settler colonial studies blog

The bitterness of Indigeneity is validating: Hyunjoo Yu, ‘Zitkala-Ša’s indisputably moody, vital evolution(s)’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2023

03Jan24

Excerpt: Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Dakota), also known by her penname Zitkala-Ša, grabbed non-Native readers’ attention with her semi-autobiographical trilogy published in The Atlantic Monthly in January, February, and March 1900. As a graduate of White’s Manual Labor School, and as a teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Zitkala-Ša wrote what was not expected of her. Perhaps, or even likely, the expectation for her was to act as a grateful poster figure who praises the benefits of the late-nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools and their notorious mission to “civilize” Indigenous children. Her stories bear witness to an Ihanktonwan child’s experiences of violence, sickness, and isolation, and her rebellious feelings that express explicit distress, disgust, and anger toward the settler colonial disciplines. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder and superintendent of the Carlisle School, openly rebuked the stories. He wrote in the school newspaper, Red Man, that he fears that “the home-sick pathos – nay, more, the underlying bitterness of her story will cause readers unfamiliar with Indian schools to form entirely the wrong conclusions” (quoted in Katanski 2005, 123). And to this, Zitkala-Ša retorted in her correspondence to the editor, which appeared in the April 1900 issue of Red Man, “I give outright the varying moods of my own evolution; … no one can dispute my own impressions and bitterness!” (1900b?).

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Settler colonialism in unexpected places: Sony Coráñez Bolton, ‘“Nuestros salvajes filipinos”: Settler Encounters and Black Indigeneities in Mexico and the Philippines’, Periphērica: Revista de Historia Literaria y Cultural, 2, 2, 2023

03Jan24

Abstract: In this essay I develop a relational analysis placing Asian and Latin American racial discourses into conversation. My analysis here seeks to grasp with greater clarity the discrepant ways that Blackness, Indigeneity, and Asian identities are articulated in distinctly and distantly elaborated nation-building projects through mestizaje—a Philippine mestizaje and one originating in Mexico. I move us through an analysis of both Pedro A. Paterno’s ethnological study on Indigenous Philippine Blackness, Los Itas (1915), and José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (1925) as part of a global mestizo archive that is situated in the longue durée of the nineteenth century. The Aetas (or Itas), also commonly known by the Spanish term “Negritos,” are a community of phenotypically Black peoples that inhabit the mountainous regions of the northern Philippines in the island group known as Luzon. They have been a well-known community in the historical and cultural construction of Filipino racial identity. I examine the ways that the Aetas offered evidence of a Blackness that was transformed into a marker indexing the retrogression and development of the “Orient.” The dyad of civilization and barbarism in the Philippines pivoted on the dialectical antinomy of the Orient and Blackness. While the Philippines was not a site of and was far-removed from the transatlantic world, the physical darkness and qualitative Blackness of Indigenous peoples in the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, and the Antipodes braid together the logics of Orientalism and Blackness in ways that are of interest to a transnational vista of race. This gesture of theoretical braiding of racial logics seemingly more germane to the Atlantic world with racial discourse in the Philippines invites questions on the ways that Blackness and Indigeneity in US-based and Latin American scholarship are treated. In the final analysis, I argue that through the comparison of these different mestizajes that the Asian political subject formation breaks from Indigeneity through the disarticulation of both Asianness and Indianness from Blackness. However, Blackness, as I’ll explore, counterintuitively serves as a foundational heuristic device articulating Philippine racial identity through the prism of settler-native encounter. In my view, the racial scientific basis for Philippine racial identity being rooted in a conquest narrative of Malays conquering Indigenous “Filipinos” whose primitivity is indexed by Blackness has the potential to greatly reshape Philippine and Filipinx historiographies of race. This case study, I argue, provides compelling historical paradigms for thinking creatively and in coalition across Asian American, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous community and political formations in the present.

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The power of antisettler dreaming: Stephen Sheehi, Lara Sheehi, ‘The reverie of resistance’, Psychotherapy and Politics International, 21, 3-4, 2023, pp. 1-6

03Jan24

Abstract: In this short piece, we discuss the importance of reverie, a psychoanalytic concept, but also, a central logic in sumud. Using direct testimony from Palestinians in Gaza and freed political prisoners, we conceptualize how reverie affirms Palestinian life, willfulness, and resistance against the backdrop of settler colonial violence and, currently, active genocide.

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Bolivian settler colonialism: Marcela Mendoza, ‘Bolivian settlers and Toba Peoples: Appropriation of Indigenous lands on the Chaco Plains in the 1800s’, Historical Encounters, 10, 2, 2023, pp. 38-51

30Dec23

Abstract: This article analyses settler encroachment on Indigenous peoples’ lands in the Chaco region of Eastern Bolivia. It is an understudied story, rarely interpreted from a perspective inspired by settler colonial studies. My analysis explores policies promoted by the emerging Bolivian state to address its ‘Toba problem’ along the Pilcomayo River, where for three centuries hunter-gatherers ignored the colonial authority and continually defied the power of the new nation. The story is situated in the mid-to-late nineteenth century when administrators of the Republic distributed small tracts of land along the river with the intention of expanding ranching and consolidating the country’s international border. My analysis focuses on the contentious interactions between Toba and ranchers in a marginal area of Bolivia. Describing ‘settling’ from a non-Anglophone perspective, this approach expands the framework of settler colonial theory, offering innovative ways to read Indigenous dispossession and extermination in the Bolivian Chaco.

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Decolonising trails: Tavis Smith, Patrick Lucas, Tom Eustache, Thomas Schoen, ‘Reflections on trails, mountain biking, and Indigenous-settler relations in British Columbia: Ride, (re)connect, and (re)build’, in Jim Cherrington (ed.), Mountain Biking, Culture and Society, Routledge, 2024

30Dec23

Abstract: The Indigenous Youth Mountain Bike Program (IYMBP) is a non-profit society with the mandate to bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders, community members, and youth together to build mountain bike trails and foster reconciliation through the sport of mountain biking. In this chapter, we reflect on some activities of the IYMBP and in particular, its work with the Simpcw First Nation. The chapter proceeds in three parts: first, we lay out a rationale and theoretical underpinning for the chapter; second, the leaders of the IYMBP craft a narrative recount of their own perspective on the Allies Festival; third, and finally, we draw on some aspects of postcolonial thought to think through the implications of those reflections.

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Trolling settler colonialism: Kata Kyrölä, ‘Reading Border through Desire: Queer Indigenous Theory, Nordic Settler Colonialism, and Trans Aesthetics’, Camera Obscura, 38, 3, 2023, pp. 77-105

30Dec23

Abstract: This article examines the Swedish fantasy‐horror‐romance film Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) through queer Indigenous thought and the notion of trans aesthetics, exploring how the film may sensitize its viewers to seeing and feeling with gender variance, queer desire, and the trauma of settler colonialism. Drawing on Eve Tuck’s call for desire‐based research, the article asks what is at stake in queer, trans, and decolonial readings of films that are not necessarily identifiable as such at the surface level. Border centers on a love story between two gender‐fluid trolls who pass as human and whose kin have been subjected to genocide, dislocation, and mutilation, but the film’s reception largely misses the connection to the treatment of Indigenous Sámi people and transgender people within Nordic settler states. The article argues that Border‘s ecstatic depiction of gender‐fluid desires, bodies, and sex, alongside its examination of the psychic consequences of settler colonial violence, make it a thus far unique film in the Nordic context — even though this examination happens through the distancing effect of trolls as metaphorical Natives. The main characters embody wrongness in the settler nation‐state, in heteronormative society, and ultimately in the delimiting category of the human, but the film imagines rightness in nature as a queer, gender‐fluid space where all creatures can just be. Through employing notions of trans aesthetics, the (non)sovereign erotic, refusal, and haunting, the article proposes desire‐based readings of cinema that envision ways of feeling and existing beyond humancentric, settler, binary notions of gender and sexuality.

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Digital settler colonialism: Shahd Qannam, Jamal Abu Eisheh, ‘Settler Colonialism and Digital Tool of Elimination in Palestinian Jerusalem’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 96, 2023, pp. 71-84

30Dec23

Abstract: This article examines various ways in which the Israeli security apparatus utilizes digital tools to surveil and control Palestinians in East Jerusalem and beyond. Authors Shahd Qannam and Jamal Abu Eisheh argue that such digital tools are part of the Israeli settler-colonial goal of eliminating the Indigenous Palestinians. They identify three ways in which digital tools contribute to the elimination of Palestinians and Palestinianness in Jerusalem: first, tools that allow the tracking of the movement of Palestinians, such as CCTV cameras, biometric information, and electronic ankle monitors, enable the Israeli regime to digitally track Palestinians and criminalize their movement, in order to subsequently physically remove them from the city. Second, the authors detail how Israel produces digital maps that deliberately erase the Palestinian identity of the city, promoting instead an exclusionary Zionist narrative. Third, they explain how social media serve both as tools of censorship that further erase the Palestinian narrative, and as tools of surveillance that push Palestinians to self-censorship, thereby eliminating
expressions of Palestinianness.

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More settler big tales: Adam Carlson, ‘”Such are the Advantages of Autochthony”: Extracting Indigeneity through CanLit and Settler-Colonial Historiography’, Canadian Literature, 253, 2023

27Dec23

Abstract: This essay looks at early work by two members of the so-called Calgary School of political philosophy, Barry Cooper and Tom Flanagan. I examine how these Western intellectuals draw on Canadian literary conventions and structuralist narratology to construct an extractivist and myth-critical settler colonial historiography that works to maintain the objective normativity of settler culture by assimilating Indigeneity into white supremacy. Cooper and Flanagan’s work, I argue, effects cultural genocide by figuring settlers as the originary indigenes of the West in the territories currently called Canada; moreover, Flanagan’s work, in which he argues Indigenous peoples are the originary genocidal settlers, is crucial to understanding how extractivism works according to a logic of elimination.

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Settler big tales: Christopher Clayton Smith, ‘Big Tales of Indians Ahead’: The Reproduction of Settler Colonial Discourse in the American West, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2023

27Dec23

Abstract: “Big Tales of Indians Ahead” traces the reproduction of settler colonial discourses—sentiments narrated by a settler society about themselves and about the Native American societies that predated them—from the period of colonial history of the seventeenth century to the present day in the twenty-first century. This study argues that the anti-Indian rhetoric that could be found in early colonial EuroAmerican writings, particularly Indian captivity narratives, were reproduced by subsequent settler societies throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the form of settler narratives from the overland trail migrations and various forms of popular culture. In the twentieth century these discourses, heavily influenced by past settler discourses, reached wider audiences through new forms of popular culture—particularly Western genre films and mass-produced works of fiction aimed at younger audiences. Finally, this dissertation tracks the ways in which these discourses are still reproduced and present in contemporary popular culture media and political identities in the American West. From Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative of the late-seventeenth century to the overland trail settler narratives of the Oregon Trail and the wildly-popular Western films of the mid-twentieth century, Native Americans had consistently been tied to reductive and derogatory depictions in American collective cultural discourses that has tied stereotypes of so-called “Indians” to inherentlyracial traits such as savagery, depravity, and violence. This study not only shows that these assertions from a settler population, and their descendants, has been falsely (and thus unfairly) attributed to racialized notions of “Indianness,” but also provides a clear and consistent historical timeline that tracks these depictions across centuries and various forms of settler discourses.

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Settler colonial comparisons: Janne Lahti, ‘Settler colonial violence in the American Southwest and German Southwest Africa’, Historical Encounters, 10, 2, 2023, pp. 63-72

27Dec23

Excerpt: Colonial violence in the American Southwest and in German Southwest Africa have seldom been compared by historians. Those writing of the US-Apache conflicts have failed to look to colonial theaters around the world, their transnational attention focusing instead on the borderlands of United States, Mexico, and independent Indians. The studies of the generationslong struggle between Indigenous powers, the Spanish Empire, Mexico, and the US for mastery of the current US-Mexico border area have usually stressed Indigenous resistance and their unique military cultures. Violence in the Southwest borderlands of North America was perpetrated by state and state-sanctioned forces, Indigenous polities, corporate mercenaries, and private people and ranged from individual acts of murder to mob lynching and ultimately, genocide. This violence was understood as both a destructive energy and a constructive tool integral to building often ambiguous identities as settlers.

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