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In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

Educators, scholars, and community activists recognize that immersion education is a key means to restoring Indigenous and other heritage languages. But language maintenance and revitalization involve many complex issues, foremost may be the lack of local professional development opportunities for potential language teachers.

In Alaska, the Second Language Acquisition Teacher Education (SLATE) project was designed to enable Indigenous communities and schools to improve the quality of native-language and English-language instruction and assessment by focusing on the elimination of barriers that have historically hindered degree completion for Indigenous and rural teachers. The Guided Research Collaborative (GRC) model, was employed to support the development of communities of practice through near-peer mentoring and mutual scaffolding. Through this important new model, teachers of both the heritage language, in this case Central Yup’ik, and English were able to situate their professional development into a larger global context based on current notions of multilingualism.

In Communities of Practice contributors show how the SLATE program was developed and implemented, providing an important model for improving second-language instruction and assessment. Through an in-depth analysis of the program, contributors show how this project can be successfully adapted in other communities via its commitment to local control in language programming and a model based on community-driven research.

Communities of Practice demonstrates how an initial cohort of Yup’ik- and English-language teachers collaborated to negotiate and ultimately completed the SLATE program. In so doing, these educators enhanced the program and their own effectiveness as teachers through a greater understanding of language learning. It is these understandings that will ultimately allow heritage- and English-language teachers to work together to foster their students’ success in any language.

 

The effects of colonization on the Indigenous peoples of the Américas over the past 500 years have varied greatly. So too have the forms of resistance, resilience, and sovereignty. In the face of these differences, the contributors to this volume contend that understanding the commonalities in these Indigenous experiences will strengthen resistance to colonial forces still at play. This volume marks a critical moment in bringing together transnational and interdisciplinary scholarship to articulate new ways of pursuing critical Indigenous studies.

Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas highlights intersecting themes such as indigenísmo, mestizaje, migration, displacement, autonomy, sovereignty, borders, spirituality, and healing that have historically shaped the experiences of Native peoples across the Américas. In doing so, it promotes a broader understanding of the relationships between Native communities in the United States and Canada and those in Latin America and the Caribbean and invites a hemispheric understanding of the relationships between Native and mestiza/o peoples.

Through path-breaking approaches to transnational, multidisciplinary scholarship and theory, the chapters in this volume advance understandings of indigeneity in the Américas and lay a strong foundation for further research. This book will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of anthropology, literary and cultural studies, history, Native American and Indigenous studies, women and gender studies, Chicana/o studies, and critical ethnic studies.

Ultimately, this deeply informative and empowering book demonstrates the various ways that Indigenous and mestiza/o peoples resist state and imperial attempts to erase, repress, circumscribe, and assimilate them.

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly NGO workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The NGOgo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both.

West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

During the colonial period in Guyana, the country’s coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. In Creole Indigeneity, Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies.

Looking particularly at the nation’s politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles’ new identities.

Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity—a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms “Creole indigeneity.” In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.

For millennia, “the North” has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions—empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history—it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change.
 
This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we’ve conceived it—and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region’s human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.

Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future.

Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin

How and why people develop, maintain, and change cultural boundaries through time are central issues in the social and behavioral sciences in generaland anthropological archaeology in particular. What factors influence people to imitate or deviate from the behaviors of other group members? How are social group boundaries produced, perpetuated, and altered by the cumulative outcomeof these decisions? Answering these questions is fundamental to understanding cultural persistence and change. The chapters included in this stimulating, multifaceted book address these questions.

Working in several subdisciplines, contributors report on research in the areas of cultural boundaries, cultural transmission, and the socially organized nature of learning. Boundaries are found not only within and between the societies in these studies but also within and between the communities of scholars who study them. To break down these boundaries, this volume includes scholars who use multiple theoretical perspectives, including practice theory and evolutionary traditions, which are sometimes complementary and occasionally clashing. Geographic coverage ranges from the indigenous Americas to Africa, the Near East, and South Asia, and the time frame extends from the prehistoric or precontact to colonial periods and up to the ethnographic present. Contributors include leading scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Together, they employ archaeological, ethnographic, ethnoarchaeological,experimental, and simulation data to link micro-scale processes of cultural transmission to macro-scale processes of social group boundary formation, continuity, and change.