scholarly journals Settler-Colonial Violence and the ‘Wounded Aboriginal Child’: Reading Alexis Wright with Irene Watson (and Giorgio Agamben)

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Joanne Faulkner
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
Aboriginal Child ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
A Site ◽  
Aboriginal Children

Drawing on Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book and Irene Watson’s expansive critique of Australian law, this article locates within the settler–Australian imaginary the figure of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ as a site of contest between two rival sovereign logics: First Nations sovereignty (grounded in a spiritual connection to the land over tens of millennia) and settler sovereignty (imposed on Indigenous peoples by physical, legal and existential violence for 230 years). Through the conceptual landscape afforded by these writers, the article explores how the arenas of juvenile justice and child protection stage an occlusion of First Nations sovereignty, as a disappearing of the ‘Aboriginality’ of Aboriginal children under Australian settler law. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality is also drawn on to analyse this sovereign difference through the figures of Terra Nullius and ‘the child’.

“DISCOVERING” INDIGENOUS PEOPLES: ACCOUNTING AND THE MACHINERY OF EMPIRE

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Neu
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Central Place ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Cost Cutting ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Military ◽  
Historical Antecedents

This study examines the historical usage of accounting as a technology of government within the domain of government-indigenous peoples relations in Canada. Our thesis is that accounting was salient within the chain of circumstances that influenced the discovery/identification of indigenous peoples as a governable population. By the 1830s, accounting techniques had come to occupy a central place in the military machinery of empire. When the cost-cutting and reformist sentiments prevalent in Britain during the early 1800s encouraged the reconsideration of the military costs of empire, accounting techniques were one of the methods used in the attempt to interrogate military expenditures. Partially as a result of these interrogations, indigenous peoples came to be identified as a site for cost cutting by British bureaucrats. However, it was at the level of the colonial administration in the Upper and Lower Canadas that the competing demands of “government” encouraged indigenous peoples to be viewed as a potential site for government. And it was once this “discovery” was made that accounting and other techniques were utilized in the attempt to turn indigenous peoples into a governable population. This study contributes to our understanding of accounting by documenting the ways in which techniques such as accounting were central to the military machinery of empire and British imperialism. The study also contributes to our understanding of the historical antecedents that shape current-day usages of accounting as a technology of government within the domain of government-First Nations relations.

Divided Against Itself

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Muldoon
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Governing Institutions

This chapter examines how the prior occupation of Indigenous peoples compromises the acquisition of sovereignty over Australia and undermines the integrity of its governing institutions. It explains why the principle of terra nullius provides an unstable basis for the polity and how an adherence to conventional notions of sovereignty prevents it from developing a lawful relationship with First Nations. The chapter concludes by arguing for a more relational conception of political community in which Indigenous sovereignty is not suppressed out of fear of division.

scholarly journals Cannabis Use Among Aboriginal Youth in the Non-Aboriginal Child Protection Services System

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Waechter ◽  
Eman Leung ◽  
Christine Wekerle ◽  
Marlyn Bennett ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Child Protection ◽  
Protective Factor ◽  
Cannabis Use ◽  
Risky Behaviour ◽  
Aboriginal Youth ◽  
Child Protection Services ◽  
Aboriginal Child ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aboriginal Children ◽  
The Relationship

The social, cultural and political contexts of vulnerability need to be considered in defining, understanding, and reducing substance abuse among maltreated youth with an Aboriginal background (MacNeil, 2008; Tatz, 1999). Aboriginal cultures tend to incorporate an ideology of collectivism that manifests in shared childrearing responsibilities within aboriginal families and communities (e.g., Dilworth-Anderson & Marshall, 1996). As such, Aboriginal children may identify with multiple and equally important attachment figures, and be more accepting of multiple caring adult guardians who can direct them away from risky behaviour (Christensen & Manson, 2001). We examined the relationship between cannabis use and reported identification with a caseworker among youth-identified Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal adolescents randomly drawn from the active caseload of a large urban non-Aboriginal Child Protection Services (CPS) system. While an Aboriginal-specific child welfare agency exists in this catchment area, youth need to be identified as Aboriginal to be involved in that system and some youth with Aboriginal heritage inevitably end up in non-Aboriginal CPS agencies. There were no significant differences in rates of maltreatment, trauma symptomatology, or overall cannabis use between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth in this study. However, Aboriginal youth who reported a more negative (i.e., low) identification with their caseworker were five times more likely to use cannabis in the past 12 months compared to Aboriginal youth who reported a more positive (i.e., medium-high) identification with their caseworker. These results suggest that having a moderate-to-high positive identification with caseworker may be a protective factor in regard to abstinence from cannabis use among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth in the non-Aboriginal CPS system.

A Precarious Confluence: Neoliberalism, Race, and Water Insecurity

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mascarenhas
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Water Insecurity ◽  
The Core ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Racial Projects ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Cities

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.

scholarly journals Racial Profiling, Surveillance and Over-Policing: The Over-Incarceration of Young First Nations Males in Australia

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 68
Author(s):  
Grace O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Juvenile Justice System ◽  
Racial Profiling ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Young Males ◽  
Clear Cut

Historically, countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand have witnessed an increased over-representation of minority groups who are exposed to the criminal justice system. For many years in Australia, young First Nations males have been over-represented in the juvenile justice system in all states and territories. Many of these young males have disengaged from their schooling early, some through deliberate exclusion from the education system and others by choice. However, the choices for many young First Nations males may not be as clear cut as first might seem. This paper shows that over-representation in the juvenile justice system may be as a direct result of racial profiling, surveillance and over-policing of First Nations peoples within Australia. The literature addresses the ways in which young First Nations males experience these phenomena from an early age, and the long-term effects and consequences that can arise from these occurrences. An analysis of the current research both internationally and within Australia is thus conducted.

scholarly journals The Colonial Project of Gender (and Everything Else)

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Sandy O’Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Religious Ideals ◽  
And Gender

The gender binary, like many colonial acts, remains trapped within socio-religious ideals of colonisation that then frame ongoing relationships and restrict the existence of Indigenous peoples. In this article, the colonial project of denying difference in gender and gender diversity within Indigenous peoples is explored as a complex erasure casting aside every aspect of identity and replacing it with a simulacrum of the coloniser. In examining these erasures, this article explores how diverse Indigenous gender presentations remain incomprehensible to the colonial mind, and how reinstatements of kinship and truth in representation fundamentally supports First Nations’ agency by challenging colonial reductions. This article focuses on why these colonial practices were deemed necessary at the time of invasion, and how they continue to be forcefully applied in managing Indigenous peoples into a colonial structure of family, gender, and everything else.

scholarly journals E-scaping apartheid: Digital ventures of Zionist settler colonialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110557
Author(s):  
Ivana Bevilacqua
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Massive Data ◽  
Data Traffic ◽  
International Media ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
A Site ◽  
Geospatial Mapping

The ongoing “Intifada of Unity” against Israel's settler colonialism has resuscitated discussions about the liberatory potential of digital emancipation due to the massive data traffic circulation through its international media coverage. In fact, in a process that has intensified since the outbreak of the global pandemic at the very least, social media platforms and geospatial mapping tools have been subverted from more mundane uses, developing into new forums for organizing, imagining, and practicing more just futures. Yet, the centrality of infrastructure both as a means of digital extractivism and as a site for rupture and resistance demonstrates that the path toward new trajectories of e-scaping cannot be conceived as a virtual venture directed at designing alternative volatile geographies alone, but should always involve facing and challenging power in its everyday forms. By investigating the materiality of cyber colonialism, this paper explores the entanglement between imperial cartography and digital map-making which has reduced Palestinians and their space to a pixelated terra nullius, sanitized from the paradigmatic sites of the occupation and overwritten by a pseudo-biblical narrative that aims to legitimize the re-indigenization of the Zionist settlers . At the same time, it unpacks online processes of hyper-visibility through which Palestine suddenly materializes as a signifier for its dangerous nature, yet fragmented and enclaved by an intangible and discretional regime of im/mobility enforced through the neglect of permits and visas, as well as by the material constraints posed by apartheid roads, barriers, checkpoints, gates, and walls. Finally, it retraces the rationality of Israeli violence diluted through the technical means of built environment, infrastructure, machines and algorithms which, on one hand, contributes to the de-development of Palestine and the censorship of its people, and on the other, normalizes Israel’s position in the region due to its perceived technological superiority vis-à-vis its neighboring counterparts.

scholarly journals Bringing Ethics Review Home to Cowichan: Indigenizing Ethics Review in British Columbia, Canada

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cowichan Tribes
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Research Ethics ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Preterm Births ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Ethics Review ◽  
Research Ethics Review ◽  
United Nations Declaration

Cowichan Tribes’ territory, located in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, is experiencing an alarmingly high rate of preterm births compared to the national average of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. In response, and in partnership with the First Nations Health Authority (FNHA), Cowichan Tribes is in the first year of a 3-year study to investigate causes. Cowichan Tribes’ Elders and community members are guiding the study to ensure it follows Cowichan Tribes’ research processes and to support self- determination in research. Furthermore, as a way to enhance reconciliation, Elders and community members guided an on-site ethics review on Cowichan Tribes territory. This article outlines the collaborative, in-person research ethics review process that Cowichan Tribes, Island Health, and FNHA completed on August 21, 2019. The purpose of this article is to provide suggestions other First Nations could use when conducting a research ethics review, and to explain how this process aligns with the principles of ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP®), the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and above all, the Cowichan snuw’uy’ulh (teachings from Elders).

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