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Unhealthy settler colonialism: Mary Wicks, Christine Hampshire, Jeannie Campbell, Sian Graham, Louise Maple-Brown, Renae Kirkham, ‘Us and them: colonialism and racism in remote Aboriginal healthcare discourse’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: Background: The origins of modern Australia are settler colonialist, the logic of which initiated theft of land and attempted erasure of First Nations peoples. This study explores the role of non-Aboriginal Health Care Workers (HCWs) in the ongoing settler colonial project and the formation of mental models that lead to dualistic discourse embodying structural and interpersonal racism. Methods: Using van Dijk’s sociocognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis, colonial ideology, HCW mental models and discourse about Aboriginal people were explored. Results: The dualistic categorisation of Us and Them underlies racist discourse around responsibility, dependence, health, illness and the role of culture in health. HCWs had poorly conceived ideas about cultural safety and demonstrated hierarchical thinking, exclusion and collusion in racism. Conclusions: Remote HCWs will continue to propagate the ideology of settler colonialism unless cultural safety, critical reflexivity and anti-racism training are prioritised in cultural training.


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Writing the history of historyless places: Anna Clark, ‘What is history in a settler colonial society? Mapping the limits and possibilities of ethical historiography using an Australian case study’, History and Theory, 2024

09Oct24

Abstract: In recent decades, the role of the history discipline as part of the architecture of colonization has become more visible and better understood. Such acknowledgement reflects foundational shifts in historical practice and theory prompted by transdisciplinary and transnational scholarship in fields such as postcolonial and settler-colonial studies, First Nations knowledges, and historical perspectives and practices contextualized by transatlantic slavery. Their intervention in turn prompted a vital question: How do we map settler-colonial historiography if the discipline has been complicit in the settler-colonial project? Using Australian historiography as a case study, this article explores how History has been part of the architecture of colonization, policing whose stories can be told and by whom. Drawing on the work of Indigenous history-makers and knowledge-holders, it also points to ways that researchers might reach outside the traditional scope of historiography to map and contemplate the range of history-making that comprises history in the settler colony.


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The labour of settler colonialism: Maria Almeida Reis, “Práticos na terra”: Arguing for Indigenous Labor and Colonial Development in Portuguese America, 1532-1757, PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2024

05Oct24

Abstract: This dissertation traces the debates over the regulation of Indigenous labor in PortugueseAmerica. I follow these debates as they first unraveled in the northeastern sugar-planting regions of sixteenth-century Brazil, and then as they traveled to the State of Maranhão and Grão-Pará, a Portuguese colony in the eastern Amazon that was administered separately from the State of Brazil. I draw from extensive research in multiple imperial archives, with manuscript sources in Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch, to analyze the development of a school of thought among sectors of the settler population that argued for Indigenous slave-trading and/or increased settler access to Indigenous workers in mission villages. I show how settlers and their opponents manipulated a portfolio of arguments to demand different labor regimes and policies. In their arguments for increased access to Indigenous laborers, settlers claimed that they were poor, that they were dependent on Indigenous skilled labor, that relying on Indigenous workers was more practical than relying on enslaved Africans, and that Indigenous peoples were “práticos na terra,” or experienced in the land, and thus the best-equipped workers in the region. I thus draw attention to the ubiquity of “pragmatic” arguments to labor debates, focusing on how settlers wielded ideas of utility, feasibility, poverty, and the common good, to make their demands. Countering the historiographical assumption that Europeans had a long-standing preference for African enslaved labor, my dissertation argues that Maranhão was a colony where a great variety of ideologies about Indigenous and African peoples were tested, questioned, and reconceptualized across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, Portuguese ideas about Indigenous peoples’ proclivity to work were much more nuanced than the historiography has posited. With time, these arguments became increasingly racialized, as settlers activated ideas about the Indigenous versus the African body and correlated skin color to one’s ability to work. Furthermore, settler arguments demanding greater access to Indigenous laborers often implicitly and explicitly contested the framework of “disease, flight, and capacity to work,” a framework long embraced by the historiography as an explanation for the rise of African slavery in the Americas. In their arguments, settlers in Maranhão wielded their on-the-ground experiences to contend that Indigenous labor was more practical than relying on the trans- Atlantic slave trade, that disease outbreaks justified more slave-trading, and that Indigenous peoples were more apt to the kinds of work required for Amazonian production. Thus, I argue that this framework was as much a constructed argument subject to debate as it was an explanation of a material reality.


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The military as settler: Juliet Nebolon, Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai’i and the Making of US Empire, Duke University Press, 2024

05Oct24

Description: Under martial law during World War II, Hawaiʻi was located at the intersection of home front and war front. In Settler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She demonstrates how settler militarism operated through a regime of racial liberal biopolitics that purported to protect all people in Hawaiʻi, even as it intensified the racial and colonial differentiation of Kanaka Maoli, Asian settlers, and white settlers. Nebolon identifies settler militarism’s inherent contradiction: It depends on life, labor, and land to reproduce itself, yet it avariciously consumes, via violent and extractive projects, those same lives and natural resources that it needs to subsist. From vaccination and blood bank programs to the administration of internment and prisoner-of-war camps, Nebolon reveals how settler militarism and racial liberal biopolitics operated together in the service of capitalism. Collectively, the social reproduction of these regimes created the conditions for the late-twentieth-century expansion of US military empire.


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Plausibly genocidal settler colonialism: Fabiola Celenza, Colonial legacies, dehumanization, and international law: analysis of the Gaza genocide ; historical foundations, theoretical perspective, and legal implications, MA dissertation, University College Dublin, 2024

04Oct24

Abstract: The roots of the plausible genocide in Palestine lie in more than a century of colonial history that has profoundly shaped the region. Indeed, the war between Israel and Hamas since Oct. 7 is not an isolated phenomenon, but the result of colonial legacies and power dynamics. This research will analyze the influence of colonial legacies in international response and implementation of law in the alleged genocide in Gaza. In addition, theoretical perspectives on dehumanization and international law are analyzed to assess how these frameworks address human rights violations against Palestinians. The hypothesis posits that historical and colonial power dynamics shape international reactions and legal measures. Using critical analysis of historical texts, official statements, and media reports, the study assesses the role of colonial history and dehumanization in the war. It finds that these factors significantly affect international responses, exposing systemic biases and shortcomings in legal frameworks. Despite existing human rights instruments, legal responses are often hindered by political and historical influences. To improve justice and accountability in Gaza genocide, the international community must address these colonial legacies and strive to decolonize legal and diplomatic frameworks. Keywords: Israeli-Palestinian question, Gaza, genocide, colonialism, human rights violations, international law, dehumanization.


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Recognising settler colonialism: Jennifer Adese, Aboriginal TM: The Cultural and Economic Politics of Recognition, University of Manitoba Press, 2022

04Oct24

Description: In Aboriginal™, Jennifer Adese explores the origins, meaning, and usage of the term “Aboriginal” and its displacement by the word “Indigenous.” In the Constitution Act, 1982, the term’s express purpose was to speak to specific “aboriginal rights”. Yet in the wake of the Constitution’s passage, Aboriginal, in its capitalized form, became increasingly used to describe and categorize people. More than simple legal and political vernacular, the term Aboriginal (capitalized or not) has had real-world consequences for the people it defined. Aboriginal™ argues the term was a tool used to advance Canada’s cultural and economic assimilatory agenda throughout the 1980s until the mid-2010s. Moreover, Adese illuminates how the word engenders a kind of “Aboriginalized multicultural” brand easily reduced to and exported as a nation brand, economic brand, and place brand—at odds with the diversity and complexity of Indigenous peoples and communities. In her multi-disciplinary research, Adese examines the discursive spaces and concrete sites where Aboriginality features prominently: the Constitution Act, 1982; the 2010 Vancouver Olympics; the “Aboriginal tourism industry”; and the Vancouver International Airport. Reflecting on the term’s abrupt exit from public discourse and the recent turn toward Indigenous, Indigeneity, and Indigenization, Aboriginal™ offers insight into Indigenous-Canada relations, reconciliation efforts, and current discussions of Indigenous identity, authenticity, and agency.


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Paternalist settler colonialism: Ashraf Othman Bader, Asem Khalil, ‘Colonial Paternalism under Israeli Military Rule (1967-1977): “Social Welfare” as a Tool of Control’, Al-Muntaqa, 7, 2, 2024, pp. 90-109

04Oct24

Abstract: This study examines the system of colonial paternalism that Israel imposed during the first decade of its post-1967 military rule over the Occupied Palestinian Territories . It interrogates the system’s legal and financial frameworks and forms of Palestinian resistance to it. Drawing on newly released archival material from the minutes of Directors-General Committee of Israeli ministries, records of Israeli military orders, and interviews with Palestinians, the study illustrates how the Israeli “social welfare” system cemented policies of control, regulation, and exploitation of the Palestinian population. It forced Palestinians into accepting financial arrangements and purchasing “subsidized” goods from the Israeli market, while simultaneously framing Israel as a caring guardian of their interests. The study enriches the theoretical debate on settler colonialism and the logic of policies governing the Palestinian population.


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Settlert option A, settler option B, settler synthesis C: Dan Tout, Kim Alley, Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘”Australia” as competing projects of settler nationalism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

03Oct24

Abstract: Nationalism has fallen out of academic fashion over the past several decades. In this article, we refocus on nationalism as a crucial dimension of the continuing settler-colonial project that is ‘Australia’. Across the settler political spectrum, nationalist teleologies envisage a moment of completion, in which conflictual settler-colonial relations will be resolved in the form of an imagined-as unified, coherent and legitimate settler nation. Here, we trace the dynamics of settler nationalism within and beyond the recent debate over an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, identifying a ‘good colonist/bad colonist’ dynamic which we contend works to conceal the eliminationist logics of the Australian settler-colonial project at large. Whereas conservative settler nationalists attempt to (re)construct a white settler nation founded on fantasies of terra nullius, ‘progressive’ settler nationalists seek to build a ‘mature’, reconciled nation-to-come by incorporating limited forms of Indigenous difference within the settler national body. Between these apparently opposing modes of settler nation-building, the unity and coherence of the nation is maintained, while prior and persisting Indigenous sovereignties are denied and disavowed (despite this, they endure). We conclude with our reflections on the necessity of undoing settler investments in the idea/l of Australia, and the political limitations they continue to impose.


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Settler colonialism, a new edition: Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Second Edition, Palgrave 2024

03Oct24

Description: Exploring the history and politics of a powerful and long-lasting idea: the creation and maintenance of European worlds outside of Europe. This textbook provides a broad overview of settler colonialism in the modern era. The author outlines how the founding of new societies was envisaged and practiced around the world, illustrating the specific ways in which settler colonial projects tried to establish ideal and regenerated political bodies. With an updated introduction and an additional chapter examining decolonisation and Indigenous recognition, this second edition brings the study of settler colonialism up to the present day.


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Treaties and settler colonialism: Joshua Manitowabi, Manitoulin Island Treaties: Anishinaabe Diplomacy, Agency, and Persistence, PhD dissertation, Brock University, 2024

01Oct24

Abstract: Treaties have been characterized by students of settler colonialism as tools of the empire. Treaties were rarely written for the benefit of Indigenous people but served as legal means to dispossess them of land and natural resources and deprive them of their traditional hunting and fishing rights. Efforts to bring land claims and resolve resource extraction disputes were often unsuccessful, in part because the interpretations of the treaties were based only on written documents that did not contain Indigenous perspectives on what the treaties should achieve. Efforts in recent years have been made to achieve a more equitable, balanced interpretation of historic treaties by accepting as evidence elements of traditional Indigenous culture such as oral histories that could clarify and support the Anishinaabe understanding of the intent of the treaty at the time of the signing. This study seeks to develop an Indigenous narrative of the Odawa, Ojibwa and Potawatomi nations of Manitoulin Island at the time of the land cession treaties of 1836 and 1862. Ethnohistory, cultural geography, research paradigms, and Indigenous research methodology provided evidence that supported the thesis that the Odawa possessed the knowledge and skills to negotiate treaties that would protect their people, land and way of life derived from a long history of successful diplomacy and treaty negotiations in the northern Great Lakes region. This study also looks to develop a more complete portrayal of the agency and resilience of the Odawa in adapting to the changes and conflicts brought by European settlers until the mid-19th century. An analysis of the historical events that preceded the 1862 treaty provides the context in which the Anishinaabe were forced to cede all of Manitoulin Island, except the eastern peninsula.


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