Settler commons over indigenous property: April Anson, ‘The President Stole Your Land: Public Lands and the Settler Commons’, Western American Literature, 54, 1, 2019, pp. 49-62

26Jun19

Excerpt: In the United States what constitutes “public lands” has never been stable. Notions of the public and their commons were a fickle matter of political contest and power relations before the beginning of what is currently called America. Today, who and what serve to underwrite, define, and profit from “public lands” is a debate often expressed in cataclysmic language. Militarized government officials and extrastate militias extend across our shared social, political, and physical landscapes, as our terrains seem to scar, wither, blister, and combust in ways even our most apocalyptic and dystopic imaginations struggle to comprehend. Can we protect a piece of this world for all of us? Can we fight for the land that we live in and love? How do we survive the end of the world that seems so fast approaching? Who are the “we” in these questions?

The issues that immediately arise in discussions of the commons—namely whose commons and for what purposes—often still assume a public that is, in fact, particular to white settler subjects. As a settler scholar raised by uninvited hippies, loggers, and mill workers on Kalapuyailihi (Kalapuya homelands), I frequently find myself implicit in the publics universalized in, and made invisible by, current debates over public lands. From my vantage point in the middle of this “we” supposedly anticipating or already suffering the beginning of the end of the world of public lands, it is difficult to decipher the apocalyptic language commoning settler colonial capitalism, making it, as it were, so ordinary as to be almost imperceptible. Almost.

This article takes two examples of contemporary debates over public lands as paradigmatic case studies for the ways apocalyptic appeals populate and naturalize the “settler commons” across the spectrum of US politics. 


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Staging settler colonialism: Jennifer Ladino, ‘Setting the Stage for Justice: The Politics of Public Lands in the Contemporary US West’, Western American Literature, 54, 1, 2019 pp. ix-xv

26Jun19

Excerpt: October 2016 ended with dramatic irony on the Western stage as two high-profile standoffs came to a head. Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan, and five other members of their self-styled militia were acquitted after a forty-one-day armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge; on the very same day, October 27, unarmed water protectors in North Dakota were shot with tear gas while engaging in nonviolent political action on behalf of clean water and the protection of Indigenous lands. The protests on the Standing Rock reservation had been gaining momentum since early 2016, as tribes and allies resisted the Dakota Access Pipeline, slated to carry hundreds of thousand of barrels of oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to southern Illinois, crossing the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and threatening water supplies and sacred lands at Standing Rock. Under unifying slogans such as “Water is Life,” diverse publics formed and collaborated in digital and face-to-face activism to support tribal sovereignty. Black Lives Matter activists joined their #resistance energies to #NoDAPL efforts, and, at one point, a group of veterans formed a human shield between water protectors and the US military, vowing the pipeline would not be built on their watch.

The Oregon occupation, by contrast, featured the usual suspects: rural white people, mostly men, wielding weapons and antigovernment ideologies. The Bundy brothers are sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who had, two years earlier, held an armed standoff with the federal government over the years of unpaid fees he had incurred for allowing his cattle to graze on BLM land—fees amounting to more than $1 million. The crew at Malheur was inspired by this earlier standoff, by long-simmering antigovernment sentiments in the West, as well as by Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who had been imprisoned for arson after setting fires that burned federally managed land. 


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Enduring frontiers undo the settler: Mattias Borg Rasmussen, ‘Institutionalizing precarity: Settler identities, national parks and the containment of political spaces in Patagonia’, Geoforum, 2019

26Jun19

Abstract: Enduring frontier spaces are key sites if one seeks to trace the subtle workings of power through the effects of the shifting rationalities of territorial governance. This article focuses on a particular group of people, the descendants of the first settler families to enter an area that would later become one of Argentina’s flagship national parks. The figure of the settler occupied a shifting position within the racialized geographies of the protected areas of northwestern Patagonia, a remarkable descent from pioneers consolidating state-space to second-class citizens and tolerated squatters brought low by the institutionalization of precarity. The article asks what it means to be a descendant of settlers during the current period of multicultural recognition and the emergence of territorial claims based on indigenous identities in Argentina. It argues, that while the settlers within the protected area, the pobladores, hold a firm place in the territorial genealogy of Patagonia, they remain in these territories as relics of the past and are thus denied a meaningful existence within the Argentine settler state of the present. Contemporary maps of racialized power in the settler territories condition the politics of subject formation but are also met with resistance as settlers claim rights to full citizenship and recognition of their role as frontier pioneers and state space consolidators.


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Japanese settler colonialisms: Sidney Xu Lu, ‘Eastward Ho! Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido and the Making of Japanese Migration to the American West, 1869–1888’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 2019

26Jun19

Abstract: This article examines how Japanese colonial migration to Hokkaido in the first two decades of the Meiji era paved the way for Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the United States in the 1880s. It elaborates how Japanese leaders carefully emulated the Anglo-American settler colonialism in Japan’s own expansion in Hokkaido by focusing on the emergence of the overpopulation discourse and its political impact in early Meiji. This colonial imitation also inspired the Japanese expansionists to consider the American West an ideal destination for Japanese emigration in the late nineteenth century. This study thus challenges the nation-centered and territory-bound history of the Japanese empire by showing that Japan’s colonial expansion in Northeast Asia and Japanese trans-Pacific migration to North America were intertwined since the very beginning of the Meiji era.


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Storytelling against settler colonialism: Mary Kate Dennis, Michael Minor, ‘Healing Through Storytelling: Indigenising Social Work with Stories’, The British Journal of Social Work, 2019

26Jun19

Abstract: Indigenous storytelling is an important site of knowledge for Indigenous peoples around the world. It is imperative that studies of Indigenous people incorporate a style that matches the interconnectedness of Indigenous knowledge. We use an inter-disciplinary approach to examine how Indigenous storytelling can inform current social work practice and pedagogy with the end goal of promoting healing for Indigenous people. Utilising an Indigenous research paradigm, we locate Indigenous knowledges through modern storytelling outlets, including novels, graphic novels, poetry and podcasts. Through conventional content analysis, we identify how a sample of Indigenous storytellers based in a settler-colonial state (Canada) navigates through traumas such as residential schools and sexual violence. For the people whose stories we examine, these traumas prove to be only a part of the grief they experience at the loss of their connection to family and culture. Through this sample of Indigenous storytelling, we see that the best possibility for healing comes from reconnecting with cultural practices and by resisting settler-colonial social work practices.


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Settler colonialism as editing out: Alessandra Link, ‘Editing for Expansion: Railroad Photography, Native Peoples, and the American West, 1860–1880’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2019

26Jun19

Abstract: In the nineteenth century, both railroad expansion and photography influenced relations between the United States and Native peoples in powerful ways. Scholars have often dealt with these two technological developments separately, but photographs and railroads have a shared history. Throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century railroad companies engaged with photographs and photographers to promote travel on their lines. This article evaluates the production and circulation of transcontinental railroad photographs, and it concludes that the so-called golden age of landscape photography was built on the suppression of peopled scenes in the West. Images of Indians and trains that reached broad audiences placed Indigenous peoples in opposition to the modern forces cast in steel and running on steam. Picturing an unpeopled West and anti-modern Indians brightened business prospects for those investing in the promise of U.S. expansion beyond the 100th meridian.


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Settler colonialism in unexpected places: Karen R. Miller, ‘Agricultural Commodities on the Philippine Frontier: State-Sponsored Resettlement and Ecological Distress in the 1930s’, in Sabrina Joseph (ed.), Commodity Frontiers and Global Capitalist Expansion, Palgrave, 2019

26Jun19

Abstract: In 1938, a delegation of Filipino government officials traveled to Mindanao, a majority “non-Christian” province in the southern Philippines, to determine whether the Koronadal Valley would be a good site for resettlement. They believed that agricultural commodity production on the archipelago’s periphery would provide a foundation for a sovereign Philippine economy and wanted to move Christian migrants from northern islands onto an enormous “agricultural colony.” To make their case, they cast the area as extremely lush, drawing on the idea that peripheral space in the tropics had limitless potential. New forms of intensive agricultural production did not pull migrants out of poverty, but it did radically transform the landscape, undercutting the power of indigenous locals and producing an agroecological terrain in persistent environmental crisis.


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Settler colonialism as miscarriage: Joanne Faulkner, ‘Settler-colonialism’s “miscarriage”‘, Angelaki, 24, 3, 2019, pp. 137-154

24Jun19

Abstract: The relation between Australia’s First Nations peoples and settler-colonial Australians may be characterised as having “miscarried” to the extent that colonial difference is unacknowledged, and Aboriginal peoples are expected to assimilate to white Australian culture. This paper brings Luce Irigaray’s feminist thought into dialogue with Indigenous philosophy and activism to think through this “relation” – or absence of relation. For Irigaray the miscarriage of relationality takes place between women and men when the sexual relation is mischaracterised as procreation, and thus reified as the concrete “child,” rather than conceived as a living, changing “interval” that is shared and maintained by each. Likewise, while coloniser Australians have – via appropriation of Aboriginal children – reduced the relation with Aboriginal peoples to one of absorption or assimilation, First Nations political action offers something akin to Irigaray’s “interval”: a third term co-produced by two different parties […].


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The political economy of settler colonialism today: Anna Stanley, ‘Aligning against Indigenous jurisdiction: Worker savings, colonial capital, and the Canada Infrastructure Bank’, Environment and Planning D, 2019

24Jun19

Abstract: This paper considers the significance of the newly conceived Canada Infrastructure Bank in relation to the political economy of settler colonialism in Canada. I argue that the Canada Infrastructure Bank is a fundamentally colonial institution that marshals private capital to reproduce and extend the jurisdictional power of the setter state. The Bank is an arms-length financing institution whose purpose is to leverage private and institutional capital for investment in large scale, nation-building infrastructure, including infrastructure that supports resource extraction in remote and northern Canada. The first section of the paper examines the specific configuration of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. I suggest that the need to attract private investment into certain kinds of infrastructure development must be understood in relation to state struggles to exercise territorial jurisdiction over Indigenous lands and resources. This struggle is reflected in the specific configuration of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. The second part of the paper focuses on some of the implications of pension securitization. The Canada Infrastructure Bank has deliberately been designed to leverage Canadian pension fund capital; I ask what it means to grow settler workers’ savings through investment in privatized, resource development infrastructure.


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Comparative settler frontiers: Roberto Stefan Foa, Anna Nemirovskaya, ‘Frontier settlement and the spatial variation of civic institutions’, Political Geography, 73, 2019, pp. 112-122

24Jun19

Abstract: This article considers the “territoriality” of civic institutions. Is the “frontier thesis” – according to which areas of new settlement exhibit higher levels of individualism, political activism, and civic organisation – a description only of the western United States, or is it a manifestation of a more generalisable phenomenon found in other global frontier regions? In order to do this, we examine data on the nature of civic institutions in frontier zones in four countries: Brazil, Russia, Canada and the USA. Taking a wide range of survey items, we find that voluntary activity, social trust, tolerance of outgroups, and civic protest are not unique to the American historical experience, but generalised legacies of frontier life. We suggest that the experience of settlement is conducive to the formation of norms of community solidarity and cooperation, and this observation should encourage a new wave of comparative frontier studies.


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