New from the University of Washington Press:
Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law, and Resistance in South-West Australia and Prairie Canada, edited by
Amanda Nettelbeck (
University of Adelaide),
Russell C. Smandych (
University of Manitoba),
Louis A. Knafla (
University of Calgary), and
Robert Foster (
University of Adelaide). A description from the Press:
Fragile Settlements compares the
processes through which British colonial authority was asserted over
Indigenous peoples in southwest Australia and prairie Canada from the
1830s to the early twentieth century. At the start of this period, as a
humanitarian response to settlers' increased demand for land, Britain's
Colonial Office moved to protect Indigenous peoples by making them
subjects under British law. This book highlights the parallels and
divergences between these connected British frontiers by examining how
colonial actors and institutions interpreted and applied the principle
of law in their interaction with Indigenous peoples "on the ground."
A few blurbs:
"Fragile Settlements makes an important
contribution to the growing field of transcolonial studies by bringing
into conversation the legal histories of the dispossession of Indigenous
peoples in south-west Australia and western Canada. The authors provide
critical insight into the ways in which the various forms of legal
colonial governance played out in two locales. This work is an important
one for anyone considering how the legal histories of the past can
better inform our understanding of clashes over sovereignty and
jurisdiction in the present."
-Shaunnagh Dorsett
"The authors of Fragile Settlements
tackle what few legal scholars have attempted - regional comparisons -
and they do it very well. They ambitiously and successfully set out to
uncover how contemporary experiences of "imperfect sovereignty" in both
Australia and Canada can be traced to their parallel histories of
Aboriginal subjugation through law and other forms of settler
governance."
-Peter Karsten
More information is available
here.
