Settler colonial ‘vulnerabilities’: Emma Barnes, ‘Critiquing Settler-colonial Conceptions of “Vulnerability” through Kaona in Mary Kawena Pūku’i’s Mo’olelo, “The Pounded Water of Kekela”‘, Transmotion, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial ‘vulnerabilities’: Emma Barnes, ‘Critiquing Settler-colonial Conceptions of “Vulnerability” through Kaona in Mary Kawena Pūku’i’s Mo’olelo, “The Pounded Water of Kekela”‘, Transmotion, 2022

12Jun22

Excerpt: As a structure, settler colonialism does not exist in isolation, but intersects with heteropatriarchy and capitalism. It is the triangulation of these structures that has produced our current climate crisis and continues to monopolise mitigation strategies. As Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill explain, “settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process” (9), and it is the gendered elements of settler colonialism and its use of “vulnerability” that this article seeks to explore in relation to climate change responses. I argue that the colonial and “masculinised nature of contemporary climate change governance” (George 115) now weaponises gendered vulnerability to climate change to perpetuate the colonial myth that Indigenous women need to be “instructed, led and managed” (Fordham et al 8) and prevents Pacific Island women from leading adaptation strategies to drought and disaster management. As Robinson suggests, “Attempts to delay solutions that effectively address climate change can thus be framed within the larger regime of US colonialism and imperialism” (320), and it is for this reason that the concept of climate change “vulnerability” needs to be analysed within the context of the Pacific’s settler-colonial history.

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