settler colonial studies blog

Settler moral ecologies: Heather B. Trigg, Stephen A. Mrozowski, ‘Dominion and improvement: The moral ecologies of colonial encounters’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 2024

06Aug24

Abstract: Environmental relationships were critical to most early colonial encounters, especially for those involving permanent settlements. The ability to successfully establish a colony required developing relationships with plants, animals, and the land because they were central to providing for the colonists’ basic subsistence needs. The ways European colonizers developed these new relationships rested on their moral ecologies, a mix of beliefs and practices which give a sense of right and wrong to actions that are informed by ontologies. In this paper we use the concept of moral ecologies to explore the relationships that two empires—the British in New England and the Spanish in New Mexico—created as they established colonies that also entangled Indigenous peoples. The differences in moral ecologies between these empires and the peoples they invaded help explain tensions in the past that remain powerful today.

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Settler representations: Brian Buud, News Framing of Indigenous Politics in Canada: Representation in the Era of Reconciliation, Palgrave, 2024

06Aug24

Description: This book explores the news media’s coverage of Indigenous-settler reconciliation following the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Using a comparative case study research design, the book examines news coverage of three significant Indigenous rights issues and events during the post-TRC era. The findings presented demonstrate that in the post-TRC era, the Canadian news media continue to produce systemic patterns in coverage which reject, marginalize and erase the territorial rights and claims of Indigenous Peoples. The author concludes that rather than helping to move the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and settlers forward along a path of reconciliation, power-sharing, and the resurgence of land-based self-determination, the news media are continuing to construct discourses and representations that work against the political objectives of Indigenous Peoples and reinforce settler colonial power relationships in Canada.

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Cynophiliac settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Gaza’s underdogs: From zoometrics to domicide’, Political Geography, 114, 2024, #103162

06Aug24

Excerpt: Images of Israeli soldiers saving dogs and cats buried in rubble by explosions have become popular in the Israeli press and social media in the current round of violence in Gaza. But what can be gleaned from the fact that no images circulate that depict Israeli soldiers digging Palestinian children out of the rubble? How does Israel’s empathy toward dogs and cats in Gaza relate to statements by Israeli officials describing Gazans as hayot-adam, a term that translates to “animal-humans” and is used colloquially in Hebrew to refer to beasts or savages? And how might animal survival and animal death help us understand the shifting meaning of humanness and humaneness amid the ongoing violence in Gaza?

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Antarctica’s settler colonial traditions: Alice E. Oates, ‘Settler colonial mindsets at Halley research station, 1955–present’, in Peder Roberts, Alejandra Mancilla (eds), Colonialism and Antarctica: Attitudes, logics and practices, Manchester University Press, 2024, pp. 248-270

06Aug24

Abstract: Colonialism is an area of growing interest for Antarctic scholars, but settler colonialism has so far received only minimal attention. This chapter utilises interviews with over-winterers from Halley research station, a British station on the Brunt Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, to argue that viewing British Antarctic activity within the broader context of settler colonialism can expand our understanding of the operation of Antarctic science and governance. Drawing on literature dealing with British colonial philosophies, settler colonial studies, and Antarctic humanities and social sciences, this chapter questions definitions of settler colonialism dependent on the dispossession of Indigenous people and focuses instead on appropriation of space as an explanatory factor in British settler colonialism in Antarctica. It identifies threads of a settler colonial mentality among Antarctic over-winterers, and in doing so contributes to scholarship that calls for a focus on the micro-history of settler colonialism, and seeks to situate Antarctica within the geopolitical context beyond 60o south.

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Genocide, the latest stage of a dying settler colonialism: Faris Giacaman, ‘Netanyahu’s willing executioners: how ordinary Israelis became mass murderers: After ten months of relentless genocidal war, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that both the Israeli state and society are partners in the genocide. The picture that emerges is a genocide from above and below’, Mondoweiss, 30/07/24

03Aug24

Excerpt: Drawing historical analogies is always tricky, not least because political regimes and their underlying motivations for carrying out atrocities during war vary wildly. The kind of imperial German racial supremacy that was part of the genocide of European Jewry was different from the settler colonial imperative of the “elimination of the native” that characterized the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by European colonists, or indeed the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 or the Gaza genocide today. But despite these differences, a common thread still runs through them, and so drawing these comparisons becomes unavoidable.

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Land grabbing settler colonialism: Elizabeth McKenzie, Ian Mosby, ‘Reconciling the Ledger: The Rupert’s Land Purchase, Settler Capitalism, and Indigenous Dispossession on the Prairies’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 34, 1, 2024, pp. 105-139

03Aug24

Abstract: This article examines one of the greatest land grabs in history and what may represent one of the single greatest transfers of wealth from Indigenous peoples to a private company: the so-called Rupert’s Land Purchase of 1870. By comparing the lands and money given to the Hudson’s Bay Company following Confederation for the transfer of Rupert’s Land to Canada with the lands and money set aside for First Nations signatories of Treaties 1–7 (1871–77) and the Métis Nation under the Manitoba Act of 1870, we attempt to establish what this looked like in material terms. In addition to highlighting the scale of wealth dispossession that occurred in both quantitative and qualitative terms, this article is primarily concerned with Canada’s actual implementation of these agreements. In recognizing the treaties beyond their written documents, this article seeks to challenge some of the popular narratives surrounding the Rupert’s Land Purchase and its significance in histories of stolen Indigenous land and wealth.

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Settler inflexibility (we knew this already): Eli Osheroff, ‘Settling a State-Settling for a State: Reinterpreting One Hundred Years of Zionist–Arab Relations’, Palestine/Israel Review, 2024

03Aug24

Abstract: In recent years, a more coherent, widespread critique of Zionism as a form of settler colonialism has developed in Western academia. Despite its critical assumptions regarding Zionism, this conversation has yet to influence one of the core images of the Zionist-Arab encounter, mainly that of Palestinian intransigence versus Zionist political flexibility. According to this stereotypical image, these contrasting political characteristics played a central role in allowing a Jewish state to be established in a large part of historical Palestine, while an Arab one did not materialize. By examining political encounters between Zionists and Palestinians over the course of more than a hundred years, this article shows that, in fact, Palestinian leadership and Palestinians generally were willing to settle for an internationally recognized Arab-Palestinian state at key points. By contrast, Zionists usually exhibited greater ambivalence toward the idea of a recognized state, preferring to settle for something else, mainly expansionism. By adopting a counterintuitive approach, this article seeks to contrast the colonial dimension of Zionism with the more flexible and ultimately more state-and norm-oriented quality of Palestinian nationalism.

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Settler nationalism and Indigenous self-determination: Etienne Cardin-Trudeau, ‘Transforming settler nationalism in Québec: Recovering the principles of the historical treaties’, Nations and Nationalism, 2024

03Aug24

Abstract: The settler nature of Québécois society makes it a distinct case of minority nationalism. Québec’s claim of selfdetermination is necessarily more complex and intricately woven with parallel claims from the Indigenous peoples of the territory. This paper argues, first, that Québécois society holds significant obligations toward Indigenous peoples reflected in the commitments made in the historical French treaties and second, that the normative principles embedded in those treaties should be used to transform the relationships it holds with Indigenous peoples and Québec’s nationalist project itself. Overall, the paper suggests that Québécois nationalism needs to move away from settler colonialism by considering more seriously the shared nature of the territory it purports to have sovereignty over and by upholding the principles that allowed settlers to stay on the land.

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Garden, gendered settler colonialism: Erela Teharlev Ben-Shachar, Tamar Novick, ‘Vegetable women: Agricultural education, indigenous knowledge, and becoming settlers in early twentieth century Palestine’, Endeavour, 48, 2, 2024

02Aug24

Abstract: This paper deals with agricultural training for Jewish women settlers in Palestine, and focuses on the first school established by the Jewish botanist and settler Hannah Meisel in 1911. The school was modeled after European schools for horticulture, but grew to serve the settler community and students’ need to overcome financial challenges as well as the gendered structure of the labor force. As they pursued agricultural work, proximity to the land, and native status, the women taking part in the training program ultimately combined ideas about scientific progress and European theoretical foundations with Palestinian indigenous knowledge and practices. By appropriating Palestinian agricultural techniques and adopting vegetables as the main sphere of work and production, women settlers both struggled to shift gendered social hierarchies and became deeply involved in the settler-colonial project.

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It’s not rocket science (it’s political science): Morgan Mowatt, Matthew Wildcat, Gina Starblanket, ‘Indigenous Sovereignty and Political Science: Building an Indigenous Politics Subfield’, Annual Review of Political Science, 27, 2024, pp. 301-316

02Aug24

Abstract: Scholarship from the nascent subfield of Indigenous politics illuminates an enduring tension between Indigenous politics and political science. Settler colonialism continues to configure the contemporary politics of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in profound ways that political science has been slow to grapple with. In a related concern, political science has little ability to engage in Indigenous knowledge production. This article reviews the structural exclusion of Indigenous knowledge despite increased inclusion of Indigenous scholarship and argues that Indigenous understandings of settler colonialism, sovereignty, and authority hold the potential to reconfigure political science’s approach to Indigenous politics in research and teaching. This reconfiguration will not only impact the development of the Indigenous politics subfield but also expand the analytic potential of political science more broadly.

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