Indigenous peoples,local communities,and Payments for Ecosystem Services

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs are reshaping the governance of ecosystems and natural resources around the world. These programs often occur in spaces that are unceded, contested, or otherwise not legally recognized as Indigenous homelands, customary areas, and territories. Building on the discourses of Indigenous self‐determination, nationhood, and cultural responsibilities, this paper examines how PES programs produce unique outcomes for Indigenous peoples as ecosystem services providers. Our findings demonstrate and substantiate three themes that impact Indigenous ecosystem services providers uniquely: (1) the internationally recognized right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous peoples; (2) the reinforcement of settler colonial jurisdiction; and (3) mismatches between Indigenous knowledges and PES‐type approaches. The ways that PES programs run the risk of reifying and reducing Indigenous knowledges have not yet been adequately considered within current PES approaches. Our findings enable a conceptualization of PES as a new conservation tool within ongoing histories of land management and dispossession by settler colonial governments. We assess the strengths and challenges of PES programs as a departure from previous conservation modalities.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

“Our Journey,Our Choice,Our Future”: Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ Self‐Government enacted through the Maa‐nulth Treaty with British Columbia and Canada

In 2011, Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations became one of five Nuu‐chah‐nulth Nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Canada to implement the Maa‐nulth Treaty with the Province of British Columbia and Canada. Modern treaties are dense and lengthy legal documents that exhaustively set out the obligations of each signatory party. They are heavily criticised for being unjust extensions of colonialism that limit Indigenous self‐determination and transform homelands under settler colonial property regimes. Yet, some First Nations accept these agreements as their chosen path for self‐government in state structures. We document Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ decision‐making that resulted when the Maa‐nulth Treaty was implemented and replaced the Indian Act by analysing the Maa‐nulth Treaty and interviews conducted with Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations leadership. We demonstrate how ?iisaak (respect) and ?uu?a?uk (taking care of) guided Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ self‐government, while nesting this discussion in the complexities and critiques of modern treaties.     

Unsettling time(s): Reconstituting the when of urban radical politics

In Indigenous/settler colonial contexts, cities are both rich and lived, multitemporal Indigenous places/spaces and sites of ongoing Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, we aim to unsettle linear notions of time associated with mainstream constructions of colonisation. We suggest that doing urban politics on stolen land requires a reconstitution of the when of urban struggles to engage with colonising pasts, presents and futures, and with multi-temporal survivances of Indigenous peoples and Country, in the here and now. Time in and as city-as-Country is multiple, non-linear, active, and made through/as relationships. As we engage with the gifts and responsibilities of non-linear time, we are led by Meanjin [so-called Brisbane, Australia], the teachings of activists from the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy and week-long protest actions that took place to coincide with the G20 Leaders' Meeting in 2014. We do this as two settler geographers, with complicities and responsibilities in/to the present, past and future as uninvited guests on unceded Aboriginal land. We signal a need to deepen the engagements of urban geographical and anti-capitalist politics with the specificities of the urban as Indigenous place/space/Country in order to complicate geographical conceptualisations of the urban and work towards decolonising the city in Indigenous/settler-colonial contexts.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.     

Capturing Terra Incognita: Alfred Burton, ‘Maoridom’ and Wilderness in the King Country

Across the settler colonies of the late nineteenth century the placemaking projects of newcomers were imbricated with Indigenous dispossession. Settler colonialism was, above all, a spatial project, and while the social and legal innovations of settler invasion have attracted substantial scholarly attention over the past two decades, its environmental dimensions remain insufficiently explored. Settler colonial studies might make more of its spatial turn. Through a close reading of the work of the Dunedin photographer Alfred Burton this article shows that visions of nature were the product of a system that managed continuing Indigenous presence by developing new conventions of representation. These practices divided Indigenous people from the landscapes that they inhabited, embellished settler environmental transformations, and contrived new natures. This article draws environmental history and settler colonial studies together to better understand the shared spatial foundations of Indigenous dispossession and settler placemaking.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

Settler colonialism in Canada and the Métis

Although the literature on settler colonialism intends to identify what is specific about the settler colonial experience, it can also homogenize diverse settler colonial narratives and contexts. In particular, in Canada, discussion of the ‘logic of elimination’ must contend with the discrete experiences of multiple Indigenous groups, including the Métis. This article examines relationships between Métis people and settler colonialism in Canada to distinguish how Métis histories contribute to a broader narrative of settler colonial genocide in Canada. Cast as ‘halfbreeds’ and considered rebels by the newly forming Canadian nation-state, Métis peoples were discouraged from ‘illegitimate breeding’. Moreover, their unique experiences of the residential school system and forced sterilization have heretofore been underexplored in historiographies of genocide and settler colonial elimination in Canada. These social, political and racial divisions in Canada are magnified through genocidal structures and they reach a critical juncture between colonialism and mixed ethnicities. At that juncture, groups like the Métis in Canada are within a metaphorical gap or, more accurately, a jurisdictional gap. Colonial treatment of the Métis demonstrates, in part, the broad reach of colonial control and how uneven it is, often to the detriment of the Métis and Indigenous groups in Canada.     

The economics of reconciliation: tracing investment in Indigenous–settler relations

The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state remains fraught due to ongoing violence and mistrust. Numerous attempts have been made to ‘reconcile’ this beleaguered relationship over the past three decades. Indigenous peoples have advocated for the decolonization of the settler state and a suitable land base using the language of public investment. In response, settler governments reframe these requests as opportunities for economic investment that is guaranteed to produce self-esteem and social inclusion for Indigenous peoples. This article documents and problematizes an ideological shift whereby holistic decolonial approaches to reconciliation give way to an investment rationale that is used to bypass demands for Indigenous peoples’ jurisdiction and self-determination. The ramifications of this shift are examined in three ‘eras of reconciliation' (Section 37 Constitutional Talks, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, reparations for Indian residential school [IRS] Survivors) that also coincide with three types of investment: a) national; b) social; and c) therapeutic.     

PROJECTIONS OF RACE,NATURE, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC CHILDHOOD IN EARLY EDUCATIONAL CINEMA AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CANADA

In this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as Other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.     

Tender grounds: Intimate visceral violence and British Columbia's colonial geographies

Ongoing colonial violence, I argue in this paper, operates through geographies of Indigenous homes, families, and bodies that are too often overlooked in standard geographical accounts of colonialism. Contiguous with residential school violence and other micro-scale efforts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, colonial power continues to assert itself profoundly through intervention into and disruption of intimate, ‘tender’ (Stoler, 2006), embodied, ‘visceral’ (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010), and biopolitical (Morgensen, 2011a) geographies of Indigenous women and children. Drawing on feminist and decolonizing theories, along with the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011), I offer in this paper a grounded account of spatial forms of governmentality in ongoing colonial relations in British Columbia, Canada. I critique dominant geographic inquires into colonialism as being primarily about land, natural resources, and territory. These inquiries, I suggest, risk perpetuating colonial violence in their erasure of Indigenous women and children's ontologies, positing this violence as something ‘out there’ as opposed to an ever-present presence that all settler colonists are implicated in.     

The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia

This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settler colonial society. This is argued as alternative with recourse to ethnographic examples that highlight the way in which ‘consent’ operates as a technique of recognition and simultaneous dispossession in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia. Attention is paid to the ways in which Indigenous life in these cases refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonising and settler colonial narratives of acceptance, and in this, a governmental fait accompli. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorise and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.     

Rebuilding Indigenous nations through constitutional development: a case study of the Métis in Canada

For the Métis Nation in Canada, self‐government remains the ‘essence of the struggle’ for which their political leader, Louis Riel, sacrificed his life in 1885. As one of Canada's founding peoples, the Métis have sought to reclaim their Indigenous right to self‐government by establishing democratic governance bodies, enhancing their economic capacity and pursuing state recognition of their rights. In addition to these efforts, the Métis have been developing a national constitution, which is anticipated to form the basis of a government to government relationship between the Métis Nation and the Canadian state. Through a case study of the Métis, this article explores the role of contemporary constitution‐building in rebuilding Indigenous nations from within and reclaiming self‐government in settler societies. We conclude that the Métis Nation's pursuit of these goals through constitutionalism will depend on its ability to build legitimacy internally amongst its citizens and externally with state decision‐makers.     

Edmonton,Amiskwaciy Wâskahikan,and a Papaschase suburb for settlers

The Papaschase Indian Reservation outside Edmonton, Alberta was established as part of Treaty 6 in 1877, but annulled in 1888. A significant portion of the land was later assembled in Canada's first land bank and sold at below-market prices to create “Mill Woods,” an idealistic vision for a planned mixed-use suburb. Settler Colonial Theory is introduced to explore the history of the Papaschase Cree and the Reservation. This testifies to the process of dispossession, settler colonial occupation, and respatialization of the Canadian landscape. Canadian suburbia is not placeless. Methods for examining such “erased spaces” and layers of previous occupation are discussed. Canadian urban historical geography and suburban research have not sufficiently examined settler colonial dispossession. This is an opportunity for geographers to contribute to Canadian reconciliation between Settler and Indigenous cultures.     

Extinction is the Dream of Modern Powers: Bearing Witness to the Return to Life of the Sinixt Peoples?

The Arrow Lakes Band was the only form of legal recognition ever made available to the Sinixt nation by Canada before they were declared extinct. The Oatscott reserve and the state were cartographies that both summoned and willed away the Sinixt. I attempt a “politics of witnessing” of recent Sinixt activities as they push back against these colonial enframings and displacements. I then contextualize biopower within settler society to chart the production of the state through a cultural economy of racialization and erasure, and through a clearing of the land based on more explicit imaginative geographies. The declaration of the extinction of the Sinixt illustrates Indian reserves less as a disciplinary and more a sovereign technology. And yet it is quintessentially modern owing to the absence of instrumental violence. Finally, the limitations of witnessing and the space Indigenous peoples make for alliances are examined.     

Quaker Dreaming: The “Lost” Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land

This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post‐colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen's Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi‐layered nature of colonial action and post‐colonial historicism, and also points to a self‐referential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.     

Settlers,Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession

This article offers a critique of the Wolfe-an model, which has become so dominant within contemporary Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). It focuses particularly on the central claim made by Patrick Wolfe, and others after him, that settler colonialism is categorically differentiated from other forms of colonialism by its drive to “eliminate the native”, instead of exploiting them. This paper builds on the literature that shows how settler colonies have used elimination as well as exploitation in their relations with indigenous peoples—even transitioning from one to the other. Instead, the paper argues that focusing on accumulation by dispossession allows for an analysis of the specificity of settler social relations to emerge. It highlights the specific ways in which settlers collectively expropriate indigenous peoples and struggle amongst different settler classes over the distribution of the colonial loot.     

“To see things in an objective light”: the Dakota Access Pipeline and the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the discourses used by proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as claims of universality to which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allied activists mounted a movement of opposition in 2014–2017. We position our analysis within the historical context of Lakota and Dakota resistance to settler colonialism, which has endured since the nineteenth century. From publicly available texts circulated by key actors in the conflict over the construction of this pipeline project, we identify themes that proponents of this project drew upon to articulate their representations of the land as universal. We suggest that claims like these, when naturalized in practice, have historically materialized in settler colonial landscapes. With the concept of settler colonial landscapes, we focus on ways of seeing and representing places that have facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous people from their territory as well as the construction of a settler-dominated community. In this way, we develop a cultural geographical understanding of the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes as a process dependent on claims to neutrality and objectivity.     

Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler‐Colonialism

The changes in regulation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands, wrought by the advent of native title in Australia, created an impression that the political economy of mining on Indigenous people's lands would be fundamentally transformed. In this paper we argue, in reality, a deeply seated settler‐colonial mentality endures in Australia within the institutions presiding over mineral governance, particularly in those States that are heavily dependent upon resource extraction. Focusing on the governance of mineral development in Queensland, Australia, we offer an analysis of the rationalities that inform the endurance of an inequitable architecture of extractive governance in that State. Our conceptual framework draws on a synthesis of the concepts of “accumulation by dispossession”, “settler colonialism”, and Indigenous critiques of the politics of recognition, to argue that liberal states remain deeply committed to the facilitation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands in direct contravention to international norms.     

Fearing social and cultural death: genocide and elimination in settler colonial Canada—an Indigenous perspective

This article reviews recent works on Indigenous politics and history in the Canadian context to produce insights about genocide in the Canadian context. The article is situated primarily in the field of Indigenous studies while also drawing on the field of settler colonial studies. It begins with contemplation of the concept of genocide and related terms in the Canadian context. The author suggests that it is useful to apply the concept of elimination developed by Patrick Wolfe to studies of genocide. The article then turns to Mohawk Interruptus with significant emphasis placed on how author Audra Simpson theorizes the concept of ‘refusal’ and the ‘fear of social and political death’. The last part of the article focuses on two books that examine the late nineteenth-century northern plains: Metis and the Medicine Line by Michel Hogue and Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. These books succeed in detailing the great changes that occurred as the fur trade era fell away and a settler colonial regime emerged on the Canadian plains. For Indigenous peoples, these changes had, and continue to have, devastating consequences. Drawing heavily on the insights of Simpson, the second half of the article argues that studying the late nineteenth-century northern plains produces important methodological insights about the study of genocide in Canada.