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Food for settler thought: Michael D. Wise, Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, Arkansas University Press, 2023

17Aug23

Description: In Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, Michael D. Wise confronts four common myths about Indigenous food history: that most Native communities did not practice agriculture; that Native people were primarily hunters; that Native people were usually hungry; and that Native people never developed taste or cuisine. Wise argues that colonial expectations of food and agriculture have long structured ways of seeing (and of not seeing) Native land and labor. Combining original historical research with interdisciplinary perspectives and informed by the work of Indigenous food sovereignty advocates and activists, this study sheds new light on the historical roles of Native American cuisine in American history and the significance of ongoing colonial processes in present-day discussions about the place of Native foods and Native history in our evolving worlds of taste, justice, and politics.


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The settler rehearsal of a future re-enactment (can you imagine of a less imaginative mind?): Jorge Palacios, Martian Borderlands: Colonizing (Outer) Space in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, MA dissertation, University of Chicago, 2023

16Aug23

Abstract: SpaceX’s rocket launch site, Starbase, lies at the bottom tip of Texas on Boca Chica Beach, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. With SpaceX maintaining a presence in the region since 2014, Starbase is seen as a bridge between Earth and Mars that will generate economic development in the area by SpaceX and government officials. In recent years, increased road closures, gentrification, and explosive rocket tests in proximity to Boca Chica beach, sacred Esto’k Gna sites, local wildlife refuges, the U.S.-Mexico Border, and the cities of Brownsville and Matamoros have been a cause of distress for environmental scientists, activists, the Carrizo-Comecrudo Tribe, and local residents. Brownsville, previously named the poorest city in the United States, sits twenty miles from Starbase with a ninety-four percent Hispanic/Latinx population of mixed citizenship status. Local residents who contend with the region’s militarization and history of racially motivated violence are now faced with the fast-moving aerospace engineering industry, space tourism, and Mars colonization. This study seeks to understand how SpaceX’s presence and activities are politically legitimized within South Texas and what they mean for Indigenous and Latinx residents. This will be done through interviews and Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in Brownsville with activists, Carrizo-Comecrudo tribal members, and local residents of Brownsville. Data from fieldwork will be compared with online media and accounts taken by the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Town Hall meetings in October 2021. This research identifies sites of discursive incommensurability that arise between modern scientific rhetoric and the Esto’k Gna, Mexican, and Tejano cosmologies that define the identity of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. In seeing how technoscientific enterprises make universalizing claims of modern science to appeal to liberal notions of technological progress, we can see how space ventures coordinate with neoliberal policies to colonize and dispossess lands here on Earth and in outer space. I argue that SpaceX colonizes the Lower Rio Grande Valley using the same strategies as those used by settlers of the Western frontier. Similar to how Texas public history and education curate an image of Texan mythologies, SpaceX propagates an image of Starbase online through aesthetic images of the technological sublime, devoid of any trace of local ethnic Mexican people and sanitized of any harm done to the area. Theorizing alongside my interlocutors, I illustrate how these conditions in turn create the phenomenon that I call Martian Borderlands, diffuse regions marked by entry-points between Earth and Mars that alienate land for the sake of rocket launches and effectively render local inhabitants alien in the process.


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The paper is actually about settler colonialism: Leticia Nogueira, Narjust Florez, ‘The Impact of Climate Change on Global Oncology’, Hematology/Oncology Clinics, 2023

16Aug23

Access the article here.


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Feminism and environmentalism will not make you Indigenous: Arlie Alizzi, ‘Utopianism, Eco-Criticism and Colonial Fantasy: Germaine Greer’s White Beech as a case study in settler futurity’, in Bronwyn Carlson, Madi Day, Sandy O’Sullivan, Tristan Kennedy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Australian Indigenous Peoples and Futures, Routledge, 2023

16Aug23

Abstract: This chapter reflects on white feminist anti-trans rhetoric and European utopianism as examples of settler futurity. It outlines my relationship to utopianism and feminism using the example of Germaine Greer’s memoir, White Beech. White Beech traces Greer’s return to Australia from the United Kingdom and her acquisition of property on Yugambeh land with the intention of turning it into a forest conservation project and ‘rewilding’ it. I use White Beech to reflect on utopianism’s complex and consumptive relationship to Aboriginal peoples, with particular attention to settler engagements with the Gold Coast and surrounds.


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Fathering a settler society (is not that easy): Laura Y. Merrell, Settler Colonial Fatherhood in New South Wales and Ontario During the Long Nineteenth Century, PhD dissertation,  Indiana University, 2023

16Aug23

Abstract: “Settler Colonial Fatherhood in New South Wales and Ontario During the Long Nineteenth Century” is a comparative study of Indigenous, white, and mixed-race fathers in the British Empire as they navigated, and in turn, shaped cultural ideas of fatherhood. Using child custody cases, popular medical guides, newspaper articles, correspondence, memoirs, and wills, this project analyzes men’s lived experiences against the backdrop of colonial institutions and imperial ideologies. Examining race, respectability, and reproduction, it uses fatherhood as an entry point into the broader theme of settler colonialism, including the formation of settler states and the reach of their authority. To interpret constructions of colonizer fatherhood, I examine legal and medical institutions. In addition, I analyze the effects of settler colonization on nonwhite fathers and the strategies they used to counter dispossession. In existing narratives of nineteenth-century colonial power relations, white male colonizers were at the top of the gendered, racialized hierarchy. They are assumed to have benefited from privileges withheld from non-white men and white women. In the arenas of medicine, law, and lives, I argue that settler colonialism put fathers under pressure. While the typical agents of colonial power—government officials, judges, missionaries, and medical professionals—make their appearance in this project, informal political actors also materialize. When confronted with families who blurred racial lines, white relatives and neighbors policed colonial boundaries. In addition, my dissertation argues that, in many instances, white men were unwilling or unable to meet normative fatherhood expectations. They placed pressure on settler colonial structures and justifications for rule.


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The bison will not make them Indigenous: Red Burkett, Methodological Analysis on Settler Territoriality and the Rise of the Yellowstone Wild Bison Advocacy Movement, MA dissertation,  Syracuse University, 2023

16Aug23

Abstract: Bison bison, also known as the North American Buffalo, are a keystone species of endemic megafauna in the Great Plains prairie ecosystem. Bison were driven nearly to extinction in the late 19th century when millions of buffalo were massacred by settlers in order to starve Indigenous civilians and force them onto federally-managed Reservations as a step in the centuries-long ethnic-cleansing of Turtle Island. Such genocidal methods were a primary tool in erasing the land claims of Indigenous nations and colonizing the territories of Indigenous communities who depended on bison as a primary source of food and materiel for social reproduction. The only wild bison known to have survived the great slaughter were a herd of approximately two dozen who migrated into Yellowstone National Park where they remained isolated until the early twentieth-century. This small population grew into two genetically distinct breeding groups and starting in the 1980’s, trail-grooming for winter recreation in Yellowstone led to a decrease of winter-related bison deaths, leading to population growth. As the bison population increased so did their migrations out of the park, bringing the wild bison herds into conflict with ranchers, private property owners and law enforcement officers in Montana. For the past three decades, Montana state and federal agencies have culled Yellowstone’s wild bison herds to maintain a population between two and five thousand individuals. This is done in spite of the dangerously low number of wild bison extant in contemporary North America. Such culling is intended to limit the territorial range of bison’s instinctual migration patterns and is justified by claims of a rhetorical concern over transmission of Brucellosis abortus bacteria from wild bison to domestic cattle. Such claims are seen by concerned Indigenous and environmental groups as a bad-faith argument due to the few precautions that governmental and commercial actors have taken to prevent disease transmission between elk and cattle in state-regulated winter feedlots where the two species are allowed to intermix; which is the only recorded vector for Brucellosis transmission from wild ungulates to livestock in modern history. Indigenous nations and environmental organizations continue to petition the Federal government to list bison as endangered and allow for the expansion of bison territory back into its formerly expansive area stretching from central Alaska down to central Mexico and from Nevada to Florida and New York. Activists point to the difference between the economic value of tourism for trophy elk hunting versus wild bison as a symbol of Indigenous autonomy and political sovereignty as a factor in why wild bison, who have never transmitted disease to cattle, are routinely relocated or killed for instinctually returning to spring birthing grounds on the same public land that infected-elk are allowed to pass through, graze, and mix with livestock within. This project brings decolonial perspectives into conversation with historical and activist geographies to engage with postcolonial and settler-colonial discussion communities. This project critiques historical geography’s engagement with the wild bison herds of Turtle Island. This thesis is informed by various scholarships on historical materialism, the production of space, and the social construction of nature. Last but not least, this project also benefits from the perspective of eco-feminism to ethically assess western ontologies and the manner in which they devalue non-human organisms through the dualistic and colonial epistemologies that have been used historically and into the present to perpetuate gender, ethnic, and racial discrimination and the dehumanizing of women, people with disabilities, Black, Indigenous, colonized, and other socially marginalized communities.


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Nice try, but unconvincing (as Zionists are made by movement AND conquest, it stands to reason that Indigenous Palestinians are made by permanence AND subjection, so no, relating to a ‘homeland’ does not make one ‘Indigenous’ or Indigenous-like): Zac Roberts, ‘Settler Colonialism, Jews, and Indigenous Peoples: Theorising homelands as a point of connection in Indigenous-Jewish relations in so-called Australia’, in Bronwyn Carlson, Madi Day, Sandy O’Sullivan, Tristan Kennedy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Australian Indigenous Peoples and Futures, Routledge, 2023

16Aug23

Abstract: The idea of connecting with a homeland is often the first example given when exploring relationships between Indigenous and Jewish people and communities in so-called Australia. However, the concept of a ‘homeland’ is undertheorised, and while it is a popular example and there are superficial comparisons, the concept nevertheless deserves more attention. This chapter draws on oral history testimonies of Indigenous and Jewish community members to explore whether Jewish conceptions of ‘the promised land’ and Indigenous conceptions of Country are indeed comparable. I contextualise these discussions within settler colonial discourse and Jewish situatedness on Indigenous homelands. In doing so, this chapter furthers growing discussion regarding relationships between non-Christian religious communities and Indigenous peoples in so-called Australia.


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Settlers think they can be native (as settlers are made by conquest AND movement, it stands to reason that Indigenous people are made by permanence AND subjection, so no, settlers cannot be ‘Indigenous’): Sibusiso Maseko, Kevin Durrheim, ‘Simmering hostilities, group identity, and contested autochthony beliefs in settler societies’, in Anna Kende, Barbara Lášticová, The Psychology of Politically Unstable Societies, Routledge, 2023

16Aug23

Access the chapter here.


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On the brevity of settler colonial forevers: Hartman Deetz,’Colonization is still shaping our daily realities as Indigenous peoples’, Cultural Survival, 2023

16Aug23

Excerpt:  I write as a Mashpee Wampanoag. It is who I am and inevitably shapes my views. The Wampanoag have the distinction of being among the “first contact” Tribes in the Americas, and as such we have a four-centuries-old tradition of interacting with the forces of colonization. This means we have four centuries of grievances, but also four centuries of solutions based on experience. We have seen time and again that the promises of “forever” rarely last more than 30 years. We have seen that when the powers of colonization seek to commodify a resource, they often do so one small piece at a time; what they don’t take this year, they will take in 30 years’ time. 


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Facing the trauma of settler colonialism: Nicole A. Thomas, Brenda Owen, Anne L. Ersig, Lisa C. Bratzke, ‘Pathways and processes to the embodiment of historical trauma secondary to settler colonialism’, Journal Of Advanced Nursing, 2023

13Aug23

Abstract: This discursive article aims to examine how systemic factors of settler colonialism influence health outcomes among Indigenous peoples in the United States through pathways and processes that may lead to the embodiment of historical trauma. Design: Discursive paper. Methods: We completed a comprehensive search of empirical and grey literature between September 2022 and January 2023 in PubMed, CINAHL and Google Scholar. Using these articles as a foundation, we explored factors related to the pathways and processes leading to the embodiment of historical trauma rooted in settler colonialism. Results: A conceptual framework of the pathways and processes of the embodiment of historical trauma secondary to settler colonialism was developed, and is presented. Conclusion: The societal and historical context for Indigenous peoples includes harmful settler colonial structures and ideologies, resulting in stressors and historical trauma that impact health outcomes and disparities through the phenomenon of the process of embodiment. Implications for Nursing: To provide holistic nursing care, nurses must be aware of settler colonialism as a determinant of health. They must be attuned to the pathways and processes through which settler colonial exposures may impact health among Indigenous peoples. Nurses must challenge existing structural inequities to advance health equity and social justice.


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