If nature is a person, we are all indigenous (nice one settler colonialism): Brad Coombes, ‘Nature’s rights as Indigenous rights? Mis/recognition through personhood for Te Urewera’, Space Populations Societies, 2020

12Jul20

Abstract: In Aotearoa New Zealand, person rights for nature have been added to the suite of resolution mechanisms for Treaty of Waitangi claims. New laws for two national parks personify landscapes and Maori relations with them to encourage greater appreciation and care, and similar arrangements will follow for other parks. However, it is uncertain whether recognizing Indigenous rights by tying them to the rights of nature will be enforceable and effective. In Te Urewera, Treaty claims emerged more from land loss than disrespect for biocultural values, but the granting of person rights was intended to avoid return of ancestral land to the local tribe, Ngai Tuhoe. Personhood will realize only some of Tuhoe’s interests because retention of preservationist conservation means that few will ever live or work on their homelands. Rather than resolving the false inclusion, repressive authenticity and delimited recognition observed in overseas processes for claims settlement, granting personhood to nature for the purported benefit of Maori is an act of mis/recognition. Disingenuously, it conflates Indigenous with environmental, development with preservation and human with natural values.


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Indigenous commoning against settler destruction: Dorothy Kidd, ‘Standing Rock and the Indigenous commons’, Popular Communication, 2020

12Jul20

Abstract: A new cycle of communications commons has become part of the contemporary repertoire of Indigenous first nations in North America. The mobilization of the Standing Rock Sioux is perhaps the best-known example of a continent-wide cycle of resistance in which Indigenous communities have employed a combination of collectively governed land-based encampments and sophisticated trans-media assemblages to challenge the further enclosure of their territories by the state and fossil fuel industries and instead represent their political and media sovereignty, and prefigure a more reciprocal relationship with other humans and with nature. Although their practices of commoning resemble other radical commons projects, the contemporary Indigenous commons begs for a reassessment of the critical framework of the commons. In this article, I discuss the critical commons literature and compare it with the practices of commoning in the anti-extractivist encampments of Standing Rock.


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Dissolving indigenous sovereignty one individual at a time: Kyle Willmott, ‘From self-government to government of the self: Fiscal subjectivity, Indigenous governance and the politics of transparency’, Critical Social Policy, 2020

12Jul20

Abstract: In 2013 the Canadian Parliament passed the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA). Subject to immediate controversy, the law generated legal and political resistance from Indigenous leaders and scholars. The law requires First Nations governments to post audited consolidated financial statements and the salaries of chiefs and councillors online for public consumption. The article traces the use of transparency as a technology of government to examine how disclosure acts as an organizing mechanism of commensuration and moral scrutiny. The article then shows how transparency and disclosure was directed to rescale critique of the state away from the Canadian government, and toward First Nations governments. The article concludes by examining how bureaucrats envisioned how Indigenous peoples would use transparency and disclosure to reform their political conducts into that of a calculating taxpayer citizenship.


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The symbolic and material economies of settler colonialism (II): John Levi Barnard, ‘The Bison and the Cow: Food, Empire, Extinction’, American Quarterly, 72, 2, 2020, pp. 377-401

12Jul20

Abstract: This essay tracks the entwined species histories of the bison and the cow in North America, with a focus on the interrelation between the symbolic and the material value of the bison in discourses of American exceptionalist historiography and neoliberal environmentalism. In the former, the bison functions as a sign of the tragic but inevitable “vanishing” of Indigenous human societies and the ecosystems in which they are embedded, while in the latter its recovery as a species provides a veneer of “sustainability” to the increasingly globalized economy of meat production into which bison have been ironically incorporated as a means of conservation. In both cases, the bison is enlisted to obscure the violence of empire and capital: first, the fast violence of settler colonialism, which radically disrupted Indigenous economies and left the bison itself ecologically extinct; and second, the slower violence of a global system of animal agriculture that drives mass extinction on a planetary scale. Drawing on Indigenous theories of environmental and geopolitical justice, the essay suggests that conservation without decolonization may contribute as much to ecological catastrophe as it does to prevent it.


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Indigenous erasure is cheap: Alan L. Hayes, ‘T.B.R. Westgate: Organizing Indigenous Erasure for the Anglican Church, 1920–1943’, Toronto Journal of Theology, 2020

12Jul20

Abstract: T.B.R. Westgate, a Canadian Anglican priest who administered his church’s national system of Indian residential schools from 1921 to 1943, developed a sophisticated and effective bureaucracy to operate them efficiently, economically, and in compliance with government standards. He entirely supported the schools’ goal of Indigenous erasure, which accorded with his settler colonial outlook, his theological position, and his overseas missionary experience. All his decisions were framed by the need to make do with funding that was very limited since neither the government nor the settler church put much value on educating a people that they disparaged and expected to disappear. In his role, Westgate also functioned as the Anglican Church’s principal advocate for the assimilation of Indigenous Peoples into settler culture. His efforts, rationales, and failures are evaluated with reference to some of the insights of settler colonial studies.


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The symbolic and material economies of settler colonialism: Daniel Lanza Rivers, ‘Grizzly Country: Settler Worlding and the Politics of Species on the California Frontier’, American Quarterly, 72, 2, 2020, pp. 351-376

12Jul20

Abstract: Before US colonization, the region that would become California was home to an estimated two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand Native people, as well as the highest spatial concentration of grizzlies in the world—an estimated ten thousand. These humans and grizzlies coexisted for an estimated fourteen thousand years before waves of settler colonial violence directed genocidal force against Native societies and completely eradicated California’s grizzlies within roughly sixty years. Drawing together an archive of regional history, political discourse, and print and visual culture, the essay offers an ecocultural analysis of how Native people and grizzlies living along the extractive edge of California’s international frontier were targeted by symbolic and material economies that framed them as unruly and disposable impediments to transforming captured environments into colonial territory. By attending to the scientific, political, and imaginative slippages among the human and nonhuman that directed the settler projects of attempted genocide and species-eradication, this essay examines how the colonial registers of the wild, the less-than-human, and the outdoors formed the constitutive underside of US Americans’ attempts to create “California” by violently remaking the worlds that preceded it.


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Indigenous in the metropole: Jonathan Harris, ‘Imazighen of France; articulations of an indigenous diaspora’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020

12Jul20

Abstract: Indigenous diasporas are an emerging social and political phenomenon, and conceptually offer a productive avenue for critical research in the study of ethnicity and migration. The politics of Indigenous peoples in diaspora have not received enough scholarly attention, and this article seeks to respond by examining how indigeneity is articulated by the many Amazigh (non-Arab North African) cultural associations of France. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s articulation theory, this article contributes a nuanced approach to the relational concept of indigeneity, exploring four key ways in which disparate subjectivities are articulated with indigeneity in the discourse and practices of the diasporic Amazigh movement. Firstly, diaspora Imazighen articulate with the Global Indigenous Movement. Secondly, they position themselves and their homeland populations as colonised people. Thirdly, they perform cultural authenticity within their project of cultural and linguistic revitalisation. Lastly, they practice a village territoriality that articulates with indigeneity by privileging rurality and pre-colonial political institutions. These diaspora articulations are argued to produce a pro-indigenous, anti-essentialist discourse, which highlights the relational nature of indigeneity.


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Settler colonialism because and not despite endemic disease: Omri Tubi, ‘Kill me a mosquito and I will build a state: political economy and the socio-technicalities of Jewish colonization in Palestine, 1922–1940’, Theory and Society, 2020

12Jul20

Abstract: Scholars see Israel as a settler state, comparable with North American, South African and Oceanian cases. But how was Jewish settlement-colonization in pre-Israel Palestine even possible? In the North American, Oceanian and South African cases, European settlers did not encounter diseases like malaria that scholars argue impede settlement. Palestine, however, had high malaria morbidity rates. The disease incapacitated and killed settlers and was one of the most serious threats to Jewish settlement and political economic development. I argue that the exigencies caused by malaria are exactly what fostered Jewish settlement-colonization in Palestine because they prompted the formation of socio-technical arrangements in order to combat the disease. These arrangements included, among other things, people, organizations, scientific knowledge, procedures and larvicides as well as considering the agency of mosquitos and other elements in the environment in disrupting settlement. These arrangements were marshalled by medical-national and political institutions that developed to combat malaria. Only then were Jewish settlers able to effectively colonize Palestine, make their colonies economically viable and make Palestine habitable for future Jewish immigrants. I demonstrate this argument by drawing on archival and library materials that describe the work of an important Zionist Malaria Research Unit (MRU) as well as malaria control efforts in Hefer Valley in the 1930s–1940s, after the unit’s disbandment. Then, I discuss the theoretical implications of this paper to settler-colonial and state-building literatures that, for the most part, neglected the socio-technical nature of state-building and settlement.


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Different settler governments contending each other’s right to try Native Americans: ‘Supreme Court rules broad swath of Oklahoma is Native American land for purposes of federal criminal law’, CNN.com, 10/07/20

11Jul20

Excerpt: The Supreme Court said Thursday that a large swath of eastern Oklahoma, including Tulsa, is Native American land for purposes of federal criminal law in a decision that the state argued could call into question thousands of state prosecutions for serious crimes.


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Settler colonialism and Marxism: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Henry Carey’s “Entire Bad Joke” and Henry George’s “Idle Taunt”: displacement, settler colonialism and revolution in nineteenth-century America’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

09Jul20

Abstract: This article follows nineteenth century debates pitting US economists Henry Carey and Henry George on the one hand, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the other hand. Carey and George maintained that displacement and settler colonialism could be a response to contradictions and an alternative to revolution. Marx and, later, Engels restated a revolutionary perspective.


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