Re-peopling in a settler-colonial context: the intersection of Indigenous laws of adoption with Canadian immigration law

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-353
Author(s):  
Amar Bhatia

This article examines the intersection of Indigenous and Canadian ways of making and maintaining relations through the specific examples of adoption and immigration. Canada and all Indigenous societies assert the authority to re-people themselves. Unlike Canada, Indigenous peoples must do so in the face of ongoing settler colonialism. I argue that Indigenous peoples and nations have authority to regulate these matters under Indigenous laws and systems of treaty relations. However, Canadian laws and policies have served to obscure this authority. I argue that non-metaphorical decolonization requires the continued exercise of Indigenous authority over “peopling” powers. These powers necessarily include authority over adoption at societal, familial, and individual levels via, respectively, ongoing treaty relations and customary membership. Adoption has formed part of this resistance but remains limited by Canadian sovereignty and the state’s assertions of control over borders and immigration.

Author(s):  
Stephanie Nohelani Teves

"Aloha" is at once the most significant and the most misunderstood word in the Indigenous Hawaiian lexicon. For Kānaka Maoli people, the concept of "aloha" is a representation and articulation of their identity, despite its misappropriation and commandeering by non-Native audiences in the form of things like the "hula girl" of popular culture. Considering the way aloha is embodied, performed, and interpreted in Native Hawaiian literature, music, plays, dance, drag performance, and even ghost tours from the twentieth century to the present, Stephanie Nohelani Teves shows that misunderstanding of the concept by non-Native audiences has not prevented the Kānaka Maoli from using it to create and empower community and articulate its distinct Indigenous meaning. While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Youdelis ◽  
Justine Townsend ◽  
Jonaki Bhattacharyya ◽  
Faisal Moola ◽  
J.B. Fobister

Extractive capitalism has long been the driving force of settler colonialism in Canada, and continues to threaten the sovereignty, lands and waters of Indigenous nations across the country. While ostensibly counterposed to extractivism, state-led conservation has similarly served to alienate Indigenous peoples from their territories, often for capitalist gain. Recognizing the inadequacy of the colonial-capitalist conservation paradigm to redress the biodiversity crisis, scholars in political ecology increasingly call for radical, convivial alternatives rooted in equity and justice. Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) are one such alternative, representing a paradigm shift from colonial to Indigenous-led conservation that reinvigorates Indigenous knowledge and governance systems. Since the Indigenous Circle of Experts finalized a report in 2018 on how IPCAs could contribute to Canada's conservation targets and reconciliation efforts, an increasing number of Indigenous stewardship initiatives across the country have been declared as IPCAs. These initiatives are assertions of Indigenous sovereignty, inherent rights, and responsibilities to their territories, as well as movements to rejuvenate biocultural conservation. Although Canada is supporting IPCAs through certain initiatives, the country's extractivist development model along with jurisdictional inconsistencies are undermining the establishment and long-term viability of many IPCAs. This paper explores two instances where Indigenous governments have established, or are establishing, IPCAs as novel strategies for land and water protection within long histories of resistance to colonial-capitalist exploitation. We argue that there is a paradoxical tension in Canadian conservation whereby Indigenous-led conservation is promoted in theory, while being undermined in practice. IPCAs offer glimpses of productive, alternative sustainabilities that move away from the colonial-capitalist paradigm, but are being challenged by governments and industries that still fail to respect Indigenous jurisdiction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-351
Author(s):  
Paloma E. Villegas ◽  
Patricia Landolt ◽  
Victoria Freeman ◽  
Joe Hermer ◽  
Ranu Basu ◽  
...  

The paper considers how the logic of settler colonialism, the active and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, shapes scholarship on migration, race and citizenship in Canada. It draws on the insights of settler colonial theory and critiques of methodological nationalism to do so. The concept of differential inclusion and assemblages methodology are proposed as a way to understand the relationship between Indigeneity and migration in a settler colonial context. The paper develops this conceptual proposal through an analysis of a single place over time: Scarborough, Ontario. Authors present portraits of Scarborough, Ontario, Canada to understand how migration and Indigenous sovereignty are narrated and regulated in convergent and divergent ways. Together, the portraits examine historical stories, media discourses, photography and map archives, fieldwork and interviews connected to Scarborough. They reveal how the differential inclusion of migrant, racialized and Indigenous peoples operates through processes of invisibilization and hypervisibilization, fixity and erasure, and memorialization. They also illustrate moments of disruption that work to unsettle settler colonial dispossession.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-195
Author(s):  
Shirley A. Jackson

In 2017, Oregon passed House Bill 2845 requiring Ethnic Studies curriculum in grades K–12. It was the first state in the nation to do so. The bill passed almost fifty years after the founding of the country’s first Ethnic Studies department. The passage of an Ethnic Studies bill in a state that once banned African Americans and removed Indigenous peoples from their land requires further examination. In addition, the bill mandates that Ethnic Studies curriculum in Oregon's schools includes “social minorities,” such as Jewish and LGBTQ+ populations which makes the bill even more remarkable. As such, it is conceivable for some observers, a watered-down version of its perceived original intent—one that focuses on racial and ethnic minorities. Similarly, one can draw analogies to the revision of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 when it included women as a protected group. Grounded in a socio-political history that otherwise would not have been included, this essay examines the productive and challenging aspect of HB 2845. Framing the bill so it includes racial, ethnic, and social minorities solved the problem of a host of bills that may not have passed on their own merit while simultaneously and ironically making it easier to pass similar bills.


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Epongse Nkealah ◽  
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji

Ideas of nationalisms as masculine projects dominate literary texts by African male writers. The texts mirror the ways in which gender differentiation sanctions nationalist discourses and in turn how nationalist discourses reinforce gender hierarchies. This article draws on theoretical insights from the work of Anne McClintock and Elleke Boehmer to analyse two plays: Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon by Bole Butake and Gilbert Doho and Hard Choice by Sunnie Ododo. The article argues that women are represented in these two plays as having an ambiguous relationship to nationalism. On the one hand, women are seen actively changing the face of politics in their societies, but on the other hand, the means by which they do so reduces them to stereotypes of their gender.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 101-110
Author(s):  
N. N. ILYSHEVA ◽  
◽  
E. V. KARANINA ◽  
G. P. LEDKOV ◽  
E. V. BALDESKU ◽  
...  

The article deals with the problem of achieving sustainable development. The purpose of this study is to reveal the relationship between the components of sustainable development, taking into account the involvement of indigenous peoples in nature conservation. Climate change makes achieving sustainable development more difficult. Indigenous peoples are the first to feel the effects of climate change and play an important role in the environmental monitoring of their places of residence. The natural environment is the basis of life for indigenous peoples, and biological resources are the main source of food security. In the future, the importance of bioresources will increase, which is why economic development cannot be considered independently. It is assumed that the components of resilience are interrelated and influence each other. To identify this relationship, a model for the correlation of sustainable development components was developed. The model is based on the methods of correlation analysis and allows to determine the tightness of the relationship between economic development and its ecological footprint in the face of climate change. The correlation model was tested on the statistical materials of state reports on the environmental situation in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug – Yugra. The approbation revealed a strong positive relationship between two components of sustainable development of the region: economy and ecology.


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.


Author(s):  
BARBARA ARNEIL

Using two recently published folios by Jeremy Bentham, I draw out a fundamental but little-analyzed connection between pauperism and both domestic and settler colonialism in opposition to imperialism in his thought. The core theoretical contribution of this article is to draw a distinction between a colonial, internal, and productive form of power that claims to improve people and land from within, which Bentham defends, and an imperial, external, and repressive form of power that dominates or rules over people from above and afar, that he rejects. Inherent in colonialism and the power unleashed by it are specific and profoundly negative implications in practice for the poor and disabled of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subject to domestic colonialism and indigenous peoples subject to settler colonialism from first contact until today. I conclude Bentham is best understood as a pro-colonialist and anti-imperialist thinker.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 735-754
Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil

AbstractIn this address, I examine the lexical, geographic, temporal and philosophical origins of two key concepts in modern political thought: colonies and statistics. Beginning with the Latin word colonia, I argue that the modern ideology of settler colonialism is anchored in the claim of “improvement” of both people and land via agrarian labour in John Locke's labour theory of property in seventeenth-century America, through which he sought to provide an ideological justification for both the assimilation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This same ideology of colonialism was turned inward a century later by Sir John Sinclair to justify domestic colonies on “waste” land in Scotland—specifically Caithness (the county within which my own grandparents were tenant farmers). Domestic colonialism understood as “improvement” of people (the “idle” poor and mentally ill and disabled) through engagement in agrarian labour on waste land inside explicitly named colonies within the borders of one's own country was first championed not only by Sinclair but also his famous correspondent, Jeremy Bentham, in England. Sinclair simultaneously coined the word statistics and was the first to use it in the English language. He defined it as the scientific gathering of mass survey data to shape state policies. Bentham embraced statistics as well. In both cases, statistics were developed and deployed to support their domestic colony schemes by creating a benchmark and roadmap for the improvement of people and land as well as a tool to measure the colony's capacity to achieve both over time. I conclude that settler colonialism along with the intertwined origins of domestic colonies and statistics have important implications for the study of political science in Canada, the history of colonialism as distinct from imperialism in modern political thought and the role played by intersecting colonialisms in the Canadian polity.


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