Settler heritage is on Indigenous lands: Robert Coutts, Authorized Heritage: Place, Memory, and Historic Sites in Prairie Canada, University of Manitoba Press, 2021

05Mar21

Description: Authorized Heritage analyses the history of commemoration at heritage sites across western Canada. Using extensive research from predominantly government records, it argues that heritage narratives are almost always based on national messages that commonly reflect colonial perceptions of the past. Yet many of the places that commemorate Indigenous, fur trade, and settler histories are contested spaces, places such as Batoche, Seven Oaks, and Upper Fort Garry being the most obvious. At these heritage sites, Indigenous views of history confront the conventions of settler colonial pasts and represent the fluid cultural perspectives that should define the shifting ground of heritage space.


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Zionism and other colonialisms: Dekel Peretz, Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, De Gruyter, 2021

05Mar21

Description: Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943) was a prominent German sociologist, economist and Zionist activist. As a co-founder of academic sociology in Germany, Oppenheimer vehemently opposed the influence of antisemitism on the nascent field. As an expert on communal agricultural settlement, Oppenheimer co-edited the scientific Zionist journal Altneuland (1904-1906), which became a platform for a distinct Jewish participation within the racial and colonial discourses of Imperial Germany. By positioning Zionist aspirations within a German colonial narrative, Altneuland presented Zionism as an extension, instead of a rejection, of German patriotism. By doing so, the journal’s contributors hoped to recruit new supporters and model Zionism as a source of secular Jewish identity for German Jewry. While imagining future relationships between Jews, Arabs, and German settlers in Palestine, Oppenheimer and his contemporaries also reimagined the place of Jews among European nations.


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Settler infrastructures include ideology: Paul J Guernsey, ‘The infrastructures of White settler perception: A political phenomenology of colonialism, genocide, ecocide, and emergency’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

02Mar21

Abstract: Emergencies are an element of perception. Far from a private and personal affair, perception is social, structured by a process of “inculcation.” Perception has a material-political infrastructure in the sense that it is underlain by cultural and economic conditions that refract the colonial, White supremacist, and heteropatriarchal inscriptions of “dominant” society into the quotidian understanding of events, crystalizing intentional modes in subjects, bodies, and communities. These infrastructures are dynamic and multifaceted, but their alloyed effect regulates phenomena of emergency always to the advantage of the settler colonial state and capitalist interests. Infrastructures of settler perception obfuscate the ways in which Native communities experience environmental emergencies as cycles of settler colonial violence and ecocide. Emergencies such as global warming are described as “human-caused” rather than directly linked to settler colonialism, capitalism, and White supremacy. Many uncritical deployments of the term “Anthropocene” commit a similar fallacy, implicating people who have had little or nothing to do with the planetary ecological collapse. In a White logic of death, or “necropolitics,” the structures of colonialism, genocide, war, and slavery represent not the beginning of crisis, but rather the end of violence and disorder. This strategy of obfuscation is employed in a variety of contexts and seen explicitly in the context of Indian education systems that form a political project of spiritual and physical domination. In response, a politics of refusal has emerged in Native communities to form incommensurable collective experiences of emergencies, attending to the ways in which emergencies reveal the relationships between us and how these indicate differential and yet interconnected responsibilities and moral duties that implicate some of us more than others and call incommensurable communities forth to action each in their own way.


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Settler colonialism includes rape: Kathryn Medien, ‘Israeli settler colonialism, “humanitarian warfare”, and sexual violence in Palestine’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2021

02Mar21

Abstract: In recent years, Israel’s military practices have increasingly been described as “humanitarian,” entrenching the narrative that the State of Israel is at war with a “hostile” and “terrorist” Palestinian population. Taking the notion of “humanitarian warfare” as my point of entry, this article critically examines the relationship between the identification and documentation of sexual violence in conflict and Israel’s notion of liberal warfare. Palestine/Israel is often absent from international reports and scholarship on sexual violence in conflict, where attention is increasingly focused on non-state actors. The article argues that this absence functions to both obscure the sexual violence of Israel’s settler colonial occupation and bolster the notion of Israel as a modern liberal democracy engaging in a conflict against a population deemed terrorist. Against this narrative, the use of sexual torture against Palestinians held in Israeli prison and detention facilities is documented, as are the sexually violent structures of militarized settler colonialism and occupation more broadly. Exploring these sites of humanitarian and feminist complicity with war, colonial occupation, and sexualized violence, the article contends, can help us to better grapple with the complexities of sexual violence in conflict and reminds us of the necessity of incorporating anti-imperial and anti-colonial politics into feminist analysis.


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Settler colonialism is embodied: Tricia McGuire-Adams, ‘”This is what I heard at Naicatchewenin”: Disrupting embodied settler colonialism’, Journal of Indigenous Wellbeing, 6, 1, 2021

02Mar21

Abstract: In this article, I consider how Anishinaabeg stories are tools that disrupt embodied settler colonialism, which is experienced as historical trauma, grief, ill-health, and substance abuse. I explored the question, “how is settler colonialism manifested upon Anishinaabeg women’s bodies?” with eight Anishinaabeg Elders from Naicatchewinin First Nation. The Elders’ stories reveal that as we heal from the effects of colonialism by making changes from within, connect to our ancestral stories of physical strength, and apply them in our everyday practices of healing, we simultaneously disrupt embodied settler colonialism.


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Settler masculinities on display: Matthew L. Basso, ‘Settler masculinity and labour: the post-pioneer era gender order and New Zealand’s Great Strike of 1913’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

02Mar21

Abstract: In the two and half decades before World War One, a new settler gender order began to emerge. In one aspect of that shift, the man-alone masculine ideal of the pioneer era, though still culturally powerful, no longer represented the practices that characterized this evolving settler society. New competing masculinities highly correlated with the changing landscape of agricultural and industrial labour came to define key nodes in this new gender order. Those masculinities played a powerful role in reshaping the culture and political economy of Aotearoa/New Zealand and other settler societies. This article looks at New Zealand’s Great Strike of 1913 – one of the numerous labour actions by industrial workers in settler societies around the globe in this period – to analyse the competing ideas of settler masculinity embodied by Pākehā farmers, industrial workers, and urban and rural elites. Focusing on the ideology and practices of the different expressions of hegemonic masculinity witnessed during and before the 1913 strike sheds light on some of the more intricate relations of power in the settler gender order. It also illuminates some of the hidden nuances of settler colonial logic imbedded in the gendered concepts of individualism, independence, work, and militarism.


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Settlers and their literatures: Camilla Cassidy, ‘Review of Fariha Shaikh, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art; Philip Steer, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire’, Victoriographies, 11, 1, 2021

02Mar21

Excerpt: That the nineteenth century was an age shaped by growing empires is hardly disputable, and it would be a stretch to suggest that it has been a question neglected by literary scholarship. But two recent monographs compellingly claim that there are omissions and misapprehensions in these accounts. Philip Steer’s Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire makes a case that hidden dynamics of mutual influence between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ can be revealed in an examination of literary form. Fariha Shaikh’s Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art sets out some ways in which textual and, to a lesser extent, visual culture described the colonies to audiences at home and to settlers in transit. Both studies illuminate how this new global reality was felt in Britain, how it shaped and was shaped by British identity and self-understanding, and how literature and art absorbed, produced and reproduced these dynamics. Both ask insightful questions about textual forms and the impact they had on settler emigration or settler colonialism (or both) and the ways in which this relationship may or may not be mutual.


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Indigeneity and ‘nature’: Michael T. Schmitt, Scott D. Neufeld, Stephanie A. Fryberg, Glenn Adams, Jodi L. Viljoen, Lyana Patrick, Clifford Gordon Atleo, Sheri Fabian, ‘”Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)’, Ecopsychology, 2021

02Mar21

Excerpt: We also strongly believe that scholarly applications of Indigenous ways of knowing must proceed with care, or they risk reinforcing a Colonial/Western mindset and doing harm to Indigenous Peoples. This harm can occur even when the scholars’ own intentions are to honor Indigenous ways of knowing. An example that prompted our commentary is an article in the aforementioned special issue, entitled ‘‘Indigenous Nature Connection: A 3-Week Intervention Increased Ecological Attachment’’ (Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, & Bae, 2020). We appreciate the intention of the authors to demonstrate the value of ways of connecting to nature that are more reflective of Indigenous cultures than Western industrialized culture. Their article presents Indigenous ways of connecting to nature in a positive light, as something that humanity in general can learn from, and that might be necessary for global survival. However, the article also represents Indigenous Peoples and traditions in problematic ways that deviate from best practice for research about Indigenous Peoples. The concerns we raise are emblematic of a larger social problem that we
contend has broader implications for how non-Indigenous researchers engage with and represent Indigenous Peoples in their work.


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Indigenous workers have international rights: David Meren, ‘Safeguarding Settler Colonialism in Geneva: Canada, Indigenous Rights, and ilo Convention No. 107 on the Protection and Integration of Indigenous Peoples (1957)’, The Canadian Historical Review, 2021

02Mar21

Abstract: This article explores the intersecting of liberal internationalism and settler colonialism by tracing the Canadian governmental response to the emergence of International Labour Organisation (ilo) Convention 107 (1957) and Recommendation 104 (1957), the first international treaties regarding the rights of Indigenous Peoples in independent states. Drawing upon the archives of the ilo, Canada’s Department of External Affairs and Department of Citizenship and Immigration, notably the latter’s Indian Affairs Branch, the article investigates the convergence of mid-twentieth-century notions of Indigenous rights and the global phenomenon of “development”. It also explores how, amid anti-colonial resistance, decolonization, and an emerging international human rights regime, settler states responded, not least by seeking to blunt if not defeat the ilo initiative. In addition to yielding greater understanding of the origins and emergence of the ilo instruments, this analysis contributes to critical interrogations of Canadian liberal internationalism by revealing how Canadian settler preoccupations were projected abroad and shaped the international system’s evolving treatment of Indigenous Peoples. It also offers a different perspective on Canadian Indian policy by revealing the “global” dimension of an allegedly “domestic” question. Finally, the article highlights a parallel history of Indigenous internationalism speaking back to a world order constructed on Indigenous displacement and dispossession.


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Indigenous settler colonialists: Andrew Shaler, ‘The Cherokee and Wyandot Companies on the Overland Trails to California: Histories of Indigenous Migration and the Settler Gaze, 1849–1856’, The Journal of the Civil War Era, 11, 1, 2021, pp. 9-35

27Feb21

Abstract: The popular memory of the nineteenth century American West has long fixated on the thousands of trail emigrants who famously crossed the North American continent in search of wealth, adventure, and new lives. Historical and scholarly narratives have explored the ways that these massive overland migrations threatened, altered, and devastated Native American societies of the West. Often neglected in these historical narratives, however, are the many Native Americans who participated in these migrations, founded their own overland companies, and blazed some of the most important trail routes across the continent. Among the most numerous were several companies of Cherokee and Wyandot people who left Indian Territory for California, where they would participate in the Gold Rush. This article explores the complex histories and memories of these Indigenous migrants and settlers, from their journeys across the trails, their experiences in Gold Rush California, and their relations with other Native and settler communities.


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