Igorot Squatters and Indian Wards: Toward an Intra-imperial History of Land Dispossession

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tinio McKenna
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American West ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
Land Disputes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
Made In

AbstractThis essay considers two land disputes that took place in the first decade of U.S. rule in the Philippines and that reached the U.S. Supreme Court:Cariño v. Insular Government(1909) andReavis v. Fianza(1909). In arguing their cases, litigants were forced to reckon with the property rights regime of the former Spanish empire. In this regard, the cases affirm the import of inter-imperial frameworks for understanding colonial problems of land ownership and sovereignty. When arguing over the rightful owners of Philippine lands, parties to these cases also drew on the history and legal bases of land dispossession and settler colonialism in the American West. Further, in later decades, the arguments made in one of these cases would figure into legal conflicts over Native American lands. These cases thus suggest the value of also examining intra-imperial relationships, the emphasis of this essay. They demonstrate how histories and legal structures of settler-driven “expansion” and extra-continental colonialism informed, even constituted, each other.

The limits of power: the political ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest

Antiquity ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 66 (250) ◽  
pp. 153-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
New World ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
History Of

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most dramatic cultural and biological transformations in the history of the world. Small groups of conquistadores toppled enormous empires. Millions of Native Americans died from epidemic disease. Old World animals and plants revolutionized Native American societies, while New World crops fundamentally altered the diet and land-tenure of peasants across Europe. In the words of historian Alfred Crosby (1972: 3),The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day [I1 October 14921 to become alike.

The Spider’s Web

2019 ◽  
pp. 385-408
Author(s):  
Douglas K. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Red Power ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reservation System ◽  
Wounded Knee

The chapter situates Native American incarcerations within a long history of broken treaties, circumscribed sovereignty, land theft, forced removals, reservation and boarding school confinement, and economic and cultural paternalism. The framework that the chapter offers is one centered on what the author calls “settler custodialism,” where the root of Indian incarceration runs through the reservation system. The chapter locates Native American prisoner resistance within a longer trajectory of struggle against settler colonialism that has drawn on traditional ties to land, family, tribe, and community. The rising consciousness of the American Indian Movement (AIM) is linked directly to the incarceration of two of its principal founders, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt. From AIM’s police patrols to the Alcatraz Island prison takeover, the radicalization of the Red Power movement had more to do with its encounter with the carceral state than has been previously recognized. The chapter concludes that the prison also served as a blunt instrument to dismantle the Red Power movement when many of its leaders were incarcerated following the 1973 Wounded Knee operation.

scholarly journals Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 944-973 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uditi Sen
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Andaman Islands ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
Colonial Governmentality

AbstractThis article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development there. I demonstrate how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness were repeatedly mobilized in colonial-era surveys and postcolonial policy documents. Postcolonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the “dying savage.” Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. I question the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argue that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalization in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius.

scholarly journals Punitive Entanglements: Connected Histories of Penal Transportation, Deportation, and Incarceration in the Spanish Empire (1830s-1898)

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (S26) ◽  
pp. 169-189
Author(s):  
Christian G. De Vito
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article features a connected history of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire, from the independence of Spanish America to the “loss” of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Three levels of entanglement are highlighted here: the article looks simultaneously at punitive flows stemming from the colonies and from the metropole; it brings together the study of penal transportation, administrative deportation, and military deportation; and it discusses the relationship between punitive relocations and imprisonment. As part of this special issue, foregrounding “perspectives from the colonies”, I start with an analysis of the punitive flows that stemmed from the overseas provinces. I then address punishment in the metropole through the colonial lens, before highlighting the entanglements of penal transportation and deportation in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire as a whole.

scholarly journals Re-Mystifying the West: Hybridity and Spirituality in Jim Jarmusch’s 'Dead Man'

Linguaculture ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-68
Author(s):  
Florina Năstase
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American West ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Spiritual Awakening ◽  
The West ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Native American Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dead Man

The paper intends to examine the ways in which the American West has undergone a cinematic transformation with the advent of counter-cultural western movies that criticize and often dismantle American imperialism and expansionism. The paper makes the argument that the American West has arrived at a new stage in its mythology, namely that it has been re-mythologized as a locus of Eastern spiritual awakening. The western of the 1990s’ decade embraces a rebirth of spiritualism through the genre of the “acid western,” typified in this paper by Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), a film that showcases the return of the West as a cultural frontier that must be re-assimilated instead of rejected. Given its symbolic title, Dead Man is not so much a Western as it is an Eastern romance, a rite of passage framed as a journey towards death. The paper will attempt to make its case by tackling the history of anti-establishment cinema, while also basing its argument on the assertions of director Jim Jarmusch, and various film critics who discuss the issue of the “acid western.” At the same time, the paper will offer a post-colonial perspective informed by Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, with particular emphasis on Native American identity.

Imitating Africans, Listening for Angels

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-182
Author(s):  
Andrew A. Cashner
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Social History ◽  
Harmonious Society ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
History Of

Church ensembles of Spaniards across the Spanish Empire regularly impersonated African and other non-Castilian characters in the villancicos they performed in the Christmas Matins liturgy. Although some scholars and performers still mistakenly assume that ethnic villancicos preserve authentic Black or Native voices, and others have critiqued them as Spaniards’ racist caricatures, there have been few studies of the actual music or of specific local contexts. This article analyzes Al establo más dichoso (At the happiest stable), an ensaladilla composed by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla for Christmas 1652 at Puebla Cathedral. In this performance his ensemble impersonated an array of characters coming to Christ’s mangers, including Indian farm laborers and African slaves. The composer uses rhythm to differentiate the speech and movement of each group, and at the climax he even has the Angolans and the angels sing together—but in different meters. Based on the first edition of this music, the article interprets this villancico within the social and theological context of colonial Puebla and its new cathedral, consecrated in 1649. I argue that through this music, members of the Spanish elite performed their own vision of a hierarchical and harmonious society. Gutiérrez de Padilla was himself both a priest and a slaveholder, and his music elevates its characters in certain ways while paradoxically also mocking them and reinforcing their lowly status. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “three worlds of the text,” the article compares the representations imagined within the musical performance with archival evidence for the social history of the people represented and the composer’s own relationships with them (the world behind the text). Looking to the world projected “in front of” the text, I argue that these caricatured representations both reflected and shaped Spaniards’ attitudes toward their subjects in ways that actively affected the people represented. At the same time, I argue that Spanish representations mirrored practices of impersonation among Native American and African communities, especially the Christmastide Black Kings festivals, pointing to a more complex and contradictory vision of colonial society than what we can see from the slaveholder’s musical fantasy alone.

Conquered Landscape in the American West

Linguaculture ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Chirica
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American West ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Western Expansion ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Future Policy ◽  
Historic Significance

AbstractThe paper traces the history of “conquered landscape” back to the original European colonists and the Puritans. We discuss the contribution of Thomas Jefferson as an architect of Western expansion through the purchase of the Louisiana territory and the mapping of future policy regarding the settling of Western territory. We cover the major moments in the settling of the West and their historic significance. We discuss Frederick Jackson Turner’s concept of the West as “a succession of frontiers” versus revisionist historian Patricia Nelson Limerick’s concept of conquest and conquered territory. The second part of the paper deals with the Native American view of the land, with reference to Paula Gunn Allen’s ideas and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novels Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. Silko juxtaposes two different kinds of space, Native American versus federal space. The Native American and Anglo-American views of nature are contrasted and explained, with the discussion of aspects of native removal, reterritorialization and misrepresentation.

Eastward Ho! Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido and the Making of Japanese Migration to the American West, 1869–1888

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (03) ◽  
pp. 521-547
Author(s):  
Sidney Xu Lu
Keyword(s):  
American West ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Anglo American

This article examines how Japanese colonial migration to Hokkaido in the first two decades of the Meiji era paved the way for Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the United States in the 1880s. It elaborates how Japanese leaders carefully emulated the Anglo-American settler colonialism in Japan's own expansion in Hokkaido by focusing on the emergence of the overpopulation discourse and its political impact in early Meiji. This colonial imitation also inspired the Japanese expansionists to consider the American West an ideal destination for Japanese emigration in the late nineteenth century. This study thus challenges the nation-centered and territory-bound history of the Japanese empire by showing that Japan's colonial expansion in Northeast Asia and Japanese trans-Pacific migration to North America were intertwined since the very beginning of the Meiji era.

Pre-Baptismal Instruction and the Administration of Baptism in the Philippines during the Sixteenth Century

1955 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Leddy Phelan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The Far East ◽  
History Of ◽  
North And South America ◽  
Hernan Cortes ◽  
North And South ◽  
Spiritual Conquest

Magellan’s abortive attempts to introduce baptism among the natives of the island of Cebu during the month of April of 1521 and the more successful efforts of the Spanish missionaries to preach the Gospel following the arrival of the Legazpi-Urdaneta expedition at Cebu on February 13, 1565 occurred during the initial and the culminating chapters respectively of the “spiritual conquest” of those native peoples of America and the Far East who were to enter the orbit of Spanish culture. During April of 1521, as Magellan was transforming himself into a lay missionary, Hernán Cortés was making the final preparations for the siege of Tenochtitlán. Its successful issue on August 13, 1521 laid the foundation not only of the Spanish Empire in the New World, but also it provided the Spaniards with the base of operations from which eventually they could extend their power to the Philippines. It was Cortés’ conquest of the Aztec Confederation in 1521 which enabled the Catholic missionaries of Spain to undertake one of the most extensive expansions in the history of the Christian Church. In 1565 the Spanish Church for its Philippine enterprise was able to draw upon a vast storehouse of missionary experience acquired in both North and South America. Magellan’s apostolic labors, ill-starred and brief though they were, exemplify many of the permanent features of the Spanish missionary enterprise. The Magellan episode also illustrates how his successors after 1565 did in fact profit from the Circumnavigator’s errors of judgment and tactics.

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