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The settler sovereignty is over the landscape: Meredith Alberta Palmer, ‘Rendering settler sovereign landscapes: Race and property in the Empire State’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020

20May20

Abstract: This article examines the politics of race, indigeneity, and landscape in US American enactments of property. Its substance is the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, now territorialized as upstate New York. The 2005 US Supreme Court case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation denied the Oneida of the Haudenosaunee the right to expand their sovereignty onto former reservation lands through the purchase of land title. In this article, I follow the genesis of the term “non-Indian character” of an area, first written in the Sherrill decision. In tracing the genealogy of this term, I examine the racial tenets embedded in US land survey tools and discourse of property-making after the Revolutionary War. I then discuss how efforts of the Holland Land Company, New York state agents, and yeoman settlers rendered settler sovereign landscapes through acts of Haudenosaunee dispossession and concepts of Indian inferiority. As Indigenous people continue to challenge US legal concepts of property today, the settler state has reauthorized this framing of Native American sovereignty that is bounded and may only recede territorially. I consider how racist understandings of Indian inferiority maintain land as property, to show how US sovereignty rests territorially on anti-indigenous concepts of race and place.


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Settler innovators: Tariq Dana, ‘A Cruel Innovation: Israeli Experiments on Gaza’s Great March of Return’, Sociology of Islam, 8, 2, 2020, 175-198

20May20

Abstract: This article sheds light on the relationship between Israeli high-tech innovation and military/security production in the framework of settler-colonialism and the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories. It analyzes the global rise of Israel in military and security innovation as a result of decades-long colonial ventures and regional wars, which have been a key variable for dynamic and extensive innovation and productivity. Moreover, the article argues that Israeli military and security would not have been attainable without the extraordinary official assistance and private investment from the United States, especially since the aftermath of the 1967 war. Besides the structural dependency on the US, this article highlights other characteristics that define Israel’s military and security production, such as the vicious nature of these innovations, complicity in global atrocities, and profitability of innovation to Israel’s war economy. Finally, the article presents Gaza’s Great March of Return (gmr) as a case study to present evidence on the ways in which Israeli military forces and security companies are jointly involved in experimentation, using new weapons and unmanned devices on the Palestinian civilians.


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A matter of historical interpretation: Megan Ryley Suster, ‘We Don’t Mention the United States’: The Cultural Politics of Historical Interpretation Within the Settler State of Hawai’i at Puʻukoholā Heiau and ‘Iolani Palace, PhD dissertation, University of California Riverside, 2020

20May20

Abstract: Through analyses of two foundational sites of the Hawaiian Kingdom—Puʻukoholā Heiau and ‘Iolani Palace—this dissertation offers an alternative interpretation of how Hawaiian history has been deployed as both a settler colonial tourist strategy and a means to foster Hawaiian independence and indigeneity. This project investigates how, through specific acts of historical commemoration at each site, the colonial histories of Hawai’i have been (re)presented and revised through the collaboration (and sometimes, conflict) of community organizations and those acting as stewards of the site. These efforts have led to narratives more critically engaged with telling histories of Hawai’i that include the structural impact of settler colonialism and militourism.

Puʻukoholā Heiau is an eighteenth-century heiau (temple or shrine) built by Kamehameha the Great on the Kohala Coast of Hawai’i Island in a successful quest to unify all the islands under his rule in the 1810s. Though condemned by Christian missionaries arriving immediately after his death, generations of Native Hawaiians quietly preserved and protected the site. The National Park Service has been its steward since the 1960s. Built for similar reasons by a later sovereign, ‘Iolani Palace serves as the second case study. Constructed in the 1870s by King Kalākaua, the Palace stands in downtown Honolulu, Oahu, as a symbol of Hawaiian sovereignty. After being occupied for several decades by those who overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom, the Palace was eventually vacated to become a museum and taken over by the Friends of ‘Iolani Palace, a non-profit organization working in tandem with the State of Hawai’i to preserve the structure and interpret its history.

Ultimately, this dissertation explores how the historical interpretations at these sites developed and how Native Hawaiian activists, community groups, and other indigenous advocates pushed contemporary stewards towards culturally decolonial micro-interventions that help complicate the settler imaginary that perceives and represents Hawai’i as both American and an American commodity. This dissertation seeks to resituate these sites as spaces of contestation and indigeneity operating within, and sometimes beyond, the limitations of their administering state agencies.


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Settler colonial utopias need catastrophes: Brittany Henry, ‘Survivalism, the Jeremiad and the Settler Colonial Utopian Imaginary in James Wesley Rawles’s Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse’, Western American Literature, 55, 1, 2020, pp. 65-96

20May20

Excerpt: While dystopian fiction has enjoyed popularity across the twentieth and into the twenty- first century, in recent decades public enthusiasm for the genre has skyrocketed as writers and filmmakers have increasingly turned to dystopian and apocalyptic representation to diagnose and warn against a range of social, political, economic, and environmental crises. Western American literature and fi lm have not been immune to the dystopian turn in popular culture, as evidenced by the prevalence of frontier mythology in dystopian and apocalyptic tales (as William Katerburg and Barbara Gurr have both noted) and the frequency with which dystopian and apocalyptic texts choose the US West as their setting or engage tropes of the Western genre in their storytelling. Examples abound but include novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s Th e Road, Octavia Butler’s Parable series, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Triptych, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Th e Water Knife, as well as television series and films such as Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity, George Miller’s Mad Max films, The Walking Dead franchise, and HBO’s Westworld. Despite this, western studies has seen a relative dearth of scholarship taking up the dystopia in a serious way as a relevant and important genre to the field (Katerburg’s 2008 Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction is a notable exception). This essay seeks to initiate and participate in a more sustained engagement between western American studies and dystopian and apocalyptic scholarship and cultural production. I am particularly interested in the opportunity western studies offers to bring dystopian scholarship into conversation with settler colonial theory in order to understand how the history and mythology of the US West informs the speculative futurities envisaged in American popular culture, in particular the religious and gendered ideologies that structure these narratives. Such a project, I contend, enables us to put more critical pressure on the political investments of a genre consumed by a wide swath of the American public.


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The life of capital over indigenous life: Anna Stanley, ‘Risk management and the logic of elimination’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2020

20May20

Abstract: This intervention is premised on the observation that differentiated and relational exposure and protection are fundamental to the political economy of settler colonialism in Canada. These orderings map directly onto a value logic that privileges the life of capital above all else, and orchestrates the voluntary and involuntary sacrifice of value to the national economy. Herein, the value of Indigenous life is continually metered out (and in various ways) in relation to the valued life of capital. I argue that ‘risk management’ – by which I mean the variety of techniques and practices that order and organize exposure to (and protection from) harm – is vital to the political economy of settler colonialism in Canada because of how it normalizes colonial violence. To support my argument I make three observations about ‘risk management’ anchored in three ‘exposure scenarios’ drawn from my research in the mining sector: (1) risk management is an intervention analogous to securitization; (2) risk management is powerful because it makes social relations fungible; and (3) risk management is a value logic consistent with settler governmentality and the logic of elimination.


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VIRAL: Lorenzo Veracini, Desmond Manderson, ‘A Virus is Colonising Our Pubilc Life’, Arena Online, 19/05/20

19May20

Excerpt: To cut a long story short, the virus SARS-CoV-2 has rapidly ushered in a new political regime. It has colonised our public life.

It has done so in several interrelated ways, but three aspects can be emphasised.


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The settler sovereign’s multiple personalities: Mark G. Brett, Naomi Wolfe, ‘Sovereignty: Indigenous Counter-Examples’, International Journal of Public Theology, 14, 1, 2020, pp. 24-40

17May20

Abstract: Through assertions of ‘sovereignty’, modern nation states lay claim to an undivided authority. It is commonly suggested that this kind of political assertion superseded the overlapping authorities of medieval theological imagination. But in settler colonial states, Indigenous sovereignties endure to the present, not washed away by the ‘tide of history’, and in many cases Indigenous peoples embrace Christian identities along with traditional law and custom. The peculiar complexities of Australian history reveal many counter-examples to the conventional modernist tale, and in particular, the article seeks to show how Indigenous Christians snatched the King James Bible from Protestant doctrines of discovery. This discussion comes at an historically significant time as Australian state governments contemplate treaty making with the First Nations, each of whom exercise their own alternative model of sovereignty within local jurisdictions. This article argues that biblical theologies can support the making of modern treaties.


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Biculturalism vs. superdiversity as decoy: Angel Chan, Jenny Ritchie, ‘Responding to Superdiversity Whilst Upholding Te Tiriti O Waitangi: Challenges for Early Childhood Teacher Education in Aotearoa New Zealand’ in Jillian Fox, Colette Alexander, Tania Aspland (eds), Teacher Education in Globalised Times, Springer, 2020, pp. 219-237

17May20

Abstract: Countries with a superdiverse population due to increases in migration have been slow in recognising and addressing social inequalities driven by this situation (Vertovec, 2007). In Aotearoa (New Zealand), there are now more than 200 different ethnic groups and 27.4% of its population was born overseas (Statistics New Zealand, 2019), and there is also an increasing number of students with diverse cultural, linguistic and migration backgrounds enrolled in the country’s early childhood teacher education programmes. The manifestation of superdiversity in Aotearoa is particularly complex and challenging since it occurs within a legislated ‘bicultural’ context (Royal Society of New Zealand, 2013). In light of these concerns, this paper reports findings from a study which utilised a methodology of critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011; Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002) to examine several key institutional policy documents in order to interrogate the responsibilities of early childhood teacher education in supporting both the country’s commitment to ‘biculturalism’ and its current superdiverse demographics. The theoretical analysis draws on Vertovec’s (2007) superdiversity approach, critical multiculturalism (May, 1999) and critical and Indigenous pedagogies of place (Penetito, 2009; Perumal, 2015). While all the documents make explicit references to ‘bicultural’ commitments, minimal attention is given to migration-related inequality issues. Our analysis highlighted complex inter-relationships and tensions between honouring ‘biculturalism’ and catering for superdiversity. Recognising and addressing this complexity is important in future policy development, and teacher education providers need to ensure that their graduates have the knowledge and skills to work equitably with children, families and communities in order to address inequalities emanating from the history of colonisation in Aotearoa as well as the current superdiversity situation.


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‘Savagism’ as decoy: Andrea Lynn Smith, ‘Savagism, silencing, and American settlerism: commemorating the Wyoming battle of the American Revolutionary War’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

17May20

Abstract:This article explores the role played by savagism in American historical consciousness, focusing on its appearance in settler accounts of the Battle of Wyoming (1778) of the Revolutionary War. The story of Wyoming is told each year in the small town of Wyoming, Pennsylvania in one of the longest-running historical commemorations in the United States. Rather than emphasizing a British foe, however, these celebrations revel in gruesome descriptions of alleged Indian forms of warfare. This article explores the political uses of savagism in these accounts. The savage trope has long served settlers in deflecting attention away from their own actions and in justifying conquest. In Wyoming narratives, savagism instead serves to deflect attention away from a deeper intra-colonist conflict that pitted two factions of colonists against each other in a bitter war that lasted decades. I conclude by considering the unifying functions of savagism in the advance of early American settlerism.


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The settler ‘home’ is where the settler maps (and unmaps): Lee-Anne Broadhead, ‘Scales of justice: putting remembrance back on the map in Palestine and Mi’kma’ki’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

17May20

Abstract: This paper considers two remarkable efforts to counter the repressive effects of ‘colonial cartography’: the Nakba map project in Israel, and the Ta’n Weji-sqalia’tiek Mi’kmaw Place Names Digital Atlas and Website Project in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia, Canada). Undertaken by the Israeli NGO Zochrot (‘remembering’ in Hebrew), the Nakba ‘counter-mapping’ project seeks to challenge settler foundation myths utilized to perpetuate ongoing oppression. The Ta’n Weji-sqalia’tiek Mi’kmaw Place Names project deploys cartographic revelation – the recovery of erased place names – as a mode of cultural reclamation, confronting settlers with the natural and human realities of the ‘world’ they ‘discovered.’ In addition, by delineating the legends and lore encoded and embedded in those place names, the project helps place the Mi’kmaw language and worldview back ‘on the map’ of remembrance and dialogue. Linkages between the two examples of settler occupation are highlighted through a consideration of the ways the Canadian government assists with the ongoing oppression of Palestine, as well as the ways Palestinian-Indigenous solidarity efforts seek to resist entrenched settler-centric narratives (mental maps). The case studies are presented as part of a necessarily larger, on-going effort to give voice to those long silenced by the hegemonic ‘truth’ of settler societies.


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