Recounting coup as the recirculation of Indigenous vitality: A narrative alternative to historical trauma

Contemporary American Indians suffer from disproportionately high degrees of psychiatric distress. Mental health researchers and professionals, as well as American Indian community members, have consistently associated these disproportionate rates of distress with Indigenous historical experiences of European and Euro-American colonization. This emphasis on the impact of colonization and associated historical consciousness within tribal communities has occasioned increasingly widespread professional consideration of historical trauma among Indigenous peoples. In contrast to personal experiences of a traumatic nature, the discourse of Indigenous historical trauma (IHT) weds the concepts of “historical oppression” and “psychological trauma” to explain community-wide risk for adverse mental health outcomes originating from the depredations of past colonial subjugation through intergenerational transmission of vulnerability and risk. Long before the emergence of accounts of IHT, however, many American Indian communities prized a markedly different form of narrative: the coup tale. By way of illustration, I explore various historical functions of this speech genre by focusing on Aaniiih-Gros Ventre war narratives, including their role in conveying vitality or life. By virtue of their recognition and celebration of agency, mastery, and vitality, Aaniiih war stories functioned as the discursive antithesis of IHT. Through comparative consideration of the coup tale and the trauma narrative, I propose an alternative framework for cultivating Indigenous community “survivance” rather than vulnerability based on these divergent discursive practices.

Protagonists of War

Julián Romero, Sancho Dávila, Cristóbal de Mondragón, and Francisco de Valdés were prominent Spanish military commanders during the first decade of the Revolt in the Low Countries (1567–1577). Occupying key positions in this conflict, they featured as central characters in various war narratives and episodical descriptions of the events they were involved in, ranging from chronicles, poems, theatre plays, engravings, and songs to news pamphlets. To this day, they still figure as protagonists of historical novels: brave heroes in some, cruel oppressors in others. Yet personal, first-hand accounts also exist. Archival research into the letters written by these commanders now makes it possible to include their perspectives and the way they describe their own experiences. Looking through the eyes of four Spanish commanders, Protagonists of War provides the reader with an alternative reading of the Revolt, contrasting the subjective experiences of these protagonists with fictionalised perceptions.

Protagonists of War

Julián Romero, Sancho Dávila, Cristóbal de Mondragón, and Francisco de Valdés were prominent Spanish military commanders during the first decade of the Revolt in the Low Countries (1567–1577). Occupying key positions in this conflict, they featured as central characters in various war narratives and episodical descriptions of the events they were involved in, ranging from chronicles, poems, theatre plays, engravings, and songs to news pamphlets. To this day, they still figure as protagonists of historical novels: brave heroes in some, cruel oppressors in others. Yet personal, first-hand accounts also exist. Archival research into the letters written by these commanders now makes it possible to include their perspectives and the way they describe their own experiences. Looking through the eyes of four Spanish commanders, Protagonists of War provides the reader with an alternative reading of the Revolt, contrasting the subjective experiences of these protagonists with fictionalised perceptions.

Return to Vietnam

Between 1981 and 2016, thousands of American and Australian Vietnam War veterans returned to Việt Nam. This comparative, transnational oral history offers the first historical study of these return journeys. It shows how veterans returned in search of resolution, or peace, manifesting in shifting nostalgic visions of 'Vietnam.' Different national war narratives shaped their returns: Australians followed the 'Anzac' pilgrimage tradition, whereas for Americans the return was an anti-war act. Veterans met former enemies, visited battlefields, mourned friends, found new relationships, and addressed enduring legacies of war. Many found their memories of war eased by witnessing Việt Nam at peace. Yet this peacetime reality also challenged veterans' wartime connection to Vietnamese spaces. The place they were nostalgic for was Vietnam, a space in war memory, not Việt Nam, the country. Veterans drew from wartime narratives to negotiate this displacement, performing nostalgic practices to reclaim their sense of belonging.

Coloniality, just war & carceral injustice in Brazil

The Portuguese empire brought inescapable violence to the indigenous communities of Brazil and to those it enslaved. Throughout the centuries of colonial subjugation, driven by the Iberian monarchical traditions of hierarchy, militarism and moral crusade, ‘just war’ narratives were employed to legitimate the use of violent legal and extra-legal measures against enslaved peoples and others deemed unruly or rebellious and a threat to colonial order. Two centuries after independence, Brazil remains at war with its ‘internal enemies’. Its justice practices continue to be characterised by colonial rationalisations. This paper illustrates the contemporary coloniality inherent in the carceral system from the moment of detention pre-trial through sentencing and imprisonment.

Wars in Review: Subaltern Methodologies in Conflict Studies

This essay reviews four disparate studies on war narratives: ‘Right to Mourn’ by Suhi Choi (2019), ‘Fly Until You Die’ by Chia Youyee Vang (2019), ‘Soldiers in Revolt’ by Maggie Dwyer (2018), ‘Breaking the Binaries in Security Studies’ by Ayelet Harel-Shalev and Shir Daphna-Tekoah (2019). The studies take a ‘view-from-below’ approach and build new theoretical frameworks that not only expose ‘the price of war’, but also investigate how ‘subaltern subjects’ subjects view their place and participation in the conflict and resist over-arching homogenous interpretations. The studies respectively focus on post-war remembrance in South Korea, oral histories of Hmong pilots, mutinying in West African states, and the experiences of female combatants in the Israeli Defence Forces. Although dissimilar in terms of geographic spaces, actors and even methodology, the authors all commonly challenge established binaries within conflict studies that assume a separation of the ‘military’ and the ‘civilian’, the prevalence of power-hierarchies within armed forces, and the supposed passiveness of powerless actors in conflict. This essay reviews these books as not individual publications that contribute to the literature of their own disciplines, but as interactive theoretical frameworks that not only dispute prevailing theories of war but also present new understandings on how these narratives interrelate.