settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial poetry sucks: Sarah Dees, ‘A Bitter Poetics of Differentiation: Cultural Evolution in the Verse of John Wesley Powell’, Political Theology, 2023

06Sep23

Abstract: The famed esxplorer, scientist, and U.S. government administrator John Wesley Powell (1834–1902) was a significant contributor to cultural evolutionary thinking in the late-nineteenth century. In addition to scientific publications, he also – curiously – used the genre of poetry as an outlet for his ideas. This article analyzes two of Powell’s obscure published poems. I argue that his poetry is significant, not for its literary value, but for what it reveals about theories of cultural evolution that were operative for a significant U.S. government agent who played a critical role in the production of knowledge about Native American religions. This article contributes to the theme of political theology and settler colonialism by examining the ideological features of settler colonialism – the production of ideas, knowledge, and theories that have supported and justified U.S. settler colonialism. I demonstrate that there was an aesthetic as well as a scientific register to racialized cultural evolutionary thinking.

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The education of settlers, recaptured? Carol A Mullen, ‘Weaponizing settler slogans to mandate colonial school policy in the Americas: Transformation through Indigenous futurity’, Policy Futures in Education, 2023

06Sep23

Abstract: The topic of this academic review is settler slogans that mandate colonial school policy in North America. Also discussed is Indigenous futurity as a strategy for transforming education and countering the educational harm that comes from weaponized language. Beginning in 1887, the US federal government authorized colonial schooling, using the dangerous educational cliché “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The purpose of this article was to illuminate this weaponizing rhetoric in education, which served as a guiding principle for imposing Indigenous assimilation that manifested as federal policy in the Americas. Research questions were, How did the kill-and-save slogan shape US and Canadian education and policy? How can the concept of Indigenous futurity improve Indigenous education? Colonial settler efforts to control tribal nations with weaponizing rhetoric leveled at education policy, public perception,and compulsory boarding/residential schools are exposed. Peer-reviewed studies were read, with analysis of 51 sources, many authored by Indigenous academics. Resultant cultural genocide, systemic discrimination, and educational disparity are described. Indigenous resistance to settler ideologies, policies, and settlements, as well as assertions of tribal rights, freedom, and sovereignty, reflect patterns in the material analyzed. Modern-day empowerment of society’s most vulnerable ethnic group requires a deep rethinking of schooling processes. Debunking settler futurity, the lesser-known Indigenous view of futurity looks to sustaining Indigenous communities and calls on society for amends.

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Again on the settlerocene: Taylor Eggan, Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology, and the Settler Colonial Imagination, Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 2022

06Sep23

Description: The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity’s displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis’s homesickness more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the degradation we humans have wrought—and in saving the earth we can once again dwell in the nearness of our own being. Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology—along with its well-trod categories of home, dwelling, and world—produces uncanny effects in settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature’s defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at once critiques Heidegger’s phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in fact be “natural” to the human condition and hence something worth embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into “exo-phenomenology”—an experiential mode that engages deeply with the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.

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Capitalocene and settlerocene: Fritz Bommas, ‘Chronicling the Capitalocene — History, Colonialism, and Capital in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins’, COPAS—Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 24, 1, 2023, pp. 41-57

06Sep23

Abstract: After first situating Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016) within the context of the Capitalocene, this essay turns to the novel’s historical narrative as decentering the individual human in a broadening account of history on the one hand, while on the other hand putting a renewed focus on the human through the central role of inequality and exploitation within the context of environmental destruction. In a second step, the essay turns to the novel’s representation of capitalism–colonialism as a destructive cycle founded upon the twin logics of elimination and (false) infinity. Barkskins, I make the case, enacts a critique of the underlying principles of the Capitalocene while remaining dedicated to the past—no particular vision of the future is offered up, even as history broadens in scope.

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On the power of ‘the legal life of settler historical production’: Megan A. Baker, Building More than an Economy: Histories of Choctaw-US Laws, Land, and Development in Oklahoma, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2023

02Sep23

Abstract: Despite today’s era of political and economic revitalization due in part to American Indian economic development, Oklahoma Choctaw people still contend with land dispossession facilitated by state and federal governments. Considered alongside the state of Oklahoma’s contentious relationship with tribal nations today, this dissertation examines how US settlers have utilized the collusive power of history and law to constitute settler sovereignty and facilitate Indigenous land dispossession. By ethnographically examining the legal life of settler historical production and how it continually reshapes the conditions for landownership among Choctaw people living in their post-removal homelands, it reveals how US and state laws – informed by anthropological and historical scholarship that proclaim the decline of Indigenous sovereignty and legitimate the settler regime of private property – have continually worked to dispossesses Choctaw people of their lands throughout time. Nevertheless, despite the relegation of Choctaw sovereignty to the past in scholarly publications and its minimization in the present by state actors, Choctaw people who maintain Choctaw ways of life consistently challenge such claims and efforts. Furthermore, the dissertation addresses the discrepancy between the massive, underutilized archival sources created by Oklahoma Choctaws and published scholarship. Consequently, it argues for the usage and development of tribal histories that are attentive to the work of settler colonialism and that draws upon overlooked and underutilized archival materials. By holding an ethnographic study of contemporary Choctaw economic development, a critical historiography of the Choctaws and Five Tribes, fieldwork on Choctaw archival materials and their repositories, and the wide breadth of tribal history informed by cultural knowledge within the same frame, the dissertation importantly highlights the interrelated relationship between the production of history, US law, and ongoing land dispossession in an era of resurgent American Indian political-economic power.

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Settler gaming: S. Thomas Keynes, ‘One More Turn: The Gamic Afterlives of Johnson v M’Intosh and Digital Settler Colonialism in Sid Meier’s Civilization VI’, in Dale Mitchell, Ashley Pearson, Timothy D. Peters (eds), Law, Video Games, Virtual Realities: Playing Law, Routledge, 2023

02Sep23

Access the chapter here.

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The settler colonial logic of elimination is endangering: Wesley Y. Leonard, ‘Refusing “Endangered Languages” Narratives’, Daedalus, 2023

31Aug23

Abstract: Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative “endangered languages” narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for wider society’s consumption, while deemphasizing or even outright omitting the extreme injustices that beget language endangerment. The objective of this essay is to promote social justice praxis first by detailing how language shift results from major injustices, and then by offering possible interventions that are accountable to the communities whose languages are endangered. Drawing from my experiences as a member of a Native American community whose language was wrongly labeled “extinct” within this narrative, I begin with an overview of how language endangerment is described to general audiences in the United States and critique the way it is framed and shared. From there, I shift to an alternative that draws from Indigenous ways of knowing to promote social justice through language reclamation.

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Settler colonialism in unexpected places (in India, for example): Pankhuree R. Dube, ‘Theorizing the Adivasi’s absence in partition histories: indigenes, refugees, and the settler state in Dandakaranya forest’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

29Aug23

Abstract: This research article examines the contest between indigenous forest-dwelling communities and settler colonial policy in post-Partition central India. According to official estimates, from 1961–71 the population of indigenous communities declined by nearly 50% in Dandakaranya within central India even as overall the population grew by a large margin during the same period. Despite perceptions of India as a post-colony committed to decolonization, this article examines how this state project, one of the earliest acts of governmentality, was deeply implicated in a settler colonial logic of elimination. Following the mass migration of Partition refugees in 1947 across newly demarcated borders, the Indian government earmarked Dandakaranya Forest as the site of a refugee resettlement project for lower-caste Partition refugees from East Bengal (now Bangladesh). Drawing on Lorenzo Veracini’s notion of ‘probationary settlers’ as exogenous others without prior claims to land, refugees are understood within this argument as probationary settlers reliant on the state for their survival. Rather than narrating the biography of the state through its various experts and institutions, this paper foregrounds the perspective of the marginalized on their environment: displaced forest-dwelling indigenous communities and lower-caste (Dalit) refugees.

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Lesbian settler colonialism: K. J. Janeschek, ‘Love doesn’t cancel colonialism’: land, lesbians, and settler colonialism, MA dissertation, University of Alaska, 2023

29Aug23

Abstract: This thesis examines the relationship between lesbians, land, and settler colonialism through an analysis of several texts written about Antarctica by lesbians. In the introduction, this thesis identifies the three fields of study which it draws upon–rural queer studies, queer nature studies, and queer indigenous studies–and notes the absence of settler colonialism as a point of analysis in rural queer studies despite the field’s focus on the relationship between queer people and land. The following section, “Lesbians, Land, and Settler Homonationalism,” provides both historical background of lesbian land-based movements such as the landdykes and theoretical considerations important for the thesis, namely how non-Native queer people and identities often uphold settler colonialism. In the next chapter, “The Antarctica Question,” the thesis explores Antarctica’s colonial history and its current queer relationship to settler colonialism. This is followed by a discussion of three texts–Approaching Ice and Towards Antarctica by Elizabeth Bradfield and On the Ice by Gretchen Legler–which examines the ways these writers’ relationship with Antarctica resembles other lesbian land movements, their negotiations with settler colonialism and a masculine Antarctic explorer history, and the personal (queer) transformations enabled by lived experiences on land (or ice). The conclusion identifies how a settler colonial logic might lapse through a relationship with land and the transformations that such a relationship forges, but ultimately will heal over the lapse in its framework unless challenged directly.

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Nice try, but there is no separation between settlement and exclusion, one is the other: Daniel Guillery, ‘Separating the Wrong of Settlement from the Right to Exclude’: Territory and Sociocultural Stability, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 25, 2, 2023, pp. 346-375

29Aug23

Excerpt: An important part of the history of modern colonialism has been a history of settlement. One major form that colonial subjugation has taken has been that of settler colonialism, in which a group of settlers moves and together establishes a home in a new, already-inhabited geographical location, aiming in some sense to replace its existing inhabitants and create an outpost of the society from which they came.1 (The settlers aimed to replace existing inhabitants often in a literal sense, through extermination or enforced displacement, though not always; sometimes the project of replacement was rather one of shaping the territory according to the settlers’ practices, goals, and ideals.)

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