The other antisettler, the refugee: Vinh Nguyen, ‘Refugeetude: When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee’, Social Text, 37, 2, 2019, pp. 109-131

16Jun19

Abstract: Through the concept of refugeetude, this article explores interlinked questions about the temporality of experience, psychic formation, and political possibility. Starting with the premise that lived experiences of refuge(e) constitute a form of subjectivity, and proposing an expansion of the refugee category beyond the legal definition to include a range of times, places, and subjects, this article conceptualizes refugeetude as a coming into consciousness of the social, political, and historical forces that situate refugee subjects and the acts that attempt to know, impact, and transcend this situation. The concept marks a critical reorientation, an epistemological shift in how we think about and understand the category refugee. Redirecting dominant perception of refugee as a temporary legal designation and a condition of social abjection toward refugee as an enduring creative force, refugeetude opens up new ways of conceptualizing refugee subjects and the relationalities that extend beyond the parameters of refugeeness, generating connections to past, present, and future forms of displacement. The author contends that, through the concept of refugeetude, we can comprehend refugee not as an irregularity or disruption of political subjecthood—a crisis to be resolved—but as an experiential resource for developing significant and durable ways of being in and moving through the world.


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Indigenismo as settler colonialism: Luis Urrieta, Dolores Calderón, ‘Critical Latinx Indigeneities: Unpacking Indigeneity from Within and Outside of Latinized Entanglements’, AMAE, 13, 2, 2019, pp. 145-174

16Jun19

Abstract: This article engages an important, but difficult conversation about the erasure of indigeneity in narratives, curriculum, identities, and racial projects that uphold settler colonial logics that fall under the rubric of Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Chicana/o/x. These settler colonial logics include violence by these groupings against Indigenous people, or indios, that has been part of Mexican and U.S. history in the Southwest. We examine Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Chicana/o/x settlers’ complicity with myths that support white settler futurity, including through social studies curricula and contemporary discourses of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. The problematics of Hispanidad and Latinidad are also engaged as part of officialized U.S. state regulation and as an expression of mestizaje based on indigenism (indigenismo). Indigenismo worked hand-in-hand with mestizaje and functioned not so much as a celebration of racial mixture, but as state eugenicist programs of Indigenous erasure throughout Latin America, and by extension in Latino communities in the U.S. Finally, we provide diverse examples of how this process works to advance a theory and praxis of Critical Latinx Indigeneities to decolonize Latinidad and mestizaje in order to envision Indigenous futurities within and outside of the Latinized entanglements of the present. 


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Indigenous testimony is admitted but non-receivable (as far as settlers are concerned): Norah Bowman, ‘Here/There/Everywhere: Quantum Models for Decolonizing Canadian State Onto-Epistemology’, Foundations of Science, 2019

16Jun19

Abstract: In settler-colonial Canada, the state does not receive Indigenous testimony as credible evidence. While the state often accepts Indigenous testimony in formal hearings, the state fundamentally rejects Indigenous evidence as a description of the world as it is, as an onto-epistemology. In other words, the Indigenous worldview formation, while it functions as a knowledge system that knows and predicts life, is not admitted to regulatory discussions about effects of resource extraction projects on life. Particularly in such resource-extraction review hearings, partly for obvious reasons of ecological ethics, there is no space for Indigenous relational-ontology. I theorize that beyond racism, white supremacy, and greed, settler-colonial onto-epistemological structures are structured to systematically eliminate the potential for relational-ontologies. This exclusion is complementary to resource-extractivist and legal positivist procedures and is biased against Indigenous knowledge and knowledge-sharing procedures; it is a crisis of state integrity and is philosophically unsound. In my analysis of Canadian National Energy Board documents, I ferret out some of these structures that de facto discredit Indigenous onto-epistemologies; I propose this fundamental problem of the Canadian settler-colonial state must be recognized and changed if the calls of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission are to be met.


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Mapping indigenous mapping: Cheryl Troupe, Mapping Métis Stories: Land Use, Gender and Kinship in the Qu’Appelle Valley, 1850-1950, PhD Dissertation, University of Saskatchewan, 2019

16Jun19

Abstract: Examining Métis land use and occupancy of the Qu’Appelle Valley from 1850 to the mid-twentieth century, this dissertation addresses change and continuity in food harvesting practices, land tenure, spatial organization and family, kinship, and gender roles. It asks, What was the family and community contribution of women’s labour in food harvesting, preparation, production, and sharing from 1850-1950? Utilizing a methodology called “deep mapping” to merge qualitative approaches with digital technologies, it combines Indigenous community-based and oral history research methods, genealogical reconstruction, and Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS). HGIS combines historical research methods with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a computer-based mapping and spatial analysis technology for organization and analysis of geographically referenced data.

Métis families first came to the Qu’Appelle Valley to hunt buffalo before taking up land on a seasonal and then on a more permanent basis by the 1860s. They supported themselves through trade with, and wage labour for the Hudson’s Bay Company as well as by what they could hunt, gather and grow. Doing so, they relied on recognizable cultural practices, including those that reinforced family and kinship structures and the roles that women filled in food gathering, preservation, and production. By the early twentieth century, as families struggled to survive within a growing, and often hostile, settler society, many found themselves displaced and forced to relocate to the road allowances or unoccupied Crown land around the Qu’Appelle Lakes. Each time these families moved, they resettled along familiar extended family lines and adapted to changing economic, social and political situations. When challenged by the imposition of settler colonialism, foreign land tenure practices, government regulation, surveillance, and state intervention into their livelihoods, they responded in flexible individual and collective ways grounded in an Indigenous worldview, their understanding of place, and familiar political approaches. They maintained a subsistence lifestyle of fishing, trapping, and harvesting wild plants and medicines mixed with small-scale agriculture and seasonal wage labour in the settler economy. Qu’Appelle Métis lived according to a worldview that privileged kinship relationships, extended family relationships, complementary gender roles in food production, and a mixed subsistence lifestyle. Consequently, women made a significant contribution to the economic production of their families through their food harvesting, production, and preparation activities.


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Settlers don’t listen: Nadia Chana, To Listen on Indigenous Land: Method, Context, Crisis, PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2019

16Jun19

Abstract: This dissertation unfolds from three premises: that listening is a relational act, something that takes place between a listener and a sound object; that North American contexts are already Indigenous contexts; and that ecological crisis “immediately demands we look elsewhere than where we are standing” (Povinelli 2016). Each chapter explores these premises from a different vantage point. Collectively the chapters attempt the methods that these premises suggest. The first, “People and Publics, Audiences and Inuit,” focuses on how Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq reads her settler audiences to produce performances that are legible to them, recontextualizing the concert hall vis-à-vis the land on which it sits. Informed by multi-sited fieldwork at healing walks, ceremonies, and other Indigenous- and settler-led events in Northern Alberta and the California Bay Area, “Singing to Rivers” then zooms out to consider entangled relationships among settler humans, Indigenous humans, and nonhumans. It explores how heterogeneous flows of people – rather than mainstream publics – find themselves singing to rivers and it explores the ethical stakes of this practice, ultimately arguing for an expanded and indigenized understanding of sound studies. “On Listening on Indigenous Land” inquires into another form of relational listening, directly addressing ethnomusicological and musicological settler publics (“us”) to ask what it means to listen on Indigenous land. Focusing on an unintended contextualizing tool that “racializing listening techniques” may provide, I focus on how whiteness might appear in power relations between interlocutors and ethnographers even when there are no white bodies in the room (or on the land). The final chapter, “Of Desks and Altars,” is about writing, itself using experimental ethnography to expand upon the third chapter’s assertion: that words do more than function as a kind of realist mapping or mirroring of the world; they make the world. By taking a multi-sited approach that responds to the structure of something as slippery and complex as climate crisis, this research contributes to new ethnographic methods for a globalized, interconnected, and contemporary world. It also offers a reconfigured understanding of sound studies by taking into account non-human actors and Indigenous understandings of what sound and listening are and do. Finally, it provides a model for engagement with Indigenous thinkers in an arena that is not necessarily “marked” as Indigenous: climate crisis in North America. Specifically, it models a wide variety of practices of critical self-reflexivity that relational listening, Indigenous contexts, and ecological crisis demand.


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Settlers represent: Jack Paine, ‘Democratic Contradictions in European Settler Colonies’, World Politics, 2019

12Jun19

Abstract: How did political institutions emerge and evolve under colonial rule? This article studies a key colonial actor and establishes core democratic contradictions in European settler colonies. Although European settlers’ strong organizational position enabled them to demand representative political institutions, the first hypothesis qualifies their impulse for electoral representation by positing the importance of a metropole with a representative tradition. Analyzing new data on colonial legislatures in 144 colonies between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries shows that only British settler colonies—emanating from a metropole with representative institutions—systematically exhibited early elected legislative representation. The second hypothesis highlights a core democratic contradiction in colonies that established early representative institutions. Applying class-based democratization theories predicts perverse institutional evolution—resisted enfranchisement and contestation backsliding—because sizable European settler minorities usually composed an entrenched landed class. Evidence on voting restrictions and on legislature disbandment from Africa, the British Caribbean, and the US South supports these implications and rejects the Dahlian path from competitive oligarchy to full democracy.


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Taiwan’s settler colonialism: Lin-chin Tsai, Re-conceptualizing Taiwan: Settler Colonial Criticism and Cultural Production, UCLA dissertation, 2019

12Jun19

Abstract: This dissertation examines a diverse body of postwar cultural production in Taiwan (1945 to the present), including literary, cinematic, and other forms of media texts, through the lens of settler colonial criticism. Taiwan, an island whose indigenous inhabitants are Austronesian, has been a de facto settler colony due to large-scale Han migration from China to Taiwan beginning in the seventeenth century. However, the prevailing discourse in Taiwan, particularly in the field of Taiwan literature studies, has been “postcolonial,” articulating Taiwan either in terms of the end of the Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) or the lifting of the Martial Law (1949-87), neither of which acknowledges the continued colonization of indigenous peoples. Furthermore, Taiwan has long been excluded from the global arena of settler colonial studies. Owing to the twofold invisibility of Taiwan as a settler colony in both local and global contexts, I employ the analytical framework of settler colonialism—a specific colonial formation whereby settlers displace the indigenous residents and take over the land—so as to address the discursive limits and academic blind spots described above. More specifically, this research project mobilizes settler colonial criticism to critically reflect on various media/genres of contemporary cultural production by Han Taiwanese authors as settlers in order to challenge current academic trends and the Han settler structure of Taiwan. In so doing, this dissertation not only fills in the gaps of the postcolonial paradigm in Taiwan but also provides significant insights for global settler colonial studies based on Taiwan’s unique experience. As such, it contributes to the redistribution of knowledge production in Taiwan’s intellectual sphere, partaking of the recent calls for “indigenous transitional justice” as a means of decolonization. In this sense, to re-conceptualize Taiwan as a settler colony through examining its cultural production is not only to re-situate Taiwan onto the world map of settler colonial studies but also to reimagine a new form of relational ethics between the indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Taiwan.


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The settler-colonial exclusions of yoga: Tria Blu Wakpa, ‘Decolonizing Yoga? and (Un)settling Social Justice’, Journal Race and Yoga, 3, 1, 2019

12Jun19

Excerpt: What are our responsibilities not only to the Indigenous peoples whose lands we occupy, but also to the Indigenous peoples and people of color whose practices we benefit from? This special cluster of Race and Yoga recognizes the need to (re)center Indigenous lands, practices, and peoples locally and globally in discussions of decolonization and yoga. Settler colonial and/or dominant yoga discourses exclude peoples who are Indigenous to the partition of Turtle Island often referred to as the U.S. as well as the Indigenous South Asian, South Asian, South Asian American, and/or South Asian diasporic peoples from whose ancestors and lands yoga broadly originated. Whereas Native American/Indigenous, South Asian, and South Asian American studies have frequently overlooked embodied practices and the ways that movement means, academic fields that center the body, embodiment, and performance studies have often omitted Indigenous peoples and their contributions. With the primary exception of Native American/Indigenous studies, fields often do not account for settler colonialism or Indigenous futurities. In the U.S., discourses around “decolonizing yoga” frequently focus on globalization and likewise do not acknowledge settler colonialism or Native American sovereignties. That is, these discourses often do not recognize the over 900 federally recognized and unrecognized tribes within the settler state boundaries are actually nations and/or that yoga is practiced on Indigenous lands that are not acknowledged as such.


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Settler-colonial attribution: Jane Anderson, Kimberly Christen, ‘Decolonizing Attribution: Traditions of Exclusion’, Journal of Radical Librarianship, 5, 2019, pp. 113–52

10Jun19

Abstract: In this article we provide a structural critique of attribution as it is figured in colonial practices and ongoing settler-colonial logics that form the basis for creating, circulating, and sharing knowledge through research practices, methods, and platforms. Settler colonialism is a tradition, and as such, it has habits. One of these habits is to hide specific tactics and practices in operationalizing dispossession. Attribution is one of these tactics. Attribution functions as a key mechanism within a copyright/author/archive matrix which maintains hierarchies of knowledge production by reducing Indigenous and nonEuropean subjectivity and legitimating the ongoing appropriation of Indigenous1 cultural material by non-Indigenous authors. The colonial force of attribution and its practices of exclusion are hidden in the stacks and how they are populated; in the rights fields of databases and how they are cited; in archival processes of selection, appraisal, and accessioning; and through efforts to digitize content and collections in order to make them open without acknowledgment and ongoing relationships. We argue that one mode of decolonizing practices for libraries and archives is through remaking, reframing, and refiguring attribution through ongoing Indigenous connections to land and knowledge.


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The history of health, the health of history: P. Reid, D. Cormack, S-J. Paine,’Colonial histories, racism and health—The experience of Māori and Indigenous peoples’, Public Health, 2019

10Jun19

Abstract: The health of Māori, the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa, New Zealand, like that of almost all Indigenous peoples worldwide, is characterised by systematic inequities in health outcomes, differential exposure to the determinants of health, inequitable access to and through health and social systems, disproportionate marginalisation and inadequate representation in the health workforce. As health providers, we are often taught that ‘taking a history’ is a critical component of a patient consultation to ensure that the underlying conditions are treated rather than the often superficial presenting symptoms. In the same way, attempts to make sense of the health and well-being of Indigenous peoples is inadequate unless health providers engage critically with the history of their respective nations and any subsequent patterns of privilege or disadvantage. Understanding this history, within the framework of western imperialism and other similar colonial projects, allows us to make sense of international patterns of Indigenous health status.

While health commentators acknowledge the unequal health outcomes of Indigenous people, and an increasing number also link these inequities to Indigenous marginalisation resulting from historic events, very few go further and expose the deep relationship between racism and coloniality and how these continue to be the basic determinants of Indigenous health today. This work includes honest examination of the role that science and the health disciplines have played historically in colonisation through the subjugation of Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge production, as well as being complicit in the creation and maintenance of a fabricated hierarchy of humankind. Despite the ‘science’ of this racial hierarchy being discredited, it retains a false validity in our societies. As long as oppressive systems that continue to re-inscribe racism and white privilege remain in communities, including our academic communities, coloniality continues its discrimination.

Indigenous voices on migration, ethnicity, racism and health will always demand the elimination of inequities in health but to do so will require a parallel commitment to critically interrogating all of our histories and our disciplines, as well as examining how our practice, including research, disrupts or maintains global systems of racism and coloniality.


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