If the struggle is over the same geography, the struggle over geography is topical: Heather Dorries, Sue Ruddick, ‘Between concept and context: reading Gilles Deleuze and Leanne Simpson in their in/commensurabilities’, Cultural Geographies, 2018

22Jun18

Abstract: After centuries of ignoring and discounting Indigenous epistemologies, geographers and other scholars rooted in Western intellectual traditions have recently displayed a new curiosity about the insights offered by Indigenous intellectual traditions. In this article, we reflect on the ethical challenges that accompany reading Indigenous philosophy as scholars trained primarily in the Western tradition. Reading a set of texts by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we argue that reading practices can serve as either enactments or refusals of colonial relationships, and provide an account of the development of reading practices that seek to find meaning in the in/commensurablity of these texts, rather than by seeking only similarities or differences. Thus, we advocate for a political approach to reading Indigenous philosophy that respects the sovereignty of the text.


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Settler colonial environmentalism: Ellen van Holstein, Lesley Head,’Shifting settler-colonial discourses of environmentalism: Representations of indigeneity and migration in Australian conservation’, Geoforum, 94, 2018, pp. 41–52

22Jun18

Abstract: Western environmentalism and conservation are deeply entangled with histories of colonialism. This entanglement has marginalised Indigenous and migrant perspectives on the environment to protect settler norms and interests. This paper approaches those two types of othering together in the context of environmental debate, using the lens of a mainstream conservation magazine. We analyse representations of indigeneity and migration in a shifting settler-colonial discourse on the environment, throughout the 45 volumes of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s magazine Habitat (1973–2016). The Australian Conservation Foundation was Australia’s first nation-wide conservation organization. Its magazine exemplifies a settler-colonial discourse that initially aimed to conserve pristine nature but that over time has responded to increasing awareness that environmental crises have transnational causes and consequences, and require intercultural and international cooperation. We found that, while contributors to the magazine increasingly represent Australian conservation issues as connected to international processes and closely collaborate with remote Indigenous communities, they continue to assume the settler as norm and prioritise the protection of wealth and lifestyles. These goals are achieved through the conditional inclusion of others and through the treatment of environments as having zero-sum limits. The colonial imaginaries of ‘wilderness’ and carrying capacity are repurposed to frame migration as being at odds with Australian people’s wealth and wellbeing. The reiteration of settler-colonial environmentalism as a dominant way of protecting the environment stands in the way of the greater pluralism of environmental relationships that will be needed for coping with environmental change.


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Integrated healing in settler contexts: Ilse Blignault, Jennifer Hunter, Janett Mumford, ‘Integration of Indigenous healing practices with western biomedicine in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America: a scoping review protocol’, JBI: Database of Systematic Reviews and Implementation Reports, 16, 6, 2018, pp. 1354–1360

17Jun18

Abstract: What types of Indigenous healing practices have been integrated with western biomedicine in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA, and for what conditions or purpose have they been used? How has this integration been achieved, i.e. what are the key features of the service models implemented?


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Sexuality is not discrete from settler colonialism: Walaa Alqaisiya, ‘Decolonial Queering: The Politics of Being Queer in Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 47, 3, 2018, pp. 29-44

17Jun18

Abstract: This article analyzes the work of Palestine’s most established queer rights organization, alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, to reveal the political power of being queer in Palestine. It argues that an open, feminist, queer space such as alQaws is a productive site to think and practice decolonization. Relying on the author’s direct involvement with the group, the article traces the development of queer Palestinian thought to provide a critique of queer politics in Palestine: it recounts how since the establishment of the organization in 2001, alQaws activists have increasingly transcended exclusivist gay identifications and rejected singling out sexuality as a discrete site of oppression disconnected from Zionist settler colonialism. The discussion covers Israeli pinkwashing and its counter, Palestinian pinkwatching; it deconstructs pinkwashing narratives, rejects the myth of the colonial savior, and reveals how discourses of sexual progress reproduce Zionist colonialism. It also documents alQaws’s challenge to normalizing development discourse.


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The toxic geographies of settler colonialism: Neil Nunn, ‘Toxic Encounters, Settler Logics of Elimination, and the Future of a Continent’, Antipode, 2018

17Jun18

Abstract: This paper engages the relationship between toxic geographies and settler colonialism. By bringing to light larger structures and histories that underpin the settler colonial project, I examine a series of toxic encounters and consider the racialised hegemonic narratives that enable the production toxicity. Among these is a methylmercury contamination in Northern Ontario, just upstream from Grassy Narrows First Nation, and a cluster of toxic conversations that bled through social media in the wake of the murder of Colten Boushie, a 22‐year‐old Cree man in Saskatchewan, Canada. I argue that examining the normative ideologies, settler narratives, and socio‐political structures that are involved in the production of toxicity provides valuable insight into the diffuse and relational colonial logics that define the lives that are privileged as the standard, and those that fall outside the regulatory category of the Human, and as a result, are subject to elimination. 


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The articulation of humanitarian and settler governance: Matthew Marshall Woodbury, Humanitarian Governance in Colonial New Zealand (1833 – 1872), PhD dissertation, The University of Michigan, 2018

17Jun18

Abstract: “Humanitarian Governance in Colonial New Zealand” focuses on a landmark intervention, Britain’s 1840 annexation of New Zealand, to show how officials, settlers, and indigenous Māori implemented a transnational discourse of humanitarian care within the colony. Invoking favorable impressions of Māori capacity for “civilization,” British proponents of colonization in the 1830s and 1840s advocated planned settlement and an intentional approach to managing indigenous peoples. New Zealand constituted an early experiment in humanitarian governance – defined as the administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle – as a solution to the grim consequences European settlement entailed for aboriginal populations.

Uncertainly surrounding the terms of annexation, competition between a private company and the British government, and the colonial state’s lack of military power relative to Māori slowed early efforts at implementing policies of humanitarian governance. The dissertation examines several areas of government action – land reserved for Māori, the administration of health and education, and programs promoting legal assimilation – to show how colonial officials initially deployed humanitarian governance as the only viable means of assimilating Māori into the colonial state. With the arrival of more colonists in the 1850s and London’s devolution of authority over Māori affairs to New Zealand, humanitarian governance became more assertive. Instead of seeking Māori participation, settlers prioritized the individualization of communal lands and accelerated the legal assimilation of Māori communities.

A hardening of racial attitudes toward indigenous peoples throughout the British Empire, and a decade of intermittent warfare in the 1860s, reframed practices of governance. If in the 1840s agents of empire implemented ideas of humanitarian governance as an experiment in colonization and a way of encouraging Māori engagement with the colonial state, by the 1870s the government conceptualized humanitarian governance as a way to limit Māori autonomy and justify interventions in the name of progress.


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Thinking decolonisation across colonial modes: Shana Almeida, Siseko H. Kumalo,'(De)coloniality through Indigeneity:Deconstructing Calls to Decolonise in the South African and Canadian University Contexts’, Education as Change, 22, 1, 2018

13Jun18

Abstract: The ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation in the South African academy have been framed and carried out have been called into question over the past several years, most notably in relation to modes of silencing and epistemic negation, which have been explicitly challenged through the student actions. In a similar vein, Canada’s commitments to decolonising its university spaces and pedagogies have been the subject of extensive critique, informed by (still unmet) claims to land, space, knowledge, and identity. Despite extensive critique, policies and practices in both South African and Canadian academic spaces remain largely unchanged, yet continue to stand as evidence that decolonisation is underway. In our paper, we begin to carefully articulate an understanding of decolonisation in the academy as one which continues to carry out historical relations of colonialism and race. Following the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), we begin the process of “de-mythologising” decolonisation, by first exposing and tracing how decolonising claims both reinforce and recite the racial and colonial terms under which Indigeneity and Blackness are “integrated” in the academy. From our respective contexts, we trace how white, western ownership of space and knowledge in the academy is reaffirmed through processes of invitation, commodification, and erasure of Indigenous/Black bodies and identities. However, we also suggest that the invitation and presence of Indigenous and Black bodies and identities in both academic contexts are necessary to the reproduction and survival of decolonising claims, which allows us to begin to interrogate how, why, and under what terms bodies and identities come to be “included” in the academy. We conclude by proposing that the efficacy of decoloniality lies in paradigmatic and epistemic shifts which begin to unearth and then unsettle white supremacy in both contexts, in order to proceed with aims of reconciliation and reclamation.


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The settler colonialism of others: John G. Reid, ‘Scots, Settler Colonization and Indigenous Displacement: Mi’kma’ki, 1770–1820, in Comparative Context’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 38, 1, 2018

13Jun18

Abstract: This article notes that while sophisticated study of Scottish intellectual analyses of global Indigenous societies and their significance has been longstanding among historians, until recently less attention has been given to the implications of Scottish settlement for specific Indigenous peoples. Historians have debated whether there is a distinctly Scottish pattern of dealings with Indigenous populations, or whether such interactions are best understood as a subset of imperial-Indigenous affairs on a global basis. Through exploring the case of Mi’kma’ki, and offering brief comparisons with Scottish-Indigenous relations elsewhere, the chapter will conclude by arguing that, while the question does invite continuing global study, nevertheless no paradigm will be found. The shifting relationships among factors such as land encroachment, intellectual argument, Indigenous displacement, and Indigenous response, ensure that historiographical as well as historical complexity will prevail.


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The racial frontier and its disappearance: Anthony William Wood, The Erosion of the Racial Frontier: Settler Colonialism and the History of Black Montana, 1880-1930, MA Dissertation, Montana State University, 2018

13Jun18

Abstract: From 1880-1910, Montana was home to one of the most vibrant and diverse African American communities in the Rocky Mountain West. By the onset of World War II, however, the black population had fallen by over fifty percent, and Montana was well on its way to being the least black state in the US by the twenty-first century. In The Erosion of the Racial Frontier, I argue that scholars of African American studies and the American West must consider the sedimented afterlife of US settler colonialism if those fields are to articulate a distinctly western narrative of African American history. My approach draws on colonial and settler colonial theories to examine the history of African Americans in Montana from 1880-1930. As a non-indigenous, non-white, community of color—or what Lorenzo Veracini would call ‘subaltern exogenous others’—black westerners fall into an uncertain space in settler colonial theory. As an ongoing structure, settler colonialism continues after the violent appropriation of Indigenous lands appears to culminate. The thesis of The Erosion of the Racial Frontier is two-fold: The logic of settlement together with the logic of anti-blackness created distinctly western categories of racial exclusion that is evident in the archive of black Montana. This western, colonial racism acted as an erosive force across the state, targeting the stability and place identity of western black communities. Moreover, the society that developed in tandem with colonial erosion necessarily continues to live with the sedimented afterlife of settler colonialism. As such, the history of Black Montana can be understood as individual and collective experiences of thousands of black Montanans struggling against and subverting the settler colonial project in western North America. 


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Coreographies of resistance against settler colonialism: Rehab Nazzal, Representation of Settler Colonial Violence in Palestine: Thesis in support of the multi-media exhibition Choreographies of Resistance, PhD dissertation, The University of Western Ontario, 2018

13Jun18

Abstract: This project-based dissertation emerges from my engagement with theories of representation, settler colonialism, and genocide, as well as involvement with direct engagement through embodied experience of the Palestinian reality in the colonized West Bank during 2015–2017. The artworks and written components of this project seek to represent shards of the multilayered Western-Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine through a focus on the struggle and resilience of the Palestinian people and the endurance of their land. Land seizing as the aim of settler colonialism and the colonised bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance are central to the various works of the exhibition and the textual analysis. The dissertation is built on the assertion that the Western-Zionist venture in Palestine amounts to an incremental genocide that targets the existence of the Palestinian people, their material culture, and their land. It also asserts that the right of the Palestinians to resist colonial violence is a legitimate right enshrined in international law and connected to the struggle of colonized and oppressed people around the world. My experience and what I observed and documented in the West Bank—particularly in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem—represented in this project, resembles Palestinian resilience, sumud (steadfastness), and resistance in the face of a century of Zionist dispossession and military oppression. Representing active settler colonialism is hindered by continued violence on the ground in Palestine, dominant Zionist narratives, suppression and misrepresentation of the colonized peoples’ resistance, as well as by the limitations of representational forms. Obstacles that I have faced while working on this project include denial of entry to Gaza ( twelve years under blockade), restrictions of movement within the country, and access to sites, information, as well as intimidation and sometimes life threats.


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