settler colonial studies blog

Mormon late colonising: John Gary Maxwell, The Last Called Mormon Colonization: Polygamy, Kinship, and Wealth in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, University of Utah Press, 2022

02Mar24

Description: More than three hundred Latter-day Saint settlements were founded by LDS Church President Brigham Young. Colonization—often outside of Utah—continued under the next three LDS Church presidents, fueled by Utah’s overpopulation relative to its arable, productive land. In this book, John Gary Maxwell takes a detailed look at the Bighorn Basin colonization of 1900–1901, placing it in the political and socioeconomic climate of the time while examining whether the move to this out-of-the-way frontier was motivated in part by the desire to practice polygamy unnoticed. The LDS Church officially abandoned polygamy in 1890, but evidence that the practice was still tolerated (if not officially sanctioned) by the church circulated widely, resulting in intense investigations by the U.S. Senate. In 1896 Abraham Owen Woodruff, a rising star in LDS leadership and an ardent believer in polygamy, was appointed to head the LDS Colonization Company. Maxwell explores whether under Woodruff’s leadership the Bighorn Basin colony was intended as a means to insure the secret survival of polygamy and if his untimely death in 1904, together with the excommunication of two equally dedicated proponents of polygamy—Apostles John Whitaker Taylor and Matthias Foss Cowley—led to its collapse. Maxwell also details how Mormon settlers in Wyoming struggled with finance, irrigation, and farming and how they brought the same violence to indigenous peoples over land and other rights as did non-Mormons. The 1900 Bighorn Basin colonization provides an early twentieth-century example of a Mormon syndicate operating at the intersection of religious conformity, polygamy, nepotism, kinship, corporate business ventures, wealth, and high priesthood status. Maxwell offers evidence that although in many ways the Bighorn Basin colonization failed, Owen Woodruff’s prophecy remains unbroken: “No year will ever pass, from now until the coming of the Savior, when children will not be born in plural marriage.

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Italian settlers in Africa: Antonio M. Morone, ‘Italian Settlers in the Horn of Africa’, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2024

02Mar24

Abstract: Colonial settlement, understood as the emigration of Italians to the colonies, was an essential element in the history of Italian colonialism, for both the political planning and the socio-cultural processes that settlers from the mother country triggered in Africa. This was not a linear process. At the end of the 19th century, the intention of founding colonization on pre-existing migratory networks and communities in the Mediterranean was thwarted by the shift of Italian expansionist efforts to the Horn of Africa. When Fascism attempted to organize a state colonization in the 1930s, it was the poor living and working conditions of many new settlers that forced the regime to bring those who ran the risk of “insabbiarsi” (literally being quagmired), that is, falling to the level of colonial subjects, back to Italy. In the post–Second World War period, Italy based much of its efforts to reclaim its colonies on the labor of its settlers in Africa but ended up politically ditching them and blotting them from historical memory. By 1949, any chance of returning to an old colonial policy was irrevocably gone. The settlers helped impose colonial order on the basis of the supposed racial and social superiority of Italians to their African subjects. It was precisely the end of colonialism and the departure of many settlers for Italy that called into question their own identity construct as champions of Italianness when they found themselves being discriminated against in their homeland for not being completely or sufficiently “Italian.” For those who decided to remain in Africa, the only thing left was to reshape their relationship with Africans and seek a space of economic and social action with the new postcolonial leaders. On the other side of colonial society, colonial subjects were not just subordinated to the colonizers but also became intermediaries in both their public and private relations, pursuing their own paths of social mobility. For this reason, the history of the colonial subjects is in many ways the other side of the coin from that of the Italian settlers.

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Settler slips: Sarah Elizabeth Vaughn, ‘Unavoidable Slips: Settler Colonialism and Terra Nullius in the Wake of Climate Adaptation’, Critical Inquiry, 50, 3, 2024

02Mar24

Abstract: This article focuses on Guyanese efforts in the postcolonial present to address environmental issues that have become increasingly complex in the face of an awareness of climate change. It opens with an account of how the preservation of Indigenous forests contributes to international efforts to reduce carbon, while making visible the instability that the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the seabed might portend for the Guyanese economy. Specifically, the article examines how engineers have historically confronted settler-colonial discourses about terra nullius unfold as they invest in sea defense. In doing so, the article foregrounds what engineers call slips—the slow or sudden displacement of a sea defense’s structural foundation. Slips are phenomena of energy conversion between land and sea. Rather than arguing for the claims of the pre-Anthropocene earth, the article suggests how many factors are in play in developing policy in the present, in an era of heightened awareness of the different forces in a changing climate.

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More romantic settlers: Nikki Hessell, ‘Songs of (Settler Moves to) Innocence’, European Romantic Review, 35, 2024, pp. 77-91

02Mar24

Abstract: This article considers how public recitation or quotation of Romantic poetry in Aotearoa New Zealand can be read within Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s framework of “settler moves to innocence.” Examining three distinct acts of settler use of Romantic poetry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, featuring Felicia Hemans, Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, the article suggests that we can interpret these moments through the lens of “generations” or the Māori term “whakapapa.” Understanding these apparently isolated moments as part of a process of generating a settler futurity out of Romantic poetry, and foreclosing Indigenous futurities in the process, the essay proposes that some of Romanticism’s cherished lines and authors have underpinned the settler colonial project in Aotearoa in ways that remain both influential and publicly visible to generations of the twenty-first century.

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Romantic settlers: Claire Knowles, Thomas H. Ford, Alexis Harley, ‘Hopeless Romantics: Australian Studies in Romanticism’, European Romantic Review, 35, 2024, pp. 3-21

02Mar24

Abstract: For most of the twentieth century, Romantic writers were largely ignored by serious Australian scholars even as they were celebrated and imitated outside the academy. This article tracks the belated emergence of Romanticism as a specialist field of study in Australia while providing what is often a counter-narrative about the broader reception of Romantic literature and ideology by the Australian public. In tracing these contrary yet entwined histories, the article shows how Romantic literature has been and remains implicated in the ongoing project of Australian colonization from 1788 to the present. It has been conscripted into the work of establishing a series of penal colonies on stolen Aboriginal land; of valorizing an English-speaking territorialization of that land; of shaping settler subjectivity; and of defining a national identity often vexed in its relationship to anglophone cultural centers. Exploring the ways in which the reception of Romantic culture is diffracted across various Australian sub-cultures, the essay arrives at the field as it exists today: at a critical Australian Romanticism that is, and needs to be, increasingly attentive to the history of the field and its investments in the settler-colonial state.

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The property of land: Dana Lloyd, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, University Press of Kansas, 2024

29Feb24

Description: Responding to Vine Deloria, Jr.’s call for all people to “become involved” in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd’s Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites, and a rethinking of even land itself. Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle has failed Indigenous peoples for decades. Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights—one party’s religious freedom and another party’s property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win. Through an analysis of the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which she interprets as a case about sovereignty and the meaning of land, Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play. Rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion versus secular property, Lloyd uses the legal dispute over the High Country—an area of the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations—to show that there are at least five different, but not equally valid, ways to understand land in the Lyng case: home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin. To protect the High Country, the Yurok filed a religious freedom lawsuit but then proceeded to describe the land as their home in court. They lobbied for protecting the High Country through a wilderness designation even as they continued to argue that they had been managing it for centuries. They have purchased large parcels of ancestral land and also declare the land their kin, a relationship that ostensibly excludes the possibility of ownership. Land Is Kin demonstrates the complexity of land in contemporary religious, political, and legal discourse. By drawing on Indigenous perspectives on the land as kin, Lloyd points toward a framework that shifts sovereignty away from binary oppositions—between property and sacred site, between the federal government and Native nations—towards seeing the land itself as sovereign.

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Settler dramas: Jennifer Lynn Peterson, ‘The Covered Wagon: Location Shooting and Settler Melodrama’, in Rob King, Charlie Keil (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 569-593

27Feb24

Abstract: This chapter offers an analysis of The Covered Wagon (1923), one of the most commercially successful films of the silent era, through the critical framework of settler colonialism. Shot on location in Utah and California, the film is a period piece depicting white settlers traveling westward along the Oregon trail in 1848. Modeled on the epic scope of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Covered Wagon used landscape and melodrama to naturalize the colonial impulse. The film also made the covered wagon itself into an iconic, nostalgic precursor to the automobile, at a time when the Ford Model T was selling more than a million units a year, and when the federal government was launching its first major road-building initiatives. In this respect, The Covered Wagon helped pave the way for fossil capitalism, serving as an ideological archetype for a generation of Hollywood films to come.

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A reservation about policing: Theresa Rocha Beardall, ‘“Imperialism without Imperialists” and the Settler-Colonial Logics of Reservation Policing’, in Daniel Gascón, Sebastián Sclofsky, Xavier Perez, Jhon Sanabria, Analicia Mejia Mesinas (eds), Police and State Crime in the Americas, Palgrave, 2024, pp 49-70

27Feb24

Abstract: Growing awareness of U.S. police violence has sparked important discussions that link state violence and the nation’s settler-colonial origins, emphasizing the use of law enforcement to control racially marginalized groups. Yet, the enduring impact of settler-colonial logics of carcerality and elimination on the lives of Indigenous Peoples in the U.S., commonly known as American Indians under federal law, remains underexplored. This chapter examines how and why the social construction of the American Indian as othered, deviant, inherently criminal, and deserving of punishment within the criminal justice system and reservation policing is maintained. I argue that the U.S. deploys this “constructed criminality” as justification for ongoing land theft, racialized social hierarchies, physical and institutional violence, and other forms of othering that permeate U.S. carceral politics.

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Settling on a settler history: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell, ‘History by committee: Representing the ‘facts’ of settler colonialism in a local historical society museum’, in Cameo Dally, Ashley Barnwell (eds), Memory in Place: Locating Colonial Histories and Commemoration, ANU Press, 2023, pp. 219-246

27Feb24

Excerpt: In his critical review of the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2018 exhibition Colony, Bain Attwood (2019) suggests that the curators’ aim of representing colonisation from both settler and Indigenous perspectives reflects the recent boom in exhibitions that seek to address what is termed ‘difficult history’ (see also Macdonald, 2008). Internationally, museums are displaying confronting histories and challenging nationalist erasures; for example, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre in Vancouver. In Australia, Indigenous artists such as Fiona Foley (2018) have pointed out that practices of historiographic critique and memorialisation have taken place in moveable Indigenous art, outside of national and academic institutions, in creative and community spaces (see also Foley & Howell, 2017; Grieves & Spiers, 2020; Konishi, 2019). Magdalena H Gross and Luke Terra (2018, p. 52) define ‘difficult history’ as ‘periods that reverberate in the present and surface fundamental disagreements over who we are and what values we hold’.

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An Indigenous foreign policy for a settler state? Angela Wilton, ‘Unsettling settler-colonialism in Gender and Development: reflections from Aotearoa New Zealand’, Development in Practice, 2024

25Feb24

Abstract: In November 2020, the first woman Indigenous Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nanaia Mahuta, was appointed in Aotearoa New Zealand. Mahuta has reinforced the message of taking a values-based Indigenous-centred approach to foreign policy and development. She has also recognised the mana of wāhine (the unique spiritual authority of women), “not defined by western feminist thinking, but the values that have long underpinned our culture, histories and traditions”. Her appointment reflects the complicated intersections of Indigeneity, colonialism, Western feminist discourse, and foreign policy in a settler-hegemonic state, and the possibilities (and constraints) for reimagined futures. How, then, can the teaching of gender and development (GAD) be attentive to these politics of settler-colonialism in Aotearoa? How can the complexities of the colonial project be reflected in GAD, and how can GAD be responsive to settler-hegemonic and Indigenous spaces? This paper will explore these questions and look at GAD’s role in perpetuating or unsettling settler-colonialism.

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