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Settlers over water: Erin O’Donnell, ‘Water sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples: Pathways to pluralist, legitimate and sustainable water laws in settler colonial states’, PLOS Water, 2023

26Nov23

Abstract: In settler colonial states, the doctrine of discovery that dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their lands also took their waters. The original water theft of colonization was underpinned by the erroneous assumption of ‘aqua nullius’ and remains almost entirely unacknowledged and largely unaddressed. Scholarly literature has focused on the injustice of this water theft and the human rights of Indigenous Peoples (under UNDRIP as well as their human right to water). This review shows that aqua nullius also renders settler state water law not fit for purpose in two important ways. Firstly, the legitimacy of settler state water laws is contested, presenting a foundational challenge to water governance, and failing to acknowledge the plurality of water laws in settler colonial states. Secondly, settler water law is experiencing a more widespread failure to deliver ecologically sustainable water management. In responding to the injustice of aqua nullius, foundational reform of settler state water laws can enable the settler state to learn from Indigenous laws that have supported thriving communities and genuinely sustainable water management for millennia. Drawing on examples from Aotearoa New Zealand, the USA, Canada, and Australia, this review shows how acknowledging, and challenging, the false assumption of aqua nullius creates novel pathways for reform, enabling pluralist water laws and water governance models that improve both legitimacy and sustainability of settler state water governance.


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Settlers over the water? Caio Simões de Araújo, ‘Must Dias fall? The politics and history of settler heritage in Southern Africa’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

26Nov23

Abstract: In the aftermath of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ Movement and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests, the politics of heritage has been at the centre of new intellectual debates and political demands, especially in relation to the status of problematic historical monuments. This article examines a form of colonial heritage that has remained politically uncontested as well as unexplored in the specialised literature, i.e. monuments memorialising early modern European sea voyages, in particular those pertaining to Bartolomeu Dias, credited as the first European navigator to successfully complete the maritime route to India, through the Western Cape. The article suggests that Dias can be productively seen not only as a symbol of pre-apartheid European colonisation, but more importantly as part of apartheid’s broader settler colonial narrative of Southern African history. Drawing on the example of monuments exchanged between Lisbon and Pretoria in the early 1960s, the article argues that settler heritage making played into white South African narratives of European settler ‘pioneerism’, but also served to cement politico-diplomatic solidarity and friendship between white-ruled states in Southern Africa. By unveiling the politics and history of settler heritage in South Africa, the article hopes to convince its readers that Dias, too, must fall.


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Transitional settler justice? Chris Cunneen, ‘Settler Colonial States and Transitional Justice’, in Jens Meierhenrich, Alexander Laban Hinton, Lawrence Douglas (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, 2023

26Nov23

Abstract: This chapter explores tensions in the relationship between transitional justice and Indigenous demands for recognition (often expressed in terms of sovereignty and reparations for colonial systemic human rights abuses) in the settler colonial states of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. These states are usually absent from considerations of transitional justice. The author challenges this assumption. In recent years transitional justice mechanisms within settler colonial states, including reparations, apologies, inquiries, and truth commissions, have been adopted. However, these responses have been limited and do not address some of the core demands of Indigenous peoples including recognition of self-determination and sovereignty. The ongoing nature of settler colonialism complicates transitional justice processes: rectifying the past demands changing the structural conditions of the present relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states.


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Enclosed settlers: John H. Cable, Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi, University Press of Kansas, 2023

26Nov23

Description: Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—to be a watershed event in the region’s history. In the decades after World War II, this transition pushed innumerable sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders off the land, redistributing territory and resources upward to a handful of large, mainly white operators. By disproportionately displacing Black farmers, enclosure also slowed the progress of the civil rights movement and limited its impact. John Cable’s Southern Enclosure is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism. Focusing on east-central Mississippi, home of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Cable situates enclosure in the long history of dispossession that began with Indian Removal. The book follows elite white landowners and Black and Choctaw farmers from World War II to 1960—the period when the old, labor-intensive farm structure collapsed. By acknowledging that this process occurred on taken land, Cable demonstrates that the records of agricultural agents, segregationist politicians, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are traces of ongoing colonization. The settler colonial framework, rarely associated with the postwar South, sheds important light on the shifting categories of race and class. It also prompts comparisons with other settler societies (states in southern and eastern Africa, for instance) whose timelines, racial regimes, and agrarian transitions were similar to those of the South. This postwar history of the South suggests ways in which the BIA’s termination policy dovetailed with Southern segregationism and, at the same time, points to some of the shortcomings of the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies.


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Aggressive settlers: F. Evan Nooe, Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South, University of Alabama Press, 2023

26Nov23

Description: A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity. In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a “long continued course of aggression and sufferings” between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, “aggression” and “sufferings” are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South. Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the Eastern Woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South. This, in turn, formed a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the region and examines the involved societies’ conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally, Nooe explores how white southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region’s Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period, during western expansion, and well through the twentieth century.


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Trauma with settler colonial characteristics: Joseph P. Gone, ‘Indigenous Historical Trauma: Alter-Native Explanations for Mental Health Inequities’, Daedalus, 152, 4, 2023, pp. 130-150

24Nov23

Abstract: The well-being of American Indian and other Indigenous communities has long been compromised by ruthless processes of European colonial dispossession and subjugation. As a result, contemporary Indigenous communities contend with sometimes overwhelming degrees of demoralization, distress, and disability. The concept of Indigenous historical trauma has arisen during the past thirty years as an alternative mental health discourse that critically contests prevailing categories of psychological disability, psychiatric distress, and mental disorders (including addiction, trauma, and suicide). Indigenous adoption and promotion of historical trauma affords an explanatory account for community mental health inequities that designates the historical legacies of colonization as central for understanding contemporary Indigenous suffering. In so doing, Indigenous advocates of historical trauma creatively recast these problems as postcolonial pathologies, and ardently call for overdue advances in reconciliation, redress, and repair with respect to Indigenous Peoples. Ideally, such advances will be evidenced by societal transformations, structural reforms, and social justice that can enhance and ensure Indigenous futurity and well-being.


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Housing justice with settler colonial characteristics: Naama Blatman, Alistair Sisson, ‘Rethinking housing inequality and justice in a settler colonial city’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2023

24Nov23

Abstract: This paper brings the housing studies literature into conversation with scholarship on settler colonialism to consider questions of housing justice in settler colonial societies. It begins from an understanding of Indigenous dispossession as not simply an historical context but an ongoing process in which housing is deeply implicated through its embeddedness in colonial land and property regimes. Furthermore, processes of exclusion, neoliberalisation, financialisation and gentrification have made housing central to the production of racial inequality in (and beyond) settler colonies. Liberal notions of inequality that dominate most housing policy and some scholarship are, therefore, inadequate; what is required is research and intervention oriented towards housing justice – the meaning of which is best understood through intellectual and practical engagement with movements struggling for it. In this spirit, the paper presents the story of a prolonged struggle in so-called Sydney, which suggests how housing initiatives and campaigns led by Indigenous people are iteratively reconstructing existing political and economic structures in ways that address commodification, dispossession, exclusion, and displacement. This story points to a need for housing justice scholarship to engage with concepts of reparations – an engagement towards which this paper, in its final section, makes some small but hopefully helpful steps.


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Settler colonialism’s playful geoglyphs: Richard Eberhardt, Mikael Jakobsson, ‘Invisible at the Edge: Playing with the Geoglyphs of Occupation in Anglo-America’,Proceedings of DIGRA, 2023

24Nov23

Abstract: Maps are both a pervasive feature of a wide variety of board games and an important locus in postcolonial inquiry. In the words of Edward Said: “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggles over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.” We offer our analysis of board games telling spatial narratives of European settler colonialism in Anglo-American. through a critical reading of the way these games map the land and invite players to bring those maps alive through gameplay. The study expands on the tangential engagement with this topic in Flanagan and Jakobsson (2023). Our theoretical foundation includes Harley (1988), Scott (1998), Wolfe (2006), and Barnd (2017). We also build on video game research, especially that of Lammes (2003, 2010), Magnet (2006), and Mukherjee (2017). But it should be noted that all of these authors study video game. We have found the need to develop a parallel apparatus for the critical analysis of board games with their unique qualities in terms of materiality, player configurations, and role in the cultural discourse. Our methodological approach is rooted in critical theory and builds on interaction criticism (Bardzell 2011). We have acquired over two hundred of these games and played over a hundred of them. By building a substantial collection of colonialist themed board games and dedicating time to play through and analyze them, we have found emergent patterns that remain hidden as long as the games are studies separately.


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The climate settler colonialist: Philip Steer, ‘Narrating Migration in the Settler Colonies: From Systematic Colonization to the Climate Refugee’, in Corina Stan,  Charlotte Sussman (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, Palgrave 2023, pp 19-35

24Nov23

Abstract: This chapter argues that present-day attempts by settler novelists in Australia and New Zealand to conceptualize the migration of climate refugees are shaped by formal approaches that were developed to comprehend migration to the settler colonies in the nineteenth century. The early theorist of settler colonization, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, advanced two contrasting accounts of the relation between capital, migratory labor, and the nation: a “social” model that prioritized a settled and homogeneous population of nation builders, and an “investment” model that asserted the value of mobile non-white laborers. That tension between settled and mobile labor was dramatized by the late-nineteenth-century genre of the invasion novel, which gave virulent form to anti-Asian immigration sentiment. The reemergence of the thematic and formal concerns of the invasion novel in response to climate-driven migration, in novels such as Rohan Wilson’s Daughter of Bad Times (2019) and Kirsten McDougall’s She’s a Killer (2021), suggests that settler culture remains beholden to those foundational conceptual dilemmas of European migration in the nineteenth century. Those enduring limitations are further highlighted through the contrast with a short story by the Māori author, Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu), which demonstrates how differently climate migration might be conceived of in Indigenous terms.


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Settler colonialism is pollution: Elizabeth Grennan Browning, ‘”We were environmentalists long before it was popular”: Legacies of Settler Colonialism in the Coal-Based Pollution of the Midwest’s 1970s Energy Sector’, Middle West Review, 10, 1, 2023, pp. 127-156

21Nov23

Excerpt: In her 1973 exposé Power Over People, Ohio-based science writer Louise B. Young reflected on the disillusioning aesthetics of the postwar American landscape: “We look around billboards and over superhighways and under transmission lines and pretty soon we don’t really see at all.” Young focused on health concerns stemming from exposure to electromagnetic fields created by rapidly proliferating high-voltage power lines; she argued that in its pursuit of capitalist gains, the electric utility industry had neglected the safety of communities that served as unwilling hosts to towering transmission lines. As notions of American progress became closely intertwined with everyday comforts derived from technology, Young sought to make visible the infrastructure behind mass electrification, as well as the sacrifices required by those whose personal lives and property suffered from its construction and operation. Young’s work invoked the storytelling of Silent Spring, published eleven years earlier in 1962: “As Rachel Carson pointed out, we urgently need an end to false assurances and the little sugar-coated pills of half-truths. We are being asked to assume the biological risks and to pay the hidden costs. In the case of high-voltage transmission lines, the electric companies have the ability to force these risks on all the property owners lying in their path.”


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