The United States has formally apologised to American Indian tribes for “ill-conceived policies” and acts of violence against them.
Republican Senator Sam Brownback read the congressional resolution at an event attended by representatives of five Indian nations at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington: the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Pawnee nations.
Four of the five are based in Oklahoma and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate are in South Dakota.
The Cherokee originally were from the south-eastern United States but were forced to migrate to Oklahoma in the early 1800s.
from Press Association
Filed under: United States | Closed
Despite a shared interest in using borders to explore the paradoxes of state-making and national histories, historians of the U.S.-Canada border region and those focused on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have generally worked in isolation from one another. A timely and important addition to borderlands history, Bridging National Borders in North America initiates a conversation between scholars of the continent’s northern and southern borderlands. The historians in this collection examine borderlands events and phenomena from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Some consider the U.S.-Canada border, others concentrate on the U.S.-Mexico border, and still others take both regions into account.
The contributors engage topics such as how mixed-race groups living on the peripheries of national societies dealt with the creation of borders in the nineteenth century, how medical inspections and public-health knowledge came to be used to differentiate among bodies, and how practices designed to channel livestock and prevent cattle smuggling became the model for regulating the movement of narcotics and undocumented people. They explore the ways that U.S. immigration authorities mediated between the desires for unimpeded boundary-crossings for day laborers, tourists, casual visitors, and businessmen, and the restrictions imposed by measures such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Immigration Act. Turning to the realm of culture, they analyze the history of tourist travel to Mexico from the United States and depictions of the borderlands in early-twentieth-century Hollywood movies. The concluding essay suggests that historians have obscured non-national forms of territoriality and community that preceded the creation of national borders and sometimes persisted afterwards. This collection signals new directions for continental dialogue about issues such as state-building, national expansion, territoriality, and migration.
contents:
- Introduction: Borders and Their Historians in North America / Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill 1
- Part I. Peoples In Between
- Conflict and Cooperation in the Making of Texas-Mexico Border Society, 1840–1880 / Miguel Ãngel GonzÃlez Quiroga 33
- Between Race and Nation: The Creation of a Metis Borderland on the Northern Plains, 1850-1900 / Michel Hogue 59
- Part II. Environmental Control and State-Making
- Epidemics, Indians, and Border-Making in the Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest / Jennifer Seltz 91
- Divided Ranges: Trans-border Ranches and the Creation of National Space along the Western Mexico-U.S. Border / Rachel St. John 116
- The Scales of Salmon: Diplomacy and Conservation in the Western Canada-U.S. Borderlands / Lissa Wadewitz 141
- Part III. Border Enforcement and Contestation
- Crossing the Line: The INS and the Federal Regulation of the Mexican Border / S. Deborah Kang 167
- Caught in the Gap: The Transit Privilege and North America’s Ambiguous Borders / Andrea Geiger 199
- Part IV. Border Representation and National Identity
- The Welcoming Voice of the Southland: American Tourism across the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1880-1940 / Catherine Cocks 225
- Projecting the In-Between: Cinematic Representations of National Borders in North America, 1908-1940 / Dominique Bregent-Heald 249
- Glass Curtains and Storied Landscapes: The Fur Trade, National Boundaries, and Historians / Bethel Saler and Carolyn Podruchny 275
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
macca
via the deliciously sceptical Newspaper Rock
Filed under: United States, wacky | Closed
mythology of eurocentrism
Reason Wafawarova, from the state-owned Zimbabwean newspaper, The Herald (via AllAfricaNews):
European history, Western values, as well as Western democracy are all mythological concepts — they are pretty much a well-packaged set of propaganda designed to create in us a personality other than our own, a culture divorced from our own reality, and beliefs that have nothing or very little to do with our own setting.
[…]
Almost all of us have at one time attacked or blamed someone wrongly because we had been given a wrong history. So many murders have been perpetrated because someone believed a lie.
// //So many wars have been started because the population was lied to and a history was projected in such a way that it motivated people to kill. The George W. Bush — Tony Blair — John Howard tripartite Iraq lie of 2003 quickly comes to mind.
So people kill, destroy, murder, engage in wars and persecute other people because a certain history creates that behaviour in them. Africa suffers today because of a history that has caused this suffering.
So history is no casual peripheral thing that one just comes across as they pass through high school. It is one’s total orientation towards the world.
This is precisely why the European has arrogated himself the role of the world’s sole valid historian. He knows this way that he can shape a majority world population that lives on lies presented as the truth.
[…]
PF-Zapu was never ashamed of Russian backing during the liberation struggle. Equally Zanu-PF was never ashamed of Chinese, Romanian, Bulgarian and Yugoslavian support when they waged the war to liberate Zimbabwe.
These are countries that never colonised Zimbabwe and as such there is no sense of history that brings with it a sense of shame, guilt or pain.
So the Westerner has to repress painful information to maintain his privileges over African resources. To maintain the equilibrium, he needs to profit from the lies he tells himself and others. So he thrives on the lies he tells, the false perceptions and consciousness he creates in himself and others.
He tells himself that he alone names and describes investment laws and market forces; he alone defines democracy and human rights, he alone knows best what constitutes terrorists and he alone fights just wars.
He is aware that the truth and a more realistic history will undermine his gains; so he maintains this mythology that says all other people cannot do much without his involvement.
[…]
When the coloniser established segregation laws in Zimbabwe, the laws were against the good and the bad black person, so were the apartheid laws in South Africa, and equally both the good and bad “Negro” sat at the back of the bus in the United States.
// //But today we are told to consider the good white person when redistributing our stolen land, to consider the good white person when deciding who should invest in our country and how, to remember the good white person when we draft our own constitution and so on.
The West demands moderate conduct from the Palestinians as if the ritual bombings they suffer at the hands of Israelis each year are moderate. It is demanded of Afghanis and Iraqis that they be moderate with the Western invaders occupying their countries, as if the invasion of these countries was in itself a moderate idea.
A mythology organises the world, organises behaviour and it organises interpersonal and intergroup relations. It provides answers, right or wrong, correct or false; it does not matter.
Filed under: media, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
african hospitality
Check out the incredible series African Hospitality from photographic artist Andrew Putter (a postcolonial take on the portrait series of the same name, by painter George Morlan, from way back in 1790). From Michael Stevenson Gallery:
Putter focuses on the ‘Wild Coast’ of South Africa in his new series of portraits. Many Europeans were shipwrecked along this coast in the 1600s and 1700s. Most fled or perished, but a handful were taken in by local Xhosa-speaking communities. Some of these European castaways formed deep ties with their African hosts, learning the language, marrying into the tribe, and dying as Africans. ‘Bessie’, for example, was a six-year-old British girl who washed up on the Mpondoland coast in the early 1700s, married a chief and became a great Xhosa queen.
[…]
Putter draws equally on the cultural histories of Europe and Africa in these works. Although the adornments and landscape are largely south-east African, the poses, compositions and lighting are heavily indebted to 18th-century English painting. Putter proposes that it is not inevitable for one culture to thrive at the expense of another, but that it is possible for new forms to emerge through the interplay of dissimilar cultures. Indeed, he shows that this interplay is already present in colonial history, gently reminding purists that everything is always already a mixture.
Found this via Africasacountry.
Filed under: art, Southern Africa | Closed
j. s. mill on american settlers
The northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favourable circumstances; having, apparently, got rid of all social injustices and inequalities that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and they have no poverty: and all that these advantages seem to have done for them is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters.
J. S. Mill, 1848.
Filed under: Quote, United States | Closed
some recent reviews in the jich
By various authors. Books in review:
Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought
Edited by Duncan Kelly
Economies of Representation, 1790-2000: Colonialism and Commerce
Edited by Leigh Dale and Helen Gilbert
The New Oxford History of New Zealand
Edited by Giselle Byrnes
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Abstract:
What is often referred to as a common law doctrine of aboriginal or customary title neither underpinned imperial policies towards Maori property rights in the 1830s and 1840s nor was it viewed as a settled or broadly accepted legal doctrine. Rather, critics of imperial policies applying to New Zealand deployed these legal sources in order to challenge and influence the workings of imperial policy on British settlement within New Zealand. The particular emphasis of such policy was on disciplining the extent of such settlement and providing a land fund from crown grants. Imperial policy-makers did not endorse these legal sources despite their use in the decision of the New Zealand Supreme Court in Regina v Symonds (1847). In this context, there was no consensual legal view or approach as to the nature or content of indigenous property rights. Ultimately, in the face of disagreement, diverse views of the nature and extent of Maori property rights persisted. The perceived non-justiciability of such rights meant that political spaces rather than the courts were of ongoing significance to characterising and debating such rights.
Filed under: law, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty | Closed
Freedom Bound is about the origins of modern America: a history of colonizing, work, and civic identity from the beginnings of English presence on the mainland until the Civil War. It is a history of migrants and migrations, of colonizers and colonized, of households and servitude and slavery, and of the freedom all craved and some found. Above all it is a history of the law that framed the entire process. Freedom Bound tells how colonies were planted in occupied territories, how they were populated with migrants “free and unfree” to do the work of colonizing, and how the newcomers secured possession. It tells of the new civic lives that seemed possible in new commonwealths, and of the constraints that kept many from enjoying them. It follows the story long past the end of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War, when just for a moment it seemed that freedom might finally be unbound.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
pigeon’s egg head
Pigeon's Egg Head
George Catlin, Pigeon’s Egg Head: Going to and Returning from Washington, 1837-9. Oil. Held at Smithsonian American Art Museum, where else – Washington. Teaching resource here.
Filed under: art, United States | Closed
