settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous sovereignty is taxing (and rightly so): Maximilien Zahnd, ‘An Alaska tax story: Tribal sovereignty, settler colonialism, and the Indigenous tax space’, EPD, Society and Space, 2023

25Oct23

Abstract: This article interrogates the extent to which tax laws are capable of empowering Indigenous
peoples. It employs the concept of an Indigenous tax space, which places spatiality at the center of
the settler colonial project. The socio-legal history of the Native Village of Kluti Kaah, an Ahtna
tribe from southcentral Alaska, constitutes the main case study. In 1987, the tribe attempted to
tax the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that passed through its traditional lands, creating an Indigenous tax
space wherein tax law and discourse congregated to express and enact Indigenous agency. The
article argues that the Indigenous tax space (1) provides a rare opportunity to reappraise the
geographies of tax laws and policies and, more broadly, (2) allows us to explore settler colonialism’s previous and ongoing effects upon Indigenous territories.

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An airport is a settler colonial node: Jason Tuấn Vũ, ‘Bound Passages: Aviation, Deportation, and the Settler Carceral Transpacific’, Radical History Review, 147, 2023, pp. 137-157

25Oct23

Abstract: This article traces the settler-colonial histories of Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) in Hawai‘i and Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport (GUM) in Guåhan (Guam) to chart the role of Indigenous dispossession in facilitating ongoing carceral transits across the Pacific. Focusing on the March 2021 deportation of thirty-three Vietnamese refugees from the United States, it situates the deportation flight’s layovers at HNL and GUM within larger processes of racial-colonial violence that constitute the development and operation of both airports. In this sense, HNL and GUM reveal the palimpsestic nature of Hawai‘i and Guåhan as sites of colonial occupation that, in turn, are used to bolster the further transit of global US empire. This essay thus attempts to chart a critical transpacific geography that links the settler-colonial and carceral dimensions of US empire through the issue of Southeast Asian deportation.

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Infrastructure is settler colonialism: Carrie Mott, ‘”The Last Victims of the Indian War”: Celilo Falls, the Dalles Dam, and Infrastructural Colonization’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023

25Oct23

Abstract: In 1957, the Dalles Dam was constructed on the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon. When the dam was completed, it inundated Celilo Falls, a Native American fishery and cultural gathering point that had been in use for at least 12,000 years. Prior to dam construction, the federal government and local agencies issued a number of reports stating the necessity of the dam for economic development through hydroelectric power generation, improved shipping navigation, flood control, and expanded irrigation capacity. These reports often sought to determine the financial payout that would be made to the groups with treaty rights to fish at their “usual and accustomed” places, such as Celilo Falls. However, the reports rarely engage with the cultural significance of Celilo Falls or the depth of opposition that people had to the dam. The research discussed here is based on archival government reports alongside the voices of affected tribal members preserved through The Confluence Project and other sources. This article develops the idea that reclamation infrastructure in the U.S. West plays a key role in colonizing efforts from federal to local scales, reflecting the aims of the settler state. Through an analysis of government documents alongside the recollections of Indigenous elders from the mid-Columbia region, this article offers insights into how reclamation infrastructure functions as an aspect of settler colonialism and relies on theorizations of this process from the people most affected by the loss of Celilo Falls.

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Responsibility against settler colonial institutions: Adam Joseph Barker, Jenny Pickerill, ‘Geographies of collective responsibility: decolonising universities through place-based praxis, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2023

25Oct23

Abstract: This paper asks how can we as geographers, occupying positions of relative privilege but also beholden to institutions entangled with legacies of colonialism and ongoing colonization, find and embody our responsibilities to Indigenous people and nations and contribute to decolonization within and beyond the academy? We begin by reflecting on Doreen Massey’s (2004) theorization of geographies of responsibility and critiques of it in the intervening years. We then engage with important considerations including the politics of recognition, relational grammars of settler colonialism and Indigenous notions of relationality. To avoid the traps of recognition politics, which often foreclose the more transformative possibilities of responsibility, we propose ways of taking of decolonial responsibility in our teaching, research and professional service. While we cannot provide simple solutions to the difficult challenge of pursuing decolonization in the academy, we believe that centralizing and prioritizing relationships of responsibility to and through place in support of resurgent Indigenous nationhood is required to avoid the denuding, individualizing process of colonial recognition and superficial performative decolonisation.

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Settlement and population: Rachel O’Sullivan, Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective, Bloomsbury, 2023

25Oct23

Description: This book examines Nazi Germany’s expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland (1939-1945) through a colonial lens. The topic of the Holocaust has thus far dominated the scholarly debate on the relevance of colonialism for our understanding of the Nazi regime. However, as opposed to solely concentrating on violence to investigate whether the Holocaust can be located within wider colonial frameworks, Rachel O’Sullivan utilizes a broader approach by investigating other aspects, such as discourses and fantasies related to expansion, settlement, ‘civilising missions’ and Germanisation, which were also intrinsic to Nazi Germany’s rule in Poland. The resettlement of the ethnic Germans-individuals of German descent who lived in Eastern Europe until the outbreak of the Second World War-forms a main focal point for this study’s analysis and investigation of colonial comparisons. The ethnic German resettlement in the Reichsgaue laid the foundations for the establishment and enforcement of German society and culture, while simultaneously intensifying the efforts to control Poles and remove Jews. Through this case study, O’Sullivan explores Nazi Germany’s dual usage of inclusionary policies, which attempted to culturally and linguistically integrate ethnic Germans and certain Poles into German society, and the contrasting exclusionary policies, which sought to rid annexed Poland of ‘undesirable’ population groups through segregation, deportation and murder. The book compares these policies – and the tactics used to implement them – to colonial and settler colonial methods of assimilation, subjugation and violence.

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The Indigenous peoples of a settler colony (as different settlers fight their war): Martin-Oleksandr Kisly, Crimean Tatars: Claiming the Homeland, in Manuel Férez Gil, Olena Palko (eds), Ukraine’s Many Faces Land, People, and Culture Revisited, Transcript, 2023, pp. 247-262

25Oct23

Abstract: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine raised anew the issue of colonial nature of this war and intensified debates on decolonization of Ukraine and its history. Nonetheless, little has been done to discuss the history of the Crimea as of a Russian settler colony.1 The history of Russian presence in Crimea cannot be comprehensive without considering its indigenous people, the Crimean Tatars, who ever since the annexation of the Crimean Khanate by the Russian Empire in 1783, had been the object of state-driven persecution and discrimination. In this vein, deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 should be treated as a high point of the Russian colonial policy in the peninsula. As this chapter intends to show, the history of Crimean Tatars’ exile and return is distinctive from other cases of Soviet ethnic deportations, because they not only survived and maintained their connection with the homeland, but also managed to initiate a protest movement, inherently, anti-colonial, and eventually return to Crimea en masse.

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A settler ideology is mobile: Scott McDermott, The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650, Anthem Press, 2022

25Oct23

Description: The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place, and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650 examines the ideology that English Puritans developed to justify migration: their migration from England to New England, migrations from one town to another within New England, and, often, their repatriation to the mother country. Guided by the Protestant scholasticism of Cambridge University, Puritan leaders accepted the ancient corporatist image of society as a living, organic body politic, a model which they applied to nations, colonies, business corporations like the Massachusetts Bay Company, and towns. But if a town, a colony, or a nation were a living body, how could Puritans justify withdrawing from one body to form a new social body, as they so often did? Drawing on the prevailing humoral theory of health, Puritans leaders believed that if a social body became “distempered” because of insufficient resources or political or religious disagreements, it might become necessary to bring about a new body politic in order to restore balance and harmony to the existing one. This theory gave rise to a robust “politics of place” in colonial New England, where one’s choice of residence could make a strong political statement. In order to facilitate the founding of new town bodies, colonial elites were endowed with unique privileges of mobility. But these entrepreneurs also needed ordinary inhabitants to make a successful migration, so that the various “members” of the new social body all benefited from the opportunities conferred through the privilege of migration. The body of a new town was articulated through the social ritual of land distribution, carried out in proportion to rank according to Aristotelian “distributive justice.” The book will trace this process at work in the founding of Ipswich and its satellite towns in Massachusetts.

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The Roots of the conflict: Magdalena Pycińska, ‘Israeli and Palestinian Settler Colonialism in New Media: The Case of Roots’, Humanities, 12, 5, 2023

21Oct23

Abstract: sraeli settler colonialism, in time, became highly linked to the idea of a state, culminating in an institution that defends the past, present, and future practises maintaining the relations between the “native” and “settlers”. Settler colonial ideas and practises sustaining binary opposition between the “native” and the “settler” are reproduced not only by Israeli state broadcasters, but also by settler colonial social media. This article proposes media analysis that goes beyond the usual national and conflict narrative and links “settler colonial common sense” with social media impacts and state ideas/sovereign ideas of property that strive to eliminate native people or transfer them outside Israel’s perceived land ownership and sovereignty. This article also shows how Israeli settler colonial politics and narratives are supported by other settler colonial states (especially the United States). New media and settler common sense cannot be disassociated from the Israeli state and global politics, even though some settlers may have their own strategies regarding the relations with native Palestinians. The State of Israel, through massive surveillance technologies and support from other states that view militarisation and population management as crucial to maintaining its power, holds a great deal of influence over how it frames the “conflict” with Palestinians. We witness how both state violence and institutionalised Jewish privilege are recreated on the ground and globally through the new media. This issue is analysed through the “Roots” (a grassroots movement for understanding among Israelis and Palestinians) case study.

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Indigenous diplomacy now: Madeleine Pugin, ‘Indigenous Australian diplomacy and the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2023

21Oct23

Abstract: The Australian National University’s inaugural Coral Bell Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy introduced philosophical perspectives that could underpin Indigenous Australian diplomacy. This piece uses the lecture as a starting point to discuss the possibilities and tensions of using a relationist ethos to pursue an Indigenous Australian Diplomacy approach within a survivalist system, drawing on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). First, I provide a brief history of Indigenous peoples in the survivalist international political order, then I explain what can be learnt from relational Aboriginal societal structures, and finally I use UNDRIP as a potential form of diplomatic machinery for supporting Indigenous diplomacy. This shows that an Indigenous relationalist approach to diplomacy and foreign policy that is guided by UNDRIP has the potential to transform the way in which states deal with Indigenous peoples and each other.

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Settler parking: Amanda Ricketts, ‘Land means the world: narratives of place and colonial ecological violence in the media framing of the Bears Ears National Monument’, Environmental Sociology, 2023

21Oct23

Abstract: Settler colonialism shapes the governance of public land in what is now called the United States, contributing to eco-social disruptions for Indigenous populations. The Bears Ears National Monument was established in December 2016 in an unprecedented collaboration between the federal government and an inter-tribal coalition. Less than a year later, in December 2017, the Trump administration issued a presidential proclamation removing and bisecting 85% of the protected land for energy exploration. I analyze media coverage of Bears Ears National Monument from December 2016 to December 2017 to observe the effects of this framing on elimination projects of the settler state in public land conflicts. I find through the repeated erasure and redirection of Indigenous narratives, local media coverage centralizes the interests of the settler state by classifying land as an asset, making settler political concerns the central contentious issue. To understand how colonial ecological violence shapes the governance of public land, like the case of the Bears Ears National Monument under the Trump administration, scholars should attend to how the media advances narratives of place and contributes to cultural elimination.

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