This conference takes place on March 2011 at the University of California, Riverside. From their website:
Ethnic studies scholarship has laid the crucial foundation for analyzing the intersections of racism, colonialism, immigration, and slavery within the United States context. Yet it has become clear that ethnic studies paradigms have become entrapped within, and sometimes indistinguishable from, the discourse and mandate of liberal multiculturalism, which relies on a politics of identity representation diluted and domesticated by nation-building and capitalist imperatives. Interrogating the strictures in which ethnic studies finds itself today, this conference calls for the development of critical ethnic studies. Far from advocating the peremptory dismissal of identity, this conference seeks to structure inquiry around the logics of white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy in order to expand the scope of ethnic studies. An interdisciplinary or even un-disciplinary formation, critical ethnic studies engages with the logics that structure society in its entirety.
As ethnic studies has become more legitimized within the academy, it has frequently done so by distancing itself from the very social movements that helped to launch ethnic studies in the first place. Irrefutable as the evidence is of the university’s enmeshment with governmental and corporate structures, the trend in ethnic studies has been to neutralize the university rather than to interrogate it as a site that transforms ideas into ideology. While this conference does not propose to romanticize these movements or to prescribe a specific relationship that academics should have with them, we seek to call into question the emphasis on professionalization within ethnic studies and the concomitant refusal to interrogate the politics of the academic industrial complex or to engage with larger movements for social transformation.
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
After We have sold out Land We in a little time have nothing to Shew for it; but it is not so with You, Your Grandchildren will get something from it as long as the World stands; our Grandchildren will have no advantage from it; They will say We were Fools for selling so much Land for so small a matter, and curse Us.
Filed under: Quote | Closed
I have been following this website for the last year or so, and it has certainly come a long way. Established by the Pakistani po-co Masood Raja, this website includes a forum, some scanned resources, and links to publications and journals.
Filed under: Website | Closed
This month has seen the release of Lisa Ford’s long anticipated monograph, entitled Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836. When settlers assert sovereignty, argues Ford, the extension of their criminal jurisdiction to encompass the natives they colonised is just as important – perhaps more important – than any act of European paperwork or obscure doctrine of conquest or cession.
From the Harvard University Press website:
In a brilliant comparative study of law and imperialism, Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime.
This occurred, not at the moment of settlement or federation, but in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when notions of statehood, sovereignty, empire, and civilization were in rapid, global flux. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places before 1820, most settlers and indigenous people understood their conflicts as war, resolved disputes with diplomacy, and relied on shared notions like reciprocity and retaliation to address frontier theft and violence. This legal pluralism, however, was under stress as new, global statecraft linked sovereignty to the exercise of perfect territorial jurisdiction. In Georgia, New South Wales, and elsewhere, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
From H-Net:
The University of North Dakota Institute for Borderland Studies Presents: The Great Plains, the Prairies, and the US/Canadian Border
An international, interdisciplinary conference focused on the role played by the US-Canadian border in the American Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies.
Call For Papers
The US-Canadian border performs a paradoxical function: on the one hand, as the longest international border in the world, it separates the United States and Canada. On the other, as the gateway through which trade must pass, it sutures the two countries together.
The University of North Dakota Institute for Borderland Studies will host a conference from June 18–19, 2010 to explore the nature of this paradox, especially as it affects the American Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies, regions that merit increased attention in scholarly discussions of the United States-Canada relationship. This conference will be widely interdisciplinary, drawing together scholars from Political Science, Economics, History, Communication, Geography, Native Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, and Literature. Its purpose will be to address contemporary issues faced by the people living in these regions, by their governments, and by their business and cultural communities.
The Institute is therefore soliciting proposals for papers drawing from these fields.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):• border security issues as they affect the Prairies and the Great Plains
• the impact of free trade agreements on cross-border industries
• the evolving profile of border towns, in both a historical and a contemporary context
• the role of cities like Winnipeg in “runaway” Hollywood film production
• issues related to water rights, such as the Devils Lake outlet affecting North Dakota and Manitoba
• questions of sovereignty as they apply to cross-border Native communities
• the image of the border in Canadian and American literatureSelected, revised papers will be included in an edited volume to be published by the University of Manitoba Press.
Graduate students are especially encouraged to submit proposals. Those whose papers are accepted will be eligible to receive a subsidy to help defray travel and other related expenses.
Submissions will be accepted in English and in French.
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=173404
and their website:
Filed under: Call for papers, Canada, United States | Closed
From the NZ Herald:
A Ngapuhi leader is warning that “outsiders” could derail the tribe’s progress to settlement while others accuse the organisation he leads of manipulating the settlement process.
In Te Runanga a Iwi o Ngapuhi’s (Traion) annual report chairman Sonny Tau outlines the importance of moving from grievance to development. Delaying Treaty of Waitangi settlement means too many opportunities are being lost, he said.
Traion wants Ngapuhi to start settlement negotiations with the Government, however, complicating matters is that some in the country’s largest iwi – 122,000 strong – want to first go through Waitangi Tribunal hearings to challenge the constitutional basis of the Crown’s sovereignty.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/history/news/article.cfm?c_id=500832&objectid=10608720&pnum=1
From the Northland Age:
“The major issue being heard lies in the different understandings of the meaning and effect of both these documents, and particularly that hapu chiefs never ceded sovereignty to the Crown.
“This initial hearing will also lay the foundations for the treaty claims that will follow.
“The tribunal’s findings will hopefully provide a foundation of true nationhood built on the real vision of te tiriti signatories,” Mr Tipene added.
The Ngapuhi hapu now sought to challenge the sovereignty that had been assumed by the Crown.
“What they actually signed was very different to that which was translated into English,” he said.
Otiria Marae will host a wananga on Saturday, giving Ngapuhi hapu the opportunity to discuss their understandings of He Whakaputanga (the Declaration of Independence of New Zealand, signed in 1835) and te Tiriti o Waitangi.
More importantly, Te Aho claims chairman Pita Tipene said, it would enable the hapu to prepare for the Waitangi Tribunal hearing scheduled to begin at Waitangi on October 28.
Mr Tipene said all New Zealanders knew about the Treaty of Waitangi, but few had knowledge of He Whakaputanga, or that the chiefs had signed the Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi.
http://www.northnz.co.nz/index.php?news_id=2671
What I have gathered is this: a Northland Maori hapu, the Ngapuhi, are claiming that their own Declaration of Independence from the wider Maori collective – framed in 1835 – effectively removed a good portion of the hapu from the scope of the totalising Treaty of Waitangi that came just a few years later. We should all await the result of this push very eagerly. I suspect that if a Council, courtroom or Tribunal sees specific Maori collectives as distinct and extra-jurisdictional entites, with preserved sovereign entitlements of their own, the implications for other claims across the world are all too clear: we need only think of the Canadian dilemmas of non-status Indians (i.e. those left out of the 1870s treaty process) and, of course, the Metis (‘Nation’ or otherwise), for classic examples.
On the one hand, it is exciting that a little pre- ‘conquest’ political document (whether framed with the help of outsiders or not) has the potential to rattle the foundations of NZ sovereignty. On the other hand, it is a little disappointing that such a written document needs to exist in the first place for natives to advance the claim that their polities were legitimate before the extension of European sovereignty.
EDIT July 2010: I have since learned more, and am now prepared to admit that my presentation here is not entirely correct. See my interview with Josh Hitchcock for a better understanding of what’s actually happening with all of this.
Filed under: New Zealand, Political developments, Sovereignty | Closed
From H-Net:
Volume 7, Issue 1 of the Journal of Aboriginal Economic Development will be published in September 2010 in preparation for the CANDO 17th Annual National Conference & AGM (Niagara Falls, Ontario).
Papers should relate to one of the following areas:
• Aboriginal Community Economic and Enterprise Development
• Aboriginal Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• The Analysis of the Aboriginal Economy
• Evaluating Aboriginal Economic Activity
• Aboriginal Corporate Responsibility, Social Auditing, and the Triple Bottom Line
• Economic Partnerships
• Indigenous Knowledge and Economic Development
• Indigenous Land Management and Economic Development
• Aboriginal Organizations and Management
• International Aboriginal Trade and the Global Economy
• Aboriginal Community Development: The Role of Women and Youth
• Change: Traditional and Modern Aboriginal Economies
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=173307
There is a lot to be said for this kind of research. We can only hope that the scholarship makes comparative links, and that from Niagara, the indigenous world is inspired.
E. C.
Filed under: Call for papers, Canada | Closed
The 2010 ethnohistory conference to be held in Ottawa. From their website:
Creating Nations and Building States: Past and Present
The theme for the ASE Ottawa 2010 is titled ‘Creating Nations and Building States: Past and Present,’ focusing on indigenous societies and their relations with expanding colonial and modern state structures of Canada, America, and Latin America. This general theme is intended to initiate discussions on the complex and often fractious relations between Native societies and expanding state structures in the Americas from contact onward. Papers on instances of ethnogenesis, persistence and transformation of identity, culture and social structures over time are especially welcomed. Since the meeting is being held in Canada’s capital during the 125th anniversary of the second Metis provisional government and resistance movement at Batoche, we encourage discussions and reflection on alternative models of indigenous nation building, displacement and violence in the interior, and the vast process of native exclusion in the construction of modern states.
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
edward cavanagh reviews belich
From borderlands 8, 2 (2009):
James Belich has produced the most rich and comprehensive comparative history of white settler colonialism – if only the settler side of it – since the transnational turn of the 1990s. Above all else, this is economic history, and that of settlers and not natives. His thesis is composed with beautiful simplicity, and stands tangential, but not adjacent, to the existing scholarship on settler colonialism.
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no2_2009/cavanagh_settler.htm
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
A recent historiographical review article has been published, which outlines recent approaches to native agency.
From the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 10, 2 (2009):
Among the research into the history of North America of interest to readers of The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History are studies analyzing American Indian agency in the teeth of empire—how they endured colonization, adapted to new relations of power, and reconstructed colonial knowledge to find meaning and pursue their own purposes. Each of the works under review addresses such themes. Each contributes significantly to under-attended topics through careful study of local archives. They apply appropriately-adapted theory to develop fresh arguments about the relations of power between imperial and indigenous agency and should therefore make useful reading for scholars in Native American Studies and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
The three works under review proceed not only from different archival sources but from different theoretical frameworks as well. Comanche Empire centers on trade and world systems theory, Violence over the Land emphasizes violence and the State, and To Live Upon Hope focuses on discourse and practice in Christian missions. Each of these approaches has benefits and collectively these works—in dialogue with prominent work in Colonial/Postcolonial Studies—enable a discussion of the continuing search for a narrative to upend the older emphasis on European agency and Native American assimilation. Ultimately, these works suggest that a historiographic return to Native Americans will restore the full and complex agency of Indians in the history of North America and will require understanding the varied and contested power dynamics of imperialism and colonization.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
