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From Time Immemorial: Indigenous Peoples and State Systems.

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... In any case, ethnic identification and its resulting politics result from a group's acceptance of valid dialogue interlocutors beyond that group's boundaries. These accepted participants usually are social groups and individuals identified as representatives of one or more nation-states (Anderson and Frideres 1981, Connor 1994, Esman 1994, Nash 1989, Perry 1996. ...
... Aboriginal politics are a special form of e Aboriginal movements around the world rest that colonial rule created stratified societies, w genes were placed in the lower rungs of soc , Perry 1996, Varese 1988. In all cases, th gue, the colonizers and their descendants app and resources by force, expropriating the nati ing them from the benefits of economic growt access to adequate political representation (See 1977;Deloria 1969Deloria , 1970Fanon 1967). ...
... Ethnicity, as Bart pointed out, is one of the available forms of self people can adopt in modern states to articulate t such resources. The notions of citizenship and t the rhetorical use of time (that is, the notion of first") are used, when possible, to validate eth cially aboriginal claims (Esman 1994, Guideri and Nash 1989, Perry 1996. This way, a minority can as having moral rights to a share of the commo aged resources. ...
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In 1994 the Zapatista National Liberation Army rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico set in motion many political and social processes, including demands for the improvement of living conditions, health and education for the indigenous people of Chiapas and the rest of the country. Regarding education, many indigenous communities began to demand a new type of formal education, suited to the every day life of their hamlets and villages. This paper, from the point of a participant observer, explores how the movement of the New Indigenous Education, as articulated by the Union of Teachers for the New Education (UNEM) is drawing on ethnic politics to present local concerns in global terms.
... Until the transition to majority rule in the early 1990s, South Africa would also have been included in this list. Like South Africa, these settler societies all have long histories of racial segregation and exclusion (Perry 1996). The contemporary legacies are reflected in the plight of Indigenous peoples: extreme levels of poverty, fractured cultures and communities, high levels of violence and conflict, low life expectancy and massive over-representation in the criminal justice system (World Bank 2011). ...
... Some researchers have suggested the comparison with 'failed states' and 'third world' living conditions is far from fanciful. This experience is one variant within a pattern repeated in other settler societies in the Americas and elsewhere (Perry 1996;World Bank 2010). ...
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Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias. This book turns the origin stories of criminology, which simply assumed a global universality, on their head. It draws on a range of case studies to illustrate this point: tracing criminology's long fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso's theory of atavism, itself based on an orientalist interpretation of men of colour from the Global South; uncovering criminology's colonial legacy, perhaps best exemplified by the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in settler societies drawn into the criminal justice system; analysing the ways in which the sociology of punishment literature has also been based on Northern theories, which assume that forms of penalty roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world; and making the case that the harmful effects of eco-crimes and global warming are impacting more significantly on the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes patterns of violence in the Global South. Southern criminology is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice. It promotes a perspective that aims to invent methods and concepts that bridge global divides and enhance the democratisation of knowledge, more befitting of global criminology in the twenty-first century. © 2019 Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Máximo Sozzo and Reece Walters. All Rights Reserved.
... Until the transition to majority rule in the early 1990s, South Africa would also have been included in this list. Like South Africa, these settler societies all have long histories of racial segregation and exclusion (Perry 1996). The contemporary legacies are reflected in the plight of Indigenous peoples: extreme levels of poverty, fractured cultures and communities, high levels of violence and conflict, low life expectancy and massive over-representation in the criminal justice system (World Bank 2011). ...
... Some researchers have suggested the comparison with 'failed states' and 'third world' living conditions is far from fanciful. This experience is one variant within a pattern repeated in other settler societies in the Americas and elsewhere (Perry 1996;World Bank 2010). ...
Article
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Abstract Issues of vital criminological research and policy significance abound in the global South, with important implications for South/North relations, and for global security and justice. Having a theoretical framework capable of appreciating the significance of this global dynamic will contribute to criminology being able to better understand the challenges of the present and the future. We employ southern theory in a reflexive (and not a reductive) way to elucidate the power relations embedded in the hierarchal production of criminological knowledge that privileges theories, assumptions and methods based largely on empirical specificities of the global North. Our purpose is not to dismiss the conceptual and empirical advances in criminology, but to more usefully de-colonise and democratise the toolbox of available criminological concepts, theories and methods. As a way of illustrating how southern criminology might usefully contribute to better informed responses to global justice and security, this article examines three distinct projects that could be developed under such a rubric. These include firstly, certain forms and patterns of crime specific to the global periphery; secondly, the distinctive patterns of gender and crime in the global south shaped by diverse cultural, social, religious and political factors; and lastly the distinctive historical and contemporary penalities of the global south and their historical links with colonialism and empire building. Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, and Máximo Sozzo, 'Southern Criminology' British Journal of Criminology (2016) 56 (1): 1-20 first published online August 20, 2015 doi:10.1093/bjc/azv083
... European settlers have only been in Australia for 232 years and do not have the depth of ancestral and cultural connection to Country as Indigenous peoples do. Indigenous peoples have lived in Australia for over 50,000 years (Broome 1994;Tobler et al. 2017), or from time immemorial as Indigenous peoples believe (Perry 2010). They have survived and adapted to the shifting of land masses, rising and falling of seas, climate change, fire, arrival of exotic plants and animals, and many other landscape influences. ...
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Collaborations between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous scientific researchers are increasingly mandated by global to local conservation policy and research ethics guidelines. Breakdowns occur due to misunderstandings around expected protocols of engagement and cooperation, which are compounded by lack of broader awareness of differences in cultural values, priorities and knowledge systems. Using first‐hand experiences, we outline eight key protocols and guidelines that researchers should consider when undertaking research with Indigenous peoples, or on Indigenous Country, through exploration of biocultural protocols and guidelines within Australian and Indigenous customary laws. We use the onion as a metaphor to highlight the layers of protocols and guidelines that researchers can peel back to guide their research from international to local scales, with ethics around the research question at the core. This paper draws on the perspectives and experiences of an Indigenous researcher (as ‘insider’/‘outsider’) and non‐Indigenous researcher (‘outsider’), working on a cross‐cultural and multidisciplinary investigation of past Aboriginal dispersal of rainforest trees on the Australian east coast. This paper is part of the special issue ‘Indigenous and cross-cultural ecology - perspectives from Australia’ published in Ecological Management & Restoration.
... There is a magical belief that industrial systems are sustainable or can be made sustainable through technological innovations, without major social reorganization that many scholars openly refute Daly, 2011;Dietz and O'Neill, 2013;Roszak, 1978;Yablonsky, 1972) but that goes unchallenged in the SDGs. The mantra also seems to be that trade and "growth" can promote sustainability and reduce poverty even though this view has long been contested by economists and is, in fact, in violation of basic international treaties for protecting cultural autonomy including the sanctity of their resources and economic and political systems (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953;Baran and Sweezy, 1968;Lemkin, 1944;Lindblom, 1977;Perry, 1996;Sponsel, 2000). These beliefs also conflict with the view of many experts, including some existing U.N. studies, demonstrating that trade and short-term growth do the opposite of what the SDGs claim; they uproot peoples from their resources, their lands, their traditional education and skills and cultures (Krauss, 1992;Cultural Survival, 1993;UNESCO, 2003;Lempert, 2015a;. ...
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This article examines the global community's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda for 2016 to 2030 by applying several previously published professional and legal indicators, peer reviewed in a variety of fields, for measuring compliance with international law and professional standards in the social and management sciences for sustainable development, poverty reduction, and development to see how the SDGs do. Overall, the SDGs show little change in substantive, ideological or implementation approach from the previous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). They are largely a reassertion of 19 th and early 20 th century European colonial approaches to weaker nations and cultures in violation of many of the principles established under international law for global peace, security and rights following the end of World War II. The implications of this approach, despite the claims, are that the SDGs are likely to further threaten international law objectives for protecting cultural diversity, sovereignty, sustainability and survival in a way that undermines not just international law but also global security.
... The page of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues pictures as a precedent the approach of Deskaheh, a Six Nations Cayuga Indian, to the League of Nations in 1923 and mentions the rejection of Maori activist T. W. Ratana's attempt to appear before the League of Nations in 1924. Perry (1996) gives summary accounts of Canada, Australia, and the United States; Jones and Hill-Burnett (1982) examined the formation of a national Aboriginal movement in Australia; for New Zealand, see Sissons (2000) inter alia. These and many other sources examine questions of the formation of structures of collective sentiment and action over the longer term. ...
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... Established in England in the 13 th Century, "time immemorial" refers to proof of continued use of property, or validity of local practices, prior to the beginning of written legal history, or "time out of mind" (Dorsett 2002 (Perry 1996). 39 It is not surprising, then, that the phrase "time immemorial" has been appropriated by indigenous peoples in both domestic and international indigenous rights discourses in asserting indigenous land and resource ...
... " As such, it must present indigenous peoples in a positive light. This is done through different arguments, including making links between the existence of the rainforest and survival of humankind , or connecting " indigenous knowledge to the sacred or the ineffable, partaking of a semantic shift that transforms 'knowledge' into wisdom, spiritual insight or some other such quality " (Brosius 2000:298; Perry 1996). However, as Ellen and Harris (2000) assert, the term indigenous knowledge itself is by no means clear (cf. ...
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In Latin America, the role of the state in funding and implementing environmental protection has been consistently inadequate. As alternative responses develop, national and international conservation NGOs replace governments in the quest for environmental sustainability. The environmental discourses and practices - and the morality accompanying resource use and conservation - privileged by the donor organizations become the environmental truth by which environmental sustainability is planned and designed. The goal of this article is to contribute to the more recent literature on power dynamics product of the collaboration among allies in global environmental and indigenous rights issues. It addresses the alliances developed among North American conservationist organizations, Panamanian authorities and NGOs, and Ngöbe indigenous peoples to create a master plan for the management of a marine protected area in the Archipelago of Bocas del Toro, Panama. I focus on the conflicts among apparent allies in the quest for environmental protection and on how the environmental truth (in the name of global environmentalism) of donor organizations shaped the creation of a management plan in the Archipelago. The process of the creation of the Assembly and the development of the plan illustrate both the efficacy and the limits of grassroots activism in situations of uneven status and power.
... The capacity of Indigenous people to participate in the planning process will determine the extent Indigenous priorities are reflected in planning outcomes. There are a range of factors that are well known which inhibit this capacity including language and cultural barriers, geographic isolation, a lack of resources, consultation fatigue, a lack of familiarity with the mainstream planning and decision making process (Perry 1996;Lane 2002). Given these barriers it is easy to understand the difficulty in trying to incorporate Indigenous ontological views of land management into the NRM planning process, which has set the criteria for how Australian landscapes are managed (Lane 2006). ...
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‘Caring for country’ is a term used to describe the complex spiritual affiliation that encompasses the rights and responsibilities that Aboriginal Australians have with their land. It includes their custodial responsibilities for keeping the land healthy and its species abundant. This ontology and associated practice of ‘caring for country’ continues across large sections of the Northern Territory of Australia through customary practice and through the Indigenous Ranger Program. This Program has been described as a ‘two toolbox approach’, which combines traditional ecological knowledge with more conventional land management practice, to manage landscapes for their natural and cultural values. Since 2007 there have been several policy initiatives which have changed the dynamics in Aboriginal communities which in turn has affected the structure of the Indigenous Ranger Program. In response to the dire social conditions facing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, the CommonwealthGovernment initiated the Northern Territory Emergency Response, which was a ‘top down’ approach with very little community engagement. At around the same time there was a shift in the way Indigenous Rangers jobs were funded. The unintended impact of this was a reduction in the number of Aboriginal people connected to the Ranger Program and potentially less input from culturally appropriate decision makers for land management. Another influencing policy change involved a shift in Commonwealth funding for land management from Natural Heritage Trust to Caring For Our Country funding. This new funding is more targeted and has changed the nature of the Ranger Program to being less ‘program based’ and more ‘outcome based’ by packaging many land management activities as ‘Fee for Service’ contracts. The transformation is taking place in a prescriptive manner. In this paper we advocate a more community-based approach which allows for greater community involvement in planning, decision making and governance.
... The State has more power than Indigenous people do, and so the State can say 'No' whenever it wants to. That means Indigenous people have to strategize about how and when to assert their concerns and interests in relation to natural resources and management more carefully than does the State.Ultimately, all Indigenous peoples are incorporated into Nation States that have greater power under the current global political economy than Indigenous groups, even those with some degree of recognized sovereignty(Hall and Fenelon 2009;Perry 1996).The State has the power to simply say 'No' to Indigenous involvement in natural resource management. As a result, Indigenous peoples have to approach co-management negotiations more carefully than State resource agency personnel, creating strategies and plans that take into account the personalities involved, the overall political climate, the State fiscal situation, and the strength of the Indigenous request before ever approaching a State agency. ...
... Over the course of the last few decades, indigenous peoples in developed, transition, and developing countries have been asserting their traditional claims to and rights in land. After several centuries of colonialism, native peoples are asserting treaty rights, or their equivalent, in countries around the world (Perry 1996). In most cases, the point of this reassertion is to achieve the dual purposes of security through land ownership through a form of private property, and to foster sustainability of resource management (Howitt et al. 1996, Wolfe-Keddi 1995. ...
... Although recognizing that these terms are colonial constructions, I feel this language captures a particular reality. As Richard J. Perry (1996) explained, "Whatever its origins . . . the concept ["Indian"] eventually acquired a social and political reality. Many indigenous peoples came to realize that, however dissimilar they may have been, having been treated generically gave them certain common problems and concerns" (p. ...
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As Indian gaming operations proliferate and public deliberations concerning the propriety of casinos intensify, the academic literature devotes little attention to debates within tribes about Indian gaming. This article interrogates this divergence by examining a specific mode of intratribal contention. Gaming-related occupations staged by factions at the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas are described. After locating these practices in the context of approximately half a century of Native American contentious politics, the author considers four questions raised by these cases: (a) Does casino gaming, regardless of the class, have a place on the reservation? (b) How should communities manage the social and economic impacts of casino gaming? (c) Who is, and is not, a member of the community eligible to share in the benefits anticipated to be accrued through gaming? and (d) Who is “traditional” and what does traditional mean?
... There is a pressing need to integrate contemporary ethnographic research on indigenous people across the U.S./Mexico border and in Hawai'i into a broad comparative framework-as, for example, Spicer (1967) and Brooks (2002a) have done for the ethnohistory of the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. However, such an integration is not a reality but one of the horizons to which this review points (but see Cook & Lindau 2000, Edmunds 2002, Kapur 2004, Menchaca 2001, Perry 1996, Sheridan & Parezo 1996. ...
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This review article addresses the following question: Given the transformed social, political, and intellectual conditions for ethnographic research among indigenous peoples in North America, what forms has such research come to take at the turn of the twenty-first century? The review considers significant trends and innovations in research sites and topics, research methodologies, theoretical orientations, and forms of representation. It also assesses the distinctive strengths and limitations posed by ethnographic research for scholars engaging with significant dimensions of contemporary indigenous life, including struggles for rights, resources, recognition, and language vitality in both the national and international arenas; the repatriation and sovereignty movements; the development of tribal casinos, tourist complexes, cultural centers, and media outlets; continued social and economic marginalization of many indigenous peoples; and challenges posed by neoliberalism and globalization to tribal...
... The page of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues pictures as a precedent the approach of Deskaheh, a Six Nations Cayuga Indian, to the League of Nations in 1923 and mentions the rejection of Maori activist T. W. Ratana's attempt to appear before the League of Nations in 1924. Perry (1996) gives summary accounts of Canada, Australia, and the United States; Jones and Hill-Burnett (1982) examined the formation of a national Aboriginal movement in Australia; for New Zealand, see Sissons (2000) inter alia. These and many other sources examine questions of the formation of structures of collective sentiment and action over the longer term. ...
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Despite challenges for U.S.-Mexico border Indigenous activists in their efforts to counter dominant discourses about both border policy and Native rights, Indigenous activists assert their rights as they advocate for public policies and actions that affirm and protect these rights. This article explores some of the discursive strategies used by Indigenous activists to index Indigenous identities and lifeways and to counter mainstream conceptualizations of Native identity and Indigenous rights on the U.S.-Mexico border. Through such semiotic strategies, Indigenous border activists create indigenized and legitimized political spaces for the assertion of their beliefs. Indigenous border activists achieve this through metasemiotic constructs that draw from stereotypes about Native people and their use of language as well as through the active mobilization of schemas for conceptualizing both Native American experiences and the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Indigenous Peoples” refers to groups who have lived in an area since it was first populated, or at least for a very long time, and who generally do not have state-level forms of organization, for example Native Nations in the Americas. This brief definition is sometimes controversial. The most cited and most detailed definition was written in 1986 by José Martinez Cobo for the United Nations. Even that definition has been contested. There are about 5000 different indigenous groups, so general statements are difficult to support. Furthermore, any definition carries political ramifications about which peoples are indigenous. Even so, there are 350 million or so indigenous peoples in the world, about the population of the United States in 2010. This definition suffices for our purposes, but it is only a gloss on a complicated subject.
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Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.
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In this paper we examine flexible ethnic identity formation as a mechanism of accommodation and resistance deployed by a particular social group with origins in the periphery as they respond to changing political and economic forces in the world-system. This paper addresses criticisms that world-system analyses are ‘too macro’ or ‘structurally deterministic’ by examining on the ground action and responses by a local oppositional movement within its broad political and economic context. Its focus is an historical case study of a particular group of people whose origins lie in European colonial expansion into the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. The paper begins by recounting ethnographic reports of Garifuna origin myths, then sketches this group's forced incorporation in a colonial world-system (and their responses), discusses their assignment to ‘minority group’ status within newly independent Belize at about the same time they are establishing transnational communities via migration to the United States, and concludes with some thoughts on the emerging ‘virtual communities’ of Garifuna and indigenous peoples around the world that are emerging on the worldwide web today. We explore what the notion of ethnic identity means in this particular case, and how and why it changes over time. We also try to understand if this flexible identity, and the social movements that arise as it is redefined, can be understood as a form of ‘resistance’. Finally, we ask if diasporic identity movements of indigenous people, like the Garifuna, actually or potentially can contribute to rising challenges against the forces of contemporary ‘globalization’.
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The main thesis of this essay is that being recognized as traditional or indigenous requires the employment of modern means. A form of ‘Bureaucratic Orientalism’ has been devised, constructing and reaffirming ‘the Other’ through the minutiae of administrative procedures and contemporary representational processes. These procedures exist for the twin purposes of establishing the right to act as an indigenous group, and of circumscribing the obligations of the state, and possibly of other institutions of governance. The entire debate is the expression of a dilemma that has no solution but is actually an expression of modernity. The three pillars upon which indigeneity is affirmed are a national (internationally legitimized) legal system, the contemporary world of NGOs, and the institutions of local government. Thus, through the very process of being recognized as ‘indigenous’, these groups enter the realms of modernity. The Philippines provide a case study for these explorations.
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Defining “indigeneity” has recently been approached with renewed vigor. While the field can involve quite passionate commitment to advocacy among scholars, theoretical clarity is needed in understanding just who might be thought of as indigenous, and the reasons why this is so. Does “indigeneity” make sense only if it is understood in relation to the “non-indigenous,” and if so, how useful is the latter category across societies and nations with very different cultural histories? Two edited volumes, one which addresses this question in global perspective and another focused exclusively on Australia, are reviewed and contextualized within broader debates.
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