Treatment Of Indigenous Peoples Research Articles

Reconstructing Gladue

Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code directs sentencing judges to exercise restraint in the use of incarceration ‘with particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders.’ In R v Gladue, the Supreme Court of Canada interpreted this as a remedial provision aiming to reduce the incarceration of Indigenous people. That has made it appear to be a failure by its own lights. Yet to write off section 718.2(e) and the Gladue principles would be to fail properly to understand their moral foundations and structure. Judges are called upon to reduce the incarceration of Indigenous people neither by working backwards from prison demographic targets nor merely by combating implicit bias. Rather, Gladue requires judges to open their minds to hitherto unappreciated reasons that many Indigenous offenders should be afforded mitigation, restorative justice, and community-based accountability. One reason, we argue, relates to the unfair criminogenic disadvantages disproportionately faced by Indigenous offenders. Another reason is that the Canadian state’s complicity in such disadvantages calls into question its legitimate authority and its standing to blame Indigenous offenders. In sum, Gladue calls upon our courts to widen the horizon of fairness in their treatment of Indigenous people. This matters for its own sake in each and every case, whether or not it brings about an appreciable reduction in Indigenous incarceration in the aggregate. Our reconstruction of Gladue not only rescues it from cynical dismissals but also helps to solve the central doctrinal puzzles surrounding it: how Indigenous offenders’ unique life circumstances must be connected to their offences to be mitigating; how Gladue principles should apply differently to more and less serious offences; how a variant of Gladue principles should be extended to members of other disadvantaged groups such as Black Canadians; and how judges should weigh the interests of Indigenous victims when sentencing Indigenous offenders.

Perlakuan Terhadap Anak-Anak Indigenous People Dan Tanggung Jawab Negara

Introduction: Indigenous peoples continue to face threats to their sovereignty, the sovereignty that is meant is centered on how the state positions indigenous peoples into national policies, by imposing values on indigenous peoples.Purposes of the Research: To examine and find out whether the treatment of Indigenous People's children in Canada violates the provisions of International Law and to find out how the state's responsibility for the human rights of Indigenous People's children is. Methods of the Research: This research is a normative juridical law research, with primary and secondary legal materials as a source of law by using the nature of prescriptive research that aims to obtain suggestions on what to do.Results of the Research: The results of the study show that the treatment of children of indigenous people in Canada violates the provisions of international law, where indigenous children receive treatment from the state in the form of violence or coercion which is contrary to human rights and fundamental freedoms regulated in the ILO (International Labor Organization) Conventions. UNDRIP Declaration (United Nation Declaration of Rights on the Indigenous Peoples), United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, then on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) and also to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Introduction: Race and the Olympic Games

Introduction: Race and the Olympic Games

Editorial

Editorial

Indigenous Rights and Interests in a Changing Arctic Ocean: Canadian and Russian Experiences and Challenges

The Arctic has been home to Indigenous peoples since long before the international legal system of sovereign states came into existence. International law has increasingly recognized the rights of Indigenous peoples, who also have status as Permanent Participants in the Arctic Council. In northern Canada, the majority of those who live in the Arctic are recognized as Indigenous. However, in northern Russia, a much smaller percentage of the population is identified as Indigenous, as legal recognition is only accorded to groups with a small population size. This article will compare Russian and Canadian approaches to recognition of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous rights in the Arctic with attention to the implications for Arctic Ocean governance.
 The article first introduces international legal instruments of importance to Indigenous peoples and their rights in the Arctic. Then it considers the domestic legal and policy frameworks that define Indigenous rights and interests in Russia and Canada. Despite both states being members of the Arctic Council and parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, there are many differences in their treatment of Indigenous peoples with implications for Arctic Ocean governance.

Incarceration of indigenous people in Brazil and resolution no. 287 of the National Council of Justice of Brazil

Abstract This article aims at analyzing Resolution No. 287 of the National Council of Justice of Brazil (CNJ), which establishes special procedures for the treatment of indigenous people who stand as accused, defendants, who are sentenced or are deprived of liberty and shows the necessary process to ensure their rights within the Brazilian Judiciary Branch. It encourages a reflection about why said Resolution’s impact on social representations within the Brazilian Judiciary Branch is nearly none. The Resolution No. 287 is a surprising step by CNJ to effectively recognize the cultural and ethnic plurality of the original peoples of Brazil, although it maintains contradictions inherent to the challenge of overcoming the assimilationist paradigm. However, beyond any new registration protocols, any reduction in incarceration rates or any training of magistrates and adaptation of their services, any change will ultimately come from the outside, as Brazilian elites abdicate privileges coming from their whiteness.

A process of healing for the Labrador Innu: Improving health and wellbeing in the context of historical and contemporary colonialism

In light of the negative effects of historical and contemporary colonialism on the Labrador Innu, healing initiatives grounded in self-determination, renewal of cultural practices, and non-reliance on Western bio-medicine, are known, taught and widely practiced among the Innu. The value of Indigenous healing practices in the treatment of Indigenous people is well-recognized in Indigenous wellness literature, yet non-Indigenous health practitioners know little about healing processes. Moreover, to our knowledge, no studies have examined any contemporary Labrador Innu healing process. The main aim of this paper is to describe the process of healing among the Innu. Although there may be multiple processes of healing, we shed light on a major process that emerged from interviews and focus groups with 39 participants. Five stages of healing were described: being “under the blanket”; finding spiritual strength; extending hands out; finding strength and power; and helping others. Findings highlighted enablement of healing through spiritualities, support from Elders, return to culture, and resistance to negative stereotypes. We provide health professionals with valuable information for considering Innu healing as a model that expands their views for the benefit of Innu seeking mental health services. Implications for non-Innu health and social service providers are about broadening their understanding of the significant role of self-determination among Innu, learning Innu ways-of-knowing and being, recognizing one's own biases, and acknowledging the power imbalances between themselves and Innu people.

Emperor: A New Life of Charles V by Geoffrey Parker

Reviewed by: Emperor: A New Life of Charles V by Geoffrey Parker Susan Broomhall Parker, Geoffrey, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. xix, 737; 39 colour images, 5 maps, 3 figures; R.R.P. US$35.00; ISBN 9780300196528. Who is Charles V? Was he a great monarch or remarkable man, both, or neither? These questions are woven throughout Parker's biography, and implied in its structure of four chronological parts detailing stages of his development and wielding of power, separated by four 'portraits' of the individual at successive life stages. At the beginning of his work, Parker establishes his intent to examine how Charles took major decisions, whether his successes and failures are attributable to the man or the structure he was part of, and what it was like to be Charles. Bringing Charles's own writings into the narrative, this produces a fascinating, highly readable account, which will entertain and surprise readers along the journey. Ambiguity of argument and counterargument, balancing contemporary views and those of own time, prevails in Parker's answer to the question of who Charles was, and—just as importantly—what we should make of him as twenty-first-century readers of a new biography. The sheer extent of his empire and his ability to shape lives across the world make Charles a noteworthy ruler in his own time and since. His continual movement across the expanse of Western Europe and the massive amount of information about his everyday life are unusual. His dedication to learn new languages despite seemingly being a poor scholar and his determination to maintain control over a vast administration and level of correspondence are impressive. Parker's choice of adjectives often avoids direct judgement, as seen in his ultimate conclusion: '[a]lthough by twenty-first century standards his personal defects and shortcomings tarnish his image, the emperor's contemporaries were surely correct to deem him an extraordinary man who achieved extraordinary things' (p. 533). Towards the end of the work, Parker suggests that Charles's imperial repertoire consisted of four key drivers for his actions: dynasty, chivalry, reputation, and faith. These are certainly important, but how did they operate in relation to each other? As Parker particularly emphasizes, his interpersonal relations, especially with [End Page 255] his family and his aunt, mother, wife, lovers, sisters, daughters, and nieces, were regularly cruel and selfish, and appeared to display little capacity for empathy with them. Dynasty was, it seems, a purely patriarchal prerogative to which subordinate family members were sacrificed. The illegitimate son or the women in his circle had little or no recourse to other forms of assistance beyond him, unlike Ferdinand or Philip, emerging patriarchs in their turn. Parker's point of comparison here appears more modern than comparative to other contemporary dynasties, which, from my research, display similar patterns of over-arching behaviour to protect the bloodline, without quite Charles's persistent (and un-Christian?) pattern of callousness. Chivalry did not outweigh dynasty. By contrast, Parker contextualizes Charles's intervention in the Americas principally in terms of contemporary views about non-Christian lands and peoples. We do read of Charles's misgivings and moral qualms about the treatment of Indigenous peoples, which remain to us as reflections not extant for others in his position of power, but they appear to have done little to change the course of his key objective in expanding the empire over which he ruled and bringing back to Europe the means to progress interminable wars. Chief among his interests, Parker makes clear, is the lure of gold, with missionizing a distinct and intermittent second. Faith did not outweigh reputation (as a warrior king) or (the expansion of territories for his) dynasty. So too it was in his interactions with the growing band of Lutherans in his German territories. Charles seemed prepared to tolerate and accommodate reforming views throughout most of his rule, where that sacrifice might benefit a greater good: that is, control by the Habsburg dynasty both in these territories and in the eastern empire against Suleiman's forces. His documentary formulation 'for the sake of God's service and mine' could be...

Critical Family History and Cultural Evolution: A Call for Interdisciplinary Research to Determine What Works to Replace Anger with Compassion for Social Justice

I use critical family history to investigate: (a) my British/Scot ancestors who engaged in slavery and have a history of oppressive treatment of indigenous peoples, and (b) my Acadian and Mi’kmaq indigenous origins. My family’s conflicting history is embedded in historical hierarchies of conqueror and oppressed, as well as family dysfunction. From this history, I wonder how we can create greater positive change toward altruism and social justice? I provide literature based in cultural evolution that investigated the complex social and natural sciences that delineate our search to understand what is happening and what works to create more altruistic human behavior leading to greater social justice

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples by Kerry Driscoll

Reviewed by: Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples by Kerry Driscoll Joseph L. Coulombe Kerry Driscoll, Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples. Oakland: U of California P, 2018. 448 pp. Cloth, $95; paper, $34.95; e-book, $95. Kerry Driscoll’s book is a well-researched and meticulous analysis of Twain’s treatment of Indigenous peoples. It covers Twain’s early writings in Missouri and Nevada, spends considerable time on Roughing It and “The Noble Red Man,” explores his shifting positions on Natives after moving east, and ends with his commentary on Indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand. Describing her own book as “a work of literary archaeology” (7), Driscoll uses letters, marginalia, notebooks, laws, newspaper reports, and historical events to reconstruct helpful interpretive contexts— including the familial, literary, regional, and transnational— in order to better understand Twain’s anti-Indian biases. Driscoll rejects “the notion of a strict linear progression in the writer’s convictions; rather . . . the change was uneven, proceeding in fits and starts. Contradictions abound and are never fully reconciled” (9). Thus, while she [End Page 104] makes no radical new pronouncements about Twain’s prejudice, Driscoll uncovers reams of fascinating materials to help understand what shaped not only Mark Twain but also the American West and the United States. Driscoll is at her best when outlining historical contexts and literary connections. For example, she describes how a Missouri senator introduced a bill that “ushered in an era of ethnic cleansing so thorough that no federally recognized tribes or reservations exist within Missouri today” (16–17). The senator’s name was Thomas Hart Benton, whom, she then points out, Tom Sawyer describes as “the greatest man in the world” (16). Driscoll also connects Twain’s vitriol toward Indians to the family stories that his mother Jane Lampton Clemens shared about her experiences and those of her own mother, writing that Twain “may have inherited and uncritically accepted her bias against them” (25). In addition, Driscoll explores possible antecedents for the character “Injun Joe” and contrasts Twain’s derogatory depiction of “savages” against his propensity to “play Indian,” a tendency shared by Tom Sawyer. Readers of Western American Literature will especially appreciate chapter two, “Blind in Nevada: Early Perceptions of Indians in the West.” Driscoll uses multiple documents, including Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s autobiography, to recount the 1861 Pyramid Lake War, which occurred immediately before Twain arrived in Nevada, and the 1862 Owens Valley Indian War. While Twain’s letters show his awareness of these wars, the first of which was begun by white men who imprisoned and raped several Native women, Twain shows little public concern for Native peoples. Instead he focuses on the West as a “bucolic” place of “carefree comraderie” (68), which, Driscoll demonstrates, stands in stark contrast to the memories of his companion, Judge Oliver, who described their trip as filled with reminders of the recent violence. Likewise, Driscoll contrasts Twain’s attitudes about Native dispossession with those of Dan De Quille, Warren Wasson, Jacob Lockhart, Bret Harte, and his brother Orion. In subsequent chapters, Driscoll examines the context and meaning of Twain’s “The Petrified Man” hoax, the male bonding of the white miners’ club “The Pah-Utes,” and the racialized [End Page 105] and sexualized fear that informs Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians. Driscoll deserves praise for her high level of scholarly sleuthing; she leaves few stones unturned. That said, she also creates inconsistencies that are hard to ignore. For example, after informing readers that the term “Digger” is a racial epithet “invented by Anglo-Saxon settlers,” which is “in many ways comparable to nigger” (110), she uses the term in the same chapter, repeatedly referencing “the Digger tribes of the Great Basin” (118). She also struggles with a dilemma faced by many scholars: how to characterize an admired author who also advocates abhorrent policies, such as exterminating Natives. While Driscoll exposes Twain’s racism— asserting that “he never succeeded in fully exorcising this racial animus” (13)— she also defends “our nation’s greatest storyteller” against charges that he’s an “absolute Indian hater” because he wrote a letter against a bounty...

II. From Following in Padres’ Footsteps to Confronting Sugar Cubes

Mary Casey's essay on mission history traces the tendency of early SCQ articles, in parallel with contemporaneous educational standards and cultural productions, to idealize the padres' work and romanticize the mission era, a trend that persisted into the late 1960s. It was only at that point that a more critical appraisal emerged. Critical analysis and new methodologies revealed the padres' ill treatment of Indigenous peoples, the mission system's role in imperial conquest, and the mission plants as instruments of control. The multiple perspectives and interactions of multiple groups of historical actors placed in the context of a wider borderlands in the recent articles in the Southern California Quarterly extend California history from a California-exceptionist mold into a richer understanding of continental history.

The Strengthening Legal Protection of Indigenous People in Facing Investment Climate in Era of Asean Economic Community in

Indigenous people, along with their traditional rights including communal rights, are recognized and sheltered under article 18B section (2) and article 28I section (3) of 1945 Constitution, Forestry Act, and regional regulation. However, the arrangement still remains sectoral and inconsistent, which does not fully stand for the Indigenous people. This contradiction was revealed in the Decision of the Constitutional Court Number 35/PUU-X/2012 on customary forest position provisions in the Forestry Act that was confirmed contradictory to the 1945 Constitution. This juridical fact becomes a foundation for State to provide communal indigenous people’s land for investing in natural resources. The used paradigm fact is positioning indigenous people and communal rights, including local wisdom, as the object of development. Consequently, several problems occurred, including: environmental degradation, inequality of structural control, ownership, utilization of land, declining of indigenous people’s welfare, and the emergence of conflicts; thus, posing a threat for national stability, security, and integrity. The enforcement of ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) will make investment climate more open to increase development which correlates to the improvement of people’s welfare, including indigenous people. The recommendations are: 1) Ratification of indigenous people’s draft act which expressly and consistently acknowledges and respects the indigenous people and their traditional rights; 2) Obligating local governments to establish local regulations on the treatment of indigenous people and their traditional rights including customary land rights; 3) Identifying, mapping, and establishing customary land rights as indigenous people’s rights and issuing certificates of ownership; 4) Mediating partnership between indigenous people’s land owner and investor; and 5) Placing indigenous people as the subject of development by implementing free prior informed consent, regulating it in nomenclature constitution, while engaging and enhancing the role of government as mediator and facilitator between indigenous people and investor.

Indigenous Peoples in the U.S., Sovereign Nations, and the DDC

Claims of bias within the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system in its treatment of indigenous peoples in the U.S. focus on marginalization through ghettoization, historicization, diasporization, and missing topics, such as the status of indigenous peoples as sovereign nations. Investigation into the treatment of indigenous peoples in the U.S. from DDC 16 to DDC 23 reveals that two of the most central concerns, ghettoization and historicization, are not borne out. Diasporization turns out to be a legitimate, but resolvable, concern. The current failure to recognize indigenous peoples as sovereign nations leads to a proposal for a series of expansions in Table 2 for the geographic areas over which indigenous peoples are sovereign; a mismatch between organization by the DDC and by indigenous peoples in the U.S. leads to the supplying of a Manual note table going from names of tribes (a Table 5 concept) to sovereign nations (a Table 2 concept).

Exceptional Leadership: Lessons from the Founding Leaders

Exceptional Leadership: Lessons from the Founding Leaders

Staged savagery: Archibald Meston and his Indigenous exhibits

Archibald Meston is remembered as the major architect of Queensland's 1897 legislation that was to regulate its Indigenous people for almost a century, and also as its Southern Protector of Aborigines from 1898 to 1904. Meston's contribution as a policymaker and Protector has received much scholarly attention, however, his activities as a showman - that is, in exhibiting live Indigenous people and himself joining in the performances - are not so well known and have been documented only sporadically. Even his best known offering, the Wild Australia Show, which was the subject of an exhibition held by the University of Queensland's Anthropology Museum in 2015, has not been fully explored. This article takes a closer look at Meston's exhibiting activities, which can now be traced more easily with the help of online searching of newspapers. It shows that these activities were central to his policies for solving Queensland's 'Aboriginals problem' and to his work as a Protector, and eventually gained him a national reputation (or notoriety) as a showman. Further, Meston's forays into the sphere of popular entertainment highlight a paradox in the treatment of Indigenous people in Queensland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereby these people were publicly paraded as 'noble savages' while behind the scenes they were being dispossessed, institutionalised, or at worst, exterminated. Meston's activities also highlight the narrow line of demarcation that existed at the time between ethnology and entertainment, enabling him to claim scientific credibility for his observations of Aboriginal life that were mostly more sensationalist than accurate.

Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, edited by Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton

Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, edited by Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton. Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2014. 360 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper). Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America is sure to become a crucial tool for furthering discussions of as Canada confronts its dark past. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Chair, Justice Murray Sinclair, described the treatment of Indigenous peoples in residential schools as genocide (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015). Some might find the qualifier as downplaying the applicability of the more common understanding of as the physical destruction of people. Others will take issue with any use of the term genocide. Still others might find the phrase cultural as opening up an analytical space for clarifying different forms of genocide. These various lines of debate invite further research and analysis, especially with respect to the residential school system in Canada. The introductory chapter situates the emergence of the term in historical vantage point by asking if research might launch the unsettling dialogue and the arduous process of fashioning decolonizing forms of redress and reconciliation (p. 3). Is an accurate descriptor? How might we pursue research across different times and spaces in a way that accounts for contextual specificities while demonstrating common purposes and effects? By asking questions like these, the text provides crucial tools for situating Canada's residential school system in its global context, while also providing a basis for theoretical advancement. The book's first section provides an overview of the historical and theoretical terrain of studies. Andrew Woolford (chapter one) focuses on the residential school systems in Canada and the United States. He introduces the notion of the colonial mesh to account for complex dynamics of mass violence aimed at annihilating Indigenous peoples. Robbie Etheridge (chapter two) trains attention on violence in Mississippi from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. He introduces the notion of shatter zones as a lens for studying specific incidences of and their connection to wider political processes, such as slavery, imperialism, and global capital. Both Woolford and Etheridge see as fostering certain norms, expectations, and ways of living and being. Threats to these ideals become targets of genocide. Christopher Powell and Julia Peristerakis (chapter three) stress how seemingly disparate institutional milieus operate relationally to shape a cumulative annihilating force threatening a group's survival. The second section brings together empirically grounded studies that encourage the reader to think of histories as a form of memory. Benjamin Madley (chapter four) and Gray Whaley (chapter five) provide accounts of events insufficiently assessed as genocide. Madley's study of violent campaigns against the Modoc in California and Oregon highlights the frequency with which is sanitized under the rubric of war. Whaley's examination of western Oregon Territory highlights how racialized assumptions naturalized abject violence. Tricia Logan (chapter six) and Jeremy Patzer (chapter seven) focus on how discussions about are often shaped by forgetting and willful ignorance. …

Anthropology Coming of Age: Keynote for International Conference of Business Anthropology, Guangzhou, China, May 19, 2012

I present myself to you as the accidental business anthropologist, for in my first academic career, which ended 25 years ago, anthropological study of business was little more than a curiosity, having neither a distinctive name nor an epistemology other than ethnographic empiricism and was on the fringe of the ethical debates that were then swirling in anthropology. Far more contentious was anthropology's treatment of indigenous peoples and its collusion with government agencies at home and abroad. Business Anthropology scarcely had a name; Lloyd Warner and his associates did valuable ethnographic studies in business, industrial, and other contemporary settings, but in the 1940s through 1970s, no one called it "business anthropology," and their work was marginal to the discipline. "Real" anthropology, we knew, was measured by the distance of one's field sites and the risks one bore of tropical diseases once there.

A Chronology of Important Events in the Genocides and Rights of Indigenous Peoples

A Chronology of Important Events in the Genocides and Rights of Indigenous Peoples1 Diana Vinding (bio) and Robert K. Hitchcock (bio) 1492–1502: Christopher Columbus and his crew land in the Bahamas, opening up what came to be known as the Americas. Initial contact was with the Tainos, who later experienced a marked population decline as a result of a combination of their treatment and disease.2 1504: Hernán Cortez arrives in Mexico.3 1519: Cortez and his conquistadores conquer Mexico, defeating Montezuma and the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico. The majority of deaths were a result of enslavement and disease, but many members of indigenous groups were also killed directly. 1552: Bartolomé de Las Casas, in Devastation of the Indies, describes the mistreatment of indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and Latin America.4 1613: The first record of the European practice of scalp taking in Canada dates from this year. 1623: Two hundred Chiskiack on the Potomac River, who were celebrating the peace that they concluded with the British colony of Virginia, die after being given poisoned brandy; Chiskiack women and children are also slaughtered by English soldiers. 1637–1638: The Pequot Indian War in Connecticut results in the slaughter of several thousand Pequot Indians at the hands of English settlers.5 1729–1731: Natchez Indians are massacred by French colonists in Louisiana in retaliation for their massacre of French settlers. 1754–1763: American Indians are involved in the French and Indian War. In 1763, Susquehanna Indians are massacred by white settlers at Conestoga Town in Pennsylvania. 1774: As noted by John Phillip in 1828, “From the time of the ‘General Commando’ of 1774 in South Africa, the Boers had been waging an intermittent war against the Bushmen with the avowed aim of exterminating them.”6 1788: The colonization of Australia begins. It is estimated that 300,000 Aboriginal people, speaking approximately 250 languages, inhabit Australia at this time; killings, disease, and starvation will significantly reduce their numbers over time.7 [End Page 111] 1803: Date of the first settlement (a penal colony) in Tasmania. 1812: Missionaries working under the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS) bring attention to the treatment of “Hottentots” (Khoi peoples) in South Africa. 1825–1830: Settlers and Tasmanian Aboriginals fight the “Black War” in Tasmania. 1828: John Phillip publishes Researches in South Africa: Illustrating the Civil, Moral, and Religious Condition of the Native Tribes, with the intention of bringing public attention “to the oppressions of the native tribes, with a view to obtain for them the protection of the British government.”8 Colonization, he writes, has entailed “an unbroken line of crimes and blood toward aborigines.”9 1830: The “Black Line” is founded in Tasmania. This organization of a dragnet of settlers, soldiers, and freed convicts aims at exterminating the indigenous people of the Tasman Peninsula, but its effort is singularly unsuccessful.10 1833: Slavery is officially abolished in Great Britain. 1834–1835: The sixth “Caffre War” in South Africa leads to an investigation by the British government of actions in the colonies and to Thomas Falwell Buxton’s establishment, in 1835, of the Aborigines Committee in the British Parliament. 1835–1837: A series of hearings and investigations is held by Thomas Falwell Buxton and his fellow committee members into the treatment of indigenous peoples at the hands of colonists, in South Africa and throughout the British colonies. 1836: The Aborigines Protection Society (APS) is founded in England. 1838: Donald S. Moodie’s The Record, or Series of Official Papers Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Native Tribes of South Africa is published.11 1840: The Treaty of Waitangi is signed in New Zealand (Aotearoa).12 1841: Donald S. Moodie publishes The Evidence of the Motives and Objects of the Bushman Wars, 1769–77.13 1842: The Ethnological Society is established as an independent institution in Great Britain. 1846–1873: Settlers commit killings, rapes, and other human-rights violations against the Indians of California.14 1857: The great “cattle killing” among the Xhosa leads to the starvation of thousands of Xhosa in South Africa. 1864: A massacre of Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians is carried out by...

A Whale of a Tale: Post-Colonialism, Critical Theory, and Deconstruction: Revisiting the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling through a Socio-Legal Perspective

This article is a critical interpretation of the indigenous whaling debate, which, although often discussed in legal academia, has received only passing critical attention. As a scholar in the critical theory/critical legal studies model, I am primarily concerned with the impact that law and debates about law have on divergent groups (racial, ethnic, gender, etc.). This article develops a criticism of the United States's postcolonial opposition to whaling, arguing, instead, for cultural relativism. The article indicts U.S. imperialism, and treatment of indigenous peoples, arguing for interdisciplinary analysis and a more keen appreciation for the voice of indigenous peoples. As I often do in my writing, I turn the critical lens back on me, as author, and investigate what it means to write critically for me, personally, and for other scholars who write postcolonial scholarship. The whaling debate is as important now as ever, especially as the issues of natural resource management take on a larger role in international politics. Off-shore drilling and energy exploration in the Arctic are but too examples of the rising importance of these issues. Whaling has largely been viewed as an environmental issue and the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICW) has been construed in terms of international relations and hegemony studies. Those approaches are an excellent contribution to the debate, but what seems to most be missing is a qualitative approach that blends critical theory, history, sociology, and cultural studies to better understand the polarizing whaling discussion.