Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada adds to the small but growing body of scholarship on Indigenous mobility in the context of (but not necessarily defined by) European imperialism and settler colonialism. Mobility looms large in recent imperial, colonial, and transnational history writing. But Indigenous peoples have rarely featured in this work. Cecilia Morgan’s book sits at the forefront of efforts to redress this (distorting) absence in the “mobility turn,” on the one hand, and efforts to centralize Indigenous experiences within histories of imperialism and settler colonialism, on the other. Focusing on the mid-nineteenth century, with some earlier and later examples, Morgan presents cases studies predominantly of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee travelers from the British colony of Upper Canada and some from the northwestern fur trade country. But the introduction makes it clear that Indigenous communities were highly mobile prior to their encounter with Europeans. Imperialism, while bringing significant changes, was not the “origin” of Indigenous mobility. Moreover, Morgan argues that these traveling figures are far from unique. They should not be viewed or dismissed as “exceptional.” Quite the reverse. Their movements are a register of the dispossession being experienced across innumerable locales. Equally, they demonstrate how movement was imbricated with strategies of resistance and survivance, and represented an increasingly important arena of Indigenous agency in the context of settler colonial encroachment.

Post colonial – fiction? ‘Post-colonial’ IS fiction. Have I missed something? … Have they gone? Fiction!!!!! Roberta Sykes, ‘Postcolonial Fictions’, (In memory of the Post-Colonial Fictions...

This article addresses the question: does (or should) settler colonial studies have a future as a unified or distinct 'field'? It does so via a consideration of two vigorous, but largely disconnected, areas of uptake and critique: American Studies and Indigenous Studies in North America; and within Australian historical scholarship. I argue that connecting these debates reveals the great diversity of a field that is often represented as decidedly singular - and typically equated with the individual scholarship of Patrick Wolfe. This characterisation elides the wealth of Indigenous studies scholarship that has constituted the field. J. Kehaulani Kauanui's contention that settler colonial studies must simultaneously engage Indigenous studies to produce meaningful scholarship is thus a central focus. I particularly explore implications for my own scholarly areas of Indigenous and colonial history and emerging commentary advocating a return to history as a way out of impasses that currently confront the field. Given the competing visions of what settler colonial studies is or should be, ultimately I argue that the field may either disintegrate in the pursuit of singularity, or flourish in the embrace of its abundance and in the recognition of its limits and ethical obligations.

This chapter focuses on one form of mnemonic practice that has received much recent media attention, namely the women’s march. Communications technologies and new social media ensure the global interconnection of continuing activisms, built on the legacies of past movements. The practice of gathering in a public place to make a political point has been referred to as a ‘demonstration’ since the mid-nineteenth century. Photographs of the Women’s Marches capture protestors in diverse geographical sites forming ‘seas of pink’ as they donned the knitted caps that have become known as ‘pussyhats’. While the term ‘intersectionality’ may have seemed relatively new to the mainstream Anglophone media, the phrase had been used for several decades in academic feminist circles. History weighed heavily on Hillary Rodham Clinton. There was constant speculation as to whether she would make history by …

In 1921 the National Geographic Magazine published a special issue on ‘The Islands of the Pacific’. Richly illustrated with photographs, as was the hallmark of the magazine, the issue also featured...

This article argues that concepts of colonial modernity, originally developed for India and East Asia, and attention to micro-mobilities can provide new understandings of the emergence of Indigenous modernity in settler societies. Using previously unexplored sources, it examines a (seemingly small and local) walking tour by three Māori schoolboys in 1892 to ‘save their race from extinction’. An exemplary expression of Māori modernity, this walk is frequently cited as marking the earliest origins of the Young Māori Party, one of the most significant Māori organisations of the early twentieth century. Prior work on this group has been almost entirely confined within New Zealand historiography where it has been the subject of significant critique as a force for assimilation. Connecting this ‘walking tour’ with colonial and Indigenous histories elsewhere provides new ways of conceiving its significance, both locally and in its wider implications, that avoid such tropes. It demonstrates the possibilities of keeping both the local and the global in view, and indeed how this can amplify the importance of local histories.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues for the importance of recovering Indigenous participation within the global networks of power and mobility that have constructed the world. It explains a range of analytic scales, including global, regional and intra-Indigenous networks, including histories of ideas and cultural forms and biography, as well as exploring contemporary legacies. The book evaluates the networks linking Indigenous and colonial cultural hierarchies and ways of ordering difference. It discusses an exemplary work of the new imperial history by Catherine Hall, to which the rest of the volume in some respects responds. The book explores the interaction of humanitarians, settlers, Indigenous people and the British imperial government at a critical moment the passing in the British parliament of the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850. It focuses on print culture, but more closely engages with the question of who belongs within ideas of Indigenous networks.

Indigenising transnationalism requires a rejection of the term transnational itself or at least demands that it be far more precisely deployed. The complementary approaches presented by Tony Ballantyne and Alan Lester particularly underscore how colonial and anti-colonial networks were mutually constituted. The stories of Te Rangihiroa and Yolŋu-Macassan journeys are linked by the scientific and colonial anxieties around hybridity which they both reflect and challenge. Indigenous cultures were already mobile, connected and adaptive prior to their confrontation with colonizing powers. The new forms of networks they created in the context of European and American imperialism should thus be understood as an extension of pre-existing mobility and exchanges. Treating Indigenous mobility and networks seriously means placing them analytically on the same footing as those of 'Western' origins. Antoinette Burton suggests that if Indigenous 'travelling figures' were critics of colonial modernity, mobility seems too narrow an explanation for their criticism; criticism, in turn, seems too anodyne a category through which to understand.

This chapter explores Maori participation in the overlapping local and transnational networks of anthropology, activism and 'native' policy through the prism of Te Rangihiroa's scientific research and writing, and his anthropological and activist networks. It has hopefully worked to explicate how limiting such frameworks are. According to newspaper reports, Te Rangihiroa argued that in future the Maoris would be absorbed into the New Zealand race. Te Rangihiroa was attracted to S. Percy Smith's theory in part because it portrayed Maori as great navigators, and he extended on Smith's work through examining more closely migrations across Polynesia and the Pacific, drawing in large part on local 'myths' from this region. The transnational networks of anthropology and related racial sciences are a particularly unlikely space to seek or find an Indigenous presence. Anthropology has most commonly been viewed as a site of colonial and racial domination, rather than a vehicle of resistance or opportunity for Indigenous peoples.

This issue of Settler Colonial Studies represents a major turning point for our relatively new journal. First published in 2011 in an open access format (entirely run on volunteer labour), the foun...

While most historical studies position Western birth control campaigns as arising out of the women's movement, this article suggests they were primarily eugenic, rather than feminist, even if many of the leading figures were women. Birth control gained support largely through its representation as a tool for (white) racial progress and population control, rather than as an issue of women's rights. Indeed, in the interwar years birth control and eugenics were so intertwined as to be synonymous. The article explores the Malthusian writings of Annie Besant; the remarkably similarly ways that Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger promoted birth control as a eugenic tool; the support for birth control within both British and American eugenics organisations; and finally Australia's largest eugenic organisation, the Racial Hygiene Association, which founded the country's first birth control clinic in 1933 and later reinvented itself as the Family Planning Association. Recovering these links allows us to see how birth control was fundamentally linked to broader, transnational discussions of race and reproduction, and of how sex should be harnessed for racial purposes.

In 2009 Elizabeth Blackburn (along with two of her American colleagues) won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, confirming her position as a global scientific leader. She was immediately celebrated as Australia’s first woman Nobel laureate. However, although 2009 was a ‘bumper’ year for women Nobel laureates, with five winners in total, the media coverage soon became highly negative and discouraging. Much discussion focused not on Blackburn’s scientific work but on her gender – the difficulties it was assumed she must have faced individually as a woman scientist, and her wider leadership role in encouraging and supporting other women to overcome these obstacles. In this chapter I suggest the continuing highly negative ways the possibilities for women’s participation and leadership in science are discussed are counterproductive. Journalistic, policy and scholarly discussions of the ‘problem’ of women in science misconstrue the extent of women’s participation in the field and the nature of their experiences. In all these spheres, science continues to be understood and represented as an unhappy place for women to be. This misrepresentation, I argue, undercuts the leadership roles women scientists are seeking.