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.     

Anti-Communism in Australian Immigration Policies 1947–54: The Case of Russian/Soviet Displaced Persons from Europe and White Russians from China

This article assesses the role of anti-Communism in Australia’s postwar immigration policy in the years before the Petrov affair, with particular reference to the entry of Russians and Russian-speaking Jews from Europe and China. Our discussion focuses on the Department of Immigration under Arthur Calwell and his successor, Harold Holt, and the security agency, ASIO. We conclude that policy in this sphere was essentially bipartisan, and that anti-Communism was an important but not overwhelming motivation, stronger than the desire to prevent entry of Nazis and war criminals but probably less salient in practice than concern to minimise the entry of Jews.     

International law and the 'war against terrorism'

This article analyses some of the international legal issues arising out of the events of 11 September 2001. Those who perpetrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were guilty of serious offences under United States law and possibly also under international law. The fact that their conduct was a crime does not, however, preclude it also being a threat to international peace and an armed attack. The author argues that the United States and its allies were entitled to respond to that attack and the threat of future attacks by using force against Al-Qa'ida and that, in the circumstances, it was also legitimate to take military action against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan which had sheltered Al-Qa'ida and permitted it to conduct operations from Afghan territory. The article also examines the application of the laws of armed conflict to the ensuing fighting and the status and treatment of those captured and held at Guantanamo Bay.     

Science,anthropology, and the study of communication

Charles F. Hockett. The View From Language: Selected Essays 1948–1974. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1977. Tables, figures, references, bibliography, and index. $15.00.     

THE SHORT-RUN AND LONG-RUN FACTOR-MARKET CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES*

ABSTRACT. This paper applies the production-theory approach to assess the impact on domestic wages and employment of immigration to the United States. Inputs are disaggregated between recent immigrants, non-recent immigrants, native workers, and capital. Census cross-sectional data for 1980 and for 123 metropolitan areas are used. Empirical estimates are reported for alternative functional forms with special attention devoted to required curvature conditions which have frequently been violated in previous work. Elasticity estimates are reported for alternative settings, including for the short run where we view domestic factor prices as given and the long run where we treat them as flexible.     

Book reviews

DIPLOMACY IN A WHIRLPOOL — Hungary between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. By Dr. S. D. Kertesz, University Of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana, 1953.

DOCUMENTS AND SPEECHES ON BRITISH COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS, 1931–52, Vols. I and II. By Nicholas Mansergh, R.I.I.A. Oxford University Press, 1953. Pp. xii, 1308 Price 131/‐

THE PROMISE THAT IS NEW CHINA. By K. T. Shah, Vora & Co. Bombay, 1953. 342pp.

APPROACHES TO COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: A Symposium introductory to Problems and Methods of Village Welfare in undeveloped Areas. Edited by Phillips Ruopp. W. Van Hoeve Ltd., The Hague, 1953: pp. xvi‐352.

HOW RUSSIA IS RULED. By Merle Fainsod. Published by Harvard University Press, 1953. pp. 574. Price 78s. 9d. (Aust.).

SOVIET POLICY IN THE FAR EAST; 1944–1951. By Max Beloff. Oxford University Press. 278 pp. 34/9.

THE STRUGGLE FOR KASHMIR. By Michael Brecher. Issued under the auspices of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and the Institute of Pacific Relations. Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1953. 211 and xii pp.

THE WORLD AND THE WEST. By Arnold Toynbee, pp vi and 99. The B.B.C. Reith Lectures 1952 (Oxford University Press 1953).

THE DEPRIVED AND THE PRIVILEGED. By B. M. Spinley (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953, pp. viii and 208, 18s.).

RUSSIA, PAST AND PRESENT. By Anatole G. Mazour, Professor of History, Stanford University, U.S.A. Third Printing. Macmillan & Co Ltd., London. Printed in U.S.A. Preface. Selected Readings for Chapters. Chronological Table. Index. Maps. Pp. vi and 785. Price 40/: Copy from publishers.