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Eco-decolonial communism against settler colonialism: Wayne Wapeemukwa, Journey to a Critical Theory of Discovery, PhD dissertation, Penn State, 2024

30Aug24

Abstract: In July 2022, Pope Francis undertook a penitential pilgrimage to Canada, where he apologized to Indigenous peoples for “the evil” committed by Christians during the Age of Discovery. Then, in March 2023, the Holy See––the ‘government’ of the Catholic Church––issued a historic “Joint Statement [on] the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’” identifying this “Doctrine” as the philosophical framework Europeans used to colonize the globe and the articulation of a conjunction of factors that birthed anti-Indigenous racism. Despite this increased public profile, the “Doctrine of Discovery” is not salient to philosophers. Yet this paucity is not benign. Those who ignore this Doctrine’s historical and ongoing impact on Indigenous peoples offer missed opportunities at best or eliminationist agendas at worst. These are existential stakes, indeed; but there is also much at stake, philosophically. Journey to a Critical Theory of Discovery stakes a claim on Indigenous social relations to land. In Chapter One, I examine how the Doctrine of Discovery evolved into a racialized “agricultural argument” for Indigenous dispossession and a new religion of whiteness. In Chapter Two, I reanimate Karl Marx’s lost texts on dispossession and offer my distinctive research contribution, speculative expropriation. In Chapter Three, I use my novel concept to demonstrate how the invention of private property and white masculinity lay at the social, political, and erotic origins of the settler state. In Chapter Four, I explore Indigenous responses to Discovery developed by Jim Brady (1908 – 1967), an Indigenous Marxist who established a partitioned mode of eco-decolonial communism. In the Conclusion, I suggest that Brady’s land-based economic co-ops pose crucial, urgent, and necessary implications for the history of our present climate crisis. As an urgent contribution to Indigenous philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, and Political Theory, this “journey” presents an alternative eco-political imaginary that opens up for us only when we seriously consider the wisdom embodied in Indigenous social relations to land, relations that contain concrete solutions for transcending capitalism, colonialism, and climate change. Responses to settler-colonialism must not merely seek to re-possess the land––as if it were inherently fungible––but take the even more radical step of ameliorating and recruiting land as a subject in decolonization; an ameliorative politics of territorial rematriation we hear echoed in the grassroots call, “Land Back.”


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Settler capitalism: Jack W Davies, Wages of Settlers: An Intellectual History of Settler Colonialism and Capitalist Development, PhD dissertation, UC Santa Ceuz, 2024

29Aug24

Abstract: This dissertation studies selections of intellectual production on settler colonialism as it concerns the theory and history of capitalism. Part I engages the consolidation of an intellectual paradigm in the post-Cold War period, which I call, “settler colonial reason.” This critical orientation to the history and present of society combines a schematic theory of settler colonialism with the remarkable salience of Marx’s notion of so-called primitive accumulation in the same decades. In the paradigm, the passage of history, particularly the history of capitalism, is principally intelligible as a repetition of origins. Whatever might happen in history, it is always and ultimately an expression of its foundational and structural “logics”—so many new forms or rounds of enclosure, dispossession, and elimination. I elaborate a critique of this paradigm across two chapters: one treating it directly and the other assessing its recent application to the history of Palestine. Part II seeks alternatives in a longer intellectual history of colonization and the uneven historical development of capitalism, beginning with classical political economy. The combined colonial and commercial policy of specific heterodox thinkers provided a conceptual solution to impasses in industrial capitalism’s early stages. I argue that “systematic colonization” in theory and Anglo settler colonialism in practice facilitated the co-existence, in metropole and colony, of high wages and high profits—in a word, “economic development.” This assigns paramount significance to the unprecedented and unrepeatable mass migration of working people from an industrializing center to an agrarian settlement for absolutely high wages, and the trade and investment relations between these regions. The final chapter tracks these themes into twentieth-century thought on economic development, including mainstream postwar development theorists, economic historians, and their critics. Through this investigation, I formalize the role of wage spreads to global patterns of economic development and underdevelopment, especially those opened by the non-replicable history of Anglo settlement. Altogether, the dissertation advocates for an approach to settler colonialism that is not typological (differentiated by internal “logics” at the national level). It pursues instead the intellectual means for determining settler colonialism concretely within and as part of the uneven historical development of capitalism.


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The animality of settler colonialism: Severin M. Fowles, Julia F. Morris, ‘On Wolves and Predation: Toward a Multispecies Archaeology of Settler Colonialism’, Historical Archaeology, 2024

29Aug24

Abstract: This article traces the life and death of two wolves that perished at the hands of 18th-century settlers in the small agropastoral community of San Antonio del Embudo in what is today northern New Mexico. Through a study of their interred remains, we examine how wolves became entangled in the unfolding negotiations between settler and Indigenous communities in the American West, playing varied ecological, political, and symbolic roles. In the process, we advance two wider arguments: first, that the archaeology of settler colonialism would do well to adopt a multispecies perspective in which nonhuman animals are counted among both the colonizers and the colonized, and second, that doing so requires a new mode of historical narration focused on the experiences of individual nonhumans as opposed to the anonymous, animalistic mass.


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University of Pluriversity? Sarah Maddison, ‘Making space at the institutional table: Co-work and risk in the colonial university’, in Susan Nemec, Billie Lythberg, Christine Woods (eds), Settler Responsibility for Decolonisation, Routledge, 2024

29Aug24

Abstract: Over the past several decades, settler colonial universities have begun to grapple with their relationships with Indigenous peoples. Different contexts and histories have given rise to diverse approaches to the project of transforming universities, variously framed as decolonising, indigenising, or reconciling the university. With increasing momentum, these strategies are now altering curricula, changing research priorities, and shaping employment practices, structures, and traditions. This work is difficult: institutions founded in empire do not easily displace their Western knowledge systems to engage with the knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples; primarily white, patriarchal hierarchies do not easily reconfigure themselves to make space for Indigenous leadership − at least not of the kind that might challenge the epistemological foundations of the institutional enterprise. This paper analyses the different frames (decolonisation, indigenisation or reconciliation) through which universities are seeking to transform their relationship with Indigenous peoples, on Indigenous lands. It considers the opportunities and limitations of these different approaches, including how their relative influence has changed over time. The paper draws on the author’s own experiences of working to transform both her institution and her discipline, describing strategies that settlers might use to both ease the burden of labour often placed on the shoulders of Indigenous scholars, while always working to make space for Indigenous people at the tables of institutional decision-makers.


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Unruly settlers: Amir Reicher, ‘Nomos aversion and the art of being somewhat governed among Jewish outpost settlers in the West Bank’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024

27Aug24

Abstract: Since the mid-1990s, in clandestine co-operation with state agencies, West Bank settlers have been establishing what have become known as the illegal outpost settlements. These are typically rustic communities located deep inside the frontier. Publicly, outpost residents insist that they want the state to retroactively legalize their communities. This is also the long-sought goal of the leaders of the settlement movement. However, this article exposes how, in fact, many ‘outpost people’ actively resist and subvert the efforts of their leadership to legalize and subsequently enlarge their communities. They do so, I argue, from a sense of ‘nomos aversion’, which at its heart is a rejection of the law and the state. This article shows how, in this context, with the aim of keeping the state at a safe distance, the on-the-ground settlers – who are at the frontlines of settler-colonial expansion – navigate their ambivalent relationship with the colonial centre by constantly reshaping their social structure between anti-statist and statist modes. I conceptualize this social technique in terms of the ‘art of being somewhat governed’. By introducing these terms, this article offers an analysis of how an internal rivalry that latently underlies a settler colonial society shapes colonial expansion.


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Curricular futurity against settler colonialism (introduci ng a special issue): Hollie Anderson Kulago, Leilani Sabzalian, Jeremy Garcia, ‘Indigenous Futurities in Curriculum’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 39, 3, 2024, pp. 1-7

26Aug24

Excerpt: We begin this issue by sharing the diverse lands, waters, and relations that we bring with
us. Evident in our opening narratives, our relations to these lands and waters realign and connect
us with our ancestors. Just as Indigenous lands and communities are diverse, so too are Indigenous
futurities in education and beyond. In her article on rematriating curriculum studies, Unangax̂
scholar Eve Tuck (2011) foregrounds rematriation as an important framework for upending settler
colonialism in curriculum studies. Rematriating here means returning lands, attending to the
significance of land in curriculum, as well as “the redistribution of power, knowledge, and place,
and the dismantling of settler colonialism” (p. 37). As Tuck offers, “When curriculum studies are
rematriated, alternative aims of curriculum in communities begin to surface” (p. 35), and in this
issue, we connect diverse futurity work to these alternative aims. Curriculum theorizing that begins
from specific Indigenous lands and waters as vital and diverse systems of relationality has the
potential to upend settler colonialism and support Indigenous futurity.


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Settler colonial sins of omission and commission (when it comes to murdering Indigneous women): Paulina García-Del Moral, ‘State Complicity: Settler Colonialism, Multisided Violence, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2024

26Aug24

Abstract: This article theorizes and analyzes the Canadian state’s complicity in the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in terms of the acts of omission (inaction) and commission (action) of the police and courts. Building on the intersectional perspective of Indigenous and antiracist feminist scholarship on MMIWG, I argue that these acts of omission and commission are rooted in a context of “multisided violence” that is colonial in nature: state action and inaction reproduce and normalize the conditions in which Indigenous women and girls can be murdered with impunity. I analyze reports by Indigenous and feminist civil society organizations as part of their transnational advocacy to compel the Canadian state to address MMIWG. I show that state acts of omission and commission are intertwined and reinforce each other through a pattern of inconsistent, deficient, and contradictory institutional responses to violence against Indigenous women and girls.


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Training settler colonialism: David Laurence Jones, New World Dreams: Canadian Pacific Railway and the Golden Northwest, Heritage, 2023

26Aug24

Description: An in-depth exploration of how a transportation company created a vision for a burgeoning nation and played a leading role driving immigration to the Canadian West. Best known for its monumental achievements in transportation technology, Canadian Pacific Railway (or “CP”) was instrumental in constructing the concept—and the reality—of the country we now call Canada. In addition to building the railroad that connected the country from coast to coast, CP was also highly effective at selling the idea of a vast and rich land of opportunity and triggering a massive wave of immigration to what was dubbed the “Golden Northwest” (later the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta). No other independent corporation in the world made such a profound contribution to the creation of a national enterprise, nor outspent a national government in populating its frontiers with settlers from specifically targeted areas, often at the expense of Indigenous populations and their traditional territories. Tracing the history of this highly influential corporation from the initial CP contract and land grant, historian David Laurence Jones explores CP’s involvement in carving out routes to the region, building towns, promoting Western Canada’s arable land and economic potential to Europeans and Americans, operating steamships, spearheading some of the largest irrigation projects in the world, and devising unique settlement schemes such as ready-made farms. Illustrated with more than four hundred archival photos and colour advertisements, New World Dreams is the most extensive history of Canadian Pacific ever published.


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Allotted Indigeneity is still Indigeneity: David Dry, ‘Autonomy Through Allotment: Political Strategies of the Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, 1870-1892’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2024

25Aug24

Abstract: The late nineteenth-century policy of allotting tribal lands into individually owned tracts is appropriately interpreted as a destructive federal effort to expropriate Native land and eliminate tribal identities. The Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, however, had divergent objectives in supporting allotment. This article argues the Ottawa advocated for allotment and U.S. citizenship to escape intrusive federal control over their lands and resources. Although they embraced policies aimed at eliminating tribal existence, the Ottawa rejected the intentions behind those policies, and instead, they drew on long-established community attributes of mobility and interconnection with outsiders to resituate their nation within American society. By centering Ottawa perspectives, this article disrupts progressive narratives that denote the pursuit of U.S. citizenship as an effort to secure equal inclusion. It underscores U.S. citizenship and allotment as tools of settler colonial domination and demonstrates how the Ottawa subversively deployed U.S. citizenship and private property rights to combat colonial administration and maintain tribal sovereignty. Examining a policy often glossed over as invariably imposed on Native nations, this article underscores the necessity of analyzing Native community dynamics and political strategies to understand the implementation and impact of allotment.


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Defensive Indigeneity: Chloe Cairncross, Dana Dougherty, ‘In Defense of Identity: A Comparative Analysis of Indigenous Self-Defense Movements in North America’, Microdynamics of Mass Atrocity Working Paper Series, 2024

25Aug24

Abstract: This paper conducts a comparative analysis of two significant historical events of Indigenous resistance in North America: the Northwest Rebellion of 1885 in Canada and the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 in the United States. The Métis during the Northwest Rebellion and the Lakota Oglala along with American Indian Movement activists during the Wounded Knee Occupation both sought to assert their rights against encroaching government policies and settler expansion. By examining the actors, agendas, actions, and outcomes of these movements, the paper explores the nuanced nature of self-defense within a settler-colonial context. Comparative analysis highlights the persistent efforts of Indigenous peoples to protect their communities and cultures despite enduring oppression and genocide. It also investigates how media portrayal and the dynamics of authority influence the success of resistance efforts, revealing the distinct challenges faced by Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States. Through an exploration of these cases, we underscore the ongoing struggles of Indigenous self-determination and the importance of solidarity in resisting colonial legacies. Ultimately, this paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of Indigenous resistance and the critical role of self-defense in preserving cultural identity and autonomy. Understanding the paths of self-defense that were taken in the past is key to guiding the ongoing struggle against genocide, oppression, and the destruction of indigenous communities.


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