Regaining Ground

Author(s):  
Peter H. Herlihy ◽  
Matthew L. Fahrenbruch ◽  
Taylor A. Tappan

This chapter describes the geographies of indigenous populations and their territories in Central America, past and present. A brief discussion of previous archaeological research provides a context for the region’s pre-Columbian populations and settlement distributions prior to an examination of the territorial and demographic collapse precipitated by European conquest. The chapter chronicles a twenty-first-century resurgence of indigenous populations and their territorial rights in Central America, including the emergence of geopolitical units that we call indigenous territorial jurisdictions (ITJs), the likes of which represent new strategies for accommodating indigenous land ownership and governance within the context of modern states. Archival and census research, in situ field experience, and geographic information system (GIS)-based land use and cadastral mapping inform the understanding of indigenous peoples’ past and contemporary demographic trends, settlement patterns, and territorial challenges.

Author(s):  
Waugh John

This chapter explores the law of Australian colonization and its relationship with the laws of Australia's Indigenous peoples. A line of legal continuity links the Australian Constitution to the imposition of British law made during the colonization of Australia and to the decisions of colonial courts that treated the Australian colonies as colonies of settlement. Those decisions, after some initial doubts, displaced the diverse and intricate laws of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, who have occupied the continent for tens of thousands of years. Only in relation to native title to land have later courts made a major reassessment of the status of Indigenous laws. There, the High Court has challenged the factual assumptions of earlier decisions and found accommodation for Indigenous land ownership within the common law, but left the legal framework of colonization otherwise intact.


Author(s):  
Aline Frey

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n2p151This article examines two feature films, focusing on the link between Indigenous cinema, environmental preservation and land rights. The first film is Mabo (2012) directed by Aboriginal filmmaker Rachel Perkins. It centres on a man’ legal battle for recognition of Indigenous land’ ownership in Australia. The second film is Terra Vermelha (Birdwatchers, Marco Bechis, 2008), which centres on the violence endured by a contemporary Brazilian Indigenous group attempting to reclaim their traditional lands occupied by agribusiness barons. Based on comparative analysis of Mabo and Terra Vermelha, this article discusses the similar challenges faced by Indigenous nations in these two countries, especially the colonial dispossession of their ancestral territories and the postcolonial obstacles to reclaim and exercise self-determination over them.


Author(s):  
Annette Skovsted Hansen

AbstractThe re-vitalization of indigenous languages depends on political and legal support and the implementation of language rights depends on knowledge of vocabulary and grammar structures of the individual languages. Throughout the nineteenth century world, compilers of dictionaries adapted indigenous languages to match standards defined in nation-building and, thereby, enabled latent possibilities for indigenous populations to re-vitalize their languages in connection with the United Nations Year for Indigenous Peoples in 1993, and the first United Nations Decade for Indigenous Peoples, 1995-2004. This article focuses on dictionaries of the languages of the Ainu populations in the borderlands between the nation-states Japan and Russia. The main argument is that the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act promulgated in 1997 had a significant impact on the production and purpose of Ainu dictionaries. The dictionaries prior to 1997 functioned, predominantly, as records, which contributed to the increased visibility of Ainu populations inside and outside Japan in the immediate national interests of Japan, whereas the dictionaries published after 1997 are intended to enable the active use of Ainu language today. An important sub-point is that the post-1997 Ainu dictionaries rely heavily on dictionaries, word lists, and grammar books compiled before 1997, which have therefore come to support efforts to re-vitalize Ainu languages in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Celine Rose Beaulieu

In the Truth and Reconciliation’s Final Report, four of the 94 calls to action referred to the repudiation of concepts which have justified claims of European sovereignty while implicitly refuting claims that dismiss the legitimacy of Indigenous land ownership prior to European contact. This paper demonstrates how the concepts of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery have prevented the recognition and affirmation of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty in Canada historically and presently. This article will first introduce the concepts of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius as religious constructs and demonstrate how these concepts became integrated into the colonial mentality of European countries by drawing from Andrew Crosby and Jeffery Monaghan’s concept of “settler governmentality.” These two concepts, in particular, justified the false pretensions of European countries to assume they could occupy, ‘discover’ and take the land from Indigenous peoples. By acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty is inherently connected to their relationship with the land, this article will conclude by analyzing the work of contemporary academics and reports that argue Indigenous laws cannot be adequately acknowledged under the current Canadian legislation.


Author(s):  
Michael Mascarenhas

Three very different field sites—First Nations communities in Canada, water charities in the Global South, and the US cities of Flint and Detroit, Michigan—point to the increasing precariousness of water access for historically marginalized groups, including Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and people of color around the globe. This multi-sited ethnography underscores a common theme: power and racism lie deep in the core of today’s global water crisis. These cases reveal the concrete mechanisms, strategies, and interconnections that are galvanized by the economic, political, and racial projects of neoliberalism. In this sense neoliberalism is not only downsizing democracy but also creating both the material and ideological forces for a new form of discrimination in the provision of drinking water around the globe. These cases suggest that contemporary notions of environmental and social justice will largely hinge on how we come to think about water in the twenty-first century.


Vox Patrum ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 393-402
Author(s):  
Ilona Skupińska-Løvset

Dura Europos, or as proposed today Europos Dura, was a fortified settlement on the border between the Roman Empire and the East. The archeological dis­coveries reflected the character of the settlement – the fortified agglomeration grouped at the military camp. After its fall Europos Dura was covered by desert sand only to be discovered in the XXth century. Archaeological research has dis­closed documentation of its multicultural character. This paper points to the fact of coexistence of various religions in late antiquity Europos Dura. Paintings and sculptures discovered in situ indicate that scene of offering was a favorite subject in the sacral art of Europos Dura, independent of religion. The ceremony of in­cense burning constitutes the dominant form of offering regarding visualizations of this important ceremony.


2021 ◽  
pp. 088541222110266
Author(s):  
Michael Hibbard

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas C. R. Silva ◽  
Rodrigo Studart Corrêa ◽  
Jamie L. Wright ◽  
Barbara Bomfim ◽  
Lauren Hendricks ◽  
...  

AbstractAmazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) are unusually fertile soils characterised by elevated concentrations of microscopic charcoal particles, which confer their distinctive colouration. Frequent occurrences of pre-Columbian artefacts at ADE sites led to their ubiquitous classification as Anthrosols (soils of anthropic origin). However, it remains unclear how indigenous peoples created areas of high fertility in one of the most nutrient-impoverished environments on Earth. Here, we report new data from a well-studied ADE site in the Brazilian Amazon, which compel us to reconsider its anthropic origin. The amounts of phosphorus and calcium—two of the least abundant macronutrients in the region—are orders of magnitude higher in ADE profiles than in the surrounding soil. The elevated levels of phosphorus and calcium, which are often interpreted as evidence of human activity at other sites, correlate spatially with trace elements that indicate exogenous mineral sources rather than in situ deposition. Stable isotope ratios of neodymium, strontium, and radiocarbon activity of microcharcoal particles also indicate exogenous inputs from alluvial deposition of carbon and mineral elements to ADE profiles,  beginning several thousands of years before the earliest evidence of soil management for plant cultivation in the region. Our data suggest that indigenous peoples harnessed natural processes of landscape formation, which led to the unique properties of ADEs, but were not responsible for their genesis. If corroborated elsewhere, this hypothesis would transform our understanding of human influence in Amazonia, opening new frontiers for the sustainable use of tropical landscapes going forward.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Marino

AbstractThis study aims to investigate the process of reconstruction of Māori postcolonial cultural identity in the twenty-first century which also passes through the reclamation and redefinition of ‘takatāpui’ notion. ‘Takatāpui’ is an umbrella term that nowadays indicates all the Māori with non-conforming wairua (spiritualities, gender identities), sexualities and sex characteristics. It is a culturally specific word which represents a form of intersectionality by identifying people as both Māori and queer.As a consequence of the increasing spread of the Internet, which has become a virtual place to construe identity and to promote the dissemination of ideas, a Multimodal Discourse Analysis is conducted on a corpus comprising 10 audiovisual texts fully retrieved from the web and exclusively produced by Māori takatāpui activists and/or containing Māori takatāpui activists’ self-narratives or claims.The corpus is analysed by applying a MMDA (Multimodal Discourse Analysis) framework based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotic framework (2006). The analysis is conducted also by taking into account Blommaert’s linguistic and ethnographic framework (2014).The findings of the analysis show the different strategies through which Māori identities are construed and conveyed reinforcing what the Māori scholar, Tuhiwai Smith (1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: Zed Books Limited, 28), calls “a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmenting and dying”.


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