Settling on water: Deborah Curran, ‘Indigenous Processes of Consent: Repoliticizing Water Governance through Legal Pluralism’, Water, 11, 3, 2019

24Mar19

Abstract: While international instruments and a few state governments endorse the “free, prior and informed consent” of Indigenous peoples in decision-making about the water in their traditional territories, most state water governance regimes do not recognize Indigenous water rights and responsibilities. Applying a political ecology lens to the settler colonialism of water governance exposes the continued depoliticizing personality of natural resources decision-making and reveals water as an abstract, static resource in law and governance processes. Most plainly, these decision-making processes inadequately consider environmental flows or cumulative effects and are at odds with both Indigenous governance and social-ecological approaches to watershed management. Using the example of groundwater licensing in British Columbia, Canada as reinforcing colonialism in water governance, this article examines how First Nations are asserting Indigenous rights in response to natural resource decision-making. Both within and outside of colonial governance processes they are establishing administrative and governance structures that express their water laws and jurisdiction. These structures include the Syilx, Nadleh Wut’en and Stellat’en creating standards for water, the Tsleil-Waututh and Stk’emlúpsemc te Secwépemc community assessments of proposed pipeline and mining facilities, and the First Nations of the Nicola Valley planning process based on their own legal traditions. Where provincial and federal environmental governance has failed, Indigenous communities are repoliticizing colonial decision-making processes to shift jurisdiction towards Indigenous processes that institutionalize responsibilities for and relationships with water.


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Women needed (for settler-colonial projects): Bonnie White, The Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women, 1919-1964, Palgrave, 2019

24Mar19

Description: This book examines the British government’s response to the ‘superfluous women problem’, and concerns about post-war unemployment more generally, by creating a migration society that was tasked with reducing the number of single women at home through overseas migration.  The Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women (SOSBW) was created in 1919 to facilitate the transportation of female migrants to the former white settler colonies. To do so, the SOSBW worked with various domestic and dominion groups to find the most suitable women for migration, while also meeting the dominions’ demands for specific types of workers, particularly women for work in domestic service. While the Society initially aimed to meet its original mandate, it gradually developed its own vision of empire settlement and refocused its efforts on aiding the migration of educated and trained women who were looking for new, modern, and professional work opportunities abroad. 


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The philosophy of settler colonialism: Michel Feith, ‘Philosophy Embedded in Space: Rethinking the Frontier in Percival Everett’s Western Novels’, African American Review, 52, 1, 2019, pp. 87-100

24Mar19

Abstract: This article places Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the frontier into conversation with John Locke’s thinking about individualism and colonial America in order to examine what Percival Everett’s representations of the frontier in his Western novels tell us about familiar claims of manifest destiny and American identity.


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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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