settler colonial studies blog

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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Settler soil: Melissa M Arcand, ‘miyo wîcêhtowin “good relations”: reckoning with the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and soil science in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Soil Science, 2024

08Jun24

Abstract: I offer this perspective as hope that miyo wîcêhtowin (translated as “good relations” in Plains Cree) can be established between the discipline of soil science and Indigenous Peoples in Canada. This perspective reflects on the difficult truths of why the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and soil science is primarily one of exploitation and neglect, but also on how fostering a relationship built on reciprocity poses opportunities for Indigenous knowledge systems and soil science to improve land and soil stewardship. Soil science was borne in this country as an instrument of colonization of the plains, marginalizing First Nations from their lands and livelihoods through agricultural settlement. It is necessary to illuminate this fraught history to understand the contemporary realities of First Nations in the prairies, including the hopeful efforts First Nations are making towards conservation and restoration of prairie landscapes—and revitalization of Indigenous knowledge systems—especially though buffalo rematriation. This sharing is done in the hope that we can collectively work towards reciprocity in the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and soil science as a discipline for improved caretaking of the land.

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A settler colonial city: Michael Thornton, ‘Toward a Japanese paradigm of settler-colonial urbanism?’ Urban History, 2024

08Jun24

Abstract: The city of Sapporo, founded in 1869 by the Japanese government as a colonial headquarters in Hokkaido, developed as part of a global wave of settler-colonial urbanism. Like counterparts in North America and Australia, Sapporo facilitated economic, environmental and political transformations across Hokkaido that led to the displacement of Indigenous Ainu society by a soon overwhelming number of ethnically Japanese settlers. However, several historical factors distinguish Sapporo’s settler-colonial urbanism from its peers, including the long history of relations between the Ainu and Japanese; the heavy role of the Japanese state in Sapporo; and the lack of mass relocations of the Ainu to reservations far from their traditional homes.

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The middle (west) of settler colonialism: David A. Nichols, ‘Exiles in the Old Northwest: How Northern Trans-Appalachia Became Midwestern’, Indiana Magazine of History

08Jun24

Abstract: Frederick Jackson Turner, premier historian of the frontier and American exceptionalism, wondered late in his career how sectional identities had formed in the United States. Out of all the American sections, the Midwest seemed to have no distinct character, serving instead as a miniature model of the entire nation. Turner’s professional descendants in the Midwestern History Association have interrogated the region’s typicality, noting that it became in the twentieth century a generator of progressive reform movements and a new homeland for diverse groups. Looking back at the region’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century past, particularly within the conceptual framework of Indiana University Press’s Trans-Appalachian Frontier series (1996–2018), lets historians determine when the Midwest separated from its parent region, the “old” West, which included the Deep South. The territories between the Appalachians and the Missouri River initially shared many features: a large and adaptive Native American population, a commitment among white settlers to commercial agriculture and land speculation, and attractiveness to utopian experimenters. The Midwest separated from this larger region after 1865, when formerly enslaved Black people moved to the midwestern states from the white-supremacist South, immigrants reshaped the social landscape of midwestern cities, and regional authors and artists began constructing a midwestern stereotype in order to critique and demystify it.

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Ambivalent liberation (from settler colonialism): Tariq Dana, ‘A postcolonial moment or colonial subcontractor?’ International Politics, 2024

08Jun24

Excerpt: Colonial and settler-colonial studies broadly agree that colonialism, anti-colonialism, decolonization and postcolonialism form a path-dependent chain. However, can the conditions of anti-colonialism and postcolonialism coexist in an ongoing context of settler-colonialism? Somdeep Sen answers this puzzling question by interrogating the nature of Hamas’ presence in Gaza. He concludes that while Hamas is a militant movement engaged in anti-colonial struggle, it has also built governance structures and institutions, resembling postcolonial statecraft. Nevertheless, for Sen, it is not either/or: he cautiously frames the coexistence between anticolonialism and postcolonialism within the long and complex path toward liberation.

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Messed up (a settler colonial moment): Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America, Harvard University Press, 2022

08Jun24

Description: A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America. In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy. Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power. Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people’s struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story.

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