settler colonial studies blog

On the idea of Australia: Dan Tout, ‘The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2023

21Dec23

Reviewing Julianne Schultz, The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2022, 472 pp., $34.99 (paperback), ISBN: 1760879304

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A sin of omission: Stephanie A. Fryberg, J. Doris Dai, Arianne E. Eason, ‘Omission as a modern form of bias against Native Peoples: Implications for policies and practices’, Social Issues and Policy Review, 2023

21Dec23

Abstract: The omission of Native Peoples’ existence, experiences, and perspectives is systematic and widespread across numerous societal domains, referred to as Native omission. In mainstream media, for example, less than 0.5% of representations are of contemporary Native Peoples. We theorize that Native omission is a tool furthering settler colonial goals to oppress and eventually erase Native Peoples. To make this case, we will review both experimental and national survey studies that unpack how Native omission shapes psychological processes among non-Native and Native individuals and contribute to discrimination, oppression, and disparities facing Native Peoples. We then discuss ways in which Native Peoples are actively resisting Native omission. Finally, we provide a series of policy recommendations to address Native omission and promote Native equity. By making visible the pernicious consequences of omission for Native Peoples, we chart a path for creating a more equitable future.

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The negative against settler colonialism: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Recognition beyond recognition!’ Interventions, 2023

20Dec23

Abstract: This essay focuses on the subject position of settler colonizers to interpret the developing global politics of Indigenous recognition in the settler societies and in Australia in particular. It focuses on the dynamics of recognition in the specific context of Indigenous–settler relations, on the contribution settlers may make to decolonial passages, on the ways perpetrator trauma shapes the settler colonial polity, and on the role truth telling and creative shame may play in overcoming the resulting impasse.

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The settling of outer space: Janne Lahti, ‘Settler Colonial Solutions to Settler Colonial Problems: Settler Cinemas and the Crisis of Colonization of Outer Space’, in John L. Hennessey (ed.), History and Speculative Fiction, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 65-81

20Dec23

Abstract: Settler colonialism tries to master the land, use it, and derive bounty from it, putting tremendous strain on and wrecking environments. This chapter examines settler colonial crises and failures by discussing how the recent blockbuster films Ad Astra and Interstellar tackle imaginary settler projects in outer space in the context of environmental problems and the precariousness of habitability. In both films, the remedy for settler colonial crisis seems to be more settler colonialism. This involves a denial of the fundamental problems settler colonization causes. These films show how settler projects refuse to end, to die out, or to turn back, and how settler colonialism rejects critical self-reflection in the face of human and environmental disasters.

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Settler apocalypse in an infrastructure: Sean Grattan, ‘Settler Colonialism and Apocalyptic Infrastructure in Almanac of the Dead’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 119-131

20Dec23

Excerpt: This is a story of hubris, settler colonialism, and waterWalking onto the University of Arizona campus the dissonance of the lawns is instantly and oppressively apparent. In Tucson there are not a lot of lawns; they still appear in some parks, but it is certainly not a prevalent landscaping decision. Grass, however, is perhaps meant to be inviting to incoming first-year students. The green, green grass of home. I begin here as a way of articulating the construction of spaces through water infrastructure as illustrating the imagination of water in a landscape that cannot support the excess of water necessary for that imaginary project. In “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe settler colonialism as a process that is different from other forms of colonialism because “settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain” (2012, 5). These lush lawns on a land-grant university are a symptom of hundreds of years of violence and domination in which infrastructure plays an integral part. As a non-Indigenous queer white man who has just arrived in Tucson, who is writing on and occupying Yaqui and Tohono O’odham land, it is perhaps not my place to blithely enter a conversation about the long history of pervasive violent extractive practices and logics that still continue around Indigenous water rights. Moreover, as a new transplant to Tucson, I don’t want to be taken in by a desire to assume a sense or right of knowledge that I cannot necessarily possess. However, sometimes the newness of a place can cause forms of estrangement that make certain narratives rise to the surface that illustrate ways ideology works through banality. Tracking shifting examples of climate chaos in different locales illustrates the interlocking localities of the large-scale and wide-ranging effects of anthropocentric climate change.

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Indigenous internationalism as infrastructure: Jordan B. Kinder, ‘Indigenous Infrastructuralisms? Grounding Materialisms along and against the Pipeline’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 103-118

20Dec23

Excerpt: In what is now called northern British Columbia, Canada, events that will shape the contours of its energetic and infrastructural futures for better or worse are currently unfolding. Since 2009, members and hereditary chiefs of the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en peoples reoccupied their unceded territory, building a healing center and other infrastructures of care in the face of necropolitical extractive, fossilfueled infrastructure developments. This reoccupation was initiated against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines, a twin pipeline project that would run 1,177 km (731 mi.) between Alberta and British Columbia’s coast carrying natural gas condensate on one end and diluted bitumen, or “dilbit,” on the other in what I have called elsewhere a mutually informing circular economy of energy deepening. Energy deepening describes how capital relies on ever-increasing energy inputs for its maintenance and reproduction as the dominant political economy of the recent past and present (Diamanti 2021, 14). Such deepening in this case would reproduce ongoing settler colonialism as expressed through extractive capitalism. Enbridge’s Northern Gateway wasn’t built, but more pipelines would be proposed as the inertia of fossil capital further sedimented. For now, TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink is under construction, a 670 km (420 mi.) natural gas pipeline that represents what Tlingit (Kwanlin Dun First Nation) anthropologist Anne Spice has powerfully termed invasive infrastructures (2018, 44–47). Violent raids in 2019, 2020, and 2021 executed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) revealed the character of this invasion as they enforced an injunction granted by the Supreme Court of BC on behalf of TC Energy. Here the state secures the realization of the pipeline’s construction through a kind of public-private partnership between TC Energy and its repressive apparatuses. Of course, for anyone familiar with extractivism and its resistance today, the Unist’ot’en Camp registers as one of many ongoing efforts within Canada’s borders. We could also name the Secwepmc-led Tiny House Warriors or Lubicon Cree energy justice activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s Sacred Earth Solar project, an initiative to outfit Indigenous communities with solar energy infrastructure and the training to maintain it. Such resistance is motivated by diverse Indigenous ways of knowing and being, as media from the Unist’ot’en Camp, Tiny House Warriors, and Laboucan-Massimo make clear. But what links these efforts are not only these diverse ways of knowing and being; they are also linked by a shared politics beyond wholly negative modes of refusal (A. Simpson 2014; L. Simpson 2017). Writing south of the medicine line in the wake of the Standing Rock blockade encampment to stop Energy Transfer Partner’s Dakota Access Pipeline, Lakota (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) historian Nick Estes draws attention to the political potentiality of a pan-Indigenous solidarity emerging from struggles against colonial, extractive capitalism that taps into “the tradition of radical Indigenous internationalism” (2019, 204). This article will detail how such interventions against extractive, settler-colonial infrastructures motivated by a pan-Indigenous solidarity are a kind of infrastructure in themselves that also express infrastructuralism that critical scholars of infrastructure would do well to take seriously as a materialization of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and decolonial critique.

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Totally decolonial: John Grant, Corey Snelgrove, ‘Returning to totality: Settler colonialism, decolonization, and struggles for freedom’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2023

16Dec23

Abstract: A unifying feature of the most prominent social movements that emerged in the 2010s is
their dissatisfaction with explaining injustices on a case-by-case basis. In Canada,
movements against settler colonialism express a similar orientation. This elicits a return of
totality thinking, which enables one to grasp the connections between what appears as
isolated or fragmented moments that in fact constitute and are constituted by a larger
whole. Drawing on Marxist and Indigenous theorists, we reconstruct an approach to
totality and a conceptualization of settler colonialism as a totality. Through an immanent
reading of John Borrows’ approach to decolonization, we justify the importance of this
concept for politicizing the persistence of unfree forms of interdependence. Finally, just as
individual struggles point toward the totality, totality thinking draws attention to the
unity-in-separation of different struggles, enabling a politics of “immanent universalism” as
an alternative to both abstract universalism and particularism.

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Settler worldmaking on tour: Michela J. Stinson, ‘Tourism, worldmaking, and disquieting settler atmospherics’, Tourism Geographies, 2023

16Dec23

Abstract: This article considers how affects animate and uphold tourism and settler colonialism. Engaging a ‘curious’ postdisciplinary research methodology informed by the relational power of listening, I trace the emergence of two interrelated atmospheres in the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, both of which exemplify how settler colonialism is built and maintained as a structure of feeling that supports larger processes of worldmaking via tourism. In detailing these two atmospheres and their effects, I illuminate the mechanisms and practices through which tourism-related atmospheric infrastructures overtly and covertly contribute to worldmaking; exemplify how settlers might learn to destabilize, disrupt, or diffuse such atmospherics in and through tourism as a practice of unsettling; and expand on the literature detailing how we might research affective, embodied, and atmospheric moments of tourism. I take inspiration from related critical, interventionist, and narrative work in tourism and build on it to suggest that unsettling tourism—or tourism worldmaking—must be oriented toward mediating agencies of worldmaking like light and sound.

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Settler colonial accomulation is primitive: Paul J. Guernsey, ‘Reframing So-Called Primitive Accumulation for Settler Colonial Contexts: Ancestral Enclosures and Spatial Conceptions of History’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2023

16Dec23

Abstract: The question of land must be centered if anti-capitalist and anticolonial camaraderies are to be sustained between settler and Indigenous peoples. This essay suggests that enclosures of Indigenous homelands, or what might be called primitive accumulations in the Marxist tradition, are not always understood by settlers who are inclined to transpose European experiences onto Indigenous ones. Enclosures of Indigenous homelands cut people off not only from the “means of production” and material foundations forming a way of life, but also from their national futurity, living kin, and spiritual relationships. For the purposes of this essay, this experiential difference is marked by the concept of ancestral enclosures. Theorizations of settler colonialism as a temporally fluid and ongoing system of domination synchronizes with recent Marxist scholarship on primitive accumulation from Harvey (accumulation by dispossession), De Angelis (the continuity of primitive accumulation), and others. My argument emphasizes that the temporal continuity of primitive accumulation must be understood alongside heterogeneous ontologies, attending not only to the “when” but also the “what” of primitive accumulation. The concept of ancestral enclosures is therefore crucial for settler colonial contexts where it is not only the “means of production” that is seized, but also a living, breathing ancestor.

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Children settler colonialism, again: Jared McDonald, ‘Stolen Childhoods: Cape San Child Captives and the Raising of Colonial Subjects in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony’, Historia, 68, 2, 2023, pp. 3-23

16Dec23

Abstract: Histories of indigenous child captives in settler-colonies remain marginal amid broader inquiries into colonial-era genocides of indigenous peoples. Yet, child transfers played an integral role in the demise of indigenous populations in numerous settler-colonies. Forced child removals occurred alongside the physical annihilation of parent societies and was often an important part of the erosion and eradication of hunter-gatherer peoples and identities. This article aims to set out an analysis of the integral role played by child abductions and transfers in the genocide of the Cape San during the early nineteenth century, with a particular focus on civilian initiative. In the Cape Colony, civilians initiated the practice of capturing and transferring San children to their invasive settler society. San children were considered malleable and better disposed to forced assimilation as labourers. Apprenticeship legislation was eventually introduced in the Cape Colony to regulate indigenous child transfers and to ensure that its worst abuses were minimised, although these ideals were seldom realised. Apprenticeship legislation attempted to catch up with existing practice set in motion by civilians and in effect, colonial authorities played an enabling role by legally legitimising it. The analysis also explores the narrative justifications for San child abduction and transfer employed by European-descended settlers, and contrasts these with contemporary evangelical-humanitarian discourses. Settlers and missionaries adopted different means to incorporate San children into settler society, while agreeing that incorporation was the desired end. Discursively, settlers and missionaries managed to frame their actions as being in the best interests of San children.

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