settler colonial studies blog

Happiness away from settlers: Amoneeta Beckstein (Aniyunwiya), ‘Indigenous American Happiness’, in H. Selin, G. Davey (eds), Happiness Across Cultures, Springer, 2024, pp. 117-134

03Dec24

Abstract: In the United Sates, happiness has mostly been studied from a Western perspective with the Indigenous American perspective mostly ignored. On the other hand, a deficit perspective is often taken with this population meaning that the literature on Indigenous Americans often focuses on ill-health and problems. This chapter explores the limited extant research—primarily from psychology—on happiness from a strengths perspective for this population. Not surprisingly, Indigenous American happiness tends to look a bit different from the Western conceptualizations of happiness. Primarily, happiness tends to be derived more socially, collectively, relationally, and through harmony and balance. Colonialism has contributed to ongoing deficits and disparities in wellbeing and other happiness detractions. Conversely, traditional culture and involvement in traditional spirituality play important roles in contributing to happiness among Indigenous Americans. The chapter proposes that a new subfield is in the making, positive Indigenous psychology (PIP), and encourages support of it for the betterment of all of Creation. Implications for sustaining, supporting, and boosting Indigenous American happiness are explored.

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Indigenous struggles against settler colonisation: Joel E. Correia, Disrupting the Patron: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay’s Chaco, University of California Press, 2023

02Dec24

Description: In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well‑being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correia’s ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America’s settler frontiers.

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Late settler colonisation in Latin America: Georg Fischer, ‘Agrarian Colonization and the Problem of Conviviality-Inequality in Twentieth-Century Latin America’, Mecila, 2024

02Dec24

Abstract: This paper examines agrarian colonization as a distinctive state development policy in twentieth-century Latin America. After discussing its intellectual roots in the nineteenth century, the study explores post-World War II agrarian colonization policies in Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil. Proposing conviviality-inequality as an analytical lens, the paper contends that the concept of colonization, rooted in European colonialism, evolved with Latin Americans aligning it with national policy goals after 1930, particularly after World War II. Finally, the paper suggests that adopting a conviviality-inequality perspective enables us to challenge linear narratives and to explore the complex interplay between politics, nature, and society in the history of agrarian colonization. Although agrarian colonization aligns with the emergence of the Plantationocene, local specificity reveals diverse convivialities embedded in conflicting rural futures envisioned by different stakeholders.

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Emergency in settler universities: Rachel Bryant, Mercedes Peters, Angela Tozer, ‘In wilderness, in community: mentorship, academia, and “emerging” as a scholar in settler colonial institutions’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

02Dec24

Abstract: We ground the emergence of the Northeast North American university on the stolen territories of Indigenous nations in the Puritan historical context of their origins. In particular, we examine the concept of academic mentorship of people identified as emerging scholars. We show how academic mentorship within this unchallenged and continued Puritanical framework functions as a disciplinary regime to assimilate scholars made marginal into the elite academic institution. Far from the bastions of progressive thought and action, we highlight the narrowly defined ways marginalized scholars must operate from within the Northeast North American university. This article derives from a panel presentation at a Canadian Historical Association annual meeting where we centred community building as a decolonizing research praxis, which became the central focus of Wolasuweltomuwakon – a community building gathering. This article holds the methodological practices we began to develop on that panel and during that gathering. We divided this article into three sections, each written by one of the three authors, together, and in conversation, with one another.

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Settler myths and their legal implications: Khylee Quince, ‘Resisting the Myth of Hobson’s Pledge and Crown Benevolence: Repairing the Record as Part of Weaving Together a Legal Future’, Legalities, 4, 2, 2024

02Dec24

Abstract: On the 6 February 1840 at the first signings of the Tiriti o Waitangi between Māori and the British Crown, the pledge ‘he iwi tahi tātou’ ‘together we are a nation’ was attributed to Crown representative Lieutenant Governor William Hobson. That was allegedly corrected at the time by prominent chief Hone Heke, who noted that a more appropriate phrasing was ‘he iwi kotahi tātou’ – or ‘together we are one nation’, which implies a very different bargain underpinned by pluralism. Whether this happened or not, it conveniently established a mythology of Crown/Māori relations that has permeated our national consciousness and legal orderings, with Hobson’s pledge held up as a unifying mantra for people from ‘two worlds with one law’. That mythology embedded the assumption of Crown benevolence toward Māori – that the colonisers brought law, order and civilisation where there had been none. This mythology denies the existence of Māori law and Māori agency in creating legal relationships with others, including early settlers. Ngāpuhi chief Patuone’s engagement in trade in the fledgling colony of New South Wales illustrates Māori concepts and practices of sovereignty and laws of obligations. It is also a deliberate mis-remembering of Māori resistance and the consistent assertion of Māori voice in both engaging with and rejecting settler law. Contemporary politics and jurisprudence wrestle with understanding our history as part of the weaving together of our legal future in Aotearoa. Reckoning with that past requires repairing the record, and recognising the existence and operation of Māori law. A number of recent developments are providing hope in this space – including decolonisation and indigenisation of legal education.

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The settlers chase the wolves away: Karen M. Winter, Critically Interrogation Wolf Eradication and Management Policy Through a Settler Colonial Lens: Towards a Compassionate Future, PhD dissertation, Antioch University, 2024

30Nov24

Abstract: This largely conceptual multi-article dissertation centers settler colonial theory in a critical interrogation of Wolf eradication and management policy (WEMP) toward the ultimate goal of dismantling injurious structures and systems that brutalize Wolf and other Indigenous animals. Wildlife policy and practice are contemporary manifestations of the long-standing historical project of settler colonialism and its quest for acquisition and ultimate control of Land. Thus, the ongoing hegemonic control of systems of wildlife management and the propensity toward lethal control are also inextricably linked to the oppression of Indigenous worldview about human relationship with the natural world. Settler colonialism, as the nexus of a critical analysis of the concepts explored in this work, reveals essential understandings of WEMP for combatting the hegemony of this normalized, extremist violence. Essential understandings include the convergence of oppression of Indigenous animals and peoples and the need for solidarity building, the utility of settler colonial theory to engage stakeholders in Wolf conflict transformation, the importance of standardizing and operationalizing the concept of compassion in humane pedagogy, inclusive of individual and social psychological barriers to compassionate response to this cruelty.

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Settlers cannot be trusted, then, and also now: Ashley Kyne, ‘Renegotiating Sovereignty? Māori Resistance in the Face of Colonial Erasure’, Yellowhead Brief, 159, 2024

30Nov24

Excerpt: Last week, on November 14th, Māori Member of Parliament Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke rose in the Aotearoa (New Zealand) Parliament to vote on a proposed Treaty Principles Bill. Opposing the proposed law, she tore the bill in half and led a haka alongside members of her party, Te Pāti Māori. e haka, a traditional Māori expression of resilience and unity, disrupted proceedings and symbolized collective opposition to the proposed reinterpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi. Indigenous Peoples around the world have watched clips and celebrated the moment. Meanwhile, critics, including mainstream media outlets, described the event as a disruption, ignoring its deeper signicance as an assertion of Indigenous identity and rights.

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The settlers must be prepared: Giacomo Ratto, Hechaluz: Shaping a Zionist-pioneering movement in post-WWII Italy (1945-1948), MA dissertation, University of Pisa, 2024

30Nov24

Abstract: This work investigates the establishment of the first Zionist pioneering movement of Italy, Hechaluz. At the end of WWII in Italy, Jewish members of the Allied armies set up educational and training facilities for pioneering Zionism (halutzism). There had never been a halutzist movement in Italy, so the aim was to create one to train young Jews in agricultural work. In this way, once trained, young Italian Jews could be sent to Palestine to participate in the Zionist colonisation that served as a basis for the establishment of a Jewish state. Education took place in the cities in Jewish community centres. The training was carried out inside educational farms called hachsharoth, where the young people lived within a collectivist social structure emulating the reality of the kibbutzim, Zionist agricultural settlements in Palestine. Starting with a general introduction on pioneering Zionism and its historical development, this research follows the growth of Hechaluz from its local forms in Rome (1944) and Milan (1945), their merger into a nationwide organisation in 1945, and concludes with the Fifth national Congress of September 1948, held a few months after the birth of the State of Israel. The study concentrates on: the events surrounding the birth of the groups in Rome and Milan, the internal political dynamics that shaped the character of Hechaluz, the training in peasant and collectivist life in the hachsharoth, and the image of chalutzism and the Palestinian kibbutzist reality given in the Hechaluz’s periodicals. The last chapter is dedicated to the discussion of the analytical frame with which Hechaluz’s political narrative can be read, understood and placed in a broader context: settler colonialism. Since the periodicals ‘Dapei Hechaluz’ (Rome, 1944-1946), ‘Dape’ Hechaluz’ (Milan, 1945-1946) and ‘Hechaluz’ (1946-1956) were the medium used to propagate the ideas and activities of Hechaluz in Italy, they constitute the main sources of this research.

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Settlers make cattle walk the earth: Kathryn Cornell Dolan, Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination, Nebraska University Press, 2021

30Nov24

Description: As beef and cattle production progressed in nineteenth-century America, the cow emerged as the nation’s representative food animal and earned a culturally prominent role in the literature of the day. In Cattle Country Kathryn Cornell Dolan examines the role cattle played in narratives throughout the century to show how the struggles within U.S. food culture mapped onto society’s broader struggles with colonization, environmentalism, U.S. identity, ethnicity, and industrialization. Dolan examines diverse texts from Native American, African American, Mexican American, and white authors that showcase the zeitgeist of anxiety surrounding U.S. identity as cattle gradually became an industrialized food source, altering the country’s culture while exacting a high cost to humans, animals, and the land. From Henry David Thoreau’s descriptions of indigenous cuisines as a challenge to the rising monoculture, to Washington Irving’s travel narratives that foreshadow cattle replacing American bison in the West, to María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s use of cattle to connect race and imperialism in her work, authors’ preoccupations with cattle underscored their concern for resource depletion, habitat destruction, and the wasteful overproduction of a single breed of livestock. Cattle Country offers a window into the ways authors worked to negotiate the consequences of the development of this food culture and, by excavating the history of U.S. settler colonialism through the figure of cattle, sheds new ecocritical light on nineteenth-century literature.

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Settlers think about walking the Earth again: Christopher Trigg, To Walk the Earth Again: The Politics of Resurrection in Early America, Oxford University Press, 2023

30Nov24

Description: The Protestant conviction that believers would rise again, in bodily form, after death, shaped their attitudes towards personal and religious identity, community, empire, progress, race, and the environment. In To Walk the Earth Again Christopher Trigg explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead, examining texts written between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. By reading histories, epic poetry, funeral sermons, and scientific tracts alongside works of eschatological exegesis, Trigg challenges the conventional scholarly assumption that Protestantism’s rejection of purgatory prepared the way for the individualization and secularization of Western attitudes towards mortality. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, and radicals looked to resurrection to understand their communities’ prospects in the uncertain terrain of colonial America. Their belief that political identities and religious duties did not expire with their mortal bodies but were carried over into the next life shaped their positions on a wide variety of issues, including the limits of ecclesiastical and civil power, the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and the emerging rhetoric of racial difference. In the early national and antebellum periods, secular and Christian reformers drew on the idea of resurrection to imagine how American republicanism might transform society and politics and ameliorate the human form itself. By taking early modern Protestant beliefs seriously, Trigg unfolds new perspectives on their mutually constitutive visions of earthly and resurrected existence.

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