“The Nation’s Hoop is Broken and Scattered”

The bulk of American Indian resistance to Euro-American colonialism and territorial cessions took two primary forms: offensive military action and unsuccessful political maneuvers in the form of petitions to state and federal authorities. Religion was sometimes enlisted to make a case against displacement from tribal homelands or against the pressures to assimilate to an alien way of life, but the appeals were to Christian senses of charity and decency—not apocalypticism. For many of the Indians who surrendered to inevitable defeat and submitted to living on “reservations” in the West, traditional religions provided a means to cope, but they slowly gave way to Christianity. The idea of pan-Indian unity proved too compelling to fade away entirely, and in the 1870s there emerged two would-be messiahs who each predicted not just the restoration of ancient Indian landholdings and power, but the apocalyptic wiping of the white race from all Indian lands, past and present.

Genocide and the Hispanic-American Dilemma

The reasoning behind Hispanic-American colonization was that the indigenous people were rational vassals, who could be embraced by Christianity, and must, therefore, be protected and well-treated, though judiciously recruited to serve the interests of the Spanish Empire. Eyewitnesses and studies conducted on the Indian issue since the early sixteenth century found that the preservation-exploitation policy gradually became extremely destructive. Raphael Lemkin, in an unpublished study on Hispanic-American colonialism, was the first to call its damaging consequences genocide. The objective of this article is to explore the historical reliability of Lemkin’s controversial claim, and how it might tally with the Spanish Crown’s manifested caring approach toward the Indians. The study is based on a broad range of documents, many of them personal and unpublished until recently, making these sources highly reliable. We believe that the research will shed light on the historical dilemma of Hispanic-American colonization.

“Poore Soules”

This chapter explores the emergence of indentured servitude in Virginia in the late 1610s. It focuses upon the Virginia Company’s increasing efforts to transport vagrants and paupers, who were often children, to the colony to serve as bound laborers. The chapter traces the roots of this policy to the political and social theories about commonwealth in Jacobean England and to the institution of pauper apprenticeship. It also uncovers the practical way in which the transportation of children and vagrants was organized in London and the ways in which it met with resistance from both local leaders and those facing transportation. The chapter offers a newly detailed analysis of the foundations of the system of bound English labor that became so critical to the development of seventeenth-century American colonialism.

To Dwell and To Reinhabit: Kiana Davenports’s House of Many Gods as Bioregional Literature

Environmental degradation has become a pivotal issue in Hawai’i nowadays. The policies of United States’government and military has shaped the Hawai’ian ecology. Through the process of ecological imperialism,started from the beginning of American colonialism, both the Hawai’ian’s landscape and their connection withthe environment is disrupted. Modern Hawai’ian ecology nowadays is a postcolonial ecology, which was, andstill is molded by the American imperial power. As a product of colonialism, Hawai’ians’ have becomealienated with their ancestral traditions, especially regarding interrelation between human and non-human.Taking cues from Lawrence Buell’s assertion that environmental crisis is a crisis of the imagination, modernHawai’ian literature tries to reorient human–non human relationship from indigenous Hawai’ianepistemology. As seen in Kiana Davenport’s the House of Many Gods, traditional Hawai’ian perspective isreimagined to reterritorialize Hawai’ians in their previous environmental outlook, before the arrival of theAmericans. This study argues that by several bioregional concepts such as dwelling, and reinhabit, KianaDavenport’s the House of Many Gods can be stated as a bioregional literature.