AlterNative | Books for Review

Because This Land Is Who We Are is an exploration of environmental repossession, told through a collaborative case study approach, and engaging with Indigenous communities in Canada (Anishinaabe), Hawai'i (Kanaka Maoli) and Aotearoa (Maori). The co-authors are all Indigenous scholars, community leaders and activists who are actively engaged in the movements underway in these locations, and able to describe the unique and common strategies of repossession practices taking place in each community.

This open access book celebrates Indigenous ways of knowing, relating to and honouring the land, and the authors' contributions emphasize the efforts taking place in their own Indigenous land. Through engagement with these varying cultural imperatives, the wider goal of Because This Land Is Who We Are is to broaden both theoretical and applied concepts of environmental repossession, and to empower any Indigenous community around the world which is struggling to assert its rights to land.

This volume examines how urban potentiality emerges in performances that reclaim the city, acting as an emancipatory force when dominant patterns of urban behaviour are thrown into crisis. It can result in establishing new habits of inhabiting city space, collective experiences shaping practices of urban commoning, re-inventing community relations, and freeing collaboration from capitalist expropriation. Instead of problematizing such radical change through the modernist belief in heroic unique acts, we need to explore the power dissident performances acquire when repeated. In search of an emancipatory politics of urban potentiality, commoning thus has the ability become a collective ethos based on mutuality and equality rather than merely a relatively fair way of sharing urban infrastructures.

In this book, the leading social and urban theorist Stavros Stavrides draws on a wide range of classic and historical thought on the urban question and social transformation. Drawing from research in Latin American urban movements, from activist participation in urban struggles in Greece, and citizen initiatives developed in Europe, this book expands the discussion on the potentialities of urban commoning to demonstrate how an emancipatory urban future may be achieved.

Using the recent turn to ecology as a starting point, Hannah Richter and Elisa Randazzo bring ecological thinking into contact with Critical Indigenous Studies, in which awareness of the necessity for sustainable relations between humans and non-humans has long preceded Western Anthropocene discourse. Currently, the drastic ecological changes labelled as 'the Anthropocene' not only increasingly shape the political awareness and the priorities of citizens and governments, but also inform a large body of social scientific scholarship.

Indigenous scholarship and practice, in particular ecological adaptability, is intrinsically related to power structures and political struggle – hence indigenous understanding of Anthropocene discourses are intertwined with discourses of colonialism and political contestation. This book problematises the depoliticising character of Western Anthropocene discourses in relation to indigenous ecologies. The authors reveal how the anti-colonial struggles of Indigenous communities and the unequal distribution of responsibilities for and suffering from ecological change, are concealed and devalued in Western discourses of the Anthropocene.

Highlighting collaborative archaeological research that centers the enduring histories of Native peoples in North America
 
“A perfect embodiment of the major transformations occurring in North American archaeology today. The wide representation of Native American voices in this volume may be unequaled anywhere in the archaeological literature. The authors advocate methods, concepts, and terminologies to unerase practices of erasure.”—Charles R. Cobb, author of The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era  
 
“As a Native academic with over 20 years of experience engaging with archaeology, I found that these chapters offer new approaches and useful examples I would integrate into my courses and that helped me think that archaeology in North America is moving in the right direction with each new generation of practitioners. By incorporating Indigenous scholars, the book models through practice how to integrate Indigenous knowledge—in its many forms—into archaeology.”—D. Rae Gould, coauthor of Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories That Have Futures  
 
Challenging narratives of Indigenous cultural loss and disappearance that are still prevalent in the archaeological study of colonization, this book highlights collaborative research and efforts to center the enduring histories of Native peoples in North America through case studies from several regions across the continent.
 
The contributors to this volume, including Indigenous scholars and Tribal resource managers, examine different ways that archaeologists can center long-term Indigenous presence in the practices of fieldwork, laboratory analysis, scholarly communication, and public interpretation. These conversations range from ways to reframe colonial encounters in light of Indigenous persistence to the practicalities of identifying poorly documented sites dating to the late nineteenth century.
 
In recognizing Indigenous presence in the centuries after 1492, this volume counters continued patterns of unknowing in archaeology and offers new perspectives on decolonizing the field. These essays show how this approach can help expose silenced histories, modeling research practices that acknowledge Tribes as living entities with their own rights, interests, and epistemologies.  
 
Tsim D. Schneider, a citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California. Lee M. Panich, associate professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University, is the author of Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California.
 
Contributors: Heather Walder | Sarah E. Cowie | Peter A Nelson | Shawn Steinmetz | Nick Tipon | Lee M Panich | Tsim D Schneider | Maureen Mahoney | Matthew A. Beaudoin | Nicholas Laluk | Kurt A. Jordan | Kathleen L. Hull | Laura L. Scheiber | Sarah Trabert | Paul N. Backhouse | Diane L. Teeman | Dave Scheidecker | Catherine Dickson | Hannah Russell | Ian Kretzler 

In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt exposes how Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions like asylums, factories, and hospitals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked together as a part of an interconnected system of settler domination. In so doing, Whitt centers the experiences of Indigenous youth and adults alike at the Carlisle Indian School, Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company Factory, House of the Good Shepherd, and other Progressive Era facilities. She demonstrates that in the administration of these institutions, which involved moving Indigenous people from one location to another, everyday white Americans became deputized as agents of the settler order. Bringing together Native American history, settler colonial studies, and the history of medicine, Whitt breaks new ground by showing how the confinement of Indigenous people across interlocking institutional sites helped concretize networks of white racial power—a regime that Native nations and communities continue to negotiate and actively resist today.

A landmark account in words and pictures of Māori art, by Māori art historians – from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary Māori artists.

He toi whakairo, he mana tangata.
Through artistic excellence, there is human dignity.

Toi Te Mana is a landmark account of Māori art from the time of the tūpuna (ancestors) to the present day.

In 600 pages and over 500 extraordinary images, this volume invites readers to climb on to the waka for a remarkable voyage – from ancestral weavers to contemporary artists at the Venice Biennale, from whare whakairo to film, and from Te Puea Hērangi to Michael Parekōwhai.

The authors explore a wide field of art practice: raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattoo), whakairo (carving), rākai (jewellery), kākahu (textiles), whare (architecture), toi whenua (rock art), painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, installation art, digital media and film. And they do so over a long time period – from the arrival of Pacific voyagers 800 years ago to contemporary artists in Aotearoa and around the world today. Through wide-ranging chapters alongside focused breakout boxes on individual artists, movements and events, Toi Te Mana is a waka eke noa – an essential book for anyone interested in te ao Māori.

Toi Te Mana is a Māori art history, written by Māori, given to the world.

Toitū te whenua, toitū te tikanga, ka ora ngā toi.
When we hold fast to our land and values, our art flourishes.

Kua rongo pai te iwi mō ngā mahi a ngā tūpuna hōia, engari, he aha rā ngā kōrero mō te hunga i noho tonu ai ki te kāinga?

Whakaheke toto tonu ana te iwi Māori ki te Pakanga Tuarua o te ao. I te tuwheratanga o te whawhai nui ka puta noa ngā taitama hei tūao ki te Taua Tuarua o Aotearoa. Kua rongo pai te iwi mō ngā mahi rongonui a ngā tūpuna hōia, tae noa ki te Ope Taua 28. Engari, he aha rā ngā kōrero mō te hunga i noho tonu ai ki te kāinga?

Kei a Raupanga he kōrero mō te ao Māori i te wā o te Pakanga Tuarua, arā, mō ngā mahi me ngā wheako o te hunga i noho nei ki te kāinga. E toru tekau mā iwa ngā pūrākau kua tāngia ki te reo Māori, kua whakanikohia ki ngā tini whakaahua ātaahua. E aro matua ana ki ngā kaupapa e whitu, arā, ki te Mahi, ki ngā Mahi Taua, ki te Hapori, ki ngā Taiohi, ki te Tōrangapū, ki te Whakapono, ā, ki Muri i te Pakanga.

Ka ahu a Raupanga mai i ngā wheketere ki ngā pāmu, mai i ngā marae ki ngā whare karakia, mai i ngā kura ki ngā puni hōia, mai i ngā takiwā taiwhenua ki ngā tāone nunui. E āta titiro ana tēnei ki ngā koiora o ngā tāngata, ki ngā mahi hoki a ngā whānau me ngā hapori. Kei roto he kōrero mō te Kīngitanga, mō te petihana o Ōrākei, mō te kapa haka, mō ngā tohetohe ā-tōrangapū, ā-hāhi, ā-papori hoki, arā, he kōrero mō ngā Māori e noho tonu ana ki Aotearoa i te wā pakanga. He waka huia a Raupanga, e horaina ana ngā kōrero o taua wā mō ngā whānau o nāianei, me ngā reanga whakaheke.

We have heard the heroic story of the Māori Battalion, but what of the Māori people who remained at home?

Raupanga brings together the people, stories and places underpinning the Māori wartime experience of the Second World War. Written in te reo Māori, thirty-seven succinctly illustrated pieces explore seven themes: Mahi (Work); Mahi Taua (Home Defence); Hapori (Community); Taiohi (Youth); Tōrangapū (Politics); Whakapono (Religion); and I Muri i te Pakanga (Post-war). Raupanga journeys from factories to farms, from marae to churches, and considers the experience of communities in and out of urban centres. Delving into stories of the Kīngitanga, kapa haka, the Ōrākei petition, and their champions, this book is a treasure trove of historical narratives waiting to be shared with whānau and future generations across Aotearoa New Zealand.

The illustrated account of how Māori society was transformed at home while the Māori Battalion were fighting overseas.

Taking readers to the farms and factories, the marae and churches where Māori lived, worked and raised their families, Te Hau Kāinga tells the story of the profound transformation in Māori life during the Second World War.

While the Māori Battalion fought overseas, the Māori War Effort Organisation and its tribal committees engaged Māori men and women throughout Aotearoa in the home guard, the women’s auxiliary forces, and national agricultural and industrial production. Māori mobilisation was an exercise of rangatiratanga and it changed how Māori engaged with the state. And, as Māori men and women took up new roles, the war was to become a watershed event for Māori society that set the stage for post-war urbanisation.

From ammunition factories to kūmara fields, from Te Puea Hērangi to Te Paipera Tapu, Te Hau Kāinga provides the first substantial account of how hapori Māori were shaped by the wartime experience at home. It is a story of sacrifice and remarkable resilience among whānau, hapū and iwi Māori.

This book argues that there is a need to develop greater indigenous-led intergenerational resilience in order to meet the challenges posed by contemporary crises of climate change, cultural clashes, and adversity.

In today’s media, the climate crisis is kept largely separate and distinct from the violent cultural clashes unfolding on the grounds of religion and migration, but each is similarly symptomatic of the erasure of the human connection to place and the accompanying tensions between generations and cultures. This book argues that both forms of crisis are intimately related, under-scored and driven by the structures of white supremacism which at their most immediate and visible, manifest as the discipline of black bodies, and at more fundamental and far-reaching proportions, are about the power, privilege and patterns of thinking associated with but no longer exclusive to white people. In the face of such crisis, it is essential to bring the experience and wisdom of Elders and traditional knowledge keepers together with the contemporary realities and vision of youth.

This book’s inclusive and critical perspective on Indigenous-led intergenerational resilience will be valuable to Indigenous and non-Indigenous interdisciplinary scholars working on human-ecological resilience. 

To review this book:

• Email your expression of interest to: editors@alternative.ac.nz. 
• Include your name, Indigenous affiliations and the AlterNative Code.