Indigenous Legal Principles: A Reparation Path for Canada’s Cultural Genocide

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Canada’s justice system and the lawyers that operate within it are ill prepared to comprehend or reconcile the relationship between colonial legal systems and indigenous systems of law. They do not get training in indigenous law, so vital to crafting appropriate reparations for the wrongs justified by colonial practices and prejudices, and that could open doors to reconciliation and healing. The example used in this article to illustrate how the two systems of law could successfully interact is the historic Indian Residential School Settlement – the largest settlement in Canadian history, almost entirely based on Indigenous law and legal theory, and harmonized in part with principles of the common law of tort. The Indian Residential School Settlement proves that in post-colonial societies western frameworks lack the tools necessary to remediate injuries motivated by systemic discrimination, which, in this case, was cultural genocide. Different perspectives and legal theories are necessary to craft appropriate reparations and the processes used to achieve them. Unless indigenous laws, traditions, and practices are central to the design and implementation of reparations, state responses to the cultural genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples in Canada will not open pathways to either healing or reconciliation.     

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Deuteronomy and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

Deuteronomy portrays itself as Moses's speech at the edge of the promised land. This article examines the book's attitudes towards the other within this rhetorical setting by concentrating on the indigenous peoples, also in contrast to those outside the land of Israel. It is pointed out that the ideology of Deuteronomy is very exclusive, and its treatment of indigenous peoples compatible with ideologies that accompany genocides and conquests. Mitigating such exclusive thinking can serve as a model for human interactions today, and this would also seem to be compatible with the overall thinking of the New Testament canonical documents.     

Plant Cultivation on the Northwest Coast: A Reconsideration

Conventional wisdom suggests that the peoples of the Northwest Coast did not cultivate plants prior to European contact. Considerable evidence suggests the contrary, however, particularly the well-documented practice of estuarine root gardening among the Kwakwaka'wakw and other indigenous peoples of the region. These gardens were maintained through transplanting, weeding, selective harvesting, soil modifications, and the production of mounds or low terrace-like structures within individually demarcated root plots. The scholarly oversight of these practices can be attributed to a number of biases rooted in the colonial and academic agendas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In turn, scholarly legitimation of the region's “nonagricultural” label has served to undermine indigenous land claims on estuarine sites into the present day.     

The Predicament Of Ideas In Culture: Translation And Historiography

Rather than a simple transfer of words or texts from one language to another, on the model of the bilingual dictionary, translation has become understood as a translingual act of transcoding cultural material — a complex act of communication. Much recent work on translation in history grows out of interest in the effects of European colonialism, especially within Asian studies, where interest has been driven by the contrast between the experiences of China and Japan, which were never formally colonized, and the alternative examples of peoples without strong, centralized states — those of the Indian subcontinent and the Tagalog in the Philippines — who were colonized by European powers. This essay reviews several books published in recent years, one group of which share the general interpretation that colonial powers forced their subjects to "translate" their local language, sociality, or culture into the terms of the dominant colonial power: because the colonial power controls representation and forces its subjects to use the colonial language, it is in a position to construct the forms of indigenous and subject identity. The other books under review here are less concerned with power in colonial situations than with the fact of different languages, cultures, or practices and the work of "translating" between the two — particularly the efforts of indigenous agents to introduce European ideas and institutions to their respective peoples.     

Shifting Sands: Towards an Anthropological Praxis

This paper reflects on some of the dilemmas within my shifting roles over the last twenty years as helper/friend/member of the Katherine Indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia and then, as anthropologist. During this period, indigenous calls for land rights have been increasingly interpreted in the terms of ‘bourgeois law’ (Collier et al. 1995). Indigenous identities have become the focus of intense public scrutiny as they define eligibility for scarce resources. Fighting over the scraps of what was once a wholistic indigenous landscape, some of Australia's indigenous peoples have begun to turn upon each other, in the struggle for recognition. Anthropologists as the scribes of indigenous identities are placed in invidious positions, and are easily accused of participating in (neo)colonial endeavours. This paper takes some small steps towards locating an anthropological praxis in this land rights/native title arena of power.     

Goldsmithing traditions and innovations in colonial Colombia: an analytical study of crucibles from Santa Cruz de Mompox

SUMMARY: The 16th-century Spanish conquest of Colombia brought new technologies that altered and interacted with native metalworking traditions. In the colonial village of Santa Cruz de Mompox, renowned because of its goldsmithing tradition, indigenous groups and Spaniards experienced momentous encounters of individuals, metallurgical technologies and knowledge. However, little is known concerning colonial metallurgy, its continuities and changes with regards to the pre-Columbian period. Here we present the analytical characterization of five crucibles recovered in Mompox, together with discussion of relevant archival evidence. We find evidence for the local manufacture of crucibles as well as for the melting of unrefined gold dust, tumbaga (gold-copper-silver alloys) and silver. These metallurgical practices illustrate some likely illegal activities, continuities with pre-Columbian traditions in the use of tumbagas, and the Spanish-led introduction of silver in northern Colombia. It is argued that metallurgical remains can be informative of wider social and economic negotiations that engaged indigenous peoples, mestizos and Spaniards, which are critical to understand the configuration of the colonial reality.     

On the Margins of Colonialism: Contact Zones in the Aru Islands

ABSTRACT

The Aru Islands are situated at the eastern end of the Indian Ocean, in the southern Moluccas. They are also one of the easternmost places in the world where Islam and Christianity gained a (limited) foothold in the early-modern period, and marked the outer reach of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The present article discusses Western-Arunese relations in the seventeenth century in terms of economic exchange and political networks. Although Aru society was stateless and relatively egalitarian and eluded strong colonial control up to the late colonial period, it was still a source of natural products, such as pearls, birds-of-paradise, turtle-shells, destined for luxury consumption in Asia and Europe. Aru society was thus positioned in a global economic network while leaving it largely ungoverned. Colonial archival data yield important information about the indigenous responses to European attempts to control the flow of goods. They both support Roy Ellen’s claim that the economic flows in eastern Indonesia extended beyond the control of VOC, and provide parallels to James Scott’s thesis of state-avoidance among the ethnic minorities in mainland Southeast Asia.     

Talking about others: archaeologists,indigenous peoples and heritage in Argentina

Abstract

In the process of creating the Argentinean nation, the indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their lands and their sacred sites. The indigenous past was therefore neglected in a nation that was thought to be formed by European immigrants. As a result, pre-Hispanic heritage was considered part of the public domain of the State and a subject of scientific enquiry. In the last few decades, legal and political changes have encouraged indigenous peoples' claims on heritage issues. The aim of this paper is to analyse a number of contested heritage issues in which indigenous communities were involved, as well as a few examples in which archaeologists, authorities and indigenous groups have succeeded in building a dialogue regarding the care of specific archaeological sites. These issues are further discussed in the context of the current socio-political and economic crisis in Argentina.     

Indigenous management of teak woodland in Zimbabwe, 1850–1900

African forests provide the focus for a growing body of historical research. This study draws on economic and environmental history approaches in exploring the exploitation and conservation of woodland, respectively. The main focus of the investigation is the consumption–conservation relationship between pre-colonial African people and the forest zone, an interaction viewed by colonial foresters in Zimbabwe as wasteful and based on religious superstition. In spite of the open criticism of rapacious timber cutting by mining companies and poor farming techniques by settlers, colonial perceptions over time stressed the notion of ‘improvident Africans’ as the prime cause of environmental destruction, in particular, deforestation and erosion. Within the African context, historical forest literature is bound to reject colonial misconceptions regarding the scope of indigenous woodland management. Customary forest practice in the Zambezi teak or Baikiea woodland points towards a better understanding on the subject, informed by a wide range of sources; oral tradition, missionary records, travel accounts and colonial documents. In reconstructing pre-colonial resource use from interviews and archival data, this study adopts a multi-source approach, while guarding against an overly romanticised view of indigenous practice.     

Constructing places for the market: The case of Newcastle,NSW

Abstract

Cities with a heritage of heavy industry, such as Newcastle (NSW), face an insecure future as they undergo economic restructuring. The identities of cities are being refashioned by entrepreneurial urban governments, as part of a three‐pronged attempt to market their territories. A social construction approach reveals the problematic nature of these symbolic reconstructions, their partiality, the reduction of heritage to a commodity, and the eliding of socio‐economic disadvantage. The new post‐industrial identity for Newcastle disinherits working people, ignores the local indigenous peoples, and trivialises the role of women. The richly layered urban landscape and historically constructed narratives – the local heritage – have been cynically appropriated and transformed for the purposes of place marketing. The rhetoric of post‐industrialism conceals poverty and alienation, and the associated physical restructurings are displacing service‐dependent populations.     

Contact and Missionization at Tayasal,Petén,Guatemala

Abstract

Until their conquest by the Spanish in 1697, many Itza Maya occupied a large village at Tayasal, Petén, Guatemala. After the conquest, two missions were built there. The village and missions are located within 2 km of modern Flores, which was once Nojpetén, the Itza capital, and later the Spanish presidio (fortified administrative center). Our excavations uncovered the San Bernabé mission on the Tayasal peninsula and defined the Late Postclassic-period (a.d. 1400–1525) occupation of the site. San Bernabé was established in the early 18th century as part of Spanish efforts to control indigenous populations in Petén. Our research demonstrates that the Late Postclassic settlement was larger than indicated by previous research and supported a relatively large ceremonial architectural group. Evidence of indigenous practices was recovered from deposits within the mission, though many elements of Itza religion found in the Late Postclassic group were absent from the mission settlement. These data provide additional evidence of religious syncretism in colonial situations.     

Whose politics and which science: beyond the colonial in liberal political theory

ABSTRACT

This article examines liberal political theory’s limits and possibilities in relation to indigenous self-determination. It shows that while the liberal tradition has provided theoretical rationale to the colonial project it is also equipped to rationalise a politics of substantive indigenous inclusion. The article introduces the recourses that exist within liberal theory for non-colonial interpretations of citizenship, democracy and sovereignty. It shows how these concepts may be interpreted to contribute to a liberal theory of indigeneity as a theory emphasising independent indigenous authority on the one hand and culturally contextualised and substantive participation in the politics of the state on the other.     

Unsettling Time: Persistence and Memory in Spanish Colonial Peru

In this paper, I explore the politics of memory during the Toledan reforms—a series of ambitious administrative changes legislated in colonial Peru between 1569 and 1581, by viceroy Francisco de Toledo. At the center of Toledo’s project was an initiative to resettle the entire native population of the audiencias of Lima and Charcas into a series of planned towns called reducciones. This movement—reducción—sought to transform Andean indigenous peoples into subjects of the Catholic Church and the Spanish crown through a series of explicitly spatial operations, including regional population nucleation and settlement planning. But the terms of these changes were also temporal: as reducción shaped landscapes and built environments, it also sought to transform indigenous historicity, bringing native peoples into the Era of Christ and carefully regulating the social institutions and practices by which they accounted for their pasts. The Toledan reforms therefore present a clear example of one empire’s attempts to subjugate conquered peoples through mnemonic practices. Yet archaeological research in one corner of the viceroyalty—Peru’s Zaña valley—suggests that the story of how indigenous memories were actually shaped during the course of resettlement and its aftermath was far from straightforward. To understand these transformations, I argue that we must explore not only the short-term dialectic of Spanish designs and their indigenous responses, but also the “afterlives” of reduccion in the 17th and 18th centuries. Over the longer term, reducción achieved staying power through a series of unanticipated pathways, in which landscape change, demography, and indigenous agency all played essential roles. I argue that these developments ultimately resulted in much more complex forms of remembering than those implicit in reducción legislation and that they underscore the importance for archaeological studies of memory of attending both to the materiality of imperial landscapes and long-term processes of subject formation.     

A landscape of powers in Highland Papua,C. 1899-1918

The article proposes that anthropologists and historians attend to a 'landscape of powers' to understand the ways colonial and mission projects become actualised in on-going social relations. An expanding body of scholarship for the Melanesian region has focused on the way missionaries and colonial agents, as much as the diverse Melanesian peoples, attain power through rendering persons and places in specific forms. This is documented here for Fuyuge-speakers relations with colonial and mission projects during their early phase. Although the forms and consequences of power among each--Fuyuge, colonial, mission--is different, attention is devoted to the resultant and emerging patterns of these long-standing interactions and interventions. In particular, the article maintains that when such projects become locally actualised a landscape of powers is established. A landscape of powers is the multiply constituted arrangement of persons and places in an historical and ethnographically delineated context.     

Mission Encounters in the Colonial World: British Columbia and South-West Australia

This paper considers various aspects of the interactions of missions and indigenous peoples in regions of Canada and Australia. An analysis of first encounters indicates that the introduction of Christianity was dependent on both evangelist and client population agreeing to a modus operandi for the mission. The structure and operation of the mission were determined by the pre-existing indigenous society and the financial and personnel resources of the mission organizations. Attitudes towards, and acceptance of, Christianity were not static, they depended on changing material and political circumstances both within and outside indigenous communities. This comparative analysis indicates that religious change was not only negotiated between missionary and "convert," but among indigenous peoples themselves. The decision to profess Christianity was not a one-off decision made by individuals or communities. Rather it was a long process of change which was contingent on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of the mission world and countervailingpressures from within indigenous and colonial societies.     

'They . . . shall no more be called Peaquots but Narragansetts and Mohegans': Refugees,Rivalry, and the Consequences of the Pequot War

Abstract

This paper argues for a series of complex dynamics and relationships between major indigenous groups within seventeenth-century New England and the English colonial authorities in the aftermath of the Pequot War, and argues for greater attention to these developments between the Mystic massacre and the outbreak of King Phillip's War almost forty years later.     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

Toward the Historical Archaeology of Levuka, a South Pacific Port of Call

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Fijian port of Levuka alternately passed through incarnations as a beachcomber community, boisterous port of call, commercial entrepôt, and colonial capital. Initial investigations in this town in 2000 provide a data set through which archaeology's potential for a meaningful dialogue on Levuka's past can be explored. These data reflect upon an increasingly segregated European community structure, through which social transformations in alcohol use, landscape alterations, and material culture consumption patterns are examined.     

Wasting Coconuts? Consumption Versus Commerce in Colonial Wallis and Futuna

ABSTRACT

Early colonial officials and other newcomers frequently lamented the poor copra production in Wallis and Futuna, positioning the continued consumption of coconuts by Islanders as a waste. This article explores the contested uses of coconuts and the divergent visions of the islands’ landscape and future held by Islanders, officials, missionaries and traders during opening decades of French colony rule. In particular, a variety of incidents in the 1920s – from an indigenous co-operative to French expulsions – highlight the centrality of the emergent copra trade to the social and political status of these different groups. More broadly, however, the article demonstrates the failure of elites – both indigenous and newcomer – to substantially increase copra exports prior to the Depression in 1930, indicative of the limits of their ability to demand labour and transform the lifeways of the wider population.