Native 'land claims', Russian style

In Russia, as in Canada, Native peoples are attempting to gain greater control over their homelands. In the last decade, legislation at both the federal and sub-federal (provincial, republican, etc.) level has sanctioned the transfer of land to Native 'possession', though not ownership, for the pursuit of traditional activities. This paper surveys the legislative basis that authorizes the creation of Native 'communes' (obshchinas) and their territorialization. After examining how the process works in theory, it examines the paths taken, and obstacles met, in establishing obshchinas in three Native communities in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia).     

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.     

Gender and environmental struggles: voices from Adivasi Garo community in Bangladesh

Based on an ethnographic field investigation conducted on the matrilineal–matrilocal Garo community of Bangladesh, this article provides a historical account of local environmental struggles to draw attention to the interconnections between gender, environment and sustainable resource management. From a feminist political ecology perspective, the article argues that interacting with traditional culture, forest ecology and changing processes of centric resource governance, gender remains a salient variable in environmental issues. Local contexts of gender dynamics help configuring local people's mode of participation in environmental struggles as well as being the consequence of those struggles. Findings suggest that Garo women and men have sustained gender specific roles and interests through their struggles to ensure control over forest lands and tree resources. Furthermore, they have developed a class-based relationship with forest ecology which must be acknowledged in forest policies.     

Chronotope,Story, and Historical Geography: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Space‐Time of Narratives

Abstract: This article studies space‐time as revealed in narrative, especially narrative intended to validate truth claims. Narrative plot is uniquely suited to capturing truths about time, causal complexity, and space. Bakhtin's “chronotope” (space‐time), which bridges plot, narrated events, and the real world, is critical to understanding this capacity, whether in fiction, in histories, or in didactic stories, myths, and parables. The chronotope is underutilized in the social sciences, but disputes over indigenous land in Canada exemplify its potential applications. To fully capture these heteroglot (“many‐voiced”) conflicts, factual verification should not be the only test of a narrative's truthfulness.     

‘Bad Mothers’ and ‘Delinquent Children’: Unravelling anti-begging rhetoric in the Ecuadorian Andes

In this paper I examine the rhetorics that circulate surrounding the lives of young indigenous women and children who beg on the streets of Quito, Ecuador. I focus particularly on rhetorics being produced and reproduced by urban planners, social workers, religious leaders and the media. Drawing on in-depth interviews, I reveal how these groups regularly imagine indigenous women and children in terms of child exploitation/child delinquency, false manipulation of public sympathies, ignorance, laziness and filth. Indigenous women and children are further understood as being fundamentally ‘out of place’ in the city. I unravel these rhetorics in order to draw attention to how begging is differentiated according to gender, race and age and to reveal how these rhetorics become inserted into exclusionary policies and practices. Moreover, and as a counterpoint to such rhetorics, I provide an alternative understanding of women's and children's involvement in begging by drawing upon the perspectives of indigenous women and children themselves. I argue that far from being passive victims, indigenous women and children work with and around oppressive conditions and mobilise them to their own advantage.     

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.     

Anti‐nationalist nationalism: the paradox of Dutch national identity

Academic research on contemporary Dutch nationalism has mainly focused on its overt, xenophobic and chauvinist manifestations, which have become normalised since the early 2000s. As a result, less radical, more nuanced versions of Dutch nationalism have been overlooked. This article attempts to fill this gap by drawing attention to a peculiar self‐image among Dutch progressive intellectuals we call anti‐nationalist nationalism. Whereas this self‐image has had a long history as banal nationalism, it has come to be employed more explicitly for political positioning in an intensified nationalist climate. By dissecting it into its three constitutive dimensions – constructivism, lightness and essentialism – we show how this image of Dutchness is evoked precisely through the simultaneous rejection of ‘bad’ and enactment of ‘good’ nationalism. More generally, this article provides a nuanced understanding of contemporary Dutch nationalism. It also challenges prevalent assumptions in nationalism studies by showing that post‐modern anti‐nationalism does not exclude but rather constitutes essentialist nationalism.     

2. INDIGENOUS POWER IN THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire reflects critical historiographical turns—indigenous power, responses to settler colonialism, and a reorientation of perspective—while uncovering new directions in American Indian history. Moreover, his four‐part framework for understanding power—spatial control, economic control, assimilation, and influence over neighbors—provides a useful model for analyzing indigenous polities in other places and times. However, by not explicitly framing the narrative of the Comanche empire within notions of sovereignty, Hämäläinen leaves open opportunities for other scholars of the Comanche and of Native North America. Future historical studies of Native sovereignty, though, should include tribally specific notions of sovereignty and ways of knowing and remembering the past.     

Jacob Talmon between Zionism and Cold War Liberalism

The paper focuses on the problematic relationship between Talmon's liberalism and Zionism. My argument is that Talmon's nationalism (Zionism included)—historicist, romantic, visionary—lived in permanent tension with his liberalism—empiricist, pluralist, pragmatic. His critique of totalitarian democracy, reflecting his British experience, emerged independently from his Zionism, grounded in Central European nationalism. The two represented different worlds. Talmon lived in both, serving as an ambassador in-between them, without ever bringing them together.

The essay's first section describes the political education of the young Jacob Talmon (née Flajszer) and the making of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. It demonstrates the independence of Talmon's Cold War liberal project from his Zionism. The second section places Talmon in the context of Cold War liberal discourse, showing how integral his critique of revolutionary politics was to contemporary liberalism. The third illustrates the tensions between Talmon's view of Jewish history and his liberalism, between his Zionism and his critique of revolutionary politics. Focusing on Talmon's analyses of nationalism, it highlights the ambiguity of his Zionism.     

After the Typhoon: Multicultural Archaeologies of World War II on Peleliu,Palau, Micronesia

Abstract

In the autumn of 1944, one of the worst battles of the Pacific War took place between the Americans and Japanese on the small Micronesian island of Peleliu in the Palau group. Over more than two months of combat, its garrison fought almost literally to the last man, while US casualties were proportionately among the heaviest of the entire war. Afterwards largely overlooked in the public consciousness, the battlefield is now the best preserved of the Pacific theatre and is the subject of an extensive archaeological survey, coupled with a programme of large-scale unexploded ordnance removal. This paper is the second of two, following our previous publication summarizing the more conventional results of the fieldwork. Here, we instead explore the deeper ways in which the material culture of Peleliu can illuminate the multicultural histories of the fighting and thus enable the battlefield to stand as a lasting, reflective memorial to all those whose lives it touched. We address the neglected narratives of the Japanese, the Korean and Okinawan forced labourers, and also the marginalized members of the US forces including African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. In particular, we attempt to bring out the indigenous perspective on the material heritage of an imported and deeply alien war. In combination, we hope the research can provide new theoretical avenues of exploration for the archaeology of battlefields.