settler colonial studies blog

Landing settler colonialism: Robert Nichols, ‘Colonization and the Recoding of Land in Classical Political Economy’, in Michael Goldman, Nancy Lee Peluso, Wendy Wolford (eds), The Social Lives of Land, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 23-50

25Oct24

Abstract: This chapter focuses on the understanding of settler colonialism. It elaborates on the notions of colonization and recoding of land in classical political economy. Late eighteenth-century Anglophone intellectuals and policy makers could be skeptical about the benefits of land appropriation, while their counterparts four or five decades later were enthusiastically in favor since both groups were operating with distinct notions of land. The chapter examines the debates historicizing the relationship between land, colonization, and political economy at one particularly important historical juncture. Moreover, historicizing the connections between land and settler colonialism allows an understanding of the variegated content of both terms.

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Not biopolitics, thanathopolitics: Amy Swiffen, ‘From European Roots to Settler Soil: Adapting Foucault’s Biopolitics to Canadian Settler Colonialism’, Social & Legal Studies, 2024

25Oct24

Abstract: This article examines the applicability of Michel Foucault’s biopolitical theory within the Canadian settler colonial context. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which describes the shift from sovereign power to the regulation of life and populations, is grounded in European historical contexts. In contrast, the Canadian settler colonial experience diverges significantly, necessitating a re-examination of biopolitics. The article argues that in Canada, the relationship between sovereignty, population, and territory does not follow the European model described by Foucault. Instead, Crown sovereignty established its control through legal mechanisms that defined ‘Indian’ status, displacing Indigenous territorialities and political structures. By analysing the evolution of ‘Indian’ status within the Indian Act (1985), the article highlights the centrality of law in constructing settler colonial biopolitics. This legal framework was used to manage and assimilate Indigenous populations, reflecting a unique biopolitical strategy aimed at creating a relationship to territory and population. The study contributes to a more specific understanding of biopolitics in settler colonial contexts, emphasizing the distinct role of law in these processes.

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The unsettlement of rural sociology: Clint Carroll, Andrew Curley, Doreen E. Martinez, Lindsey Schneider, Johann Strube, ‘Indigenous Perspectives on Dismantling the Legacies of Settler Colonialism in Rural Sociology’, Rural Sociology, 2024

25Oct24

Abstract: Rural Sociology has failed to incorporate Settler-colonialism and Indigenous theory in studying rural social relations. This presents a serious gap in the discipline’s conceptualization of land as the foundation of social reproduction. Indigenous theory provides rich insights about humans’ relations among themselves and with the more-than-human that inform our understanding of Settler colonialism as a driver of social formation, and human–environmental interactions more generally. This paper, written by four Indigenous environmental social scientists and one Settler rural sociologist, invites the discipline to engage Indigeneity and Settler colonialism in methodologically, theoretically, and ethically appropriate ways.

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The tragedy of settler colonialism: Julie Burelle, Beth Piatote, ‘Antikoni in a Settler Classroom on Kumeyaay Land: Storytelling “in the Meantime” to Imagine “Beyond” It’, Performance Matters, 10, 2, 2024

24Oct24

Abstract: This article documents the process that led two groups of students enrolled in a course at UC San Diego to enter into a deeper and more reciprocal embodied relationship with the play Antikoni (a Nez Perce adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone), its author Beth Piatote, and with UC San Diego’s fraught history related to the repatriation of Kumeyaay ancestors. Building on Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang’s urgent invitation to think “beyond land acknowledgement” and to invest time and energy in creating a world beyond settler colonialism, this article examines how being entrusted with a story—Antikoni in this case—can serve to activate settler accountability and, potentially, usher in the relational shift imagined by Stewart-Ambo and Yang. This article documents how the students chose to reciprocate the gift that is Antikoni in tangible ways in the form of two staged readings and offers a reflection on how this experience can extend beyond the classroom and lead to lasting transformative work among larger campus communities.

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Training settlers: Naama Blatman, Lucy Taksa, Ben Silverstein, Phil McManus, Lorina Barker, Angela Webb, ‘Rail relations: Aboriginal storywork and remaking Australia’s settler-colonial infrastructure’, Geographical Research, 2024

23Oct24

Abstract: Australian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler-colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, willingly or not. Aboriginal people’s entanglements with the New South Wales railways, to which we refer as “rail relations,” have involved dispossession, removal, employment, mobility, and travel, including the forced removal of children known as the Stolen Generations. These are relations of harm, loss, and grief but also of pride, connectivity, and survival. We argue in this paper that when Aboriginal communities engage in storying the New South Wales railways as Aboriginal they reassemble this infrastructure otherwise: not just as a tool of dispossession but also as life affirming. Indigenous storytelling can therefore overcome settler colonial erasure and the oversimplification of railway infrastructure hi/stories. Research about how Aboriginal lives have been interconnected with railways expansion and development is limited. While Aboriginal railway stories are continuously told within communities, they remain almost entirely silenced elsewhere. Overcoming the invisibility of Aboriginal rail relations is crucial as both truth-telling of the past and to ensure more just infrastructural outcomes now and in the future.

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Settlers on fire: Alex Zahara, Settler fire management: an examination of wildfire policy, practice, and research in the boreal forest region of Northern Saskatchewan, PhD dissertation, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2024

21Oct24

Abstract: In this dissertation, I provide a place-based examination of settler fire management in the Boreal Forest region of what is lately known as the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. In Chapter 1, I start with a historical examination of settler colonialism in the kistapinānihk, or Prince Albert, region of the province, which is my home community and the site of state-led wildfire management in Saskatchewan. Drawing from Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies research, I argue that settler colonialism in the region is characterized by: the violation of agreements with Indigenous Nations, communities and people; ecological change for the purpose of developing and maintaining settler economies; and settler-led conquest characterized by genocide and Indigenous erasure. In Chapter 2, I describe anti-colonial placed-based research, including how my positioning as a non-Indigenous settler researcher informed my research topics, questions, methods and analysis. In the subsequent article-style chapters, I examine two areas of wildfire management in the province: (1) agency-led wildfire response and policy; and (2) wildfire research and practice as is characterized by dominant science and this dissertation. In Chapter 3, I examine the history of fire tower development in the province, including a recent shift towards remotely-operated cameras, showing how wildfire detection in the province has, at times, been colonial insofar as it renders Indigenous lands and labour exploitable to achieve settler state economic and political goals. In Chapter 4, I document the quarter-century long controversy about what many Indigenous northerners refer to as the ‘Let-it-Burn’ policy, showing how provincial practices of fire suppression render many Indigenous ‘values-at-risk’ expendable under the guiding premise that fires are ‘natural’ in certain regions. In Chapter 5, co-authors Robin Mcleod, Dr. Herman Michell and myself conduct a systematic literature review of wildfire science pertaining to climate change in the province, showing how Indigenous erasure permeates dominant scientific research practices, which in turn impacts scientific knowledge of wildfire issues. In Chapter 6, I examine these findings as they relate to Indigenous and settler jurisdiction, concepts of universalism and place-based knowledge, and settling as research practice. Reframing settling as an ethical orientation to uphold obligations with Indigenous Nations, I suggest that settlers may contribute to anti-colonialism within fire management and research by working collectively with Indigenous Nations to push back against practices of conquest and uphold agreements for shared jurisdiction.

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So there is a Voice to parliament after all: Lidia Thorpe says it the way it is

21Oct24

Access the intervention here.

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Introducing a special issue on Indigenous mental health under settler colonial conditions: Alex L. Pieterse, Arthur W. Blume, Gayle S. Morse, Laurie D. McCubbin, Bryan S. K. Kim, ‘Indigenous and Native American Perspectives on Mental Health and Well-Being: Introduction to the Special Issue’, The Counselling Psychologist, 52, 7, 2024, pp. 998-1005

20Oct24

Abstract: The current Special Issue focuses on the Indigenous and Native American perspectives on mental health and well-being. This introduction highlights the need to explore how psychological health is conceptualized and operationalized among this population and the ways in which their mental health needs can be better met. The article also provides a brief review of each of the articles in the Special Issue.

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Beware of settlers bearing ‘gifts’: Sabina Trimble, Canadian Settler Philanthropy and Reconciliation: A Critical Textual Analysis, PhD dissertation, University of Kent, 2024

20Oct24

Abstract: This thesis presents a critical textual analysis of what I call the reconciliation change narrative in the Canadian settler philanthropy sector, as expressed across an archive of 156 texts produced from 2008-2022 by four philanthropic organizations and their members: one Indigenous-led intermediary (the Circle); three settler-led philanthropic intermediaries (Imagine Canada, Community Foundations Canada [CFC], and Philanthropic Foundations Canada [PFC]); and one widely read sector publication called The Philanthropist. Engagement with the concept of reconciliation became common in the Canadian settler philanthropy world after 2015. Change narratives like reconciliation are stories whereby philanthropic actors situate themselves in the social order and justify their activities; they are simultaneously discursive and affective formations with important material functions, directing organizational and sectoral policies, and shaping giving and granting decisions, institutional practices, and giving relationships. Across my chapters, I explore how diverse and dissonant expressions of the reconciliation change narrative can maintain colonial durabilities, working to mask or obscure the ongoing workings of colonial violence in the settler philanthropy sector and the wider world, especially through what Coulthard (2014) calls colonial recognition and Vimalessary et al. (2016) describe as colonial unknowing. At other times the texts I analyze present alternative possibilities for and beyond dominant expressions of reconciliation and settler philanthropy. These shift the focus away from the colonial politics of reconciliation toward the advancement of relations of reparations, reciprocity and refusal. Drawing on diverse approaches and theoretical frameworks from critical discourse analysis, affect theory, decolonial studies and philanthropic studies, I demonstrate through this analysis that Canadian settler philanthropy’s relations to coloniality are, and always have been, characterized by dissonance.

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With a chapter invasive species and settler colonialism: Sarah B. Shear, ‘Witnessing Scar(ring)s: Settler Colonial Theory for Social Studies Education Research’, in Bretton A. Varga, Erin C. Adams (eds), The Theory-Story Reader for Social Studies, Teachers College Press, 2024, pp. 178-185

20Oct24

Access the chapter here.

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