The language of settler colonialism, II: Sarah Dowling, ‘Elimination, Dispossession, Transcendence: Settler Monolingualism and Racialization in the United States, American Quarterly, 73, 3, 2021, pp. 439-460

28Sep21

Abstract: This essay describes the US’s dominant linguistic ideology, settler monolingualism, which works with other white supremacist logics to organize social life. I show that monolingualism’s alignment of place, language, and culture plays a crucial role in settler colonialism’s temporal-territorial claims. Then, I outline settler monolingualism’s three key features: elimination, dispossession, and transcendence. Drawing on the work of Patrick Wolfe, I show that monolingualism is key to the settler colonial “logic of elimination”: it attacks Indigenous cultural continuity, and it enlarges the population of settlers. However, I complicate Wolfe’s simplistic account of racialization: engaging with work by Tiffany Lethabo King and Iyko Day, I describe how racialized populations are disqualified from possessing and belonging to the nation on a basis that is partly linguistic. Black and non-Black racialized populations are rendered alien in part through the narrowing of what counts as “English.” In the contemporary US, however, these constitutive exclusions are concealed through representations of multilingualism, which suggest that the settler colony has innovated expansive forms of belonging that transcend the European nation-state. Such representations position English as a deep historical layer supporting “new” linguistic diversity. Thus they reiterate and reinforce settler colonial claims by positioning English as natural and as native.


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The language of settler colonialism, I: Bayley J. Marquez, Juliet Rose Kunkel, ‘The Domestication Genocide of Settler Colonial–Language Ideologies’, American Quarterly, 73, 3, 2021, pp. 461-482

28Sep21

Abstract: Settler colonial–language ideologies serve as one tool of dispossession within settler colonial assemblages of genocidal accumulation. We focus on the role of settlers in learning, codifying, and teaching Indigenous languages in order to analyze the language ideologies at play when language becomes colonized alongside the colonization of land. We develop a comparative reading of Dakota and Lakota bilingual-language instruction through the materials of Stephen R. Riggs during the nineteenth century and Ann Nolan Clark during the mid-twentieth century in order to examine the instantiation and continuity of settler colonial–language ideologies. We contrast these ideologies with how language ideologies formed in Europe as a component of the formation of race, which naturalized a link between people and land through defining conceptions of the human and the rational political subject. However, in settler colonial contexts this link between people and land, through language, does not function in the same way. Instead, Indigenous peoples’ land is imagined as terra nullius and Indigenous peoples as less than human. We propose the concept of domestication genocide to demonstrate how settler language ideologies link land, legibility, and animacy as a part of these language teaching programs.


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Settler colonial land grabbing now: Andrew Crosby, ‘(Re)mapping Akikodjiwan: Spatial Logics of Dispossession in the Settler-Colonial City’, Urban History Review, 49, 1, 2021, pp. 84-107

28Sep21

Abstract: This article examines the socio-spatial reproduction of settler-colonial urbanism at a contested site of urban development in Canada’s capital city. Akikodjiwan is an Algonquin sacred site on the Ottawa River (Kichi Sibi) and the location of a large-scale private real estate development project. Using the Access to Information Act, this article demonstrates how the Canadian government—led by the National Capital Commission—orchestrated a land transfer to the developers amid long-standing calls by the Algonquins to have the land returned. This article contributes to understandings of the positioning of the settler city at the center of the spatial logic of coloniality in Canada, as a site of the deployment of socio-spatial strategies of settler-colonial governance and property relations, but also as a site of Indigenous resistance. Transpiring in a purported climate of reconciliation, the remapping of Akikodjiwan demonstrates the ongoing spatial implications and role of place making in settler-colonial city making, where racialized logics and regimes of private property are mobilized in an attempt to dispossess and exclude Indigenous peoples from their lands, alongside the simultaneous transfer of thousands of settlers onto an Algonquin sacred site.


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Far right settlers: Andrew Crosby, ‘Policing Right-Wing Extremism in Canada: Threat Frames, Ideological Motivation, and Societal Implications’, Surveillance & Society, 19, 3, 2021, pp. 359-363

28Sep21

Excerpt: Canada is a settler-colonial state built upon the foundational pillars of white supremacy, racial capitalism, territorial acquisitiveness, and the attempted elimination of Indigenous peoples (culture, political/legal authorities, and claims to land). A young, affluent country that relies on these ongoing processes for its wealth and stature, the institutions of white supremacy required to construct and develop the Canadian state permeate social, political, and economic life. It is inevitable then that far-right, white-nationalist, and racist groups seemingly thrive in this settler-colonial landscape.


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Suicide in the settler colony: Kristen Cardon, ‘Suicide justice: Adopting Indigenous feminist methods in settler suicidology’, Health, 2021

27Sep21

Abstract: White settler colonies around the world have long reported disproportionately high rates of Indigenous suicides, a consequence of the continuing violence of imperialism. This article posits a need for interdisciplinary approaches to address this crisis and therefore turns to humanist methods developed in Indigenous and feminist scholarship. I analyze texts from U.S. psychologist Edwin Shneidman to rearticulate their relationship to what I call settler suicidology. I then evoke literary critic Eve K. Sedgwick’s reparative reading method to reimagine suicide prevention as suicide justice, reading the novel There There by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) to advocate for distributive justice as a new approach to Indigenous suicide crises. My term suicide justice names increasing accountability between settler suicide workers and the communities they seek to serve.


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Settler tourists on the land: Kendra E. Fortin, Chris E.Hurst, Bryan S. R. Grimwood, ‘Land, Settler identity, and tourism memories’, Annals of Tourism Research, 91, 2021

27Sep21

Abstract: This paper draws on theoretical insights associated with settler colonial studies and a collective memory work methodology to illuminate the multiple and contested meanings of land conveyed in tourism memory narratives of Settler Canadians. As part of a multi-day nature-based tourism experience in June 2019, 16 Settler co-participants wrote, and collectively analyzed, memory texts associated with travel experiences that they felt expressed genuinely Canadian and Indigenous qualities. Thematic analysis of memory narratives and co-participant discussions show how land meanings—specifically, land as organizer, educator, connector, and sustainer—relate to the dynamics of Settler identity. The paper thus builds upon emerging scholarship on tourism and settler colonialism and contributes pathways for decolonizing Settler-Indigenous relations in tourism and tourism research.


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Marxism and settler colonialism: Jessica Evans, ‘Mediating Capitalism’s “Rules of Reproduction” with Historical Agency: Political Marxism, Uneven and Combined Development and Settler-Capitalism in Canada’, Historical Materialism, 2021

27Sep21

Abstract: This article responds to Samuel Knafo and Benno Teschke’s recent critique of Political Marxism and their proposal for an alternative, ‘radical agency-centred’ historicism. While sympathetic to the critiques raised by the authors, I am less convinced by the conclusions they reach. Rather than abandon Political Marxism altogether, I argue that there remains much of value in the tradition. Through an analysis of the differential path of capitalist development in settler-colonial Canada, I suggest that bringing the methodological insights of Uneven and Combined Development to bear on the theoretical material of Political Marxism can alleviate the problems identified by the authors.


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With a chapter on settler-Indigenous relations by Elizabeth Strakosch: Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘Indigenous-Settler Relationships: Policy, Rights, Reconciliation, and Sovereignty’, in Jenny M. Lewis, Anne Tiernan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics, Oxford University Press, 2021

27Sep21

Access the chapter here.


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Settler colonial racialised comparisons: Bayley J. Marquez, ‘The Black Model Minority: Slavery, Settlement, and the Genealogy of the Model Minority’, Du Bois Review, 2021

27Sep21

Abstract: This paper interrogates the fundamental anti-Blackness of model minority discourses and how they are embedded in structures of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism through a genealogical examination of the contradictory history of the “Black model minority” within the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute’s Indian Program. This program educated both Black and Indigenous students throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and purposefully made racialized comparisons between groups. I read this history through present day scholarship on the model minority myth in relation to anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. I argue that the “Black model minority” at Hampton was predicated on upholding slavery through defining it as an educational project and that slavery and settler colonialism are intimately linked through pedagogy. This narrative of the Black model minority demonstrates that slavery and land dispossession were framed as pedagogic by industrial education institutions. Ultimately, this work questions the idea of “valuing education,” which is present in model minority discourses across many contexts, and how it is complicated by this history.


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Settler matchmaking: Jenna Dayl Ives, Canadian Matchmakers: How Early 1900s Colonial Racist Policies United Indigenous Women and Chinese Bachelors on the Prairies. MA dissertation, University of Regina, 2021

27Sep21

Abstract: Canadian government legislation implemented policies in the early 1900s that facilitated inter-racial marriages between Indigenous women and Chinese bachelors. Foreign workers were over-recruited from China, to migrate to Canada, to support the development of the railway system. To deal with this “perceived” over-population Canada began implementing racist policies that included intentional deterring of Chinese men from bringing their families with them to Canada. My research focuses on the consequences of these racist policies designed to keep Canada a white, British nation. This narrative inquiry qualitative research includes two participants’ who are descendants of these marriages. Using an Indigenous feminist and intersectional theoretical lens, my research fostered a safe space for these two participants’ lived experiences to be told. Thus, further uncovering aspects of our Canadian Prairie history, and backing their ancestral histories up with the limited available scholarly recognized works. The project used a de-colonial approach in the way that the direction of the research process was led by the participants’, which unveiled how systemic racism did, and continues to, impact Indigenous Peoples’ nationwide, specifically here in the Prairies. I honoured the lived experiences of these participants’ by using research methods and theories that are based on reciprocity, relationships and respect. This process includes how my own story, shared throughout the paper, inevitably impacts the way our conversations evolved and the conclusions I have drawn. To ethically and respectfully ensure the use of the stories heard throughout this thesis, the participants’ were given the opportunity to review and approve the direct quotes included completing the reciprocal research conversational consent. Three themes emerged from the participant stories. First, our historical account of colonialism needs to be accurate, and the only way to ensure that is to recount the stories of those affected. Second, the traditional Indigenous knowledge system(s) and its teachings about women’s roles as integral to the well-being of communities was systematically erased, with consequences to Indigenous Peoples’ as a whole. Third, those teachings, roles and stories are a pathway to restoring identities and belonging to all who live on Turtle Island.


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