Nonsettler-colonial settlements: Vanessa Sloan Morgan, Heather Castleden, Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations, ‘”Our Journey, Our Choice, Our Future”: Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ Self‐Government enacted through the Maa‐nulth Treaty with British Columbia and Canada’, Antipode, 2019

21Apr19

Abstract: In 2011, Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations became one of five Nuu‐chah‐nulth Nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Canada to implement the Maa‐nulth Treaty with the Province of British Columbia and Canada. Modern treaties are dense and lengthy legal documents that exhaustively set out the obligations of each signatory party. They are heavily criticised for being unjust extensions of colonialism that limit Indigenous self‐determination and transform homelands under settler colonial property regimes. Yet, some First Nations accept these agreements as their chosen path for self‐government in state structures. We document Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ decision‐making that resulted when the Maa‐nulth Treaty was implemented and replaced the Indian Act by analysing the Maa‐nulth Treaty and interviews conducted with Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations leadership. We demonstrate how ʔiisaak (respect) and ʔuuʔałuk (taking care of) guided Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ self‐government, while nesting this discussion in the complexities and critiques of modern treaties.


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Settler-colonial settlements: Andrew Curley, ‘Unsettling Indian Water Settlements: The Little Colorado River, the San Juan River, and Colonial Enclosures’, Antipode, 2019

21Apr19

Abstract: In the United States, indigenous nations are settling water claims for access to the continent’s surface waters. This legal‐political process transforms the nature of indigenous water use to conform with logics of quantification that are foundational to western water laws. This article critiques Indian water settlements by highlighting the inherent limitations and marginalisation of indigenous water rights in two recent examples of water settlements, the Little Colorado River Water Settlement in 2012 and the San Juan River Water Settlement in 2005. This article argues that Indian water settlements are forms of colonial enclosures, built on a lineages of law that replicates and perpetuates settler‐colonial dispossession. These settlements enclose upon unquantified Indigenous rights in the interest of colonial‐capitalist expansion in the western states.


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‘If you eat, you are involved in settler colonialism’: “Is eating a settler-colonial act?” – History, justice, and the future of food: Institute for Postcolonial Studies, May 9 @ 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm

20Apr19

“If you eat, you are involved in agriculture” is a popular saying among agrarian and alternative food advocates. It is often attributed to the American poet and farmer Wendell Berry who wanted to draw attention to the way eaters are intimately connected with growers. By thinking of eating as an agricultural act, Berry believes eaters will join with growers to help co-create a more just food system that respects the environment, farm workers, animals and planetary health.

Understanding the connection between eating and growing food is a pressing issue today. But what about the past? Both eaters and growers are often ignorant of the entanglement of agriculture and settler-colonial violence. As Patrick Wolfe observed, agriculture “progressively eats into Indigenous territory” for the reproduction of the settler population, while simultaneously curtailing “the reproduction of Indigenous modes of production” and justifying violent dispossession.

If eating implicates one in agriculture, and agriculture is implicated in colonial violence, then eaters, not just farmers and graziers, are implicated in this history.

“If you eat, you are involved in settler-colonialism”.

How should we respond to this claim? What does food justice look like that recognises past injustices associated with agriculture? How would such food justice be enacted in urban farms and gardens of inner-city Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane or Perth? What would it look like in our kitchens, restaurants and supermarket aisles? Or to borrow a question from Indigenous food sovereignty scholar, Michelle Daigle, “what do everyday practices of responsibility and accountability look like for settler food actors as they live and work on contested and occupied Indigenous lands?”

This forum will explore some of these questions, raised in Christopher Mayes’s new book Unsettling Food Politics: Agriculture, dispossession and sovereignty in Australia, which will be launched at the event.


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Settler-refugees: Susanne Lachenicht, ‘Refugee “nations” and Empire-Building in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Early Modern Christianity, 2019

18Apr19

Abstract: This article investigates to what extent the early modern period as the Confessional, Imperial and Economic Age was also an age of tolerance, how much early modern empires depended on religious minorities willing to migrate and settle overseas, how much in the words of Jonathan Israel religious migrants were “agents and victims of empire”. 1 I will take the example of Sephardi Jews and Huguenots to analyse the agencies of persecuted religious minorities in negotiating terms and conditions for their (re-)settlement – more often than not as separate nations or at least separate communities within the ever-growing European empires.


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Settler-colonial entanglements: Ronaldo Munck, Pablo Pozzi, ‘Israel, Palestine, and Latin America: Conflictual Relationships’, Latin American Perspectives, 2019

18Apr19

Access the article here.


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Settlers and guns: K. T. Thompson,’Stock Histories’, Social Text, 37, 1, 2019, pp. 107-115.

17Apr19

Abstract: This article traces a discursive lineage from a 2013 Second Amendment billboard campaign in Colorado to visual accounts of white settler nostalgia that circulated in the 1860s. The billboard foregrounds fantasies of indigeneity for a contemporary political discourse of “gun rights” and quite literally backgrounds the reciprocities of nineteenth-century contexts of violence: the Civil War specifically, and genocide and enslavement more generally. The article reveals a correspondence between the Confederacy, white militias, and the so-called peace-making efforts on the Great Plains after the Civil War. It contends that fantasies and projections of white settler nostalgia remain resonant in contemporary gun rights debates, while the Second Amendment’s inextricable relations to settler colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy remain suppressed.


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And now for something completely different: David McCullough, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, Simon & Schuster, 2019

17Apr19

Description: As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River.


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The settler’s wilderness: Jamie Corliss, White wilderness: race, capitalism, and alternative knowledges of natural space, MA dissertation, DePaul University, 2019

14Apr19

Abstract: This project investigates discourse about American wilderness, from the first European explorers through contemporary outdoor recreation, to reveal that wilderness is a socially constructed concept. By uncovering nine essential myths, this project argues that wilderness discourse is both influenced by and perpetuates American settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Section One traces a history of wilderness discourse to demonstrate that wilderness discourse establishes whites as citizens, as civilized, as courageous conquerors, as rightful owners to land, as protectors of space, and as beneficiaries of any potential profit. Section Two uses a content analysis of contemporary outdoor recreation websites to argue that attempts at multiculturalism in wilderness recreation fail to address underlying structures of power that justify settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Ultimately, Section Three advocates for “race radical” epistemologies of wilderness, using an analysis of visual art, as a means to challenge the structures of power embedded in wilderness discourse.


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Assimilating the settlers (rather than the other way round): Jennifer Sessions, ‘Making Settlers Muslim: Religion, Resistance and Everday [sic] Life in Nineteenth-Century French Algeria’, French History, 2019

09Apr19

Abstract: On 26 April 1901, members of the Righa tribe overran the French colonial village of Margueritte in central Algiers province. They seized the settlement’s male colonists and demanded they ‘make [them]selves Muslims’ by reciting the shehada and donning North African clothing. Several Europeans who could not or would not comply were killed. This article explores the meanings of this forced conversion of European settlers, which made the Margueritte revolt unique in the history of Algerian resistance to French colonialism. For French colonial officials, the religious ritual indicated the causal role of ‘Islamic fanaticism’ in fomenting the revolt. Administrators and magistrates focused their investigations on the religious habits of the revolt’s leaders, possible ties to Sufi brotherhoods and pan-Islamist conspiracies. But in doing so, they largely overlooked the more quotidian meanings of the conversion ritual for the inhabitants of Margueritte itself. By resituating the symbolic transformation of body and soul within the cultural logics of everyday life in the settler village, the article attempts to map out the more mundane social practices by which ethno-religious colonial hierarchies were enacted and embodied in French Algeria.


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The settlers against the ocean: Meg Samuelson, Charne Lavery, ‘The Oceanic South’, English Language Notes, 57, 1, 2019, pp. 37-50.

09Apr19

Abstract: This essay proposes the category of the oceanic South. It presents the Southern Hemisphere’s blue expanses as one of its defining features and elaborates from this a framework that brings into agitated contention the extractive economies of the North, the persistent legacies of settler colonialism in the South, and other interlocking human and more-than-human itineraries. Tracking a drift into the Southern Ocean in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, the essay takes this “most neglected of oceans” as a vantage point from which to draw the contours of the oceanic South and engage its troubled surfaces and lively depths. Thinking through the roiling and hostile, fecund, and unbounded nature of this ocean, the essay follows “the lives of whales” in novels by Witi Ihimaera and Zakes Mda. Sounding the ocean’s imaginative depths, these fictions offer illuminating ways of thinking the South while maintaining an unsettling planetarity.


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