Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Nettelbeck, et al., eds., on "Aboriginal Peoples, Law, and Resistance in South-West Australia and Prairie Canada"

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.