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Childcare, Mobility Decisions and ‘Staggered’ Migration
No full textMigration to Australia is increasingly ‘multi-step’ or ‘staggered’ (Robertson 2013), often involving extended periods on temporary visas before permanent residency is achieved. This paper explores how the uncertainty around long-term migration outcomes that structure staggered migration impacts on how migrants’ make decisions about mobility that concern their children and their care. This paper utilises data from in-depth narrative interviews with Asian migrants in Australia who have experienced ‘staggered’ migration across multiple visa categories. It explores three key mobility decisions migrants make around children: bringing their children to Australia; mobility of families and family members for child-care arrangements; and considering their children’s future mobility and citizenship. We argue that multiple factors come into play in these decisions about children, mobility and care. Specific policy constraints of temporary visas (such as lack of access to subsidised social services or family reunion) shape options, but migrants’ overall sense of social and economic security in the long-term is also significant
Saying It Like Indians: The Wooster Group’s Cry Trojans!, Sa(l)vage Ethnography, and the Politics of “Playing Injun”
No full textIn The Wooster Group\u27s Cry Trojans!, the Trojan characters are depicted as Red Indians. The theatre company\u27s play with white, American appropriations of Native American culture is the latest in a long line of controversial engagements with race in the company\u27s history, dating back to Route 1 & 9 and The Emperor Jones. It also forms part of their more recent engagement with classical theatre, in particular Shakespeare, as Cry Trojans! has it origins in a much-reviled collaboration between the Wooster Group and The Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012. By their own admission, the Group chose to "Play Indian" to be "as American as possible," and also because (to quote Kate Valk, who played Cressida), they felt they "\u27... should say it like Indians,’ because I was thinking of English as a second language." The choice then comments on the Group\u27s own play with authenticity, another constant enagement throughout its thrity-plus years history. By mimicking and appropriating Native American and First Nations cultural production (Smoke Signals and Atanarjuat in particular), the Group performs its own uneasy engagement with authenticity. However, in contrast to their staging of The Emperor Jones, which employed blackface to unpack Eugene O\u27Neill\u27s "idea of a Negro," Cry Trojans! reduces native culture and history to a white, elite history of appropriation and genocide without positing alternative histories of resistance and/or re-appropriation. It does so most expicitly in the final scene, where a blanket, a property associated with Euro-American germ warfare and Native American genocide, is applied first to Troilus and then to Pandarus, the bequeather of poxy diseases, to suggest the imminent demise of the Trojan-Injuns. The Wooster Group seems to be aware of part of their appropriative formulations, and put on display both the work (their adoption of an Indian manner) and the work of art (the acts of appropriation that lead to their adoption of Indian manner): but for a Company so invested in the ironies of post-modernity, they do not in this production seem so aware of the depth of their own unironic complicities in the erasure of indigenous cultures and cultural forms. The production\u27s employment of Native American/First Nations cultural production undermines their own claims of native cultural loss
The Calder Case: Setting A Precedent for Indigenous Canadian Constitutional Relations
No full textIndigenous-State Relations around land claims in Canada have been an area of significant debate throughout the past fifty years. Often, the land claims process that the Indigenous nations had to work through was one that was not conducive to a proper settlement. In the case of the Nisga’a and their land claims case during the 1970s, the Nation challenged the system that had held them from asserting their sovereignty, providing a way for the Nisga’a and other Indigenous nations to not only sign treaties, but assert their own rights as well. This landmark case ultimately saw the Nisga’a utilize their oral histories to prove their occupancy on the lands, helping invalidate the state’s claim that the lands had been empty prior to the arrival of settlers in the 19th century
