Indigenous camps as a transnational settler-colonial phenomenon: Victoria Grieves-Williams, Victoria Grieves-Williams, in Fernanda Peñaloza, Sarah Walsh (eds), Mapping South-South Connections, Palgrave, 2019, pp 59-79

22Mar19

Abstract: This chapter establishes a transpacific epistemological connection through the exploration of often surprising parallels that exist between Indigenous peoples of Australia and those of Mexico and Central America. An insider, Indigenous knowledge’s framework for understanding and theorising the phenomenon, recognised and named by the people themselves as la Bestia, reveals the redundancy of modernist, neo-liberal interpretations of Indigenous disadvantage. Indigenous people in the settler colonial states of Mexico and Australia are caught by forces beyond their immediate control, overwhelming push factors, that see them abandon contexts within their ancestral country where they are no longer sustained physically and spiritually, to seek a life elsewhere. In both locations across the Pacific this process has seen the lives of many Indigenous people lived out precariously in “camps”; this phenomenon is a reflection of the nature of the modern democratic states that have developed on their lands. This is best described as living in a state of exception, following the theory of Giorgio Agamben.


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Settling on their dead: Sigrid Arnott, David L. Maki, ‘Forts on Burial Mounds: Interlocked Landscapes of Mourning and Colonialism at the Dakota-Settler Frontier, 1860–1876’, Historical Archaeology, 2019, pp 1–17

20Mar19

Abstract: During the 19th century, the U.S. government took ownership of Dakota homelands in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, leading to increasingly violent conflicts and decades of war. Military and militia forts were built at the physical boundaries of contested space to push “hostiles” west and to protect European American settlers. Fort Wadsworth, constructed in South Dakota during the 1864 Dakota Campaign, and Fort Juelson, built in 1876 by Norwegian immigrants during an “Indian scare” in Minnesota, were both knowingly constructed on top of burial mounds, appropriating and reshaping sacred Native American landscapes into protective enclosures for the dominating, yet fearful, colonizers. Aerial laser scanning, geophysical survey, and historical research explore the archaeological expression and significance of these interlocked landscapes at geographic and cognitive frontiers.


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Settler cities: Bruno Huberman, Reginaldo Mattar Nasser, ‘Pacification, Capital Accumulation, and Resistance in Settler Colonial Cities: The Cases of Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro’, Latin American Perspectives, 2019

17Mar19

Abstract: Approaching urban social conflicts in Brazil and in Palestine/Israel in terms of settler colonial theory allows the identification of the historical racist structures involved in the violent pacification of racialized native populations. Settler colonialism does not end with the declaration of independence but persists in the postcolonial context through the constant expropriation, extermination, confinement, and assimilation of racialized populations in the service of capitalist accumulation by settler elites. The cases of Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro exemplify this process.


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Settlers and their colonial entanglements: Rebecca Tinio McKenna, ‘Igorot Squatters and Indian Wards: Toward an Intra-imperial History of Land Dispossession’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2019

13Mar19

Abstract: This essay considers two land disputes that took place in the first decade of U.S. rule in the Philippines and that reached the U.S. Supreme Court: Cariño v. Insular Government (1909) and Reavis v. Fianza (1909). In arguing their cases, litigants were forced to reckon with the property rights regime of the former Spanish empire. In this regard, the cases affirm the import of inter-imperial frameworks for understanding colonial problems of land ownership and sovereignty. When arguing over the rightful owners of Philippine lands, parties to these cases also drew on the history and legal bases of land dispossession and settler colonialism in the American West. Further, in later decades, the arguments made in one of these cases would figure into legal conflicts over Native American lands. These cases thus suggest the value of also examining intra-imperial relationships, the emphasis of this essay. They demonstrate how histories and legal structures of settler-driven “expansion” and extra-continental colonialism informed, even constituted, each other.


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Settler colonialism in Bahrain: J. Choi, Settler Hegemony and Indigenous Resistance: A New Approach to Political Cleavages in Bahrain under Hamad bin ʿIsa Al Khalifa (1999 – 2010), PhD Dissertation, University of Exeter, 2019

13Mar19

Abstract: The mass public uprisings in Bahrain on 14 February 2011 was another episode of the long-standing political strife that has been observed in the country since the early 20th century. This study highlights one of the sources of group identity that shapes part of the political dynamics in Bahrain that has so far received little academic attention, namely the one surrounding the competing discourse between ‘conquerors’ and ‘indigenes’. The conquest and settlement of the Al Khalifa have influenced the lives of the existing inhabitants and the country’s social structure under their hegemony. In the meantime, a large element of the Bahraini population, who are commonly called the Baharna (sing. Bahrani), has developed self-awareness as the ‘native people of Bahrain’. This self-perception has formed one of the crucial components of societal identity in Bahrain, and has been occasionally used by different political groups as an effective tool to mobilise the opposition and delegitimise the ruling family. In this regard, this study interprets a series of institutional measures and policies developed under King Hamad bin ʿIsa Al Khalifa in the 2000s as part of settlers’ crucial strategies to consolidate Al Khalifa’s dominance, namely the development of legitimising narratives, the exploitation of land, the formation of hegemonic boundaries, as well as the extraordinary security measures. At the same time, this thesis examines how the indigenous identity was politicised during this period, closely intertwined with their ethnic, sectarian and socio-political identities. This thesis has offered an original investigation on the political cleavage in Bahrain through the lens of settler colonialism. The settler colonial framework presents a useful approach to explain the confrontation between the rulers’ conqueror ideology and the indigenous claim of part of the population, to advance our understanding of the interplay of multiple competing identities in the struggle for power and the control of socio-political resources in Bahrain.


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Decolonial geography against settler colonialism: Michelle Daigle, Margaret Marietta Ramırez, ‘Decolonial Geographies’, Antipode, 2019, pp. 78-84

13Mar19

Excerpt: The decolonial, we contend, is an affi rmative refusal of white supremacy, anti-blackness, the settler colonial state, and a racialised political economy of containment, displacement and violence.


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Against settler colonialism (as a concept), and probably in its favour (as a practice): Ran Greenstein, ‘Colonialism, Apartheid and the Native Question: The Case of Israel/Palestine’, in Vishwas Satgar (ed), Racism after Apartheid Challenges for Marxism and Anti-Racism, Wits University Press, 2019

08Mar19

Access the article here.


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Settlers against settlement: Thaddeus Sunseri, ‘A “Moral Ecology” of Afrikaner Settlement in German East Africa, 1902–1914’, in Carl J. Griffin, Roy Jones, Iain J. M. Robertson (eds), Moral Ecologies: Histories of Conservation, Dispossession and Resistance, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 265-288

08Mar19

Abstract: Afrikaner immigration to German East Africa before the First World War was a bellwether for further white settlement, providing Afrikaners escape from British rule following the South African War. Settled primarily around Mt. Meru, Afrikaner immigration expedited the enclosing of the landscape, the displacement of African agro-pastoralists, and curtailment of their rights to land, pasture, and water. But Afrikaners themselves quickly contested German policies, especially restrictions on hunting, transhumance, and mobility. Drawing on moral frameworks derived from their South African past, Afrikaners were an unusual example of agents of colonial enclosure resisting its main prerequisite, namely the requirement to fence their lands. Depicted in colonial-era discourses as a violent and backward population, this chapter uncovers the hidden history of Afrikaner resistance to German settlement policy.


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Colonising differently (and yet colonising still): Lucy Taylor, ‘The Welsh Way of Colonisation in Patagonia: The International Politics of Moral Superiority’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2019

06Mar19

Abstract: This article explores the ‘myth of friendship’ between the Welsh and indigenous communities of Patagonia in the mid to late nineteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, it unpacks the purpose of this myth which is to demonstrate the moral superiority of the Welsh nation. The proof of Welsh righteousness derives not only from their peaceful, loving approach to colonisation in Patagonia but from stories which recount that the ‘Indians’ loved them back. This technique of elevation works because it is framed by the international politics of colonial expansion, thus the Welsh settlers compare themselves favourably to the violent and oppressive actions of the British Empire and Argentine state. This assertion of moral superiority is not only a way to raise the position of the Welsh nation on the global stage, it targets those who enforce Welsh political and linguistic subordination, both in Wales (the English elite) and as settlers (the Argentine government). In this way, their claim to high status and national dignity based on ‘righteousness’ is an act of resistance, as well as elevation. I conclude that this new interpretation of Y Wladfa (the colony) offers fresh insight to understandings of Welsh internationalism. Moreover, its reflections on the use of moral capital as a tool of resistance might find wider parallels. Certainly, I argue, the persistence of the ‘myth of friendship’ continues to conceal the brutal reality of indigenous dispossession.


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The food politics of settler colonialism: Janna L. Lafferty, Plant Pedagogies, Salmon Nation, and Fire: Settler Colonial Food Utopias and the (Un)Making of Human-Land Relationships in Coast Salish Territories, PhD Dissertation, Florida International University, 2018

06Mar19

Abstract: As knowledge about the constellating set of environmental and social crises stemming from the neoliberal global food regime becomes more pressing and popularized among US consumers, it has brought Indigenous actors asserting their political sovereignty and treaty rights with regards to their homelands into new collaborations, contestations, and negotiations with settlers in emerging food politics domains. In this dissertation, I examine solidarities and affinities being forged between Coast Salish and settler food actors in Puget Sound, attending specifically to how contested sovereignties are submerged but at play in these relations and how settler desires for belonging on and to stolen Indigenous lands animate liberal and radical food system politics.

The dissertation presents my ethnographic fieldwork in South Puget Sound over a period of 18 months with two related Coast Salish food sovereignty projects that brought Indigenous and settler food actors into weedy collaborations. One was a curriculum development project for Native and regional youth focused on the revitalization of Coast Salish plant landscapes, knowledge, pedagogies, and systems of reciprocity. The other was a campaign to counter the introduction of genetically engineered salmon into US food markets and coastal production facilities across the Western Hemisphere, which I situate within longstanding salmon-centered social and political struggles in Coast Salish territories in the context of Indigenous/settler-state relations. Throughout these engagements, I identified how multicultural, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist food movement frameworks share in common with neoliberal nature privatization schemes modes of disavowing the geopolitics of Indigenous sovereignty within the US settler state. The research reveals patterns in how Coast Salish food actors push back against the ways settler food actors are plugged into settler colonial governmentality. These insights, in turn, helped to make legible how inherited liberal mythologies of the nation-state and legal orders rooted in the doctrine of terra nulliuslimit the stakes of food system work in terms of inclusion and equality, and miss their collusion with structures that unmake the human-land relationships that Coast Salish people define as existential and (geo)political.


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