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Avril Bell, Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities: Beyond Domination. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 272 pages. ISBN 9780230237421. $100 USD hardcover.
This is the 14th book in the successful Identity Studies in the Social Sciences series that Palgrave Macmillan has published. Having read some of the earlier works in this series, I believe this book continues to meet the high academic standards that the series editors have established. The author sets out two major objectives: (1) to demonstrate how settler societies continue to operate under the colonial dynamics that were so popular a century ago and (2) to explore strategies that involve identities in relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. The author deals with the issues of temporality and agency intermixed in this foci as they impact on the conflictual relations between the two parties. The issue of authenticity for Indigenous people continues to be problematic for both themselves as well as settler society although each, at times, denies its existence. As Bell so clearly points out, modern settlers see Indigenous ways of being/thinking as remnants of the past although settlers can only conceive of them as traditional. As such, modem settlers believe the cultural expressions of Indigenous people can only be expressed as past symbols and nostalgic expressions of better days of the noble savage.
The author limits herself to four diverse regions of the world: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. While there are differences among the four case studies, they also are part of what Bell calls the "post-British world"...