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Resilience’s resiliency (on Indigenous survival and settler colonialism): Joshua L Reid, ‘On Indigenous Resilience’, The American Historical Review, 129, 4, 2024, pp. 1410-1419

09Dec24

Excerpt: Indigenous historians engage with and understand resilience through both an interdisciplinary lens and specific community attitudes toward the concept. Scholars of developmental psychology, psychiatry, social work, and education have drawn on resilience to analyze how Indigenous peoples have dealt with the trauma of colonialism, especially settler colonialism, while maintaining distinct beliefs, practices, and identities. Moving beyond the “bounce back” understanding of the concept, Native social work researcher Hilary Weaver defines resilience as “an ability to resist, persevere, survive, and grow despite significant challenges” and broadens those expressing resilience to include communities and the natural world. She and others posit that resilience is central to being Indigenous; Stephanie Rotarangi and Darryn Russell, for example, connect it explicitly to indigeneity, arguing that “to be indigenous is to be resilient.” These scholars and practitioners showcase resilience to illustrate that there is more to Indigenous peoples than damage and trauma even as they acknowledge that the catastrophic consequences of colonialism and capitalism on Native nations, communities, and environments. Much of their scholarship highlights how Indigenous identities, beliefs, and practices continue and are expressed, reclaimed, and transformed today. They argue that Indigenous expressions of resilience often connect past, present, and future. For example, some point to ways that ancestors who first encountered colonial expansion planned for the continuity of their peoples; additionally, they urge Native peoples today to carry forward ancestral responsibilities for subsequent generations. Drawing on the idea of intergenerational trauma or Historical Trauma Theory as proposed by Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, others explore how the trauma of ancestors remains relevant for Indigenous peoples today. Countering developmental psychology’s tendency to pathologize the individual through resilience analysis, these scholars shift the focus of trauma onto the structures and systems responsible for causing the damage, i.e., colonialism and capitalism.


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Many ideas, interacting (and settler colonialism is one of them): Ron Eyerman, ‘Discursive combat: the question of Palestine’, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2024

08Dec24

Abstract: This article seeks to explain the growth of identification and support for the Palestinian cause over the last decades from a regional concern to a global movement. What are the mechanisms that made this possible? This problematic is addressed within a cultural sociological framework, focusing on the cultural work of intellectuals and the collective actions of social movements in articulating and dispersing the idea of a distinctive Palestinian identity and cause. This is a form of cultural nationalism, where claims to nationhood are rooted in the idea of a distinctive, ancient culture. Focus is on the role of intellectuals in the articulation of collective identification and the cultural representations through which it is dispersed. The prime data supported this argument consists of aesthetic representations like novels, films, and photography.


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Perceiving a sociopolitical void is a settler colonial disposition: Beatriz Jaguaribe, ‘Lost and Future Cities: Explorations in the Wilderness and Imaginaries of Modernities in Brazil’, Portal, 25/09/24

08Dec24

Excerpt: By the 1920s, few places on Earth remained hidden to Western eyes. Yet huge swaths of the Amazonian rainforests in South America continued to challenge Western mapping. Cast as “blank spaces” on European maps and also in the cartography of the nations that contained portions of the Amazonian rainforest, these territories were inhabited by myriad Indigenous populations. Their inaccessibility, wildness, and Indigenous peoples made them fertile ground for a plethora of narratives, films, illustrations, and news reportage consumed mostly by urban audiences. Alternatively portrayed as a lush Eden or a terrifying green inferno, the Amazon evoked imaginaries that were and are very much produced by the congested landscapes of modernity. 


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Settling Mars would be challenging (hypothesising about it may be challenged): Cristina Grieg, Anamaria Berea, Michael Hammer, Edgar Arguello, Clark Petri, Chris Prather, Sam Carter, ‘An Exploration of Mars Settlement with Agent Based Modeling’, World Conference on Complex Systems, 2024

08Dec24

Abstract: Our goal is to simulate the interactions of future Martian colonists through an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) approach, to anticipate conflict. Given the engineering and technological limitations, we draw on research regarding high performing teams in isolated high stress environments (ex. submarines, Arctic exploration, war) to focus on mental health of four standard psychological profiles. Interactions between agents are modeled while global events such as accidents or delays affect the whole colony. We offer areas for consideration regarding a crew’s mental well-being, and propose a minimum crew size to maintain a stable crew population.


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The opposite of disappearance is hope (hope is way better): Carlos Benitez Trinidad, Poliene Soares dos Santos Bicalho, ‘From Disappearance to Hope: The Construction of the Brazilian Indigenous Movement’s Imaginary (1974-1977)’, Latin American Perspectives, 51, 4, 2024

06Dec24

Abstract: This article analyzes the construction of the imaginary created by the Brazilian Indigenous Movement against the historical representations imposed by the non-indigenous, of disappearance, and backwardness. It is based on the study of the speeches of the assemblies of Indigenous chiefs between 1974 and 1977. The crisis of institutional Indigenism, military authoritarianism, and developmentalism announced the extinction of Indigenous peoples. Faced with ethnocidal integrationism, the Indigenous chiefs had to deal with the challenge of ethnic differences, external influence, and dehumanizing stereotypes to build a new ideological framework. This research focuses on the mechanisms that led from an imaginary of disappearance to one of hope in a context of aggressive growth of neoliberal threats against Indigenous lands.


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Reactionary settler colonialism never went away: Gerald Roche, ‘”Conquered Primitives Have No Written Language”: Language Revitalization, Reactionary Settler Colonialism, and Perpetual Genocide’, Genocide Studies International, 2024

06Dec24

Abstract: Indigenous people in settler colonies such as Australia, the United States, and Canada are currently engaged in a range of projects to revitalize their languages: to reclaim and restore them in the wake of colonial destruction. Such language revitalization is frequently met with fierce backlash. This article examines the relationship between language revitalization backlash and genocide. I argue that language revitalization is part of broader efforts by Indigenous people to reconstitute themselves as distinct groups in reaction to colonial genocides. Backlash against language revitalization can therefore be seen as one element of ongoing efforts to prevent this, leading to a set of social and political relations I call perpetual genocide. I explore the dynamics of language revitalization backlash and perpetual genocide through an analysis of more than 600 social media comments collected from Australia over 2022 and 2023—the opening years of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages—and identify three key themes in these comments: civilizational racism, English and white supremacy, and linguistic diversity as a threat. Based on this analysis, I argue that this backlash, and the perpetual genocide of Indigenous peoples more broadly, is driven by a structural arrangement I call reactionary settler colonialism, which is led by a right-wing vanguard but involves all settlers as implicated subjects. I conclude by discussing counter-genocidal praxis in relation to this formation.


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Knowing about settler colonialism is a transferable skill: Natalie Calleja, Norfiza Mohammad Zali, Ameena L. Payne, Keara Quadros, Sophie Rudolph, Rosie Yasmin, ‘Intersecting settler colonialisms: Implications for teaching Palestine in Australia Education’, Curriculum Perspectives, 2024

06Dec24

Excerpt: Teaching about Palestine in Australian schools and universities recently has been met with government and institutional resistance and sometimes censorship and disciplinary action. We see this as an indication of intersecting settler colonialisms: teaching Palestine unsettles the Australian settler colonial state. This situation is, therefore, an opportunity for educators to better engage with the impacts of settler colonialism on education and curriculum. 


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The underdevelopment of settler colonialism: Juan Sebastián Galán, ‘Crown Versus Settler Colonialism in Mexico’, Serie Documentos Cede, 05/11/24

06Dec24

Abstract: This paper examines the persistent eects of Crown versus settler colonialism. Exploiting a spatial regression discontinuity design in Mexico, I document that regions where the relative power of the colonial state over settler elites was higher exhibit higher historical and contemporary economic prosperity. In contrast to the view that Crown judges disproportionately weakened property rights, court records analyzed with natural language processing algorithms suggest they constrained settlers from expropriating indigenous lands. In the long-run, a feedback loop appears to have consolidated an emerging rural middle class, whose relative enfranchisement tied it less to patronage politics, encouraging public good provision and labor mobility out of agriculture.


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The public-provate partnership of settler violence: Jonathan Obert, ‘State-Building, Settler Colonialism, and Policing the Nineteenth-Century American West’, in James Campbell, Vivien Miller (eds), The Routledge History of Crime in America, Routledge, 2024

06Dec24

Abstract: This chapter traces how two policing logics – centralized state-building militarism and settler colonial violence – intersected with and shaped one another on the nineteenth-century American western frontier and borderlands. Because settlement meant both direct federal administrative control over new lands and the opportunity for settlers to wield some flexibility in creating their own communal political institutions (not to mention the existence of already vibrant legal traditions among Native groups and Mexican and other residents of lands acquired from foreign empires), policing in the west was a complex patchwork. Militarized forms of legal coercion coexisted alongside (and occasionally competed with) highly participatory forms of local social control. Policing the American west thus reflected a particularly violent form of legal pluralism, in which policing individuals easily bled over into contests among collective enemies and in which state-building helped reinforce private violence and vice versa.


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Legal clinical education and settler colonialism: Amanda Porter, Eddie Cubillo, ‘Unsettling Australian Clinical Legal Education’, in Nicole Watson, Heather Douglas (eds), Legal Education Through an Indigenous Lens: Decolonising the Law School, Routledge, 2024

06Dec24

Abstract: This chapter highlights the epistemic violence in Australian clinical legal education. Perhaps because clinical legal education is viewed as indelibly progressive, it has long escaped the attention of sustained decolonial analysis. This chapter addresses this void by providing four critiques of clinical legal education: its failure to acknowledge the lingering effects of settler colonialism, its omission to consider racism, intellectual nullius (the phenomena of not engaging with Indigenous knowledges and source material) and psychological nullius (referring to Indigenous peoples’ factual and ideological exclusion from Australian public institutions). The authors also share their experiences of teaching an Indigenous Law and Advocacy Clinic that centred Aboriginal sovereignty, advocacy and storytelling.


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