Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories (Yael Ben-zvi)

Abstract

Yael Ben-zvi, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories.  Dartmouth UP, 2018.  276 pp. ISBN: 9781512601466.  www.upne.cpm

In Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories, Yael Ben-zvi employs EuroAmerican human rights theories to examine and compare the distinctive resistances of African and indigenous Americans to colonization.  Delving into a rich array of resources—petitions, letters, newspaper articles, and speeches, among others--to examine EuroAmerican rights claims, Ben-zvi inventively applies these theoretical histories to the petitions and appeals for freedom and land made by indigenous and African American peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (roughly 1760-1840). The author closely analyzes aspects of settler rights claims and indigenous and African American histories of resistance (or, as she terms them, “unsettlement projects”) that have received little scholarly attention, aligning the resistance of the latter communities with settler dehumanization and violence.