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The current legal and political context is perhaps more congenial than ever before to considering claims made by minorities for the protection of some aspect of their identity. This book argues that multicultural societies depend for their success on having courts and legislatures which are capable of assessing these identity claims in a fair and transparent manner. Identity claims appeal to distinctive and important features of an individual's or group's identity. Despite the ubiquity of identity claims before public institutions, how decision makers assess these claims and the identities of the groups which make them is only vaguely understood and mostly ignored in normative political theory and policy analysis. This book examines the key approaches used by national and international institutions to assessing the identity claims of religious, cultural, and Indigenous minorities today. It develops a normative guide to aid in the fair assessment of identity claims. The identity approach developed in the book is grounded on the requirement that public institutions must respect people's identities and that these institutions must have the capacity to reflect on their own unfair biases. The analysis identifies and responds to four important skeptical challenges to the public assessment of identity claims which include concerns about the incommensurability and questionable authenticity of identity claims, and about the risks of essentializing and domesticating the identities of the people who advance them. The approach developed in this book explains how decision makers can meet these challenges while engaging in a fair and transparent assessment of identity claims.

By 2009, reverberations of economic crisis spread from the United States around the globe. As corporations across the United States folded, however, small businesses on the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) continued to thrive. In this rich ethnographic study, Courtney Lewis reveals the critical roles small businesses such as these play for Indigenous nations. The EBCI has an especially long history of incorporated, citizen-owned businesses located on their lands. When many people think of Indigenous-owned businesses, they stop with prominent casino gaming operations or natural-resource intensive enterprises. But on the Qualla Boundary today, Indigenous entrepreneurship and economic independence extends to art galleries, restaurants, a bookstore, a funeral parlor, and more. Lewis’s fieldwork followed these businesses through the Great Recession and against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding EBCI-owned casino. Lewis's keen observations reveal how Eastern Band small business owners have contributed to an economic sovereignty that empowers and sustains their nation both culturally and politically.

The emergence of village-communities profoundly transformed social organization in every part of the world where such societies developed. Contributors to The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America employ archaeological and historical evidence to explore the development of villages among eastern North American indigenous societies of the deep and recent past. Rich data sets from archaeology and contemporary social theory are employed to document the physical attributes of villages, the structural organization and aggregation of such entities, what it means to be a villager, cosmological and ritual systems, and how villages were entangled with one another in regional networks. The result is a volume which highlights the similarities and differences in the historical trajectories of village formation and development in eastern North America, as well as the larger processes by which villages have the power to affect large-scale social transformations.

Deadly Virtue argues that the history of the French Calvinist attempt to colonize Florida in the 1560s is key to understanding the roots of American whiteness in sixteenth-century colonialism, science, and Protestantism. The book places the history of Fort Caroline, Florida, into the context of Protestant colonialism and understandings of the body, emotion, and identity held in common by travelers throughout the early Atlantic world. Protestants envisioned finding a rich and powerful Indigenous king, converting him to Christianity, and then establishing a Protestant-Indigenous alliance to build an empire under Indigenous leadership that would compete with European monarchies. However, when the colony was wiped out by the Spanish, these Protestants took this as a condemnation from their god for this plan of collaborating with Indigenous people and developed separatist strategies for future Protestant colonial projects. By introducing the reader to the humoral model of the body, this book shows how race, gender, sexuality, and Christian morality came to intersect in modern understandings of whiteness.

Today, the portrait of the Pacific Islander, Mai, painted by Joshua Reynolds is world-renowned as a symbol of empire and of the eighteenth century. But Reynolds painted other visitors from the New World, now forgotten. One especially haunting portrait was of a Cherokee warrior called Ostenaco, who visited Britain a dozen years before Mai. This book is less about Reynolds’s portraits than the full, complicated, and richly illuminating lives behind them. It tells the whole life story of Mai, the refugee from Ra‘iatea who voyaged with James Cook to London in the 1770s and returned home again to seek vengeance on his neighboring Islanders. It traces, for the first time, the entire biography of Ostenaco, who grew up in the southern Appalachians, engaged with colonists throughout his adulthood, and became entangled with imperial politics in complex ways during the American Revolution. And it reveals the experiences of the painter who encountered both Indigenous visitors, Reynolds himself—an artist often celebrated as a founder of modern British art but rarely seen as a figure of empire. This book interweaves all three parallel and otherwise unconnected lives together, explaining their links but also exposing some of the extraordinary diversity of the eighteenth-century world. It shows that Indigenous people pushed back and shaped European expansion far more than is acknowledged. It also reveals how much more conflicted Britons were about their empire in this era than is assumed, even while they witnessed its reach into every corner of the globe.

What is the future of curatorial practice? How can the relationships between Indigenous people in the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions, and curatorial knowledge in museums globally be (re)conceptualised in reciprocal and symmetrical ways? Is there an ideal model, a ‘curatopia,’ whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia, which can enable the reinvention of ethnographic museums and address their difficult colonial legacies? This volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of the play in curatorial practice, reviewing the different models and approaches operating in different museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world, and debating the emerging concerns, challenges, and opportunities. The subject areas range over native and tribal cultures, anthropology, art, history, migration and settler culture, among others. Topics covered include: contemporary curatorial theory, new museum trends, models and paradigms, the state of research and scholarship, the impact of new media, and current issues such as curatorial leadership, collecting and collection access and use, exhibition development, and community engagement. The volume is international in scope and covers three broad regions—Europe, North America and the Pacific. The contributors are leading and emerging scholars and practitioners in their respective fields, all of whom have worked in and with universities and museums, and are therefore perfectly placed to reshape the dialogue between academia and the professional museum world.

This book provides an imaginative retelling of London's history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries. London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. This book offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, the book also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.

Moved by Aboriginal or Indigenous understandings of tracks, Norie Neumark’s Voicetracks seeks to deepen understandings of voice through listening to a variety of media and contemporary art works from Australia, Europe, and the United States. The author aims to bring voice studies into conversation with new materialism to broaden thinking within both. Through a methodology based in listening, she brings theories of affect and carnal and situated knowledge into conversation with her examples and the theories she works with. Through her examples, Neumark engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works with which she engages—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing humans, animals, things, and assemblages. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories from sound, animal, and posthuman studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with and within the assemblages of living creatures, things, places and histories around us. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.

‘Radical alterity is not about exotism and exclusion but about imagination of how to weave different worlds in respect of their singularities always in becoming, how to recreate outsideness in our minds.’ This is what Barbara Glowczewski calls ‘indigenising anthropology’ in this collection of essays that chart her intellectual trajectory as an anthropologist involved since 1979 with Warlpiri people from central Australia and other Indigenous people in the Kimberley and on Palm Island. The book shows how the many ways in which Aboriginal men and women actualise virtualities of their Dreaming totemic space-time into collective networks of ritualised places resonate with some of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concepts and also with reticular digital memories. It is a tribute to Indigenous cosmovisions and art, as well as the creative affirmation of collective movements in Oceania, in Brazil and France, who struggle to defend existential territories that could restore a multiplicity of commons to heal the earth from past colonisation and present destruction. Glowczewski draws on 40 years of shared experiences with Indigenous peoples, her own conversations with Guattari, her participation in decolonial ecological debates and engagement for an ‘earth in common’ (https://encommun.eco/), to deliver an innovative agenda for radical anthropology which offers new avenues for research on environmental and social justice based on the value of difference and creative resistance.

This book is the first to focus on Indigenous women of the Southwest and Pacific Northwest and the ways they dealt with the challenges posed by the existing legal regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In most western states, it was difficult if not impossible for Native women to inherit property, raise mixed-race children, or take legal action in the event of rape or abuse. Through the experiences of six Indigenous women who fought for personal autonomy and the rights of their tribes, the book explores a long yet generally unacknowledged tradition of active critique of the U.S. legal system by female Native Americans.