« Older posts
Newer posts »

Medicalising settler colonialism: Samir Shaheen-Hussain, Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023

04Jul23

Description: Launched by healthcare providers in January 2018, the #aHand2Hold campaign confronted the Quebec government’s practice of separating children from their families during medical evacuation airlifts, which disproportionately affected remote and northern Indigenous communities. Pediatric emergency physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s captivating narrative of this successful campaign, which garnered unprecedented public attention and media coverage, seeks to answer lingering questions about why such a cruel practice remained in place for so long. In doing so it serves as an indispensable case study of contemporary medical colonialism in Quebec. Fighting for a Hand to Hold exposes the medical establishment’s role in the displacement, colonization, and genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Through meticulously gathered government documentation, historical scholarship, media reports, public inquiries, and personal testimonies, Shaheen-Hussain connects the draconian medevac practice with often-disregarded crimes and medical violence inflicted specifically on Indigenous children. This devastating history and ongoing medical colonialism prevent Indigenous communities from attaining internationally recognized measures of health and social well-being because of the pervasive, systemic anti-Indigenous racism that persists in the Canadian public health care system – and in settler society at large. Shaheen-Hussain’s unique perspective combines his experience as a frontline pediatrician with his long-standing involvement in anti-authoritarian social justice movements. Sparked by the indifference and callousness of those in power, this book draws on the innovative work of Indigenous scholars and activists to conclude that a broader decolonization struggle calling for reparations, land reclamation, and self-determination for Indigenous peoples is critical to achieve reconciliation in Canada.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Reproducing settler colonialism: Jennifer J. Hill, Birthing the West: Mothers and Midwives in the Rockies and Plains, University of Nebraska Press, 2022

04Jul23

Description: Childbirth defines families, communities, and nations. In Birthing the West, Jennifer J. Hill fills the silences around historical reproduction with copious new evidence and an enticing narrative, describing a process of settlement in the American West that depended on the nurturing connections of reproductive caregivers and the authority of mothers over birth. Economic and cultural development depended on childbirth. Hill’s expanded vision suggests that the mantra of cattle drives and military campaigns leaves out essential events and falls far short of an accurate representation of American expansion. The picture that emerges in Birthing the West presents a more complete understanding of the American West: no less moving or engaging than the typical stories of extraction and exploration but concurrently intriguing and complex. Birthing the West unearths the woman-centric practice of childbirth across Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming, a region known as a death zone for pregnant women and their infants. As public health entities struggled to establish authority over its isolated inhabitants, they collaborated with physicians, eroding the power and control of mothers and midwives. The transition from home to hospital and from midwife to doctor created a dramatic shift in the intimately personal act of birth.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Black freedom on native land? Alaina E. Roberts, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021

04Jul23

Description: Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of “40 acres and a mule”—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I’ve Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

A settler climate: Riley Olstead, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, ‘Circles and lines: indigenous ontologies and decolonising climate change education’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

04Jul23

Abstract: In 2015, The Truth and Reconciliation Report (TRC) was released in Canada, outlining 94 Calls to Action which, include pushing Canadian post-secondary institutions to ethically engage Indigenous communities and knowledge systems.1 This paper seeks to respond to the TRC by offering a spatial analysis of the differences, broadly conceived, between Indigenous and western ontological structures. We consider these differences in terms of ‘circles and lines’ through a novice, settler understanding of how Mi’kmaw concepts of etuaptmumk (two-eyed seeing), netukulimk (conservation laws) and m’sɨt No’kmaq (all our relations) can be brought to support decolonial teaching and learning about such important and urgent matters as climate change. A related goal in this paper is pedagogic: we hope our own ambivalent learning here can be used as an example to reflect deeply on how settlers like us might/should/can’t work with the ethical, political, and practical challenges of responding to the TRC in our research, involving, and considering Indigenous ways of knowing and being.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Displacing the displacer portrayed as a displacer: Wil Sahar Patrick, Reuben Rose-Redwood, CindyAnn Rose-Redwood, ‘Dis-Placing White Supremacy: Intersections of Black and Indigenous Struggles in the Removal of the Roosevelt Statue at the American Museum of Natural History’, in Bronwyn Carlson, Terri Farrelly (eds), The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, Palgrave, 2023, pp 437–459

04Jul23

Abstract: The removal of monuments and the renaming of places have become major flashpoints of social and political contestation over the past decade. In the United States, there has been a surge in the removal of neo-Confederate statues, monuments and place names as well as a dethroning of statues of Christopher Columbus and other prominent figures who organised and committed Indigenous genocide. The iconoclasms of these two movements—for the removal of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous monuments—are often portrayed as separate struggles. However, this clean delineation of the commemorative landscape between those features that embody anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity obscures how both are informed by the ideology of white supremacy and emplace it in the built environment. Campaigns for the removal of monumental objects such as the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York demonstrate the intersectionality of commemorative struggles and the potential for solidarity between Black and Indigenous peoples. While recognising the distinct struggles of Black and Indigenous communities, this chapter argues that the intimacies, resonances and collaborations to dismantle white supremacy and settler-colonial monumentality can open spaces to nurture the possibilities for intersectional solidarity.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Commemorating settler deathscapes: Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, ‘Edifying: The Deathscapes Project and the Landscape of Settler-Colonial Monumentality in Australia’, in Bronwyn Carlson, Terri Farrelly (eds), The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 461-484

04Jul23

Abstract: In this chapter, we draw on the Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States project to disclose the bloody foundations that underpin colonial statues and monuments. As the Deathscapes project evidences, these bloody foundations are, in the context of settler states, daily exposed to view through the embodied racialised deaths of Indigenous people. In its focus on the nexus between the settler state’s usurpation of Indigenous sovereignty and its militarisation of the border in order to assert its illegitimate sovereignty, Deathscapes also brings into view the refugee deaths that result from this lethal assemblage of settler power. Situated within the context of this lethal assemblage, Deathscapes draws attention to the fact that these statues and monuments cannot be hived off as historical artefacts in terms of their legacies of violence. The very infrastructural fabric of the Australian settler state is constituted by the violence that these colonial figures unleashed and which continues to shape the colonial present. In the course of the chapter, we examine how some of these commemorative colonial monuments have become sites that, through acts of Indigenous resistance and naming, bring into graphic focus the embodied relations between past and present forms of settler violence.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Memorials to settler colonialism: Noah Bassil, ‘Memorials to Settler-Colonialism in Australia: Racism, Colonialism and White Power’, in Bronwyn Carlson, Terri Farrelly (eds), The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 13-32

04Jul23

Abstract: This chapter is based on a post-colonial reading of contemporary politics and an appreciation of the long struggle against colonialism that can be traced back centuries. It contextualises the current ‘colonial memorialisation’ struggle as a component of that larger struggle, which is evident to me will continue for as long as the colonial political, economic and cultural order (i.e., imperial order) remains in place. Informed by my reading of the past, and a capacity to identify the ways the past continues to exist in the present, this chapter analyses the global memorialisation of colonisers and colonialism. The memorials discussed in this chapter include statues, flags, place and building names and dates of commemoration, beginning in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall movement. It is argued that the monuments and memorials to colonialism and the colonisers cannot be separated from the broader politics of economic inequality, challenges to white privilege and the (re)resurgence of right-wing politics and militant nationalism. This chapter reveals how the contemporary world order relies heavily on the racist cultural order constructed in a period of Empire and then provides a contemporary exposé of the ways that the efforts to challenge the racist cultural order by movements such as #RhodesMustFall are a threat to the prevailing and dominant political and economic system. The struggle to bring down monuments dedicated to colonialism and imperialism is intertwined with continuing unequal political and economic structures. It is in the recognition that racism and capitalism are inextricably connected (Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, The University of North Carolina Press, 1944) and that the capitalist system requires a racist (and misogynist) order for its survival that the full implications of the challenge to colonial memorialisation are located.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The electability of settler colonialism: Zachary R. Smith, ‘How Treacherous the Gift’: The Origins of Representative Institutions in Settler-Colonies, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2023

04Jul23

Abstract: Settler-colonies are places of tremendous inequality and violence. Yet, at the same time, settlercolonies are also places where elected institutions flourish. What explains the origin of institutions
seemingly founded on ideals of equality and liberty amidst systemic violence and hierarchy? This
dissertation examines the process of elected representative institutional formation in settlercolonies through comparative-historical analysis drawing on original archival research of three
case studies—the South African Cape Colony and Natal and French Algeria—and application of
the findings from these studies to a fourth case, Zionist settlement in early twentieth-century
Palestine. It identifies two necessary conditions for institutional formation: a shared ideological
background of Enlightenment thought and a pre-existing racial hierarchy. Given these necessary
conditions, high values on two causal factors—the relative unity of the settler population and
relative support from imperial authority—explain the timing of these institutions’ creation and
their design. Linking the necessary conditions and causal factors are settlers’ economic
motivations for the protection and accumulation of wealth, which catalyze the process of
institutional formation and influence these institutions’ exclusionary character. In elected
representative institutions, the purported bastions of equality and freedom, settlers built the
bulwarks of their own domination.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The international law of settler colonialism: Elya Milner, Alexandre Sandy Kedar, ‘Squaring the circle: Settler colonialism, the international law of occupation and the separation barrier’, Political Geography, 15, 2023

04Jul23

Abstract: The Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) is highly invested in maintaining a façade of adherence to International Law (IL) in Israel’s continuous occupation of the West Bank, and in mitigating the contradictions and complexities in Israel’s implementation of this law. Our paper proposes a unique legal-geographical perspective to the analysis of this dynamic, while anchoring the critique of the HCJ’s work within an understanding of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as a settler colonial project. Empirically, we focus on the Court’s evolving jurisprudence in relation to the inclusion of expansion plans for the Jewish settlements in the routing of the separation barrier. Through a close reading of the legal texts, we demonstrate how the Court strove to subject the settler colonial logic of permanent spatial transformation and settlement expansion into the IL’s imperatives of temporality and conservation. Through this case-study we propose a nuanced empirical and methodological approach to the study of contemporary settler colonial legalities. This approach focuses on the intertwinement of everyday professional practices of space and law in order to unravel the weaving of settler colonial logics into contemporary imperatives.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The property of settler colonialism: Daniel Denvir, ‘Property, Race, Colonialism, and Capitalism: An Interview with Brenna Bhandar’, Jacobin, 02/07/23

03Jul23

Excerpt: In colonial regimes, dominant conceptions of private property developed alongside racial hierarchies.


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