settler colonial studies blog

Race shifting is settler colonialism: Darryl Leroux, ‘State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46, 2, 2023

19Jul23

Abstract: This article examines the claims to an Indigenous identity made by the four state-recognized Abenaki tribes in Vermont through an analysis of their petition for federal acknowledgement (1982–2005) and applications for state recognition (2010–2012). A detailed analysis of their claims demonstrates that the tribes are not Abenaki, but instead, represent the descendants of French Canadians who immigrated to the Champlain Valley of northwestern Vermont in the mid-nineteenth century. In this case study of what the anthropologist Circe Sturm has called “race shifting,” I demonstrate how the politics of recognition, which do not include the kin-making and relations of Indigenous nations, serve the interests of settler colonialism under the guise of decolonization. I attribute the emergence of race shifting along three vectors: the move away from white identity post-Civil Rights era; the lack of a tribal presence in Vermont; and the flaws in the state recognition process.

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Settlers are squatters (squatters are settlers): John Suval, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2022

16Jul23

Description: White squatters in the American West propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. Yet, in the lead-up to the Civil War, they became foot soldiers on the front lines of clashes that sundered the Union. These dynamics have been largely overlooked. Dangerous Ground tracks squatters across antebellum America, from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush–era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas, revealing how claiming western domains became intertwined with partisan politics and fights over slavery extension. Unlike previous generations of politicians who condemned settlers who lacked title to the lands they occupied, Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party built a strong base by celebrating white squatters as pioneering yeomen and encouraging their land grabs through preemption laws, Indian removal, and hawkish diplomacy. As America expanded, the party’s power grew. But the US-Mexican War proved a step too far, leading many to ask whether these squatters were genuine yeomen or forerunners of slavery expansion? Some northern Democrats bolted to form the Free Soil Party, while southerners denounced any hindrance to slavery’s spread. Faced with a fracturing party, Democratic chiefs promoted “squatter sovereignty,” allowing territorial inhabitants to determine whether new lands would be slave or free, leading to a destabilizing transfer of authority from Congress to frontier settlers. Squatters thus morphed from darlings of the Democratic Party and agents of Manifest Destiny into combatants in battles that ruptured the Party of Jackson and the nation.

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Youth against erasure: Erika Jiménez, ‘The occupation wants to delete us’: Palestinian youth’s interpretations of and resistance to settler colonialism’, Third World Quarterly, 2023

16Jul23

Abstract: Despite the increased application of settler colonial theory to analyse settler colonial contexts, critical scholars have highlighted its inadequacies – primarily, that it has marginalised Indigenous knowledge and agency. Palestinian scholars have questioned the paradigm’s ability to fully capture the particularities of the Israel–Palestine context. This paper seeks to contribute to these critiques by exploring Palestinian youth’s interpretations of settler colonialism in the West Bank. It draws on qualitative research that explored Palestinian youth’s views on and experiences of human rights. This article suggests that Indigenous analyses of settler colonialism seem more relevant to Palestinian youth than the settler colonial analytic. These, along with consideration of the interplay between neoliberalism and colonisation, may better assist them to understand and articulate settler colonialism and strategise against it.

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Taxing settler colonialism: Maximilien Zahnd, ‘Praise the Gardeners, Dun the Hunters: Alaska Natives, Taxation, and Settler Colonialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2023

16Jul23

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between tax law and settler colonialism by looking at the ways in which taxes can be part of the “civilizing” process of Indigenous peoples. In 1921, the Territory of Alaska enacted a “license tax on the business of fur-farming, trapping and trading in pelts and skins of fur-bearing animals.” Since most trappers were Natives, the “fur tax” de facto targeted them. This article unpacks the sociocultural and political dimensions of the fur tax against the backdrop of Alaska’s settler colonial history. Despite what the Alaska attorney general claimed was its “strict” revenue-raising function, the tax was part of a much broader settler colonial agenda. That agenda sought to turn seminomadic, “uncivilized” Native hunters into spatially grounded, “civilized” farmers, gardeners, reindeer herders, or wage workers. Ultimately, I suggest, within many if not most settler colonial spaces political and sociocultural ideologies alter the initial revenueraising function of taxes.

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Settlers and their guns (and their immigration policies): Emine Fidan Elcioglu, ‘Armed Citizens on the Border: How Guns Fuel Anti-Immigration Politics in America’, Social Problems, 2023

16Jul23

Abstract: To make a nation on stolen land using enslaved labor, the early American state relied on gun and immigration policy to create a well-armed white settler population. This legacy continues to animate modern conservativism, which is staked on supporting gun-friendly and anti-immigrant policies. Despite this history and ongoing political reality, however, the sociology of migration has largely ignored the relationship between firearms and immigration politics. To explore this relationship, the current study draws on 20 months of ethnographic data from the U.S.-Mexico border. I show how contemporary American gun culture bolsters anti-immigrant organizations through two mechanisms. First, gun shows and shooting ranges are important sites of recruitment among anti-immigrant groups. Second, the thrill of handling firearms mitigates the monotony of everyday anti-immigrant activism, while also easing the disenchantment that participants may otherwise feel about the effectiveness of their actions in bringing about long-term change. The article concludes by urging scholars of American politics to be mindful of the legacies of settler-colonialism and to take seriously the reinforcing effects of guns on nativist politics.

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Sustainable settler colonialism: Haven Bills, Sonja Klinsky, ‘The resilience of settler colonialism in higher education: a case study of a western sustainability department’, Teaching in Higher Education, 28, 5, 2023, pp. 969-986

14Jul23

Abstract: University-level sustainability education aims to reduce future harm to people and the planet, however, this goal is challenged by the tight relationships between Western academia and settler colonialism (SC). As a process that is predicated upon Indigenous erasure and harmful land relations, SC is antithetical to sustainability goals. This raises questions about how those responsible for providing education in this space respond to these challenges: are they reinscribing or resisting SC? How are these processes occurring? Through interviews at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, we analyse how educators are grappling with reproductions of SC while attempting Justice-Based Environmental Sustainability (JBES) education. We find primary barriers to achieving JBES and challenging SC exist individually (anxiety and discomfort) and systemically (university understandings of land, progress, and power). Using resilience as a frame of analysis points to the importance of interventions designed at the interplay of the individual and the system broadly.

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Indigenous tourism: Khokaneswar Tripura, Gareth Butler, Gerti Szili & Kevin Hannam, ‘Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism: tourism stories from the Chittagong Hill Tracts’, Tourism Geographies, 2023

14Jul23

Abstract: Tourism development in the ‘post-conflict’ Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) region of Bangladesh proliferated after the CHT Peace Accord was signed in 1997. The Accord positioned tourism as an important component in reasserting Indigenous Jumma peoples’ rights and facilitating regional socio-economic recovery. However, the Jumma people have remained firmly on the periphery of development discourse and the region’s growing tourism industry has since paved the way for the forces of settler colonialism – namely through the actions and mobilities of the non-Indigenous Bengali majority – to manifest in several ways, including the acquisition of land and the marginalisation of Indigenous communities. In response, and without formal support, Indigenous tourism stakeholders have utilised domestic tourism as a form of resistance to help build more stable modes of Indigenous employment and improve community access to education and healthcare. Increasing interest in Indigenous tourism also aided the establishment of ‘counter-narratives’ to address negative perceptions. In short, tourism has been harnessed by Indigenous communities to address heavily entrenched socio-economic inequalities and long-standing misconceptions of Indigenous cultures even though stategovernment strategies have largely sought the opposite. Drawing on an interpretivist paradigm, through semi-structured interviews with Jumma participants who are employed in the tourism industry, this paper distils the paradoxical challenges and opposing forces of tourism development in the CHT that continue to simultaneously stabilise and destabilise the region.

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Disaster and settler colonialism: Minh Do, Amy Janzwood, Kristen Pue, ‘Multilevel governance, climate (in)justice, and settler colonialism—evidence from First Nations disaster evacuations in so-called Canada’, Critical Policy Studies, 2023

14Jul23

Abstract: Wildfires and subsequent community evacuations offer a highly visible example of climate change-induced dislocation. In so-called Canada, both the changing climate and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples are policy priorities for the federal government and certain provincial governments, like the Province of British Columbia. Despite these purported policy priorities, we find evidence that colonial logics–like the rejection of Indigenous governments’ capacity and knowledge to shape this policy area–underpin emergency management, resulting in the perpetuation of inequities and less effective responses. By analyzing data from Indigenous Services Canada, we find that First Nations are disproportionately affected by largely climate-related disasters, evacuating at a higher frequency–328 times higher, on average. We then employ a decolonial lens to analyze the policy landscape and actions taken to date and examine whether emergency management is moving away from unilateral policymaking in favor of more horizontal, multilevel governance arrangements. We find that both the federal and British Columbia governments perpetuate barriers that prevent First Nations from acting as effective first responders in emergency situations.

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Settler colonialisms in Crimea: Rory Finnin, Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity,University of Toronto Press, 2022

14Jul23

Description: In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim nation, from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea peninsula. The gravity of this event, which ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims, was shrouded in secrecy after the Second World War. What broke the silence in Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Republic of Turkey were works of literature. These texts of poetry and prose – some passed hand-to-hand underground, others published to controversy – shocked the conscience of readers and sought to move them to action. Blood of Others presents these works as vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons. In bringing these remarkable texts to light and contextualizing them among Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian representations of Crimea from 1783, Rory Finnin provides an innovative cultural history of the Black Sea region. He reveals how a “poetics of solidarity” promoted empathy and support for an oppressed people through complex provocations of guilt rather than shame. Forging new roads between Slavic studies and Middle Eastern studies, Blood of Others is a compelling and timely exploration of the ideas and identities coursing between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine – three countries determining the fate of a volatile and geopolitically pivotal part of our world.

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Figuring it out: Nicole R. Tuitt, Lisa M. Wexler, Carol E. Kaufman, Nancy Rumbaugh Whitesell, Elizabeth Rink, Michael Anastario, Jerreed D. Ivanich, Lorenda Belone, Roland S. Moore, David Huh, Tessa Evans Campbell, James Allen, ‘Unsettling Settler Colonialism in Research: Strategies Centering Native American Experience and Expertise in Responding to Substance Misuse and Co-occurring Sexual Risk-Taking, Alcohol-Exposed Pregnancy, and Suicide Prevention Among Young People’, Adversity and Resilience Science, 2023

11Jul23

Abstract: Native American (NA) populations in the USA (i.e., those native to the USA which include Alaska Natives, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians) have confronted unique historical, sociopolitical, and environmental stressors born of settler colonialism. Contexts with persistent social and economic disadvantage are critical determinants of substance misuse and co-occurring sexual risk-taking and suicide outcomes, as well as alcohol exposed pregnancy among NA young people (i.e., adolescents and young adults). Despite intergenerational transmission of resistance and resiliencies, NA young people face continued disparities in substance misuse and co-occurring outcomes when compared to other racial and ethnic groups in the USA. The failure in progress to address these inequities is the result of a complex set of factors; many of which are structural and rooted in settler colonialism. One of these structural factors includes barriers evident in health equity research intended to guide solutions to address these disparities yet involving maintenance of a research status quo that has proven ineffective to developing these solutions. Explicitly or implicitly biased values, perspectives, and practices are deeply rooted in current research design, methodology, analysis, and dissemination and implementation efforts. This status quo has been supported, intentionally and unintentionally, by researchers and research institutions with limited experience or knowledge in the historical, social, and cultural contexts of NA communities. We present a conceptual framework illustrating the impact of settler colonialism on current research methods and opportunities to unsettle its influence. Moreover, our framework illustrates opportunities to resist settler colonialism in research. We then focus on case examples of studies from the Intervention Research to Improve Native American Health program, funded by the NIH, that impact substance use and co-occurring health conditions among NA young people.

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