settler colonial studies blog

More settler big tales: Adam Carlson, ‘”Such are the Advantages of Autochthony”: Extracting Indigeneity through CanLit and Settler-Colonial Historiography’, Canadian Literature, 253, 2023

27Dec23

Abstract: This essay looks at early work by two members of the so-called Calgary School of political philosophy, Barry Cooper and Tom Flanagan. I examine how these Western intellectuals draw on Canadian literary conventions and structuralist narratology to construct an extractivist and myth-critical settler colonial historiography that works to maintain the objective normativity of settler culture by assimilating Indigeneity into white supremacy. Cooper and Flanagan’s work, I argue, effects cultural genocide by figuring settlers as the originary indigenes of the West in the territories currently called Canada; moreover, Flanagan’s work, in which he argues Indigenous peoples are the originary genocidal settlers, is crucial to understanding how extractivism works according to a logic of elimination.

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Settler big tales: Christopher Clayton Smith, ‘Big Tales of Indians Ahead’: The Reproduction of Settler Colonial Discourse in the American West, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2023

27Dec23

Abstract: “Big Tales of Indians Ahead” traces the reproduction of settler colonial discourses—sentiments narrated by a settler society about themselves and about the Native American societies that predated them—from the period of colonial history of the seventeenth century to the present day in the twenty-first century. This study argues that the anti-Indian rhetoric that could be found in early colonial EuroAmerican writings, particularly Indian captivity narratives, were reproduced by subsequent settler societies throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the form of settler narratives from the overland trail migrations and various forms of popular culture. In the twentieth century these discourses, heavily influenced by past settler discourses, reached wider audiences through new forms of popular culture—particularly Western genre films and mass-produced works of fiction aimed at younger audiences. Finally, this dissertation tracks the ways in which these discourses are still reproduced and present in contemporary popular culture media and political identities in the American West. From Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative of the late-seventeenth century to the overland trail settler narratives of the Oregon Trail and the wildly-popular Western films of the mid-twentieth century, Native Americans had consistently been tied to reductive and derogatory depictions in American collective cultural discourses that has tied stereotypes of so-called “Indians” to inherentlyracial traits such as savagery, depravity, and violence. This study not only shows that these assertions from a settler population, and their descendants, has been falsely (and thus unfairly) attributed to racialized notions of “Indianness,” but also provides a clear and consistent historical timeline that tracks these depictions across centuries and various forms of settler discourses.

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Settler colonial comparisons: Janne Lahti, ‘Settler colonial violence in the American Southwest and German Southwest Africa’, Historical Encounters, 10, 2, 2023, pp. 63-72

27Dec23

Excerpt: Colonial violence in the American Southwest and in German Southwest Africa have seldom been compared by historians. Those writing of the US-Apache conflicts have failed to look to colonial theaters around the world, their transnational attention focusing instead on the borderlands of United States, Mexico, and independent Indians. The studies of the generationslong struggle between Indigenous powers, the Spanish Empire, Mexico, and the US for mastery of the current US-Mexico border area have usually stressed Indigenous resistance and their unique military cultures. Violence in the Southwest borderlands of North America was perpetrated by state and state-sanctioned forces, Indigenous polities, corporate mercenaries, and private people and ranged from individual acts of murder to mob lynching and ultimately, genocide. This violence was understood as both a destructive energy and a constructive tool integral to building often ambiguous identities as settlers.

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Settler garrisons are settler colonial places (and keep an empire together): Jodi Kim, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2022

27Dec23

Description: In Settler Garrison Jodi Kim theorizes how the United States extends its sovereignty across Asia and the Pacific in the post-World War II era through a militarist settler imperialism that is leveraged on debt as a manifold economic and cultural relation undergirded by asymmetries of power. Kim demonstrates that despite being the largest debtor nation in the world, the United States positions itself as an imperial creditor that imposes financial and affective indebtedness alongside a disciplinary payback temporality even as it evades repayment of its own debts. This debt imperialism is violently reproduced in juridically ambiguous spaces Kim calls the “settler garrison”: a colonial archipelago of distinct yet linked military camptowns, bases, POW camps, and unincorporated territories situated across the Pacific from South Korea to Okinawa to Guam. Kim reveals this process through an analysis of how a wide array of transpacific cultural productions creates antimilitarist and decolonial imaginaries that diagnose US militarist settler imperialism while envisioning alternatives to it.

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New media, new colonialisms: Lorenzo Veracini, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, ‘”New” Media: Decolonial Opportunities or Digital Colonialism?, Humanities, 13, 1, 2024

23Dec23

Excerpt: This ontological and teleological push–pull extends to the real-world effects of the digital. While the internet certainly has had positive effects on communication speed; on the reach of education, information, and entertainment; on social connections; and on the availability of certain products, this same interconnectedness has its downsides: a swamp of unsought information and communication; a physically, psychologically, and cognitively unhealthy expenditure of time and energy; and most dangerous, a new vehicle for repression and surveillance. It is this tension, this yin–yang of cause and effect that this Special Issue takes as its purview. What happens, our authors ask, when the space of postcolonial and settler colonial studies is cyberspace? When it comes to decolonization, is the internet good or bad? Or better, is it also good or exclusively bad? It may be both.

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Upsetting the settlers for sport: Chen Chen, Dan Mason, ‘Indigenous sport nationalism, settler borders, and (in)convenient solutions: media framing of the 2010 Iroquois Nationals passport dispute’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

23Dec23

Abstract: This study examines mainstream media coverage of the Iroquois Nationals’ withdrawal from the 2010 men’s World Lacrosse Championship as a result of failing to meet the requirements of US and UK immigration authorities. While the team’s refusal to use either US or Canadian passports in international travels raised important questions about Indigenous sovereignty in settler states, mainstream media largely framed the incident as an issue readily resolvable by short-term bureaucratic and technical solutions. The findings shed some light on the limitations of this coverage but also highlight the value of sport as a site where the underlying tensions within settler colonial states manifest.

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Settler utopias: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, Musab Bajaber, ‘Utopia, the Imperial Settler Utopia, and Imperial Settler Science Fiction’, in Cathy Shrank, Phil Withington (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia, Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 553–566

23Dec23

Abstract: This chapter argues that Utopia is groundbreaking because it established the notion of ‘imperial settler utopias’ that influence attempted and fantasized manifestations of utopianism. Unlike settler utopias that are isolated and focused on inward development, imperial settler utopias—whether real or fictional—are settler colonies so entranced by their own ideals that they envision themselves as predestined to be dominant on the merit of their superiority. The interaction between fictional and attempted imperial settler utopias is cyclical. More’s Utopia influenced the development of real-world imperial settler utopian colonies and in return these colonies, combined with the legacy of Utopia, contributed to the rise of literary genres that extrapolate on imperial settler colonialism. These rising literary genres, again, continue to feed fantasies of imperialism. This chapter illustrates this cyclical interaction by, first, examining More’s influence on the development of settler colonies that eventually made up the United States. Then, it explains how, in return, the United States’ imperial settler utopian foundations led to the development of science fiction that fantasizes expansion into space as exemplified in Star Trek. These science fiction fantasies, again, affect actual attempts to explore space. This cycle of influence is one of the best examples illustrating More’s remarkable influence on the direction of history and literature since the publication of Utopia.

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Imagining the re-enactment: Alessandra Calanchi, ‘De-colonizing the Earth to Re-enact Colonialism on Mars: New Forms of “Transplantation” in Outer Space’, Iperstoria, 22, 2023

23Dec23

Abstract: In the current rush to Space ‘colonization,’ a term which moved from Science Fiction to reality in just a few decades, it becomes necessary to (re)define not only the borders of the known ‘world’—which projects itself far beyond the galaxy where we live—but also the lexicon of exploration, invasion, and belonging. The analogies with the ‘conquest’ of the New World—something that, as far as the US is concerned, went down in history under the mythopoeic term ‘Frontier’—are striking. In my essay I intend to deal with the linguistic and cultural implications of the terms used by those who wish or are planning to organize interplanetary travels aimed at taking human beings onto the Red Planet in the next decades. Such projects are based on a shared vision of ‘new worlds’ waiting to be discovered and occupied: therefore, their lexicon is heavily influenced by such a vision, though at international conferences you may happen to meet someone who prefers the more neutral term ‘settlement’ to ‘colony.’ On the opposite side we find ethic environmentalists, the defenders of post- and de-colonial thought, and the supporters of an equitable future. Language, which is never neutral, does, in fact, reveal in its choices and in its prefixes (re-, de-, trans-, inter-, post-, neo-, un-, etc.) what really lies behind these projects. Rarely do they concern the safety of the whole human race or a sustainable use of resources: on the contrary, they are more often driven by economic profit, safety just for a few, and total indifference to ecology and ethics.

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A settler cover up: Tyla Betke, ‘”Not a Shred of Evidence”: Settler Colonial Networks of Concealment and the Birtle Indian Residential School’, The Canadian Historical Review, 104, 4, 2023, pp. 519-545

23Dec23

Abstract: This article examines how the network of settler colonial systems in Canada worked to ensure the widespread and intentional cover-up that allowed one man to remain in the Indian Residential School (IRS) system for over two decades (from 1910 to 1932) despite overwhelming evidence of his abuse. Using genocide scholar Andrew Woolford’s metaphor of settler colonial mesh as a framework, this article details the 1930 case against Birtle Indian Residential School Principal Henry B. Currie to understand the multiple strategies of concealment used to protect him. A multitude of actors and institutions were involved in the coverup: the Indian agent and the Department of Indian Affairs, the Presbyterian Church, the court systems, and the public press. Strategies of concealment included blatant bribery, transferring accused principals to other schools, document falsification, forced marriages, and misreporting runaways, along with the IRS system itself, which kept children from their families and support systems. The article concludes with a discussion of settler claims of ignorance and the role archives play in revealing the truth about abusers within the IRS system.

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Settler women with blood on their hands: Caroline Abbott, ‘Axes on the Ground: Wolves and Women in Euro-America’, Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia, 19, 2023

23Dec23

Abstract: Nineteenth-century US print media is rife with interactions between white settlers and the wolves (and other wild canids) they slaughtered. Print played host to the evolutions of folkloric villains, heroes, and gender norms in ways that directly impacted national identity and settler conceptions of the so-called American frontier. North American frontiers provided an opportunity for settler women to embody gender roles different from those handed down to them in European folklore. What would we learn about these ideas by approaching the settler women with blood on their hands?

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