Indigenous Authors Research Articles

The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love, and Law in the Atlantic World

Nicole Legnani's The Business of Conquest is an intriguing examination of the rhetorical constructions of law and empire in the Spanish Atlantic world. Legnani argues that conquest, although it had real consequences, was a type of fiction or artifice. She reads polemical texts by Felipe Guáman Poma de Ayala, Bartolomé de Las Casas, José de Acosta, and others, as well as chivalric novels and legal documents such as the Requerimiento and contracts, within the framework of the “Capitalocene.” Drawing on the work of Jason W. Moore, she locates the origins of planetary destruction in the long sixteenth century and explores the anxieties created by economies of both moral and material values. Legnani is most interested in slippages and tensions between love (caritas) and greed (cupiditas) in what she describes as a joint venture between crown and church.The Business of Conquest adroitly demonstrates how authors used contingency. They struggled to tell history right and to depict themselves as moral actors in their own narratives. Some of this was done through erasure. For example, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo omitted his past as a slave brander in the prologue of his chivalric novel Claribalte, which in turn erases the New World and its peoples (p. 110). This leads Legnani to pose the question of how abolishing Indigenous slavery might have helped to render it invisible—at least to some segments of imperial society. Meanwhile, Las Casas used syntax. For him, ignorance—described in the subjunctive and conditional—was what led to the horrors of the conquest.Legnani also considers the ways that Lascasian advocacy for self-determination diverged from the arguments of José de Acosta, even as both authors used similar organizational methods in their texts and as both treated love and interest as synonyms. While Las Casas promoted Indigenous self-determination and the idea that evangelizers should be willing to embrace perilous missionary work and go into Indigenous communities unarmed, Acosta saw himself as missionizing among barbarians and contended that evangelical activities deserved armed protection. Legnani argues that, for Las Casas, plundering tombs was of questionable legitimacy at best. She shows how Acosta condemned unbridled rapacity but viewed grave robbing as an activity that could fulfill God's work. In his cost-benefit analysis, Acosta saw martyrs as a limited resource and blamed Las Casas for pitting the church against the crown. Because her argument hinges on how the ideas of Las Casas haunted Acosta's work, this is an asymmetrical treatment that gives greater space to Lascasian notions.The final chapter returns to Indigenous authors. Here Legnani examines the attempt by Peru's curacas to create an Indigenous aristocracy by ending the encomienda system and preventing Indigenous lands from being given to Spaniards. In what she terms “a bidding war,” the curacas and their advocates, Las Casas and Domingo de Santo Tomás, offered over 2,000,000 ducats “to purchase something from King Philip II [that they also argued] was not his possession to give or take away: namely, sovereignty over the lives, livelihoods, and lands of the Indians of Peru” (p. 185). She returns to her framework of love and contends that the text denies either shared love or common interests. This chapter also veers into the Inquisition case of a heretical friar and culminates in a discussion of the pishtaco as “an unnatural creature” that “gestates within the empire's reliance on the (ab)uses of biopower and terrorizes by rendering the human body for consumption” (p. 217).One of the perplexing things about this book is its omission of some kinds of love from the analysis of how amor became an umbrella term that “reconciled cupiditas and caritas” (p. 71). Since marriage, especially for elites, might be seen as another kind of joint venture with stakes in both the moral and material economies, it seems odd that there is no consideration of this. There is no real contextualization of the borrowed term “loving violence” in the second chapter. During the sixteenth century, Europeans were widely engaged in what Reformation scholar Alexandra Walsham called “charitable hatred” in her 2006 book. One wonders how this broader willingness to persecute in order to save might have influenced authors like Acosta. This same chapter might have also benefited from further development in its treatment of Charles V's guilt and engagement with recent scholarship on the emperor, including the historiographical debates about his vision of empire.Nonetheless, this is a fascinating study of early modern discourses. Literary scholars and historians of colonial Latin America and global Catholicism, as well as advanced graduate students in those fields, will find this study thought provoking and full of interesting information about tropes and ideas.

The Future of Colonialism in Australian Indigenous Fiction – A Psychoanalytic Study of Trauma in The Swan Book and Terra Nullius

The goal of this study is to examine the colonial concerns depicted in the futuristic Australian fictions Terra Nullius and The Swan Book. The Swan Book, a 2013 Australian novel by Alexis Wright, digs deeply into subjects like climate catastrophes and the repressive condition of the natives in a future Australia. Claire G. Coleman's fantasy novel Terra Nullius, on the other hand, presents a futuristic Australia in which many colonial themes are subtly and implicitly depicted. This research article aims to emphasize the aftermath effects of colonization and to put together how they are thinking about Australia’s problems in the future by analyzing the two novels of these indigenous authors using important psychoanalytic theories. This study also highlights the impact of magic realism in these texts.

Indigenous Cultural Identity of Research Authors Standard: research and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in rural health journals.

The Indigenous Cultural Identity of Research Authors Standard (ICIRAS) is based on a gap in research publishing practice where Indigenous peoples' identity is not systematically and rigorously recognised in rural health research publications. There are widespread reforms, in different research areas, to counter the reputation of scientific research as a vehicle of racism and discrimination. Reflecting on these broader movements, the editorial teams of three rural health journals - Rural and Remote Health, the Australian Journal of Rural Health, and the Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine - adopted a policy of 'Nothing about Indigenous Peoples, without Indigenous Peoples'. This meant changing practices so that Indigenous Peoples' identity could be embedded in authorship credentials - such as in the byline. An environmental scan of literature about the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in research revealed many ways in which editorial boards of journals could improve their process to signal to readers that Indigenous voices are included in rural health research publication governance. Improving the health and wellbeing of Indigenous peoples worldwide requires high-quality research evidence. This quality benchmark needs to explicitly signal the inclusion of Indigenous authors. The ICIRAS is a call to action for research journals and institutions to rigorously improve research governance and leadership to amplify the cultural identity of Indigenous peoples in rural health research.

Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente

Reviewed by: Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente Stacie Charbonneau Hess Jesse Wente. Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance. Canada: Penguin Random House, 2021. 198 pp. Hardcover, $29.95 CAN / $22.95 US. Jesse Wente believes in a good story. He has built his career around story-telling: first, as a film student, then a radio columnist, a film critic, and now holding one of the most influential positions in Canada—Director of the Indigenous Screen Office—which was established in 2018. If Wente believes in a good story, he believes even more in "narrative sovereignty," defined by him as "the idea that people, communities, and nations should control their own stories and the tools used in that storytelling" (168). In the context of his memoir, Unreconciled, he is referring to the narrative sovereignty of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, those peoples whose presence preceded the invention of Canada by thousands of years. When Indigenous stories are told by another group—say, the powerful film industry moguls in Hollywood, or the white editor of a popular magazine—that's cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is the very topic for which Wente became a household name in Canada in 2017, after he cried on live television. Although there are many emotionally charged passages in Wente's memoir, two scenes might become painfully engraved in the readers' minds. The first is ten-year-old Jesse playing softball on his home turf in Toronto, when a crowd of neighborhood kids taunt him with a war whoop. Wente recognizes the sound—not as one he has ever made, or heard, in real life—but as one from Saturday morning cartoons. That war whoop is Wente's first experience with blatant racism, and shapes his ideas about Hollywood (mis)representation. In another blistering scene, Wente breaks down and sobs in emotional exhaustion on a live morning talk show—some three decades later. His exhaustion reaches its peak after a public battle over a now-legendary 2017 issue of Write magazine that featured all indigenous authors, authors whose names [End Page 260] would be obscured by the ensuing drama over cultural appropriation. Wente's exhaustion is with the white-centeredness of everything in Canada—even an issue that is supposed to celebrate indigenous writers. He is careful to name each of those writers in a chapter called "The Power to Tell Our Own Stories." Throughout the book, Wente's frustration is palpable, and Unreconciled reads as a manifesto to his educated, well-thought-out torment as a person still processing trauma as he presses on in the face of it. Wente is American and Anishinaabe, a member of the Serpent River First Nation. His grandmother Norma, to whom this book is dedicated, was a student in Spanish for ten years at a residential school. Despite living with Jesse for his entire adolescence, she spoke of it only once. Two generations separated from both the Reserve and the Ojibwe language, Wente laments that his upwardly mobile, English-speaking family is "the exact type of Indians residential schools were designed to produce" (17). In this way, Wente's story is a familiar one. He calls the "damage wrought by residential schools" his family's "unwanted inheritance" (75). Wente's parents are executives and he attended private high school. One chapter is even named: "Ojibwe Enough." Yet, the memoir does more than admit to the complication of straddling two identities; Wente's stories interweave personal tribulations in the context of the changing political landscape of Canada. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was issued in 2015, seven years and six thousand interviews after it began. Whether the country has lived up to its intention to recreate a more equitable Canada is, according to Wente, not even a matter for debate. Despite the fact that Canada is years ahead of the United States in terms of reckoning with its genocidal past, Wente insists the wound colonialism has caused is still wide open, and not even healing. Unreconciled can be at times jarring and uncomfortable—but maybe that is the point. A nation can't get to the Reconciliation part without wading in the...

Contributions of scientific research to regional development in the Amazonas region, northern Peru

ABSTRACT The relevance of scientific research to local challenges and the need to produce actionable knowledge that benefits local development have not been evaluated. This study evaluates whether scientific research focused on the Amazonas region is framed within its five regional components of the Concerted Regional Development Plan (CRDP) to achieve sustainable development. In this study, 386 scientific articles published during 1960–2021 focusing on the Amazonas region were evaluated. Although Amazonas is the third poorest region in Peru, scientific production in this region has largely increased (CAGR2001-2021 = 16.4%). However, women and indigenous authors are underrepresented suggesting a unilateral knowledge transfer. The highest scientific contribution was reported for component 1 of the CRDP (58%), centering on topics about the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Scientific research focusing on the Amazonas region fails to fully aboard the overall sustainable components of the CRDP. Social sciences are clearly understudied. It is the role of regional institutions (government, universities, industry, non-profit, etc.) to ensure the extension of research topics covering other dimensions of scientific knowledge and social needs. Conclusively, it is pending that local policymakers take into consideration emerging disciplines that can provide an updated perspective in developmental policies in the Amazonas region.

Insurgencies fromThere There

AbstractConsidering Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There (2018) along with John Rollin Ridge’s sensational novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit (1854), this essay examines alternate formations and implications of nineteenth- through twenty-first-century Indigenous resistance to what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense.” The essay uses Orange’s central thematic of “there there” as a formal and conceptual means to rethink the unique historical schemas and stakes of Indigenous fiction then and now. More specifically, the essay examines how these two novels, written by Indigenous authors with starkly different historical and ideological positions, offer nuanced and original portrayals of the complex alternate ground—physical-tactical, cultural, and political—that Indigenous resistance has and must negotiate. Ultimately, it argues that Orange’s novel deploys unique formal strategies that allow a consolidation of historical agency to confront the realities of US imperialism that have rendered Indigenous life and its modes of resistance precarious.

Indigenising design: The Seven Grandfathers’ Teachings as a design methodology

This article presents ‘The Seven Grandfathers’ Teachings as a Design Methodology’ which includes an Indigenous value system as a foresight method to identify future responsible design opportunities that integrate Indigenous knowledge and new possible role of designers towards a more sustainable and biocultural diverse world. The Seven Grandfathers’ Teachings have been an Indigenous way of knowing in North America for generations. The Indigenous authors explore how Indigenous knowledge systems, when applied to design, can produce an approach that promotes ethical designs and processes. This design methodology allows a respectful and conscious practice while integrating Indigenous knowledge, thus, Indigenising design practices. The role of designers changes according to time and place; Indigenous knowledges have the potential to give a different approach to enact environmental and culturally relevant design practices.

Unpunishable Crimes in Claire G. Coleman’s Futuristic Novel Terra Nullius

Aside from being part of a vibrant corpus of Indigenous futurism, Claire G. Coleman’s novel Terra Nullius (2017) can also be analysed as an eco-crime novel. Indigenous Australian authors of this genre (e.g., Philip McLaren, Steven McCarthy, Nicole Watson) often anchor the source of criminal acts in the theft, loss and devastation of traditional lands, which provides their crime novels with a heightened awareness of environmental issues. The same applies to Terra Nullius. This is, however, a novel that successfully conceals its futuristic framework until halfway through. Equally, this successfully disrupts the usual postulates of crime fiction by shifting the reader’s attention from the usual “whodunnit” to the more elusive “whoizzit” mode of crime fiction. This, as the discussion reveals, means that the criminal acts in Terra Nullius are rendered unpunishable. This paradox, as it is argued, is strengthened by introducing the so-called “noir detective” (Timothy Morton) in the character of Father Grark, who cannot investigate that which constitutes the crime and the alibi shaping the world of Coleman’s futuristic novel.

The Ugly Truth to Canada’s Big Lie: A Tale of Ongoing Settler Colonial Genocide of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples and the Creation of an Apartheid State

ABSTRACT Drawing heavily on Indigenous authors, this paper explores the historical roots to the emergence of Canada as a genocidal and apartheid state with respect to its Indigenous peoples. A major theme of the paper is that historical injustices grounded in settler colonial priorities continue to inform contemporary socio/political contexts that maintain Canada’s status as a racist, apartheid and genocidal state with respect to Indigenous peoples. Examples drawn from the Lytton fire of 2020 and the November floods in British Columbia highlight that the needs and rights of Indigenous peoples will always take a back seat to Canada’s corporate economic interests. A corollary to the paper constitutes the dismantling of Canada’s “Big Lie” that Canada is a progressive country that has shown considerable progress in its relationship with Indigenous peoples.

Teaching to Read as an Outsider: How I Created and Taught an Introductory Course on Indigenous Literatures in Quebec

Teaching to Read as an OutsiderHow I Created and Taught an Introductory Course on Indigenous Literatures in Quebec Marie-Hélène Jeannotte (bio) In 2009, when discussing the new course I was about to give on Indigenous literatures in Quebec, I was often met with doubtful questions: "But what books will you teach? Which authors? Is it really a literature?" A few years earlier, at the turn of the 2000s, Maurizio Gatti, one of the first researchers to study Indigenous literatures in French, faced similar disbelief from an employee at the Quebec documentation center in Paris, but also from the majority of professors he approached to supervise his PhD, some of them even challenging the very existence of Indigenous literatures (Littérature 18). At that time, Indigenous books in French were both rare and largely ignored. Librarians and other book professionals viewed Indigenous texts as purely ethnological (Gatti, Littérature 17–19). Unlike Indigenous literatures in English, which, back in 2009, were already well established in English Canada, Indigenous literatures in French in Quebec were then still absent from the literary field. As Isabelle St-Amand states, Si les littératures autochtones sont relativement bien établies au Canada anglais, il en va autrement dans le cas du Québec, où le statut de la littérature autochtone fait toujours l'objet de discussions. … [L]es œuvres des écrivains autochtones sont peu enseignées dans les universités et peu de discours critiques ont été élaborés sur la question.1 Indeed, Indigenous literatures were missing from university literary studies curricula in Quebec in the first decade of the 2000s. Indigenous literatures in French were taught in Ontario (Gatti, Être écrivain 180) and at Laval University's Department of Anthropology (Gagné 227). In 2008, the need to establish the legitimacy of these literatures in [End Page 135] academia and research but also within a curriculum convinced me to propose the creation of a course entirely dedicated to Indigenous literatures from Quebec to the University of Sherbrooke, the Francophone university where I was an MA student. I designed the course as an introduction to Indigenous literatures in French (or in French translation) in Quebec, including oral tradition and contemporary works. The course was offered for the first time in 2009. According to Gatti (Être écrivain 180) and Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui (5), it was the first Indigenous literatures course in French to officially be included in a Quebec university literary studies' curriculum. I have taught this class often since, updating and expanding it as Indigenous literatures in Quebec achieve wider and wider recognition. While none of my students had ever read an Indigenous work—nor could name an Indigenous writer—at the beginning of our first semester in 2009, the situation is the opposite today. Students who have never read a literary work by an Indigenous author are now in the minority. In this article, I wish to share and reflect upon my experience as a non-Indigenous teacher creating an introductory course in a literature department where Indigenous works were, back in 2009, practically unknown. I do not present this particular course as a model to follow. On the contrary, my intention is to describe the context within which the course was created, as well as the challenges, issues raised, and missteps made along the way. Having now taught this course several times over a decade, I wish to detail its evolution as well as that of its academic context, and of myself as a teacher. As well, I propose to explore questions that will be of interest to non-Indigenous scholars setting out to teach Indigenous literatures. As a teacher, how can I establish the legitimacy of Indigenous literatures? How can I equip students to read, interpret, and analyze works by First Nations authors when basic knowledge of Indigenous cultures is often lacking? How can I help students gain more awareness of their biases? I will share here a few avenues for reflection that have proved useful over these past thirteen years, all of which stem from fostering a sense of humility, listening, and empathy. filling a gap I came to Indigenous Studies through literature and specifically the...

Structured Relationalism in the Classroom: A Collaborative Approach to Teaching Indigenous Literatures

Structured Relationalism in the ClassroomA Collaborative Approach to Teaching Indigenous Literatures Kristina Fagan Bidwell (bio) and Adar Charlton (bio) With special thanks to the students in ENG 114 and ENG 811, whose varied contributions to, critiques of, and sometimes resistance to the pedagogical project described here shaped this essay. Kristina Fagan Bidwell is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. Adar Charlton came to the U of S as a PhD student in English and was a student in Fagan Bidwell's graduate seminar. Together, Fagan Bidwell and the seminar students designed a multi-phased collaborative project for Fagan Bidwell's all-Indigenous introductory English course. To reflect their different roles and positions, Fagan Bidwell and Charlton wrote their introductory positionings and concluding reflections separately but the sections describing the project itself together. introductory positions kristina fagan bidwell: I believe that academic work is, ultimately, personal, and that is certainly true of this project. I am a member of NunatuKavut, the Inuit community of southern Labrador; grew up in Newfoundland; and have lived in Saskatchewan for many years, with the result that I am neither fully at home "back home" nor on the prairies. I am Indigenous, but I am not Indigenous to the lands now known as Saskatchewan as are the Cree, Dene, Saulteaux, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, or Métis. And so, I am always aware of the diversity of Indigenous people and our complex relationships to one another and to place, an awareness that shaped my thinking as I prepared, in 2012, to teach an introductory literature course to a group of all-Indigenous students [End Page 183] and a same-term graduate seminar in Indigenous literatures. But when I decided to take advantage of this teaching schedule to bring the two classes together, I did not anticipate how the resulting project, and the long process of thinking collaboratively about it, would change how I think about my teaching, turning my primary focus to the relationships to and around course content, rather than to the content itself. adar charlton: I am a white settler from Thunder Bay, Ontario, situated on the lands of the Anishinaabeg, the traditional territory of Fort William First Nation under the Robinson-Superior Treaty of 1850. I grew up witnessing the injustices of systemic and outward racisms and violence toward Indigenous peoples in Thunder Bay perpetrated by ongoing processes of settler colonialism. Coming to understand my own privilege and complicity within these processes motivates me to combat settler amnesia and hold space for Indigenous presence in my work in order to support a decolonial future. I read, teach, and share Indigenous literature now as an emerging scholar and teacher because this literature carries the transformative power to create such a future. Participating in Kristina's seminar and in this collaborative project as a first-year PhD Student at the University of Saskatchewan started a process for me of continual, critical, and self-reflexive positioning. course creation Indigenization of the classroom is often understood as incorporating course materials and interpretive frameworks in which Indigenous students can see themselves reflected. However, the diversity of even the nineteen Indigenous students in the introductory English class challenged that conception: they came from First Nations, Métis, urban, rural, and northern communities across different language groups and treaty areas and brought with them widely varying experiences and belief systems.1 Attempting to reflect this diversity through course content would inevitably leave some students feeling misrepresented or excluded. In the same term, the graduate seminar was focusing on relationalism, a theoretical approach that assumes people are primarily constituted by relationship. In the seminar, we explored how relationalism offers an alternative way of thinking about Indigenizing the classroom—through relational processes rather [End Page 184] than through content—and designed a project that put this thinking into pedagogical practice. While this project centered on a text by an Indigenous author, its focus was not on bringing any particular or fixed form of Indigenous culture into the classroom. Instead, we worked from the assumption that Indigenous cultures were inevitably present in a class that included Indigenous students, and that those cultures were relational and continually recreated...

Play to Learn: Shakespeare games as decolonial praxis in South African schools

The place of Shakespeare in South African secondary education has become highly contested in light of calls to decolonise the English Home Language curriculum through intentional inclusion of indigenous authors and knowledge systems, and the removal of colonial impositions such as Shakespeare. Yet removing Shakespeare from the curriculum is not the only or even the best solution for countering the violent legacies of colonialism and apartheid. This article argues that a more effective decolonial approach would be to change the way Shakespeare is taught in schools by cultivating horizontal, instead of hierarchical, dialogue within classrooms and between secondary educators and Shakespeare scholars. The authors describe their own horizontal collaboration to produce “Blood will have Blood”, a series of lesson plans and assignments centred on scenes of violence in the Shakespeare set works. Using the digital theatre game Play the Knave, the programme engages secondary school students in creative experimentation and embodied play with Shakespeare’s texts. As learners access the curriculum from their own epistemological standpoints and through their own bodies, they come to understand gendered and racial forms of violence represented in the plays and manifested in their personal and historical contexts. The article contextualises the project in terms of Practice as Research (PAR) methodology while offering preliminary findings from the programme’s implementation in Cape Town schools.

SLIS Notes: Censorship Turbulent Times

Just this past year in 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) had to release a statement in response to an increase in censorship of materials centered on LGBTQIA+ issues and books by Black authors, Indigenous authors, or other people of color. The statement in its entirety is found here: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/statement-regardingcensorship. The statement reaffirms that ALA and its Executive Board, Divisions, Roundtables, and other units stand firm in the freedom to read and against censorship.

The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing by Jens Temmen

Reviewed by: The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing by Jens Temmen Katrina Phillips (bio) The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing Jens Temmen Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020, x +259 pp. ISBN 9783825347130, $56 hardcover. Settlers in what is now known as the United States dreamed of expansion before they even reached the westernmost part of the continent. According to Roberta Conner, Joseph J. Ellis identified a "fully continental vision of an American empire" in George Washington's 1783 annual message—and James P. Ronda contends that Thomas Jefferson was "determined to make the United States an imperial contender" (qtd. in Conner 108). It would not be as easy as these men hoped, though, particularly as American settlers, surveyors, and soldiers continually encountered hundreds of sovereign Native nations who had called these lands homes since time immemorial. America's burgeoning legal system—and its stumbling implementation of often contradictory federal Indian policies—regularly required what Jens Temmen considers "the terminology of aberration, exception, or simply extinction" in order to marginalize Native nations within US legal discourses (39). The federal government, along with American citizens, businessmen, and military officials, turned their attentions overseas toward the end of the nineteenth century, gleefully embracing the spoils of imperialism. For Temmen, though, this shift is not as neatly defined or differentiated as some scholars may hope (39). In The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s), Temmen traces the trajectory of US imperial expansion from the continent to overseas, focusing on what he considers "the moments and spaces that connect or disconnect these phases" (2). For Temmen, the US nation-state became conterminous with the North American continent as early as the American Revolution, projecting sovereignty over the continent while simultaneously nullifying Native and Indigenous sovereignties (3). Temmen argues that the study of US imperialism seems to be in a holding pattern, one that maintains an ongoing dialogue over how to analyze the differences in the two phases of American expansion without simply reverting to what Amy Kaplan calls "the central geographic bifurcation between continental expansion [End Page 104] and overseas empire" (10). The book is rooted in what he describes as "nodes of connection and narratives of disconnection between these U.S. imperialism(s)," centering 1898 as an alleged watershed moment for US imperialism (8). Temmen's addition of the plural "s" in parentheses is deliberate, underscoring his focus on this "multitude of imperial strategies, while still emphasizing their fundamental connectedness" (11–12). The notion of "the trinity of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory" serves as what Temmen calls "the core vocabulary" of the book (3). By analyzing works that were either written or cowritten by Indigenous authors alongside US legal texts, Temmen highlights the myriad ways Indigenous people have long pushed back against the notions of US imperialism. At first glance, Temmen's choice of works may seem incongruous or too dissimilar or disparate to support his argument: Temmen places John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) and Queen Lili'uokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898) alongside Geronimo and Stephen M. Barrett's Geronimo's Story of His Life (1905). One might argue that there are few similarities among the histories of these three Indigenous nations—the Cherokee, the Kānaka Maoli, and the Apache—not to mention the differences among their engagements with and methods of resistance to American imperialism. However, Temmen's careful reading of these literary texts against legal and government-written texts balances out what he calls the consideration of the two, particularly by legal scholars, as "unequal partners" divided between robust enforcement and emotional education (45). The Indigenous authors of these texts wanted justice for their communities, and they deliberately put the US legal system on trial through their writings (48). These texts, for Temmen, become a means of "haunting" the system that has long sought to erase and eradicate Indigenous sovereignty. Temmen begins with Ridge's dime novel...

Saving Torwali Music and Dance: Community Led Performance and ‘Public’ Archiving

Abstract Here we explore ways in which the Indigenous Torwali community of Swat, north Pakistan, is working to renew and preserve its musical and dance traditions, and how Torwalis are using social media and online archives to share and popularise their performances, worldwide. Social activism is a motivator, but people also relish the fun created through instant online engagement. The methodology for the paper is to weave a narrative, using Indigenous storytelling by both Indigenous authors, one Torwali and one Ngarigu, Australian Indigenous, about their experiences with and knowledge of performance in the community.

Libraries and White Supremacy

Shortly after the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, I came across the 1872 painting American Progress. In this painting, westward expansion is being led by a large floating white woman with a schoolbook in one arm and telegraph wires in the other. The indigenous inhabitants of the west cower before this apparition. It is indeed a haunting image. In this paper, I explore the legacy of enlightenment constructs of civilized/savage in the operations of academic libraries. I then introduce indigenous authors Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Shawn Wilson who offer some alternatives to western knowledge practices. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on what theological librarians can contribute to our professional conversation on White Supremacy.

Graphic Reminders: Confronting Colonialism in Canada through Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story

David Alexander Robertson’s 2015 graphic novel Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story connects non-Indigenous Canadians to the racial realities of Canada’s intentionally forgotten past. Robertson translates Helen Betty Osborne’s biography into the accessible format of the graphic novel which allows for a wide range of readers to connect present day racial injustices to the past, generating new understandings surrounding violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada. Helen Betty Osborne, a young female Cree student was abducted and murdered in 1971, targeted for her race and gender. The horrors Betty experienced reveal the connection between her story and the contemporary narrative of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada. Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story deconstructs Betty’s life from the violence she is subjected to, personifying a historical figure. The graphic novel allows for a visual collision of past and present to express the cycle of colonial violence in Canada ignored by non-Indigenous Canadians despite its continued socio-economic and political impact on Indigenous peoples. As an Indigenous author, Robertson preserves the integrity of Indigenous voice and revives an integral gendered and racialized historical perspective that is necessary to teach. This close reading of Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story explores how Robertson uses the graphic novel to revive history and in doing so, demonstrates connections between past and present patterns of racial injustice against Indigenous women in Canada today.

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Swansong or Songline?

ABSTRACT Indigenous-Australian fiction offers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices the opportunity to carve out an Indigenous space within as well as without Australian identity after more than two centuries of silencing and oppression. Since the 1990s Indigenous authors such as Alexis Wright have broken new ground by going beyond the typical Indigenous autobiography known as life-writing as a means to recover their Indigenous history and to be heard. They do so by rewriting race and ethnicity from a non-European epistemology emanating from the Dreaming or Dreamtime, their spiritual and material universe or ontology holistically rooted in the land. This essay takes Indigeneity as fundamental in the postmodern and postcolonial construction of contemporary Australianness, and analyses how Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) questions the Enlightenment legacy that enthroned European civilisation and its hierarchical epistemology. In order to do so, it addresses the European encounter with the Indigenous Other through the notions of hospitality, cosmopolitanism, and friendship as developed by Kant in the late 1800s and their re-assessment as “hostipitality” by Jacques Derrida in the early 2000s, and applies these to the reading experience of Indigenous narratives.

Neoliberalism and eurochristianity

This article argues for an articulation of the “eurochristian worldview” in order to situate neoliberalism as an expression of eurochristian colonialism. It uses an interdisciplinary focus on discourse related to neoliberalism and religion to evidence the necessity for analyses based on worldview. Following the thinking of Indigenous authors and cognitive theory to articulate key distinctions between worldview, culture, and religion, it challenges conventional secularization narratives for being, like neoliberalism, an expression of eurochristian worldview and ongoing colonization.

Co-Designing Change

Co-Designing Change