« Older posts
Newer posts »

Extraction is a settler religion: Jan H. Pranger, ‘Christianity, settler colonialism, and resource extraction’, Dialog, 2023

13Jun23

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between Christianity, extractivism, and Amer-European settler colonialism. It argues that Amer-European Christianity is an extractivist religion, with beliefs and practices that are deeply intertwined with an extractivist relationship to the natural world and Indigenous peoples. In conversation with the work of Willie Jennings and exploring the impact of the doctrine of Christian discovery, the extractivist theology of John Locke, and the supersessionist use of divine election and covenant, this article exemplifies how Amer-European Christianity has shaped and been shaped by settler colonial extractivism. It raises the question whether and how Amer-European settler Christians may decolonize their extractivist relationship to Indigenous peoples and the natural world by learning from Indigenous peoples in dialogue with the work of the Osage theologian “Tink” Tinker.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Unsurveying the survey: Janet Miron, ‘The Eagle Said, “I will Take You Home Again”: Reclaiming Indigenous Histories from the Geological Survey of Canada, c. 1870–1910’, Histoire sociale / Social History, 56, 115, 2023, pp. 93-122

13Jun23

Abstract: Raymond Miron (Anishinaabe and French, Bawaating/Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario) and Robert Nolan (Anishinaabe, Batchewana First Nation, Ketegaunseebee/Garden River, Ontario) worked with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically with one of its employees, Robert Bell, a settler of Scottish descent. Miron and Nolan were two of the many Indigenous Peoples who shared their expertise, knowledge, skills, technologies, maps, and travel routes with Bell as he endeavoured to explore the northern half of North America for the GSC. However, in his published reports, Bell evaded acknowledgment of the many contributions made by Indigenous Peoples, despite the dependency of his work upon them. Nevertheless, by attending to silences in colonial archives and reading between the lines of the GSC’s sources, Indigenous stories can be uncovered and reclaimed from the narratives constructed by White explorers. What Miron, Nolan, and so many other Indigenous people shared with Bell, as well as what he took from them without consent, was based on rich geographic and geological knowledge that predated the GSC by thousands of years. Indeed, the significance and brilliance of Indigenous knowledge permeates the records of the Geological Survey, including those written by Bell, and defied colonial attempts to erase or deny it.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The manifest undestiny of settler colonialism: Robert Rix, The Vanished Settlers of GreenlandIn Search of a Legend and Its Legacy, Cambridge University Press, 2023

13Jun23

Description: For four hundred years, Norse settlers battled to make southern Greenland a new, sustainable home. They strove against gales and winter cold, food shortages and in the end a shifting climate. The remnants they left behind speak of their determination to wrest an existence at the foot of this vast, icy and challenging wilderness. Yet finally, seemingly suddenly, they vanished; and their mysterious disappearance in the fifteenth century has posed a riddle to scholars ever since. What happened to the lost Viking colonists? For centuries people assumed their descendants could still be living, so expeditions went to find them: to no avail. Robert Rix tells the gripping story of the missing pioneers, placing their poignant history in the context of cultural discourse and imperial politics. Ranging across fiction, poetry, navigation, reception and tales of exploration, he expertly delves into one of the most contested questions in the annals of colonization.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

A postcard from settlerland: Sierra Mendez, ‘With Love from San Antonio: Settler Souvenir Postals and Mass Reproductions of “Mexicans”’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2023

13Jun23

Abstract: The persuasive power of souvenir postal cards has been overlooked in scholarship. This essay examines how settlers in San Antonio, at the turn of the twentieth century, used souvenir postal cards strategically to produce knowledge about their city and its place in the modern nation, to market it to White tourists and other settlers as a “bordertown,” and to continue to dispossess and subordinate native Coahuiltecan, Tejano, and Mexican locals. Examples in this essay are drawn from a corpus of 300 real-photo postcards (1904–17) to consider their modes of production, images, captions, messages, and affects en masse. Through this essay, I show that souvenir postal cards are a way settler colonialism and coloniality/modernity worked, evidencing on local and global scales networked interest and cooperation between dominant imperial nations and groups to mass-(re)produce themselves and impose their structural patterns of power.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Textbook (settler) futurity: Benjamin W.  Ramirez, The (De)Colonization of Memory: A Critical Analysis of United States History Textbooks and the Struggle for Indigenous Futurity, PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2023

13Jun23

Abstract: In this dissertation, analyze how settler narratives normalize representations of the settler in relation to Indigenous peoples that bolster settler futurity through the colonization of our collective memory. Drawing on the tenets of Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) I focus on the permeation of colonization in US society while centering Ojibwe knowledge to assist in the analysis of settler colonization (Brayboy, 2005). Critical Content Analysis (CCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) complement the TribalCrit framework to reveal patterns, norms, and values of settler narratives in two US history textbooks from Pearson for California and Texas. Overall findings highlight how the forms of representation support settler discourse and related norms and values in US history textbooks that silence Indigenous voices. In my analysis, I critically highlight profit motivations, claims to scholarly authority, portrayals, Indigenous critiques of citizenship, and land relations in the textbooks. I also demonstrate how, despite minor linguistic differences between the textbooks produced for California and Texas, shared terms, and rhetorical strategies across both versions of the textbooks and accompanying materials control the characterization of Indigenous people. This includes the portrayal violence against Indigenous peoples and settler expansion, and how language frames Americanization as assimilation in ways that obscure genocide while promoting “democratic progress.” I further analyze how the framing and language used in the textbooks and accompanying materials generates settler affect (Fanon 1963/2004; Nasser & Nasser, 2008) that maintain the settler society and settler futurity. In the final chapter, I extend the concept of refusal from the work of Tuck and Yang (2014), Audra Simpson (2014), and Leanne Simpson (2017), I conceptualize a pedagogical practice that I call historical refusal, and include critical questions that teachers can utilize to identify, and critically reflect on, the construction and content of historical narratives in US textbooks to challenge settler narratives in high school classrooms.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Stamped out: Daniel Dumas, ‘Place them on a stamp: Inuit, banal colonialism, and the “pioneer experiment” of the High Arctic Relocations’, Political Geography, 105, 2023

12Jun23

Abstract: Postage stamps are considered to be silent messengers of the state, capable of transmitting ideas, representations, and often politically-charged messages of what nation states wish to present to both domestic and international audiences. Building on calls for further research into the specific stories of individual stamps and their producers, this article focuses on the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp issued in 1955 by the Canadian Post Office Department. Representing one of the first Indigenous-themed stamps, it is argued that it can be read as an attempt by the federal government to both incorporate Inuit as full citizens of the state, while portraying the Arctic as a key geographic space belonging to the Canadian imagined community. Furthermore, a connection is made between the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp and the High Arctic Relocations, which took place in 1953 and 1955. Primarily initiated due to concerns following the precipitous drop in Arctic fox furs, several Inuit families were relocated from northern Québec and Baffin Island to uninhabited Cornwallis and Ellesmere Islands in the High Arctic, in what the federal government called a “pioneer experiment”. The relocations also subtly served as a means of bolstering Canada’s de facto sovereignty amid increased American presence in the region during the Cold War. By connecting the High Arctic Relocations with the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp as two nodes of a matrix of Postwar Canadian Arctic policy that sought to administer Inuit lives, bodies, and lands, it is argued that the stamp constitutes a prime example of what I term banal colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Facing settler colonial dispossession and recursive colonialism: Joshua Lee Mayer, Conjuring Territory: Afro-Indigenous Authority and Settler Capitalism in Nicaragua, dissertation, UCLA, 2023

12Jun23

Abstract: This dissertation, based on 20 months of activist fieldwork, is an ethnographic examination of Afro-Indigenous peoples’ struggle to conjure territory—that is, to convert the legal recognition of territorial rights into a social reality. In 2009, the Indigenous Rama and Afrodescendant Kriol peoples in southeastern Nicaragua received a joint title to roughly 4,000 km2 of land and 4,000 km2 of sea. Since then, they have faced dispossession and displacement at the hands of land speculators, cattle ranchers, gold miners, and state-supported megaprojects. As community members grapple with the failure of the law itself to generate freedom from dispossession, the dissertation demonstrates that they are confronting fractally recursive colonialism: a form of colonialism at one scale that reproduces another form of domination at a different scale. Specifically, the violent, extractive relation of United States imperialism toward Nicaragua is reproduced within Nicaragua as mestizo settler colonialism toward Afro-Indigenous peoples. Over the past century, Global North actors have forcibly indebted the Nicaraguan state, resulting in current debts to multilateral and private lenders. Paying these debts requires constant growth in exports to bring in U.S. dollars. The state meets these obligations by promoting mining, cattle ranching, and infrastructure projects that depend on the settler colonization of Afro-Indigenous lands. After conceptualizing fractally recursive colonialism, the dissertation moves on to an ethnographic account of Rama-Kriol political thought and action. Starting from oral histories in two Rama and Kriol communities, the dissertation examines the historical roots of Rama-Kriol political thought on territory and freedom, attending especially to concepts of territorial care. The dissertation then narrates Rama and Kriol communities’ efforts to contest dispossession through an array of strategies, including lawsuits, vigilance, outright refusal of state and settler authority, cooperation with government officials and settlers, and appeals to international authorities. Through political and economic entanglements with state and international institutions, the communities are generating jurisdiction within their territory—a key building block for sovereignty. The conclusion reflects on the enormous stakes of the Rama and Kriol communities’ work to get free and—alongside similar communities around the world—to create a livable future on this planet.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settler colonial heartland: R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815–1900, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

12Jun23

Description: After the War of 1812 and the removal of the region’s Indigenous peoples, the American Midwest became a paradoxical land for settlers. Even as many settlers found that the region provided the bountiful life of their dreams, others found disappointment, even failure—and still others suffered social and racial prejudice. In this broad and authoritative survey of midwestern agriculture from the War of 1812 to the turn of the twentieth century, R. Douglas Hurt contends that this region proved to be the country’s garden spot and the nation’s heart of agricultural production. During these eighty-five years the region transformed from a sparsely settled area to the home of large industrial and commercial cities, including Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Detroit. Still, it remained primarily an agricultural region that promised a better life for many of the people who acquired land, raised crops and livestock, provided for their families, adopted new technologies, and sought political reform to benefit their economic interests. Focusing on the history of midwestern agriculture during wartime, utopian isolation, and colonization as well as political unrest, Hurt contextualizes myriad facets of the region’s past to show how agricultural life developed for midwestern farmers—and to reflect on what that meant for the region and nation.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonial reconciliationism (reconciliation as a settler resource)? Myra Hird, Hillary Predko, Extracting Reconciliation: Indigenous Lands, (In)human Wastes, and Colonial Reckoning, Routledge, 2023

08Jun23

Description: Extracting Reconciliation: Indigenous Lands, (In)human Wastes, and Colonial Reckoning argues that reconciliation constitutes a critical contemporary mechanism through which colonialism is seeking to ensure continuing access to Indigenous lands and resources. Making use of two historical case studies concerned with the intersection of resource extraction, Crown/Inuit relations, and waste legacies in Nunavut, Turtle Island (Canada), the authors illuminate the mechanisms of colonial and neoliberal governance globally that promise reconciliation while delivering the status quo. Through Indigenous and non-Indigenous anticolonial and posthuman concepts and theories, the book engages with the inhuman politics of settler colonial extractivism, and explores the socio-ethical social justice dimensions, political possibilities, and environmental implications of a much more challenging and accountable reckoning between (settler) colonialism and Indigenous land rights. Extracting Reconciliation is of interest to students and scholars in gender studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, indigenous studies, and politics.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonial pandemic: Fiona McCormack, Bronwyn Isaacs, Priya Kurian, Rolande Paekau, Cayathri Divakalala, Sharayne Bennett, ‘Settler colonial bordering and post-pandemic futures: disrupting the nation state in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, Cultural Studies, 2023

08Jun23

Abstract: In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life, exacerbating existing lines of discrimination. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled in terms of a particular conflation of nature, society and economy peculiar to settler colonialism. Using bordering practices during the pandemic as a point of departure, this essay draws on scholarship on borders to interrogate settler colonialism in Aotearoa. This allows for four innovations: First, it situates Covid-19 as structure rather than event, one which accentuated historical patterns of nation-making. Second, it underscores continuities in Indigenous relations of ownership, belonging, social reproduction, kinship ethics and environmental engagements. Third, it suggests alliances between migrants, non-white and colonized peoples; those for whom borders do not remain at the periphery, but rather penetrate deep into the informal spaces of the everyday. And fourth, it recalibrates resistances as expressions of sociality aimed at reclassifying nature, economy and society.


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