Indigenous survival, land holding and loss in the midst of settler colonialism.
University of Sussex, July 4-5, 2013
Dispossession is a two-day workshop to be held at the University of Sussex on July 4-5, 2013 to support participants contributing to an edited volume. The edited collection and the symposium are focused on the experiences of communities of indigenous peoples in settler colonies who managed to retain access to land and create viable farming communities through the early-mid nineteenth century, but who were very often subsequently persuaded, forced or obliged to abandon those enterprises and land holdings. We intend to analyse these communities in an interconnected and comparative way across various colonial sites within and beyond the British Empire during the long nineteenth century, teasing out both the trans-imperial/global, and the more locally generated relations, ideas and practices behind their stories.
Both the edited book and the symposium are promised outcomes of a much broader-based Australian Research Council Linkage Grant for the ‘Minutes of Evidence’ project. The project brings together leading Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists, researchers, education experts and Community members to promote new modes of publicly engaging with historical and structural injustice through creating ‘meeting points’ (in public spaces, schools, universities, and research) to share memories, understandings and possibilities in relation to the nation’s past and present.