cleveland indians
No race, creed or religion should endure the ridicule faced by Native Americans today.
– National Congress of American Indians.
Another hat tip to Mat A.
Filed under: art, Political developments, United States | Closed
Borders, State University of New York, October 16 2010.
Women and Gender in Colonial Contexts, Université Paris-1, 19-21 January 2012.
A big thanks to those who sent me their link.
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
cher
In 1973, Cher released a track called “Half Breed” – which is certainly news to me. Check out the album art for the Japanese version:
What’s interesting is that this American song – about living with mixed white and Cherokee heritage – made number 1 in Canada and New Zealand (but only made number 3 in Australia). You may scoff, but this represents a fairly significant – and transnational – triumph of miscegenation discourse into the realm 70s pop-culture. It also one of the few early tracks she released in Germany, where it made 29. (Statistics come from Wikipedia, btw.)
For her surreal and uncomfortable film-clip, complete with symbolic Cherokee window-dressing, head over to Youtube. Thanks to Rob A. for pointing this one out to me.
Filed under: wacky | Closed
The Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements (ATNS) project is an ARC Linkage project examining treaty and agreement-making with Indigenous Australians and the nature of the cultural, social and legal rights encompassed by past, present and potential agreements and treaties. The project also examines the process of implementation and the wider factors that promote long term sustainability of agreement outcomes.
Check it out here.
Filed under: Australia | Closed
Check out the artwork from a new computer game by German software designers Pegasus Spiele.
Of course, “the smartest farmer harvests the biggest potatoes”:
The fresh country air, romantic sunsets, a picnic on a meadow – many people are fascinated by life in the country. A feeling of home is in the air. However, there is more to the life of a farmer than just the genial country life – it also requires many hours of hard work to bring in a rich harvest.
In the 19th century, the USA bought vast tracts of land west of the Mississippi. This farmland with its square and clearly partitioned fields was ideal for the settlers from the east, who soon turned this region into America’s Heartlands.
Players take on the roles of these settlers, developing their lands and building farms. Each cultivated field yields victory points; however, players need to decide round by round whether they actually want to collect these victory points. They might also forego these points and save up for a farm instead, which might yield even more victory points. Bonus tiles offer further options for strategic play.
Games like this have been around almost as long as personal computers have: The Oregon Trail was a classic in the 1970s, which inspired the educational Yukon Trail in 1993; and the more serious The Settlers was developed in 1993, and has been redeveloped right up to 2010 with The Settlers 7: Path to a Kingdom.
In addition to this I have recently been informed of the online virtual world called Second Life, in which players can escape their old life and start afresh in places abounding with new social and economic opportunities; and just like the classic settler fantasia, there are no natives.
Filed under: wacky | Closed
“Natives and the Vanished Dignity”, From New Era, flashed via AllAfricaNews:
For us to achieve the notion of ‘all people are equal’, the colonised must first be deliberately allowed to come at the same socio-economic level as the colonisers and their children, then we can start talking about equality as there can never be equality when a hungry athlete is put at the same line with a satisfied athlete and told to compete at the same time, place and manner.
As this might look as equality to others, it is not to me. The application of equality must be twinned with equity and the principle of fairness. The principle is that yes we must treat equal cases equally but fundamentally, we must deal with unequal cases in proportion to their inequality.
[Frantz] Fanon’s utterances remain relevant in today’s context.
In the words of this magnificent African child, ‘the settler’s town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt; the settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler’s town is a well-fed town, easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things’.
Far away and in remote areas, is the native place of residence described as ‘ a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire.’
Who doesn’t know that in this country, we still have settlers that use zoological terms in mentioning natives? Just look around and see how the natives are inhumanely treated.
It will not be difficult to stand by the road and see a bakkie packed with more than 20 workers being transported to workplaces, working on a tender worth more than one million Namibian dollars. The natives remain the exploited employees of the settlers and colonisers. We still have segregated schools. Accessibility does not imply a total removal of apartheid remnants and machineries. I visited a school that still has chairs still printed South West Africa while you find a service station with all prices written ‘Rand’ instead of ‘Dollars’.
It is said that settlers have both Namibian and South African citizenship. The settlers are of course ignorant of our revolution. The other day I was at the police station to collect my certificate of conduct, I was in a queue with many people that included the two citizens that I assume to be Afrikaners.
One of them was told by the police officer that a certain document of his that I did not take much note of was missing. In response, this man had the audacity to rudely shout at the police officer, fold his document and throw it to the direction of the ‘constable’ and remarked ‘throw it in your dustbin’.
This event angered me and those patriotic compatriots who were in that same queue. I for one thought that the man will be arrested right away but to my surprise he took off freely – presumably saying ‘the natives cannot do anything to me the son of the settler’.
As a young person, it is very much disturbing seeing this happening in a decolonized motherland and to a state agency to which we have surrendered our natural act of protecting, governing and defending ourselves (our sovereignty). If I am to meet this same man somewhere and he does something to me, should I report him to the police or ‘nandi tulemo ongonyo’ (punch him)?
Having told this story to many citizens from different regions and various places, I soon learned that there are many cases in which the natives are inhumanely treated by the settlers to the point where they are still given to ‘eat with dogs and other pets’.
This appears unreal hearing it from the third party but once you have a conversation with those that have experienced it, you realise that decolonisation has just taken off.
[…]
It seems that Du Bois’s avowal that the problem of the 20th century is that of a colour-line needs to be stretched to the 21st century. What is clear here is that something needs to be done. Natives in the new Namibia must be on top of the food chain.
Needless to say, I end with the submission that if establishing a body to deal with cases pertaining to inhumane treatment of the native is farfetched then the police must do us this little favour of establishing an SMS line where we can tip the police on events of this nature because as I have already indicated, many people especially the unskilled and semi-skilled natives have sold their dignity for survival.
Filed under: Africa, Political developments, postcolonialism | Closed
I recently came across Carolyn Lake’s review of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, and found it interesting. As she writes in her article “Colonial Nation”:
Although Drover is at home on the land, Sarah is not. The character of Neil Fletcher reminds us of this when he remarks on Sarah’s arrival in Darwin: “She won’t last, a delicate English rose withers in the outback.” But Sarah does last, and this can be attributed to her partnership with Drover. It is Drover who literally comes to the rescue to transport Sarah’s cattle to Darwin after she fires Fletcher. It is Drover who gets her served a drink in the front bar, and it is Drover who manages to save the children from Mission Island. Although Sarah does try to recapture Nullah, her passive approach does not compare with Drover’s action- packed search-and-rescue escapade. Drover and Sarah’s relationship ties back again to the land. When the two characters kiss, rain falls on the drought-stricken Darwin. When they consummate their relationship, monsoonal storms appear, the land becomes rejuvenated, birds fly and rivers flow. When Britain is soon to leave Australia defenseless against Japanese attack, it is the very British Sarah, together with the very Australian Drover, who save the land.
This relationship between myth and land has deeper consequences, creating a settler discourse around land that displaces any notion of dispossession from Indigenous peoples. Early in Australia, Nullah tells Sarah that she is like the Rainbow Serpent, that she will heal the land. But Sarah will do more than heal the land; she will own it. Do Sarah’s healing powers justify her ownership? Sarah’s mythic propensity to cultivate the land is curiously similar to the settler’s ability to develop agriculture. The broad meaning of Terra Nullius is land belonging to no one, land over which no one has sovereignty. This includes but is not limited to an expression of sovereignty through the development of agriculture. Sarah’s adoption of the title of Rainbow Serpent, the title that seems to distance her from the status of colonizer, invader or dispossessor, comes eerily close to the doctrine of Terra Nullius, the doctrine that “justified” European colonization of Australia. Rather than attempting to circumvent Indigeneity, by naming Sarah the Rainbow Serpent, Indigenous discourses are appropriated by European ones, constructing these alternative meanings and histories.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
K. N. Gulson and R. J. Parkes, “From the barrel of the gun: policy incursions, land, and Aboriginal peoples in Australia” Environment and Planning 42(2), 2010, 300 – 313.
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the enduring traces of colonialism within the Australian nation-state and the ongoing challenges to Aboriginal peoples’ rights, especially land rights. We try to make sense of contemporary federal government and New South Wales state, or provincial, government policy changes which connect land use, access and ownership to social welfare, and which target Aboriginal peoples in remote, or outback, areas and the inner city. We connect these two policy initiatives by pointing to the tension between social and planning policies, conceptions of landownership, and the notion of Aboriginal self-determination. We try to understand the rationale and enactment of these policies through the idea of policy incursions. We argue that policy incursions represent a constellation of settler nationalism, the enactment of a white national imaginary, and the exploitation of crisis that reinscribe Aboriginal people in 21st-century Australia as objects of state policy, while marginalising them as subjects of the state.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Here are some snippets from an essay by James Hughes (LSE), published recently in the Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict, and subsequently available online as an e-print:
A persuasive case has been made for the colonial “land grabbing” origins of the modern conception of genocide. A pattern of genocide has emerged historically in places where land greed has become infused with religious bigotry, and where the racist and religious ideologies of coercive colonial conquest combine with settler colonialism (Kiernan, 2007). European philosophers have debated since the Sixteenth century on the morality of colonial occupation and barbarism, including the physical and “cultural” genocides of indigenous societies versus their rights – all conducted under the rubric of the mission civilisatrice (Fitzmaurice, 2008). Historically, settler colonists and the settler colonial mentality of forced acquisition, have been the driving forces for the dehumanization and displacement of peoples, the logical conclusion of which is genocide. The interaction of religion and the interests of settler colonialists is most illuminating when the core elements of both are the basis for an overriding state ideology as in the US ideology of “Providence” and later “Manifest destiny”, and the Zionist Biblically-rooted claims to Palestine. In these and other cases genocidal massacres were employed as a terrorizing land clearing device. While state leaderships have often attempted to disguise the motivations of racism and religious bigotry within the more legitimate ideological wrappings of security or national interests, it is generally only the exceptionally fanatical leader who openly expresses clarity of genocidal intent. Cromwell saw his massacres of the Irish as a “judgement of God” on “Papists”, and the Cromwellian attributed slogan “to Hell or Connaught” captures the logic of his policy. Hitler’s demand for “living space” for Germany in the East was also intended to secure an ideological result – to obliterate “Jewish Bolshevization”. Yet, even great democrats can articulate deeply genocidal instincts. How different the Jefferson Memorial would look if it inscribed his damnation of the native Americans: “to pursue them to extermination”. To be fair to Jefferson, this and a few comments of similar ilk were reluctantly made in the aftermath of massacres of settlers by native Americans, and unlike many of his contemporaries, Jefferson recognized that genocide was part of the “Anglo” culture of colonial occupation, from Ireland to Asia. For some scholars, ethnic competition for land was a factor in the Rwanda genocide, as it is in Darfur. A sole focus on threat perception and security dilemmas, however, distracts us from the role of state ambitions and material interests. Elites may exaggerate a threat and thereby provide a discourse to legitimize acts which may, in fact, have an ulterior motive, whether it is the pursuit of material interests – seizing and colonizing lands from another group; or imposing ideological hegemony – as in racial purity, or counter communism.
[…]
So the question remains what makes some societies genocidal and others not? Much of the scholarship on genocide, generated from the US and informed by liberal norms, is overly focused on the relationship between genocide and twentieth century totalitarian and authoritarian states. As Kuper, Mann and others have argued, genocide affects all historical periods and regimes, including democracies. If we further take into account the role of state strategic ambitions, ideological and material interests, racism, imperialism and settler colonialism, and forms of inequality and group competition we come closer to explaining why state/societal resentments against specific groups can turn genocidal. Ideologies of racial superiority, in particular, however explicit or implicit, are likely to be an important part of the justification for genocide.
Filed under: Genocide, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Richard Broome, author of the survey history Aboriginal Australians, has recently released a new and updated version for Allen and Unwin Press, featuring coverage right up to the Intervention, and engagement with more recent scholars.
In the creation of any new society, there are winners and losers. So it was with Australia as it grew from a colonial outpost to an affluent society.
Richard Broome tells the history of Australia from the standpoint of the original Australians: those who lost most in the early colonial struggle for power. Surveying two centuries of Aboriginal-European encounters, he shows how white settlers steadily supplanted the original inhabitants, from the shining coasts to inland deserts, by sheer force of numbers, disease, technology and violence. He also tells the story of Aboriginal survival through resistance and accommodation, and traces the continuing Aboriginal struggle to move from the margins of a settler society to a more central place in modern [Australia].
Find out more info here.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
