Immigrant and settler Sweden: Nina Carlsson, ‘Revitalizing the Indigenous, integrating into the colonized? The banal colonialism of immigrant integration in Swedish Sápmi’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020

03Jul20

Abstract: In an endeavour to understand connections between immigration policy and contemporary colonialism on Indigenous territory, this study investigates how state-led immigrant integration policies and practices reproduce colonialism in Swedish Sápmi. It explores the applicability of scholarship on settler colonialism on Sweden and develops the notion of banal colonialism by combining scholarship on settler and everyday colonialism with banal nationalism. Drawing from state documents regulating immigrant integration and semi-structured interviews conducted with integration workers in Swedish Sápmi, the study shows that immigrant integration policy largely silences the colonial past and present of Sweden. While the implementation of national-level policies on Indigenous land reproduces majority-centred narratives, also practices challenging the colonial order are identified. The study shows how the notion of banal colonialism captures mundane colonial practices, but also brings attention to instances where immigrant integration policy has the potential of challenging settler colonialism.


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Settler and indigenous gaming: Joshua D. Miner, ‘Monitoring Simulated Worlds in Indigenous Strategy Games’, The Computer Games Journal, 2020

03Jul20

Abstract: Though all video games require the player to observe the game state, the strategy genre relies on an experience of managing rule-based simulations that model real-world material systems. Designing for this experience produces a mode of interactive vision that structures gameplay as management: gamic monitoring. This article aims to develop a theory of gamic monitoring and explore its features through settler and Indigenous strategy, simulation, and resource management games. Games scholarship has yet to fully account for recent developments in Indigenous video games or how they relate to mainstream genres. Four comparative examples demonstrate how Indigenous games speak to settler-style gameplay, particularly its dynamics of monitoring and managing populations and resources. Due to their divergent frameworks for action, Indigenous strategy games intervene in mainstream genre conventions by shifting informatic play toward relational procedures of observation and decision-making. They express a paradigm of reciprocal interaction through how they mediate and critique codified game systems. Because Indigenous strategy games reconfigure resources and political engagement according to distinct models of managing the game state, they remain useful for further research in developing alternate models of strategy gameplay.


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Water conservation as settler discourse: Michael Warren Cook, Settler Discourses of Water Conservation: Addressing the Arid American West from Roosevelt to Snake Valley, MA dissertation, University of Colorado, 2020

03Jul20

Abstract: This thesis aims to foster discussion about the complex terrain of water politics by investigating the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of a hegemonic water discourse in the US today: water conservation. Its overarching question is: how do settler colonial invocations of water conservation discourse facilitate unsustainable relationships to water in the arid American West? The second chapter attempts to answer this question by drawing on rhetorical criticism. I revisit a key moment in the emergence of water conservation discourse in the US by “the conservation president,” specifically Theodore Roosevelt’s first State of the Union Address in 1901. The third chapter answers this question by drawing on rhetorical field methods and analysis of public culture. In this chapter, I analyze oral histories of water I conducted from settlers in Snake Valley, who are resisting a decades-long water grab that’s been justified in terms of “water conservation.” The two chapters engage extant conversations in the Quarterly Journal of Speech and Environmental Communication, respectively, with the hope of bringing this research into dialogue with rhetorical studies and a cultural studies approach to environmental communication.


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Settler colonial imaginings now: Dan Tout, ‘Destruction and Erasure: Juukan Gorge and the Contemporary Settler-Colonial Imagination, Arena Online, 30/06/20

30Jun20

Excerpt: In a recent article published in Arena Online, Jon Altman offered several important correctives to the narratives that have surrounded the destruction in late May of two Juukan Gorge sites belonging to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people in the Pilbara by mining giant Rio Tinto. In particular, he highlighted the underlying issues with the native title regime as an ostensible means of protecting Indigenous rights to land, and pointed towards the settler-colonial logics of contemporary Australia.

Settler colonialism is primarily about land. Settler-colonial formations are premised on the foundational projection of permanent territorial sovereignty. The clue is in the name: unlike the temporary colonial sojourner, the settler stays. The peculiarities of the sovereign intentions of the settler project, which seeks to establish exclusive territorial sovereignty over expropriated Indigenous lands, produce what Patrick Wolfe described as a ‘logic of elimination’. Access to land is, as Wolfe insisted, the primary motivation for elimination. Settlers—and the settler state—aim to displace the pre-existing (and inconveniently persisting) Indigenous presence in order to establish their own direct connection with the land. In the settler-colonial equation,  as Deborah Bird Rose has suggested, ‘to get in the way all the native has to do is stay at home’.


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The settler colonialism of pandemics (II): Bryan S. R. Grimwood, ‘On Not Knowing: COVID-19 and Decolonizing Leisure Research’, Leisure Studies, 2020

30Jun20

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has enfolded waves of uncertainty—intense doses of not knowing—into our daily experience. In this commentary, I stutter into the discomfort of not knowing as a mode of relation. Recognizing that the collective uncertainty surrounding the pandemic has marshaled vital desires to know how to respond, to cope, and even to survive, I think and write toward productive possibilities that arise when we tune attention away from knowing more and knowing better. The journey I take hitches to conceptual anchor points from settler colonial studies, and to moments of personal upheaval associated with both the current pandemic and learning to take responsibility for settler colonization. As I navigate this route of not knowing, I churn up potential decolonizing pathways for leisure researchers to debate, discard, pick up, or move through.


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The settler colonialism of pandemics: Tai S. Edwards, Paul Kelton, ‘Germs, Genocides, and America’s Indigenous Peoples’, Journal of American History, 107, 1, 2020, pp. 52–76

30Jun20

Excerpt: “Junipero Serra was a nazi not a saint!” “GENOCIDE EQUALS SAINTHOOD?” “NATIVE LIVES MATTER.” These were just a few of the slogans emblazoned on posters and banners during protests opposing the eighteenth-century priest Junípero Serra’s canonization in 2015. Accusations that Serra committed genocide also reverberated in the press. Vincent Medina—a Catholic Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Indian and the assistant to the curator at one of California’s surviving missions—told the New York Times that canonizing “the leader of the disastrous, genocidal California mission system is a way that the church further legitimized the pain and suffering of Ohlone and countless other California Indians.”


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Arrivants as weapons of settler colonialism: Kundai Manamere, ‘Remembering Tom the boss boy: the place of black immigrants in the establishment of the southeastern lowveld sugar estates, Zimbabwe, 1906–1972’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

28Jun20

Abstract: This article explores the role of black immigrants in the history of settler colonialism by demonstrating the interstitial positioning of boss boys on white owned farms in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Most of these individuals came as part of earlier settlers and they occupied a strategic position in the entrenchment of settler colonialism as they acted as intermediaries between the coloniser and the colonised. This article is about a black immigrant named Tom Dunuza, personal servant, driver and boss boy to Thomas Murray MacDougall, the pioneer of Triangle Sugar Estates in southeastern Zimbabwe. It makes use of archives and oral narratives of his two descendants, former and current estate workers and residents to capture memories of Tom Dunuza’s role in the establishment of the lowveld sugar estates and illuminates our understanding of the complex and ambiguous position that boss boys occupied on early colonial farms. Those whom he supervised remember him as a colonial collaborator. The article demonstrates that through a racialised system of violence and paternalism, the boss boy enforced the oppression and subjugation of workers on early colonial farms. It also shows how changes in farm ownership and management from individual and direct control to corporate and indirect administration influenced the development of a positive image of Dunuza among current workers and residents as new forms of paternalism emerged.


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A settler colonial pandemic: Kelsey Leonard, ‘Medicine lines and COVID-19: Indigenous geographies of imagined bordering’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020

28Jun20

Abstract: In response to COVID-19, this commentary explores the disproportionate impacts that the pandemic is having on Indigenous nations of Turtle Island (North America) and the rendering of Indigenous borders as sites of compassionate community care. I argue that settler colonialism during COVID-19 is enacted through travel and second-home escapism of urban elites.


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Manufacturing settler knowledge: Liam Midzain-Gobin, Making Sense: Indigenous Peoples, Knowledge Production, and Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation McMaster University, 2020

28Jun20

Abstract: Though it is often taken for granted with an assumed naturalness, settler colonial sovereignty relies on the settler state’s realization of Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the erasure of indigeneity. More than singular or historical events, dispossession and erasure are ongoing, and are best understood as contemporary, and structural, features of settler governance because of the continued existence of Indigenous nations. As a result, seemingly stable settler states (such as Canada) are in a constant state of insecurity, due to Indigenous nations’ competing claims of authority. As such, settler states are continually working to (re)produce their own sovereign authority, and legitimacy. This text argues that knowledge is central to the (re)production of settler sovereignty, and hence, settler colonialism. Understood this way, knowledge is both produced and also productive. What we ‘know’ is not only framed by the cosmologies and ontologies through which we make meaning of the world, but it also serves as an organizing tool, structuring what interventions we imagine to be possible. Focusing on government policymaking, this text documents the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and imaginaries from settler colonial governance practices. It does so through an analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey, the settlement of, and territorial allotment in, British Columbia and provincial land management policies such as the Forest and Range Evaluation Program. Using this empirical work, it argues that this erasure enables the reification of settler imaginaries over Indigenous territory, which in turn creates the conditions within which settler colonial authority is legitimized and sovereignty continually remade through policy interventions. While the text largely centres on territory in what is today Canada, it also offers a view into the way in which (settler) coloniality more broadly is continually upheld and remade. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of a global colonial order, the continual remaking of settler sovereignty enables the constitution of international and global politics.


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The Western looks like what happens after settler colonialism: Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, Sara L. Spurgeon (eds), Weird Westerns Race, Gender, Genre, University of Nebraska Press, 2020

26Jun20

Description: Weird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre—an increasingly popular and visible form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, and conventions with elements drawn from other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Despite frequent declarations of the western’s death, the genre is now defined in part by its zombie-like ability to survive in American popular culture in weird, reanimated, and reassembled forms.

The essays in Weird Westerns analyze a wide range of texts, including those by Native American authors Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) and William Sanders (Cherokee); the cult television series Firefly and The Walking Dead; the mainstream feature films Suicide Squad and Django Unchained; the avant-garde and bizarre fiction of Joe R. Lansdale; the tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands: The Weird West; and the comic book series Wynonna Earp.

The essays explore how these weird westerns challenge conventional representations by destabilizing or subverting the centrality of the heterosexual, white, male hero but also often surprisingly reinforce existing paradigms in their inability to imagine an existence outside of colonial frameworks.


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