What are the Limits of Social Inclusion? Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Governance in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.     

Do we need more economics in Australian economic diplomacy?

ABSTRACT

Economic diplomacy—that is, informal and formal processes and links between states and non-state actors on international economic issues—is a current focus of Australian foreign policy. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s stated economy diplomacy aims are liberalising trade, boosting economic growth, encouraging investment and assisting business. If Australia is to embrace a genuine and effective notion of economic diplomacy there are two problems to be overcome. First, DFAT’s economic diplomacy framework is incomplete and misses the bigger economic picture, particularly the role of Australia’s key economic agencies, Treasury and the Reserve Bank of Australia. Second, DFAT does not consistently apply economic principles to foreign affairs issues including trade, foreign aid and the global investment agenda. Going forward, Australia should abandon the focus on the four narrow pillars and instead focus on developing a clear, coordinated international economic strategy that articulates Australia’s core international economic objectives and priorities.     

‘The realities of power’: David Stoll and the story of the 1982 Guatemalan genocide

ABSTRACT

In a short opinion piece published in late 2013, anthropologist David Stoll claimed that genocide did not occur in Guatemala under the military dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), that the charges against the former general and his subsequent conviction were unsubstantiated, and that human rights conditions for the country’s Indigenous peoples, including the Ixil population of northern Quiché department, actually improved under his government. By looking at the definition of protected groups under the United Nations Genocide Convention, and such basic notions as perpetrator motives and intent in international humanitarian law, this article will address Stoll’s latest contribution to a ‘counter-narrative by Guatemalans who perceive that their side of the story [was] left out’ of the 2013 genocide trial.     

‘Brothel of the Pacific’: Syphilis and the Urban Regulation of Laikini Wahine in Honolulu, 1855–75

ABSTRACT

By 1860, Hawai‘i’s Indigenous population had declined by 75 per cent when compared to its estimated pre-contact level. Legislators and physicians attributed this crisis to the seasonal migration of Hawaiian prostitutes. After contracting syphilis from sailors in Honolulu, these women returned to their Native villages where they unwittingly spread the disease. Drawing on legislation, health reports, and newspapers, this article underscores the urban-rural nature of Hawai‘i’s syphilis epidemic by analyzing the 1860 Act to Mitigate the Evils and Diseases Arising from Prostitution (ATM). The law compelled prostitutes to enlist on a government registry, undergo medical inspections, and submit to treatment if infected. Arresting depopulation, adherents argued, hinged on the government’s ability to police Indigenous women within a conspicuous urban environment. In designing and enacting the ATM, legislators and physicians characterized Honolulu as a syphilitic breeding ground that catalyzed Indigenous depopulation by sheltering transient carriers of this highly gendered disease.     

Negotiated Agreements,Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industry in the Salar de Atacama,Chile: When Is an Agreement More than a Contract?

While acknowledging advances in legal recognition of Indigenous rights, much of the research literature positions negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and corporations simply as ‘neoliberal technology’ that gives the appearance of Indigenous consent while allowing exploitation to continue. This analysis is flawed in considering agreements as discrete, stand-alone phenomena. It ignores the possibility that Indigenous peoples may use agreements as part of broader strategies to achieve control over extractive industry activity and to secure a share of ‘development’ benefits — strategies that involve selective engagement with the state. This article supports its argument by locating an agreement between the Chilean lithium mining company, Albemarle, and the Council of Atacameño Peoples within a broad and sustained strategy by Atacameño people to address the negative impacts of mining in the Salar de Atacama, Chile, while securing its economic benefits. This strategy includes using the agreement to voice Atacameño territorial claims and environmental concerns to the state, and to insist that the state lives up to its responsibilities. The analysis leads to a fuller appreciation of the agency exercised by Indigenous peoples in dealing with the sustained expansion of extractive activity on their territories, and a more nuanced understanding of negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and mining corporations and between Indigenous people and the state.     

Orientalism at Work? Dundee's Response to Competition from Calcutta,circa 1870–1914

From the late nineteenth century the Dundee jute industry faced intensifying competition from Calcutta. This article examines the responses in Dundee to this competition, focusing upon the ways Dundonians understood Calcutta and India, and how these understandings shaped the debate on possible lines of action. It argues that the diversity of approaches to the threat, inter-linked with the complexities of local politics, led to a concentration of effort on seeking to establish and then strengthen Indian factory legislation. The severity of competition from another empire country posed acute dilemmas for pro-imperial politics in the city: how could such a politics be sustained if the local economy was being so harmed by Calcutta's invasion of Dundee's markets, yet a protective response was ruled out by the realities of imperial policy?     

Federalism,constitutional recognition and Indigenous Peoples: how a new identity-based state can be established in Australia

ABSTRACT

The debate on constitutional recognition of Indigenous Peoples in Australia has highlighted the desire for meaningful responses to Indigenous Peoples’ claims to sovereignty and self-determination. One potential response is to apply federal principles and establish a new state, or states, for Indigenous Peoples in Australia. This proposal has been most prominently put by Tasmanian Aboriginal leader Michael Mansell. Others have followed. However, (at least) one fundamental problem with this federal idea has not been properly addressed, namely the dispersal and limited geographical concentration of Indigenous people in Australia. This paper asks whether and how federalism can be used to institutionalise the shared and self-rule of widely dispersed minorities, or more specifically, Indigenous Peoples in the settler-majority country of Australia. It demonstrates that a non-territorial approach can be applied to federalism in Australia, and that it may form one possible response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.     

‘Sharing the white man's burden’ Nazi colonial revisionism and Australia's New‐Guinea mandate

ABSTRACT

The September 2014 general elections in Fiji resulted in a decisive victory for Prime Minister Bainimarama and his FijiFirst Party. It indicated a desire for stability on the part of the electorate as well as the popularity of measures such as ‘free’ education and the removal of affirmative action programmes for Indigenous Fijians. The Social Democratic Liberal Party garnered a significant portion of the Indigenous vote through appeals to ethnic identity, but will need to broaden its base in future to have any chance of forming a government. The high voter enrolment and participation reflects a hope for more accountability as well as transparency, in contrast to the arbitrariness of the previous eight years. New oversight institutions and a more expansive bill of rights in the constitution offer some ground for cautious optimism in the face of cynicism about the gap between the government's rhetoric and its actions.     

Appropriation,Absence and the Canadian Studies Classroom

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on “appropriation of voice” or “cultural appropriation” in the Canadian Studies classroom. It is aimed at instructors who teach Canadian Literature outside Canada, in places where Canada is itself a strange, foreign or even exotic country. Keeping classroom practice in mind, I divide the article into three sections. The first provides a classroom-oriented overview of appropriation debates; the second looks at tokenism on reading lists; the third reflects on problems of absence or of dealing with canonical texts that skim over Canada’s Indigenous Peoples—specifically, by analyzing two brief examples from Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and one from Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996).     

Incomplete Sovereigns: Unpacking Patterns of Indigenous Self-Governance in the United States and Canada

ABSTRACT

In the early 1970s, both the Canadian and United States federal governments introduced modern land claim agreements as a first step forward in the states’ recognition of Indigenous goals for self-determination. Since then, both the United States and Canadian federal governments have incrementally expanded their recognition of Indigenous rights to include Indigenous goals for political self-determination. Yet, despite the fact that both countries began implementing broadly similar policies at approximately the same time, the degree to which Indigenous political and economic self-determination has been realized varies considerably both within and between the two countries. The variation in Indigenous self-governing power and authority suggests that the policy shift towards Indigenous self-determination is incomplete and has faced important barriers to implementation. This paper investigates two key aspects of this variation in Indigenous self-determination in the United States and Canada: (1) institutional histories embedded in geography, and (2) the temporal nature of policy frameworks. I argue that the full realization of Indigenous self-determination has been shaped in different ways and, ultimately, is limited by the intersection of embedded institutional legacies and federal political dynamics.     

Returning to that which was never lost: Indigenous Australian saltwater identities,a history of land claims and the paradox of return

In this paper I explore the kincentric ecologies that define sea country for Indigenous Australians, in particular the Yanyuwa of Northern Australia. Despite colonial alienation from their coastal territories, Yanyuwa have sustained a four-decade long legal fight for restitution. Using the framework of ‘urgent patience’ as resistance against ‘social death’, this paper tracks the historical legacy of legislative land rights for saltwater peoples.     

“You Cannot Trade What Is Not Yours”: Indigenous Governance and the NAFTA Negotiations

ABSTRACT

Contemporary International Relations scholars and practitioners generally recognize that substate governments affect the state’s international affairs; however, there is less acceptance of Indigenous governments as global actors that meaningfully impact the state. After all, the expectation would be that central governments, with considerably more resources and power, would be unlikely to face a challenge from an Indigenous government. However, Indigenous governments are negotiating new relationships with foreign and domestic governments, forming economic development corporations, hiring private firms to raise capital, funding trade missions, and even opening offices in key international locales such as Beijing to engage in trade promotion and push investment opportunities in projects such as resource extraction. Applying paradiplomacy theory, which argues that International Relations cannot be properly explained absent the global affairs of substate governments, this article analyzes the effect of Indigenous peoples and governance in the Canada–US trade relationship. It specifically considers how Indigenous engagement in the global economy affects the bilateral trade regime, foreign direct investment, and cross-border trade. The driver for these analysis centers on demands for the inclusion of a so-called “Indigenous chapter” in the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations in 2017 and 2018.     

Indigeneity coalesced: The 2022 national strike in Ecuador

This article analyses the national strike in Ecuador in June 2022, which paralysed most of its cities and roads for 18 days. The uprising has relevance for understanding the historical path of Indigenous movements in Latin America. We address two main questions. First, we analyse the 2022 uprising in the context of the extended timeframe of Indigenous revolts stretching back to 1990, considering what this popular mobilization tells us about recent highs and lows of Indigenous organizations and their relationship with current government regimes. Second, we delve into a tactical aspect of the uprising, exploring how the Indigenous population, among the most impoverished sectors in Ecuador, could block and freeze the country’s economic and commercial activity for so long.     

Covert Control? Indigenous Agency in Edward Winslow Gifford’s Fijian Archaeological Expedition of 1947

ABSTRACT

The story of University of California archaeologist Edward Winslow Gifford’s 1947 Fijian fieldwork has been told up to now as a classic piece of colonial fieldwork with aims and direction dictated by the foreign specialist. But examination of the extensive Gifford archive held in the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and its Hearst Museum and a bit of ‘reading against the grain’ reveal a quite different story. Indigenous agency played a major, probably even decisive, role in how the expedition unfolded. The value of archival research into the history of archaeology, and particularly its contribution to the teaching of archaeological practice today, is significant in revealing ‘hidden histories’ that make a difference.     

Crafting heritage: artisans and the making of Indigenous heritage in contemporary Taiwan

Since the 1990s, Indigenous groups in Taiwan have been increasingly engaged in retrieving and reviving cultural practices that are considered ‘traditional’ and markers of Indigenous identities. This article takes such recent and ongoing revival of cultural practices and connected material culture amongst Taiwanese Indigenous groups as the departure point to argue that the idea of a ‘contemporary Indigenous heritage’ is constructed (notably by Indigenous artists and artisans) through the conflation of ‘tradition’, ‘value’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘indigeneity’, as well as creativity and innovation. In the article, I endeavour to explain this process. To this end, I identify and illustrate a set of strategies and discourses through which Indigenous artists and artisans in Taiwan construct their work as both ‘Indigenous’ and ‘heritage’. I suggest that such strategies and discourses revolve around the following: (i) materiality, (ii) visual display and performance, (iii) Indigenous cultural research and (iv) knowledge transmission. Building on the Taiwanese case study, this article furthers scholarly enquiries into the making of heritage by generating an enhanced understanding of the role of artists and artisans in the creation, renewal, authentication and transmission of ‘Indigenous heritage’.     

‘Putting Place on a Plate’ along the West Cork Food Trail

ABSTRACT

In 2011, Ireland's National Tourism Development Authority (F?ilte Ireland) announced a plan to increase the number of food tourists to the country. According to the plan, Irish food will be recognized for the quality of its regional food experiences that evoke a unique sense of place. To further the plan, it created a program entitled ‘Place on a Plate’ which encourages restaurant owners/chefs to offer fresh locally sourced seasonal food and list the names of local suppliers on their menus. This paper examines the effectiveness of this ‘Place on a Plate’ strategy by examining 53 restaurant menus along the West Cork Food Trail in southwest Ireland to determine whether they contain: (1) a statement as to the origin of their food supplies, (2) a listing of local food producers, and (3) geographical place name references on individual menu items. The study found that the majority of restaurants do not include a statement as to the origin of their food supplies, indeed only three out of the surveyed restaurants provided complete food supply listings. The largest number of menu items to be connected with a place were linked with Ireland followed by West Cork and the Atlantic. The results suggest that the ‘Place on a Plate’ strategy has had a limited impact and that more education needs to occur about its potential to contribute to West Cork's gastronomic identity.     

Burning Libraries: A Community Response

ABSTRACT

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a growing recognition that widespread impacts of climate change (erosion, sea level rise, wildfires, warming soil temperatures) are rapidly destroying archaeological sites and permanently wiping out millennia of cultural heritage and important scientific data on a global scale. This paper provides a brief overview of the efforts of the international archaeological community and its allies to organise a broad and coordinated response to this widespread and urgent threat to our basic record by mobilising at the local, national and international level. The work of the archaeological professional societies has supplemented a growing host of initiatives on multiple scales by national and local governmental agencies, regional research teams, local and Indigenous heritage groups and the international global change scientific community. This paper provides some reflections on the Society for American Archaeology’s Climate Change Strategies and the Archaeological Record team effort from 2015 to 2018, some links to more contacts and resources and some suggestions for future directions.     

Cleavages,electoral geography,and the territorialization of political parties in the Republic of Georgia

Abstract

This article examines the territorialization of party support in the Republic of Georgia as political parties in Georgia try to territorialize by aligning themselves to existing societal cleavages. The article specifically focuses on the case of the United National Movement (UNM), which from its inception in 2001 was led by Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and was the country’s governing party from 2004 to 2012. While in power, the UNM enjoyed nationwide support. After being unseated, instead of nationalizing countrywide, the UNM has based its support in national elections on specific areas populated by ethno-linguistic and religious minorities. By analyzing the results of the most recent five national elections and the 2014 national census, the article shows that continuing support for the UNM and the subsequent territorialization of the party is dictated by these existing societal cleavages.     

The dragon versus the kangaroo: perceptions of Chinese and Australian influence and development assistance in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT

China’s engagement within the South Pacific has increased dramatically in recent years mainly through significant increases in development assistance. Development assistance is provided to address humanitarian needs but to also secure national interests of the donor. This paper examines the extent and nature of Australia’s and China’s influence in Vanuatu from the perspectives of the Ni-Vanuatu people using new data. China is perceived as having the most influence in the country despite Australia’s development assistance being viewed far more positively. Support for infrastructure is the most important factor contributing to a positive image for both countries. Perceptions of land grabbing are the main factor contributing to negative images. Regional differences in perceptions of Australia and China across Vanuatu also exist.     

Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation,Intra‐Indigenous Relatedness,and the State Effect

In Australia's Northern Territory, the Larrakia have been involved in a decades‐long effort to gain recognition as traditional owners through Land Rights and Native Title legislation. From one perspective, their claims have failed to achieve the entitlement and recognition grounded in these governmental regimes (Scambary 2007; Povinelli 2002). However, over the past decade the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation (LNAC) and the Larrakia Development Corporation (LDC) have emerged as locally powerful corporate bodies that pursue programs and exercise forms of power on behalf of the Larrakia that can be understood in terms of state and governmental practice. Through suburban development, a night patrol, educational and vocational training, a radio station, and through forms of policy research and statistical enumeration, the Larrakia nation have emerged in the eyes of many as a de facto Aboriginal ‘state’ in the Darwin region. This paper explores the intra‐Indigenous relations through which these practices have emerged, and analyses the extent to which the LNAC might be understood as a kind of ‘state’ within a state, responsible for world‐shaping activities of knowledge production, housing and health outreach, vocational training and education, and policing. Focussing on the forms of ‘stateness’ that accrue to the Larrakia Nation in Darwin through its policing, knowledge production, and outreach programs for Aboriginal campers, the article explores the differential articulation of Aboriginal groups with the state. It concludes by asking how such differences matter in contexts of planned urbanisation in the Northern Territory.