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Neglected treaty, neglected treatise: Abbie LeBlanc, ‘The Míkmaw Concordat: Rethinking Treaty Making between Indigenous Peoples and Settlers’, American Journal of Political Science, 2023

03Aug23

Abstract: In 1610, the Míkmaq formed a treaty with French representatives of the Holy See. James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson argues in The Míkmaw Concordat (1997) that through this treaty the Míkmaq enfolded settlers into their existing international political order by extending to settlers their concept of sacred kinship. In the more than 25 years since the publication of The Míkmaw Concordat, it has received no attention from scholars of political science. This omission is unsurprising as political science struggles to account for Indigenous politics because of its traditional focus on the “Westphalian state.” This framework excludes many aspects of Indigenous political traditions, particularly their approaches to international politics, which are not reducible to state-centric frameworks. The Concordat, as a treaty between two nonstate entities, is an example of Indigenous treaty making that can illuminate both the history of settler colonialism and how contemporary social movements are resisting the settler state.


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Indigenous Palestine? Zahi Zalloua ,Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality, Bloomsbury, 2023

03Aug23

Description: Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Examining the Palestinian question through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, this timely book warns against the liberal approach to Palestinian Indigeneity, which reinforces cultural domination, and urgently argues for the universal nature of the Palestinian struggle. Foregrounding Palestinian Indigeneity reframes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a problem of wrongful dispossession, a historical harm that continues to be inflicted on the population under the brutal Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, in a global context marked by liberal democratic ideology, such an approach leads either to liberal tolerance – the minority is permitted to exist so long as their culture can be contained within the majority order – or racial separatism, that is, appeals for national independence typically embodied in the two-state solution. Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause not only insists that any analysis of Indigeneity’s purchase must keep this problem of translation in mind, but also that we must recast the Palestinian struggle as a universal one. As demonstrated by the Palestinian support for such movements as Black Lives Matter, and the reciprocal support Palestinians receive from BLM activists, the Palestinian cause fosters a solidarity of the excluded. This solidarity underscores the interlocking, global struggles for emancipation from racial domination and economic exploitation. Drawing on key Palestinian voices, including Edward Said and Larissa Sansour, as well as a wide range of influential philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek, Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, Zalloua brings together the Palestinian question, Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies to develop a transformative, anti-racist vision of the world.


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The settlers were always interested in empire: Wm. Matthew Kennedy, The imperial Commonwealth: Australia and the project of empire, 1867–1914, Manchester University Press, 2023

02Aug23

Description: Challenging conventional historiographies which claim that empire served only to hamper Australia’s national development and which examine only the Anglo-Australian connection, this book draws together for the first time several underutilized archives and emerging literatures to produce a new imperial history of Australia. It is one that places Australian settler colonialism in a broader imperial context while differentiating Australia’s categories for understanding the imperial world from those of London. This book demonstrates that many Australians came to view Britain’s empire not simply as a Greater British world state presided over by London, but as a global, ultramarine republic in which Australian settlers were co-equals. With this vision in mind, Australian settlers developed their own distinct categories for evaluating, criticizing, and claiming empire, ones based on settler logics that often placed race above gender, class, or nationality. Drawing on Australia’s many settler periodicals and official records, The imperial Commonwealth argues that this vision shaped colonial Australians’ understandings of the means and ends of their own settler colonialism came to define their relationship to Britain and motivated them to forge new transimperial connections with other settler and subject colonies in the Pacific, Africa, and South Asia through technology, humanitarianism, and military endeavour. By formulating, challenging, refining, and ultimately translating their own ideal of empire into colonial culture, politics, and law, Australian settler colonists transformed the Commonwealth into an empire in its own right.


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The settlers were always interested in climate change: Elaine LaFay, ‘Looking at the Weather: The Politics of Meteorological Data’, Harvard Data Science Review, 28/07/23

02Aug23

Description: Historical weather and climate data have become essential resources for tracking and understanding global warming. All too often, however, these data sets are treated as inert and apolitical. In this column, Elaine LaFay shows that historical weather data reveal far more than a changing climate: they play a key role in American settler-colonialism in the context of U.S. expansion into the Gulf South. Winds and weather were understood as active participants in human health and as powerful instruments in settlers’ imagination of themselves and their world.


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Settler colonialists heading to Florida: Elaine Lafay, ‘Botany, Health-Seeking, and Settler Colonialism in Tropical Florida, 1827–1840’, The Journal of Southern History, 89, 3, 2023, pp. 417-452

02Aug23

Excerpt: On July 4, 1840, the ailing physician Henry Perrine gazed out into the ocean from his home on Indian Key, Florida. It was a beautiful day on the tiny island that lay south of the Florida mainland: the temperature stood at 83 degrees Fahrenheit, and a trade wind ushered a southerly sea breeze across the shores. When Perrine circulated his meteorological data in the Magazine of Horticulture, he told readers, “Ye northerners, who have not ever resided in tropical climates, cannot realize the delightful reality of the delicious temperature of the summer season.” “In Boston,” he wrote sadly, “the thermometer may likely indicate ten degrees more of scorching heat, at this very hour.” Simply look at the data below, he told them, and try to imagine, to “feel the delightful difference of the weather of South Florida.” But Perrine was not just trying to make people jealous. He had a scheme in mind. At its heart was an experiment in settler colonialism. First, Perrine was going to entice white residents, especially invalids in search of curative places, to come to south Florida to improve their health. Then, he would engage them in (and charge them for) “light healthy labor” to cultivate and subsequently sell tropical plants, including but not limited to Agave sisalana, logwood, and Peruvian bark, which Perrine had been steadily importing from nearby countries like Mexico and Cuba. He trumpeted that these plants would become “new staples of cultivation, especially on steril[e] or ruined soils,” across the South, thus addressing longstanding fears of regional soil exhaustion. Finally, Perrine was going to kick back and get rich.


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Indigeneity in the settler matrix? Renissa R. Gannie, Destruction and Resiliency: Decolonizing Settler Knowledge in Native American Literature Through the Peoplehood Matrix, MA dissertation, University of Denver, 2023

02Aug23

Abstract: This thesis explores the complex dynamics of settler colonialism and the construction of peoplehood within the Laguna Pueblo, Lakota, Jemez Pueblo, Anishinaabe, and Blackfeet culture through a comparative analysis of literary works focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Frances Washburn’ Elsie’s Business, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus, and Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather; these authors employ narrative strategies to depict the destructive impacts of settler colonialism on indigenous identities and communities. Drawing upon postcolonial and indigenous literary theories, this research uses a comparative framework to analyze the diverse ways the selected works address the themes of settler colonialism, peoplehood, and cultural resilience. Through close reading and examination of the author’s use of narrative techniques, such as storytelling, language, and symbolism, they convey the multifaceted experiences and struggles of indigenous individuals and communities within a settler colonial context. The analysis emphasizes the importance of stories for cultural preservation and resistance, the significance of ceremonial cycles and language, and the symbolism of the land and landscape in reclaiming and reaffirming indigenous peoplehood.


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The settler colonial Wendigocene: Jonnelle Walker, ‘Wendigocene: : A Story of Hunger’, Turtle Island Journal of Indigenous Health , 2023

31Jul23

Abstract: My mother once told me that if you speak about Wendigos out loud, they will come. They are cannibals, flesh eaters, spirit eaters. Wendigos survive by consuming the life of others without reciprocity, care, consent, or regard in the name of personal gain or profit. Growing up, I was taught that the Wendigo condition was something that you caught like a disease or that grew within yourself like a cancer. They were monsters, they were the closest thing we had to “human.” Afterall, according to the ideological lineages of Marxism, liberal Enlightenment, and settler colonialism, to be “human” is to be a monster, a capitalist, a cannibal. Each of these ideological lineages root the definition of the “human” in transcendence, defined by property, exhibited through man-made aesthetics rooted in capital, white supremacy, anti-Black racism, anti-Indigeneity, and a false human/nature divide. In this paper, I argue that the term “Anthropocene”, much like the “human” it centers, requires an ontological limiting that fails to encapsulate the fullness of Anishinaabe worlds, but most importantly Anishinaabe responsibility to each other. I offer a reframing from my positioning, where the last 500 years of apocalypses can be theorized through an analysis of the rise of the Wendigos. In conversation with other critiques of the well-problematized “Anthropocene,” this contribution offers a theoretical exploration of Wendigo theory to further support that the term “Anthropocene” is reflective of itself. I suggest the term “Wendigocene” as an alternative to “Anthropocene” within the context of Anishinaabe communities for Indigenous theorists, as this reframing invokes a responsibility to care for our relations and exercise abolitionist legal praxes which are central to our sovereignty. 


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The language of settler colonialism, Stephen May, ‘New Zealand is “racist as f**k”: Linguistic racism and te reo Maori’, Ethnicities, 2023

31Jul23

Abstract: A key feature of the confluence of modern nation-state formation and colonization has been the marginalization and denigration of minoritized language varieties, particularly Indigenous languages, over time. Indigenous languages have been actively proscribed in public language domains, such as education, leading to their inevitable shift and loss, in settler-colonial contexts worldwide. This process of linguistic hierarchization has long been recognized in the sociology of language and the sociology of nationalism but the overt and covert linguistic racism attendant upon it had remained relatively underexplored. Recent discussions within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, however, have addressed this lacuna, particularly through the development of raciolinguistics as a theoretical framework. Linguistic racism, a form of cultural racism, uses discursive constructions of language use and related linguistic hierarchies as a proxy for the racialized discrimination and subordination of Indigenous peoples and other minoritized ethnic groups. Here, I explore discourses of linguistic racism by Pakeha (White) New Zealanders in Aotearoa New Zealand toward te reo Maori, the Indigenous Maori language, in everyday discourses and the media. I focus particularly on the public contestation of the increasing normalization of te reo Maori in contemporary New Zealand society, the result of the successes of the last 40 years of Maori language revitalization, via both overt and covert forms of linguistic racism toward te reo Maori. These discourses act in defense of English monolingualism, the direct linguistic legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history, along with the privileges this history has provided for White, monolingual English-speaking New Zealanders. Interestingly, the racialized opposition to te reo Maori is most evident among older, White New Zealanders. This suggests the
potential for change among younger New Zealanders and New Zealand’s increasingly diverse migrant population, both of whom appear more open to the ongoing development of societal bilingualism in English and te reo Maori.


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Race, migration, settler colonialism: Jennifer Ma, ‘Racialization, Colonialism, and Imperialism: A Critical Autoethnography on the Intersection of Forced Displacement and Race in a Settler Colonial Context’, Frontiers in Sociology, 2023

31Jul23

Abstract: Migration has been identified as a priority area for policy responses by both the federal and provincial/territorial governments yet, much of our knowledge about migration is not premised on addressing current xenophobic and racist narratives about migrants. The purpose of this research is an interrogation of Canada’s colonialism, imperialism, and racialization, which produce specific oppressive policies and practices that have impacted my family. This research is premised on the understanding that in the space between what is known about migration in Canada and what is not, a great deal of narrative and interpretive work is done that makes assumptions about migrants, specifically forcibly displaced people from the Global South. Through a critical autoethnography focused on my lived experiences as a descendant of forcibly displaced Chinese-Vietnamese people living in a settler colonial nation state, this study critiques to what extent these assumptions are founded, and to what extent they represent a socio-political climate in which migration is set out as particular problems requiring a legal and policing solution. In particular, my analysis centres anti-colonialism and anti-racism, shifting to resistance to systemic violence and liberation, while considering the discursive and on-the-ground effects of racist, colonial, and imperial policies and practice. Set against the backdrop of the rise of white nationalism, xenophobia, and racism across all levels of government and academia, and the general public, the results of this study produce a counter-narrative focused on the intersection of forced displacement and race in a settler colonial context, which is both timely and urgent.


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Settler colonial education (how a land grant grants degree granting): Amy Reavis, Nora Wallace, ‘”Entitled to Our Land”: The Settler Colonial Origins of the University of California’, California Law Review Online, 14, 2023

31Jul23

Access the article here.


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