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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Containing settler colonialism: Gabrielle Moser, ‘Settler colonialism’s container technologies: photographing crates in the Canadian Arctic (1926–1953)’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

27Feb21

Abstract: Wooden crates are a recurring subject in the visual archive of settler colonialism in Canada’s Arctic, appearing on the shores of eastern Baffin Island throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Reading some of the hundreds of photographs that appear in the holdings of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, this essay charts the symbolic and political work that crates performed in the settler colonial imaginary. It draws on David L. Eng’s call to examine the ‘colonial object relations’ that have split Indigenous subjects into ‘good and bad objects’ in the liberal imaginary to propose that wooden crates are symptomatic of settler colonialism’s unconscious drive to make and unmake Inuit subjects into citizens in response to the demands of national and transnational political events. Tracing the intersection of crates, photography and ballot boxes in the archive, the essay examines the settler colonial state’s attempts at imposing and consolidating power, but also points to the practices of continuity and resistance enacted by Inuit subjects.


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Homeless, Indigenous, Forgotten (not): E. Ornelas, ‘Settler Colonial Memory and Agamben’s Camp in Indigenous Minnesota’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 13, 2, 2020

27Feb21

Abstract: In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Franklin/Hiawatha encampment was established in the summer of 2018 only to be forcibly terminated during the winter of 2019, then revived again in 2020. Also called the “Wall of Forgotten Natives” by its inhabitants, this cluster of tents was comprised of houseless residents of the Twin Cities, many of whom were Native American. Recognizing the continued murder, dispossession, removal, forced assimilation, under-resourcing, and invisibility of Indigenous peoples, the moniker “Wall of Forgotten Natives” seems apt. Considering Agamben’s idea of the camp as a space of exclusion that is included within the purview of law, this essay argues that the camp is also a designation of what is forgotten, or what is excluded from settler memory, yet paradoxically included within the settler prerogative of elimination.


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