settler colonial studies blog

Land back means negotiating with settlers: Jean Dennison, ‘Beyond #LandBack: The Osage Nation’s Strategic Relations’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 47, 2, 2024

16Jul24

Abstract: While the #LandBack movement has captured popular imagination, it remains unconvincing to many settlers who are the primary landowners in settler states. This article seeks to expand Indigenous studies understandings of the LandBack movement by looking at the strategic relations the Osage Nation used to get back 43,000 acres of land in 2016. Such strategic relations are mired in colonial and capitalist systems, but they are also how many Native nations, such as the Osage, are rebuilding their homelands. This article thus seeks to tell fuller stories of Indigenous strategies for survival and, ultimately, relationality.

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An old debate in a new dress (however, if you think about it for a second, a Manichaean rejection of binaries is itself a big fat binary): Scott Burnett, Nettly Ahmed, Tahn-dee Matthews, Junaid Oliephant, Aylwyn Walsh, ‘Indigenous resurgence, collective “reminding”, and insidious binaries: a response to Verbuyst’s ‘settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past’, Critical Discourse Studies, 2024

16Jul24

Abstract: This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the powerknowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, we believe it to be a problematic category, especially in Western knowledge production about Indigenous people. Our reasons are that the term conflates the use of history with its recovery, unfairly maligns Indigenous knowledge keepers as self-serving and uninterested in the truth, and introduces an insidious binary which has unwelcome discursive effects, in that longer chains of equivalence ultimately place Indigenous storying and knowledge keeping on the other side of an epistemological divide from “proper” history-writing.

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Wolfing settler colonialism: Stephanie Rutherford, Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022

16Jul24

Description: A wolf’s howl is felt in the body. Frightening and compelling, incomprehensible or entirely knowable, it is a sound that may be heard as threat or invitation but leaves no listener unaffected. Toothsome fiends, interfering pests, or creatures wild and free, wolves have been at the heart of Canada’s national story since long before Confederation. Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin contends that the role in which wolves have been cast – monster or hero – has changed dramatically through time. Exploring the social history of wolves in Canada, Stephanie Rutherford weaves an innovative tapestry from the varied threads of historical and contemporary texts, ideas, and practices in human-wolf relations, from provincial bounties to Farley Mowat’s iconic Never Cry Wolf. These examples reveal that Canada was made, in part, through relationships with nonhuman animals. Wolves have always captured the human imagination. In sketching out the connections people have had with wolves at different times, Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin offers a model for more ethical ways of interacting with animals in the face of a global biodiversity crisis.

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The settler camp: Irit Katz, The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel–Palestine, University of Minnesota Press, 2022

16Jul24

Description: The Common Camp underscores the role of the camp as a spatial instrument employed for reshaping, controlling, and struggling over specific territories and populations. Focusing on the geopolitical complexity of Israel–Palestine and the dramatic changes it has experienced during the past century, this book explores the region’s extensive networks of camps and their existence as both a tool of colonial power and a makeshift space of resistance. Examining various forms of camps devised by and for Zionist settlers, Palestinian refugees, asylum seekers, and other groups, Irit Katz demonstrates how the camp serves as a common thread in shaping lands and lives of subjects from across the political spectrum. Analyzing the architectural and political evolution of the camp as a modern instrument engaged by colonial and national powers (as well as those opposing them), Katz offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of Israel–Palestine, highlighting how spatial transience has become permanent in the ongoing story of this contested territory. The Common Camp presents a novel approach to the concept of the camp, detailing its varied history as an apparatus used for population containment and territorial expansion as well as a space of everyday life and subversive political action. Bringing together a broad range of historical and ethnographic materials within the context of this singular yet versatile entity, the book locates the camp at the core of modern societies and how they change and transform.

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Classic settler colonialism and classical settler colonialism: Michael Maas, Fay A. Yarbrough (eds), Empires and Indigenous Peoples: Comparing Ancient Roman and North American Experiences, University of Oklaohoma Press, 2024

16Jul24

Description: The Romans who established their rule on three continents and the Europeans who first established new homes in North America interacted with communities of Indigenous peoples with their own histories and cultures. Sweeping in its scope and rigorous in its scholarship, Empires and Indigenous Peoples expands our understanding of their historical parallels and raises general questions about the nature of the various imperial encounters. In this book, leading scholars of ancient Roman and early anglophone North America examine the mutual perceptions of the Indigenous and the imperial actors. They investigate the rhetoric of civilization and barbarism and its expression in military policies. Indigenous resistance, survival, and adaptation form a major theme. The essays demonstrate that power relations were endlessly adjusted, identities were framed and reframed, and new mutual knowledge was produced by all participants. Over time, cultures were transformed across the board on political, social, religious, linguistic, ideological, and economic levels. The developments were complex, with numerous groups enmeshed in webs of aggression, opposition, cooperation, and integration. Readers will see how Indigenous and imperial identities evolved in Roman and American lands. Finally, the authors consider how American views of Roman activity influenced the development of American imperial expansion and accompanying Indigenous critiques. They show how Roman, imperial North American, and Indigenous experiences have contributed to American notions of race, religion, and citizenship, and given shape to problems of social inclusion and exclusion today.

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The mechanics of settler colonialism: Leigh Boucher, ‘Mechanics Institutes in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Victoria: Racial Difference and Liberalism in the Settler Colony’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2024

15Jul24

Abstract: In the second half of the nineteenth century, mechanics institutes proliferated across the Australian colonies at such a rate that, by 1900, they were more widespread, proportional to population, than in Britain. This article examines the first 30 years of their development in colonial Victoria to offer a new interpretation of their deep entanglement with settler colonial liberalism. As in Britain, the Victoria mechanics institutes largely failed to deliver technical education to working-class men. However, the men who propelled their proliferation had much wider hopes for their pedagogic function in the settler colony. This article examines how the twin forces of political liberalism and settler colonialism underwrote and shaped mechanics institutes in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. Examining the ideas of colonial liberals who propelled their proliferation and the activities that took place within them, it becomes clear that these institutes were imagined to cultivate certain kinds of settler Britons, capable of bearing the freedoms of an emerging settler modernity. At the same time, moreover, they both legitimated and implemented a settler colonial project of dispossession and demographic replacement. Mechanics institutes, I argue, were thus agents of both settler colonial destruction and liberal cultivation.

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Endurance: Ikuko Asaka, ‘The endurance and expanse of settler colonial history’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

15Jul24

Abstract: This piece is a response to Cyrus Schayegh’s analysis of the political context behind the emergence and foci of Settler Colonial Studies. I explore questions of teleology and geography as they relate to Caribbean history and U.S. militarism.

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The settler colonial apple does not fall far from the tree: Leda Cooks, Ifat Gazia, ‘Food translation under occupation: Apples, identity, and resistance in Indian-occupied Kashmir’, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2024

15Jul24

Abstract: In 2019, Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir was changed from an autonomous region to a union territory by the Indian government. On August 5, 2019 India cut off all internet and phone communication into and out of Kashmir and restricted movement into and out of the country. The shutdown occurred during the height of the apple harvest, and as apples rotted on trees and the harvest was lost, signs of resistance to the shutdown were written on the apples themselves. In this article we explore how apples translate as identity and resistance in the postcolonial context of Indian Occupied Kashmir. Using the communication blackout and ongoing occupation of Kashmir as a focal point, we examine how narratives about apples can be translated as a cultural discourse of agency, even as structured spaces for and means of resistance are increasingly eliminated by the Indian state. Central to our analysis are theoretical frames of translation, postcoloniality, and food system sovereignty and communication. We utilize dialogical narrative analysis as methodology to understand how the meanings of apples, a mundane but central part of everyday life for many, have communicated resistance, identity and agency during the last several years since the shutdown.

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Heritage settler colonialism: Leah Rosenkranz, Jeremy Spoon, Douglas Deur, ‘Unbalanced or Absent: Assessing Indigenous Representation in Interpretive Materials at Government Administered Heritage Sites in Cascadia and Hawai‘i’, Heritage & Society, 2024

15Jul24

Abstract: Unbalanced or absent Indigenous representation in interpretive materials at government administered heritage sites in settler-colonial contexts can create contention and perpetuate a misinformed or one-dimensional visitor experience and historical narrative. This research therefore examines representation in interpretive materials accessible in 2019 at heritage sites with Indigenous ancestral connections in settler-colonial contexts. This study uses 10 U.S. case study heritage sites and two supplementary sites in Washington, Idaho, and Hawai‘i. Researcers utilized participant observation and systematic photography during two 2019 research phases to document interpretive materials. Quantification generated 731 analytic units which were subsequently assessed for the presence of inductively and deductively generated codes. The assembled empirical results illustrate three overarching themes: (1) controlled historical narrative; (2) absence of shared authority; and (3) challenges in representing and/or integrating different ways of knowing. This research contributes to heritage studies and practical heritage site management in two ways: (1) offering a timely multi-sited and multicultural sample of settler-colonial heritage site interpretive materials comparable to other sites; and (2) illustrating empirical trends in interpretive materials that privilege settlers over Indigenous peoples. This research suggests that future interpretation could benefit from a more balanced multivocal approach that recognizes ancestral and contemporary Indigenous homelands and the complexity of Indigenous-settler interactions.

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Feminist settler colonialism? Rebecca J. Sheehan, ‘Settler Colonialism in Black and White: Roberta Sykes, Germaine Greer, and the Different Embodied Experiences of Womanhood, Rape, and Sovereignty’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 49, 4, 2024

15Jul24

Abstract: This article explores the short-lived friendship between white Australian feminist Germaine Greer and Black Australian activist Roberta Sykes. From 1971–73, when both were engaged in transnational public work in Australia, Britain, and the United States, they bonded over their experiences of rape and sexism, their will to change their worlds, and the highs and lows of being activist women. The friendship fractured when Greer published an article about rape that disclosed Sykes’s story without her permission. Sykes articulated her feelings of betrayal in a germinal 1975 article about the violent colonization of Black women in Australia—including by white feminists. For Sykes, the women’s liberation movement’s concern with patriarchy and sexual liberation neglected the experiences of Indigenous women and women of color, ignored colonialism and racism, and bolstered white women’s power. Drawing influences from Indigenous, anticolonial, and Black Power visions of self-determination, Sykes repeatedly testified against the objectification and exploitation of Black women. Fifty years later, however, despite her intervention, and the subsequent contributions of postcolonial and intersectional theories, patriarchy is the hegemonic feminist theory for analyzing rape. By centering Sykes’s context of settler colonialism, this article argues that sovereignty is a more capacious concept than patriarchy for understanding different women’s experiences of rape and conceptualizations of freedom. Applicable for feminist praxis beyond the Australian context, the concept of sovereignty honors First Nations peoples and enables analysis that incorporates diverse perspectives. In doing so it recognizes and promotes rather than undermines women’s self-determination.

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