settler colonial studies blog

Slavery to settler colonialism: Xavier Reader, ‘Transforming fortunes? Personal legacies of British slavery at the making of the Swan River colony’, History Australia, 2024

02Aug24

Abstract: Throughout the Swan River colony’s foundational years, in another sphere of empire, British slavery was gradually being dismantled. This article links these two discrete processes through the biographical case studies of six early emigrants to the Swan River colony with connections to British slavery. Through an exploration of their aspirations and attempts to seek prosperity through emigration, I argue that the Swan River was viewed as a place that could transform fortunes: for some, a means to emulate the successes of their forebears in other British colonies; for others, simply a way to escape the bonds of slavery itself.

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Settler colonial carbon neutrality: Douglas Robb, Philippe Le Billon, Karen Bakker, ‘Landscapes of Recarbonization: Carbon Neutrality, Settler Colonialism, and Cumulative Environmental Effects in the Peace River Region, Canada’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2024

02Aug24

Abstract: Contemporary discourses of net-zero decarbonization (also referred to as carbon neutrality) routinely overlook the landscape transformations required to offset carbon emissions. Conventional analyses also often fail to engage with decarbonization as an inherently spatial process, embedded in landscapes in which the biophysical, socionatural, and political economic dimensions of energy intersect. This creates a conceptual pitfall: the potential to misread and depoliticize strategies of putative decarbonization that might not, in fact, be carbon neutral, particularly when the cumulative effects of broader landscape transformations are considered. To illustrate this pitfall, our analysis queries net-zero decarbonization strategies that arise alongside—and often as a result of—simultaneous investments in fossil fuel production, a process we term recarbonization. We posit recarbonization as a variegated sociospatial phenomenon that materializes through the site-specific interplay between capitalist social relations and biophysical processes. In making this claim, we seek to bridge political economy with concepts of materiality and relationality that, we suggest, enable deeper theoretical engagement with multifaceted landscape transformations entailed by processes of energy transition. Drawing on a case study of the Peace River region in the western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, this article exposes the cumulative environmental effects and ongoing forms of colonial violence of some net-zero decarbonization agendas.

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Mandate to settler colonialism: Dalal Iriqat, ‘Legacy of the British Mandate: Eliminating The Palestinian Right to Self-Determination’, Middle East Policy, 2024

02Aug24

Abstract: In February 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a plan for the “postwar” Gaza Strip that envisions Israel’s military as unilaterally and indefinitely patrolling the enclave while an unnamed third party runs the local government. While even allies like the United States criticized this scheme, Palestine has never enjoyed autonomy as a state, and the institutions and practices of Israel’s far-right government—and even of the Palestinian elite—are rooted in the settler colonialism facilitated by the British mandate, 1922–1948. This period was the first and last time in modern history that Palestinian Arabs and Jews were administered as a single polity, albeit on radically unequal terms. This article examines how international law was used to suppress the Palestinians and privilege the creation of a Jewish state of Israel. The legacy of this regime can be seen in the present-day thwarting of Palestinian self-determination through Israel’s use of the military for civil administration, digital surveillance, and the right-wing agenda for annexation of the West Bank and perpetual war in Gaza.

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Indigenous space cadets? Adam Fish, ‘Planetary media: Decolonizing the space industry through Indigenous ownership’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2024

02Aug24

Abstract: The colonial relationship between Indigenous people and people of European origin has been characterized by conflicts, economic exclusions, and epistemological discriminations as well as the mutual sharing of knowledge, practices, and technologies. In many cases, the industrial development of space technologies such as telescopes and rocket test sites has continued the exploitative nature of colonialism. This article, however, offers a different story and concept of Indigenous decolonization that is not antagonistic but complementary to the space industry and Western liberalism more generally. The case is Space Enterprises, a company and Earth station owned by the Center for Appropriate Technologies in Alice Springs, Northern Territories, Australia and conceived by its Aboriginal owners, workers, and board of directors as representing a beneficial integration of their Indigenous self-determination and the space industry. This essay offers synthetic decolonization as an example of this integration with Western liberalism. Understanding the flows between the Indigenous-owned Earth station and satellites, as well as the connections between Indigenous and Western liberal planetary imaginaries, requires a theory of mediation. Towards that goal, planetary media is offered as a way of conceptualizing the flows of information between local Indigenous and planetary spaces and imaginaries. This essay argues that another decolonization is possible, one based on mediation between Indigenous and Western liberal systems of thought.

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The settler environmental crisis: Ranjan Datta, Jebunnessa Chapola, John Bosco Acharibasam (eds), Indigenous Land-Based Knowledge and SustainabilitySettler Colonialism and the Environmental Crisis, Routledge, 2025

30Jul24

Description: This edited volume explores the crucial intersections between Indigenous Land-Based Knowledge (ILK), sustainability, settler colonialism, and the ongoing environmental crisis. Contributors from cross-cultural communities, including Indigenous, settlers, immigrants, and refugee communities, discuss why ILK and practice hold great potential for tackling our current environmental crises, particularly addressing the settler colonialism that contributes towards the environmental challenges faced in the world. The authors offer insights into sustainable practices, biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation, and sustainable land management and centre Indigenous perspectives on ILK as a space to practise, preserve, and promote Indigenous cultures. With case studies spanning topics as diverse as land acknowledgements, land-based learning, Indigenous-led water governance, and birth evacuation, this book shows how our responsibility for ILK can benefit collectively by fostering a more inclusive, sustainable, and interconnected world. Through the promotion of Indigenous perspectives and responsibility towards land and community, this volume advocates for a shift in paradigm towards more inclusive and sustainable approaches to environmental sustainability. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental sociology, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous studies.

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The settler nation takes place: Katherine Szadziewicz Scharfenberg, Nations Taking Place: Unsettling Geographies in Indigenous and American Literatures, PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2024

30Jul24

Abstract: “Nations Taking Place: Unsettling Geographies in Indigenous and American Literatures” considers the resistant, political, and affective power of geographic discourse in North America produced in the decades before and after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830—that is, roughly between the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War (the late 1760s) and the decade preceding the Civil War (the mid 1850s). This study explores how geographic discourse simultaneously produced and unsettled social models for different kinds of communities. My analysis is particularly interested in how Native people used settler geographic discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way to resist colonialist violence and assert Native sovereignty. I also examine the central formal literary features—such as irony and narrative cohesion—that provide the mode of expression to demonstrate geographic discourse’s formally disruptive potential. The archive of “Nations Taking Place” includes treaty literature and other diplomatic writings, natural history, Native life-writing, and novels and poetry by Indigenous and settler writers including Hendrick Aupaumut (Mohican), Thomas Jefferson, William Apess (Pequot), John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseudonym), and Mary Jemison (adopted Seneca).

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Land and genocide: Mikalla N. Freisinger, Unveiling Environmental Injustice: Exploring the Genocidal Consequences of Settler Colonialism on Navajo Land, MA dissertation, Northern Arizona University, 2024

30Jul24

Abstract: This thesis project investigates the historical trajectory and contemporary implications of colonial environmental destruction on the Navajo reservation in North America, focusing specifically on the detrimental effects of uranium mining. Three central research questions guide this inquiry: (1) What is the historical context of colonial environmental destruction on the Navajo reservation? (2) How has colonial environmental destruction harmed the residents on the Navajo reservation? (3) How can the ways settlers have obscured the harms done on the Navajo reservation be explained by theories of racial capitalism, environmental racism, and state corporate crime, as it relates to environmental genocide? Utilizing a historical approach informed by critical Indigenous theory, this research draws upon a diverse range of secondary data sources. Through this lens, the research uncovers the deep-rooted patterns of colonial exploitation and environmental degradation on Navajo lands. The findings reveal the multifaceted impacts of colonial environmental destruction on Navajo communities, including adverse health effects, cultural displacement, and ecological degradation. Furthermore, the study elucidates how settler interests have often aligned with state and corporate entities, as well as perpetuated environmental injustices through mechanisms of racial capitalism, environmental racism, state corporate crime and human right violations. By contextualizing these findings this research underscores the urgent need for environmental justice approaches that center Indigenous sovereignty, community resilience, and restitution for past injustices. It calls for recognition of the ongoing battle of colonial exploitation and a commitment to transformative action to address systemic inequalities and environmental injustices faced by many Indigenous communities.

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Plain settlers: Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders, University of Nebraska Press, 2024

29Jul24

Description: Great Plains Homesteaders tells the epic story of how millions of people, white and Black, women and men, young and old, and of many different religions, languages, and ethnic groups, moved to the Great Plains to claim land. Most were poor, so the government’s offer of “free” farms through the Homestead Act of 1862 seemed a godsend. The settlers found harsh growing conditions and many perils—including exploitation by railroads and banks, droughts, prairie fires, and bitter winters—yet they persisted. The settlers successfully “proved up” nearly a million claims between the 1860s and the 1920s. They filled up the immense grassland, transforming it into productive farms, the beginning of the region’s agriculture. They also created a distinct culture that continues to shape their estimated fifty million descendants living today. Every homesteader’s experience was different, as particular and distinct as the people were themselves. Yet their collective story, with all its hardships and toil, its ambitions and setbacks, its fresh starts and failures and successes, is central to the American experience.

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Deliberative democracy against settler democracy: Roger Davis, ‘Rethinking Australian democracy as a deliberative system’, AlterNative, 2024

28Jul24

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between Australia’s Indigenous and settler colonial systems of democracy through the lens of deliberative systems theory. It suggests that the ongoing effects of colonialism have rendered Indigenous democracy largely invisible causing a harmful divide in Australia’s democracies. A pluralist conception of democracy is necessary to understand the disconnect between the two systems, evidenced by a striking absence of literature on Australian Indigenous democracy. In response, this paper first theorizes a conceptual framework of a concurrent deliberative system, then describes the Indigenous deliberative system and the colonial system’s efforts to eliminate Indigenous democracy. Against this theoretical and empirical background, it considers whether the recent referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament was just a colonial legacy or represented a pathway towards a shared postcolonial democratic future.

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Settler engineering: Tyler McCreary, Frank Schmitz, ‘Engineering indigenous dispossession and plantation slavery in the Southeast Gulf coast’, Journal of Historical Geography, 86, 2024, pp. 107-116

28Jul24

Abstract: In this paper we examine the activities of US Army topographers and engineers in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) watershed during the violent transformation of the region from the heartlands of the Creek confederacy to US territorial control. A vital waterway for the Creek in the late eighteenth century, the rivers would become an important transportation network in the US plantation economy by the early nineteenth century. We emphasize that the army made its initial infrastructural improvements in the region to provide security for the plantation system. Army engineering in the ACF watershed began in the struggle for the Gulf borderlands, as white American settlers, British forces, Indigenous peoples, and Black maroons fought for control over the contested terrain. US engineers and topographers produced territorial knowledge and physical infrastructure to facilitate the occupation of Indigenous territory and elimination of potential spaces of Black freedom. Topographic knowledge would later serve as the foundation for restructuring the land as property, naturalizing its possession by white plantation owners. Similarly, roads and waterway improvements, created to facilitate troop movements, would later serve as vital transportation infrastructure for settlement and expanding plantation slavery. This paper demonstrates how military engineering techniques designed to secure the Nation in the context of race war subsequently provided the coordinates for reorganizing the land within an emergent plantation economy inside its territorial borders.

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