Treaty Lands Research Articles

Feeding, mating and animal wellbeing: new insights from phylogenetic comparative methods.

Feeding, mating and animal wellbeing: new insights from phylogenetic comparative methods.

Maanjiwe Nendamowinan (The Gathering of Minds): Connecting Indigenous placemakers and caring for place through co-creative research with the Toronto Islands

Connecting Indigenous Placemakers was a week-long practitioners’ retreat and public symposium held on Menecing, the Toronto Island (Treaty 13a). The collaborative project was supported by the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN), Ngā Aho Māori Designers’ Network, and other institutional partners. Based on the success in Aotearoa New Zealand of supporting Indigenous placemaking practitioners and shaping opportunities through a network, the 2019 gathering created a supportive space for Indigenous creatives to be on the land, work on collective and individual projects, build relationship with one another, share knowledge and shape broader discourse on Indigenous placemaking in Toronto. As retreat participants integrated the teachings of Menecing, the Treaty Lands and Territory of the MCFN and a gathering place of many nations, the group began referring to the project as Maanjiwe Nendamowinan, the Gathering of Minds. This co-creative experience made clear the primacy of Place. That is, ‘we don’t make place – Place makes us’. Grounded in Menecing, and in dialogue with many voices, we demonstrate the more-than-ontological significance of Indigenous conceptualizations of and relational practices in (uppercase- P) Place, an entity with a specific identity. We conclude with key considerations that keep Place and placekeeping at the heart of research: respect for the sacred, living well with all our relations, relationship with the peoples of Place, and rethinking research.

Where We Stand: The University of Minnesota and Dakhóta Treaty Lands

Where We Stand: The University of Minnesota and Dakhóta Treaty Lands

Teaching Indigenous Graphic Novels: English / Indigenous Studies 360

Teaching Indigenous Graphic NovelsEnglish / Indigenous Studies 360 Sophie McCall (bio) My name is Sophie McCall. I am a Scottish-descended settler scholar teaching Indigenous and contemporary Canadian literatures at Simon Fraser University, forever learning and unlearning how to read, listen to, and engage with Indigenous stories. The focus of my teaching is how writers challenge the violent histories of settler colonialism and use forms of literary expression to imagine and bring into reality narratives of cultural and artistic reclamation. It is an honor to think through how to do the work I do at the University with a sense of accountability and responsibility to unceded, ancestral, and traditional xʷməθkʷəy ̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl ̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) lands and knowledges in Vancouver, British Columbia. This territorial acknowledgment asks me to think about what it means to be a part of the ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands, and how to become an ally in Indigenous-led initiatives of decolonizing and indigenizing the university. I am indebted to my Indigenous colleagues and students, who have helped me in my own process of learning and unlearning the histories I have been brought up with. I grew up on unceded Kanien'kehá:ka and Algonquin territories in Montréal, Québec, in the 1970s and 1980s during a heated moment in Québec politics. My father was very involved in advocating for a bilingual, multicultural Québec and against the separation of Québec from Canada. Every morning and evening, with the radio and TV blasting, he would be on the telephone, coordinating with community organizations and diasporic communities such as the Chinese Canadian community concerning minority rights in education and language. However, especially during the Oka crisis of 1990, it became clear that the liberal, multicultural politics of recognition that I grew up [End Page 92] with in my white, Anglophone family do not acknowledge or engage with Indigenous conceptions of self-determination. I became aware of the high cost of what Dene scholar Glen Coulthard later would call the "colonial politics of recognition in Canada," in which a liberal-multicultural political framework harmonizes Indigenous rights within the state's assertion of sovereignty. In all of my work, I ask whether a(n other) politics of recognition, or perhaps the language of recognition, as a shared sense of responsibility and accountability across Indigenous, settler, and racialized communities is possible, in the ongoing project of working towards social justice on unceded and Treaty lands in Canada. Introducing myself and acknowledging the territories where I grew up, as well as where I now live and work as an uninvited guest, offers an opportunity for me to reflect on my own social location and how my experiences on a daily basis shape my research questions. In Cree scholar and filmmaker Tasha Hubbard's words, "I have students who have expectations when they take my class that they're going to learn all about Indigenous people. [Instead], at the beginning of the class, I will [say] that they are in this space to basically turn their gaze towards themselves. Because so much of the time Indigenous people are the object of the gaze" (CBC Arts 01:25:05). This work of self-reflection is an important part of Indigenous studies—to articulate to whom one is accountable, to engage in a process of un-learning one's history and its relationship to other histories, and to suggest how to remain relevant in ongoing struggles of decolonization, reconciliation, or other social justice projects. What first inspired me in developing this course were the brilliant Indigenous graphic novels, comic books, and illustrated stories that have appeared over the past ten to fifteen years. To name a selection: Kwak'waka'wakw writer Gord Hill's history of Indigenous Nations' resistance in the making of the Americas in 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (2010); Anishinaabe writer and scholar Elizabeth LaPensée's retelling of a Deer Woman story in graphic form in Deer Woman: A Vignette (2017); Cree writer David Alexander Robertson's cycle of intergenerational stories in 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga (2013); Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas's dynamic...

Where We Stand: The University of Minnesota and Dakhóta Treaty Lands

Where We Stand: The University of Minnesota and Dakhóta Treaty Lands

Special Issue Introduction: Thinking Through “Being in the COVID‐19 World” and Bright Spots for our Food Futures

Special Issue Introduction: Thinking Through “Being in the COVID‐19 World” and Bright Spots for our Food Futures

David William Schindler (1940-2021).

Trailblazing aquatic researcher, advocate, and whole-ecosystem experimentalist

Wii Niiganabying (Looking Ahead):

Fifty years ago, Indigenous elders and leaders drafted their response to the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy (White Paper of 1969). Their formal rebuttal, Citizens Plus (Red Paper), published in 1970, was a turning point in Indigenous education policy. It marked the beginning of the shift away from government-controlled, assimilationist educational policies to greater Indigenous control over funding and pedagogical methods. The Red Paper refuted the White Paper’s main conclusions and stated that Indigenous peoples are “citizens plus” because the federal government is legally bound to provide Indigenous peoples with services in exchange for the use of the land they occupy. The most important Indigenous rights to be upheld included education, health care, Aboriginal status, and Aboriginal title. These unique rights recognized that Indigenous peoples are the original owners of all the natural resources on their traditional treaty lands. The Red Paper became a political turning point for Indigenous peoples in Canada by presenting an Indigenous vision for a new political and legal relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples based on Aboriginal and treaty rights. Since the 1970s, Indigenous leaders have struggled to maintain control of educational funding while having to abide by provincial standards of educational curricula. Indigenous communities want to provide more positive learning experiences and positive identity through reconceptualizing educational curricula. They are exploring ways to indigenize the educational experience by igniting cultural resurgence through the integration of Indigenous languages, knowledge, culture, and history by reconnecting students to their elders, land, and communities.

Community-engaged Learning (CEL): Integrating Anthropological Discourse with Indigenous Knowledge

The Indigenous Action Group (IAG) is an alliance of solidarity between Indigenous and settler faculty at the University of Toronto Mississauga with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN), whose Treaty lands the campus is located on. This partnership of responsibility supports the MCFN goals of truth (through public knowledge and recognition of their history), and reconciliation (through the support and equitable sustenance of Indigenous pedagogy, knowledge systems, and research methodologies in educational institutions). The IAG has developed a Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) course to bring ontological pluralism to the Academy to legitimize Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, and involve the placemaking of local Indigenous communities (Tuhiwah Smith, 2012). This second year undergraduate course entitled “Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island (in Canada)” was developed and implemented by the Indigenous Action Group to prioritize first person voices from the local Indigenous community. We are hoping this diverse educational model will change the discourse in anthropology courses to begin a collective understanding of ongoing power imbalances and oppression in education from colonial mechanisms.

Introduction: Mana from the Mauna

IntroductionMana from the Mauna Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada (bio) and No'u Revilla (bio) We are Maunakea. Are you Maunakea? What does it mean to be a mountain? In movements to protect Indigenous lands and lifeways, like Maunakea, Haleakalā, and Pōhakuloa in Hawai'i, Ihumātao in Aotearoa, or Standing Rock in unceded Oceti Sakowin treaty lands; in movements to condemn white supremacy and its insidious targeting of Black lives in the United States; and in movements to uplift Palestinian liberation against Zionist occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism, how have we asked, answered, and fundamentally changed questions about land, life, representation, and care? Questions about you and me? In 'ōlelo Hawai'i, Kānaka 'Ōiwi are intentional about naming our spheres of belonging. Not only does our language distinguish between different types of "you," but also between different types of "we." For example, we have a class of pronouns that refers to three or more people. "Mākou" is a collective pronoun that means "we," but does not include the listener. "Kākou," on the other hand, is a "we" that includes all of us and implies a certain connectedness. So much of the force behind the idea that We are Maunakea is that we are moving from a mākou we to a kākou we, and the most basic kākou in the Maunakea movement starts with these three: you and I and the 'āina. This is what it means to be a mountain. When the Kingdom of Hawai'i was overthrown in 1893, those fighting for its restoration rallied around two major concepts: aloha 'āina, a deep and abiding love for the land based on our familial relationship that you will hear much more about in this issue, and 'ai pōhaku, the idea that we Kānaka have no need for any of the colonial trappings of life, as long as we can eat from/of the stones of the 'āina. In this era of #LandBack, 'ai pōhaku, the call for us to eat stones, centers the 'āina in our struggles, and reminds us that the more stones we eat, the more like a mountain we become. We, the editors of this issue, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and No'u Revilla, make no claim to any sort of pivotal role in this movement, but we are stone-eaters like the rest of us who fight for the Mauna. [End Page 515] In this special issue highlighting the 2019 stand at Pu'uhuluhulu1 on Hawai'i island, the most recent in a long history of 'Ōiwi resistance to development on Maunakea, we two editors grappled with the needs of aloha 'āina in terms of land, representation, and care. As 'Ōiwi editors who are not kama'āina to Maunakea, but 'onipa'a2 as Kānaka 'Ōiwi to protect our 'āina and lāhui, we are constantly and necessarily humbled by the force of these questions. What do you need? What can we offer you? Education and writing are what we can offer. In other words, this is how we ho'oulu lāhui.3 We met as graduate students in 2010 in a course with Dr. Cristina Bacchilega on adaptation and translation. Our first conversation was a short but inspiring exchange about the 'ōlelo no'eau (poetical saying) "I wai no'u," which literally translates to "Give me water." According to Dr. Mary Kawena Pukui's annotation in the essential 'Ōlelo No'eau: Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings,4 "I wai no'u" refers to the capacity of someone to offer worthy engagement in competition or battle. Yet, in our first meeting, we were interested in sharing a more expansive understanding of the 'ōlelo no'eau, one rooted in Dr. Pukui's annotation, but also inclusive of contemporary understandings of decolonial love. We have been cultivating a friendship ever since, one based on a deepening aloha for our lāhui, language, and mo'olelo.5 In 2019 we were both hired as Assistant Professors at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, where Kamaoli teaches Mo'olelo 'Ōiwi (Hawaiian and Indigenous Literature and History) at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, and No'u...

Treaty Lands, Global Stories: Designing an Inclusive Curriculum

Treaty Lands, Global Stories: Designing an Inclusive Curriculum

The Great Sioux Nation V. The 'Black Snake': Native American Rights and the Keystone Xl Pipeline

The Keystone XL Pipeline has been shrouded in controversy almost since its conception. As a structure intending to cross the Canadian border into the United States, the pipeline must receive presidential approval before construction can commence. Since 2008, TransCanada has attempted to obtain this approval unsuccessfully. Criticism against the pipeline has focused largely on the negative environmental impacts that will likely accompany its construction and utilization, and it is precisely these environmental concerns that have ultimately stymied presidential approval and made international headlines. In November 2015, the U.S. government denied TransCanada’s application, effectively killing the Keystone XL project. While the Keystone XL project no longer poses a physical threat to the environment, an overview of the U.S. government’s consideration of the project reveals drastic flaws in process, specifically in regards to the human rights of a substantial portion of individuals who would be negatively affected by the Keystone XL Pipeline — the Sioux Nation.The pipeline is set to run through a substantial portion of the Black Hills of South Dakota — the sovereign and treaty lands of the Great Sioux Nation. This “black snake” threatens not only the environment of the Sioux lands, but also sites sacred to the tribes. The Sioux Nation has risen up in defense of their lands, and their right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) before the state can undertake projects on their indigenous lands. While the U.S. government maintains it has complied with domestic standards regarding Indian consultation and with its perverse interpretation of the right to FPIC protected under the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, its actions have fallen drastically short of those expected by the United Nations and required by the inter-American system. This paper argues that under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, the United States is obligated to obtain the fully informed consent of the Sioux Nation before approving the Keystone XL pipeline.

Nez Perce Defending Treaty Lands in Northern Idaho

For anyone living in Northern Idaho, it is difficult to imagine that their seemingly inconsequential slice of life would be a significant link in neo-extractivist global commodity chains. Yet, star...

Tribal Hunting and Fishing Rights Fail to Survive Cession of Treaty Land: Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife v. Klamath Indian Tribe

Tribal Hunting and Fishing Rights Fail to Survive Cession of Treaty Land: Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife v. Klamath Indian Tribe

Making Space for Property

A modern day treaty process in British Columbia, Canada, involving First Nations and the federal and provincial governments, entails a struggle to carve out both metaphoric and material space for indigenous land and title. Despite considerable opposition, the state has insisted that First Nations will hold their treaty lands as a form of simple, this being the way most private property owners hold property, granting broad rights to access, use, and alienate. This is said to generate what the state terms certainty, a concept predicated on the idea of property as a priori, singular, and definite. I explore the resultant contest through a performative lens that treats property not as essence, but as effect. Tracing the complicated ways in which fee simple is performed in the treaty process reveals that fee simple is anything but. Multiple, competing, and overlapping fee simples are in circulation. The identification of this multiplicity offers valuable lessons for our understanding of the contemporary space of postcolonial reconciliation.

Making Space for Property

A modern-day treaty process in British Columbia, Canada, involving First Nations1 and the federal and provincial governments, entails a struggle to carve out both metaphoric and material space for indigenous land and title. Despite considerable opposition, the state has insisted that First Nations will hold their treaty lands as a form of “fee simple,” this being the way most private property owners hold property, granting broad rights to access, use, and alienation. This is said to generate what the state terms certainty, a concept predicated on the idea of property as a priori, singular, and definite. I explore the resultant contest through a performative lens that treats property not as essence, but as effect. Tracing the complicated ways in which fee simple is performed in the treaty process reveals that fee simple is anything but. Multiple, competing, and overlapping fee simples are in circulation. The identification of this multiplicity offers valuable lessons for our understanding of the contemporary space of postcolonial reconciliation.

Spirits from Another Realm, Activists in Their Own Right: The Figure of the Yankton/Romantic Child in Zitkala-Ša’s Work

Spirits from Another Realm, Activists in Their Own Right:The Figure of the Yankton/Romantic Child in Zitkala-Ša’s Work Mandy Suhr-Sytsma (bio) The Ihanktonwan (Yankton Sioux) writer, educator, and activist Zitkala-Ša (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in 1876 and lived until 1938.1 To say that the period of Zitkala-Ša’s life was a difficult one for American Indians would be a gross understatement. The American Indian population reached an all-time low during Zitkala-Ša’s lifetime, the result of two centuries of massacres, diseases, and deprivations brought on by settler colonialism.2 Moreover, she witnessed new manifestations of colonialism in the allotment of tribal lands and the Indian boarding school system. The General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act, privatized American Indian landholdings and ultimately resulted in the loss of about two thirds of the treaty lands—more than 90 million acres—held by Native Americans in 1887; this loss resulted from direct government appropriation as well as often highly fraudulent land sales to non-Native owners.3 The Carlisle-model Indian boarding school system operated from 1879 to 1960, with hundreds of thousands of American Indian children, including Zitkala-Ša, attending government- or church-run boarding schools based on the model of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. US Army officer and Carlisle founder Richard Pratt came up with the idea to convert old military forts into Indian boarding schools while overseeing Native American inmates at the Ft. Marion prison in Florida, and the US government enthusiastically took up his plan. With the aim of assimilating Indians in the most effective manner, the Carlisle model operated with military rigor, requiring students to stay in off-reservation schools (preferably far from their home communities) for three-year terms, brutally enforcing an English-only policy, and teaching a curriculum of basic literacy, arithmetic, and “manual training” (i.e., unpaid labor). The children who attended these schools experienced unfathomable losses of dignity, culture, language, and kinship.4 Throughout her work, Zitkala-Ša describes and decries the losses brought on both by the boarding school system and by the Dawes Act. While the period spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth [End Page 136] centuries was a time of immense loss for American Indians, it also saw a revitalization of tribal and intertribal communities along with renewed assertions of American Indian sovereignty. In contrast to the “progressive” Euro-American approach to Indian policy that characterized Indians’ assimilation into Euro-American society as the only alternative to extinction, Zitkala-Ša joined other American Indian leaders of the day in advocating for the cultural continuance and political empowerment of Indigenous nations. Zitkala-Ša was a key player in this movement for self-determination. In 1900, over the course of three separate issues of the Atlantic Monthly, she published three autobiographical stories: “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians.” The stories, which follow Zitkala-Ša from a traditional Yankton childhood into her years as a student, then teacher, in Indian boarding schools, reveal the horrors of the schools and suggest that American Indians would be better off handling their own affairs, especially in regard to education.5 Zitkala-Ša’s roles as writer and activist continued to intersect for the remainder of her life. She went on to publish additional stories, essays, and an opera, and to help lead two national organizations for American Indian rights, serving as secretary of the Society of American Indians (SAI) from 1916 to 1920 and as president of the National Council of American Indians (NCAI) from 1926 to 1938.6 Zitkala-Ša demonstrates a deep interest in childhood, children, and the figure of “the child” throughout her work. In 1901, she became widely known as a children’s author owing to her collection Old Indian Legends, a text praised in prominent literary magazines of the day as valuable for young readers.7 Selections from Old Indian Legends were frequently reprinted in school readers, as were excerpts from “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” the first of Zitkala-Ša’s Atlantic Monthly stories (Davidson and...

Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix by William J. Campbell (review)

Reviewed by: Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix by William J. Campbell Timothy J. Shannon (bio) Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. By William J. Campbell. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Pp. 278. $39.95 cloth) Historians have typically described the Fort Stanwix Treaty of 1768 as a land swindle. Although not as infamous as Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan, it was more consequential, for it involved much more territory (parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia) and left a far bloodier legacy. The British Crown had expected the Stanwix treaty to cement and pacify the boundary line established between colonial and native populations by the Proclamation of 1763. Instead, the treaty accelerated a frenzy of land speculation and alienated powerful Indian nations in the Ohio country who had been locked out of the proceedings. In Speculators in Empire, William J. Campbell sets out to rehabilitate the reputation of the Stanwix treaty. He describes Sir William Johnson, the royal Indian superintendent charged with conducting the negotiations, as a loyal imperial official who did his best to balance Crown interests with those of the Iroquois Confederacy. Likewise, Campbell depicts the Iroquois chiefs who were Johnson’s counterparts as canny, independent diplomats, not powerless dupes preyed upon by colonial land speculators. As Campbell tells the story, the British Crown and the Iroquois Confederacy worked as partners at Fort Stanwix in 1768: “Both parties knew that where Iroquois authority could be established so too might a British colonial system be extended—and eventually an effective trade network established and land sold, settled, and improved” (p. 69). Campbell is right to emphasize the partnership that Johnson and his allied chiefs forged to bolster each other’s power, but his analysis falls short of ushering the Stanwix treaty into the light of respectability. [End Page 235] As the book title indicates, land speculators played an important role in the treaty, creating a union between private interests and public policy that caused many Native Americans and even the British ministry to question the legitimacy of the treaty land cessions. The question is: who should take the blame? Previous historians have assigned it to Johnson. He purposefully departed from his royal instructions to extend the boundary line in ways that benefited his own speculative interests and those of his well-connected friends. Campbell is more generous to Johnson, describing his manipulations of the boundary line as well-intentioned improvisations meant to strengthen his office and protect Iroquoian homelands. Campbell blames the more sordid elements of the treaty on George Croghan, Johnson’s deputy commissioner, who pursued speculative schemes with a brazen chicanery that makes one wish he were alive to share a jail cell with Bernie Madoff. Campbell, however, lets Johnson off too easily. Johnson may have exhibited more concern for Indians than Croghan, but when it came to using their public roles to acquire native land, the difference between the two men was one of degree, not kind. Although he does a good job of explaining Iroquoian motives for participating in the Stanwix treaty, Campbell misses the opportunity to present other important native perspectives on it. He never fully explains why so few Ohio Indians (Delawares, Shawnees, Miamis, Wyandots) attended a treaty negotiation that sold away so much of their land. Likewise, he tends to speak of the six Iroquois nations collectively, slighting the local perspective of the Oneidas and Mohawks. Campbell claims that when Johnson extended the boundary line from the Susquehanna River to the Oneida Carry (the portage between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek guarded by Fort Stanwix), he was trying to protect eastern Iroquois homelands. Yet this extension left the Mohawks and many of the Oneidas east of the new boundary, rendering their territory less, not more, secure from speculators and squatters. In this case, Johnson appears to have been more concerned with protecting Croghan’s and his own land claims in the region rather than those of his Indian neighbors. [End Page 236] Among the strengths of the book, Campbell provides an excellent summary of the geopolitical significance of the Oneida Carry and the way in which...

Understanding Disparity on the Canadian Prairies: A Step toward Improving Tuburculosis Outcomes

Understanding Disparity on the Canadian Prairies: A Step toward Improving Tuburculosis Outcomes

The Marcus Kolb Site (41CE438), Cherokee County, Texas

In 2001, Claude McCrocklin conducted metal detecting and test excavations at an historic 19th century site in the upper Neches River basin of East Texas. Based on the findings from that work, unreported until now, McCrocklin believed that this site was occupied by the East Texas Cherokee. This site, the Marcus Kolb site (41CE438), "was confirmed by the artifacts identical with those found on Lost Prairie in Arkansas." The Lost Prairie sites referred to by McCrocklin are the early 19th century Lost Prairie Cherokee sites along the Red River in southwestern Arkansas investigated by McCrocklin. The Marcus Kolb site is within the limits of the proposed 1836 treaty land grant between the Texas Cherokee and the Republic of Texas.