Dispossession Of Indigenous Peoples Research Articles

State Power, Vulnerability, And Indigenous Peoples In International Law

Abstract Recent trends show that rather that the management of populations through life, States such as Kenya have adopted power that ensures that the populations are better managed through death. This power ensures that life closer to it is of higher value and worth protecting while those farthest from it are left to die. Therefore, this study adopts a socio-legal approach to analyse the vulnerability of indigenous peoples. Using this approach will help explain how dispossession of indigenous peoples from their lands and territories in Kenya results from continued colonialism and neopatrimonialism. The findings show that States’ political and economic power have led to the vulnerability of indigenous peoples by legitimizing death-exposing developments projects using the legal frameworks adopted from colonial powers.

The Great Outboard Debate: Negotiating Materiality and Dispossession in a Southeast Asian Marine Hunting Community

ABSTRACT: Lamalera is a small coastal community in the Lesser Sunda region of eastern Indonesia whose cosmology and livelihoods are rooted in hunting large marine prey, including toothed whales and large ocean fishes. In the past decade Lamalera's hunting practices have become embroiled in an international authenticity debate about technology, traditional belief, and conservation, fixating on the incorporation of outboard motors in hunts. Combining theories of material religion and the dispossession of indigenous peoples, this article makes two arguments. First it argues that the movement to outboards should be understood as an adaptation in the materiality of a sacred practice rather than the unraveling of tradition or decline of authenticity as has been proposed. Second, the article argues that the discourse of authenticity itself impacts the community in harmful ways, both by requiring Lamalerans to defend themselves, which has internal social costs, and by detrimentally reframing the important work that the community has done to keep their sacred practices alive in the midst of challenging circumstances.

Resistance and Other Pathologized Products of Madness

Abstract Impositions of madness revisit a founding dispossession that undergirds settler colonialism in the Americas as the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and resources and African slave removals. . . . In taking up this diagnostic “in-between,” both works endeavor to rescue madness from the cultural work it performs as pathologizing of so-called Black barbarity and so-called Indigenous primitivism.

THE CITIES WE CALL HOME: Indigeneity, Race and Settler‐Colonial Urbanisms

AbstractThe connection between Indigeneity and urban spaces remains on the margins of urban studies and Indigenous studies, even as the majority of Indigenous people in the United States live in cities. Scholars have recently begun to think about the connection between settler colonialism and racial capitalism and the urban. In this essay I examine how the dispossession of Indigenous peoples has shaped modern urban development and, importantly, how Indigenous peoples and culture have contributed to reclaiming and challenging urban dispossession through their engagement with Black people and culture. In this essay I use a few examples of Indigenous expressive culture in Detroit, Michigan, during the Emergency Management Era and urban Indigenous youth activism, to urge for us to move beyond simply demonstrating that Indigenous peoples live in urban contexts. Instead, I call for an urban Indigenous studies that explores the connections between dispossession and the possibilities of a radical Indigenous resurgence in cities, and describe how this can be done through solidarity with African Americans in a predominantly Black city.

Governing caterpillar fungus: Participatory conservation as state-making, territorialization, and dispossession in Dolpo, Nepal

Protected areas account for nearly a quarter of the total area of Nepal and over eighty percent of its Himalayan region. National parks—which are governed by top-down policies enforced through militarized infrastructures—have become a crucial avenue and site for the Nepali state to expand its authority and territorialize its peripheral spaces. But such state-forming effects of the park are obscured by the stated goals of biodiversity conservation which are often implemented through participatory conservation policies that claim to promote local participation and development. Through a case study of Shey Phoksundo National Park and the contested governance of caterpillar fungus in Dolpo, Northwest Nepal, this paper examines the role of participatory conservation in state-making, territorialization, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Himalayan borderlands. After a brief background on the relationship between Dolpopa and the Nepali state, I introduce state-making, territorialization, and dispossession as corollary processes that define the experiences of conservation for Dolpopa. I conceptualize state-making and territorialization as intertwined state efforts and strategies to systematize local spatial practices and reorder socio-natural relations in ways that justify state authority and establish state territory in Dolpopa spaces. I approach dispossession as an ongoing, relational process of domination and removal, particularly of Dolpopa's ability to access and govern their collective land including caterpillar fungus. In so doing, I neither reify the state as a monolith nor assume dispossession to be totalizing. Rather, I show how “the state” is constituted in moments by a range of actors, institutions, and processes; as well as how Dolpopa contest dispossession by asserting their claims to collective land both within and beyond state structures.

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America by Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr.

Reviewed by: Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America by Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. John Rennie Short Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America. By Jeffrey Alan Erbig, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2020, p. 259, $24.95. Colonial territories in South America, as elsewhere around the world, were mapped as they were claimed and appropriated. In this book, Jeffrey Alan Erbig, Jr. examines the complex interaction between two imperial powers and indigenous people in the making of a boundary in the eighteenth century between Brazil and Spanish South America in the area now known as Uruguay. Portugal and Spain signed two treaties, the1750 Treaty of Madrid and the 1777 Treaty of San Ildefonso, to determine the border between Brazil and Spanish South America. A general map of the continent was drawn up in Europe and Portuguese and Spanish diplomats drew more detailed instructions for the border. Mapmakers then traveled to South America to survey the border line. It was a massive enterprise that involved numerous teams surveying the almost 10,000-mile boundary. This book focuses in on one region, the Rio de la Plata. It was complex space of Portuguese and Spanish colonial settlements, Jesuit missions, and indigenous encampments, tolderías of about 30 to 100 people There were complex interactions in this settlement archipelago. The mobile lifestyle of indigenous people widened their access to resources in the interior, allowing them to trade with the colonial settlers and control vital trade routes. In the complex trading system that developed, the colonial settlers had to acknowledge the territorial control of the indigenous people. Boundary-marking and border-making were not a simple projection of imperial domains onto this complex space. Border-making had to accept the diffused power in the region. It was a social process that involved the founding of forts and strategic settlements to mark and guard the boundary, population reshufflings, displacement, and new forms of interactions. The indigenous people played a major role in the complex interactions between imperial agents, religious foundations and settlers. The delimiting of competing imperial powers increased indigenous power in certain places, at least for a time. While the creation of the border involved the displacement and dispossession of indigenous people, some local groups used the process to extend their territorial reach and extend their trading networks. Indigenous groups further from the border were more firmly situated inside imperial control, while those closer to the border could leverage their liminal position to expand trade routes and subvert the border. But, over time, as the border hardened, the indigenous people were squeezed by the imperial authorities. The late 18th century [End Page 348] border-making provided opportunities for certain indigenous leaders, but these disappeared once the border failed to restrict the movement of imperial agents. The book is based on a detailed study of numerous maps produced at the time and a careful reading of 700 manuscripts. The result is a very granular description of the process. At times, the granularity, when combined with shifting temporal frame, makes it easy to lose your bearings in the complex text. The book would have benefitted from either a more straightforward linear narrative or a more overt signaling of the shifting temporal context. At times the text elides over decades and centuries without much warning to the reader. Despite this criticism, the book adds to our knowledge of the complexity of colonial settler societies and highlights the social nature of boundary drawing and border making. The work highlights an interesting shift in territorial possession from legal access to resources to legal ownership of resources. It provides a case study of the imperial monopolization of property and the drive for territorial exclusivity. The book also indicates how the maps drawn by European cosmographers, so easy to draw up from the comfort of courts in Europe, were difficult to express on the ground. The author highlights the enormous gap between imperial designs and local implementation. There is much to find much to learn from the book. It is an important contribution to our understanding of how boundaries are made and their social consequences in settler colonialism...

Colonialism, Computerized

This article argues for the incorporation of a transdisciplinary approach to cartographic materials in archives, especially in relation to archival description and preservation. Delving into the theoretical foundations and developments in the fields of archival studies and cartography, it explores the creation of cartographic materials and focuses on their processing by archives (i.e., their appraisal, arrangement, description, and preservation and the means of making them available to archival researchers). The lag between theoretical developments and practical applications is illustrated through the creation and management of the Canada Land Inventory (CLI) and Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) materials held by Library and Archives Canada. An analysis of the creation and ongoing management of these materials highlights the role of cartography and archives in the formation of Canada as a modern colonial state and in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples.

Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America

Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America

Anything but common: why Van Diemen’s Land never had commons

ABSTRACT It is sometimes assumed that the concept of the ‘commons’ was transposed directly from Britain to the Australian colonies, and that the term is interchangeable with ‘Crown land’ to describe lands not yet claimed by European settlers. This paper compares British commons with those introduced in the earliest years of the New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land colonies, and asks why the latter failed to reserve land specifically for common grazing in its first thirty years. By comparing these two colonies, it becomes clear that each was driven by different environmental factors and priorities. Moreover, it shows that British commons and Crown lands in Australia were only comparable in a very shallow sense. This piece argues that calling unalienated acres claimed by the Crown in Australia ‘commons’ perpetuates the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands by applying a framework founded in a thousand years of British common law and precedent.

Project Review: SwampScapes

Project Review: <i>SwampScapes</i>

Working for Justice in Food Systems on Stolen Land? Interrogating Food Movements Confronting Settler Colonialism

The evolving practice and scholarship surrounding food movements aim to address social, political, economic and ecological crises in food systems. However, limited interrogation of settler colonialism remains a crucial gap. Settler colonialism is the ongoing process of invasion that works to systematically erase and replace Indigenous Peoples with settler populations and identities. While many progressive and well-intentioned food movements engage directly with issues of land, water, identity, and power, critics argue they have also reified capitalism, white supremacy, agro-centrism and private property that are central to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. Scholars and advocates have called for greater accountability to the contradictions inherent in working towards social and ecological justice on stolen land. We write this paper as three settler activist-scholars to interrogate ways that social movements are responding to this call. A community-engaged methodology was used to conduct semi-structured interviews with individuals working in settler-led food movement organizations in Northwestern Ontario, Canada and in Southern Australia. We present our findings through three intersecting categories: 1) Expressions of settler inaction; 2) Mere inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and ideas; and, 3) Productive engagements and visions to confront settler colonialism. To explore the possibility of deeper engagements that confront settler colonialism, we suggest a continuum that moves from situating our(settler)selves within the framework of settler colonialism to (re)negotiating relationships with Indigenous Peoples to actualizing productive positions of solidarity with Indigenous struggles. We argue that this work is essential for food movements that aim to transform relationships with the land, each other, and ultimately forge more sustainable and equitable food futures.

AN EXAMINATION OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN CANADA’S LEGAL INSTITUTIONS: 1492 LAND BACK LANE

In this paper, I will investigate how Canadian legal institutions function to serve the interests of the settler colonial state in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This investigation will be facilitated through an examination of the court proceedings of 1492 Land Back Lane, a contemporary example whereby land defenders are being criminalized by Canadian courts for re-occupying their unceded land in Caledonia to protect it from a proposed housing development. Here we see an example of oppression, and therefore, it may be useful to utilize Sensoy &amp; DiAngelo’s (2017) definition of oppression: namely, the prejudice and discrimination of one social group, in this case, settlers, against another, here Indigenous peoples, backed by legal authority and historical, social and institutional power (p. 84). Focusing on legal authority in this case, I seek to demonstrate ultimately how anti-Indigeneity is embedded within the Canadian legal system. In order to do this, I will begin by examining key historical legal documents, namely the Constitution of Canada and the Indian Act, with an eye to the settler colonial ideology of paternalism underlying them. Then, I will turn to the court proceedings of 1492 Land Back Lane, establishing their problematic and paternalistic nature, and grounding them within existing case law on Indigenous land rights, to demonstrate how Canadian courts can serve to perpetuate settler colonialism and land dispossession, often through the legal mechanism of injunction. Ultimately, I seek to demonstrate how the very concept of land back is incompatible with Canadian law.

“Why didn’t I know this?”: Land education as an antidote to settler colonialism in early childhood teacher education

ABSTRACT Settler Colonialism is marked by the permanent move of mostly European settlers into other territories that requires the ongoing displacement and/or elimination of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples from Africa, and the individual ownership of land for capital gain. This displacement and elimination takes place in the curriculum with an impact on what is learned and not learned in schools. To counteract this, we use land education, an educational approach where curriculum starts with Indigenous peoples and Indigenous knowledge, confronting and dismantling anti-Indigenous colonial processes. Land education is a project of imagining just and sustainable futures, but much work must be done to get there. This article shares insights on what aspects of “getting there” looks like in early childhood teacher education.

Land, Water, Mathematics, and Relationships: What Does Creating Decolonizing and Indigenous Curricula Ask of Us?

Indigenous epistemologies view a person as a whole, interconnected to land, in relationship to others. Knowledge is subjective and collective. However, hegemonic western knowledge created dualism that are perpetuated through western schooling with detrimental effects on Indigenous knowledge systems and livelihood. The dualisms separate mind from body, body from nature, and spirit from matter which led to western schooling practices that support goals of settler colonialism including dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This article presents theoretical and conceptual discussions, personal reflections, and relationship-building the authors engaged while creating decolonizing and Indigenous syllabi in the fields of environmental studies, philosophy, and mathematics education at the university level. Engaging these processes disrupts the separation created through western dualisms and move toward reconnection as an initial step in creating decolonizing curricula, shifting dominant curricula organized through the logics of settler colonialism, to curricula that envision and support Indigenous nations and sovereignty.

Between Ecology and Indigeneity

Abstract We live at a time of unprecedented ecological and socio-political crisis—climate change, pandemic, extinction, inequality, and repression—yet everywhere it is underpinned by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the persistent refusal of Indigenous authority and sovereignty. Bringing together concerns about bio- and necropolitics, habitat destruction and animal cruelty, corporate-colonial modes of conservation, whitened food systems, and settler-colonial systems of land, business and environmental law, this special issue highlights enduring structures of injustice and creative lines of Indigenous resistance, authority, and cultural-political transformation.

Spatial and Discursive Violence in the U.S. Southwest by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita

Reviewed by: Spatial and Discursive Violence in the U.S. Southwest by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita William Orchard SPATIAL AND DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE IN THE U.S. SOUTHWEST. By Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Durham: Duke University Press. 2021. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita have made enduring contributions to Chicana/o studies. In Telling Identities (1995), Sánchez examined the testimonios of Californio elites who lost their land after the U.S.-Mexico War. She discovered a counter-history that revealed the social conflicts that resulted in the Californios’ dispossession. Telling Identities was a milestone early study of 19th century Mexican American history and writing. Together, Sánchez and Pita edited the writing of 19th century writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, whose work, especially the novel The Squatter and the Don (1885), galvanized the study of 19th century Latinx literature and drew attention to the recuperation of texts through the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, initiated in 1992. In their new book, Spatial and Discursive Violence in the U.S. Southwest, Sánchez and Pita continue to examine land loss, expanding their consideration to three new regions — Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas — and taking into account the effect of overlapping colonizations on Indigenous as well as Mexican American communities. The Marxist term “enclosure” is key to their study. The classical view of enclosure posits it as a shift from feudal to capitalist modes of production as communal spaces are transformed into private property. Sánchez and Pita see enclosure as “an ongoing and recurrent process” (3). Their title names the two aspects of enclosure they examine: spatial violence that is associated with state actions like war, genocide, and theft, and discursive violence that produces new subjects as modes of production are transformed, generating new discourses of citizenship and race. In the work of dispossessed writers, Sánchez and Pita detect a “critical memory” that has no nostalgic relation to the past, but instead registers “the collective scars left by history” (204). As they examine each region, they provide periodizations of the enclosures specific to a locale, taking us from Indigenous communal systems of production through the semifeudal systems associated with Spanish colonization to the capitalist modes of the United States. These deep histories are distinct for each region and always involve a multiplicity of temporalities. The chapter on Oklahoma considers the seizure of Indigenous land through a sustained reading of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1990), which chronicles the Osage [End Page 35] murders of the 1920s that were motivated by a desire to obtain the Osage's oil-rich land. Sánchez and Pita’s reading of Hogan’s novel clearly contextualizes the events in the novel, and demonstrates how Hogan remixes and critiques the dominant historiography about these events. Unlike the chapters on New Mexico and Texas, this chapter moves from Mean Spirit to Hogan’s other novels and works by Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday, none of which take place in Oklahoma. One wonders why the Native American writers are all contained in this chapter, and why the chapters on New Mexico and Texas deal only with Mexican American writers. The New Mexico chapter, in particular, would have conveyed a richer sense of the multiplicity of temporalities by including Indigenous voices like Silko’s. The chapters on New Mexico and Texas use writings by Mexican Americans to reveal the social conflicts at play in the contest for land while also demonstrating how these writers came to understand themselves as historical subjects. These chapters are noteworthy for drawing our attention to Mexican American complicity in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and showing the ways Mexican American writers negotiated accommodation to the forces overwhelming them as they attempted to hold onto ways of life that they were rapidly losing. Working across a large body of writing, Sánchez and Pita demonstrate how literature helps us understand the everyday experience of enclosure from the standpoint of the dispossessed and how “Chicano/a land narratives in differing ways respond to, reject, or acquiesce to hegemonic narratives of US settlement in the Southwest” (203). Given their interest in both Indigenous and Mexican...

Toward an ethics of decolonizing allyship in climate organizing: reflections on Extinction Rebellion Vancouver

Since launching in the UK in 2018, Extinction Rebellion (XR) has become a global social movement that uses mass civil disobedience to pressure governments to take immediate action on the climate crisis. While XR has shifted the conversation on climate change, it has also been critiqued for its lack of attention to privilege and oppression, and for its ‘apolitical’ approach to climate organizing. In this article, we argue that XR must develop an intersectional approach in order to address the climate crisis. In particular, we reflect on our experiences as participants in XR-Vancouver, located on unceded Indigenous territory in the settler colonial state of Canada. Settler colonialism in Canada is intertwined with the climate and ecological crises, as Canada's status as a petrostate is built on the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples through a strategy of racial extractivism. To attend to these dynamics, we build on Kyle Powys Whyte's concept of ‘decolonizing allyship’ and suggest three ethics – of relational accountability, care, and incommensurability – that settler-led movements like XR can cultivate. We conclude by inviting XR to (re)engage with a ‘politics of refusal’ that subverts the state and allows XR to collectively enact what different systems (rooted in intersectional, decolonizing allyship) could look like.

Origins: Colonies and Statistics

AbstractIn this address, I examine the lexical, geographic, temporal and philosophical origins of two key concepts in modern political thought: colonies and statistics. Beginning with the Latin word colonia, I argue that the modern ideology of settler colonialism is anchored in the claim of “improvement” of both people and land via agrarian labour in John Locke's labour theory of property in seventeenth-century America, through which he sought to provide an ideological justification for both the assimilation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This same ideology of colonialism was turned inward a century later by Sir John Sinclair to justify domestic colonies on “waste” land in Scotland—specifically Caithness (the county within which my own grandparents were tenant farmers). Domestic colonialism understood as “improvement” of people (the “idle” poor and mentally ill and disabled) through engagement in agrarian labour on waste land inside explicitly named colonies within the borders of one's own country was first championed not only by Sinclair but also his famous correspondent, Jeremy Bentham, in England. Sinclair simultaneously coined the word statistics and was the first to use it in the English language. He defined it as the scientific gathering of mass survey data to shape state policies. Bentham embraced statistics as well. In both cases, statistics were developed and deployed to support their domestic colony schemes by creating a benchmark and roadmap for the improvement of people and land as well as a tool to measure the colony's capacity to achieve both over time. I conclude that settler colonialism along with the intertwined origins of domestic colonies and statistics have important implications for the study of political science in Canada, the history of colonialism as distinct from imperialism in modern political thought and the role played by intersecting colonialisms in the Canadian polity.

Colonialism, science, and health

In addition to genocide, slavery, and the dispossession of indigenous people, colonialism, as a form of control, meant the suppression of traditional knowledge. The imposition of Christianity, the modern Western paradigm, and modern science that followed perpetrated this suppression. The universal role held by modern science is supported neither by epistemic nor social aspects. It is ineffective and complicit in the collapse of civilization, and it is worsened by comprehensive and unifying ideas to be reduced to an input-process of technological innovation for the benefit of social control industries such as the military, information technology, communication, or health. Furthermore, it suppresses ancestral knowledge related to health and medicine that may be beneficial and must be researched (stimulant medicines). Coupled with the health industry, it promotes the medicalization of life, spreading uncertainty, anxiety, and unease. Therefore, it is an instrument of neocolonialism that imposes its priorities, supplanting problems in subordinated countries, and extracts substantial resources, which is detrimental to social policies and programs. The biggest objection to the universality of modern science is derived from its empiricist and reductionist nature. Through the practically impossible idea of a unifying and explanatory knowledge, it impedes researchers the understanding of the complexity of the world and their historical moment and to act accordingly. It transforms great creative and liberating potential to submissiveness for the interests of capital and its representatives.

Toward an Ethics of Decolonizing Allyship in Climate Organizing: Reflections on Extinction Rebellion Vancouver

Since launching in the UK in 2018, Extinction Rebellion (XR) has become a global social movement that uses mass civil disobedience to pressure governments to take immediate action on the climate crisis. While XR has shifted the conversation on climate change, it has also been critiqued for its lack of attention to privilege and oppression, and for its ‘apolitical’ approach to climate organizing. In this article, we argue that XR must develop an intersectional approach in order to address the climate crisis. In particular, we reflect on our experiences as participants in XR-Vancouver, located on unceded Indigenous territory in the settler colonial state of Canada. Settler colonialism in Canada is intertwined with the climate and ecological crises, as Canada’s status as a petrostate is built on the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples through a strategy of racial extractivism. To attend to these dynamics, we build on Kyle Powys Whyte’s concept of ‘decolonizing allyship’ and suggest three ethics — of relational accountability, care, and incommensurability — that settler-led movements like XR can cultivate. We conclude by inviting XR to (re)engage with a ‘politics of refusal’ that subverts the state and allows XR to collectively enact what different systems (rooted in intersectional, decolonizing allyship) could look like.