« Older posts
Newer posts »

Institutionalised children: Felicity Jensz, Rebecca Swartz, ‘Children and institutions in settler colonial contexts: a trans-imperial perspective’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

02Dec23

Abstract: Children in settler colonial settings engaged with institutions in diverse ways. They were sometimes coerced, benignly encouraged or lured into these engagements and sometimes they actively engaged and shaped the nature of these institutions over their childhood and subsequent adult years. This lead article provides the historiographical, methodical and conceptual framework for the special issue of Settler Colonial Studies on children, institutions and settler colonial contexts. It provides the basis for the discussion of the following articles which examine children’s interactions with and experiences of institutions in settler colonial contexts in Australia, Palestine, the Philippines, Poland, and Southern Rhodesia that were affected by American, British, German, and Japanese imperialism. Studies of colonialism, and settler colonialism in particular, have tended to overlook the role and position of children in these contexts as objects and agent of change. Rather, focus has been predominantly placed upon the actions and agency of adults of various cultural groups, ones who have left larger traces in the colonial archives. In this article, we provide an overview of some of the broad concepts that frame the special issue being: childhood and race; Institutions and motives; and settler colonialism and imperial contexts.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler magic: Tyler McCreary, Rebecca Hall, ‘The Healer, the Witch, and the Law: The Settler Magic That Criminalized Indigenous Medicine Men as Frauds and Normalized Colonial Violence as Care’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023

02Dec23

Abstract: This article examines the puissance of psychospiritual geographies to Witsuwit’en–settler relations during the 1920s and 1930s in British Columbia, Canada. Specifically, we track the ontological politics of the psychospiritual that inhere to relationships between Indigenous healing traditions and a complex array of colonial institutions, including police detachments, courts, churches, residential schools, and asylums. Our entry point is the 1931 witchcraft trial of two Indigenous healers who police apprehended treating a person with cin sickness, a form of animal-spirit dream possession. The article highlights three central elements of the contested nature of psychospiritual care. First, it demonstrates the role that policing witchcraft played within the expansion of settler surveillance and control over Indigenous life. Second, we critically unpack court transcripts from the witchcraft trial, exploring how the Indigenous healers explained the treatment of dream sickness on the stand, as well as how courtroom mistranslations facilitated their criminalization. Third, we flip our gaze and interrogate the substance of colonial care, particularly focusing on the role of churches, residential schools, and asylums in causing psychospiritual harm to their Witsuwit’en wards. Through the article, we reveal the colonial deception that produces the illusion of benevolent settler institutions caring for Indigenous well-being while they actively disrupt the psychospiritual connections that define wellness within Witsuwit’en ontologies. To decolonize this foul settler magic, we argue that we must disrupt the universality of colonial ontologies, expose the violence inherent to settler regimes of care, and recognize the vitality of Indigenous psychospiritual relations to the more-than-human world.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Terra Nullius as textus: Aimee Carrillo Rowe, ‘On Terra Nullius and Texts: Settler Colonialism, Native Disappearance, and the Introductory Cultural Studies Reader’, in Thomas K. Nakayama, Rona Tamiko Halualani (eds), Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, Wiley 2023, pp. 197-210

02Dec23

Access the handbook here.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Migrants and Indigenous struggles: Raquel Andrea González Madrigal, ‘Critical relationalities: Centering Indigenous land, presence, and sovereignty in immigrant/migrant rights discourses’, Latino Studies, 2023

29Nov23

Abstract: This article situates the US-Mexico border and anti-immigration law in the context of US imperialism and settler colonialism. It centers Tohono O’odham land, presence, and Indigenous sovereignty in an examination of Latin@/x migration, border policies, and im/migrant rights. Contributing to scholarship in critical Latinx indigeneities, this article contends that the structures and mechanisms of border militarization are inherently anti-Indigenous. While targeting migrants and refugees who often are Indigenous elsewhere, this racial profiling happens on Native land and against Native peoples. The article further examines discourses of sanctuary in relation to Indigenous sovereignty to spotlight the necessity of integrating Indigenous perspectives within im/migrant rights discourses.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The logic of elimination in digital spaces: Arrow Kyle Keeler, ‘Knowledge, Experience, and Anti-Colonial Action: A Methodology for Combating Settler Colonial Erasure in Digital Spaces in the Indigenous Environmental Justice Classroom’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2023

29Nov23

Abstract: This article provides new methodologies for combatting settler colonial erasure in digital spaces and working against reproduction of settler colonial narratives, specifically on Wikipedia, through assignments in the higher education classroom. By utilizing these assignments to edit Wikipedia, instructors will be better equipped to answer students’ calls for assignments that move beyond the classroom and into activity and activism. Recently, researchers Nicole VT Lugosi-Schimpf (Métis), Nicole Patrie, and Kris Cromwell have shown the potential for this work as an educational and anti-colonial tool. However, the methodologies for editing Wikipedia in the classroom up to this point have relied on Wikipedia’s Wiki-Edu program for student training, which presents a number of obstacles for student editors seeking to make lasting additions to the encyclopedia. The framework detailed here provides methodologies to bypass Wikipedia’s training modules and prepare students to make higher quality edits that are harder to remove by colonially minded editors. This framework works against settler colonialism in digital spaces, improves upon current training that prepares advanced undergraduate students to edit Wikipedia, and provides students with the ability to make lasting change beyond the classroom.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settlers over water: Erin O’Donnell, ‘Water sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples: Pathways to pluralist, legitimate and sustainable water laws in settler colonial states’, PLOS Water, 2023

26Nov23

Abstract: In settler colonial states, the doctrine of discovery that dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their lands also took their waters. The original water theft of colonization was underpinned by the erroneous assumption of ‘aqua nullius’ and remains almost entirely unacknowledged and largely unaddressed. Scholarly literature has focused on the injustice of this water theft and the human rights of Indigenous Peoples (under UNDRIP as well as their human right to water). This review shows that aqua nullius also renders settler state water law not fit for purpose in two important ways. Firstly, the legitimacy of settler state water laws is contested, presenting a foundational challenge to water governance, and failing to acknowledge the plurality of water laws in settler colonial states. Secondly, settler water law is experiencing a more widespread failure to deliver ecologically sustainable water management. In responding to the injustice of aqua nullius, foundational reform of settler state water laws can enable the settler state to learn from Indigenous laws that have supported thriving communities and genuinely sustainable water management for millennia. Drawing on examples from Aotearoa New Zealand, the USA, Canada, and Australia, this review shows how acknowledging, and challenging, the false assumption of aqua nullius creates novel pathways for reform, enabling pluralist water laws and water governance models that improve both legitimacy and sustainability of settler state water governance.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settlers over the water? Caio Simões de Araújo, ‘Must Dias fall? The politics and history of settler heritage in Southern Africa’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

26Nov23

Abstract: In the aftermath of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ Movement and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests, the politics of heritage has been at the centre of new intellectual debates and political demands, especially in relation to the status of problematic historical monuments. This article examines a form of colonial heritage that has remained politically uncontested as well as unexplored in the specialised literature, i.e. monuments memorialising early modern European sea voyages, in particular those pertaining to Bartolomeu Dias, credited as the first European navigator to successfully complete the maritime route to India, through the Western Cape. The article suggests that Dias can be productively seen not only as a symbol of pre-apartheid European colonisation, but more importantly as part of apartheid’s broader settler colonial narrative of Southern African history. Drawing on the example of monuments exchanged between Lisbon and Pretoria in the early 1960s, the article argues that settler heritage making played into white South African narratives of European settler ‘pioneerism’, but also served to cement politico-diplomatic solidarity and friendship between white-ruled states in Southern Africa. By unveiling the politics and history of settler heritage in South Africa, the article hopes to convince its readers that Dias, too, must fall.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Transitional settler justice? Chris Cunneen, ‘Settler Colonial States and Transitional Justice’, in Jens Meierhenrich, Alexander Laban Hinton, Lawrence Douglas (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, 2023

26Nov23

Abstract: This chapter explores tensions in the relationship between transitional justice and Indigenous demands for recognition (often expressed in terms of sovereignty and reparations for colonial systemic human rights abuses) in the settler colonial states of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. These states are usually absent from considerations of transitional justice. The author challenges this assumption. In recent years transitional justice mechanisms within settler colonial states, including reparations, apologies, inquiries, and truth commissions, have been adopted. However, these responses have been limited and do not address some of the core demands of Indigenous peoples including recognition of self-determination and sovereignty. The ongoing nature of settler colonialism complicates transitional justice processes: rectifying the past demands changing the structural conditions of the present relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Enclosed settlers: John H. Cable, Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi, University Press of Kansas, 2023

26Nov23

Description: Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—to be a watershed event in the region’s history. In the decades after World War II, this transition pushed innumerable sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders off the land, redistributing territory and resources upward to a handful of large, mainly white operators. By disproportionately displacing Black farmers, enclosure also slowed the progress of the civil rights movement and limited its impact. John Cable’s Southern Enclosure is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism. Focusing on east-central Mississippi, home of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Cable situates enclosure in the long history of dispossession that began with Indian Removal. The book follows elite white landowners and Black and Choctaw farmers from World War II to 1960—the period when the old, labor-intensive farm structure collapsed. By acknowledging that this process occurred on taken land, Cable demonstrates that the records of agricultural agents, segregationist politicians, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are traces of ongoing colonization. The settler colonial framework, rarely associated with the postwar South, sheds important light on the shifting categories of race and class. It also prompts comparisons with other settler societies (states in southern and eastern Africa, for instance) whose timelines, racial regimes, and agrarian transitions were similar to those of the South. This postwar history of the South suggests ways in which the BIA’s termination policy dovetailed with Southern segregationism and, at the same time, points to some of the shortcomings of the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Aggressive settlers: F. Evan Nooe, Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South, University of Alabama Press, 2023

26Nov23

Description: A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity. In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a “long continued course of aggression and sufferings” between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, “aggression” and “sufferings” are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South. Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the Eastern Woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South. This, in turn, formed a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the region and examines the involved societies’ conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally, Nooe explores how white southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region’s Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period, during western expansion, and well through the twentieth century.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »