settler colonial studies blog

Environmentalism as settler colonialism: George Zachariah, ‘Unsettling Environmentalism: Decolonial Musings, International Review of Mission, 113, 1, 2024, pp. 23-38

04Jun24

Abstract: Decolonial ecological imaginations entail a critical interrogation of mainstream environmentalism to unmask and unsettle it. These reflections expose how mainstream environmentalism legitimizes and perpetuates the colonization of the Earth and subaltern and Indigenous communities. Mainstream environmentalism is a colonial project to perpetuate the interests of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. This calls for a new search for decolonial and alternative ecological reimagination, informed by the epistemologies and eco-politics of the Indigenous and subaltern communities and other grassroots social movements. Decolonial ecological imaginations involve the task of contesting and unsettling settler colonialism, extractive/exploitative capitalism, white supremacy, and all ideologies and practices of domination and exclusion.

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Systems change against settler colonialism? Tom Johnson, Tanya Allport, Amohia Boulton, ‘Te Ruru: Co-creating an Indigenous Systems Change Framework’, Journal of Awareness-Base Systems Change, 4, 1, 2024, pp. 49-75

04Jun24

Abstract: Indigenous cultures have long-held perspectives that emphasise the interdependence of all living things as holistic systems. Our worldview is thus shaped by deeply embedded relationality, which is in constant response to our interconnected experiences and knowledges. Systems thinking is a way of looking at the world that recognises the interconnectedness of both natural and humanmade systems. The systems change approach, which takes into account the interconnected nature of the world’s economic, social, and ecological systems, finds common ground with an inclusive, connected Indigenous holistic world view. This article explores the congruence and compatibility between systems change thinking and Indigenous frameworks, emphasizing their common ground. The article introduces an example from Aotearoa New Zealand, which has integrated the tenets of systems change methodology within tribally based principles and aspirations to create ‘Te Ruru”. Te Ruru, an Indigenous framework of systems change, has been designed by a tribally owned Māori (Indigenous peoples of New Zealand) health research centre to investigate the overarching system(s) that perpetuate inequity of Māori health outcomes. Te Ruru is depicted in three parts: the first part, or micro lens; the second part, the macro lens; and part three, the meso lens. The first part of the framework prioritizes Indigenous identities and values. In part two, Te Ruru’s beak, eyes, and wings symbolize the translation of research findings, strategic oversight, and the ability to navigate systems change. The third part of the framework illustrates the goal of new mātauranga and the need to address internal barriers and traumas, emphasizing the necessity for healing and restoration to sustain long-term systems change. A case study of how Te Ruru has been used in conjunction with a research methodology (TUI) is also included. Te Ruru has been purposefully adapted from a specific tribe’s knowledge and iterated to represent not just the visible system(s) that Māori communities occupy, but also the ‘unseen’ within Indigenous and colonial histories. Using systems change from an intentional Indigenous paradigm is thereby an act of decolonisation—a direct act against the systems currently blocking Indigenous flourishing. Te Ruru’s transformational power lies in its ability to bring to the surface the seen and unseen, and thereby support Māori to take the helm to lead systemic change via the Indigenous translation of inclusive health research.

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If the agricultural sector does not follow the logic of elimination, but elimination happens elsewhere or later, it’s still settler colonialism: Matan Kaminer, ‘”No foreign workers, no agriculture, no region”: Thai farmworkers in Israel in the wake of war’, Global Labour Journal, 15, 2, 2024, pp. 126-129

04Jun24

Excerpt: There is perhaps no more paradigmatically settler-colonial activity than agriculture, especially in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Zionist strategists perceived the takeover of farmland from indigenous cultivators as a primary goal of their colonising project, pursuing it eagerly through purchase until the war of 1948, and primarily through violence since then. More than an economic sector, agriculture has served a strategic role in consolidating control over broad stretches of frontier, as well as the ideological purpose of emblematising the Jewish people’s return to its land. However, pace the emergent orthodoxy in settler-colonial studies – which has recently been subjected to strident critiques, not least in the Palestinian/Israeli context – Israeli agriculture has not, for the most part, been characterised by an “eliminationist” attitude towards indigenous labour or by a serious commitment to exclusively employing the labour of settlers. In fact, Israeli agriculture, like other low-wage sectors of the economy, has nearly always depended on Palestinian labour. When the First Intifada of 1987 to 1991 convinced Israeli policymakers that this dependency was dangerous, their response was to replace it not with the more expensive labour of Israeli citizens, but with the similarly cheap and skilled labour of migrant workers. The farm sector would quickly come to recruit the bulk of its workforce from Thailand, while continuing to employ thousands of Palestinians.

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Settler foodways: Rodolfo Alvarez, Aubrey Hernandez, ‘Exploring Texas German Foodways’, Migrant Knowledge, 16/05/24

03Jun24

Excerpt: Modern America is a land of rich diversity, especially regarding food. Americans with strong ethnic identity take pride in their ethnic cuisine. The diversity of U.S. food is reflected both in the household and the expansive restaurant industry. However, early Texas German settlers entered a world very different from our own. These settlers found themselves on the frontier, far from the domesticated urban centers of the East Coast and Europe. As Texas Germans adapted to their new home, they had to change their eating habits, creating new foods and adjusting old recipes, ultimately, also impacting modern American foodways.

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A settler’s paradise: Robert Aquinas McNally, Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness, University of Nebraska Press, 2024

03Jun24

Description: John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States’ vision of itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. That vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had inhabited and managed those same lands, in many cases for millennia. Muir argued for the preservation of wild sanctuaries that would offer spiritual enlightenment to the conquerors, not to the conquered Indigenous peoples who had once lived there. ‘Somehow’, he wrote, ‘they seemed to have no right place in the landscape’.

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A settlers’ paradise: Chhavi Mathur, Paradise Found: The Settler Colonial Legacy of Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, MA dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2024

03Jun24

Abstract: The Okanagan Valley of British Columbia is often depicted in Canadian settler culture as an oasis in a desert, or a Garden of Eden, thanks to its exceptional climate and semi-arid shrub steppe biome. With its fruit, tourism, and wine industries, it is best known today as place of leisure and plenty. This idyllic and utopic image of the place is, however, complicated by the complex history of its cultural and material landscape. The Okanagan idealized by Canadians is, in fact, the traditional unceded territory of, primarily, the Syilx people. Since the late 19th century, through successive phases of settler colonialism in the Okanagan, the material and cultural landscape of the area has been written over, reshaped, transformed, and remains contested in many ways. This thesis contributes to a discussion on the making of environmental cultures through an ecocritical reading of the role of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine – with a focus on the years 1959-1983 when it was funded by the provincial government – in shaping the idealized narrative and landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan Valley that persist to this day. The visual and textual analysis of the magazine is framed by the socio-political, economic, and material history of the region from the mid to late decades of the 20th century. While international tourists were presumably the primary audience of the magazine, this thesis argues that the magazine also served the province’s campaign to attract Anglophone migrants and to ‘sell’ British Columbia and more specifically the Okanagan as an idyllic home for white settler populations. It traces and uncovers some of the recurring aesthetic tropes that have constructed and framed both the British Columbian landscape generally and within that, the Okanagan Valley, as an idyllic place to live. It contrasts the white settler colonial landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan with Indigenous imaginations of the place. It brings out the fault lines and contradictions between the imposed settler aesthetic and the material affordances of the environment.

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The genocidal context: The Society for Social Studies of Science, Palestine Forum, 2024

03Jun24

Contents:

Working Group on War on Genocide
Preamble
The Algorithmically Accelerated Killing Machine
Lucy Suchman
Land, People, and Palestine: Lessons From Jewish Genetics
Noah Tamarkin
Resistance is Fertile: No Reproductive Justice Without Freedom for Palestine
Michal Nahman, Sigrid Vertommen, Rodante van der Waal, Rishita Nandagiri, Elif Gül, Weeam Hammoudeh, and Fatimah Mohamied
An Ode to Gazans
Jess Bier
Mapping a Catastrophe
Christine Leuenberger

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The settler colonial context: Sharri Plonski, ‘Introduction: Decolonizing Palestine—the content of liberation’, International Politics, 2024

03Jun24

Excerpt: In May 2021, in response to ongoing expulsions of Palestinians from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah—and later, against the bombs falling on Gaza—Palestinians/Palestine called for unity. They marched in streets on both sides of the Green Line, they arrived at Al-Aqsa, they stood in solidarity around the world, and they marched on and beyond borders. And they imagined new liberated futures.

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Dispossessing for settler sport: Shawn Forde, Audrey R. Giles, Rochelle Stewart-Withers, Steven Rynne, Jeremy Hapeta, Lyndsay Hayhurst, Daniel Henhawk, ‘Sport for Reconciliation? Federal Sport Policy in Settler-Colonial States’, The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 15, 1, 2024

03Jun24

Abstract: In settler-colonial contexts, the use of sport for reconciliation (SFR) has received increasing attention from national governments and their sporting agencies, though researchers have yet to track the development of SFR across settler colonial contexts. In this study, we examined how government sport policies in Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand frame understandings of reconciliation.
Through the application of both policy and frame analysis to 82 documents from 1970s to 2020, we argue that policy framings have shifted from presenting Indigenous peoples as a homogenous disadvantaged group to more inclusive considerations of Indigenous cultures. Nevertheless, an assimilative agenda continues to guide policy, as understandings of Indigenous self-determination are absent from sport policy documents and reconciliation is primarily understood as Indigenous peoples being reconciled to the status quo.

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A denial of Indigenous water is settler sovereignty: Teagan Autumn Johnson-Moore, Follow the Water: Colorado Ute’s History in Water Allocation and Dispossession, MA dissertation, University of Chicago, 2024

03Jun24

Abstract: This thesis explores sovereignty, settler-colonialism, and water rights in Indigenous spaces, focusing on the experience of the Colorado Ute tribes in southwestern Colorado. Drawing on historical analysis and contemporary scholarship, this study examines how the lack of water allocation until 1988 has impacted the sovereignty of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe (“SUIT”) and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe (“UMUT”). It argues that the dispossession of water rights has served as a tool to undermine Indigenous sovereignty and perpetuating settler-colonial structures and policies. The research delves into nineteenth to twenty-first century water laws, settler-composed compacts, and regulations revealing how the legacy of dispossession continues to affect SUIT and UMUT. Through an exploration of legal documents, court cases, and scholarly perspectives, this thesis highlights the marginalized voices of Indigenous peoples in water governance and law while acknowledging and rectifying past injustices by advocating for water for the Colorado Ute tribes. By centering Indigenous sovereignty and challenging settler colonial narratives, this thesis aims to contribute to broader discussions on Indigenous rights, water governance, and decolonial efforts in Colorado.

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