settler colonial studies blog

Reviewing Julianne Schultz, The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2022, 472 pp., $34.99 (paperback), ISBN: 1760879304

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

A sin of omission: Stephanie A. Fryberg, J. Doris Dai, Arianne E. Eason, ‘Omission as a modern form of bias against Native Peoples: Implications for policies and practices’, Social Issues and Policy Review, 2023

21Dec23

Abstract: The omission of Native Peoples’ existence, experiences, and perspectives is systematic and widespread across numerous societal domains, referred to as Native omission. In mainstream media, for example, less than 0.5% of representations are of contemporary Native Peoples. We theorize that Native omission is a tool furthering settler colonial goals to oppress and eventually erase Native Peoples. To make this case, we will review both experimental and national survey studies that unpack how Native omission shapes psychological processes among non-Native and Native individuals and contribute to discrimination, oppression, and disparities facing Native Peoples. We then discuss ways in which Native Peoples are actively resisting Native omission. Finally, we provide a series of policy recommendations to address Native omission and promote Native equity. By making visible the pernicious consequences of omission for Native Peoples, we chart a path for creating a more equitable future.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The negative against settler colonialism: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Recognition beyond recognition!’ Interventions, 2023

20Dec23

Abstract: This essay focuses on the subject position of settler colonizers to interpret the developing global politics of Indigenous recognition in the settler societies and in Australia in particular. It focuses on the dynamics of recognition in the specific context of Indigenous–settler relations, on the contribution settlers may make to decolonial passages, on the ways perpetrator trauma shapes the settler colonial polity, and on the role truth telling and creative shame may play in overcoming the resulting impasse.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The settling of outer space: Janne Lahti, ‘Settler Colonial Solutions to Settler Colonial Problems: Settler Cinemas and the Crisis of Colonization of Outer Space’, in John L. Hennessey (ed.), History and Speculative Fiction, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 65-81

20Dec23

Abstract: Settler colonialism tries to master the land, use it, and derive bounty from it, putting tremendous strain on and wrecking environments. This chapter examines settler colonial crises and failures by discussing how the recent blockbuster films Ad Astra and Interstellar tackle imaginary settler projects in outer space in the context of environmental problems and the precariousness of habitability. In both films, the remedy for settler colonial crisis seems to be more settler colonialism. This involves a denial of the fundamental problems settler colonization causes. These films show how settler projects refuse to end, to die out, or to turn back, and how settler colonialism rejects critical self-reflection in the face of human and environmental disasters.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler apocalypse in an infrastructure: Sean Grattan, ‘Settler Colonialism and Apocalyptic Infrastructure in Almanac of the Dead’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 119-131

20Dec23

Excerpt: This is a story of hubris, settler colonialism, and waterWalking onto the University of Arizona campus the dissonance of the lawns is instantly and oppressively apparent. In Tucson there are not a lot of lawns; they still appear in some parks, but it is certainly not a prevalent landscaping decision. Grass, however, is perhaps meant to be inviting to incoming first-year students. The green, green grass of home. I begin here as a way of articulating the construction of spaces through water infrastructure as illustrating the imagination of water in a landscape that cannot support the excess of water necessary for that imaginary project. In “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe settler colonialism as a process that is different from other forms of colonialism because “settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain” (2012, 5). These lush lawns on a land-grant university are a symptom of hundreds of years of violence and domination in which infrastructure plays an integral part. As a non-Indigenous queer white man who has just arrived in Tucson, who is writing on and occupying Yaqui and Tohono O’odham land, it is perhaps not my place to blithely enter a conversation about the long history of pervasive violent extractive practices and logics that still continue around Indigenous water rights. Moreover, as a new transplant to Tucson, I don’t want to be taken in by a desire to assume a sense or right of knowledge that I cannot necessarily possess. However, sometimes the newness of a place can cause forms of estrangement that make certain narratives rise to the surface that illustrate ways ideology works through banality. Tracking shifting examples of climate chaos in different locales illustrates the interlocking localities of the large-scale and wide-ranging effects of anthropocentric climate change.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenous internationalism as infrastructure: Jordan B. Kinder, ‘Indigenous Infrastructuralisms? Grounding Materialisms along and against the Pipeline’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 103-118

20Dec23

Excerpt: In what is now called northern British Columbia, Canada, events that will shape the contours of its energetic and infrastructural futures for better or worse are currently unfolding. Since 2009, members and hereditary chiefs of the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en peoples reoccupied their unceded territory, building a healing center and other infrastructures of care in the face of necropolitical extractive, fossilfueled infrastructure developments. This reoccupation was initiated against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines, a twin pipeline project that would run 1,177 km (731 mi.) between Alberta and British Columbia’s coast carrying natural gas condensate on one end and diluted bitumen, or “dilbit,” on the other in what I have called elsewhere a mutually informing circular economy of energy deepening. Energy deepening describes how capital relies on ever-increasing energy inputs for its maintenance and reproduction as the dominant political economy of the recent past and present (Diamanti 2021, 14). Such deepening in this case would reproduce ongoing settler colonialism as expressed through extractive capitalism. Enbridge’s Northern Gateway wasn’t built, but more pipelines would be proposed as the inertia of fossil capital further sedimented. For now, TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink is under construction, a 670 km (420 mi.) natural gas pipeline that represents what Tlingit (Kwanlin Dun First Nation) anthropologist Anne Spice has powerfully termed invasive infrastructures (2018, 44–47). Violent raids in 2019, 2020, and 2021 executed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) revealed the character of this invasion as they enforced an injunction granted by the Supreme Court of BC on behalf of TC Energy. Here the state secures the realization of the pipeline’s construction through a kind of public-private partnership between TC Energy and its repressive apparatuses. Of course, for anyone familiar with extractivism and its resistance today, the Unist’ot’en Camp registers as one of many ongoing efforts within Canada’s borders. We could also name the Secwepmc-led Tiny House Warriors or Lubicon Cree energy justice activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s Sacred Earth Solar project, an initiative to outfit Indigenous communities with solar energy infrastructure and the training to maintain it. Such resistance is motivated by diverse Indigenous ways of knowing and being, as media from the Unist’ot’en Camp, Tiny House Warriors, and Laboucan-Massimo make clear. But what links these efforts are not only these diverse ways of knowing and being; they are also linked by a shared politics beyond wholly negative modes of refusal (A. Simpson 2014; L. Simpson 2017). Writing south of the medicine line in the wake of the Standing Rock blockade encampment to stop Energy Transfer Partner’s Dakota Access Pipeline, Lakota (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) historian Nick Estes draws attention to the political potentiality of a pan-Indigenous solidarity emerging from struggles against colonial, extractive capitalism that taps into “the tradition of radical Indigenous internationalism” (2019, 204). This article will detail how such interventions against extractive, settler-colonial infrastructures motivated by a pan-Indigenous solidarity are a kind of infrastructure in themselves that also express infrastructuralism that critical scholars of infrastructure would do well to take seriously as a materialization of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and decolonial critique.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute