« Chile’s Indigenous (and settler) question: Pilar M. Herr, ‘Settler Colonialism in Araucanía: The Mapuche’s Defense of Their Lands and Citizenship Rights Through the Medium of Letters in Nineteenth Century Chile’, The Latin Americanist, 68, 1, 2024, pp. 85-97
The geometries of settler colonialism are inscribed on Indigenous lands: Irene Cheng, The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Minnesota Press, 2023 »

The settler border is political: James M. Hundley, ‘Rethinking political symbols: Indigenous nationhood and settler colonialism in the Canada/United States borderlands’, Canadian Geographies, 2024

09Apr24

Abstract: Straddling the Canada/United States border at its western end is a 67‐foot monument symbolizing 200 years of peace between the two countries. Today, it is frequently used as a site for protest against the state. This article analyzes an environmental protest against energy transmission projects through the Salish Sea by Coast Salish Indigenous nations. I argue that the Coast Salish are using the landscape as a political symbol, effectively erasing the international border that separates them. Their presentation as a unified nation succeeds because of their strategic manipulation of political symbols. Drawing primarily on ethnographic methods, this article demonstrates that the choice of the international park as a site of protest serves as an entry point for Indigenous activists to expand the scope of their position; the border is implicated in the creation of emergent political identities that draw on and transform political symbols. The argument is that the materiality of these political symbols is being used by Indigenous nations and their allies and contributes to theoretical work on settler colonialism as it pertains to the creation, deployment, and analysis of political symbols. The use of political symbols in the borderlands illustrates the shifts in a struggle over power and identity and how they manifest in daily life.


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