My Land My Life

Throughout Oceania, land is central to identity because it is understood to be spiritually nourishing and sustaining. Land is the mother. Land, and the kinship it nurtures, is the basis for sustaining livelihoods and ways of life. Therefore, Indigenous dispossession from the land has deep and far-reaching consequences. My Land, My Life: Dispossession at the Frontier of Desire explores the land rush that took place in Vanuatu from 2001 to 2014 which resulted in over ten percent of all customary land being leased. In this book, Siobhan McDonnell offers new insights into the drivers of capitalist land transformations. Using multi-scalar and multi-sited ethnography, she describes not simply a linear march toward commodification of the landscape by foreign interests, but a complex web replete with the local powerful Indigenous men involved in manipulating power and property. McDonnell meticulously describes land-leasing processes and maps the relationships between investors, middlemen, and local men. She shows how property is a tool with which foreigners reassert capitalism and neocolonial control over Indigenous landscapes. The legal identity of “landowner” contains foundational contradictions between the rights established in Vanuatu’s kastom system and those afforded by property, as individualized rights over land. Property has also created sites for the production of masculine authority and enabled men to manipulate claims to land and entrench their personal power. This book explores how transactions of customary land have created new domains of agency and frontiers of desire: foreign desire to possess land and local desire to lease land for cash. It concludes with a discussion of Vanuatu’s constitutional and land reform package, drafted by the author, which took effect in 2014 and delivered a more empathetic approach to Indigenous land rights and ended the land rush. Informed by decades of study, legal work, and community engagement, My Land, My Life demonstrates an engaged anthropological practice based on reciprocity that responds directly to what Indigenous people have asked for. This book is certain to appeal to a wide range of scholars as well as policy makers.

Growing up in a small town to me was an adventure. In Bluff, a small town in central Queensland, everyone knew everyone. I had plenty of friends to hang out with. My mates and I were always outside playing and never got home until dark, which I sometimes got a flogging for, but I had fun playing. The school had about five to six buildings in the seventies and eighties but big enough to keep us kids busy. I was raised by my mother along with two older brothers and one younger sister and lots of relatives. On the weekends, we’d go camping down the creek, where our cubby house was or go crawchying (yabbies) for something to eat. Having a childhood gave me a lot of imagination and inspired me to write stories about our adventures and begin to write poetry. This book is mostly about my Aboriginal culture and thoughts and hopefully some poems that the reader can relate to.

A major American poet faces her own native land, her own life, and the result is a volume of compelling, transforming poems. The book includes two extraordinary longer works: the self-exploratory "Sources" and "Contradictions—Tracking Poems," an ongoing index of an American woman's life. The poet writes, "In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak of a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this country. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."

The political, cultural, and socioeconomic struggles of Alaska's Native peoples have a long and difficult history of local, national, and even international import. In two volumes, Donald Craig Mitchell offers a new level of historical detail in this readable account of the political and legal dimensions of Alaska Native land claims through 1971. Sold American is an account of the history of the federal government's relationship with Alaska's Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut peoples, from the United States' purchase of Alaska from the czar of Russia in 1867 to Alaska statehood in 1959. Mitchell describes how, from eighteenth-century the arrival of Russian sea otter hunters in the Aleutian Islands to the present day, Alaska Natives have participated in the efforts of non-Natives to turn Alaska's bountiful natural resources into dollars, and documents how Alaska Natives, non-Natives, and the society they jointly forged have been changed because of this process. Take My Land, Take My Life concludes thatstory by describing the events that in 1971 resulted in Congress's enactment of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Together, these volumes interpret a 134-year history of relations between the federal and state governments and Alaska Natives. Mitchell's story of the rise of new forms of Alaska Native political leadership culminates in the territorial and monetary settlement that, while highly controversial, has provided crucial lessons and precedents for indigenous legal and political actions world wide. Particularly intriguing from his painstaking research in Congressional records are Mitchell's portraits of important players in the Alaska Federation of Natives and the federal government asthey battle for power in subcommittees of Congress. Detailed and provocative, Mitchell'

While a Confederate prisoner of war on Johnson’s Island, William Norman wrote what he calls a “short diary or sketch” - a summing up of the important events of his life before he was captured at Kellysford Virginia, in 1863. Born into a hard working but somewhat poor family in Surry County, North Carolina; the future Confederate Captain lived a life out on the frontiers in Iowa and Nebraska as a schoolteacher, clerk and farmer with varied success. When the Civil War broke out he was a practicing lawyer in his native state and quickly took up arms in the Second North Virginia regiment; he fought in the army of Northern Virginia at the great battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg before his capture.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1857.

Evelyn Tart has to go to Chile to clean up a disaster her new employee has created at Chile's largest Internet provider. When she gets to her hotel room standing in the middle of her room is a Greek God wearing nothing but a towel and a smile. A room mixup begins a whirlwind romance for Evelyn Tart and Elias Matts that takes them to Sweden, Seattle, and Bermuda.