Abstract: Settler colonialism and active fire exclusion greatly eliminated recurrent fire from forests and grasslands in the United States. Pyrogenic carbon (PyC), a key legacy of fire and a stable form of carbon (C) in soils, has inadvertently been lost with the cessation of biomass burning. Using a simple simulation, we estimate that fire exclusion from grasslands over the last 125 years has resulted in a loss of 963 – 1028 Tg of PyC, approximately equivalent to a 12% – 22% decline in the soil PyC reservoir. This loss of PyC from grassland ecosystems and the lack of introduction of fresh PyC has likely had a significant impact on soil health in the Great Plains. To rebuild this lost stable C pool and the associated ecosystem function of PyC, we recommend combining Indigenous Knowledge and western science to restore historical fire regimes to forests and grasslands and reintroduce PyC via biochar application to agricultural fields.

Call for Papers due June 5, 2024

Erasure and Resistance: Indigenous Architecture and Settler Colonialism

Indigenous architecture throughout North America reflects ongoing impacts of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has led to the erasure or transformation of traditional building practices through alienation from traditional lands, loss of living construction materials such as bison or tules, and disruption of passing on traditional building techniques through mandatory boarding school participation. European-American settlement has adversely impacted even precontact or precolonial architecture, for example, colonizers flattened extensive Mississippian mounds for development and cut down through floors of Pueblo Bonito to reach pots that could be exhumed and shipped to Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

Architecture has served as an apparatus of settler colonialism including missions built beginning in the 16th century for Christianization, assimilation, and cultural genocide, and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) administration, healthcare, and school buildings of the 19th and 20th centuries. More recent settler colonial federal architecture such as HUD housing, schools, and healthcare facilities are rarely culturally or climatically responsive.

Contemporary Indigenous architecture designed in collaboration with Indigenous communities or by Indigenous architects resists settler colonialism. Following Indigenous design principles, community-initiated facilities include housing, health care facilities, schools, tribal administration buildings, and tribal cultural centers and museums.

This session invites papers that consider settler colonialism in relation to a wide range of architecture built by or for Indigenous communities. Papers might address preserving traditional buildings and building practices, employing traditional knowledge and building techniques, integrating modern technologies with Indigenous principles to create hybrid architecture, or using traditional approaches to building on the land. Papers could focus on a specific building, building type, Indigenous community, or region; architecture associated with a particular period of policy; or the work of a particular architect. Session chairs welcome papers with any North American geographic focus, although topics concerning the southeastern United States would be especially pertinent. 

Session Chairs: Jason Tippeconnic Fox (Comanche/Cherokee), Idaho State Preservation Office and Anne Lawrason Marshall, University of Idaho  

Contact: Anne L Marshall, RA, PhD, Professor EmeritusArchitecture/American Indian Studies
University of Idaho
875 Perimeter Drive MS 2451
Moscow, Idaho 83844-2451
USA
Founder and Co-ChairSAH Indigenous Architecture Affiliate Group

annem@uidaho.edu

Abstract: Though the Caledonian and Irish experiences are widely different, common features call for investigation. In both cases, the question of State allegiance remains a major issue, connected as it is with a colonial past, with cultural, linguistic identities and above all with the sense of belonging or not to one or the other nation. In both cases it is becoming a matter of emergency to find new compromises, in New Caledonia in the wake of the referenda on self-determination, and in Northern Ireland, as Brexit represents a threat to the whole process that led to peaceful politics.

Abstract: This chapter considers the work of scholars examining concepts such as transitional justice and counterinsurgency and argues that, by manufacturing reconciliation in Canada in ways that fall short of rights entitlements, Crown representatives may be seeking to relegate settler-colonialism merely to the past (as something that had merely historical impacts) in order to achieve better assimilative outcomes through a structure of historical ignorance. To illustrate, this chapter considers changes to Indigenous land claims processes at the federal level as well as provincial actions that could be seen as limiting with respect to Indigenous claims.

Abstract: Indigenous scholars in settler-colonial contexts have highlighted the hyperimprisonment of Indigenous people, locating it as an extension of the colonial project. Although research on this issue in New Zealand is emerging, there is a notable gap in understanding how the carceral state has developed within this particular context. This study aims to address the following research question: How does the historical context of racial segregation in Pukekohe contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of the carceral state in New Zealand? To thoroughly examine the hyper-imprisonment of Māori, it is essential to unpack the historical origins of state violence. Despite existing research establishing a link between Māori over-representation in prisons and the enduring effects of colonisation, there is a lack of studies exploring the complex interplay among the carceral state, whiteness, policy, policing, and law, which collectively shape the current landscape of incarceration. This study focuses on the racial segregation in Pukekohe between 1920 and 1960 and utilises reflexive thematic analysis within a case study framework, drawing on the insights offered by Robert Bartholomew’s book, No Māori Allowed (2020). The analysis centres on the theoretical concept of the state of exception, shedding light on how power was wielded by the white racial polity. Thus, providing a unique perspective on the carceral state and state-sanctioned violence. The findings highlight the interconnectedness of various systemic control mechanisms employed by the carceral state. Housing, policing, and whiteness emerge as crucial factors in the control and confinement of Māori in Pukekohe. By emphasising the role of whiteness in suppressing this history, this study underscores the need for critical examination and recognition of white cultural imperialism as a fundamental pillar of the carceral state. Overall, this research offers significant insights into the construction of a targeted population and the enduring consequences of state-sanctioned violence, emphasising the importance of a comprehensive examination of New Zealand’s racialised history in discussions on the hyper-imprisonment of Māori.

Abstract: In 1893, Simon Pokagon, a leader of the “unremoved” Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, published a birchbark pamphlet titled The Red Man’s Rebuke. This story condemned settlers for dispossessing Native peoples of their lands and removing them west of the Mississippi River in service of their “civilization.” Pokagon’s Rebuke remains one of the most cited texts in Native American history. But what happened to Pokagon’s message after the Chicago World’s Fair? This paper analyzes five Potawatomi Removal stories told at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that Midwestern settlers found their answer to “the Indian side” of the Removal question by telling the “Potawatomi” perspective of local history; featuring “authentic” representations of Native peoples in their stories and as witnesses to their efforts; perpetuating a myth that all the Potawatomi had been removed; condemning the actions of their “dishonorable and dishonest” forefathers; and publicly acknowledging that they were occupying stolen land. By claiming that the sons of the present were not the forefathers of the past, non-Indians were settling the story of Potawatomi Removal. In the process, they gave their community and their region a past that was simultaneously romantic and tragic, positioning themselves as its inheritors and interpreters.

Abstract: United States political history is a uniquely populist and settler one. While there is plenty of scholarship on populism and on settler colonialism separately, there is a significant gap in understanding how the political phenomena are connected. To begin to remedy this gap, I argue that particularly in the US political context, populist and settler colonial sociopolitical logics are both historically and theoretically interconnected. Both political phenomena are central to understanding the foundations of American socio-political life. Working in a theoretical-historical mode, I identify five ways in which settler colonialism and populism have intersected, and in the process produce a set of logical functions: to categorize, subordinate, dismiss, authorize, and defy. These functions reveal a mirrored internal logic to populism and settler colonialism. Using this theoretical analytic, I will then discuss four distinct moments of populist politics in the US: Shays’ Rebellion, Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the emergence of the People’s Party, and Donald Trump’s presidency. The intertwined logics are present and coarticulated in each of these populist waves, with certain logics dominant at different times. Ultimately, this thesis will reveal that both populist and settler colonial political logics are interdependent, foundational, and continuous features of US politics and that, therefore, populism and settler colonialism in the US context ought to be considered in tandem.

Abstract: Like roots reaching for the nourishment of familiar ground, generations of resistance lineages continue to weave a worldwide tapestry of solidarity. These efforts help to disrupt various forms of colonial violence, including under the guise of liberal democracies. One of the multiple mechanisms they target is how people and lands are pitted against one another through adversarial categories of difference. Such efforts are a powerful antidote to colonial fragmentations, mobilizing differences via shared goals based on grounded solidarities. This article seeks to answer how anti-colonial struggles in Palestine and Sápmi engage with three ways of structuring similarities and differences. We thereby utilize Coulthard’s (2014) framework of recognition politics, divided into (1) assimilation, (2) multiculturalism, and (3) place-based solidarity. Next to excerpts from local organizers and a speculative dialogue between interviewees, we reference Audre Lorde’s work to better understand the relational qualities of differences. Our research shows that the structural dominance of assimilatory and multiculturalist approaches to difference tends to stabilize injustices while normalizing colonial violence, including via Westernized peace politics like the Oslo Accords or state-led reconciliation initiatives. On the other hand, the integrity of place-based solidarity generates reciprocal relationships and interdependent responsibilities, which undermine colonial divide-and-conquer politics. With the help of our interviewees, this article provides a shared analysis to further the solidarity between the struggles of two of colonial modernity’s most critical fronts, Sápmi and Palestine.

Abstract: This is an emotional history of an emotional alliance of French and Indigenous warriors who united to avenge the Spanish massacre of the Huguenot Fort Caroline in Florida in 1565. In this alliance, Indigenous fury was normalised when it served French Protestant interests. However, Protestant representations of Spanish and Indigenous rage used for the black legend presently came to found racist arguments for structural violence in settler colonialism and American white supremacy that are gendered and rooted in bodies. To explain, this essay sets this revenge story within the logics of the sixteenth-century French emotional regime.

Abstract: On Tuesday, December 29, 2020, 16 protesters at Waikeria Prison, one of New Zealand’s largest male prisons, engaged in a six-day standoff with prison guards to protest inhumane prison conditions. The Department of Corrections framed the event as an aimless riot, delegitimizing the intentional demonstration of resistance against state violence. Imprisoned intellectuals, specifically Imprisoned Black Radical tradition, have long examined and centered the prison as the harshest instrument of the state linked to the struggles of the collective. However, voices from imprisoned intellectuals are rarely considered in academic scholarship despite acute analysis of the state and liberation. This article employs the state of exception to contextualize the Waikeria protest. Particular attention is devoted to the ‘state of continuity,’ which allows for a broader understanding of a permanent state of racialized oppression and marginalization faced by Indigenous and Black communities in racialized-settler-colonial contexts. Populations designated as the exception are thus framed as a threat targeted for militaristic police intervention. This article concludes by extending the discussion of the state of continuity to include how expressions of rage and dissent by Indigenous and Black people are viewed as a direct threat to the sovereign order but are necessary for revolutionary change.