settler colonial studies blog

Truer and west of here (that’s where settler mythologies are): Betsy Gaines Quammen, True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, Torrey House Press, 2023

18Sep24

Description: True West explores myths of the West and how, if left unexamined, they distort the realities of the present and exacerbate polarizations. These misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the wellbeing of western communities overrun by newcomers seeking a dream—and the country, unless America recognizes the dangers of building a national identity on illusion. Gaines Quammen interrogates it all by listening, carefully, to people from varying political and cultural perspectives as she seeks to reconcile the deep anger and broad misunderstandings that linger amid myths that define and impede the West and America.

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Food for settler thought: Olivia Stowell, ‘Re-heating the “First” Thanksgiving: the Thanksgiving episode as settler colonial narrative’, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, 2024

16Sep24

Abstract: Thanksgiving-themed episodes of cooking television open up questions about the interrelations of food, history, power, and culture. This study addresses such questions through textual and thematic analysis of 46 Thanksgiving-themed episodes of reality cooking competition programmes on US cable TV, exploring how the Thanksgiving episode operates as a site for the deployment of the culinary as a category by which the past is re/created. I argue that the Thanksgiving episode represents history through two frames: “tradition” and “reenactment.” Reading the Thanksgiving episode as a site of history’s reconstruction illuminates popular media’s involvement in the socio-historical-political machinery of contemporary life.

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Settler colonial spillover: Jaime Graydon Dennison, Spillover: Americans and the Colonization of Panama, 1912-1936, PhD dissertation, Temple University, 2024

16Sep24

Abstract: The United States is, and always has been, an empire. A host of recently published works expound the inseparable link between imperialism and the development of the United States and of its global standing. This dissertation aims to further this trend by examining U.S. imperialism in its key possession—the Isthmus of Panama. Few studies have explored the connections between the U.S. presence in the Canal Zone and growing U.S. control over the ostensibly sovereign Republic of Panama. Consequently, many consider Panama an atypical example of empire. Through multinational archival research, this dissertation offers a corrective. I examine how U.S. state and nonstate actors effectively made the Republic of Panama—and not just the Canal Zone—a U.S. colonial space, and, more specifically, a space typical of settler colonialism practiced around the globe. Through a process I call “spillover,” U.S. citizens settled and meddled throughout the isthmus, yet continued to take advantage of the Americanized institutions of the Canal Zone. Missionaries, soldiers, U.S. law enforcement personnel, agriculturalists, diplomats, and pleasure seekers expanded the imperial project set in Washington yet frequently relied upon U.S. government protection and interference. In this way, my actors on the isthmus closely reflect those agents of empire who conquered the “American West” or built colonies in the British and Japanese empires. My dissertation will, ultimately, show how U.S. citizens, through their “spillover colonialism,” set the tone for U.S.-Panamanian tensions during the mid-twentieth century and ushered in a new course for U.S. hegemony in the Greater Caribbean. I focus exclusively on the years between 1912 and 1936—after the construction of the canal but while Panama was still a U.S. protectorate. During this period, the United States learned new ways to impose its will abroad as empire, with all its costs and unpopular headlines, grew ever more cumbersome. Panama became the nursery for a brand of empire, rooted in my concept of spillover, where the United States could create colonies and control territory without going to war or planting the flag. My actors in Panama carried out all the hallmarks of imperialism, from occupying provinces to undermining Panamanian sovereignty with near impunity. At times, Panamanians pushed back, opting to resist U.S. incursions through diplomacy or more informal channels. U.S. imperial agents, therefore, learned how to apply their hegemony in ways that allowed them to sell their intentions as protecting U.S. lives and investments (such as the canal) and claim to observe the sovereignty of Panama. In so doing, U.S. colonialists in Panama effectively controlled a country of immense strategic value without having to wage the same campaigns that their countrymen had done in Haiti, Nicaragua, or the Philippines. These lessons bore fruit when, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt curtailed U.S. incursions in Panama in 1936, North Americans selectively spilled their cultural, economic, military, and political influence over the Atlantic-Caribbean territories that neighbored the bases, ports, and stations acquired from Great Britain in 1940. My project, carefully crafted into six chapters, brings Panama into the scholarly conversation on the typicality of U.S. imperial power abroad—something historians often use Puerto Rico or the Philippines to argue.

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Pastoral complicity: Valerie Rohy, ‘Queer Complicity and the Colonial Anti-Pastoral’, Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture 1, 1-2, 2024

16Sep24

Excerpt: In fact, some queer subjects may be complicit with settler colonialism, just as they may profit from or fail to resist white supremacy, capitalism, or misogyny.³ This seemingly obvious reality is remarkably hard to keep in view, for doing so means abiding with discomfort, both the discomfort of responsibility and that of uncertainty, ambivalence, and contradiction. In pursuing that uncertain path, this reading furthers efforts within the environmental humanities to trace the ways in which the “natural” environment is socially constructed–including its structuration by literary forms such as the pastoral–and how these formations are, in turn, implicated in questions of Indigenous survival in the face of colonization, particularly in the global South.

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Indigenous modernist traditions: Matt Hooley, Against Extraction: Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities, Duke University Press, 2024

16Sep24

Description: In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. Hooley shows how Indigenous literary and visual art modernisms challenge the strictures of everyday life and question the ecological, political, and cultural fantasies that make multivalent US colonialism seem inevitable. Hooley analyzes literature and art by Louise Erdrich, William Whipple Warren, David Treuer, George Morrison, and Gerald Vizenor in relation to histories of Indigenous dispossession and occupation, enslavement and Black life, and environmental harm and care. He shows that historical narratives of these cities are intimately bound up with the violence of colonial systems of extraction and that concepts like Indigeneity and sovereignty extend beyond treaty-granted promises of political control. These works, created in opposition and proximity to the extraction of cultural, political, and territorial resources, demonstrate how Indigenous claims to life and land matter to rethinking and unmaking the social and ecological devastations of the colonial world.

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Owning settler colonialism: Ari Hallgrímur Finnsson, “Stable and Four-Square”: A Colonial History of Property-Owning Democracy’, Global Intellectual History, 2024

14Sep24

Abstract: This paper explores the colonial history of the theory of ‘property-owning democracy.’ Focusing on R.R. Torrens’ title registration system, the paper links property-owning democracy to nineteenth-century debates on land rights and title registration. Instituted in South Australia in 1858, Torrens’ system linked the simplification of transactions in land to visions of a property-owning society. Seeking to replace complex land laws, Torrens’ system’s emphasis on speeding up land transactions appealed both to settler society and metropole. This transformation facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous lands and intertwined property law with colonial narratives of progress, liberty, and democracy. Ultimately, Torrens’ vision identified democracy with a new property regime securing the future of property title and political rights. Through a common engagement with nineteenth-century Britain’s ‘land question,’ Torrens’ project in South Australia is linked to the development of the twentieth-century political concept of property-owning democracy. The paper makes the case that exploring land registration debates reveals the importance of secure property rights and human capital in the history of ideas of property-owning democracy. Legal and bureaucratic innovations like the property register were considered to free individuals to invest in their own economic development and create the economic conditions for democracy.

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Dispossession upon dispossession: Kyle T. Mays, City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022

14Sep24

Description: In July 2013, Detroit became the largest city in U.S. history to declare bankruptcy. The underlying causes were decades of deindustrialization, white flight, and financial mismanagement. More recently it has been heralded a comeback city as wealthy white residents resettle there. Yet, as Kyle T. Mays argues, we cannot understand the current state of Detroit without also understanding the longer history of Native American and African American dispossession that has defined the city since its founding. How has dispossession impacted the development of modern U.S. cities? And how does comparing the historical experiences of Native Americans and African Americans in an urban context help us comprehend histories of race, sovereignty, and colonialism? Using archives, oral and family histories, and community documents, City of Dispossessions is a cultural, intellectual, and social history that argues that physical and symbolic forms of dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans, and their reactions to dispossession, have been central to Detroit’s modern development. The book begins with the first settlement by the Frenchman Cadillac in 1701 and chronicles how the logic of dispossession has continued into the present, through a wide range of forms that include memorialization of the “disappearing Indian,” the physical dispossession of African Americans through urban renewal, and gentrification. Mays also chronicles the wide-ranging forms of expression through which Black and Indigenous Detroiters have contested dispossession, such as the Red and Black Power movements and culturally relevant education. Through lively, accessible prose as well as historical and contemporary examples, City of Dispossessions will be of interest to readers of urban studies, Indigenous Studies, and critical ethnic studies.

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Indigenous nationalism requires recognition: Kurtis Boyer , Chris Andersen, ‘Defining a Nation: Métis Nation Building in the Face of Epistemic Injustice’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 11, 2, 2024, pp. 71-94

14Sep24

Abstract: Over the past four decades, Indigenous political claims “in” Canada have come increasingly to assume a nationalist form. Efforts at instilling a national identity play an abundantly clear role in Indigenous nation (re)building: they hold the potential to concretize internal solidarity, mobilize community to pursue long-term goals, and they aid in overcoming a host of collective action problems. However, for national claims to play such a role, it is necessary that outside groups recognize a community’s national identity and accept it as distinct. That is to say, nationhood must be thought about in terms of its occurrence in an (unequally) relational context: claims to a national distinction occur in competition with other claims, in a field of struggle and competition in which actors possess varying abilities to enforce/support claims and to have those claims recognized by others. In this regard, the concept of epistemic injustice is especially useful to engage with the differential capacity of communities to claim and enforce national claims unto others. Our analysis, which focuses specifically on the case of the Métis, pays particular attention to the widespread misrecognitions that occur when a dominant social group marginalizes Métis claims to nationhood. Through this exploration, our article contributes to a better understanding of relational conditions overall and the ways in which identity and nationhood can support the process of Indigenous nation building.

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Unreconciliation (it can go the other way too): Elisabeth Alber, ‘New Caledonia:a Promising Attempt to Constitutionalize a Sovereignty Conflict Going Wrong’, Perspectives on Federalism, 16, 1, 2024

14Sep24

Abstract: New Caledonia is a French autonomous territory in the South Pacific whose constitutional status is designed to be transitional. It derives from the 1998 Nouméa Agreement, based on the 1988 Matignon-Oudinot Agreements. These Agreements ended violence between loyalist and indigenous groups and delayed a promised independence referendum by 30 years, in return for territorial and non-territorial autonomy. Indeed, the Nouméa Agreement provided the New Caledonian divided society with a power-sharing system that up to 2021 worked well. It recognizes the ‘Kanak people’ and ‘shared sovereignty’. It also entrenches procedural rules for a series of referendums that, if the restricted electorate had voted in favour, would have guaranteed full sovereignty to New Caledonia. In early 2024, two years after the inconclusive third and last independence referendum, tensions escalated and in May 2024, following deadly riots over a voting reform proposal, the French Government declared a 12-day state of emergency. There is no consensus on New Caledonia’s final constitutional status. Instead, dialogue between the parties has eroded and a true ‘Indigenous-settlers’ reconciliation is far from being reached. Combining historical background with recent legal and political analysis, this paper offers insight into the intricate history – and problematic present – of New Caledonia.

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Resettlers: Sulyn Bodnaresko, Reciprocal Citizenship: Settling into the Responsibilities of Living on Indigenous Lands, PhD dissertation, University of Calgary, 2024

14Sep24

Anstract: This study examined newcomer-settler citizenship as a personal and scholastic response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action 94. With the guidance of Indigenous principles, including relationality, respect, interconnectedness, and reciprocity, I engaged with newcomer-settlers and Indigenous peoples working in the immigration and settlement sector to consider, “How can I be the best relative that I can be, and learn from others, while living on these Blackfoot, Stoney Nakoda, Tsuut’ina, and Métis lands that my settler-colonial family and I call home?” This Indigenist, interpretative, mixed methods research study has helped me to more fully understand the costs paid by Indigenous peoples to support my standard of living and comfort on these lands. Through relationships and this research process, I have also come to recognize an ethical and decolonizing way of being—called reciprocal citizenship—whereby non-Indigenous peoples can challenge settler-colonialism’s inherent oppression by centering Indigenous truths, dignity, and liberty in their thoughts, actions, and words. Reciprocal citizenship is about the ethical acts of giving back for the gifts of living on these lands, and seven actions revealed through this study include: respecting Indigenous-settler relationships; critically self-reflecting on oppression in Canada; acknowledging one’s own moves to innocence and comfort; seeking to learn; growing settler-colonial awareness; imagining shared futures; and actioning personal responsibilities that are guided in relationship with Indigenous peoples, knowledge systems, and the land. Reciprocal citizenship brings together citizenship education, transformative learning, and reconciliatory education. It asks both newcomer-settlers and established-settlers to step into their citizenship responsibilities, so that all can live in mutual respect and flourish on these lands that that we now call Canada.

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