“I Had to Rediscover Our Healthy Food”: An Indigenous Perspective on Coping with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is disproportionally prevalent among the Bedouin minority in Israel, with especially poor treatment outcomes compared to other indigenous groups. This study uses the perspective of the Bedouins themselves to explore the distinct challenges they face, as well as their coping strategies. The study is based on an interpretive interactionist analysis of 49 semi-structured interviews with Bedouin men and women. The findings of the analysis include three themes. First, physical inequality: the Bedouin community’s way of coping is mediated by the transition to a semi-urban lifestyle under stressful conditions that include the experience of land dispossession and the rupture of caring relationships. Second, social inequality: they experience an inaccessibility to healthcare due to economic problems and a lack of suitable informational resources. Third, unique resources for coping with T2DM: interviewees use elements of local culture, such as religious practices or small enclaves of traditional lifestyles, to actively cope with T2DM. This study suggests that there is a need to expand the concept of active coping to include indigenous culture-based ways of coping (successfully) with chronic illness.

Impact On Mental Health and Wellbeing in Indigenous Communities Due To Land Loss Resulting From Industrial Resource Development: Protocol for a Systematic Review

Background Indigenous Peoples are impacted by industrial development projects that take place on, or near, their communities. Existing literature on impacts of industrial projects on Indigenous Peoples primarily focus on physical health outcomes and rarely focus on the mental health impacts. To understand the full range of long-term and anticipated health impacts of industrial resource development on Indigenous communities, mental health impacts must be examined. It is well-established that there is a connection between the environment and Indigenous wellbeing, across interrelated dimensions of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. This systematic review will synthesize the evidence on the mental health impacts of land dispossession due to resource extractive projects on Indigenous communities. Looking at the mental health impacts of land dispossession from industrial resource development on Indigenous communities is relevant for a variety of reasons including planning, mitigation strategies, decision making, and negotiations. Methods This review includes an Indigenous Advisory Team and a team of Indigenous and settler scholars. The literature search will use the OVID interface to search Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, and Global Health databases. Non-indexed peer reviewed journals related to Indigenous health or research will be scanned. Books and book chapters will be identified in the Scopus and PsycINFO databases. The grey literature search will also include Google and be limited to reports published by government, academic, and non-profit organizations. Reference lists of key publications will be checked for additional relevant publications, including theses, dissertations, reports, and other articles not retrieved in the online searches. Additional sources may be recommended by team members. Included documents will focus on Indigenous Peoples in North America, South America, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Circumpolar regions, research that reports on mental health, and research that is based on land loss connected to dams, mines, agriculture, oil and gas. Literature that meets the inclusion criteria will be screened at the title/abstract and full text stages by two team members in Covidence. The included literature will be rated with a quality appraisal tool and information will be extracted by two team members; a consensus of information will be reached and be submitted for analysis. Discussion The evidence from this review is relevant for land use policy, health impact assessments, economic development, mental health service planning, and communities engaging in development projects. Systematic review registration: Registered in the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO; Registration number CRD42021253720)

The Bible and American Empire

The influence of the Bible in the shaping of American empire is rooted in the colonial era but is most clearly in evidence in the nineteenth century. In the spirit of postcolonial frameworks, this chapter seeks to lay bare some of the ways in which scriptural discourse undergirded the religious, political, and cultural power of Anglo-American settlers that legitimated the land dispossession of Native Americans and enslavement of African Americans. The first part of the chapter contrasts some alternative epistemologies about mapping land by colonial settlers, Native Americans, and Mormons. The second half of the chapter evaluates the racialized interpretations of the myth of Ham that supported the southern plantation “slaveocracy” and some alternative scriptural interpretations offered by African Americans in their aspirations for liberation from slavery and equal treatment in society.

Extraction, Indigenous Dispossession and State Power: Lessons from Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en Resistance

When Indigenous-led resistance to land- and water-killing projects threatens extraction, settler-colonial state and corporate institutions use security mechanisms to eliminate such “threats.” Using as case studies the pipeline conflicts of the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s (especially Unist’ot’en Camp’s) resistance to Coastal GasLink (CGL) in British Columbia (BC), Canada, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota, United States (US), this paper explores how fossil-fuel extraction interacts with critical infrastructure (CI) securitization to further Indigenous land dispossession. I argue that although the Wet’suwet’en and Standing Rock cases both involved the state and corporations criminalizing Indigenous resistance to extraction—to uphold fossil-fuel capital interests—the Wet’suwet’en case is unique because Canadian actors attempted to pacify resistance through symbolic appeals to Indigenous rights. Indigenous communities across the world are violently oppressed for peacefully defending their water, land, and communities. However, the motives and strategies of violence are unique for every colonial jurisdiction exercising violence, and for every Indigenous community impacted. I compare and contrast the rationales and strategiesof both cases through an in-depth content analysis of passages from TigerSwan surveillance and BC Supreme Court injunction documents. I discuss my findings within theoretical debates on dispossession and securitization.

Land and storytelling: Indigenous pathways towards healing, spiritual regeneration and resurgence

This article aims to contribute to discourses of healing, Indigenous resurgence and spiritual regeneration within the context of the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took place in Canada between 2008 and 2015. First, it considers to what extent the TRC’s restorative justice process can relate to Indigenous ways of conceptualising healing. Secondly, it reflects on the Commission’s exclusive focus on the Indian Residential School system and its legacies, which, according to many Indigenous scholars, overlooks a much broader and more complex history of colonisation, political domination, and land dispossession still ongoing. I underline that, from an Indigenous perspective, land plays a fundamental role to achieve healing, spiritual regeneration, and resurgence. In the last section, I move the discussion to the literary dimension as I explore Richard Wagamese’s 2012 novel Indian Horse. In particular, I argue that fiction, especially that fiction produced during the years of the Commission’s work, can be a crucial site for challenging the TRC’s restorative process and for bringing out the significance of storytelling and of an Indigenous deep sense of connection to the land as a source of learning, spiritual reclaiming, and healing.

Gambling with the Windigo: Theorizing Indigenous Casinos and Gambling in Canada

The legacy of colonialism in Canada manifests through land dispossession, structural violence and assimilative policies. Casinos are an anomaly emerging in Canada, becoming major economic engines, generating capital for housing, education, health, and language and cultural rejuvenation programs. On the other hand, the literature on Indigenous casinos raises crucial questions about compromised sovereignty, addiction, and neocolonial economic and political entrapment. This article theorises Indigenous casinos as a modern expression of the windigo. In Algonquian oral history, the windigo is a mythic giant cannibal. The underlying meaning of the windigo is the consumption of Indigenous peoples leading to illness and death. One can become a windigo and consume others, and one must always be cautious of this possibility. I propose casinos and Indigenous-provincial gambling revenue agreements are modern-day windigook (plural form of windigo). This framework provides an urgently needed new theorisation of casinos, grounded in Indigenous epistemology and ontology.

THE BLACK MODEL MINORITY

This paper interrogates the fundamental anti-Blackness of model minority discourses and how they are embedded in structures of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism through a genealogical examination of the contradictory history of the “Black model minority” within the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute’s Indian Program. This program educated both Black and Indigenous students throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and purposefully made racialized comparisons between groups. I read this history through present day scholarship on the model minority myth in relation to anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. I argue that the “Black model minority” at Hampton was predicated on upholding slavery through defining it as an educational project and that slavery and settler colonialism are intimately linked through pedagogy. This narrative of the Black model minority demonstrates that slavery and land dispossession were framed as pedagogic by industrial education institutions. Ultimately, this work questions the idea of “valuing education,” which is present in model minority discourses across many contexts, and how it is complicated by this history.

Suspension 2.0: Segregated Development, Financial Speculation, and Waiting among Resettled Peasants in Urban China

Since the late 2000s, many rural-to-urban migrants in China have lost their rural land to development plans, resettled in designated areas, and acquired formal urban residency. They stopped migrating, and have apparently ended their life of "suspension," namely protracted mobility. While most existing research literature on this population foregrounds the issue of land dispossession, this article argues that, following resettlement, these former migrants' lives can be more accurately characterized as a state of suspension instead of dispossession. Many resettled young adults, while having secured livelihood thanks to state compensation, are excluded from the technology- and capital-intensive developments to which they have lost their land. Some of these young people instead became petty speculators and rentier capitalists by liquidating their compensated assets through mortgages, private lending, rent, and other financial means. They are constantly waiting for the next investment opportunity and windfall gain. Although physically settled down and economically secure, they remain anxious and unsettled. They continue to orient their lives towards an elusive future rather than striving to transform the here and now, thus living in a state that I call "suspension 2.0."