settler colonial studies blog

Biodiversity as resistance against settler colonialism: Monica Fahey, Maurizio Rossetto, Emilie Ens, Ray Kerkhove, ‘Araucaria bidwillii genomics suggest Indigenous Peoples broadened translocation practices in response to settler colonialism’, People and Nature, 2023

18Jan24

Abstract: Retracing past anthropogenic dispersal of culturally important taxa offers insights to the biogeographic history of species, as well as the history of the people who interacted with them. Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii Hook.) is a culturally and spiritually significant conifer tree for several Indigenous groups in eastern Australia. Sharing the edible nuts and attending Bunya gatherings is an important way for these groups to maintain their cultural connections and it has been hypothesized that prior to European colonization, Indigenous Peoples facilitated the dispersal of Bunya Pine as part of these ancient traditions. We used ethnohistorical information on the use of Bunya Pine by Indigenous Peoples to interpret genomic patterns within and between disjunct distributions of Bunya Pine. We found signatures of long-term isolation within the Australian Wet Tropics (AWT) and extensive gene flow within southeast Queensland (SEQ) that does not fit models of faunal or passive dispersal. Within SEQ, we found greater population structure amongst sites known to pre-date European colonization, than when colonial-era planted sites were included in our analyses, suggesting that pre-colonial translocation was sporadic or localized rather than systematic and widespread. Increased Indigenous translocations in conjunction with plantings by European settlers appears to have erased the natural pre-colonial population structure of SEQ Bunya Pine. Our stairway plot models suggest sharp population decline of SEQ Bunya Pine in the early and late Pleistocene, though we did not find evidence that anthropogenic dispersal facilitated effective population size growth of the species in the Holocene We concluded that pre-colonial translocation of SEQ Bunya Pine was likely restricted by kinship-based custodial rights, and that when Indigenous Peoples were displaced by European settlers, translocation was intensified to maintain cultural connectivity. This study is an example of how Indigenous Australian groups adapt plant management strategies to meet socio-cultural needs and demonstrates the potential for plant genomics to supplement Indigenous Biocultural Knowledge that has been impacted by colonial dispossession.

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Outer space colonialism is … colonialism: Alina Utrata, ‘What’s Wrong with Outer Space Colonialism?’, E-International Relations, 12/01/24

18Jan24

Excerpt: In October of 2023, the New York Times published an article entitled: “Maybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and then Mars”. NASA landed on the Moon for the first time over half a century ago, and by 2040 they plan to return—this time, to stay. Outer space colonialism is usually believed to belong to the world of science fiction. But there are very real projects currently underway to ensure that both astronauts and civilians can survive for lengthy periods on the Moon, and thus begin the process of settling space. This includes, for instance, developing 3D printers that could construct homes with the capacity to withstand conditions on the Moon—such as temperatures upwards of 600 degrees, a “vicious combination of radiation and micrometeorites”, and Moon dust “so abrasive it can cut like glass . . . [which] swirls in noxious plumes and is toxic when inhaled” (Kamin 2023). As I detail in my article in the American Political Science Review (Utrata 2023), there are many reasons why one might object to colonies on the Moon. These include the enormous emissions in the midst of the climate catastrophe (Rubenstein 2022; Utrata 2021); the continued dispossession of indigenous lands and displacement of vulnerable communities for rocket launch sites (Sammler and Lynch 2021) and entrenchment of coloniality and colonial relationships (Trevino 2020; Bawaka Country et al. 2020); or the risk of geopolitical conflict and militarization of space (Deudney 2020). However ill-advised colonizing outer space might be, it is often assumed to be fundamentally different from earthly colonialism for one key reason: outer space is actually empty. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein (2022, 158) puts it: ‘Corporate space enthusiasts insist that the game is different this time because the lands they’re aiming for aren’t inhabited… when it comes to space… we can finally feel good about frontierism because we’ve finally got an empty frontier’. In this article, I want to draw out one aspect of my critique about outer space colonialism and its claim to have found genuinely “empty space”, both for what it suggests about the ethics of settling space as well as what it reveals about terrestrial colonization. The problem with colonialism—whether in outer space or on Earth—cannot simply be reduced to a matter of whether spaces are or are not “empty”. Calling something empty presupposes a certain conceptualization of relating to that space, and already begins the process of legitimating and imposing certain forms of (territorially-based) political rule. Space colonies, as David Valentine (2017, 187) has noted, are often purported to offer “a libertarian hope that conscious effort and free enterprise in places where—as I have frequently heard said—“there are no natives” will fix things so that humans can do a more equitable job of colonialism this time around”. For its Silicon Valley supporters, outer space is something of a “technological solution” (to borrow Morozov’s 2013 term) to the ethical issues of colonialism. If new technologies can allow humans to reach lunar lands which are genuine terra nullius, or empty spaces—then what’s wrong with colonizing outer space?

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Settler jouissance is damaging: Isaac Thornley, ‘The Settler-Colonial Jouissance of Western Alienation: Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Canadian Pipeline Politics’, canadian literature, 2024

16Jan24

Abstract: This paper explores the settler-colonial jouissance of the subject of Western alienation, an imaginary figure with whom proponents of fossil fuel development encourage people in Alberta to identify, through an examination of the public discourses that promote pipeline projects in Canada. The dual aims of this paper are, first, to explicate some aspects of the ideological-discursive terrain of Canadian-Albertan pipeline conflicts with reference to concepts from Lacanian and Žižekian theory, and second, to show more broadly how psychoanalysis can be a useful tool for analyzing Canadian environmental politics. To explain why the subject’s enjoyment is perpetually frustrated, I examine the rhetoric of fossil fuel industry proponents, such as former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, who invoke scapegoats responsible for “landlocking” Alberta oil. This scapegoating intensifies the drive to continually fail to achieve political autonomy and economic self-sufficiency. Pipeline proponents appeal to “new markets in Asia Pacific,” overseas sites of total enjoyment which the landlocked subject of Western alienation is perpetually denied. These social fantasies work in concert to conceal the colonial, capitalistic, and climactic antagonisms inherent to oil sands development, and mobilize consent for pipeline projects.

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Aqua Nullius is damaging: Erin O’Donnell, Melissa Kennedy, Janice Baird, ‘Ending aqua nullius: pathways to legitimate and sustainable settler state water laws’, Global Water Forum, 10/01/24

16Jan24

Abstract: Water law in Australia is underpinned by the erroneous assumption of aqua nullius, the attempted extinguishment of Indigenous water laws. It’s not a situation unique to Australia as similar processes have occurred in all settler colonial states. In doing so, the state is assuming the power and authority to control and usually exploit water that it does not legitimately have. This means that the foundation of settler state water law is basically rotten at the core. It’s not just unfair, in Australia this injustice lies at the heart of decades of failed water policy. The Australian Government has just passed new laws which hopefully mark the first steps in redressing this situation, and has another important opportunity in the new EPBC Act reforms in 2024. Here, Erin O’Donnell, Melissa Kennedy and Janice Baird explain why this reform is so important and what needs to be done if aqua nullius is to be finally overturned.

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Settler Georgics are damaging: Katarina O’Briain, ‘Refusing Settler Georgics’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 36, 1, 2024, pp. 7-36

16Jan24

Abstract: This essay recovers and seeks to refuse a harmful and enduring eighteenth-century fiction: settler georgic, an imperial mode that North American settlers used to foreclose refusal, naturalize British understandings of cultivation and use, and figure violent dispossession as both inevitable and in the past. Tracing this history helps to show the damage that such logics continue to do as well as the assumptions that govern literary historical methods. I look to the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (2020) is premised on the refusal of settler narrative, to think through alternate modes of literary history. Read alongside Audra Simpson’s important study of refusal, Mohawk Interruptus (2014), Leanne Simpson’s text opens up possibilities for reading the quieter, everyday refusals that are sometimes overlooked in eighteenth-century archives. This work also suggests the limits of refusal in academic and university contexts, and the ways in which institutional acknowledgements of refusal risk strengthening the settler colonial structures that they claim to refuse.

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Settler disacclimatisation: Lisa Fink, ‘Unsettled Ecologies: Alienated Species, Indigenous Restoration, and U.S. Empire in a Time of Climate Chaos’, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2024

14Jan24

Abstract: This dissertation traces environmental thinking about invasive species from Western-colonial, diasporic settlers of color, and Indigenous perspectives within U.S. settler colonialism. Considering environmental discourses of species invasion through the lens of settler colonialism helps us better understand how ideas about race, Indigeneity, and nature continue to shape invasion biology’s language and practices—which erase Indigeneity and contribute to the marginalization of those constructed as “alien” within dominant U.S. racial discourse. Synthesizing Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, and environmental humanities, I argue that dominant invasive species discourses and management practices contribute to a broader settler colonial project of maintaining control over Indigenous lands and waters. I emphasize that such species’ ecological, economic, and social impact directly results from colonialism and capitalism, which prompts a necessary shift in language from “invasive species” to alienated species, an alternative term I propose to signal this interconnection. Reading various media such as U.S. Congressional proceedings, popular science, YouTube videos, social media, and reality TV shows like Duck Dynasty, I demonstrate how dominant discourses of species invasion rely on racial logics of purity and colonial logics of possession to construct such species as alien Others against which nativity and whiteness are defined. Close readings of contemporary literature emerging from communities constructed as “alien,” such as Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998) and Marwa Helal’s Invasive Species (2019), reveal that, far from being value-neutral, these mainstream discourses and practices have as much to do with colonialism and race as they do with biology. As a counterpoint, I investigate differences between Indigenous and settler-colonial understandings of species’ migration, emphasizing relationships between Indigenous and so-called “alien” communities under settler colonialism. Focusing on approaches by the Anishinaabeg and CHamoru, I highlight how Indigenous ecologies, ecological knowledge, and practices focus on the possibilities of emerging relations with alienated species and envision radical alternatives for imagining place, migration, and belonging. I identify these responses in interview data from fieldwork conducted with nine Anishinaabe nations and in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (Potawatomi) Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) and Craig Santos Perez’s (CHamoru) from unincorporated territory [hacha] (2008).

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Settler colonial acclimatisation: Barrie Ryne Blatchford, America’s Acclimatization Exchange: Animal Acclimatization, Settler Colonialism, and the Transformation of American Nature, 1840-1975, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2024

14Jan24

Abstract: This dissertation argues that the significance and extent of American animal “acclimatization”—the nineteenth-century term for the purposeful introduction of non-native wild animals—has been drastically underestimated in previous historiography. Far from a negligible “fad” that only briefly interested a small number of hunters and wildlife enthusiasts, American acclimatization was in fact a large-scale and enduring exercise in bioengineering that introduced dozens of new species to the nation over the course of more than a century. At first led by private individuals and organizations, American acclimatizers introduced several new birds and fish into the country from the mid-nineteenth century, including modern-day mainstays like the English sparrow, ring-necked pheasant, and German carp. While private organizations devoted to animal acclimatization mostly dissipated by the late nineteenth century, the federal government’s biologist-bureaucrats made the acclimatization of new animals a central component of vast efforts to supply America’s hunters and fishers deep into the twentieth century, a persistence that has been heretofore overlooked. In composing the first dedicated study of American animal acclimatization, I visited a dozen different archives and have brought hundreds of previously unexamined sources to bear. These revealed the enduring popularity of animal acclimatization and its persistence as a wildlife rejuvenation tool. These sources also laid bare the ideological motivations for animal acclimatization. Far from salving a nostalgic yearning for the fauna of Europe, Euro-Americans often saw animal acclimatization projects as progressive techniques of environmental management instead. Animal acclimatization projects, moreover, were intertwined with the Euro-American colonization of the American West. Settler-colonial ideology, that fusion of Euro-American racial supremacy with grandiose notions of national identity and expansion, runs through the rhetoric of many acclimatizers. More concretely, the United States Fish Commission effected the violent dispossession and subordination of the Winnemem Wintu People on California’s McCloud River in order to set up the nation’s first chinook salmon hatchery. The USFC used the hatchery to artificially spawn tens of millions of salmon to replenish American waters as well as establish chinook salmon in American and international watersheds where the fish had never existed before. Finally, I argue that the story of American acclimatization—what I call the American “acclimatization exchange”—offers important nuance and modification to the two most famous paradigms in environmental history: the conservation movement and Alfred Crosby’s “Columbian Exchange.” Massive parallel efforts in animal acclimatization indicate that the conservation era featured far more interventionist environmental management than usually appreciated. The early adoption of “fish culture” in 1860s American also suggests that the conservation era’s periodization should be significantly backdated. Furthermore, the sheer popularity and endurance of foreign species acclimatization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, plus the fact that Americans often obtained and exchanged species from Asia, India, and the broader Pacific World, temporally and geographically expands on Crosby’s notion of an Atlantic World “Columbian Exchange” in the wake of initial European discovery and colonization.

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Israeli-Palestinian Conflict – the Settler Colonial Perspectives: Settler Colonial Studies, 02/01/24

14Jan24

The October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas against Israeli targets and the subsequent assaults by Israel in Gaza have turned the world’s attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The more traditional news media as well as various social media sites currently overflow with reports and commentaries as we collectively attempt to understand the relations between Israelis and Palestinians. What some of these voices seem to be missing is an understanding of the long and complex history of this conflict. Wanting to react to this escalating crisis, the editors of Settler Colonial Studies looked to the past volumes of the journal and compiled an article collection shedding light on the trajectories and nuances of the ongoing violent struggle. While some people around the world dispute it, for the editors of this journal Israel constitutes a settler colonial state created by the UN in 1948 from territories already occupied by the Palestinian people. Our work as an academic journal constitutes examining the complexities of such settlement situations globally – in Israel but also in the US, Australia, and elsewhere where a group created a nation out of already occupied land, often by denying the humanity and rights of Indigenous peoples. The current situation in Gaza approximates a violent act of settler colonialism, of pushing the Palestinians out of the land and replacing them. We do not dispute any nation’s right to defend itself, just as we support the rights of Indigenous groups globally to pursue their sovereignty. We hope Israel’s leaders grasp their situation as a settler colonial state, recognize the rights of those whose lands were unlawfully ceded, and work to find a two-state compromise accepting historical and current realities of settlement. We also hope Palestine’s leaders strive for sovereignty in a peaceful manner. We condemn the taking of human life on all sides and encourage collaboration and humane compromise.

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The biosameness of settler colonialism: Brock Bersaglio, Charis Enns, ‘Settler Ecologies and the Future of Biodiversity: Insights from Laikipia, Kenya’, Conservation and Society, 2023

14Jan24

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and biodiversity. Focusing on Laikipia, Kenya, we argue that the types of plant and animal species present in the landscape have been shaped by historical and present power relations and often support settler colonial projects. We introduce five modes of violent ecological transformation that have been used to prolong and advance structures of settler colonialism in Laikipia: eliminating undesirable species from landscapes; rewilding landscapes with species deemed more desirable; selectively repeopling nature to create seemingly inclusive wild spaces; rescuing species at risk of extinction to shore up moral support for settler ecologies; and extending the range of settler ecologies by scaling wild spaces. Through these modes of ecological transformation, ecological relations of use and value to settler colonialism live on while other(ed) ecological relations are suppressed or erased. As efforts to implement the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) gain momentum, attention to settler ecologies is vital. Although there is no denying that radical action is needed to halt and reverse global biodiversity loss, there is a pressing need to question what types of nature will be preserved through the GBF and whose interests these natures will serve.

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‘Innocent settlers’: Yann Allard-Tremblay, ‘Dispelling the Fantasy of Innocence: Complicity and the Cultivation of Transgression in Settler Colonial Contexts’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2024

09Jan24

Abstract: This article critically engages with the Canadian framing of settler colonial/decolonial politics in terms of guilt and innocence. I argue that centring innocence, even as something to be snatched away from settlers, as with the theorization of settler moves to innocence, can corrupt the practice of moral responsibility. Furthermore, I argue that the desire for and expectation of innocence, in the face of structural injustices such as settler colonialism, are illusionary and that complicity is widespread. In contrast, I follow Iris Marion Young’s focus on political responsibility, but I argue that public collective actions need not be as centred as she suggests. Given the nature of settler colonialism and of coloniality, I argue for the acknowledgment of the political significance of daily individual acts and for the cultivation of dispositions that disrupt unjust structures, such as a disposition to transgress.

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