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Stating the inevitable: Joanie Bouchard, Sabrina Bourgeois, ‘An Unheard Confidence Crisis? An Analysis of Indigenous Peoples’ Perception of Settler Institutions and Politics’, Representation, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: Focusing on the case of Canada, this paper offers an investigation of how members of Indigenous nations perceive the system of government using data from the 2019 Canadian Election Study (CES). Given the legacies of colonialism, we consider if Indigenous individuals in Canada adopt a distinct outlook on political institutions, actors, and democracy when compared to other Canadian voters by leveraging quantitative tools. We find that Indigenous people have a significantly more negative perception of several political institutions, politicians, and democracy in Canada.


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Visual settler colonialism: Mishuana Goeman, Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in The New World, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

11Oct23

Description: In Settler Aesthetics, an analysis of renowned director Terrence Malick’s 2005 film, The New World, Mishuana Goeman examines the continuity of imperialist exceptionalism and settler-colonial aesthetics. The story of Pocahontas has thrived for centuries as a cover for settler-colonial erasure, destruction, and violence against Native peoples, and Native women in particular. Since the romanticized story of the encounter and relationship between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith was first published, it has imprinted a whitewashed historical memory into the minds of Americans. As one of the most enduring tropes of imperialist nostalgia in world history, Renaissance European invasions of Indigenous lands by settlers trades in a falsified “civilizational discourse” that has been a focus in literature for centuries and in films since their inception. Ironically, Malick himself was a symbol of the New Hollywood in his early career, but with The New World he created a film that serves as a buttress for racial capitalism in the Americas. Focusing on settler structures, the setup of regimes of power, sexual violence and the gendering of colonialism, and the sustainability of colonialism and empires, Goeman masterfully peels away the visual layers of settler logics in The New World, creating a language in Native American and Indigenous studies for interpreting visual media.


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The question of indigeneity is not settled (in South Africa): Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Indigeneity, Autochthony, and Belonging: Conceptual Ambiguity as an Impediment to Decolonisation in South Africa’, in Decolonising Political Concepts, 2023

11Oct23

Excerpt: On 18 March 2022, a South African judge delivered an unprecedented judgement: “the fundamental rights of First Nations Peoples” were insufficiently considered in the context of a multi billion-rand property development in Cape Town …


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The children of settler colonialism: Julia R. Shatz, ‘”On this project depends the glory of Palestine”: childhood and modern futures at the Ramallah clinic’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: In 1925, one of the first infant welfare clinics to specifically serve Arab children in Palestine opened in the city of Ramallah. This article examines how that institution brought together various political ideologies that used the Palestinian child’s body as a vehicle for a modern future. The clinic targeted poor children and mothers in an attempt to eradicate local knowledge and indigenous practices of infant care in the name of progress and science. Supported and funded by American missionaries, Palestinian philanthropists, local medical practitioners, colonial administrators, and Zionist health organizations, it produced conceptions of modern Palestinian childhood at the intersections of Zionist settler colonialism, interwar global humanitarianism, and indigenous political claims. The Ramallah clinic, along with other infant welfare projects in Palestine, offers a complicated view of the on-the-ground operation of settler colonial projects and the role of children within them. Based on a study of the different constituencies involved in opening the clinic, this article argues that discourses of infant health became means for articulating different – and sometimes opposing – political futures. In doing so, this article illuminates how settler colonialism interacted with, shaped, and was shaped by other local and global forms of coloniality as well as resistance to colonial structures.


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Whose country? Richard Abel, Our Country/Whose Country? Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism, Oxford University Press, 2023

07Oct23

Description: The concept of settler colonialism offers an invaluable lens to reframe early westerns and travel pictures as re-enactments of the United States’ repressed past. Westerns in particular propose a remarkable vision of white settlers’ westward expansion that reveals a transformation in what “American Progress” came to mean. Initially, these films tracked settlers moving westward across the Appalachians, Great Plains, and Rockies. Their seizure of “empty land” provoked continual resistance from Indigenous peoples and Mexicans; “pioneers” suffered extreme hardships, but heroic male figures usually scattered or wiped out those “aliens.” Some films indulged in nostalgic empathy for the Indian as a “Vanishing American.” In the early 1910s, westerns became increasingly popular. In Indian pictures, Native Americans ranged from devious savages, victims of white violence, and “Noble Savages” to “in-between” figures caught between cultures and “mixed-descent peoples” partnered for security or advantage. Mexicans took positions across a similar spectrum. In cowboy and cowgirl films, “ordinary” whites became heroes and heroines fighting outlaws; and bandits like Broncho Billy underwent transformation into “good badmen.” The mid to late 1910s saw a shift, as Indian pictures and cowgirl films faded and male figures, embodied by movie stars, dominated popular series. In different ways, William S. Hart and Harry Carey reinvented the “good badman” as a stoic, if troubled, figure of white masculinity. In cowboy films of comic romance, Tom Mix engaged in dangerous stunts and donned costumes that made him a fashionable icon. In parodies, Douglas Fairbanks subverted the myth of “American Progress,” sporting a nonchalant grin of effortless self-confidence. Nearly all of their films assumed firmly settled white communities, rarely threatened by Indians or Mexicans. Masked as “Manifest Destiny,” the expropriation of the West seemed settled once and for all. Our Country/Whose Country? offers a rich and expansive examination of the significance of early westerns and travel pictures in the ideological foundations of “our country”.


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The healthcare workers of stetler colonialism: Billie-Jo Hardy, Sam Filipenko, Diane Smylie, Carolyn Ziegler, Janet Smylie, ‘Systematic review of Indigenous cultural safety training interventions for healthcare professionals in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States’, BMJ Open, 13, 10, 2023

07Oct23

Abstract: Objective To synthesise and appraise the design and impact of peer-reviewed evaluations of Indigenous cultural safety training programmes and workshops for healthcare workers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and/or the United States. Design Systematic review. Data sources Ovid Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America, Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts, ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, Sociological Abstracts, and Web of Science’s Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index from 1 January 2006 to 12 May 2022. Eligibility criteria Studies that evaluated the outcomes of educational interventions for selecting studies: designed to improve cultural safety, cultural competency and/or cultural awareness for non-Indigenous adult healthcare professionals in Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the United States. Data extraction and synthesis Our team of Indigenous and allied scientists tailored existing data extraction and quality appraisal tools with input from Indigenous health service partners. We synthesised the results using an iterative narrative approach. Results 2442 unique titles and abstracts met screening criteria. 13 full texts met full inclusion and quality appraisal criteria. Study designs, intervention characteristics and outcome measures were heterogeneous. Nine studies used mixed methods, two used qualitative methods and two used quantitative methods. Training participants included nurses, family practice residents, specialised practitioners and providers serving specific subpopulations. Theoretical frameworks and pedagogical approaches varied across programmes, which contained overlapping course content. Study outcomes were primarily learner oriented and focused on self-reported changes in knowledge, awareness, beliefs, attitudes and/or the confidence and skills to provide care for Indigenous peoples. The involvement of local Indigenous communities in the development, implementation and evaluation of the interventions was limited. Conclusion There is limited evidence regarding the effectiveness of specific content and approaches to cultural safety training on improving non-Indigenous health professionals’ knowledge of and skills to deliver quality, non-discriminatory care to Indigenous patients. Future research is needed that advances the methodological rigour of training evaluations, is focused on observed clinical outcomes, and is better aligned to local, regional,and/or national Indigenous priorities and needs.


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The mixed materials of settler colonialism: Penni Russon, ‘Longing and Belonging in the Green Worlds of Jeannie Baker’, in Melanie Duckworth, Annika Herb (eds), Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 75-87

07Oct23

Abstract: Jeannie Baker uses mixed materials, including real plants, to illustrate relationships between nature, humans and suburban and urban development in her textless collage picturebooks Window (1991) and Belonging (2004). These popular texts are read and studied in the classroom to raise environmental awareness and explore themes of sustainable development and community action. How can a reading of these two books through the lens of Indigenous writer and academic Ambelin Kwaymullina’s verse manifesto, Living on Stolen Land, reveal and disturb the mechanisms of settler-colonialism as they appear in Baker’s work? Placing these texts in juxtaposition with each other generates new understandings and new narrative possibilities.


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The institutions of settler colonialism: Nell Musgrove, ‘Settler colonial expansion and the institutionalisation of children in Victoria, Australia’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

07Oct23

Abstract: Recent histories have underlined the importance of understanding the nineteenth-century gold rushes which took place in various parts of the anglophone world in relation to settler colonialism, and this work has advanced understandings of gender, race and Empire in significant ways. However, the field has yet to seriously grapple with questions about the role, treatment and positioning of children. This article will examine the Australian colony of Victoria, which was profoundly transformed by a gold rush beginning in 1851. Through case studies of three families – one white, one Chinese and one Aboriginal – the article will illustrate the complex relationships between poverty, colonialism and carceral institutions for children during the second half of the nineteenth century. These case studies allow an exploration that centres on the lives of the children and families forced to navigate an often-inescapable network of institutions, thereby demonstrating the impossibility of separating these institutions (which form the foundations of our modern-day child protection system) from the project and philosophy of settler colonialism.


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Many layers of settler colonialism: Eri Kitada, ‘Fragments of multi-layered settler colonialism: mixed-race children in Japanese schooling, the American Philippines, 1924–1945’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

07Oct23

Abstract: This article examines Japanese schools in Davao Province, the American Philippines, by highlighting the mixed-race children born to Japanese fathers and Filipino mothers. How did mixed-race children experience Japanese schooling in the Philippines, in which Japan’s settler colonial project operated in a colonial territory of the U.S. empire? I call entangled conditions, such as Davao on the island of Mindanao, ‘multi-layered settler colonialism.’ In Davao, the settler colonial projects of the U.S. and Japanese empires developed co-constitutively by underlining the subjugation of tribal Filipinos to Christian Filipinos and displacing the former. By following Black and postcolonial feminist method and patching together archival fragments of different genres and locations, I uncover the perspectives of mixed-race students in the history of multi-layered settler colonialism. I argue that the goals of Japanese education in the Philippines, a product of the public and private collusion, both conflicted with and reinforced American colonial education which was also developed by state and nonstate actors. I also show that the diverse experiences of mixed-race children and their mothers contested the stated goals of American colonial and Japanese education by illuminating the multi-layered nature of settler colonialism.


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The outposts of the settler: Amir Reicher, ‘Between Two Messiahs: An Ethnography of Settler-Colonizers in the West Bank, PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 2023

05Oct23

Abstract: This dissertation is a study of settler-colonialism. Based on fieldwork among Jewish settlers in the West Bank, it analyzes from an anthropological perspective how a settler-colonial process takes place. Officially, since the signing of the Oslo Accords, with few exceptions, Israel ceased to build new settlements in the West Bank. But, on the ground, from the 1990s onwards, the West Bank hinterland was scattered with over 150 illegal outposts, strategically constructed to appropriate as much land as possible. Often established on remote hilltops, the illegal outposts are the central tool today in appropriating Palestinian land, and the “outpost people” who reside in them, are considered the most radical settlers of all. For this research, I moved to one of these frontier outposts which I pseudonymously refer to as Ma’ale Eliya. Located at the edge of the Judean Desert, I stayed in the community for an overall period of almost two years. On one level, at the center of this research is an investigation of how a settler-colonial project expands: I explicate the settler-colonial know-how by which settlers appropriate land against indigenous resistance, the different challenges they face, and the internal conflicts and desires that shape their colonial endeavor. I make the case that these days, at the heart of the advancement of the West Bank settlement project is a sense of crisis and a set of contradictions that paradoxically propel the colonial process forward. On a second level, by focusing on a particular strand of what I discovered to be “post-messianic” settlers, this dissertation investigates the conditions of political action in the aftermath of ideological and religious rupture. My main argument is that rather than wholehearted beliefs, the generation of outpost settlers is animated to colonial action precisely from a sense of ideological retreat. In analyzing this dynamic of post-ideological radicalism, in addition to being about settler-colonialism, this research is also about political action in an age when master narratives lose their mastery.


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