Indigeneity and Carcerality: Thinking about reserves, prisons, and settler colonialism
In 1871, a group of men – hereditary chiefs of the Six Nations of the Grand River – met with anthropologist Horatio Hale in the town of Brantford, Ontario. The people of the Six Nations community are Haudenosaunee – the People of the Longhouse, a confederacy of nations that predates European contact with Indigenous peoples […]
Indigenous Geographies of Carceral Islands
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this post contains images of people who have died. At the Carceral Archipelago’s conference last month we discussed how landscapes around penal institutions could be rendered “empty” in our histories. This conception emerges from archival records in which land and sea are portrayed as “natural […]
The Carceral Archipelago Conference, Leicester 13-16 September 2015
The Carceral Archipelago conference, held in Leicester from 13 to 16 September 2015, felt just like reading over thirty outstanding monographs in two-and-a-half days, getting to know their authors personally, and having the chance to reflect collectively about their mutual entanglements. It was an intense marathon through the burgeoning field of the global history of […]
“Convicts, Indigenous People and Labour”
A few weeks ago the Carceral Archipelago team of postgraduates presented at the University of Leicester’s annual postgraduate conference. The theme of the Carceral Archipelago panel was “Convicts, Indigenous People and Labour”. The project’s three postgraduate students – Kellie Moss, Katy Roscoe and Carrie Crockett – presented three papers that ranged from Western Australia to […]
(In)visible Aboriginal Convict Heritage on Rottnest Island
In modern day Australia there are two key heritage ‘issues’ that are addressed in completely different ways – firstly, convict heritage; secondly, histories of aboriginal contact and conflict with European settlers. I will explore the tensions between the two narratives that emerge in the heritage of Rottnest Island, which held convicted Aboriginals between 1839 and […]
Awful Things Began to Happen: Rapid Change of Ainu Homeland and Convict Labour as Seen by the Ainu, By Minako Sakata
The Kamikawa region is one of areas that today still has relatively a large population of the Ainu. It is also the site of the most famous land dispute between the Hokkaido Government and the Ainu in the early 20th century. The Hokkaido Aborigines Protection Act of 1899, containing some restrictions and leading to many […]
Legacies of a British penal colony: adivasis in the Andaman Islands
It is an unexpected pleasure to be back in the Andaman Islands for the first time in almost two years. I have been researching aspects of the Islands’ history for almost 15 years, and in 2013 completed a research project with two colleagues based in Ahmedabad: historian of science Dr Madhumita Mazumdar and anthropologist Professor […]
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