Indigenous mobility as resistance: Georgine Clarsen, ‘Black As: performing Indigenous difference’, in Nancy Cook, David Butz (eds), Mobilities, Mobility Justice and Social Justice, Routledge, 2018

21Sep18

Abstract: In 2014, four Yolngu men from the Arnhem Land township of Ramingining in Australia’s north emailed a video clip to David Batty, who has been making films with Indigenous people for over 30 years.1 Chico, Jerome, Dino and their adopted white brother, Joe, sent Batty footage of their crocodile hunting exploits and invited him to create a television series with them. The result was the 24-part series Black As. Shot during the 2015 Dry season in the Djambarrpuyngu language (of the Yolngu Matha language chain) with English subtitles, this low-budget series, of which the four stars are co-owners, tells a comic story of a hunting trip.2 The series went directly to web streaming via the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and quickly became one of the broadcaster’s highest-rated Iview programs, with more than 1.2 million views nationally for full episodes and 23 million hits worldwide on one promotional clip alone. Batty’s media company, Rebel Films, has so far attracted some 150 million viewers around the world, including for the Spanish-language version on Facebook and YouTube. As I write, Batty and his crew are in post-production on the second Black As series, financed by ABC Iview sales and a crowdfunding campaign. In this chapter, I analyze this lighthearted representation of young Indigenous men’s movement across their Country as an enactment of mobility justice. Following Tim Cresswell’s (2010) formulation of mobility as a political entanglement of movement, representation and embodied practice, I read Black As as a specifically Indigenous expression of mobility, which is necessarily politicized in the face of the ongoing settler-colonialism oppressions that have imposed deep inequalities and uneven mobilities on Indigenous subjects. Exemplifying what Audra Simpson (2014) calls a politics of refusal, the men move their unreliable vehicles across the unsmoothed terrain of their Country. They deploy their embodiment as encultured Indigenous men of that place to move on their own terms, outside settler movement regimes, to find bush foods and tell their story to camera. They thereby reanimate (as filmic representations) for a new generation and circumstances cultural practices that are tens of thousands of years old. As Simpson demonstrates, Indigenous refusal is more than resistance to injustice; it is also a political, generative, embodied assertion of ongoing sovereignty. In this chapter I tease out the story presented in Black As as a refusal of the historical and contemporary forces that have sought to constrain Indigenous mobilities and deny Indigenous sovereignty. Dino Wanybarrnga, Chico Wanybarrnga, Jerome Lilypiyana and Joe Smith’s performances of mobilities and (essential to the humor of the series) immobilities offer a proud story of self-determined movement, which they have mobilized across their immediate community and the globe with the help of non-Indigenous filmmaker allies.


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Settler care isn’t: Sarah E. Nelson, Kathi Wilson, ‘Understanding barriers to health care access through cultural safety and ethical space: Indigenous People’s experiences in Prince George, Canada’, Social Science & Medicine, 2018

21Sep18

Abstract: Almost 1.7 million people in the settler colonial nation of Canada identify as Indigenous. Approximately 52 per cent of Indigenous peoples in Canada live in urban areas. In spite of high rates of urbanization, urban Indigenous peoples are overlooked in health care policy and services. Because of this, although health care services are more plentiful in cities as compared to rural areas, Indigenous people still report significant barriers to health care access in urban settings. This qualitative study, undertaken in Prince George, Canada, examines perceived barriers to health care access for urban Indigenous people in light of how colonialism impacts Indigenous peoples in their everyday lives. The three most frequently reported barriers to health care access on the part of the 65 participating health care providers and Indigenous clients of health care services are: substandard quality of care; long wait times; and experiences of racism and discrimination. These barriers, some of which are common complaints among the general population in Canada, are interpreted by Indigenous clients in unique ways rooted in experiences of discrimination and exclusion that stem from the settler colonial context of the nation. Through the lenses of cultural safety and ethical space – frameworks developed by international Indigenous scholars in efforts to better understand and operationalize relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and societies in the context of settler colonialism – this study offers an understanding of these barriers in light of the specific ways that colonialism intrudes into Indigenous clients’ access to care on an everyday basis.


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Settler anxiety: Lisa Slater, Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism: Australia, Race and Place, Routledge, 2018

21Sep18

Abstract: This book analyses the anxiety “well-intentioned” settler Australian women experience when engaging with Indigenous politics. Drawing upon cultural theory and studies of affect and emotion, Slater argues that settler anxiety is an historical subjectivity which shapes perception and senses of belonging. Why does Indigenous political will continue to provoke and disturb? How does settler anxiety inform public opinion and “solutions” to Indigenous inequality? In its rigorous interrogation of the dynamics of settler colonialism, emotions and ethical belonging, Anxieties of Belonging has far-reaching implications for understanding Indigenous-settler relations.


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The settler west as a global project: Janne Lahti, The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives, Routledge, 2018

21Sep18

Abstract: The American West and the World provides a synthetic introduction to the transnational history of the American West. Drawing from the insights of recent scholarship,the author recenters the history of the U.S. West in the global contexts of empires and settler colonialism, discussing exploration, expansion, migration,violence, intimacies, and ideas. Lahti examines both established subfields of Western scholarship, such as borderlands studies and transnational histories of empire, as well as relatively unexplored connections between the West and geographically nonadjacent spaces. Lucid and incisive, The American West and the World firmly situates the historical West in its proper global context.


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The ‘politics of intertwined relations’: Nicole Gombay, Marcela Palomino-Schalscha (eds), Indigenous Places and Colonial Spaces: The Politics of Intertwined Relations, Routledge, 2018

19Sep18

Description: In the aftermath of colonial occupation, Indigenous peoples have long fought to assert their sovereignty. This requires that settler colonial societies comprehend the inadequacy of their responses to Indigenous peoples’ contestations of existing power relations.

Taking an international and contemporary perspective, this book critically explores the extent to which Indigenous peoples are transforming the conditions of their coexistence with settler colonial societies. With contributions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers across the humanities and social sciences, the book is divided into four sections that reflect some key arenas of debate: ontological negotiations; assertions of connections to and rights over land; the contradictions embedded in practices of “recognition”; and the possibilities for change based on rightful relationships. From medicine to urban spaces, from love to alternative economies, from acts of citizenship to environmental justice, the chapters of this book provide a grounded analysis of how these spaces of intertwined coexistence are being crafted, resisted, reconfigured, and expanded.

Providing concrete insight into the responses of Indigenous communities to the impacts of settler colonialism, this book will appeal to researchers in Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Rural Studies, Political Geography, Indigenous Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies.


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Parks and settler recreation: Lauren Eichler, David Baumeister, ‘Hunting for Justice: An Indigenous Critique of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation’, Environment and Society, 9, 2018, pp. 75-90

16Sep18

Abstract: Within the mainstream environmental movement, regulated hunting is commonly defended as a tool for preserving and managing populations of wild animals for future generations. We argue that this justification, encapsulated in the seven principles of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, perpetuates settler colonialism—an institutional and theoretical apparatus that systemically eliminates Indigenous peoples, expropriates Indigenous lands, and disqualifies Indigenous worldviews— insofar as it manifests an anthropocentric ideology that objectifies hunted animals as “natural resources” to be extracted. Because this ideology is antithetical to Indigenous views, its imposition through hunting regulation interrupts Indigenous lifeways, contributing to the destruction of Indigenous identity.


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A colonising development: Melanie K. Yazzie, ‘Decolonizing Development in Diné Bikeyah: Resource Extraction, Anti-Capitalism, and Relational Futures’, Environment and Society, 9, 2018, pp. 25-39

16Sep18

Abstract: In this article, I examine the anti-capitalist and antidevelopment politics that Diné resisters espouse in their critiques of resource extraction in the Navajo Nation. I argue that existing anthropological and historical studies about Diné resistance minimize the specifically anti-capitalist character of this resistance by erasing the capitalist underpinnings of development. I draw from Indigenous feminists, Native studies scholars, and Diné land defenders to argue that development in the form of resource extraction is a violent modality of capitalism that seeks to kill Diné life. In response to this death drive, Diné resisters have created a politics of relational life to challenge and oppose development. I examine the historical and material conditions that have given rise to this politics of relational life and suggest its central role in invigorating anticapitalist decolonization struggles.


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Security is not precarity: Wilfrid Greaves, ‘Damaging Environments: Land, Settler Colonialism, and Security for Indigenous Peoples’, Environment and Society, 9, 2018, pp. 107, 124

16Sep18

Abstract: This article theorizes why Indigenous peoples’ security claims fail to be accepted by government authorities or incorporated into the security policies and practices of settler states. By engaging the concepts of securitization and ontological security, I explain how Indigenous peoples are unable to successfully “speak” security to the state. I argue that nondominant societal groups are unable to gain authoritative acceptance for security issues that challenge the dominant national identity. In effect, indigeneity acts an inhibiting condition for successful securitization because, by identifying the state and dominant society as the source of their insecurity, Indigenous peoples’ security claims challenge the ontological security of settler societies. Given the incommensurability of Indigenous and settler claims to authority over land, and the ontological relationship to land that underpins Indigenous identities and worldviews, the inhibiting condition is especially relevant with respect to security claims based on damage to the natural environment.


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Solidarity and default white space: Joe Curnow, Anjali Helferty, ‘Contradictions of Solidarity Whiteness, Settler Coloniality, and the Mainstream Environmental Movement’, Environment and Society, 9, 2018, pp. 145-164

16Sep18

Abstract: In this article, we trace the racialized history of the environmental movement in the United States and Canada that has defined the mainstream movement as a default white space. We then interrogate the turn to solidarity as a way to escape/intervene in the racialized and colonial underpinnings of mainstream environmentalism, demonstrating that the practice of solidarity itself depends on these same racial and colonial systems. Given the lack of theorization on solidarity within environmentalism, we draw on examples of solidarity work that bridge place and power and are predicated on disparate social locations, such as in accompaniment or the fair trade movement. We conclude that the contradictions of racialized and colonial solidarity should not preclude settler attempts to engage in solidarity work, but rather become inscribed into environmentalist practices as an ethic of accountability.


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‘Settler colonialism is [all] ecological domination’: Kyle Whyte, ‘Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice’, Environment and Society, 9, 2018, pp. 125-144

16Sep18

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the environment. Settler colonialism is ecological domination, committing environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples and other groups. Focusing on the context of Indigenous peoples’ facing US domination, this article investigates philosophically one dimension of how settler colonialism commits environmental injustice. When examined ecologically, settler colonialism works strategically to undermine Indigenous peoples’ social resilience as self determining collectives. To understand the relationships connecting settler colonialism, environmental injustice, and violence, the article first engages Anishinaabe intellectual traditions to describe an Indigenous conception of social resilience called collective continuance. One way in which settler colonial violence commits environmental injustice is through strategically undermining Indigenous collective continuance. At least two kinds of environmental injustices demonstrate such violence: vicious sedimentation and insidious loops. The article seeks to contribute to knowledge of how anti-Indigenous settler colonialism and environmental injustice are connected.


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