settler colonial studies blog

The geometries of settler colonialism are inscribed on Indigenous lands: Irene Cheng, The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Minnesota Press, 2023

09Apr24

Description: How nineteenth-century social reformers devised a new set of radical blueprints for society. The Shape of Utopia documents a pivotal moment in American history when ordinary people ardently believed in the potential to reshape society. Highlighting the inherent political capacity of architecture, Irene Cheng showcases how visionary utopian planners in the mid-nineteenth century used their blueprints as persuasive visual rhetoric that could mobilize others to share in their aspirations for a better world.

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The settler border is political: James M. Hundley, ‘Rethinking political symbols: Indigenous nationhood and settler colonialism in the Canada/United States borderlands’, Canadian Geographies, 2024

09Apr24

Abstract: Straddling the Canada/United States border at its western end is a 67‐foot monument symbolizing 200 years of peace between the two countries. Today, it is frequently used as a site for protest against the state. This article analyzes an environmental protest against energy transmission projects through the Salish Sea by Coast Salish Indigenous nations. I argue that the Coast Salish are using the landscape as a political symbol, effectively erasing the international border that separates them. Their presentation as a unified nation succeeds because of their strategic manipulation of political symbols. Drawing primarily on ethnographic methods, this article demonstrates that the choice of the international park as a site of protest serves as an entry point for Indigenous activists to expand the scope of their position; the border is implicated in the creation of emergent political identities that draw on and transform political symbols. The argument is that the materiality of these political symbols is being used by Indigenous nations and their allies and contributes to theoretical work on settler colonialism as it pertains to the creation, deployment, and analysis of political symbols. The use of political symbols in the borderlands illustrates the shifts in a struggle over power and identity and how they manifest in daily life.

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Chile’s Indigenous (and settler) question: Pilar M. Herr, ‘Settler Colonialism in Araucanía: The Mapuche’s Defense of Their Lands and Citizenship Rights Through the Medium of Letters in Nineteenth Century Chile’, The Latin Americanist, 68, 1, 2024, pp. 85-97

09Apr24

Abstract: As Chilean citizens, the Mapuche peoples were landowners of large tracts of lands in Araucanía, Chile’s southern borderlands region between the Bío- Bío and Toltén rivers. This article analyzes a series of letters that Mapuche leaders wrote to state authorities and others in the middle of the nineteenth century. The content of these letters reveals multiple ways that Mapuche leaders argued for the protection of their lands and interests, as the state created policies that actively worked to undermine them through a settler colonization plan. This strategy included appropriating Mapuche lands for outside settlers and denying the Mapuche their citizen rights as Chilean citizens.

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Governing water is a marker of sovereignty: John Bosco Acharibasam, Margot Hurlbert, Ranjan Datta, Lewis wâsakâyâsiw Kevin, ‘Meanings of Indigenous Land-based Healing and the Implications for Water Governance’, Explore, 2024

09Apr24

Abstract: The continuous process of settler colonialism in Canada has profoundly impacted Indigenous Peoples’ relationship with the Land and water, which holds immense significance in their healing journey. Reconnecting with the land and water through culturally rooted practices has far-reaching implications for the health and well-being of Indigenous communities. Maintaining a strong bond with the land and water is integral to Indigenous healing traditions. To gain insights into this connection we used a relational theoretical framework and engaged with (the community), a remote Indigenous community. Our approach centred around community-based participatory research, utilizing methods like deep listening, cultural camps and story-sharing to collect wisdom from community members, knowledge keepers, and Elders. The research findings show understanding the connection between Land-based healing practices and Indigenous-led water governance is critical to solving the water crises within remote Indigenous communities. This knowledge is indispensable for reshaping current water governance systems and ensuring the well-being of Indigenous communities across Canada.

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Argentina’s Indigenous (and settler) question: Carolyne R. Larson (ed.), The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History, University of New Mexico Press, 2020

09Apr24

Description: For more than one hundred years, the Conquest of the Desert (1878-1885) has marked Argentina’s historical passage between eras, standing at the gateway to the nation’s “Golden Age” of progress, modernity, and–most contentiously–national whiteness and the “invisibilization” of Indigenous peoples. This traditional narrative has deeply influenced the ways in which many Argentines understand their nation’s history, its laws and policies, and its cultural heritage. As such, the Conquest has shaped debates about the role of Indigenous peoples within Argentina in the past and present. The Conquest of the Desert brings together scholars from across disciplines to offer an interdisciplinary examination of the Conquest and its legacies. This collection explores issues of settler colonialism, Indigenous-state relations, genocide, borderlands, and Indigenous cultures and land rights through essays that reexamine one of Argentina’s most important historical periods.

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The tourist and the settler (i.e, a permanent and violent tourist): Kristalyn Marie Shefveland, Selling Vero Beach: Settler Myths in the Land of Aís and Seminole, University Press of Florida, 2024

09Apr24

Description: Separating “Old Florida” myths from realities in a tourist haven with a deep Indigenous past. Themes of unspoiled paradise tamed by progress can be seen in stories about pioneer history across the United States, especially in Florida. Selling Vero Beach explores how settlers from northern states created myths about the Indian River area on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, importing ideas about the region’s Indigenous peoples and marketing the land as an idyllic, fertile place of possibilities. In this book, Kristalyn Shefveland describes how in the Gilded Age, Indian River Farms Company and other boosters painted the region as a wild frontier, conveniently accessible by train via Henry Flagler’s East Coast Railway. Shefveland provides an overview of local Aís and Seminole histories that were rewritten by salespeople, illustrates how agricultural companies used Native peoples as motifs on their fruit products, and includes never-before-published letters between Vero Beach entrepreneur Waldo Sexton and writer Zora Neale Hurston that highlight Sexton’s interest in story-spinning and sales. Selling Vero Beach unpacks real and fabricated pasts, showing how the settler memory of Florida distorted or erased the fascinating actual history of the region. With a wide variety of stories invented to lure investors and tourists, many of which circulate to this day in a place that remains a top vacation destination, Vero Beach is an intriguing example of why and how certain pasts were concocted to sell Florida land and products.

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Entangled settler colonialisms: Micaela Sahhar, ‘Where is Palestine in the Anzacs’ Palestine Campaign? Israel and the Struggle for Indigeneity in Commemorative State Practice’, Middle East Critique, 2024

08Apr24

Abstract: At the end of the second decade of the twenty first century, Israel has sought to align itself with a range of Indigenous struggles both to conceal the ongoing nature of settler-colonialism and to attempt to position the Zionist-state project as an indigenous one. This article examines one instance of this trend, in the recent commemorative events surrounding the centenary of the Palestine Campaign, a military campaign fought by Australian soldiers during World War I. The article argues that official Israeli
commemoration of this campaign, and the recent foregrounding of the role of Aboriginal servicemen in it, is an example of Israel’s indigenous diplomacy, which aims to occlude Palestinian presence and history in their ancestral lands. It argues that this practice ultimately does not serve the purpose it is intended to fulfil, but merely delays the work of imagining a just future in Israel/Palestine.

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The embroidery of antisettler resistance: Amita Khurana, ‘The Power of Tatreez: Transformations in Politics and Practice Post-1948’, Afkar, 6, 1, 2024, pp. 13-28

08Apr24

Abstract: In May 1948, approximately 700,000 Palestinians were exiled from their homeland when the state of Israel was created. Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine has been ongoing since then, as Palestinian land, culture, language, art, and food continue to be appropriated by the Israeli settler state. This essay examines one Palestinian traditional art form: Palestinian embroidery (tatreez) as a cultural tradition, a mode of resistance and refusal to cultural erasure, as a commodity of NGOs, and a mode of survival in refugee camps as a result of 1948. My research methods include a close literature analysis of secondary sources and archival research, an original analysis of an NGO website, and my interviews with Palestinians in a refugee camp located in Lebanon. This paper aims to contribute to existing feminist literature on the roles of Palestinian women in the Palestinian liberation and decolonization movement.

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Operatic settler colonialism: Derek Baron, ‘Opera and Land: Settler Colonialism and the Geopolitics of Music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 2024

08Apr24

Abstract: This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal offreservation boarding school for the compulsory education of Indigenous children, established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. By examining the music education and performance culture at the Carlisle School, this article considers the role of music both within boarding school discourses of “civilization” and in terms of the larger federal goal of dispossession of Native land. Based on original archival research and engagements with contemporary discourses in Indigenous music and sound studies, the article then considers a nationalistic comic opera titled The Captain of Plymouth performed by Native students at the Carlisle commencement exercises in 1909. It argues ultimately that, although music, dance, and expressive culture were a central concern for federal assimilationist policy, music making at Carlisle provided a groundwork for the emergence of an intertribal social formation that guided musical practices and self-determination movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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A mimicry of decolonisation: Achia Anzi, ‘Settler Mimicry: Colonization and Decolonization through Imitation’, Palestine/Israel Review, 2024

07Apr24

Abstract: This article explores the dynamics of settler mimicry in Israel—Palestine and its manifestations in the visual arts. It probes the operation of mimicry as a colonial strategy but also emphasizes its decolonial potential. Although imitation of the Palestinian natives enables Israeli settlers to annex the territory, this article suggests that mimicry can be delinked from its colonial registers and transform the settlers’ worldview. This analysis seeks to expand the insights of Patrick Wolfe, who saw the elimination of the natives as the central feature of settler colonialism. By highlighting instances in which the settler mimics the native, this article challenges his reductionist framework, which pins colonial projects to their materialist objectives. Whereas exploitation colonialism uses the colony’s resources, Wolfe contends, settler colonialism is geared toward the seizure of land, and hence toward physical and ideological elimination of the native. This article, on the other hand, emphasizes the complexity of settler colonialism and foregrounds the tension between the cultural apparatuses of elimination and mimicry. While imitation facilitates the indigenization of settlers, it also highlights the presence of natives. This internal tension renders the operation of settler colonialism ambiguous and thus can be utilized to decolonize Zionism.

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