Acknowledging settlers: Richard Pickard, ‘Acknowledgement, Disruption, and Settler-Colonial Ecocriticism’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2018

19Jul18

Excerpt: At the University of Victoria, where I teach, as at many other Canadian universities, we use a range of territorial acknowledgements. Many academic departments, faculties and individuals have developed their own acknowledgements, and you’ll hear some variants at official university events. The university’s 2017–22 Indigenous Academic Plan, for example, includes the following:

We acknowledge and respect the Lkwungen-speaking peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands and the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

The deep tension that underlies these sorts of phrases, deriving from rifts between emptiness and meaning,…


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The persistence of settler governance and racial capitalism: Jodi A. Byrd, ‘Beast of America: Sovereignty and the Wildness of Objects’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 117, 3, 2018, pp. 599-615

19Jul18

Abstract: Close reading Irrational Games’s 2013 BioShock Infinite to consider how notions of the wild circulate at the site of the both absent and present Indian, this essay argues that the ontological turn in technology studies is predicated on the juridical, racial, gendered, and colonial violences enacted in the spaces between the civil and the savage, the beast and the human. The recent ascendancy of object-oriented theory within videogame studies along with the object-oriented coding languages used to construct those games raises questions about structures, systems, and sovereignty at the site of interpretation and methodology. By placing videogame studies into critical conversation with critiques of ongoing settler colonialism, this essay suggests that settler colonial governance and racial capitalism persist in the spaces between representation and play. By drawing upon recent conversations in queer theory and critical indigenous studies, this essay offers some preliminary insights into the nature of sovereignty and the discourses of colonialism that continue to be informed by the presence of indigenous peoples within the philosophical precepts and ontological givens of code and software.


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On settler belonging: Travis Franks, ‘”We Are Considered Undesirable Foreigners” in “This Our Texas”: Mexican American Settler Nativism in Caballero’, MELUS, 2018

16Jul18

Abstract: Narratives of settler belonging rely, in part, on the appropriation of indigeneity. Today in the United States, non-Natives regularly coopt perceived markers of Indianness, such as dream catchers or a mystical connection to nature. Some claim distant indigenous ancestry, most often through the mythic Cherokee-princess-grandmother trope.1 They also supplant indigenous identity through place-making: destroying or taking over significant indigenous sites and conflating a sense of “belonging to the land” with property ownership.


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The Treaty of Waitangi is an international document: Mark Hickford, Carwyn Jones (eds), Indigenous Peoples and the State: International Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, Routledge, 2018

16Jul18

Description: Across the globe, there are numerous examples of treaties, compacts, or other negotiated agreements that mediate relationships between Indigenous peoples and states or settler communities. Perhaps the best known of these, New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi is a living, and historically rich, illustration of this types of negotiated agreement, and both the symmetries and asymmetries of Indigenous-State relations. This collection refreshes the scholarly and public discourse relating to the Treaty of Waitangi and makes a significant contribution to the international discussion of Indigenous-State relations and reconciliation. The essays in this collection explore the diversity of meanings that have been ascribed to Indigenous-State compacts, such as the Treaty, by different interpretive communities. As such, they enable and illuminate a more dynamic conversation about their meanings and applications, as well as their critical role in processes of reconciliation and transitional justice today. 


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Settler colonialism, engineered: John Hennessey, ‘Engineering Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido: A Postcolonial Reevaluation of William Wheeler’s Work for the Kaitakushi, Asia in Focus: A Nordic journal on Asia by early career researchers, 6, 2018, pp. 2-13

16Jul18

Abstract: In 1876, the Kaitakushi, the Japanese government agency responsible for the settlement of the northern island of Hokkaido, hired three Americans from Massachusetts Agricultural College: William Smith Clark, William Wheeler and David Pearce Penhallow. Their task was to establish a comparable institution in Hokkaido, Sapporo Agricultural College, that would spread American-style scientific agriculture among new settlers. Although recent historical research has highlighted the colonial nature of the modern settlement of Hokkaido and other American advisors’ role in transmitting modern technologies of settler colonialism, the tenure of these three professors has never been examined from a postcolonial perspective. This article will investigate the writings of engineer William Wheeler, who served as president of the new college for several years and advised the Kaitakushi on numerous infrastructure projects, to look for clues about his attitudes towards and role in Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido. Textual evidence reveals Wheeler’s awareness of and complicity in this undertaking.


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Settler colonialism requires a portable domesticity: Grace Moore, ‘Raising high its thousand forked tongues’: Campfires, Bushfires, and Portable Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2018

16Jul18

Abstract: This article explores the significance of the campfire to Australian settler culture in the nineteenth century. Considering the paradox that campfires could be both comforting and evoke terror, the piece considers how they provided a link between the northern and southern hemispheres. Drawing on a range of primary materials — many of which have been forgotten — the article addresses the thin boundary between warmth and tragedy that came to be associated with campfires. Furthermore, it examines connections between fire and the emergence of an Australian settler identity, along with the bush dweller’s role in changing the face of the wilderness and its fire ecology.


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Three ways of indigenisation: Adam Gaudry, Danielle Lorenz, ‘Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: navigating the different visions for indigenizing the Canadian Academy’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 2018

16Jul18

Abstract: Following the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, Canadian universities and colleges have felt pressured to indigenize their institutions. What “indigenization” has looked like, however, has varied significantly. Based on the input from an anonymous online survey of 25 Indigenous academics and their allies, we assert that indigenization is a three-part spectrum. On one end is Indigenous inclusion, in the middle reconciliation indigenization, and on the other end decolonial indigenization. We conclude that despite using reconciliatory language, post-secondary institutions in Canada focus predominantly on Indigenous inclusion. We offer two suggestions of policy and praxis—treaty-based decolonial indigenization and resurgence-based decolonial indigenization—to demonstrate a way toward more just Canadian academy.


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Indigenous mobilities challenge settler colonialism: Rachel Standfield (ed.), Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ANU Press, 2018

16Jul18

Description: This edited collection focuses on Aboriginal and Māori travel in colonial contexts. Authors in this collection examine the ways that Indigenous people moved and their motivations for doing so. Chapters consider the cultural aspects of travel for Indigenous communities on both sides of the Tasman. Contributors examine Indigenous purposes for mobility, including for community and individual economic wellbeing, to meet other Indigenous or non-Indigenous peoples and experience different cultures, and to gather knowledge or experience, or to escape from colonial intrusion.

‘This volume is the first to take up three challenges in histories of Indigenous mobilities. First, it analyses both mobility and emplacement. Challenging stereotypes of Indigenous people as either fixed or mobile, chapters deconstruct issues with ramifications for contemporary politics and analyses of Indigenous society and of rural and national histories. As such, it is a welcome intervention in a wide range of urgent issues. Second, by examining Indigenous peoples in both Australia and New Zealand, this volume is an innovative step in removing the artificial divisions that have arisen from “national” histories. Third, the collection connects the experiences of colonised Indigenous peoples with those of their colonisers, shifting the long-held stereotypes of Indigenous powerlessness. Chapters then convincingly demonstrate the agency of colonised peoples in shaping the actions and the mobility itself of the colonisers.


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On US settler modernity: Jodi Kim, ‘Settler Modernity, Debt Imperialism, and the Necropolitics of the Promise’, Social Text, 36, 2, 2018, pp 41-61

16Jul18

Abstract: This essay offers an investigation of US settler colonialism and military empire, a conjunction theorized as settler modernity, in the post–World War II era. It argues that settler modernity is an ensemble of relations significantly structured and continually reproduced through manifold regimes, relations, and forms of debt, and in particular through debt imperialism. Debt imperialism is a kind of temporal exception. It is a multiscalar process through which the United States imposes imperial power by rolling over its significant national debt indefinitely and not conforming to the homogeneous time of repayment that it imposes on others. Debt is not simply a financial economy but also crucially a broader social relation, production of subjectivity, and creation of a temporal exception through which US settler modernity functions and continually attemptsto re-create itself. Focusing on Asia and the Pacific as a significant site where we witness a militarized convergence of these arrangements, the essay asks: How is debt a necropolitical regime for those impoverished, gendered racial, and colonized nations and subjects whose promissory notes must be fully repaid with interest? How has US settler modernity been constituted by this usurious necropolitics of the promise, even as it continually confers upon itself the temporal exception of debt imperialism? This analysis reveals that what is at stake in US settler modernity is not only the elision of conquest and genocide as the conditions of possibility for military empire, economic power, and the avowed defense of liberal democracy but also the attempt to possess metapolitical authority.


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On the racial regimes of settler colonialism: Jodi A. Byrd, ‘”Variations under Domestication”: Indigeneity and the Subject of Dispossession’, Social Text, 36, 2, pp. 123-141

16Jul18

Abstract: This essay draws upon critical ethnic studies, Indigenous critical theory, and settler colonial studies to consider how biopolitics and biocapital have converged in North America through the racial regimes inaugurated by settler colonialism. It does so by close reading the popular science fiction television series Orphan Black to interrogate how late colonialism saturates cultural productions and to demonstrate how dispossession functions through durative and recursive structures. Providing the extractive and appropriative logics underlying racial capitalism, dispossession is both generative and procedural as it produces investments in neoliberal subjectivity, property, and territoriality—and their loss—to ensure that the originary colonization of Indigenous peoples in North America remains the condition of possibility for settler colonial social relations.


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