settler colonial studies blog

Mouldy settler colonialism: Joonsoo S. Lyeo, Michael D. Wong, Natalie Clyke, Becky Big Canoe, Penny Kinnear, Helen Stopps, Nicholas D. Spence, Sarah R. Haines, ‘Ten questions concerning First Nations on-reserve housing in Canada’, Building and Environment, 2024

20Apr24

Abstract: Indigenous Peoples are the original inhabitants of Canada and are made up of three distinct groups: First Nations, Métis and Inuit. About 40% of First Nations people with Registered or Treaty Indian status live on-reserve. Relative to the general Canadian population, First Nations living on-reserve are more likely to live in inadequate housing conditions that include significantly higher rates of mold growth and overcrowding, as well as a significant amount of existing housing stock in need of major repairs. Efforts to improve on-reserve housing conditions must be understood in the context of colonial policies, which have systematically prevented First Nations from obtaining safe, secure, and sustainable housing. This paper aims to evaluate the range of challenges, concerns, and innovative solutions for First Nations on-reserve housing. Ten questions and answers have been presented to characterize the current state of First Nations on-reserve housing in relation to the rest of the Canadian housing stock, including an in-depth comparison of the differences between on-reserve and off-reserve housing. Various known causes of challenges resulting in adequate on-reserve housing are discussed, as well as a review of various operational and construction-related challenges facing on-reserve housing, such as community remoteness, a lack of available skilled trades, and mold and moisture issues. Human health and wellbeing are also discussed as a key outcome of poor housing quality, looking at both physical and mental health in communities, with special attention to IAQ problems as a result of overcrowding and mold accumulation.

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Settler colonialism produces settler ecologies: Irus Braverman, ‘Settler ecologies and more-than-One Health: From malaria to avian flu in the Hula Valley, Palestine-Israel’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2024

20Apr24

Abstract: The story of the Hula Valley in the Galilee region of Palestine-Israel serves as the focus of this article, which draws on the concepts “more-than-One Health” and “settler ecologies” to highlight the harmful ecological implications of settler colonial projects in this region and elsewhere. Specifically, I tell the story of the Zionist drying of the Hula wetlands in the 1950s for the purpose of fighting off malaria and advancing agriculture in the region—and then of Israel’s reflooding and rehabilitation of parts of the Hula in the 1990s in support of the massive annual bird migration. In winter 2021, more than eight thousand cranes succumbed to an avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak in the Hula Valley and over one million chickens in the area’s coops had to be culled. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted mainly in summer 2022, this article discusses the historical and socioecological conditions that have arguably enabled and exacerbated the avian outbreak, advocating for a more-than-One Health approach that is founded on acknowledging the settler colonial legacies of this place.

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The psychology of settlers: Sibusiso Maseko, Kevin Durrheim, ‘White settler ownership and dominance shape the consequences of autochthony beliefs on support for land reparations in South Africa’, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 30, 1, 2024, pp. 9-18

18Apr24

Abstract: Evidence suggests White settlers’ autochthony beliefs in historically colonized lands can both strengthen and weaken support for reparation measures. We propose that the divergent effect of autochthony beliefs on support for reparation measures is contingent on the perception of White settler ownership and preference for group-based hierarchies. In a single study with N = 807 White South Africans, we tested the moderation function of White settler ownership beliefs and preference for group-based hierarchies on the relationship between autochthony beliefs and support for land reparations. Results confirmed the hypothesis that endorsement of autochthony beliefs predicted stronger support for land reparation measures among respondents who perceived lower White settler ownership and preferred group-based equality. Our findings suggest that White settler ownership and social dominance orientation play a crucial role determining whether autochthony beliefs strengthen or weaken support for reparative measures in settler colonies.

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The commission of justice? Jeremie M. Bracka, ‘Reckoning with Colonial Legacies of Harm: Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2024

17Apr24

Abstract: Australia’s colonial era is formally over. Yet the legacies of structural inequality, dispossession, exploitation and racism against Indigenous Australia remain alive and well. In 2021, Victoria established the Yoorrook Justice Commission, culminating in a formal truth-telling and treaty process. Seeking to address harm since colonization, the state process is unprecedented both nationally and abroad. This article considers the relevance of the commission to truth recovery, accountability and structural reform in Australia. To date, national efforts to deal with the colonial past have been piecemeal and relatively ineffective. The Yoorrook Justice Commission departs from previous single-issue inquiries as well as from reconciliation policies driven by white-Australian federal institutions. While the Commission is not a panacea for resolving colonial injustice, it provides an important means of relational and structural truth-telling towards more just relations and righting racial wrongs. Ultimately, the Yoorrook Justice Commission sets a valuable precedent for Australia and other postcolonial nations. Its level of Indigenous ownership, its authority as a Royal Commission and the breadth of its inquiry make it a significant transitional justice project.

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A settler colonial anthropocene: Ruth A. Morgan, ‘A Pacific Anthropocene’, in James Beattie Ryan, Tucker Jones, Edward Dallam Melillo (eds), Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World, Honolulu, University of Hawai’I Press, 2023, pp. 257-278.

17Apr24

Excerpt: That the Anthropocene is the product of historical processes has at-tracted environmental historians to its analysis. It is a concept that speaks to the very project of the field, that is, to show that all human history is en-vironmental. Their early engagements with the concept (and its critiques) focused on the intellectual history of the idea; questions of disciplinary expertise and authority regarding its definition; and representations of the Anthropocene in material culture and historical narratives; and have since turned to moral questions of historical responsibility and environmental justice. In this chapter, I open with a reflection on the contributions of settler Australian environmental historians in the articulation of the Anthropocene; I then situate this historiography in terms of the southwest Pacific and its peoples. Placing the Anthropocene in this way traces the connecting threads between the concept and its (uneven) materiality, recognizing the historical processes that have produced this moment and the material differences in its manifestation around the globe. Focusing on the southwest Pacific, as this chapter suggests, takes a regional approach to placing the Anthropocene that brings such material differences into sharp relief.

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Surrogate settler colonialism (the reproductive settler frontier): Sigrid Vertommen, ‘Surrogacy at the Fertility Frontier: Rethinking Surrogacy in Israel/Palestine as an (Anti)Colonial Episteme’, History of the Present, 14, 1, 2024, pp. 108-137

16Apr24

Abstract: Surrogacy is a popular assisted reproductive practice in Israel, and it has been legal since 1996, albeit, until recently, only for married heterosexual couples. Same-sex couples who aspired to genetic parenthood were therefore “forced” to look for available surrogates abroad, in countries such as the United States, India, Nepal, Mexico, and Russia. This resulted in the emergence of a lucrative transnational surrogacy industry in Israel that relies on the reproductive labor power of racialized egg cell providers and surrogates in the global South, East, and North. While much of the existing research on surrogacy in Israel explains its ubiquity by centering cultural accounts of Jewishness, this article rethinks contemporary policies, practices, and markets of assisted reproduction from the vantage point of the “colonial episteme,” by unpacking the complex “intimacies” and reproductive afterlives of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in Israel/Palestine. The article argues that surrogacy operates both as a demographic frontier in the consolidation of a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine and as a commodity frontier for the accumulation of capital in a booming surrogacy industry. Surrogacy and other reproductive technologies also emerge as sites of reproductive resistance through practices of surrogacy strikes and sperm smuggling.

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Assyrian indigeneity in Iraq: Mariam Georgis, ‘Traversing Disciplinary Boundaries, Globalizing Indigeneities: Visibilizing Assyrians in the Present’, Meridians, 23, 1, 2024, pp. 182-209

16Apr24

Abstract: The author’s work spans the disciplinary boundaries of political science, Middle East studies, Indigenous studies, and their subfields. Broadly situated within critical theoretical bodies of knowledge, she focuses on an Indigenous nation in what is today known as Iraq. Her work is grounded within particular and fragmented locations that blur various lines and multiple layers of coloniality. This article offers a critical reflection of the invisibility in working on Indigeneity in southwest Asia within the structural imperatives of the academy. It takes up each of these themes by examining the fields of international relations and Iraqi studies to show how the story of Assyrians is invisible or unintelligible across these fields of political science and Middle East studies. Moreover, what the Assyrian story tells us about these disciplines and the multiplicity of coloniality (Patel 2019) is also rendered invisible. Despite the absence of Assyrians from Indigenous studies, the author sees this field as a site from which to potentially globalize Indigeneities. Specifically, she uses Indigenous feminism to construct a more nuanced framework into Assyrian histories, a framework that uses the lens of colonialism, land theft, erasure, and genocide to reframe the Assyrian experience as a remnant of the colonial global order.

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Settler colonial intersections: Eman Alasah, ‘The Palestinian Feminist Movement and the Settler Colonial Ordeal: An Intersectional and Interdependent Framework’, Meridians, 23, 1, 2024, pp. 110-132

16Apr24

Abstract: In light of recent developments in both the (anti)colonial and feminist discourses surrounding the settler colonial condition of Palestine, this article revisits and expands intersectionality as an analytical tool that captures manifold paradigms of subjugation. By considering the various ways in which colonial hegemony and patriarchal authority empower, substantiate, and contribute to one another, the article proposes interdependence as a more comprehensive analytical concept that, in addition to accentuating the multiplicity of oppressive structures, illuminates how they interact within a broader, complex matrix of power. The article positions the Palestinian feminist anticolonial struggle in relation to wider debates on Black, transnational, and Third World feminisms to contextualize the movement. The article eventually turns to contemporary examples of intersectional feminist mobilization that exemplifies the nuanced and ever developing nature of the movement.

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Indigenous feminisms against settler colonialism (introducing a special issue of Meridians): Basuli Deb, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, ‘Indigenous Feminisms across the World, Part 1’, Meridians, 23, 1, 2024, pp. 1-13

16Apr24

Excerpt: Several years ago Meridians joined many academic organizations and institutions in the United States by acknowledging that our Western Massachusetts–based offices are on Nonotuck land. In this we formed part of a wave of solidarity with Indigenous peoples that necessarily begins with recognition of how settler colonialism is deeply ingrained, embedded, and naturalized in every way, from place-naming conventions to thought structures. Further, as a first step toward moving from acknowledging to acting in the spirit of redress and forum building, Meridians undertook an audit of the content we have published in the twenty-four years of our existence. We found a shocking (if all too common) lack of Indigenous feminists and/or Indigenous feminist work in our oeuvre to date. As a result of this data-driven insight, and by way of beginning to transform our archive, we have endeavored to increase the participation of Indigenous feminist scholars and knowledge producers as peer reviewers and contributors to the Meridians project. Editor Candelario’s preliminary efforts yielded several publishable submissions focused largely on the Americas. Rather than intersperse these among other issues, we decided to devote an entire issue to Indigenous feminisms across the world.

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The memories of settler colonialism: Olli Hellmann, ‘Settler memory and Indigenous counter-memories: narrative struggles over the history of colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand, Political Science, 2024

14Apr24

Abstract: As with other settler colonies, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a longrunning conflict between a Eurocentric ‘master narrative’ of the historical past and Indigenous counter-narratives. Previous research on these narrative struggles adopts the ‘top-down’ perspective on collective remembering, focusing primarily on how memory entrepreneurs deploy cultural texts and practices to construct particular representations of history. To broaden the methodological scope, the analysis developed in this paper follows the ‘bottom-up’ approach, which makes it possible to map the distribution of collective memories across individuals and investigate their attitudinal effects. By means of a rigorous survey study (N = 1,066), the paper reveals three key findings about collective remembering in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, individuals in the ‘critical years’ of adolescence are more open to weaving Indigenous Māori perspectives into their understandings of history than older generations. Second, when compared to the monocultural master narrative, historical reconstructions that reflect Māori experiences promote a more inclusive understanding of national identity and generate public support for redressing historical injustices against Māori. Third, the empirical analysis finds no evidence for claims made by conservative political actors that creating space for the articulation of Māori histories perpetuates social division and weakens popular identification with the nation.

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