Abstract: Indigenous people suffer earlier death and more frequent and severe disease than their settler counterparts, a remarkably persistent reality over time, across settler colonized geographies, and despite their ongoing resistance to elimination. Although these health inequities are well-known, they have been impervious to comprehensive and convincing explication, let alone remediation. Settler colonialism, the focus of a fast-growing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field, is a promising candidate to rectify this impasse. Settler colonialism’s relationship to health inequity is at once obvious and incompletely described, a paradox arising from epistemic coloniality and perceived analytic challenges that we address here in three parts. First, in considering settler colonialism an enduring structure rather than a past event, and by wedding this fundamental insight to the ascendant structural paradigm for understanding health inequities, a picture emerges in which this system of power serves as a foundational and ongoing configuration determining social and political mechanisms that impose on human health. Second, because modern racialization has served to solidify and maintain the hierarchies of colonial relations, settler colonialism adds explanatory power to racism’s health impacts and potential amelioration by historicizing this process for differentially racialized groups. Finally, advances in structural racism methodologies and the work of a few visionary scholars have already begun to elucidate the possibilities for a body of literature linking settler colonialism and health, illuminating future research opportunities and pathways toward the decolonization required for health equity.



Abstract: This thesis analyzes the Suruí Forest Carbon Project in the context of settler colonialism. By exploring the three core principles of settler colonialism as outlined by settler colonial scholar Patrick Wolfe: access to land, elimination of the native, and the understanding that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event, I will demonstrate how each one of the three principles helped contribute to creating the context within which the Suruí Forest Carbon Project was situated. By taking this approach, I will be able to demonstrate the limits and possibilities of the project for the Suruí indigenous peoples. This analysis will allow me to present the challenges and contradictions associated with implementing REDD+ carbon credit projects in settler states such as Brazil and how, due to settler colonialism’s structural limitations, these types of projects could be a possibility of providing some agency for indigenous peoples trying to find ways to assert their autonomy. The Suruí Forest Carbon Project was the first and still one of the only examples of an indigenous-led carbon emissions reduction project operating through the sale of carbon credits. During the first five years the project was operational, it drastically helped reduce deforestation levels within the Suruí’s territory, leading many to deem the project a success. However, in 2015 and 2016, following the discovery of gold and diamonds on the Suruí’s territory, the project’s sight was eventually overrun by garimpeiros (small-scale gold miners), and in 2018 the project was suspended, leading some to consider it a failure. Therefore, I will present some of the challenges that arise when neoliberal conservation efforts, such as carbon credit projects, struggle to address factors outside their initial control, in this case, settler colonialism. Also, by analyzing the different components going into the project’s creation, implementation, and suspension, I will present how carbon credit projects working directly with indigenous peoples can successfully halt deforestation for limited periods. But how settler colonialism makes these groups of people and their land vulnerable, which can help contribute to projects being undermined. Through my analysis, I will help demonstrate some factors that impact these types of projects’ longevity and some things that would need to be implemented in the future to succeed in the long term.




Abstract: Some historians have used the phrase Americanization of war to describe the process in which Anglo-American settlers adopted or appropriated the military tactics of American Indians. However, both proponents and opponents of the idea of the Americanization of war have focused on the northern colonies. This is likely because the Americanization of war in the colonial period has been closely associated with American rangers, most notably those commanded by Benjamin Church, John Gorham, and Robert Rogers. While these men and the soldiers they commanded are all demonstrative of the Americanization of war, Church, Gorham, and Rogers all conducted operations in New England, New York, and Canada. These studies do not address the unique process of the Americanization of war in the southern colonies. A study of the colonial wars in the South reveals that a process of Americanization of war did take place, although it varied somewhat from that in the North. Unlike their northern counterparts, the settlement patterns of the colonial South produced a ranger that was more inspired by English practices than American Indian tactics. Still, over the course of several colonial wars in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the southern ranger became exemplary of the Americanization of war, yet distinct from his northern counterpart. The Americanization of war in the South happened though a complex process that involved trade, hunting, military alliances, slavery, and frontier life. By the mid-eighteenth century, southern rangers reflected the Americanized society that was developing in the colonial South. Ultimately, understanding the distinct process of the Americanization of war in the colonial South is important to understanding southern culture and its exceptional place in American identity.