settler colonial studies blog

Indigenising settlers: Roger Blackley, Galleries of Maoriland: Artists, Collectors and the Māori World, 1880–1910, Auckland University Press, 2018

05Oct18

Description: Galleries of Maoriland introduces us to the many ways in which Pākehā discovered, created, propagated and romanticised the Māori world at the turn of the century – in the paintings of Lindauer and Goldie; among artists, patrons, collectors and audiences; inside the Polynesian Society and the Dominion Museum; among stolen artefacts and fantastical accounts of the Māori past.

The culture of Maoriland was a Pākehā creation. But Galleries of Maoriland shows that Māori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of romanticisation. What, this book asks, were some of the Māori purposes that were served by curio displays, portrait collections, and the wider ethnological culture? Why did the idealisation of an ancient Māori world, which obsessed ethnological inquirers and artists alike, appeal also to Māori? Who precisely were the Māori participants in this culture, and what were their motives?

Galleries of Maoriland looks at Māori prehistory in Pākehā art; the enthusiasm of Pākehā and Māori for portraiture and recreations of ancient life; the trade in Māori curios; and the international exhibition of this colonial culture. By illuminating New Zealand’s artistic and ethnographic economy at the turn of the twentieth century, this book provides a new understanding of our art and our culture.

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Self determination and its settler-colonial ends: Joseph Massad, ‘Against Self-Determination’, Humanity, 2018, pp. 161-191

03Oct18

Excerpt: Settler-colonists would only accede to a recognition that the indigenous peoples whose lands they usurped are nations on condition that self-determination not only would not lead to the declared goals of “independence” and “liberation” from settler-colonialism, but would effectively obstruct any path towards those goals. This can be observed in settler-colonies around the globe.

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The urban form of settler colonialism: Naama Blatman‐Thomas, Libby Porter, ‘Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2018

30Sep18

Abstract: In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.

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Complicit? Cameron David Ian Greensmith, ‘(Unsettling) White Queer Complicities: Toward a Practice of Decolonization in Queer Organizations’, Intersectionalities, 6, 1, 2018

30Sep18

Abstract: This article expands upon important and growing dialogue around how non-Indigenous peoples can work in solidarity with Indigenous peoples to support their nationhood and sovereignty in the wake of ongoing white settler colonialism in Canada. In particular, this article centralizes queer organizations and implicates their investments in white queerness as sustaining contemporary colonial projects. While queer organizations work toward social change surrounding all things queer and trans, their connections to white supremacy and settler colonialism routinely go unexamined. In an effort to bring light to queer organizations’ and workers’ complicities in white settler colonialism, this paper makes use of the narratives of 41 non-Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) service providers who voluntarily participated in in-depth interviews. By paying attention to their stories of deflections of responsibility in ongoing white supremacist and settler colonial projects, this article considers the extent to which white service providers and service providers of colour can address and embed decolonization within queer organizations in Canada. Together, these non-Indigenous LGBTQ service providers, organizers, and activists carry the potential to utilize their own experiences and understandings of complicity to shape their relationships with Indigenous peoples in ways that support their nationhood and sovereignty.

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Settler colonialism is a kind of ecopsychology: Alysha Tylynn Jones, David Sean Segal, ‘Unsettling Ecopsychology: Addressing Settler Colonialism in Ecopsychology Practice’, Ecopsychology, 10, 3, 2018

28Sep18

Abstract: This article identifies settler colonialism as a phenomenon existing outside of awareness in the field of ecopsychology and begins to explore what “unsettling” ecopsychology may entail. Unsettling the field is a process of revealing how ecopsychology reproduces and reinforces settler colonialism. This process requires deep reflection among practitioners regarding how they can challenge the dominant colonial narratives that underpin settler privilege within the field itself. Offered as additional points of engagement in the process of unsettling are practices of accountability and relationality through the learning of history and cultural protocols and engagement in acts of solidarity with Indigenous land-based resurgence. By opening up this dialogue, we (the authors) seek to make a critical contribution to the field of ecopsychology and, as non-Indigenous/settler practitioners, to encourage a discussion of accountability for those doing therapeutic land-based nature connection work as visitors on traditional Indigenous territories.

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Native slavery and settler colonialism: John M. Monteiro, Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America, Cambridge University Press, 2019

26Sep18

Description: Beginning in the 1490s in the Caribbean, and through the slow demise of native slavery in North and South America over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Amerindians were subjected to enslavement, captivity, and forced labor. Indian slavery was practiced across the Americas, at one point in time or another, in jurisdictions claimed by every European power that engaged in New World colonialism. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Scottish, French, and Russian colonists held native Americans as slaves, exerting their mastery over them and dealing in them as chattel. In parts of the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, native slavery survived the ending of European colonial claims and the formation of independent nation-states, lasting well into the nineteenth century. By that point, however, the numbers of Amerindians held as slaves in Brazil and the United States were tiny compared to the masses of African and Afro-American captives that made up the absolute majority of the populations of the two country’s plantation zones. Indian slavery thus seemed a small thing-economically, socially, demographically-when set alongside African and Afro-American slavery, on the ascent through the first half of the new century in Brazil and the southern United States alike. Until recently-and for many good reasons-scholarly attention to Indian slavery has been similarly dwarfed by the volume of care and attention paid to African and Afro- American slavery in the Americas. Over the last fifteen years, however, the study of native slavery has undergone a remarkable boom among North American historians

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Settler colonialism’s ‘scenes of captivity’: Jonathan Nash, The Politics of Wounds, Dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2018

23Sep18

Abstract: What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to Fanon and Mbembe, I argue that settler colonialism produces what I term as “scenes of captivity,” where the settler nation-state detains, incarcerates, and interrogates brown, Indigenous, and black bodies both for producing knowledge about those bodies and protecting and securitizing the nation-state. Understanding the ways in which settler colonialism’s logics of detention, captivity, and interrogation, both then and now, provides insights into how we might begin dismantling detention centres.

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The gender of settler colonialism: Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Kyle Whyte, ‘Theorizing Indigeneity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism’, in Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, Luvell Anderson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, 2018, pp. 152-168

23Sep18

Access the chapter here.

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Probationary settlers are settlers: Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Probationary Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in the American West: American Jews and American Indians, 1850-1934, Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2018

23Sep18

Abstract: “Probationary Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in the American West: American Jews and American Indians 1850-1934,” explores Jewish encounters with American Indians in the context of white settlement in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota. In the mid-nineteenth century, immigrant Jews fought against, traded with, and lived among Indians. By 1890, however, Jews primarily sought dispossession of native land through agricultural communes across the Plains. This study examines the nuances of Jewish identification with American Indians as “Others,” as well as with American whites as settler colonists. As Jews struggled to gain the status and privilege of white settlerhood in the 19th-century West, they readily participated in the settler colonial practice of displacing Indigenous people. By following the trajectory of Jewish immigrants and their descendants, my dissertation makes sense of the national, racial-ethnic, and class boundaries that Jews crossed to promote their own interests as they both carried out and critiqued federal Indian policy. ^ Using insights from settler colonial and whiteness studies, government documents, and Indian oral histories, this project explains how Midwestern Jews participated in and benefited from Native dispossession. Not fully entitled to the privileges of whiteness, however, immigrant Jews, like American Indians, also faced pressure to assimilate into American society during the late 19th and early 20th century. American Jews eventually claimed the benefits of whiteness and economic settler structures whereas Natives remained marginalized because the federal government did not envision full citizenship and self-determination for Indigenous peoples. This dissertation also considers the role of gender and intimacy in Jewish-Native relationships and interactions to explore the converging and diverging experiences of American Indians and Jews. With these shared interactions in mind, “Probationary Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in the American West” views families as a key site of cooperation and conflict within the settler state.

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Settlers farm and graze: Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, ‘Farm Novel or Station Romance? The Geraldton Novels of Randolph Stow’, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 18, 1, 2018

23Sep18

Abstract: Against the metaphysical and postcolonial readings of Stow’s early fiction, I would like to use them to isolate a particular dialectic that is in play within the modality of settler colonialism, between the pastoral and agricultural (farming) modes of land exploitation. In the pastoral mode, land is left in its original state and the natural herbage used as pasture for livestock; in the farming mode, land is cleared and sown for crops or for feed. Pastoral occupation is characterised by large-scale, quasi-nomadic land-usage—either via lease or, indeed, without any formal title—with a central station (homestead) and satellite operations staffed by stockmen (usually men), who herd and tend the livestock (cattle or sheep). Farming in settler colonies is characterised by much smaller land allotments for mixed farming (cropping and livestock), purchased outright often through land-issuing legislation and leads to close settlement with hamlets and towns as nodes for services, transport and market.

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