jefferson ended slavery, as he at one time considered, I suggest that an alternative America would have arisen in which Jeffersonian idealism would have encouraged family farms as the principal units of agricultural production. I further argue that, absent the availability of cheap British manufactures, the Philadelphia School of Protectionists would also have likely triumphed early and an American industrial development based on internal growth fueled by cotton grown on family farms would have allowed America to come to dominate the world-economy of the late 1800s. Protectionist policies would have similarly excluded French manufactures and the industrial development based on cotton the French were also attempting in the late 1700s would have failed just as did that of Britain. French military victory in the Napoleonic Wars would not have produced a French world-economy. An America without serious global opposition would not have resisted annexing all of Mexico and Canada in the 1840s and expanding aggressively into Asia via the Pacific basin and Hawaii to create an American Empire.
Keywords: Counterfactuals; American Empire; Cotton agriculture; The South; Industrialization; World-economy
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
reblog: russia / indigeneity
“If a person from the south of the country living in Kamchatka says that he or she feels like a Koryak, then they have the right to fish without being disturbed,”
Russia Considers Better Definition Of Indigenous Peoples.
via Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources
Filed under: Political developments | Closed
