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A settling rhetoric: Jeff Branson, Examining the Role of Rhetoric in Settler Colonialism and Imperialism Through the Occupations of the Shoshone Peoples of Western North America and of the Philippines, MA dissertation, Harvard University, 2024

13May24

Abstract: This thesis seeks to determine the role of rhetoric in the American process of occupation that includes Settler Colonialism and Imperialism. I explore the connection between these two ideas using an example of each: the United States’ occupation of the tribal territory of the Shoshone peoples of North America as an example of Settler Colonialism and the United States’ occupation of the Philippines as an example of Imperialism. I examine the contributions of rhetoric to these processes of occupation and describe each process. This thesis expands upon the basic research of Walter L. Williams, who posited that the occupation of the Philippines was an expansion of the earlier “Indian Policy.” While the terminologies of “Settler Colonialism” and “Imperialism” were not used by Williams (in fact were not formed to the degree they are today at the time he published his work), modern scholars such as Paul A. Kramer and Julian Go have explored the use of these terms. I argue that all three authors describe a similar occupational process and that rhetoric from both the American government and from the press was a key part of executing each occupation. Most of my research on the connection to rhetoric comes from primary sources: newspaper articles, presidential speeches, Congressional arguments, and military briefs that describe both types of occupation. I demonstrate how using rhetoric to frame the story was one key to justifying the occupation while also describing the belief system that produced it. I depict how the rhetoric of a unified American process of occupation used internal, external, and press sources to lay out the steps to justify an occupation. First, the occupied nation is characterized as weak and incapable of managing its land, resources, and population; it is deemed in need of either reestablishment or civilization by the Americans. Next, as the occupation takes shape and the occupied peoples resist, the depiction of them changes; the centers of information paint them as bloodthirsty, almost inhuman sources of danger that need to be quelled. Finally, once resistors inside the occupied nation are incapacitated (either through death, capture, or threat of both), the initial characterization of hapless native peoples returns, and the rhetorical channels depict the benevolence of the United States to help them. As a result of my research, I outline a unified rhetorical process called American Occupation, with branching outcomes: American Settler Colonialism and American Imperialism. These differing outcomes are essentially based on (1) whether the goal of occupation was to expand the physical border of the United States by relocating the occupied peoples and settling their lands, as in Settler Colonialism, or (2) expanding the ideological border of the United States by controlling the occupied peoples and altering their lives to be more aligned with an American image, as in Imperialism. While these end goals differ, the occupational process that approaches them is unified, and the rhetoric that surrounds it is consistent.


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Gentrifying settlers: Miranda C. Roberts, The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism and Gentrification in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina and Corina, MA dissertation, Chapman University, 2024

13May24

Abstract: This thesis explores two underexplored works of gentrification literature—Paula Fox’s novel, Desperate Characters (1970) and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection, Sabrina & Corina (2019). Desperate Characters offers a nuanced and critical examination of characters with privilege who move into Brooklyn in the 1960s, which involves the displacement of Black and Latinx communities; Fajardo-Anstine’s collection introduces Denver as a site of dramatic gentrification in the new century, by portraying Latinx characters from older neighborhoods who must adjust to the disintegration and cohesiveness of their communities in the face of gentrification. In my discussion of these works, I draw from pre-existing scholarship as necessary to discuss how the writers use language which reframes gentrification within displacements involved in a longer history of settler colonialism in the U.S. In Fox’s novel, newly-arrived gentrifiers, the Bentwoods, engage in a new iteration of conquest in the urban frontier, often frustrated by realities which undermine their aestheticized ideal. The novel maintains an uneasy tone about those who are causing displacement of others throughout, while Fox’s language likens the endeavor to imperialist expansion of European powers. The history of Indigenous displacement is made more directly visible in Fajardo-Anstine’s narratives, which include characters who are descendants of people first shaped by the Spanish colonial expansion in North America, prior to nineteenth-century U.S. cultivation of the American West. The themes of frontier and westward expansion manifest in new ways, so that the displacement of underprivileged communities can also be seen as a form of modern-day settler colonialism. By highlighting these works, this thesis situates gentrification within a longer history of colonization, and centers the conflict of gentrification presented through opposing perspectives.


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Settler bandits: Meg Foster, ‘Bandits, heroes and villains: A view from a settler colony’, History Compass, 2024

13May24

Abstract: ‘Bushrangers’ were late 18th to early 20th‐century bandits who lived in the Australian bush through the proceeds of crime, but today, they are national legends. A particular constellation of factors led to the white male bushranger’s status as a national hero in Australia. By charting the development of bushranging historiography alongside bushranging in practice and the bushranging myth, this article will demonstrate the distinctive Australian and settler colonial dimensions of this bandit tradition. In describing how white bushranging men came to national prominence, the piece will also draw attention to those excluded from this legend—women and people of colour, with particular reference to Aboriginal people. The Australian bushranging myth, as it exists today, was not an organic or natural development. It was actively constructed by white settlers, including white settler historians.


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Assimilation by representation: Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, ‘Tribal Representation and Assimilative Colonialism’, Stanford Law Review, 76, 2024

13May24

Abstract: There are 574 federally recognized domestic dependent tribal nations in the United States. Each tribe is separate from its respective surrounding state(s) and governs itself. And yet, none of them have the power to send representatives to Congress. Our democratic representative structures function as if tribal governments and the reservations they govern do not exist. But tribal citizens do not simply live within a state and are not simply governed by that state like any other state citizen. Rather, it is tribal law and tribal governments—not state law or state governments—that primarily govern and shape the lives of tribal citizens living on reservations. Tribal governments are not complementary or subsidiary to state governments—they are frequent rivals for power and resources. This system, simply put, doesn’t make sense. Tribes should have their own representation in the federal government. This Article makes the case for why and examines how this seemingly obvious omission in our democratic structuring came to pass. This Article examines the democratic mismatch between existing governments—which include not only 50 states, but also 574 federally recognized tribes—and the representative democratic structure that is built into the Constitution around the institution of the state. It details the failed attempts of tribal governments to obtain representation, either as states or outside of statehood. This history reveals a story about race, power, colonialism, and institutions. Attempts by white majorities to hold onto political power within states included denying Native peoples’ individual rights and denying statehood to largely Native areas until Native people assimilated or white citizens outnumbered them. These dynamics, which this Article dubs “assimilative colonialism,” have not only shaped our existing democratic structures but have also had a lasting effect on Native relationships with political power. The nefarious brilliance of assimilative colonialism was to offer American political power to Native peoples—whether citizenship, statehood, or delegates—only and always at the cost of what made them Native. As a result, many Native people justifiably view American political power not as empowering but as dangerous. Assimilative colonialism has thus held back the emergence of Native movements for political reform by making it impossible to even imagine tribal representation in a real sense since it seemed only possible through assimilation. It is long overdue that we step back and examine the legacy of assimilative colonialism in American representative democracy. We ought to think about structural reform and what representative structures could—and maybe should—have been on the table for tribal governments and their citizens since the beginning. We ought to be asking: What would American democratic structures look like if we truly incorporated tribal governments as equal sovereigns within the United States?


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Mental: Sharyn W. Hillin, Cultural Connectedness and Native American Mental Health, PhD dissertation, University of Alabama, 2024

13May24

Abstract: Recent research has indicated a possible connection between the destruction of Native American culture and communities and mental health disparities among Native Americans in the United States. While numerous studies have been conducted among Native Americans in western regions of the United States that establish a relationship between cultural connectedness and mental health resiliency, no such relationship has been investigated in the southeastern region of the United States, particularly within the state of Alabama. Using a blended ethnographic phenomenological methodology, ten Poarch-Creek Indians in Alabama were interviewed to examine their experiences of living away from reservation land, separated from their Native culture and community. This study sought to explore the impact of this separation and the possible relationship between mental health resilience and cultural connectedness. Through analysis of the data collected, six themes emerged—four having a negative impact on mental health: “Different” Treatment, Walking in Two Worlds, Difficulty in Relationships, Sense of Loss, and two having a positive or protective impact on mental health: Native Beliefs and Connection to Culture. Themes can be organized into a conceptual model depicting the overall impact of historical oppression on mental health, as well as protective factors related to the Native experience and resilience.


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Settler colonialism and the climate crisis: David Osborn, ‘Toward earthbound climate movements: The importance of understanding ontology and settler colonialism in engaging the climate crisis’, in Kristin Haltinner, Dilshani Sarathchandra (eds), Resolving the Climate Crisis: US Social Scientists Speak Out, Routledge, 2024

13May24

Abstract: Despite widespread mobilization on climate change, social movements have not engaged the roots – in worldviews and ways of being – of the climate crisis. In this chapter, settler colonialism is presented as an ongoing process in which relations are structured in such a way that climate change, itself part of a broader crisis of life, is created, allowed, and continued. Climate movements have a part to play in either constructing or contesting these dominant ways of being and exercising agency in the support of existing lifeways and in the creation of new ones. White settler people and White-dominant movements are identified as especially in need of change and are the focus of the chapter. Empirical research on the direct action climate movement in the Pacific Northwest is presented in which, for the mostly White settler respondents, there was an emergent transformation of worldviews and ways of being. These changes positively supported engagement in movement work even while lacking explicit discussion and development within the movement.


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Indigenous resilience is an easy cope: Aiyana James, Laura Laumatia, ‘Dismantling the settler paradigm in Indigenous climate resilience’, in Kristin Haltinner, Dilshani Sarathchandra (eds), Resolving the Climate Crisis: US Social Scientists Speak Out, Routledge, 2024

13May24

Abstract: Indigenous climate scholars have called on environmental activists to recognize that climate change is not the first environmental disaster to impact tribal communities, but an extension of centuries of land dispossession that has disrupted tribal lifeways. These actions have been based in the dominant ideology of settler colonialism, which justifies the taking of tribal lands and resources for consumptive purposes, even as it erases or ignores tribal rights. Settler colonialism has been used to justify natural resource extraction that has significantly damaged tribal food systems, ceremonies, and land relationship, but it can also be seen in actions that co-opt tribal knowledge systems. In this chapter, two climate professionals, one Indigenous and one White settler, posit that it is incumbent on would-be tribal allies in climate activism to recognize both tribal histories and context for effective climate action, and to recognize how contemporary environmental calls for action must be wary of settler replacement of tribal voices with their own agenda.


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Seedy settlers: John B. Seitz, ‘Seeds of the Settler Colony: How Peasant and Kazakh Knowledge, Environment, and Bureaucracy Shaped Steppe Agronomy in the Late Russian Empire’, Technology and Culture, 65, 2, 2024, pp. 531-554

13May24

Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, Russian imperial officials hoped to transform the Kazakh Steppe from a zone of pastoral nomadism into a zone of sedentary grain farms. They planned to accomplish this transformation by importing peasants from European Russia and settling them in the steppe along with advanced scientific agricultural practices, equipment, and infrastructure. It was a project that linked steppe settlement and the Russian Empire to a global story of settler colonialism, science, and technology in the first decades of the twentieth century. An examination of this project through the lens of the expansion of grain farming reveals that the changes it wrought were not solely due to European science and technology but were contingent, dependent on local knowledge, the vagaries of climate, and adaptation to the realities of the steppe environment.


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Techno-settler colonialism: Tristan Hughes, ‘The political theory of techno-colonialism’, European Journal of Political Theory, 2024

10May24

Abstract: This paper examines an ideology I call techno-colonialism. I argue that techno-colonialism represents an attempt to selectively reproduce settler colonial practices adjusted to twenty-first century realities. This argument has implications for contemporary settler colonialism, the radical right, and climate change politics. In what follows, I discuss the techno-colonial doctrines of Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Patri Friedman. These figures articulate a political theory about exploiting new technologies to escape the state and found new societies. To explore techno-colonial ideology, I focus on Seasteading—the practice of creating floating city-states to colonize the ocean––as an attempted realization of techno-colonial ideals. As I claim, techno-colonialism attempts to humanize the politics of settlement. But I argue that techno-colonialism’s ambitions fail, and techno-colonialism fails to create a harmless politics of settlement. I conclude that we should be attentive to the relations of political and economic power in which such exit projects are embedded. Moreover, this paper also promotes our understanding of climate change and the radical right’s politics. While scholars most naturally associate the radical right with climate change denialism, the techno-colonists illustrate another possibility. They welcome catastrophe, and see rising-sea levels as an opportunity to start society afresh.


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It may even end up undoing it: Ian Lustick, ‘Must Every Golem Die?’ Palestine/Israel Review, 1, 1, 2024, pp. 237-241

10May24

Abstract: Settler-colonial projects often produce states that eventually turn against the purposes of those who created them. We see this in the American and Boer revolts against the British and the sabotage by British settlers in Ireland and French settlers in Algeria of efforts to integrate the native populations of those territories into the British and French states. We see it also in the relationship between the objectives of European states and Zionists to end antisemitism by exporting the Jewish problem to the Middle East and in Israel’s increasingly pariah status on the world stage and the global increase in antisemitism—both accelerated by Israel’s ferocious response to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks in October 2023. In the Jewish tradition this is the story of the golem—the legendary creature conjured by rabbinic skill and divine power to protect the Jews from their enemies in sixteenth-century Prague. At first successful, the golem became increasingly wild and eventually was put to death by the rabbi who created him out of fear for the welfare of the Jewish community itself. But not all golems must die. The key is to recognize they are not tied to their original purposes and can thus be transformed.


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