settler colonial studies blog

The abilities of settlers: Leah Wiener, Enabling Settler Citizens: Disability, Age, Public Health, and Settler Colonialism in Northern Ontario, 1876-1951, Simon Fraser University, 2023

23May23

Abstract: My dissertation analyzes the relationship between public health and settler colonialism, employing age and ability as key categories of analysis. I argue that settler colonialism and public health were constitutive of one another. Public health policy weaves together notions about land, race, labour, age, and ability, to structure and stratify societies. Public health relied on white supremacist tropes to justify the state’s attempts to subjugate and dispossess the Anishinaabeg in Northern Ontario. The idea of a “public” was critical and contested in the intersection of policy and the emerging social science of public health. Settler standards of public imagined a “public” that was white, male, middle-class, and adult, with a body that could be made healthy through individual effort. Settler ideas about Indigenous Peoples shaped the “public” as a racialized and age-stratified concept in Canadian public health and health policy. In this dissertation, I seek to highlight how material and symbolic age, and material and symbolic children, figured in settler-colonial processes of state formation in the context of public health policies. I examine how bureaucrats and institutions in the public and voluntary sectors constructed and portrayed Indigenous and settler health, measuring each against a middle-class standard of “public” health. To do this, I set forth four interconnected arguments. First, settler colonialism and settler public health policy were mutually constitutive. Second, disability existed alongside and entangled with age as a key framing for settler public health policies. Third, these public health policies drew from a bifurcated notion of the “public,” resulting in policies focused on protection and surveillance based on racialized lines. Finally, these framings of disability, age, and the “public” had clear material impacts in Northern Ontario’s settler colonial context, enabling settlement while dispossessing Indigenous Peoples.

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Afroindigeneities? Kyle T. Mays, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2021

23May23

Description: Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy. Mays uses a wide-array of historical activists and pop culture icons, “sacred” texts, and foundational texts like the Declaration of Independence and Democracy in America. He covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the cultural appropriation of Black culture. Mays compels us to rethink both our history as well as contemporary debates and to imagine the powerful possibilities of Afro-Indigenous solidarity.

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Healthy unsettlering: Kate Jongbloed, Jorden Hendry, Danièle Behn Smith, Joe Gallagher Kʷunuhmen, ‘Towards untying colonial knots in Canadian health systems: A net metaphor for settler-colonialism’, Healthcare Management Forum, 2023

20May23

Abstract: Forceful imposition of settler-colonial laws and institutions violate Indigenous rights to self-determination, with profound impacts on health and wellness. As a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous health leaders working in what’s known colonially as “British Columbia,” our collective work advances the rights and health of Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) by dismantling Indigenous-specific racism and White supremacy. We envision settler-colonialism as a net composed of hundreds of thousands of “colonial knots” that entangle Indigenous Peoples and prevent sovereignty and self-determination. The net also depicts Indigenous resistance, and the way forward of “untying colonial knots” patiently and persistently every day. We unpack this metaphor of the settler-colonial net and the artwork that inspired it. Our aim is to offer one more tool to Canadian health leaders who are bringing their hands, hearts, and minds to the complex and messy work of arresting White supremacy, Indigenous-specific racism, and settler-colonial harm.

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Settler colonialism is about removals: Susan Burch, ‘Between and Across Institutions: Multiple Removals, Settler Colonialism, and Histories of the West’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2023

20May23

Excerpt: In the early 2000s, Faith O’Neil (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) sought answers about what had happened to her family members incarcerated at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians—a federal facility opened in South Dakota in1902 and overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Around the same time, I sought answers in the National Archives, trying to understand lived histories in Canton’s locked wards. As I researched and started writing a book about people on the inside of Canton and their kin outside of it, I collaborated with tribal historians and activists. When I began contacting descendants to offer digital copies of archived sources about their kin, Faith O’Neil answered my letter. O’Neil’s decision to share her own historical sources and family memories with me, and our joint research efforts while I completed my book project, set in motion a different approach to interpreting institutions and Western history.

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Beading, stolen: Eric D. Johnson, ‘The Chaîne Opératoire of Settler Wampum Manufacture at the David Campbell House in Northern New Jersey’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2023

20May23

Abstract: From at least 1750 until 1900, Euro-American settlers of New York and New Jersey appropriated the production of Indigenous North American shell beads, namely wampum. Excavations at the David Campbell House in northeastern New Jersey yielded deposits of worked shell coterminous with household assemblages dating from 1810 to 1850. Artifact analyses combined with merchant ledger manuscripts reveal the chaîne opératoire of settler beadmaking from 1770 to 1900, including temporalities of production, waste, and racial and gendered labor dynamics in transition to factory production. Conclusions warrant greater archaeological attention to the relationship between capitalist industrialization, settler-colonial dispossession, and Indigenous resistance.

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Beading, recovered: Presley Mills, Justine Woods, ‘Beading Is Medicine: Beading as Therapeutic and Decolonial Practice’, in Roberto Filippello, Ilya Parkins (eds), Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress, Palgrave, 2013, pp. 21-36

20May23

Abstract: Beading is an important pathway for Indigenous peoples to restore, revitalize, and reclaim ancestral practices and community connections destroyed by colonization. As a decolonial practice, beadwork mobilizes Indigenous knowledge transmission and is intrinsically tied to the emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being of Indigenous peoples. Research colleagues and friends Justine Woods and Presley Mills met at the first Beading Circle hosted at Toronto Metropolitan University in the winter of 2019. Gathered around a table, the first teaching Woods shared with the group was to only bead while in a positive and calm mindset as the beads take in our energy and, with each stitch, become embedded with our intentions. Using beadworking as a method of inquiry, Woods and Mills hosted three beading circles in the fall of 2021 with four collaborators from the beadwork community to consider the ways beading is a therapeutic and decolonial practice. Through exploratory discussion, the group answered questions such as: Amidst ongoing settler colonialism, how can beadwork restore and repair your relationship to community, identity and ancestral lands? How does beading impact you emotionally? How does practicing beadwork contribute to individual and collective efforts of decolonization? In this chapter, Woods and Mills discuss how beadwork fosters a common thread within community, the power of beadwork as a conduit of decolonial space, and beadwork’s relationship to Fashion and how beading was medicine during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Cinema, the settler (II): Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Cinema, the Settler’, Humanities, 12, 3, 2023

18May23

Abstract: While the history and technology of cinema are considered for the purpose of achieving decolonial ends, this paper suggests that ‘classic’ cinema may be considered a quintessentially settler colonial medium. However, the moving image is now delivered in new ways and through new devices, and streaming has transformed global patterns of cinema production and consumption. Thus, two developments are considered in relation to this transformation. On the one hand, there are signs that mainstream cinema may be genuinely addressing its implication with colonialism, and this paper focuses on a formal apology and on a big budget movie that adopted a radically innovative approach to representing Indigenous peoples: Prey (2022). On the other hand, streaming has made cinema portable and has made consumption in personally deliberated instalments possible. The ‘digital natives’ consume cinema in fragmented and noncollective patterns, and their activity is subjected to unprecedented modalities of surveillance and appropriation. This paper concludes that a form of digital colonialism supported by streaming operates in ways that are homologous with modes of settler colonial appropriation.

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Cinema, the settler (I): Caroline Damiens, ‘Film exhibition for indigenous people in Soviet Siberia: ‘cinema-coming’ and political enlightenment in the red yurt’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 2023

18May23

Abstract: How can we get insights into early Soviet cinema screenings for indigenous audiences in the Siberian taiga at the end of the 1920s? Preserved by the Grodekov Khabarovsk Regional Museum (Russia), the recently published diaries of Alexandra Putintseva, a cultural worker posted at the ‘Far Eastern red yurt’ from 1929 to 1932, are a valuable source to investigate the issue. Putintseva’s diaries provide a wealth of information on movie screenings within these particular Soviet institutions, as well as their reception by indigenous audiences. They show that, far from the common colonial stereotype, indigenous audience was not astonished or frightened in front of the cinematic spectacle or apparatus. Furthermore, they also offer essential information on the immediate context within which these screenings took place, an issue of equal importance in understanding what cinema as a social practice meant for indigenous audiences. Performed in a multifunctional building aiming to radically change (‘modernise’) indigenous (‘traditional’) way of life, cinema was classified as political enlightenment work. As a result, for the indigenous audience, watching films was intimately intertwined with the new Bolshevik society and its modernising endeavour. Ultimately, the diaries illustrate what I have termed ‘cinema-coming’ (when the expected audience does not go to the cinema, cinema ‘comes’ to the audience), in which film exhibition was closely linked to state ideology and the formation of modern citizens.

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The architecture of settler colonialism: Thierry Jasmin, ‘Capital, Colonization, Contemporaneity: The Architecture Behind Joar Nango’s Sámi Shelters’, Canvas, 2023

18May23

Excerpt: In an interview with Pin-Up Magazine, Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango (b. 1979) explains that “colonization and architecture are not separate phenomena.” Nango makes the salient observation that no Sámi institution has been designed by Sámi architects, even though they certainly exist. Therefore, it is important to ask how Sáminess is represented in the architecture of these institutions and if this representation should be considered an appropriation or a contribution to Sámi culture. This essay will establish that the contemporaneity of Sámi architecture is characterized by a particular use of materials that is based on nomadic vernacular architecture, but brought into the future by critiquing colonial notions of land rooted in capitalism. Nango’s brilliant installation Sámi Shelters #1-5 (2009-2014) purposefully avoids this important architectural feature to critique the “Giant Lávvu Syndrome,” a popular appropriation of Sámi architecture that reduces an anti-colonial use of materials to mere form.

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The reproductive injustice of settler colonialism: Autumn Asher BlackDeer, ‘Violence, Trauma, and Colonialism: A Structural Approach to Understanding the Policy Landscape of Indigenous Reproductive Justice’, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 2023

18May23

Abstract: Indigenous peoples in the U.S. have the highest rates of violence against women, disproportionate representation in the child welfare system, and exorbitant amounts of traumatic injuries among all ethnic groups within the U.S. yet discussions of trauma and violence against Native communities fail to consider the ongoing influence of settler colonialism. Too often trauma-focused work takes an individualist approach while policy work focuses on the collective, leading to a siloed approach in which micro-trauma work misses policy influences and in which policy work fails to seriously consider the ongoing trauma and violence experienced by Native Nations. Through the application of three Indigenous theoretical models that account for both historic and ongoing colonial influence, this work introduces relevant issues in the policy landscape of reproductive justice for Indigenous communities that are essential for trauma scholars and practitioners to understand.

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