settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous thrivance against settler colonialism: Dianne Baumann, ‘Thrivance is My Identity: Moving Beyond Survival’, Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 10, 4, 2023

22Sep23

Abstract: In this article I explore the significance of ancestral homelands to Blackfeet identity. Through the analysis of Blackfeet stories and our historical and on-going fight for land sovereignty I examine the entanglements of settler colonial formations and ideologies within Indigenous communities without reinforcing a problematic “plight of the Indian” logic. While the information presented here may contain some elements of pain, the focus centers on pushing beyond a theory of survivance to a theory of thrivance, emphasizing an understanding of our own Blackfeet ways-of-knowing and practices. A thrivance focus is important as it moves beyond a statement of survival to a statement of “we are here, we are productive, and we continue to thrive and contribute to today’s world.” In addition, thrivance accentuates the importance of ancestral homelands and traditional practices to healing and a positive sense of Indigenous identity and dignity. This emphasis on Blackfeet identity contributes to Native American studies, ethnic studies, and settler colonial studies; but most importantly it offers the hope of understanding through reintroducing a positive Indigenous identity, thus encouraging more balanced and harmonious communities.

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Not Red Indians: Audra Simpson, ‘We Are Not Red Indians (We Might All Be Red Indians)’, Mapping Change, 26/07/15

22Sep23

Excerpt: In a 2004 interview Yasser Arafat, in a state of near confinement and exhaustion, reflected upon his incapacity to move without the immediate threat of assassination, about the Palestinian right of return, about American elections, and his achievements. Among these achievements was the fact that “the Palestine case was the biggest problem in the world” and that Israel had “failed to wipe us out.” As a final mark of that success, he added the declarative and comparative and final point of distinction, “we are not red Indians.” This paper uses this point of comparison of a departure point to reflect upon the deep specificity and global illegibility of Indigenous struggle and life in the face of death and dispossession in North America. In order to do so I will choose a series of historical assemblages — of sociality, treaty-making, militarized pushbacks upon encroachment, spatial confinement (“reservationization”), and pushback for land, for life and for dignity within occupation to amend Arafat’s statement and reimagine “success.” I argue that these assemblages are themselves a structure of political life that stand alongside and push against a “logic of elimination” – a logic that authorizes the removal, the attacking and “assimilating” of indigenous peoples for land. I consider these tangled processes in order to re-narrate the seemingly negligible political and corporeal life of Indigenous sovereignty within dispossession and settler occupation. This is an occupation that naturalizes itself through law and narrates itself as new, as beneficent and democratic atop the lands and lives of Indigenous peoples who persist, with sovereignties intact, in spite of this grinding historical and political process of settler colonialism. In order to put this point of comparison, and sentiment of Arafat’s achievement in relief this paper examines how is it that the very techniques of force, of pushback, of sociality and outright refusal and resistance receive the writ of dismissal within a global and comparative frame of resistance and (political life). At the end of the paper it is asked how these processes may be re-narrated and comprehended in a global, comparative frame of not only analysis, but struggles for justice.

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Is settler colonialism civilisational? Steven Sabol, ‘The Touch of Civilization’: Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization, University Press of Colorado, 2017

19Sep23

Description: “The Touch of Civilization” is a comparative history of the United States and Russia during their efforts to colonize and assimilate two indigenous groups of people within their national borders: the Sioux of the Great Plains and the Kazakhs of the Eurasian Steppe. In the revealing juxtaposition of these two cases author Steven Sabol elucidates previously unexplored connections between the state building and colonizing projects these powers pursued in the nineteenth century. This critical examination of internal colonization—a form of contiguous continental expansion, imperialism, and colonialism that incorporated indigenous lands and peoples—draws a corollary between the westward-moving American pioneer and the eastward-moving Russian peasant. Sabol examines how and why perceptions of the Sioux and Kazakhs as ostensibly uncivilized peoples and the Northern Plains and the Kazakh Steppe as “uninhabited” regions that ought to be settled reinforced American and Russian government sedentarization policies and land allotment programs. In addition, he illustrates how both countries encountered problems and conflicts with local populations while pursuing their national missions of colonization, comparing the various forms of Sioux and Kazakh martial, political, social, and cultural resistance evident throughout the nineteenth century. Presenting a nuanced, in-depth history and contextualizing US and Russian colonialism in a global framework, “The Touch of Civilization” will be of significant value to students and scholars of Russian history, American and Native American history, and the history of colonization.

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Music to settler ears: Jody Stark, ‘”Unpacking the Keeper Current” of Settler Colonialism: Why Decolonizing Work is Complicated for (White) Music Educators’, Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 22, 2, 2023, pp. 37–62

19Sep23

Abstract: In this article, I explore several complicating factors that impact (White) music teachers as they work towards decolonizing their teaching practices. Created by the discursive structures of settler colonialism, these factors include the discourse of an additive multiculturalism, both in society and in the field of music education, the tendency to enact what Tuck and Yang call “moves to innocence” to avoid dealing with one’s privilege and complicity in systems of oppression, the Western penchant for spectacle and consumption resulting from an extractivist mindset, and a Western conception of music as works or pieces.

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Hydraulic settler colonialism: Adrian Drummond-Cole, Making Water Liquid: Hydraulic Settlement in California’s Central Valley, PhD dissertation, UC Santa Cruz, 2023

19Sep23

Abstract: Making Water Liquid: Hydraulic Settlement in California’s Central Valley provides a social, spatial, and historical account of the role of water management in the Anglo conquest of California. This work focuses on the San Joaquin Valley from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century to evaluate efforts by settlers, farmers, scientists, engineers, and administrators to render land and water into objects of knowledge, ownership, investment, and use. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, I develop the concept of hydraulic settlement to describe the strategic use of hydraulic infrastructure, governmental institutions, and financial instruments to carry out a mode of colonial settlement and capital accumulation defined by its relationship to the manipulation and control of water. Charting a contingent history from Indigenous reservations and swampland reclamation through canal irrigation, hydraulical materialism, and political hydrography to water districts, groundwater extraction, and the bonds of settlement, this research reveals how the seemingly neutral processes used to manage, measure, and monetize water belie understudied histories of dispossession, exclusion, inequality, and violence.

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Ignoring settler colonialism: Melissa Forcione, Christopher Lamb, Kim Buitenhuis, Anne Godlewska, ‘Settler-colonial geographical ignorance in Canadian education’, EPF: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, 2023

18Sep23

Abstract: Despite increasing attention to Indigenous demands for justice, self-governance and the decolonization of Canadian society, many Canadians remain deeply unaware of the complex ways Indigenous and non Indigenous lives entwine in Canada and of the past and present settler-colonial structures which continue to control and harm Indigenous Peoples and lands. Drawing on our decade-long project examining education at multiple levels in multiple jurisdictions and bringing together scholarship on settler-colonial ignorance, decolonizing education and geographical imaginaries, we highlight how pervasive settler-colonial geographical ignorance, (re)produced through formal education, inhibits many Canadians’ capacities to understand themselves as inextricably linked and responsible to Indigenous Peoples. Through our examination of the results of surveys of college and university students and of public kindergarten to Grade 12 curricula in three Canadian provinces, we provide analyses of settler-colonial forms of geographical unknowing (re)produced in Canadian public education and echoed in the discourses of students. Our analysis draws out commonly held (mis)perceptions and prejudicial attitudes that pervade settler-colonial imaginations, allowing us to identify the entangled temporal, spatial and (non)relational dimensions of settler-colonial geographical ignorance in Canada. Considering the ways that many non-Indigenous people misunderstand and ignore the geographies of settler-colonialism and of Indigenous Peoples, we hope to contribute to ongoing, urgent investigations into the ways that settler-colonial and geographical ignorance serve to oppress Indigenous Peoples and exploit the lands to which they belong for others’ benefit. Furthermore, by focusing on and demonstrating the spatial nature of such ignorance, we argue that (re)conciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples in Canada must also be spatial.

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Arciving settler colonialism: Delia Chartrand, Reconciling the Archive: Creating Space for Indigenous Structured Systems of Remembrance in Canadian Archives, MA dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

18Sep23

Abstract: Indigenous ways of knowing and situating history have been historically neglected by archival institutions over the vast tradition of archives in Canada. Embodied expressions of history such as orality, storytelling and ceremony hold unique information imbedded within the performative exchanges which needs to be recognized as authentic and valid. As archives are used to promote our collective conceptions of heritage and identity, their failure to incorporate embodied expressions into their institutional frameworks has contributed to the dismissal of Indigenous histories on a broader scale by the Canadian public. In recent years, new methods of resituating archival records regarding Indigenous peoples have been explored as a means of addressing our country’s colonial pasts. These methods utilize partnerships between archival institutions and engagement with Indigenous source communities to enhance knowledge of archival collections. Conversely, national and international frameworks have recognized the importance of expressions such as oral traditions, oral histories and ceremony to Indigenous communities as valid forms of history in need of protection. While these frameworks are used by archival institutions, often cited as guiding principles in their work with Indigenous peoples, archives in general have yet to accept the embodied expression as an archival record. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report defines reconciliation as an act of mutual respect between two groups. I suggest that reconciliation within archival work can therefore only be achieved if archives acknowledge and incorporate Indigenous embodied records into their institutional frameworks.

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Settler colonialism by starvation: Kristin Burnett, Travis Hay, Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity, University of Manitoba Press, 2023

14Sep23

Description: Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways. Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s. They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination. Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project by re-evaluating northern food policy and laying bare the governmental and corporate processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities.

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Colonialism is not imperialism because of settler colonialism: Barbara Arneil, ‘Colonialism versus Imperialism’, Political Theory, 2023

12Sep23

Abstract: Contemporary scholars routinely argue colonialism and imperialism are indistinguishable. In this essay, I challenge this argument. While it is true the “colonial” and “imperial” overlap and intersect historically, I argue there is a central thread of modern colonialism as an ideology that can be traced from the seventeenth century to mid-twentieth century that was not only distinct from—but often championed in explicit opposition to—imperialism. I advance my argument in four parts. First, I identify key ways in which the colonial can be distinguished from the imperial, including most importantly the specific kind of productive power inherent in colonialism. Second, I examine how colonialism and imperialism evolve in meaning and are redefined by both champions and critics, in relation to each other in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Third, I examine the historical moment when colonialism and imperialism fully conflate after WWII through the UN process of decolonization as the “salt water thesis” delimits colonialism to mean foreign racialized domination, and it thus becomes synonymous with imperialism. I conclude with an analysis of why the distinction still matters in both theory and practice.

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Diversity settles: D. D. Squire, J. Chiarelli, S. Brown, ‘Women of color student affairs professionals’ orientations toward and away from settler colonialism’, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2023

12Sep23

Abstract: This research study aims to understand how women student affairs professionals of color orient themselves to settler colonialism and their understandings of decolonization. The researchers were interested in student affairs professionals’ knowledge and understanding how these professionals think about their relationship to settler colonialism and integrate decolonizing praxis into their life and campus roles. Participants were asked to share about their affective experiences (e.g., attitudes, self-efficacy), cognitive learning (e.g., vocabulary, knowledge), and skills regarding decolonization.

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