InstitutionClaim Cited
Canada criminalized potlatching and used Indian Act amendments, agents, magistrates, police, churches, imprisonment, and confiscation to attack Northwest Coast systems of law, title, leadership, redistribution, kinship, and ceremony; Kwakwaka’wakw families continued in secret and later made repatriation and public renewal institutions of their own.
How did Canada try to make First Nations governable by criminalizing the public institutions through which they governed themselves?
InstitutionClaim Cited
Federal officials translated Diné land, animals, and households into sheep-unit carrying-capacity targets, then used purchases, slaughter, districts, permits, and enforcement to reduce herds. Range deterioration was real and multicausal, but the program displaced Diné authority and knowledge, especially women's ownership, while leaving a permit system that Navajo institutions and land users still have to govern.
What happens when an outside conservation bureaucracy can count a people's animals but cannot be governed by the relationships those animals sustain?
InstitutionClaim Cited
The Gezira Scheme organized gravity irrigation between the Blue and White Nile into one of the world's largest managed agricultural systems. Colonial administrators, a private syndicate, and tenant farmers shared cotton revenue but not equal decision power; Sudan later inherited the canals, board, crop rotations, and dependence on centralized maintenance. Reform raised farmer autonomy yet fragmented responsibility for water and assets. War after 2023 turned a production system that once sustained national livelihoods and food supply into a site of looting, displacement, and acute hunger.
How did a centralized irrigation machine create national production, then lose the clear authority and protected maintenance needed to keep water, land, and farmer effort aligned?