settler colonial studies blog

NEPA settler colonialism: Michelle L. Edwards, ‘Resisting settler colonialism: comments from tribes on NEPA “modernization”‘, Environmental Sociology, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: In 1969, the United States passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which became a model for environmental policies across the globe. These regulations were intended to improve federal agency actions by bringing information on social and environmental impacts into decision-making. In 2020, the United States Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) drastically changed, or in their terms, ‘modernized’ NEPA regulations. Critics have called these changes socially and environmentally harmful. Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by changes to the NEPA process; thus, I argue that it is critical that we consider the viewpoints of Tribal-affiliated organizations and individuals on these changes. I analyze the officially submitted comments from Tribal-affiliated organizations and individuals on the 2020 NEPA rule changes. I provide quantitative and qualitative data demonstrating views on 1) the rulemaking process, 2) five specific NEPA changes, and 3) the proposed changes overall. Using these data, I explore how the NEPA changes represent continued settler colonialism, and how these comments represent a form of resistance.

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Firing up the resistance: Sherena Razek, ‘Fire as Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: In August 2021, wildfires erupted in the southwestern hills of Jerusalem, engulfing and ultimately destroying up to 20,000 dunums of pine forests planted by Israeli settlers. The burned landscape revealed a stunning vista of terraced hillsides, a visual testament to the existence of Palestinian land-based relations hidden under the camouflaging foliage. In this experimental visual essay, fire is postulated as an elemental force of Indigenous Palestinian resistance to the ongoing conditions of environmental and human Nakba imposed on Palestinian lands and bodies under Zionist settler colonialism. Fire, as a transformative and atmosphere-altering medium, is thus theorized and visualized as elemental intifada.

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Indigenous highway: Stuart Taylor, Retracing the Keowee Trail: A Deep Map of the Cherokee Path in the History of the Carolinas, Cascade Books, 2024

15Nov24

Description: In Retracing the Keowee Trail, the author tells the story of the Cherokee Path that connected the low country of colonial Carolina with the mountain homeland of the Cherokee Nation. The Keowee Trail was a busy trading route for a burgeoning deerskin trade. Along this same path, epidemic disease made its way inexorably from the colony toward Cherokee society, reducing their population by more than half. Along this path, warfare was waged in both directions, by Cherokee war parties determined to defend their homeland and by settlers like the author’s Scots Irish ancestors, evermore hungry for land. That ancestral history is an entry point into this larger narrative. A “deep map” approach to the Keowee Trail will hold together multiple lines of perspective, including memoir, family history, migration patterns, religious history, Indigenous wisdom, trauma theory, ghost stories, mythology, archeology, geography, the watersheds, and the flora and fauna of the Southern Appalachians.

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Wild settler colonialism: Tiffany Dang, Nature Unsettled: the making of the wilderness imaginary and the Canadian settler state, PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: Despite the economic significance of extractive resource industries to the national economy, Canadians hold their national parks—as spaces of untouched nature—in high regard as a key aspect of national pride and identity. By critically investigating the cultural framing of nature in Canada as contextualized within the structure of settler colonialism, I attempt a fuller understanding of these landscapes. Paying particular attention to how settler colonial difference has historically intersected with the cultural framing of nature in Canada, this thesis aims to bring to light histories of racialized labour and non-settler migration alongside histories of Indigenous dispossession regarding the design and control of natural landscapes. Three intersecting themes drive the core of this thesis: (1) landscape representation as a tool of colonisation, (2) the relationship between urbanization, infrastructure, and settler colonisation, and (3) the potential for landscapes futures engaged in decolonial and other-than-human knowledges. This work has primarily focused on the development of landscapes in the Canadian Rocky Mountains as a hinge between Indigenous dispossession and racialized migrant work regimes at the turn of the twentieth century. This is achieved by achieved by an analysis of three historically significant moments in Canadian history. The first considers the development of the earliest national parks in the Rocky Mountains at the turn of the twentieth century as discursive landscapes of settler colonial nationalism. The second recounts the significant racial component of the labour behind infrastructure construction and facilitation i.e. the work of accessing the wilderness. In the third, a major flood event reveals tensions between other-than-human agencies and the material infrastructures of settler colonialism. The scale of these settler colonial landscapes not only encompass Canada as a settler nation, but also the broader geographies of the British Empire. The historical aspects of this thesis have been informed by archival research conducted in Canada and the UK, with significant attention paid to the marketing materials produced by the Canadian Pacific Company and the Canadian Parks Department. These archival sources are complimented by readings of contemporary news media and scientific papers on river hydrology and ecology. Ultimately, this thesis unsettles the nature imaginary in Canada by bringing together landscape studies, urban theory, and settler colonial studies; it expands landscape studies through new considerations around labour, poses a spatial-power link between processes of urbanization and settler colonisation, and moves beyond Indigenous-settler binaries in settler colonial studies by intersecting it with racial histories and other-than-human futures.

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Settlers controlling Indigenous mobility: Isabela Agostinelli dos Santos, Reginaldo Nasser, ‘From forced displacement to forced immobility: the Israeli mobility regime to the post-disengagement Gaza Strip’, Monções: Revista de Relações Internacionais da UFGD, 13, 25, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: The article investigates the effects of the mobility regime imposed by Israel after the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, when Israel withdrew all its Jewish settlements from the region. Although the Israeli State claims to have no further responsibility for Gaza under international occupation law, its remote-control policies reveal the continuation of colonial domination by other means. In this scenario, we argue that Gaza emerges both as a space of expulsion, where Palestinians must move and remain, and as a deathscape, since the effects of the policy of (im)mobility of people generate fatal effects. In a historical perspective, the article argues that Gaza experienced two contrasting phenomena: a moment of forced displacement, when 200,000 Palestinians took refuge in the region during the creation of the State of Israel, in 1948, and a moment of forced immobility, caused by restrictions on the movement of people and products, occurring since 2005. Although contrasting, both phenomena can be understood through the Zionist settler colonialism framework, which, since its foundation, has sought to deal with the “Arab” problem: the demographic threat to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

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Settler war is a structure (not only an event): Tariq Dana, ‘Death dealers: Dynamics of Israel’s permanent war economy’, Capital and Class, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: This study critically explores Israel’s permanent war economy, examining its core principles and strategic impacts. It analyzes how the war economy is integral to Israel’s settler-colonial structures and functions, fulfilling various ideological, geopolitical, and financial goals through a sustained conflict footing, rather than being a transient occurrence. To this end, the study identifies and analyzes four key dynamics underpinning Israel’s war economy: First, acute societal militarism serves as an economic growth engine, nurturing skilled military capital and advanced technologies that feed the war economy system. Second, the role of American patronage is examined as a key enabler of the Israeli war economy. In the absence of a traditional colonial metropole, the United States functions as an imperial sponsor, providing extensive military aid, technological transfers, financial assistance, and diplomatic backing–without which Israel’s military posture would be inconceivable. Third, the article investigates Israel’s exploitation of the occupied Palestinian territories as a laboratory for testing, optimizing and marketing military systems’ performance to international clients. Fourth, examines how Israel’s arms export multiplies revenues for the Israeli war economy while also providing diplomatic leverage to advance Israel’s geopolitical agendas and foreign policy objectives.

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Parenting pretendians: Taylor Elyse Mills, ‘Protecting the Next Seven Generations: Self-Indigenization and the Indian Child Welfare Act’, Genealogy, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: In 1978, the United States enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) “to protect the best interest of Indian Children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the removal of Indian children and placement of such children in homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture.” The ICWA was codified to address centuries of genocidal government policies, boarding schools, and coercive adoptions that ruptured many Native families. Now one of the strongest pieces of legislation to protect Native communities, the ICWA was designed to ensure that Native foster children are placed with Native families. Implementing the ICWA has not been smooth, however, as many non-Native foster parents and state governments have challenged the ICWA. While the ICWA has survived these legal challenges, including the recent 2023 Haaland v. Brackeen Supreme Court case, the rise of non-Natives claiming Native heritage, also known as self-indigenizers or “pretendians,” represents a new threat to the ICWA. This Article presents a legal history and analysis of the ICWA to unpack the policy implications of pretendians in the U.S. legal context. This Article demonstrates how the rise of pretendians threatens to undermine the very purpose of the ICWA and thereby threaten the sovereignty of Native peoples. By legally sanctioning the adoption of Native children into non-Native pretendian homes, the ICWA can facilitate a new era of settlers raising Native children, rather than preventing this phenomenon as intended. In response, this Article offers concrete policy recommendations to bolster the ICWA against this threat.

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Fantasies of settler inhabitance (emerge when one faces migrants instead): Federica Guazzini, ‘Colonial Encounters and Land Tenure in Early Italian Rule in Africa. A Critical Enquiry into Recently Rediscovered Personal Papers of Leopoldo Franchetti’, in Uoldelul Chelati Dirar, Karin Pallaver (eds), Africa as Method: A Handbook of Sources and Epistemologies, Springer, 2024, pp. 145-159

09Nov24

Abstract: To what extent is it possible to disclose an epistemic coloniality within a corpus of primary sources related to encounters with Otherness in the Italian colonies in Africa from the late 1880s till the eve of the First World War? This paper draws on newly rediscovered private diaries and letters related to fieldworks conducted in the African colonies with the aim of analyzing the local land systems which paved the way for settler societies. A preliminary critical analysis of the manuscripts allows an understanding of colonial taxonomies in the making, and how they depended on African intermediaries, whose knowledge informed the colonizers of social and individual disputes, as well as on the local balance of power. The manuscripts are the outcomes of extensive traveling, eyewitness accounts and evidence gathered on the location. Thus, their study contributes to deciphering the framed view of African territories, and the methods employed to manage people’s lives, providing insights into the issue of land tenure during early colonial rule.

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Fantasies of settler resilience (emerge when one intuits settler fragility instead): Anthea Garman, ‘Tropes Have Fangs: Elsa Dutton, 1883, “Going Native”, Adaptive Whiteness and Trope Resilience’, Journal of Literary Studies, 40, 2024

09Nov24

Abstract: In Taylor Sheridan’s television miniseries 1883, the origin story of his American neo-Western series Yellowstone, the voice-over narration is given by the central character, 18-year-old Elsa Dutton. Elsa is travelling with her family from Texas to Oregon on the wagon trail to the West along with migrants from Eastern Europe who have little idea of the country they have arrived in. Despite her death at the end of the series, the voice-over in the next edition of the Dutton family saga, 1923, is also given by Elsa. Her role and her ongoing spectral presence are the mythical centre of these stories and of the Yellowstone series. In 1883, she plays the daughter who takes advantage of the freedoms of the trail to get out from under her mother, Margaret Dutton’s, control to join the men herding the cattle, and to have two sexual liaisons, including one with a Native American, Sam. In 1923, as a voice-over only, she plays the role of the ancestor whose grave marks the place in Montana where the Dutton family are fighting for their possession of the land. Interesting directorial and narratival questions arise in relation to the role and voice of Elsa when stories are told of a past in which dispossession from land was being carried out ruthlessly and systematically. While her character exercises enviable freedom for a woman of her time, by contrast her voice-over carries warnings of danger, destruction, hell and disaster for both series, captured in the words, “freedom has fangs”. This gaining of freedom for the settlers and great loss of freedom and autonomy for the Indigenous peoples is a complicated story for the director to manage. This article looks at the storytelling tropes activated in 1883 and shows how they work against intentions to tell an old story differently.

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Collecting settler colonialism: Christian Jarling, ‘Settler Colonialism and Collecting for Museums: The Namibia Collection in Bremen’s Übersee-Museum (1880s to 1970s)’, in Jürgen Zimmerer, Kim Sebastian Todzi, Friederike Odenwald (eds), Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others: The Materiality of Identity and Depots of Global History, De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 65-104

08Nov24

Excerpt: The ethnographic Namibia collection in Bremen’s Übersee-Museum encompassed more than 1,500 objects at the end of 2020. Most of these objects, unlike the museum’s other collections from former German colonies, were not exclusively collected during the period of formal German rule. Rather, the objects and their documentation came together over the course of many decades, largely between the 1880s and 1960s, and thus attest to a longstanding relationship between Namibia and the Bremen museum. An evolving historical context informed how objects were first collected and the museum’s desire to have them. These two phenomena were mutually reinforcing and tell a shared story. This essay depicts the formation of the Bremen collection as a process with caesuras and continuities. Over eight decades, individual objects and groups of items found their way to Bremen under specific circumstances and with the help of various actors. The museum did not receive these items directly from their African producers or previous owners (with one notable exception). Instead, museum workers engaged with German actors on site, who enabled the transfer of Namibian objects to Bremen. Within the system of settler colonialism4 in Namibia, civilian actors supported the museum and continuously expanded its holdings. In Cameroon and German East Africa, by contrast, colonial soldiers and government officials more often performed this work.

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