Indigenous cosmovision against settlervision: Ranjeeva Ranjan, Alexis Castillo, Karla Morales, ‘Mapuche cosmovision and territorial rights: An interdisciplinary approach to understand the conflict of Wallmapu, Chile’, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021

08Apr21

Abstract: The indigenous population of Latin America has been suffering from a sense of alienation since the arrival of Columbus in 1492 who referred to this land as “Nuevo Mundo”. There is a long history of environmental exploitation in Chile which has severely strained the relationship amongst the Mapuche community, the State and private entities (hydroelectric and timber industry). Although this conflict seems to be economic-productive associated with land, wherein land attains a “tangible material good”, in the Mapuche cosmovision, land (Mapu means land in Mapudungun, the language of Mapuche) acquires a connotation of “intangible material and immaterial good”. There is a profound imperceptible connection between nature and Mapuche and their traditions and culture are strongly rooted in the land. The industrial expansion has promoted a series of negative externalities like habitat fragmentation, loss of native forest, biodiversity reduction, water availability, etc. These affect the “idiosyncrasy” of this community (Mapuche-Nature relationship) and loss of their land could represent an identity loss. The Chilean indigenous policy appears to be inadequate and fail to recognize the socio-cultural and territorial rights for all indigenous peoples, including Mapuche, given the multidimensionality of the land under the indigenous cosmovision. The socio-political measures imposed by the Chilean government until now to make their life “modern” boomeranged alienating them further from society. This paper proposes to look at the territorial rights of the Mapuche with an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on developing the conceptual framework of Mapuche cosmovision of land and territory. The study follows a brief analysis of the historical context of the territorial conflict between the Chilean State and the Mapuche people and how the implementation of national and international normative framework on indigenous rights has not been effective in resolving this territorial conflict. The study tries to synthesize and talks about integrating the Mapuche land cosmovision in the socio-political discourse and be considered while formulating any land policy involving Mapuche and other indigenous peoples inhabiting in Chile in future. The discussions and analysis have been carried out through a comprehensive literature review and integrate an interdisciplinary approach to look at this issue, both from the philosophical perspective and from the socio-political policy framework of government.


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Settler colonialism in ancient texts: Anand Venkatkrishnan, ‘Skeletons in the Sanskrit closet’, Religion Compass, 2021

08Apr21

Abstract: This essay proposes that we cannot write a history of Sanskrit studies without locating it in the settler colonial history of the United States. It provides examples of anti‐Black racism in the writings of early Sanskritists, and recommends that we understand them as Americans. It concludes by arguing for alternative minority histories in the field.


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Authenticity is repressive! Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, ‘Beyond the Coloniality of Authenticity’, American Quarterly, 73, 1, 2021, pp. 161-167

06Apr21

Excerpt: I begin with a story about my initial encounter with the concept of authenticity, during my undergraduate studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in the 1970s. In Hawai‘i, youth and young adults had begun to question the socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement of indigenous Hawaiian people in our ancestral homeland, and to repudiate the waves of Americanization following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and especially following admission to statehood in 1959. An awakening of consciousness brought to light the suppression of Hawaiian language and cultural practices and laid bare the dispossession of land and livelihood razed by the unrelenting march of capitalist political economies during decades of settler colonial government. These energies coalesced into a movement that became known as “the Hawaiian Renaissance.”


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Decolonising law, one mode of colonial domination at a time: Sujith Xavier, Beverley Jacobs, Valarie Waboose, Jeffery G. Hewitt, Amar Bhatia (eds), Decolonizing Law: Indigenous, Third World and Settler Perspectives, Routledge, 2021

06Apr21

Description: This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.


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The poverty of settler colonialism: Jerome Tharaud, ‘Western Salvage: Scarcity, Settler Colonialism, and Adaptation in Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021

03Apr21

Excerpt: Wallace Stegner is perhaps best known as a chronicler of the arid West. As he put it in his 1987 lecture “Living Dry,” “The West is defined … by inadequate rainfall, which means a general deficiency of water . . . . Aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one” (American West 6, 8). But if Stegner anticipated an environmental historian’s definition of the West as “a region of scarcity, where water sources are few and far between,” he also explored scarcity as a cultural condition (Worster, Under 31). From his ruminations on John Wesley Powell’s “homemade education” (Beyond 8) to his account of the “deprivation” of his own “frontier” upbringing (Wolf Willow 25, 23), Stegner mapped another geography of Western scarcity: information deserts where books are rare treasures; aging towns whose young people have left in search of opportunity; places where entire histories have eroded away, replaced by imported traditions. This essay examines that alternative geography through its most eloquent statement, Wolf Willow (1962). As Stegner reconstructs his family’s failed venture homesteading a borderland wheat farm and his formative experiences in the nearby town of “Whitemud” (his fictionalized name for Eastend, Saskatchewan), he illuminates the relationship between different forms of scarcity, the historical process that has produced them, and possible strategies for adapting to them. Wolf Willow thus offers an opportunity to reconsider not only the history of Western regionalism and its relationship to settler colonialism, but also the potential futures of the region—considered both as a particular geography and as a general concept—in an age of global climate crisis.


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Or trapped outside of history? Darryl Cronin, Trapped by History: The Indigenous-State Relationship in Australia, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021

01Apr21

Description: The Australian nation has reached an impasse in Indigenous policy and practice and fresh strategies and perspectives are required. Trapped by History will highlight a fundamental issue that the Australian nation must confront to develop a genuine relationship with Indigenous Australians. The existing relationship between Indigenous people and the Australian state was constructed on the myth of an empty land – terra nullius. Therefore, interactions with Indigenous people have been constrained by eighteenth-century assumptions and beliefs that Indigenous people did not have organised societies, had neither land ownership nor a recognisable form of sovereignty, and that they were ‘savage’ but could be ‘civilized’ through the erasure of their culture. These incorrect assumptions and beliefs are the foundation of the legal, constitutional and political treatment of Indigenous Australians over the course of the country’s history. They remain ingrained in governmental institutions, Indigenous policy making, judicial decision making and contemporary public attitudes about Indigenous people. Trapped by History shines new light upon several historical and contemporary examples where Indigenous people have attempted to engage and dialogue with state and federal governments. These governments have responded by trying to suppress and discredit Indigenous rights, culture and identities and impose assimilationist policies. In doing so they have rejected or ignored Indigenous attempts at dialogue and partnership. Other settler countries such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States of America have all negotiated treaties with Indigenous people and have developed constitutional ways of engaging cross culturally. In Australia, the limited recognition that Indigenous people have achieved to date shows that the state is unable to resolve long standing issues with Indigenous people. Movement beyond the current colonial relationship with Indigenous Australians requires a genuine dialogue to not only examine the legal and intellectual framework that constrain Indigenous recognition but to create new foundations for a renewed relationship based on intercultural negotiation, mutual respect, sharing and mutual responsibility. This must involve building a shared understanding around addressing past injustices and creating a shared vision for how Indigenous people and other Australians would associate politically in the future.


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Indigenous resistance against settler terraforming: Michael Dockry, Kyle Whyte, ‘Improving on Nature: The Legend Lake Development, Menominee Resistance, and the Ecological Dynamics of Settler Colonialism’, American Indian Quarterly, 45, 2, 2021, pp. 95-120

01Apr21

Abstract: In 1968 a large- scale recreational vacation property development, Legend Lake, was carved out of the recently terminated Menominee reservation to create a tax base for Wisconsin’s newly formed Menominee County. Menominee peoples’ resistance to the Legend Lake project and land sales expressed multiple concerns about settler colonialism and the process of terraforming and ecological change, land dispossession, cultural erasure, and implications for the future. Th e Menominee people came together to respond to this twentieth- century manifestation of the ecological dynamics of settler colonialism by asserting their tribal identity, culture, and relationships to their land. In this paper, we argue that the ecological changes created by the Legend Lake project was one of the major catalysts for Menominee resistance to settler colonialism that ultimately led to the restoration of the Menominee tribe.


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Settler violence is also sexual violence: Mythili Rajiva, ‘A comparative analysis of White and Indigenous girls’ perspectives on sexual violence, toxic masculinity and rape culture’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: North American feminist scholarship on violence against women (VAW) focuses primarily on gendered-based violence and does not substantively incorporate intersectionality. In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of Canadian Indigenous and White middle-class adolescent girls’ narratives of toxic masculinity, rape culture and sexual violence. I use VAW research, Indigenous feminist theory and girlhood studies to focus on the following: (1) the ‘boys will be boys’ discourse, (2) the feminist critique of the stranger danger discourse and (3) the surveillance of girls. I analyze focus group data with girls (aged 13–19 years). I am interested in how girls both accept and resist the status quo in their day-to-day negotiations with family, peers, schools and public spaces.


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Settler ideal communities: Emily R.M. Lind, The White Settler Colonial Landscape of Toronto’s Wychwood Park, PhD dissertation, Carleton University 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Mythologized as a former artist’s colony, Wychwood Park is a gated community in midtown Toronto that encompasses fifty-eight homes built at the turn of the twentieth century. Wychwood Park’s landscape plan is one of Canada’s earliest examples of a garden suburb – a suburban design model derived from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century English Garden City movement. The Park boasts the highest concentration of Arts and Crafts domestic architecture in Toronto. Famous early residents included artists and art patrons who were instrumental in establishing what became the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario College of Art and Design, and the Ontario Society of Artists. In this dissertation, I argue that Wychwood Park is a white settler colonial landscape. This argument is informed by the idea of landscape as an actor in social and political processes, rather than a reflection of them. The physical landscape of Wychwood Park, and the extent to which it reflects the ideas and values that sustain settler colonial rule, are seriously interrogated in this project. I am interested in the ways that a neighbourhood like Wychwood Park can teach Torontonians something about how patriarchy and racism work and what it means to live in an environment shaped by gendered/racialized thinking and social organization. I am informed by Richard Schein’s contentions that “discourses of racialized social relations work through landscapes”
and that landscapes are the sites in which racialized discourses become “materialized.” In this dissertation, I situate the patriarchal and racialized social relations of settler colonialism within the material landscape of Wychwood Park. This approach highlights Wychwood Park’s engagement with the settler colonial project, addressing a gap in existing literature on the Park specifically and on Toronto history as a whole.


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Secular settlers: Stacey Gutkowski, ‘Secular feelings, settler feelings: the case of Palestine/Israel’, Religion, State and Society, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Scholars have not yet discussed how secular and settler-colonial emotions intersect in contexts such as Palestine/Israel. This article addresses the gap. It explores one case of settler, secular emotion, using data from a larger study on secular Jewish-Israeli millennials after the 2014 Gaza War. It analyses how the Jewish-Israeli settler experience problematises ‘Jewish secular’ feelings and vice versa. Stressing the need to study secular sentiments intersectionally, it offers Bourdieu’s field and habitus as a new conceptual framework. This article argues that the dominant power dynamics within a given context will also predominantly shape people’s emotions – though, critically, not always.


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