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The settler colonial city: Lorenzo Veracini (ed.), Special Issue: Urban Indigeneities and Settler Colonial Cities, Urban History Review, 51, 2, 2023

14Dec23

Access the special issue here


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Settling on science fiction: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler Colonialism and Science Fiction: Imagining the Worlds Turned Inside Out’, Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, 2023

14Dec23

Abstract: For those who were not Indigenous to it, the Americas were once the ‘New World’, colonies, and distant and alien places. When it comes to imagining new worlds, there is no better new world than a literally brand new one. Mars is the closest, and humans recently hurled a few sophisticated objects at it. Billionaire Elon Musk is planning to hurl a few more in that direction and turn it into a colony. Mars, however, has been mainly an imagined place. Science fiction as a literary genre has imagined it, and many other new worlds, and has routinely done so to reflect on real or impending contradictions developing in this one. The contradictions are in a sense where the new worlds are imagined from, but the new worlds are imagined as colonies located somewhere else. This paper sketches the evolution of science fiction colonialism and focuses on the ways in which it is contiguous with a political tradition I have elsewhere defined as ‘the world turned inside out’.


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The world turned inside out today? Joseph Bernstein, ‘Who Would Give This GuyMillions to Build His Own Utopia? Dryden Brown wants Praxis to be a crypto-city for tech bros and tastemakers’, New York Times, 12/12/23

14Dec23

Excerpt: When he took the stage at a conference for “start-up societies” in Amsterdam in October,27-year-old Dryden Brown cut a rumpled figure, moving stiffly in a gray hoodie with a T-shirt poking out at the bottom. He was there to tout his company, Praxis, which has an ambitious goal: to create a newcity on the Mediterranean.


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Boom settlers: Mary E. Thomas, Bruce Braun (eds), Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil, University of Minnesota Press, 2023

12Dec23

Description: Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. The collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom”.


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Settler colonial numeracy: Laura Soderberg, ‘Data-Driven Childhoods: Settler Colonialism and Numeracy in the Boys’ Literature of Francis La Flesche and Francis Rolt-Wheeler’, American Literature, 2023

09Dec23

Abstract:The turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century marked a time of intensified data collection in the United States focused especially on childhood. This article explores how two children’s narratives, Francis La Flesche’s The Middle Five (1900) and Francis Rolt-Wheeler’s The Boy with the U.S. Census (1911), reflect and respond to this conjunction of boyhood, settler colonialism, and official surveillance. Read together, these texts provide a window into the ways that data collection mediated between the everyday lives of children and the bureaucratic machinations of US colonial governance, marking those data as a site at which governance could be asserted or contested. The colonizing discourse with which these texts engage treats numeracy (rather than the more common literacy) as the threshold for citizenship and reduces Indigenous people, in particular, to the passive objects of measurement and administration. More surprisingly, though, these books also display the role that children’s literature played in placing children themselves in a relationship with numerical data collection, either as enthusiastic and active participants or wary counteragents. While Rolt-Wheeler portrays bureaucracy as an imperialist adventure in which white boys should joyfully partake, La Flesche offers a portrayal of the harm that this incessantly quantitative thinking did to Native children, but he also adds a nuanced critique of the epistemologies underlying such thinking.


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Remix (settler colonialism)! K. Aurylaitė, ‘Contemporary Indigenous Remix: Poets Matthew James Weigel and Jordan Abel Sampling from Settler Colonial Archives’, in S. B.dard-Goulet, C. Premat (eds), Nordic and Baltic Perspectives in Canadian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Northern Spaces Narratives, Stockholm, Stockholm University Press, 2023, pp. 47–100

09Dec23

Abstract: This chapter discusses two poetry books by Canada’s Indigenous writers, It Was Treaty/ It Was Me (2020) by D.n.sųłin.́ and M.tis Matthew James Weigel and Injun (2016) by Nisga’a Jordan Abel, as different examples of textual remix. Each of them, albeit in different ways, responds to and exploits the contemporary accessibility and materiality of language, which results from its availability in the digital space and on the Internet, and which, in turn, inspires a series of appropriative procedures (such as copying-pasting, sharing, and remixing, for example) to which language – seen as matter – is then subjected. Critics have referred to contemporary culture, which is dominated by new media technologies, as ‘remix’ culture (Manovich, 2015; O’Neil, 2006; Navas, 2012; Goldsmith, 2010; Dworkin, 2010), in which every Internet user re/produces cultural content, even if they often do so mechanically and uncritically. The poets discussed in this chapter engage in reflective and critical dialogues with the textual material they select, appropriate, and transform—that is, remix, often radically and provocatively— for their own works. Both Weigel and Abel sample from settler colonial archives rather than Indigenous sources, revisiting versions of the past as constructed by colonial sources. However, they do not engage in revisionist rewritings of the sources or their messages. Instead, both poets undertake a series of what Walter Mignolo (2014) theorize as ‘decolonial gestures.’ Their poems foreground investigation of and dialogue with the sources as processes to open the source texts for unlimited re-readings and allow them to arrange and articulate their own space within the formulas and structures of settler colonialism, whose ongoing effects on Indigenous land and being both seek to expose and address.


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Indigenous dispossession, settler illegitimacy: Jeremy Patzer, ‘Frail Legitimacies: Examining the Settler-Colonial Legal-Politics Underlying the Wet’suwet’en Crisis’, in Kathryn M. Campbell, Stephanie Wellman (eds), Justice, Indigenous Peoples, and Canada: A History of Courage and Resilience, Routledge, 2023

08Dec23

Abstract: Professor Patzer provides a current example in this chapter for understanding settler colonialism in practice, illustrated through what occurred during the recent crisis affecting the Wet’suwet’en land defenders in British Columbia. Here, he scrutinizes the mixture of law and politics that has dispossessed the Wet’suwet’en of much of their land and ability to fully determine their future, given they are facing the pending imposition of a pipeline on their unceded territory. By delegitimizing Wet’suwet’en traditionalists, the settler state ignores and obscures how they have been challenged when called upon to explain the legitimacy of colonial dispossession, especially in British Columbia, where much of the land is not accounted for by historical land cession treaties. Patzer maintains that while the higher courts have recently been engaged in rewriting Canadian Aboriginal law to produce new legal principles to address past controversies, in effect, what they have produced are “half-measures” of justice. These practices are reflective of an inability to engage with difficult questions about the legitimacy of the Crown’s sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their lands, further perpetuating colonial conflicts.


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Settler jurisdiction, Indigenous criminalisation: Adam J. Barker, Emma Battell Lowman, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Criminalization of Indigenous People in Canada’, in Kathryn M. Campbell, Stephanie Wellman (eds), Justice, Indigenous Peoples, and Canada: A History of Courage and Resilience, Routledge, 2023

08Dec23

Abstract: In this chapter Professors Adam J. Barker and Emma Battell Lowman, well-known scholars of settler colonial theory, lay out a basis for understanding the criminalization of Indigenous people through the lens of settler colonialism. For them, settler colonialism in fact represents colonization that persists through the continual assertion of jurisdiction over land and the interconnected processes of Indigenous displacement, dispossession and elimination. Offered as a strong basis for understanding the criminalization of Indigenous peoples in Canada today, the authors provide historical and modern-day examples of settler violence, from the lynching of Louie Sam in 1884 to the criminalization of Indigenous protests and assertions of nationhood. They further illustrate how the residential school system and reserve system are interlocking carceral systems logically linked to contemporary examples of police violence against Indigenous people and have influenced disproportionate Indigenous imprisonment in Canada. Settler colonialism is proffered as useful for explaining and understanding ongoing conflicts and government attempts to suppress Indigenous resurgence and land assertions, through consistently criminalizing Indigenous demands made of the settler state.


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Dancing with settlers: Kate Mattingly, ‘Native American Dancing beyond Settler Colonial Confines’, in Kate Mattingly, Iyun Ashani Harrison (eds), Antiracism in Ballet Teaching, Routledge, 2023

07Dec23

Abstract: Rather than focus on how ballet can be more “inclusive,” this chapter takes a broader view of dance education and its complicity with settler colonialism. While scholars have brought attention to cultural appropriation in ballet, less prominence has been given to the erasure of Native artistry and peoples, and ballet’s imbrications with racial-settler capitalism. Beginning with a description of a recent collaboration among photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), dancer Crickett Tiger (Muscogee Creek/Cochiti), and artist Leah Mata-Fragua (Northern Chumash), the chapter foregrounds Native artists who influence definitions of “American” ballet, historically and currently. Focusing on the significance of responsibility and reciprocity, this chapter draws on scholarship by Tria Blu Wakpa (Filipina, European, and tribally-unenrolled Native ancestries) to amplify Indigenous sovereignty and epistemologies, and to highlight their vital importance in generating equitable and sustainable learning environments for students, artists, and educators.


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Unsettled settler law: Laura Waldman, ‘No Settled Law on Settled Land: Legal Struggles for Native American Land and Sovereignty Rights’, CUNY Law Review, 220, 2023

07Dec23

Abstract: Since the early years of colonization, Native American people have engaged in continuous legal struggles for land and sovereignty, which have exposed the colonial underpinnings and white supremacist worldview that are the root cause of their ongoing subjugation. In modern times, that often takes the form of government-backed corporate control over natural resources. This note traces the historical links from treaty violations by early white settlers for the purpose of usurping plantation land and gold, to recent incursions by companies building unwanted oil and gas pipelines on Native American lands. Both then and now, using law as a tool of resistance has had varying results. On the one hand, there are countless instances where the law has been used as a weapon against Indigenous sovereignty, for example allotment leveraged property law to further divide Native American lands, as well as Native American people from their land. The European conceptions of how property ought to be used, enshrined in laws that require land claims to be exclusive, have consistently deprived Native American nations of decision-making over their lands. On the other hand, some treaties have been successful in ensuring enforcement of environmental protections on Indigenous land. Moreover, the framework that forms the basis for many rights, that tribal membership is a political rather than a racial designation, has been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. And, though recent judicial efforts to undermine the protective relationship the federal government has with Native American nations have been successful, there is room for deeper understandings of Native American sovereignty to emerge into law—understandings based on inherent, rather than relational sovereignty.


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