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Been to the nation, lord, but i couldn't stay there
Abstract
This essay takes as its case study the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma's 2007 vote to disenfranchise approximately 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen (African-Cherokee descendents of slaves once held by members of the Cherokee Nation) in violation of the treaty the Cherokee Nation signed with the United States in 1866 to end the Civil War. Arguing that indigenous sovereignty and political status is incommensurable with the ‘internal’ to the United States, the essay provides a genealogy of ‘internal colonialism’ in order to track how it has emerged as descriptor within postcolonial theory for indigenous peoples' relations with the United States. In order to place indigenous critical theory into conversation with subaltern studies, the essay argues that disaggregating processes of racialization from colonization makes the ongoing settler colonization of indigenous nations visible in conversation with subaltern studies at the same time that it reveals the persistent racisms that have continued to inflect Cherokee nationalism.
... In this paper, I draw on scholarship in Indigenous Studies, settler colonial studies, and critical internationalisation studies to illustrate how settler colonialism operated in various social and institutional spaces that were integral to my 'Canadian' experience as a non-white international student. Following Indigenous Peoples' critiques of the violences within settler colonial societies (see Byrd 2011b), 'settler colonialism' as an emerging concept has inspired scholarship in various disciplines, including the studies of sport, physical activity, and movement cultures (Chen and Mason 2019;Bruyneel 2016;Fortier 2016;Henhawk 2018;McGuire-Adams 2020;McGuire-Adams and Giles 2018;Sykes 2016). ...
This paper reflects on my experience as a non-white international student at a top-ranked sport/kinesiology faculty in Canada, particularly the (un)learning of my complicity within settler colonialism. Following a decolonising autoethnographic approach, I juxtapose my own desired pathway of pursuing international study with shapeshifting forms of settler colonialism. The stories reveal that Canada’s marketing of higher education, settler geography, the whiteness of university, and the spectacle of ‘reconciliation’ can operate in concert to prevent international students from developing critical understandings of the violent conditions of their stay on occupied Indigenous land. While elusive opportunities of (un)learning and resisting do exist, I argue that the seemingly natural trajectory of (re)producing settlers of colour warrants critical intervention.
... It was also at this time that the processes of "conquest, colonization, and cultural change" taking place across Europe since the early middle ages-processes identified as key to "the making of Europe" and its nationstates (Bartlett 1993)-were being written into national narratives of France, England and Prussia as processes of nation-building (Weber 1976;Bell 2007). In other words, at the very time these nations were deepening involvement in overseas colonies, they were also engaged in the parallel activity of swallowing up their own internal minorities-a process historians and social critics would later identify with "internal" colonialism (Hechter 1975;Byrd 2011). For our purposes, the most prominent example of this relationship between expansionary processes and national self-identity was the drive among competing European nations to secure trading rights in China, culminating in a scramble for concessions in the late 1890s (Bickers 2011). ...
Many historians of China, particularly those based in North America, insist that the Qing dynasty’s territorial expansion was imperial, and comparable to the imperial expansion of other global empires. Other historians, particularly but not only those based in the PRC, continue to resist this interpretation. They argue that dynastic expansion in the Ming and Qing periods was simply a form of nation-state building, akin to similar processes in Europe. Rather than rejecting their claims as a product of Chinese nationalism, we argue that the term “empire” should be (re-)understood as a global co-production, emerging from multiple intersecting histories and scholarly debates about those histories. Doing so challenges influential definitions of empire which rely on a distinction between empires and nation-states, highlighting their dual presence in both Euro-American and Chinese pasts (and presents). This move demands a rejection of periodizations which suggest that empires ceased to exist following the period of decolonization from 1945-1970s. This opens up new avenues of historical and normative enquiry to acknowledge the modern continuity between empires and nation-states.
... Rather, it is a common ground that spans from the oceanic floor (Philip, 2008;Walcott, 2018) into swamps (Snorton, 2017), where clay, mud (Snorton, 2017) Other examples of naturalization and cultural-political identities demonstrate how dialectics of racialization and blood quantum are divisibly debated in terms of the conferral of citizenship rights, or externalized legitimacy through community acceptance, or an internalization of settler logics. These include, for example, Cherokee Freedman citizens within the Cherokee Nation (Byrd, 2011), or Taíno self-determinacy (Neeganagwedgin, 2015) beyond creolization narratives in the context of Indigenous survivance in the Caribbean. ...
In this article, I explore embodiment within discourses on trans and two-spirit through a consideration of polyspirited(many-spirited) within the context of Indigenous and transnational stories of clay. Two main articulations spiral out from embodiments of the polyspirited: 1) that embodiment is not limited to one or two spirits but potentially many spirits operating through or within the body collectively in reciprocal relationality; and 2) that stories of clay teach us that the Westernized scientific conception of the human body is limited in its capacity to articulate what it means to be in relation. By understanding clay stories, we begin to comprehend that we are potentially more than two-spirit peoples.
We bring the concept of internal colonialism—developed by Indigenous and racialised activist‐scholars in Abya Yala—into conversation with settler colonialism, white supremacy, white privilege, and Indigenous fleshed or embodied politics. Our goal is to incite fraught hemispheric conversations about the internalisation of coloniality by subaltern peoples, anticolonial struggles, and the relevance of internal colonial structures of dispossession in the making of Latin American nation‐states. We believe in the power of establishing dialogue/cooperation between grassroots Black, Indigenous, and racialised thought against colonialism in Abya Yala and Turtle Island. A reading of these contributions suggests that binary classifications—oppressor/victim, dominator/dominated—trap our imagination, destabilising commitments to decolonisation. We focus on the construction of the environmental state in Chile, conservation discourse in the Riviera Maya, the rise of corporatist rule in southern Mexico City, and cuerpo‐territorio mapping in the Ecuadorian Amazonia. We propose that a relational reading of colonial power dynamics enables opportunities for liberation.
At first glance, the concept of the subaltern seems to perfectly describe the position of Native Americans within contemporary US society, yet, until recently, it was not commonly used by Indigenous studies scholars. This has changed partly due to the emergence of the field of settler colonial studies, born of the dialogue between postcolonial and Indigenous studies. In particular, scholars have looked at the historical and contemporary role cities are playing in highlighting patterns of dispossession and resistance. In the article, we look at the contributions of this new theoretical framework, then focus on the case of Rapid City, SD, presenting its history of dispossession and violence, and showing how Indigenous resurgence challenges that history.
Contemporary scholars routinely argue colonialism and imperialism are indistinguishable. In this essay, I challenge this argument. While it is true the “colonial” and “imperial” overlap and intersect historically, I argue there is a central thread of modern colonialism as an ideology that can be traced from the seventeenth century to mid-twentieth century that was not only distinct from—but often championed in explicit opposition to—imperialism. I advance my argument in four parts. First, I identify key ways in which the colonial can be distinguished from the imperial, including most importantly the specific kind of productive power inherent in colonialism. Second, I examine how colonialism and imperialism evolve in meaning and are redefined by both champions and critics, in relation to each other in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Third, I examine the historical moment when colonialism and imperialism fully conflate after WWII through the UN process of decolonization as the “salt water thesis” delimits colonialism to mean foreign racialized domination, and it thus becomes synonymous with imperialism. I conclude with an analysis of why the distinction still matters in both theory and practice.
This paper examines a period of transition in the approach of the Indian state to Kashmir from roughly 2014 through today, comparing dispossession under earlier practices of military-imperial land seizures and occupation to new regimes of dispossession through state-level bureaucracy, planning schemes and “encroachment” clearance for capital projects. I suggest that this period represents the end of a decades-long transition from an indirect military-imperial occupation to direct settler colonial rule. It also represents a new moment of mass dispossession, toward the eventual goal of merging Kashmir with India and creating a unified Hindu state. Before this transition, most dispossession in Kashmir happened outside legal frameworks, and extrajudicial executions and land seizures were either ignored or denied by the state. The last several years have seen the increasing operationalization of “legal” mechanisms to take land for non-military, “development” projects. I look closely at the afterlives of “encroachment,” a colonial era urban planning designation that has been increasingly deployed by the Indian state in Kashmir to conduct mass evictions. I also look at increases in home demolitions by Indian military forces, theorizing them both as a terror tactic to instill fear and maintain precarity in Indigenous populations as well as a mechanism for land acquisition.
This article expands upon the current theoretical construction of colonialism to make settler-colonial societies’ economic strategies more explicit. These strategies, which I term economic violence and economic hegemony, have been used by US federal and state governments to subvert the inherent sovereignty of Native Nations in order to access their resources. This paper also proposes and illustrates six categories of economic hegemony – debt creation, underfunding, mismanagement of funds and resources, blackmail, taxation jurisdiction, and regulation – to clarify the types of tools that settler-colonial states, like the United States, have available to accomplish their goals. Significantly, however, the illustrative examples also foreground Native Nations’ agency in countering and even anticipating US federal and state governments’ aggressions across time and geographies. Incorporation of these strategies into political and economic discourse leads to a more precise analysis of settler-colonial incursions while emphasizing the many ways in which Native Nations exert their sovereignty to forward economic justice.
In this address, I examine the lexical, geographic, temporal and philosophical origins of two key concepts in modern political thought: colonies and statistics. Beginning with the Latin word colonia , I argue that the modern ideology of settler colonialism is anchored in the claim of “improvement” of both people and land via agrarian labour in John Locke's labour theory of property in seventeenth-century America, through which he sought to provide an ideological justification for both the assimilation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This same ideology of colonialism was turned inward a century later by Sir John Sinclair to justify domestic colonies on “waste” land in Scotland—specifically Caithness (the county within which my own grandparents were tenant farmers). Domestic colonialism understood as “improvement” of people (the “idle” poor and mentally ill and disabled) through engagement in agrarian labour on waste land inside explicitly named colonies within the borders of one's own country was first championed not only by Sinclair but also his famous correspondent, Jeremy Bentham, in England. Sinclair simultaneously coined the word statistics and was the first to use it in the English language. He defined it as the scientific gathering of mass survey data to shape state policies. Bentham embraced statistics as well. In both cases, statistics were developed and deployed to support their domestic colony schemes by creating a benchmark and roadmap for the improvement of people and land as well as a tool to measure the colony's capacity to achieve both over time. I conclude that settler colonialism along with the intertwined origins of domestic colonies and statistics have important implications for the study of political science in Canada, the history of colonialism as distinct from imperialism in modern political thought and the role played by intersecting colonialisms in the Canadian polity.
Contemporary critical scholarship on the university firmly places new discursive and curricular formations within a global context of neoliberal, neoimperial, and neocolonial processes. Recently, some focus has been given to last century’s institutionalization of the interdisciplines (e.g. Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies) and how the invitation to become a part of the university has mapped onto repressive liberal fantasies of tolerance and inclusion. With this history in mind, this paper begins with the current wave of student protests and how the institutionalization of difference has structured university responses to new formations of critique. We argue that, though de-escalating the politics of knowledge production and legitimation, a new moral economy has emerged in which universities trade on ‘good’ students who adhere to prescribed performances of critique and villainize the student–activists who threaten the status quo as a means to manage current crises while retaining social legitimacy.
What is a colony? In this article, I reconsider the meaning of colony in light of the existence of domestic colonies in Canada around the turn of the twentieth century. The two case studies examined are farm colonies for the mentally disabled and ill in Ontario and British Columbia and utopian colonies for Doukhobors in Saskatchewan. I show how both kinds of colonies are characterized by the same three principles found in Lockean settler colonialism: segregation, agrarian labour on uncultivated soil and improvement/cultivation of people and land. Defining “colony” in this way is theoretically interesting as it is different from the definition found in most dictionaries and post-colonial scholarship. There is also an inherent contradiction within domestic colonies as they both support state power over indigenous peoples, Doukhobors and the mentally ill and disabled but also challenge the principles of domination, individualism, private property and sovereignty upon which the Canadian settler state was founded.
Despite a treaty in 1866 between the Cherokee Nation and the federal government granting them full tribal citizenship, Cherokee Freedmen—the descendants of African American slaves to the Cherokee, as well as of children born from unions between African Americans and Cherokee tribal members—continue to be one of the most marginalized communities within Indian Country. Any time Freedmen have sought the full rights and benefits given other Cherokee citizens, they have encountered intense opposition, including a 2007 vote that effectively ousted them from the tribe. The debates surrounding this recent decision provide an excellent case study for exploring the intersections of race and sovereignty. In this article, I use the most recent Cherokee Freedmen controversy to examine how racial discourse both empowers and diminishes tribal sovereignty, and what happens in settler-colonial contexts when the exercise of tribal rights comes into conflict with civil rights. I also explore how settler colonialism as an analytic can obscure the racialized power dynamics that undermine Freedmen claims to an indigenous identity and tribal citizenship.
What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or practical authority? Does it require the ability to control the flow of people or goods across a border; is it primarily a principle of international recognition; or does its essence lie in the power to regulate the lives of a state's citizens? Political theorists, historians, scholars of international relations, lawyers, anthropologists, literary critics-all approach the dilemmas of sovereign power with a mixture of urgency and frustration.In On Lingering and Being Last, Jonathan Elmer argues that the logic of sovereignty that emerged in early modern Europe and that limits our thinking today must be understood as a fundamentally racialized logic, first visible in the New World. The modern concept of sovereignty is based on a trope of personification, the conjunction of individual and collective identities. In Grotius, Hobbes, and others, a fiction of sovereign autonomy enabled states to be personified as individuals, as bodies politic, even as individual humans could be imagined as miniature states. The contradictions of this logic were fully revealed only in the New World, as writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville demonstrate.The racialized sovereign figures examined in On Lingering and Being Last-the slave king Oroonoko, the last chief Logan, and their avatars-are always at once a person and a people. They embody the connection between the individual and the collectivity, and thereby reveal that the volatile work of sovereign personification takes place in a new world constituted both by concepts of equality, homogeneity, and symmetry-by an ideal of liberal individualism-and by the realities of racial domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion. The conjunction of the individual, race, and New World territorialization, Elmer argues, is key to understanding the deepest strata in the political imagination of Atlantic modernity.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Chapter One. Opening Chapter Two. Blood, Culture, and Race: Cherokee Politics and Identity in the Eighteenth Century Chapter Three. Race as Nation, Race as Blood Quantum: The Racial Politics of Cherokee Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century Chapter Four. Law of Blood, Politics of Nation: The Political Foundations of Racial Rule in the Cherokee Nation, 1907-2000 Chapter Five. Social Classification and Racial Contestation: Local Non-National Interpretations of Cherokee Identity Chapter Six. Blood and Marriage: The Interplay of Kinship, Race, and Power in Traditional Cherokee Communities Chapter Seven. Challenging the Color Line: The Trials and Tribulations of the Cherokee Freedmen Chapter Eight. Closing Notes Bibliography Index
The paper explores the thesis that white-Black relations in America are essentially those of colonizer and colonized. The concept of colonization as a process is distinguished from colonialism as a social system in order to isolate the common features in the experience and situation of Afro-Americans and the colonial peoples. Three contemporary social movements are analyzed in this light: urban riots, cultural nationalism, and ghetto control politics. Some dilemmas within these movements are considered in terms of the ambiguities that exist when colonization has taken place outside of a colonial political context. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of the white role in ghettoization and decolonization.
More than eighty years since Chief Deskaheh petitioned the League of Nations for Haudenosaunee self-determination, it is becoming clearer that the existing rights discourse can take indigenous peoples only so far. States and global/regional forums have framed self-determination rights that deemphasize the responsibilities and relationships that indigenous peoples have with their families and the natural world (homelands, plant life, animal life, etc.) that are critical for the health and well-being of future generations. What is needed is a more holistic and dynamic approach to regenerating indigenous nations, and I propose the concept of sustainable self-determination as a benchmark for future indigenous political mobilization. Utilizing case studies of indigenous community regeneration such as the Native Federation of Madre de Dios (FENAMAD) in Peru and the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP) on Turtle Island as well as analyzing the existing research on rights, political mobilization, and ecosystems, this article identifies alternatives to the existing rights discourse that can facilitate a meaningful and sustainable self-determination process for indigenous peoples around the world. Overall, findings from this research offer theoretical and applied understandings for regenerating indigenous nationhood and restoring sustainable relationships on indigenous homelands.
This paper considers references to Oklahoma in blues recordings from 1924 to 1941, and the paradox that, although the reality of life for African-Americans in that state was little different from life in the Deep South, the recordings usually speak of migration to Oklahoma in optimistic terms. The notion that the Indian Nation (a.k.a. ) had been a refuge for runaway slaves is rebutted, together with the conclusion that optimistic references in the blues preserve this idea as a collective memory. What is being recalled is rather the period between the Civil War and statehood (1907): the former slaves of Native Americans in Oklahoma became tribal members, gaining the civil and property rights accorded to tribes-people, and the black townships movement offered the prospect of autonomy and self-government on the frontier. Two songs which take a negative view of Oklahoma's Jim Crow reality are also considered.
On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New WorldCharley Patton: the conscience of the delta', in R. Sacreé.) The Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues TraditionsCherokees vote to revoke membership of freedmen', AP Indian Country Today
- Ellison
- Ralph
Ellison, Ralph (1986) Going to the Territory, New York: Random House. Elmer, Jonathan (2008) On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World, New York: Fordham University Press. Evans, David (1987) 'Charley Patton: the conscience of the delta', in R. Sacreé.) The Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues Traditions, Liège: Presses Universitaires Liège, pp. 111Á214. Evans, Murray (2007) 'Cherokees vote to revoke membership of freedmen', AP Indian Country Today, 12 March; online at http://www.indian countrytoday.com/archive/28150249.html (accessed 5 July 2009).
Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American HistorySome aspects of the southern question The Antonio Gramsci ReaderInternal colonialism: an American theory of race
- Gordon
- Linda
Gordon, Linda (2006) 'Internal colonialism and gender', in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.) Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 427Á51. Gramsci, Antonio (1998) [1926] 'Some aspects of the southern question', in David Forgacs (ed.) The Antonio Gramsci Reader, New York: New York University Press, pp. 171Á85. Guitié, Ramó n A. (2004) 'Internal colonialism: an American theory of race'', Du Bois Review 1(2): 281Á95. Hechter, Michael (1999) [1975] Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country Teaching to Transgress Killing Rage: Ending Racism
- Holland
- Sharon
Holland, Sharon and Miles, Tiya (eds) (2006) Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress, New York: Routledge. hooks, bell (1995) Killing Rage: Ending Racism, New York: Henry Holt.
Colonialism: classic and internal
- Robert K Thomas
Thomas, Robert K. (1969) 'Colonialism: classic and internal', New University Thought 4: 37Á44.
What was Taney thinking? American Indian citizenship in the era of Dred Scott Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture
- Hoxie
- Frederick
Hoxie, Frederick E (2007) 'What was Taney thinking? American Indian citizenship in the era of Dred Scott', Chicago-Kent Law Review 82(329): 329Á59. Huhndorf, Shari (2001) Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kaplan, Amy (2002) The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Watson files bill to cut Cherokee-US ties
- Will Chavez
The historical irony of H.R. 2824
- Eric Cheyfitz
- Holland Sharon
Watson bill over Freedmen could fall hard on Cherokee if compromise cannot be reached
- Jerry Reynolds
Cherokee file federal suit in Freedmen dispute
- Clifton Adcock
CN files Freedmen lawsuit in federal court
- Will Chavez
The Cherokee Nation's new battle
- Lee-St
- John
Freedmen Granted Tribal Citizenship
- Gavin Off
Cherokees flee the moral high ground over Freedmen
- Robert Warrior
- Kymlicka Will
House of Representatives 2009 ‘Letter to Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States
- Diane Watson
- Conyers John
- Frank
- Barney
- Lee
- Barbara
- John Lewis
- Sheila Lee
- Jackson
Cherokees vote to revoke membership of freedmen
- Murray Evans
Housing amendment would punish Cherokee over Freedmen
- Jerry Reynolds
Jim Crow in Indian country
- Diane Watson
- Moreton-Robinson Aileen