If it is settler-colonial, it must not be international: Trycia Bazinet, ‘Denaturalizing settler-colonial logics in international development education in Canada’, in Julie Cupples, Ramón Grosfoguel (ed.), Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, Routledge, 2018

18Aug18

Abstract: Canada, along with other settler-colonial nations such as the United States, New Zealand and Australia, was not an original signatory of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Even when Canada became a so-called “full supporter of the declaration” in 2016,1 Justice Minister Wilson-Raybould said that in retrospect adopting UNDRIP as Canadian law is “simplistic” and “unworkable” (Canada, 2016). This is only one out of the many statements and policies that demonstrate that settler governments, regardless of the effectiveness of their reconciliatory public relations, are ultimately concerned with reconciling Indigenous’ rights as long as they can be reconciled with the Crown’s sovereignty (Borrows, 2002; Mackey, 2016). Indeed, one of the recurring reason cited by Canadian authorities in their attempts to justify their refusal to endorse UNDRIP had to do with concerns over sovereignty and the management of natural resources.


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Managing intra-settler rivalries: Charles V. Reed, ‘Royalty, loyalism and citizenship in the nineteenth- century British settler empire’, in Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery (eds), Royals on tour: Politics, Pageantry and Colonialism, Manchester University Press, 2018

17Aug18

Abstract: The ethnic rivalry between the British and the Boers is one of the major narratives of South African and British imperial history. This chapter talks about the ‘Cape Dutch’ and De Zuid-Afrikaan does not intend to uproot this traditional narrative completely, but rather to interrogate and problematise it. In the cases of the Cape Dutch and the Irish Catholics of New Zealand, so-called ‘outsiders’ were themselves the authors of imperial culture and citizenship. Much recent and important work has identified the investment and contribution to the British imperial project by the Scottish, Welsh and Irish who administered, fought for, evangelised in and settled the British empire. The invention of Afrikanerdom during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was as much a response to the cultural potency of a British loyalism as it was a function of opposition to British injustices.


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German settler colonialism: Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Peter Monteath (eds), Savage worlds: German encounters abroad, 1798-1914, Manchester University Press, 2018

17Aug18

Description: With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants, and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered.

Whether in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas or Africa, within Germany’s formal empire or in the imperial spaces of other powers, Germans brought with them assumptions about the nature of extra-European peoples. These assumptions were often subverted, disrupted or overturned by their own experience of frontier interactions, which led some Germans to question European ‘knowledge’ of these non-European peoples. Other Germans, however, signally failed to shift from their earlier assumptions about indigenous people and continued to act in the colonies according to their belief in the innate superiority of Europeans.

Examining the multifaceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, the wide ranging research presented in this volume offers historians and anthropologists a clear demonstration of the complexity of frontier zone encounters. It illustrates the variety of forms that agency took for both indigenous peoples and Germans in imperial zones of contact and poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.


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Settlers need to adapt (and steal indigenous knowledges): Thomas M. Wickman, Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast, Cambridge University Press, 2018

17Aug18

Description: Snowshoe Country is an environmental and cultural history of winter in the colonial Northeast, closely examining indigenous and settler knowledge of snow, ice, and life in the cold. Indigenous communities in this region were more knowledgeable about the cold than European newcomers from temperate climates, and English settlers were especially slow to adapt. To keep surviving the winter year after year and decade after decade, English colonists relied on Native assistance, borrowed indigenous winter knowledge, and followed seasonal diplomatic protocols to ensure stable relations with tribal leaders. Thomas M. Wickman explores how fluctuations in winter weather and the halting exchange of winter knowledge both inhibited and facilitated English colonialism from the 1620s to the early 1700s. As their winter survival strategies improved, due to skills and technologies appropriated from Natives, colonial leaders were able to impose a new political ecology in the greater Northeast, projecting year-round authority over indigenous lands.


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Settlers see diseased indigenous peoples (on stubborn constructions of indigeneity as disease): Travis Hay, ‘Commentary: The Invention of Aboriginal Diabetes: The Role of the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis in Canadian Health Care Provision’, Ethnicity & Disease, 28, 2018, pp. 247-252

15Aug18

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to analyze the extent to which the ‘thrifty gene hypothesis’ remains embedded within regimes of Canadian health care. The thrifty gene hypothesis, formulated by the American geneticist and travelling scientist James V. Neel in 1962, proposed that Indigenous peoples were genetically predisposed to Type 2 diabetes due to the foodways of their ancestors. The hypothesis was functionally racist and based on what biological anthropologists now call ‘the myth of forager food insecurity.’ Importantly, Neel reconsidered his own hypothesis in 1982 before he ultimately rejected it in 1999; nonetheless, in the mid-1990s, a team of Canadian scientists led by the endocrinologist Robert Hegele of Western University conducted a genetic study on the OjiCree community of Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario. Thereafter, Hegele told the academic world and news media that he had discovered a thrifty gene in Sandy Lake. Like Neel, Hegele later came to reject his own study in 2011. Nonetheless, the ‘thrifty gene hypothesis’ and Hegele’s Sandy Lake study continue to be cited, referenced, and reproduced in the current Clinical Guidelines of the Canadian Diabetes Association, as well as across state-related health literature more broadly. The purpose of this study, then, will be to apply the PHCRP to the thrifty gene hypothesis in a Canadian context. 


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The gender of land ownership (in settler colonialism): Karen V. Hansen, Grey Osterud, Valerie Grim, ‘”Land Was One of the Greatest Gifts”: Women’s Landownership in Dakota Indian, Immigrant Scandinavian, and African American Communities’, Great Plains Quarterly, 38, 3, 2018, pp. 251-272

15Aug18

Abstract: In rural societies, equity in land is key to women’s position, much as wage labor is in urban, industrial society. Access to productive property is especially important to women in marginalized, subjugated, or newly arrived racial-ethnic groups. The ownership of land shapes the resources that women and men can differentially obtain, control, and utilize. Native American, African American, and immigrant women obtained land in a variety of ways: allotment, purchase, homesteading, and inheritance. Ownership enabled them to cultivate land to support the family, rent it out for income, and exercise the leverage it provided them throughout their lives. Using cases spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we explore landholding from the perspectives of Dakota and Scandinavian immigrant women on the Northern Plains and African American women in the South. Through careful attention to what women made of the land they owned, we can better understand gender and power in a settler colonialist society.


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Settler colonialism is indigenous imprisonment: Harry Blagg, Thalia Anthony, ‘”Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make”: Bare Life and the Carceral Archipelago in Colonial and Postcolonial Societies’, in Elizabeth Stanley (ed.), Human Rights and Incarceration, Palgrave, 2018, pp. 257-283

15Aug18

Abstract: This chapter offers a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of Australian prisons as exclusive sites of settler colonial repression. We refer to transcripts from 2016 to 2017 Royal Commission into Child Protection and Youth Detention in the Northern Territory to reveal how the brutal treatment of Indigenous children in prisons is part of the same continuum of racism that reduces Indigenous lives to ‘bare life’. Imprisonment is not an exceptional state of un-being for Indigenous people. Rather, in the colony, the exception is the norm. The rights for Indigenous people cannot be afforded individually but need to recognise and account for Indigenous dispossession, state domination and Indigenous sovereign claims. Penal abolitionism can only be meaningful within a process that decolonizes other sites of exception for Indigenous people.


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The market encounter (and settler colonialism): Jeremy Siegman, Enemies in the Aisles: the Politics of Market Encounter on Israel’s Settler Frontier, PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2018

15Aug18

Abstract: Enemies in the Aisles is a study of the politics of Israeli-Palestinian market encounter in Israeli businesses in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. It shows how these market encounters partially depoliticize Israeli-Palestinian relations and thus normalize Israeli settler colonization, but also how political antagonisms crop up in the marketplace to render this normalization partial and precarious. 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork centered on participant-observation at one of the large supermarkets that have proliferated in Israeli settlements in recent years, where many to most entry-level workers are occupied Palestinian subjects and most customers and managers are Jewish-Israeli settlers. The study’s focus on this particularly rich site of Israeli-Palestinian encounter was supplemented by broader interviews and immersion with Palestinians who are subject to Israeli occupation and dispossession while working in Israeli service economies. In the context of intensified, militarized separation between Israelis and Palestinians since the 1990s, supermarkets and other settlement businesses have become rare spaces of ostensibly civilian encounter between the groups. They have also become flashpoints for broader discourses about the market as a site of peace, or alternatively of domination. Enemies offers a nuanced ethnographic account of the relations among neoliberalism, market practice and the entrenchment of Israeli settler colonization and occupation, complicating literatures that have emphasized the structural alignment between these forces. Specifically, I argue that Israeli-Palestinian market encounters instill a precarious normalization of Israeli settler colonization. On the one hand, the exploitation of Palestinian service work, as well as a partially civilianized security regime, help to displace the political antagonisms of colonization from the marketplace, producing an atmosphere that partly normalizes Israeli dominance. On the other hand, at times this normalization is unsettled by forms of political antagonism that emerge both subtly and overtly from workplace interactions, and range from hovering suspicions to direct, heated exchanges about the 2014 Gaza war. The project conceptualizes these findings as various forms of settler-indigenous antagonism, including an antagonistic public sphere and a politics of dissonance between a settler public and a Palestinian counterpublic. These forms of political antagonism point to the limits of market depoliticization – and the shortcomings of an analytical overemphasis on it – even though, crucially, they do not constitute agonistic democracy and are not best characterized as forms of indigenous resistance. Enemies thus puts anthropological, political-theoretical and other writings on neoliberalism, settler colonialism, security, public spheres and the political into novel conversation. Through its focus on frontier service economies, Enemies also draws attention to the distinctly civilian, settler aspects of Israeli power, intervening in Palestine Studies and critical theory literatures that have habitually emphasized military power and logics of rule in Israel/Palestine as a site of global counter-insurgency. I thus help resituate Israel/Palestine for further, nuanced comparison to various global configurations of (neo-)liberalism with settler colonialism, securitization and other forms of power.


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As the settlers have displaced, one has to visit them: Chris Holdridge, ‘Ceremony, Conquest, and Conciliation: An Afterword’, Royal Studies Journal, 5, 1, 2018, pp. 168–174

12Aug18

Abstract: British royal tours to the empire’s settler dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand reached their zenith in the early- to mid-twentieth century during a period of wilful amnesia and lack of engagement with the legacies of violence and dispossession brought about by colonial rule. This afterword considers royal tours in the light of the systemic racial inequality inherent within settler colonialism and its narrative of nationhood and British loyalism. The discussion draws on the articles in this special issue, but also on new examples: Mark Twain, the American author and anti-imperialist, demonstrates a different type of touring celebrity to visiting royals and their role as defenders of empire, with Twain critical of empire in his literary works and travels; Sol Plaatje, the black South African journalist, politician and one-time translator to the Duke of Connaught, reveals the ineffectiveness––and reticence to intervene––of touring royals as mediators between settlers and colonial subjects robbed of their land and liberties. The article concludes by noting improvements in the speed of travel and telecommunications as crucial for the increase in royal tours to settler dominions, an increase that proved critical in facilitating the affective power of royal performance for the solidifying of settler nationalisms reliant upon loyalism to the Crown.


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The public history of settler colonialism: Michael Belgrave, ‘Colonialism Revisited Public History and New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal’, in David Dean (ed.), A Companion to Public History, Wiley, 2018, pp. 215-230

10Aug18

Abstract: Over the last three decades New Zealand has undertaken a comprehensive state‐sponsored review of the impact of colonisation on Māori, its indigenous population. This has been the country’s leaders exercise in public history, one where historians have worked both to provide evidence for the Waitangi Tribunal, a commission of enquiry which investigates claims against the crown, based on alleged breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty of Waitangi gave legitimacy to British claims of sovereignty over New Zealand, but also made substantial promises to Māori tribes. Māori were guaranteed the right to retain their lands on other properties, as well as the right to retain their own tribal laws. Some Māori have even argued that the treaty did not transfer of sovereignty from tribes to the British Crown. As well as providing evidence and sitting on the Tribunal, historians have assisted in negotiating Treaty settlements, sometimes following a tribunal enquiry, on behalf of both Māori and the Crown. Waitangi history has become a highly specialised form of public history, prepared for quasi‐judicial judicial inquiries and as part of political negotiations. This chapter explores both the strengths and limitations of this form of history, where the historians inevitably support tribunal reports and negotiated settlements that are at times extremely can controversial.


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