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Paraguayan indigeneities: Henryk Gąska, ‘Paraguayan Indigenism since Barbados I . The Catholic Church and Indigenous Peoples in Paraguay’, Anthropos, 119, 1, 2024, pp. 93-102

18Jun24

Abstract: One of the actors in the field of Paraguayan indigenism is the Catholic Church. The article focuses on relations between the Catholic Church and indigenous peoples in reference to the Declaration of Barbados I (1971). The Declaration, as well as the Document of Asunción (1972), had a game-changing impact on Paraguayan indigenism. Its “fruits” include the Marandú Project and the subsequent legal struggle for indigenous land rights. Both documents also inspired new legislation, such as the Statute on Indigenous Communities, the Law 904/81, the new Paraguayan National Constitution of 1992, the Indigenous Education Law 3231/07 and the Indigenous Health Law 5,469/15 – with their respective regulations. The Catholic Church significantly contributed also to the political and legal process of promoting autonomy and self-determination of indigenous peoples of Paraguay. Furthermore, the author also discusses the missionary project of formation of indigenous leadership in the shifting political and social settings. The resulting introduction of an intercultural diploma for native teachers and legal training for elected indigenous leaders help to face new challenges to economic and religious life of native communities, especially in urban contexts.


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Nice settlers (still settlers): Miguel Montalva Barba, White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space, Bristol University Press, 2024

14Jun24

Description: This book examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies. The author focuses on the White residents of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which, according to the Cooks Political Report Partisan Voting Index, is the most liberal district in the state and 15th in the United States of America. The book uses settler colonialism and critical race theory to explore how self-identified progressive White residents perceive their gentrifying neighborhood and how they make sense of their positionality. Using the extended case method, as well as in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis and visual/media analysis, the author reveals how systemic racialized inequality persists even in a politically progressive borough.


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Settler colonialism is quite unhealthy (some data): Nicole A. Thomas, Settler Colonial Determinants Of Indigenous Health: Relationship Between Indigenous Women’s Level Of Allostatic Load And High Blood Pressure During Pregnancy, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2024

14Jun24

Abstract: There is a dearth of comprehensive literature relevant to the relationship between settler colonialism and health outcomes of Indigenous peoples residing in the United States (U.S.). Critical analysis of settler colonial determinants of Indigenous health will help to further shape discourse, research priorities, and policy relevant to Indigenous population health and disease distribution. This thesis will bring awareness to settler colonialism, propose relationships between settler colonialism and health outcomes, and identify specific settler colonial determinants of Indigenous health to help guide development and use of nursing theory. This dissertation argues that the structure of settler colonialism threatens and implicates the health of Indigenous peoples residing in colonized nations. The dissertation supports Patrick Wolfe’s assertion that settler colonialism is a current-day structure of elimination and will build upon this notion by providing analyses to identify pathways, processes, and determinants of the embodiment of settler colonialism. The project further encourages readers to identify the presence and influence of Eurocentric power relationships between structural and systemic settler colonial determinants and Indigenous peoples, often resulting in oppressive and traumatic experiences. The exposure to exogenous hazards and continual stress and trauma resulting from settler colonialism may lead to high levels of allostatic load and/or epigenetic dysregulation. For example, Indigenous women in particular are affected by settler colonialism which may result in disproportionate maternal health disparities such as high blood pressure during pregnancy. This project will increase understanding and awareness of settler colonialism as a current-day structure and a significant determinant of Indigenous health. This dissertation consists of three manuscripts. The first manuscript is a literature review that informed the development of a conceptual framework identifying six settler colonial determinants of Indigenous health. Frameworks describing how the structural determinants of settler colonialism result in historical and cultural trauma, and negatively impact health outcomes via biological and social pathways, have not been developed. Therefore, I identified six interconnected settler colonial determinants of Indigenous health that I hypothesize will result in the embodiment of settler colonialism and ultimately lead to adverse health outcomes, such as hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP). The six determinants are historical context, land, environmental justice, culture, settler-colonial societal context, and structural violence. The second manuscript is a published literature review that explores the processes and pathways of the embodiment of historical trauma secondary to settler colonialism of Indigenous peoples. Guided by EcoSocial Theory, Historical Trauma Theory, and the Allostatic Load (AL) Model, this literature review provides evidence that sources of stress rooted in experiences of historical trauma resulting from the structure of settler colonialism should be investigated as sources of stress for women who are vulnerable to experiencing settler colonialism. The third manuscript documents the results of a secondary data analysis from the Strong Heart Study (SHS) that investigates the relationship between Indigenous women’s level of AL and high blood pressure during pregnancy. This secondary analysis is a quantitative, retrospective, cross-sectional, cohort design analysis using data from the Phase IV Strong Heart Study. Given that Indigenous women are at risk of experiencing settler colonialism and experience greater maternal health disparities than most all other racial/ethnic groups, I examined relationships among high blood pressure during pregnancy, AL, and factors of culture. I selected variables of settler colonialism, historical trauma, and cultural trauma (i.e., loss of access to traditional values/cultures, and native lifestyle) for this secondary analysis based on findings from the first two manuscripts. This dissertation concludes with a final chapter that describes implications for theory, policy, nursing practice, and further research. Evidence generated from this dissertation has the potential to move the nursing field forward in ways that can lead to broad, transformative impacts for Indigenous communities. It further provides a theoretical foundation for advancing nursing knowledge and guiding future research studies.


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A Chinese Christian colony in Sarawak: Ivy Kenneth Janson, Shifting Sovereignties: Sovereignty Production across the New Fuzhou Settler-Colonial Environment in Sarawak in the Early Twentieth Century (1901-1935), MA dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2024

14Jun24

Abstract: This thesis examines the Indigenous Iban and the New Fuzhou settlers of the Lower Rejang Valley in Sarawak, presently Malaysia, at the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of Silverstein’s theory of sovereignty production. Specifically, this thesis examines the ways in which sovereignty production methods changed from 1901 to 1935. The Iban lost access to their traditional forms of sovereignty production through nomadic rice cultivation due to government policy and economic incentives, but maintained a distinct identity through rubber profits and the perpetuation of oral genealogies. Meanwhile, the New Fuzhou settlers originally sought to reproduce the Southern Chinese agrarian countryside supplemented by liberal Christian values, but ecological conditions and a new American Missionary leader resulted in a new Christian-Capitalist sovereignty expressed through cash crop production and joint-stock corporations. Sovereignty production and how it changes helps recognize non-traditional expressions of agency among all groups present in settler-colonial environments.


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Nakba as legal concept (also on settler colonialism as a legal category): Rabea Eghbariah, ‘Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept’, Columbia Law Review, 124, 4, 2024, pp. 887-991

10Jun24

Abstract: The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination. This Article introduces Nakba as a legal concept to resolve this tension. Meaning “Catastrophe” in Arabic, the term “al-Nakba” (ةᚁالنك (is often used to refer to the ruinous process of establishing the State of Israel in Palestine. But the Nakba has undergone a metamorphosis; it has evolved from a historical calamity into a brutally sophisticated structure of oppression. This ongoing Nakba includes episodes of genocide and variants of apartheid but remains rooted in a historically and analytically distinct foundation, structure, and purpose. This Article therefore proposes to distinguish apartheid, genocide, and Nakba as different, yet overlapping, modalities of crimes against humanity. It first identifies Zionism as Nakba’s ideological counterpart and insists on understanding these concepts as mutually constitutive. Considering the limits of existing legal frameworks, this Article goes on to analyze the legal anatomy of the ongoing Nakba. It positions displacement as the Nakba’s foundational violence, fragmentation as its structure, and the denial of self-determination as its purpose. Taken together, these elements give substance to a concept in the making that may prove useful in other contexts as well.


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Settler colonial cowboy: Beenash Jafri, ‘Native Survivance and the Violent Pleasures of Resignifying the Cowboy’, American Quarterly, 76, 2, 2024, pp. 311-322

10Jun24

Excerpt: Cowboy takes up the entirety of this small museum and is divided into three sections, each on a full floor: on the main floor, “Mythmaking” prompts us to reflect on the cowboy as myth; on the second floor, “From Fantasy to Lived Experience” shifts the focus from the myth of the cowboy to the cowboy as worker and rodeo performer; and in the basement, “Reimagining the Past, Present, and Future” presents artists speculating on the futures made possible through creative engagement with the cowboy and its associated histories. By foregrounding the cowboy as a site of myth and meaning-making—for example, through the placement of “Mythmaking” on the main floor—the curators suggest that the primary problem plaguing the cowboy imaginary is its narrow scope, which makes particular representations more prominent than others. The exhibit expands or opens up these narrow/short-sighted/stereotypical perceptions by offering more authentic representations of the cowboy. Yet its design and organization—which emphasizes the cowboy as a multifaceted and multicultural figure—has the simultaneous effect of downplaying the historical and material conditions of settler colonialism and imperialism that make the cowboy so ubiquitous. The exhibit thus exemplifies the disjunct between frameworks of multiculturalism and decolonization. However, if we consider the exhibit from the vantage point of Indigenous and settler colonial studies, it becomes clear that even if a variety of actors engage with the cowboy, they do so precisely because it is embedded in the US settler colonial project.


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A history of (settler colonial) violence: Sami Lakomäki, ‘Talking about violence: bloody stories and colonialism in Sápmi, ca. 1600-1900’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 2024

10Jun24

Abstract: From the seventeenth century well into the twentieth violent stories depicting ancient conflicts between the Sámi and their neighbours circulated widely in and around Sápmi. Narratives about battles and raids were produced and consumed for different purposes by diverse narrators and audiences employing various media. This article investigates how these violent narratives became embedded in Swedish and Finnish colonialism in Sápmi between 1600 and 1900. It argues that the stories offered various groups a platform for discussing issues troubling them in their own colonial present. Three themes were of pivotal importance to the storytellers and their audiences: the meaning of colonial conquest, Sámi survivance, and the boundaries separating Sámi from non-Sámi.


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Mutual belonging against bsettler colonialism: Brenda Nicolas, ‘Pertenencia Mutua: Indigenous Oaxacans Contesting Settler Colonial Grammars’, American Quarterly, 76, 2, 2024, pp. 241-271

10Jun24

Abstract: Drawing on settler colonial grammar of place, the colonial practice of naming and renaming Native land through mapmaking processes that historically deny, erase, and homogenize Indigenous communities, this essay argues that Indigenous Oaxacans disrupt settler colonial renaming of land by engaging in their community’s collective understanding of pertenencia mutua (mutual belonging)—an Indigenous Oaxacan relational consciousness of belonging across Abya Yala (“the Americas”) that allows them to recognize their role as Indigenous visitors on Native land and as Native to Abya Yala. Theorizing through pertenencia mutua offers a deep understanding of Indigenous efforts to (re)build communities in their struggle against settler colonial violence, including through naming practices and grammar of place. Using semistructured interviews, oral histories, and social media content, I analyze how Indigenous Oaxacan young adults engage on the ground and on social media to unsettle colonially named places by placing their identity and their own communities in relational existence. Such unsettlings call for the retheorization of place.


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The utopia of Indigenous/nonindigenous insurgencies: Japhy Wilson, ‘Chronicle of an Insurgent Utopia’, in Jorge León Casero, Julia Urabayen (eds), Rethinking Democracy for Post-Utopian Worlds, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 193-206

10Jun24

Abstract: In contrast to the utopian fantasies of the state, an insurgent utopia surges up from below rather than being imposed from above and is rooted in the urgency of immediate necessity, rather than in technocratic dreams of perfect social order. This chapter chronicles the emergence of an insurgent utopia in the oil-producing region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. It begins with a process of radical awakening to the deepening socio-ecological crisis of the region, which confronted the population with the Real of capitalist development in the form of despoiled landscapes, ruined livelihoods, rampant diseases, and vast disparities of wealth and power. The recognition of a common struggle against seemingly impossible odds dissolved the differences between the settler and Indigenous populations and united them in a community of the dispossessed. This unity took the material form of an uprising that jammed the gears of capital accumulation and forced the redirection of oil rents to the region. But those involved in the uprising do not describe it as a bitter struggle for economic justice, but as a carnivalesque inversion of reality, in which the established order was abruptly inverted, and the utopian dimension of egalitarian freedom was directly lived by those with nothing left to lose.


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Antisettler blockades: Peter Nyers, ‘Decolonizing blockades: Settler-citizen solidarities with indigenous blockades’, Politics and Space C, 2024

09Jun24

Abstract: In the Winter 2020, Canada witnessed an extraordinary number of blockades and solidarity
protests in support of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. The Wet’suwet’en had for years been fighting
against the construction of an oil pipeline across their traditional territories. After a police raid
dismantled their blockade, the traditional chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en issued a call for solidarity and
support. The response was overwhelming with an enormous number of solidarity actions, including
blockades of critical infrastructure, organized across Canada and internationally. This paper
critically examines how settler-citizens engaged in acts of solidarity with Indigenous people, with a
particular focus on how these acts of solidarity can contribute to the decolonization of Canadian
citizenship. Since the Wet’suwet’en struggle involved the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, the
solidarity actions of Canadians raise important questions about the meaning of settler forms of
citizenship. This paper takes a relational and decolonial perspective on solidarity blockades. Such an
approach allows us to ask questions that are outside the scope of assessments concerned with the
efficacy of a particular blockading action. The paper investigates the forms of solidarity found at the
blockades, noting that a wide range of antagonistic, agonistic, and spatio-temporal relations were
enacted at the various blockading actions. These relations allowed for a contentious production of
new political subjectivities, collectivities, and citizenships.


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