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Between 1889 and 1920 the allotment policy imposed by the US government on the peoples of the White Earth Reservation made tribal membership, once regulated by the Anishinaabeg themselves, an [...]

In 1900 an Australian book of marital advice instructed its white, female, middle-class readers about the importance of carefully selecting a husband. 'A young woman in search of a partner [...]

The assimilation policies of Hampton Institute during the Victorian era are explored. The Institute accepted Native American and African American students, however, they were prohibited from following their native customs and were provided with a 'white' education. The author maintains that interracial marriages between Native American and African American men and white women were viewed by the Institute's authorities as full assimilation into white culture.

In 2017 and 2018 historians teaching at the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with staff from the University of Melbourne's Cultural Collections, brought an element of object-based learning to their undergraduate teaching. This article describes their pedagogical strategies in bringing material culture to a study of the past, discusses the advantages to this kind of teaching, and describes the results of a survey of students which aimed to measure student engagement and skills gained. We argue that object-based learning is an adaptable pedagogy that allows students to feel confident in reading a variety of historical sources, extrapolate about the experiences and emotions of people in the past and to think deeply about the politicised ways in which societies commemorate, memorialise and archive the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the work of Lutheran missionary F. W. Albrecht, who in the decades following the Second World War instituted a privately funded school scheme to provide formal education to Aboriginal children in central Australia. The scheme that Albrecht devised targeted "half-caste" girls living at cattle stations located within the orbit of the Finke River Mission—historically significant because, unlike the child removal commonly associated with the Stolen Generations, it relied on the consent of Aboriginal parents and encouraged the girls to maintain links to and pride in their Aboriginal cultural heritage. As part of a larger study of F. W. Albrecht and the Aboriginal women who were subject to his education scheme, this article discusses the in loco parentis–style relationship that existed between Albrecht and one of his Aboriginal students. By outlining the emotional content of this history, as researchers (one who claims an Indigenous identity position and one who does not) we argue that an ethical engagement with emotions in history is necessary to avoid what Lewis Gordon has termed "disciplinary decadence". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tim Rowse, Len Smith and Mark Hannah discuss some key issues about historical research in their response to the 2003 paper, 'Absorbing the Aboriginal problem, pointing to a fundamental truism about the history of government policies concerning Aboriginal people. The reasons for focusing on politicians' visions of the future and not on the intricacies of race relations in each Australian colony, State and Territory are clarified.

Laws governing interracial marriage in Australia and in the US are examined in a comparative study of the attempt to culturally assimilate the Indigenous people into the dominant society of the two countries. Australian policies in the late 19th and early 20th century were directed more towards biological absorption of the mixed-descent population than towards cultural assimilation.

This article begins with a single, seemingly isolated moment of activism by the Indigenous residents of the Gap community in Alice Springs. We use this protest to make two arguments. First, we highlight the significance of local mobility to Indigenous people in the twentieth century; and second, we trace a hidden counter network of Indigenous civil rights activism in the Northern Territory. We argue that "micro-mobility" should receive greater attention from historians and show how the 1951 protest was one part of a broader counter network of Indigenous activism, stretching across the vast distances of the Territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the twentieth century some Australian states and the U.S. federal government enacted comparable policies that demonstrate how the discourse of protection continued to survive in an era when settler nations were focussed on "assimilating" Indigenous populations. The Australian policy of exemption and the U.S. policy of competency did not represent a true change in direction from past policies of protection. In contrast to the nineteenth century, though, these twentieth-century policies offered protection to only a deserving few. Drawing on records of exemption and competency from New SouthWales and Oklahoma in the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how the policies of exemption and competency ostensibly gave the opportunity for some individuals to prove that they no longer needed the paternalism of colonial governments. They were judged using very different local criteria. In Australia, applicants were mostly judged on whether they engaged in "respectable" use of alcohol; in the United States, applicants were assessed on whether they had "business sense". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]