settler colonial studies blog

Unreconciled memory: Daniel M. Cobb, Marissa L. Carmi, ‘Unreconciled: Indigenous Presents/Presence & Settler Memory’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 29, 2, 2023, 316-331

21Nov23

Abstract: This essay explores race, racism, history, and popular memory from the vantage point of the Indigenous world, and, specifically, Native peoples colonized within the present-day United States. Over the course of the past decade, Indigenous movements for land and life have shed light on the incomplete nature of conquest in Native North America and the instability of settler colonialism. “Unreconciled” explores the ongoing tension between Indigenous presence and the settler colonial “logic of elimination” in the context of land acknowledgments, commemoration, popular culture, and federal policy. We show that, despite changes with regard to the ways in which non-Indigenous people in settler states collectively remember or imagine community, elements of settler memory continue to reside within and limit public conversations on race, remembrance, reconciliation, and reparation.

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Settlers and the city: Bruno Huberman, The Palestinians and East Jerusalem: Under Neoliberal Settler Colonialism, Bloomsbury, 2023

21Nov23

Description: Over the last two decades, the Israeli government has implemented policies for the development of East Jerusalem. These comprise urban revitalization as well as professional training and the promotion of entrepreneurship for the Palestinians. But how do these policies co-exist under Israeli settler colonial power? This book focuses on the contradiction between the rise of neoliberal development in East Jerusalem and the simultaneous continuation of Israeli settler colonialism. It argues that the combination of settler colonialism and neoliberalism allows for the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ to also occur permanently through deceptive soft forms. More than this, based on theoretical research, interviews, and an analysis of race and class relations in East Jerusalem, the book shows that neoliberal development is used to facilitate the reproduction of racial hierarchies, settler privileges and the pacification of the Palestinian residents, where these outcomes are presented as the ‘natural’ result of market relations. The author calls this environment ‘neoliberal settler colonialism’ and explores Palestinians’ new acts of resistance that exist ambivalently within this structure. A significant theoretical contribution, the study highlights a new settler colonial and neoliberal sociability that co-opts the exploited and oppressed.

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Settlers and their metropolitan interlocutors: Darren Reid, Imperial informants in a settler world: writing empire to the British Aborigines’ Protection Society from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, 1870-1890, PhD dissertation, University College London, 2023

21Nov23

Abstract: This thesis explores the entangled relationship between settler colonialism and imperial humanitarianism in the late nineteenth-century British Empire through the practice of becoming informants for the Aborigines’ Protection Society. Using letters written by settlers, Indigenous peoples, and missionaries living in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa between 1870-1890, it argues that the connections forged between colonial subjects and the Society reveal continuities of imperial subjecthood within self-governing colonies as well as contingencies of settler colonialism on the limitations of imperial networks. Informants came from a wide variety of backgrounds and had different motivations. Colonists became informants to participate in British House of Commons debates and publish letters in the British press. Missionaries became informants to undermine pro-settler logics of mission society capitalism. Indigenous peoples became informants to challenge settler government disinformation campaigns. Yet running through all these different perspectives was a shared desire to claim political rights as imperial citizens, to subvert settler discourses that opposed imperial authority, and to challenge imperial disavowal of responsibility for Indigenous-settler relations. Consequently, these informants moved between a variety of imperial networks to resist the development of settler sovereignty and construct an alternative version of subjecthood that blended self-determination with imperial oversight, all through the discourses of British humanitarianism, honour, and justice. While some experienced more success in their epistolary endeavours than others, the Aborigines’ Protection Society was ultimately incapable of fulfilling informant visions of imperial subjecthood. This thesis therefore suggests that the entrenchment of settler sovereignty and nationalisms in the early twentieth century was not a direct continuation of mid nineteenth-century campaigns for self-government, but was contingent on the failure of imperial networks to provide workable alternatives in the late nineteenth century.

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Racial settler colonialism: James Owens, Race-Making and Land-Taking: Uncovering Policing in the Constitution of Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 2023

19Nov23

Abstract: This dissertation addresses calls for greater communication studies inquiry into processes of colonization, racialization, and the White standpoint all too often naturalized in research. The dissertation accomplishes this through a communication study that expands the horizons of critical research on policing and race, revealing policing as a constitutive force of cultural and structural racism. I study cases of policing in transformative conflicts: uprisings by Anglo Eastern North American settler colonists against Indigenous people and British rule in the 1670s and 1760s, anti-Indigenous settler colonial uprisings in the Northwest Territory from 1795-1815, and the adaptation of colonial policing in industrial urban conflict in Chicago, 1854-1867. These case studies provide previously absent context on the colonial practices, racial ideology, and infrastructures that conditioned practices of policing in Chicago. Policing, the dissertation argues, must be understood as a colonially emergent social technique that gained political importance as means to creatively assert, not merely reinforce, representations and material systems of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. Later urban conflicts in Chicago, I show, adapted colonial policing as means to control geographic, racial, market, and legal boundaries necessary to the hegemony of capitalists, the Chicago Police Department, and city government. Scholarly contributions also include an original research framework of theory and method. I draw on ideas from WEB Du Bois to re-formulate Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and its later poststructural adaptation. My original genealogical method enables the search for emergence and descent of characteristic labor performances, the relations and representations those acts cite and adapt, as well as the structures they produce or destroy, and thereby the form of hegemony they organize. For police studies and history, the dissertation finds continuities between modern and colonial policing and needed redefinitions of policing as a practice. For feminist abolition and Black Marxist studies, my redefinitions expand understandings of the constitutive role of policing in racial capitalism and the White nation project. The dissertation works to draw these fields of study into collaboration with critical communication studies.

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Tax is sovereignty for Indigenous peoples too: Maximilien Zahnd, On Indigenous Tax Consciousness: The Socio-Legal History of the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, 1938-1987, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2022

19Nov23

Abstract: This thesis explores the relationship between taxation, Indigenous sovereignty, and settler colonialism. Specifically, it chronicles the socio-legal history of the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, a Gwich’in tribe from the Alaska interior region. The tribe gained national attention when it attempted to tax a school construction project in the 1980s, triggering a fierce but ultimately unsuccessful judicial battle with the state of Alaska. The thesis seeks to answer the following research questions: How does a tribe develop the idea to use taxation, and why does it decide to use it? The thesis thus strives to explore the origins and contours of what I call ‘Indigenous tax consciousness’. Drawing on archival and field research, I argue that a tribe’s tax consciousness consists of a long and delicate process that often takes years to crystallize. It requires a favorable politico-legal climate, good timing, a few key individuals, and some serendipity. Most importantly, however, Indigenous tax consciousness goes hand in hand with a profound desire to seek political, economic, and cultural empowerment.

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Indigenous-immigrant activism: Yukiko Tanaka, “Indigenizing Settlement”: Investigating the Possibilities and limitations of Indigenous-Immigrant Solidarity through Immigrant Settlement Organizations, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2023

19Nov23

Abstract: This dissertation investigates the possibilities and limitations of solidarity between immigrant and Indigenous communities when mediated through the immigrant settlement sector. I conducted participant observation, interviews, and sharing circles in a program I call the Indigenous-Newcomer Training Program (INTP), which brings together Indigenous and immigrant youth in employment seeking, along with interviews and document analysis in the broader immigrant serving sector in Saskatoon, SK, Canada. In my first empirical chapter, I find that contrary to previous literature on immigrant-Indigenous relations, the sector is deeply invested in acknowledging the First Peoples of the land and resisting anti-Indigenous racism among immigrants. While these organizations are taking steps toward building relationships with Indigenous communities, they also face limitations in terms of funding, overburdening Indigenous colleagues, and maintaining Western ways of knowing. My second empirical chapter investigates the ways INTP’s employment programming demonstrates alternatives to neoliberalism and settler colonialism by drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing. I argue that INTP resists the neoliberal self-reliance that other state-funded programs attempt to inculcate in immigrant and Indigenous job seekers by focusing on healing at individual and community levels instead of individual skill development. Yet, because of the constraints presented by INTP’s reliance on state funding, the extent to which they can resist is limited. In my final empirical chapter, I turn to the ways Indigenous and immigrant youth come to (re-)interpret each other through the frames provided by INTP. I find that when immigrants compare settler colonialism in Canada to the colonialisms their home countries went through, rather than building solidarity, these comparisons reveal resentment of Indigenous people. I argue that rather than using colonial comparison to absolve themselves of settler complicity, immigrants make these comparisons to become settlers themselves. Overall, this dissertation argues for analysis in migration studies that keeps settler colonialism in view and takes Indigenous solidarity as an imperative. By conceptualizing the empirical case of INTP as an opportunity to reconstruct theory on settlement agencies and immigrant-Indigenous relations, my study brings the literature up to speed with this reality on the ground, and offers an empirical case study in a largely theoretical field.

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Indigenous transnational activism: Razan Samara, Exploring Narratives of Solidarity Between Palestinian and Indigenous Activists on Turtle Island, MA dissertation, University of Toronto, 2023

19Nov23

Abstract: Palestinian and Indigenous anti-colonial movements have long understood that their struggles are inextricably linked. At the same time as Indigenous peoples are re-writing and rerighting history, there has been an increased interest in scholarly contributions that have made a compelling case for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist Indigenous resurgence and liberation rooted in transnational solidarity. Expanding upon this work in the fields of Indigenous and Palestine/ian Studies, this study engages grey literature materials to consider how Palestinian and Indigenous activists on Turtle Island (North America) define, build, and enact solidarity with one another. This analysis maps narratives of relationship building to contribute to a claiming back of our shared histories, and further our understanding of how Palestinian and Indigenous activists can deepen relations and imagine collective liberatory futures.

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Settler colonialism’s nonsense chronotope: Shirley Bricout, ‘Making (Non)Sense of the Sea, Sand and Self in The Boy in the Bush by D.H. Lawrence and M.L. Skinner’, Études Lawrenciennes, 2023

18Nov23

Excerpt: To the Australian characters, the sea is a constant reminder of their interaction with the British Isles and the legacy of the Swan River colony established in 1829. The sea itself is “empty” (BB 24, 44); it is measured in the number of weeks the crossing takes (six) and Britain is still called “Home” (BB 34, 392). This imperial common history is very vivid in the memories of the locals when Jack arrives, since they have just celebrated the half-centenary of the settlement on the Swan River. Mollie Skinner recalls in her memoirs how Lawrence had encouraged her not to write about the settlers in the earlier colony but “from the time when [she] became aware of what went on in this empty country” (114).

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Settler colonialism targets social reproduction: Elliot Goodell Ugalde, ‘Unveiling the Veiled Narratives: Settler-Colonialism, Matrilineality, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls along the Highway of Tears’, Canadian Journal for the Academic Mind, 2023

18Nov23

Abstract: Critical Indigenous scholars have extensively examined the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women/Girls (MMIWG) along the Highway of Tears (HoT) in British Columbia and have linked the phenomena to varying underlying colonial structures. However, these analyses often overlook the central role of settler-colonialism in imposing patriarchal ontologies, which perpetuate ongoing Indigenous femicide. To address this theoretical oversight, this document adopts Linda Smith’s framework of ‘gendering’ as a means of decolonial praxis to incorporate feminist social reproduction theory into the discourse of Critical Indigenous scholars’ commentary on MMIWG. The aim is to shed light on how the problem of MMIWG is rooted in the imposition of colonial, patriarchal ontologies that disrupt matriarchal social reproduction along the HoT. Furthermore, this document argues that a critical examination of how settler-colonialism disrupts matrilineal social reproduction should occupy a more central position within postcolonial discourses focused on addressing MMIWG along the HoT as per considering the higher matrilineal governance of nations along the HoT. Ultimately, this document argues that a more comprehensive understanding of settler-colonialism’s impact on displacing Indigenous matrilineal social reproduction should be given greater emphasis when discussing the causal factors surrounding MMIWG along the HoT. By addressing the theoretical oversights and incorporating a gendered analysis within a decolonial framework, the paper aims to advocate for more effective approaches to address the issue.

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Settler water ecologies: Sophia Borgias, ‘Drought, Settler Law, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct: The Shifting Political Ecology of Water Scarcity in California’s Eastern Sierra’, Journal of Political Ecology, 2023

18Nov23

Abstract: This article examines how drought intersects with long-standing issues of ecological degradation and social inequity caused by water extraction. I focus on the case of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and its ongoing impacts on the communities and ecosystems in the Owens and Mono basins in the Eastern Sierra region of California. Drawing on ethnographic and policy research, I show how environmental law addressed some of these impacts but reinforced others, perpetuating a settler colonial approach to water management that marginalizes Indigenous communities and naturalizes a level of environmental degradation. Drought has further exacerbated and obscured these issues of degradation and inequity, as Los Angeles has increasingly contested its environmental mitigation obligations and doubled down on the extractive approach that resulted in the need for mitigation in the first place. This research builds upon insights from political ecology and critical legal studies, underscoring how drought exacerbates existing water scarcity but also obscures the role of settler colonial legal frameworks and extractive practices in producing it.

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