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Settler conservation against Indigenous resurgence: Lindsey R. Popken, P. Joshua Griffin, Charlotte Coté, Eric Angel, ‘Indigenous food sovereignty through resurgent self-governance: centering Nuu-chah-nulth principles in sea otter management in Canada’, Ecology & Society, 28, 2, 2023

11May23

Abstract: Although North American settler governments face scrutiny over the ecological, social, and ethical shortcomings of environmental policy, many Indigenous Nations are pursuing a resurgence of environmental self-governance according to ancestral principles and practices. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the reintroduction and prioritized conservation of sea otters by Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) actively impedes the harvest of culturally and nutritionally significant shellfish species by Nuu-chah-nulth Nations. Integrating a range of qualitative methods, we argue that structural inequities, divergent normative and material priorities, and ontological differences animate a divide between Nuu-chah-nulth and Canadian state governing bodies in sea otter management. The DFO’s unwillingness to accommodate Indigenous knowledge, principles, and priorities in its sea otter management scheme reproduces the unequal power relations of settler colonialism to the detriment of Indigenous food sovereignty and security. We propose to reframe sea otter governance around the Nuu-chah-nulth principles of hišukʔiš c̓awaak (everything is one), ʔiisaak (respect with caring), and ʔuʔaałuk (taking care of). This reorientation is in alignment with the efforts of Indigenous peoples throughout Canada and globally to enact multi-species caretaking through the resurgence of self-governance rooted in ancestral knowledge and wisdom. Ultimately, we argue that a sea otter governance structure centering Nuu-chah-nulth principles, ecological knowledge, and leadership would be well-positioned to lead collaborations and respectful engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Nations.


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The borders of settler colonialism: Anne Mai Yee Jansen, ‘Borders’, The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English, 2023

11May23

Abstract: This chapter begins with a broad overview of the field of border studies from the 1980s to the present. It traces the roots of U.S.-based border studies from Gloria Anzaldúa to the present, paying special attention to major trends and intellectual shifts in the scholarship. It then uses a passage from Efrén Divided to demonstrate three different conceptualizations of the border in literature and delves into the way borders have been theorized in literary studies. Following this discussion, the chapter considers what can be gained by bringing Indigenous studies and border theory into conversation, especially where concepts of sovereignty, mapping, and settler colonialism are concerned. To that end, it turns to Empire of Wild to explore the useful plasticity of border theory.


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Settler colonial slow violence: Alyssa Martin, The ‘Disposable Others’: Settler Colonial Processes of Industrial Pollution in Cancer Alley, Louisiana, 1964-2023, MA dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2023

11May23

Abstract: This thesis uses the lens of settler colonialism to bring memory, place-making, space, and history into the discussion of environmental racism in Louisiana. The effects of environmental racism are most obviously seen through higher rates of health problems or death. Less obvious are the effects that environmental racism has on the history and culture of people of color. To address this historiographical gap, this thesis explores how residents of Cancer Alley, Louisiana, have experienced emotional, generational, and physical erasure. The proliferation of industrial plants in poor Black communities has led to an alarming rise in mortality rates among Black Americans. Cancer Alley is one of the worst examples of this, as the parishes in this area rank in the top 5 percent nationally for cancer risk from toxic air pollution. Although there have been historical works published on environmental history, the history of race and environment, and environmental racism in Louisiana, Cancer Alley itself has not yet been subject to historical scrutiny, despite its uniquely high levels of pollution and large presence of community activism. This thesis seeks to answer the following questions: How have these residents organized and been ignored by local, state, and federal governments? To what extent have historical and cultural elements been affected by the increased presence of petrochemical plants? How has the increasing threat of climate change impacted the history and culture of these communities?


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Settler colonial genocide is always somewhere else: Reid Gerbrandt, Truth Before Reputation: An Analysis of Canadian Political Discourses on Settler-Colonialism and Genocide in China and Canada, MA dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

11May23

Abstract: The discovery of 215 potential unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021 sparked one of the last big debates on settler colonial genocide in Canada. On June 10, 2021, NDP MP Leah Gazan presented a motion to declare the Indian Residential School System (IRSS) genocide. However, it did not gain unanimous consent as politicians from several political parties voted against it. This was surprising as only a few months earlier Parliament had voted to recognize the ongoing Uyghur crisis in China genocide. What made this recognition significant was that several processes of group destruction that were part of the IRSS are evident in the Uyghur crisis, and several politicians even identified Uyghur destruction as settler-colonial in nature. The questions remain: why did Canadian politicians view settler-colonialism in China as a process of genocide, while avoiding this label for settlercolonialism in Canada? And what discursive strategies did they employ to highlight genocide in one context while minimizing it in another? Using the frameworks of conceptual constraint and “blame games,” this thesis examines how Canadian politicians portray China as a stereotypical “Villain” nation while upholding Canada as a “Hero” nation. It will also show how these views are maintained in the public sphere, and why we need to continue to monitor this latter discourse despite the Canadian House of Commons finally recognizing the IRSS as a genocide in October 2022.


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Settler colonialism, rusting away? Claire W. Herbert, Michael Brown, ‘Race, Property, and Erasure in the Rust Belt: Viewing Urban Changes through a Binocular Colonial Lens’, Du Bois Review, 2023

11May23

Abstract: This article builds on settler and domestic colonial histories and theories to advance our understanding of urban changes in segregated, disinvested, U.S. Rust Belt cities. While many major cities have rebounded in population and experienced gentrification since the mid-twentieth century, many Rust Belt cities have continued to decline. The resulting conditions call for new theories to describe their changes, trajectories, and the impacts for majority poor Black populations. We construct a Binocular Colonial Lens: an analytic framework that superimposes shared conceptual descriptions and theoretical explanations of settler and domestic colonialisms. With this lens, we can elucidate the practices of erasure that are deployed throughout colonized communities and focus them on phenomena associated with urban decline and revitalization. While some urban scholarship has used metaphors and language of settler colonialism to describe gentrification, most of these works at best reflect the salience of settler ideology, and at worst reinforce Indigenous erasure. Foregrounding shared conditions of colonization and conquest in the United States, we train this Binocular Colonial Lens on Detroit, which reveals myriad urban processes like ghettoization, urban renewal, suburbanization, and gentrification as ongoing colonization, wherein domestically colonized populations are subject to numerous forms of erasure at the behest of the settler state and toward the advancement of settler society. This lens advances urban theory by expanding the depth of our analyses of urban changes, and scaffolds connections with other axes of racialized inequality by revealing shared tools of erasure operative in, for example, mass incarceration and environmental injustices.


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Settler colonial remembrance is targeted: Daniel S. Murphree, ‘Remembering the “Dade Massacre”: Regional Memory, Settler Colonialism, and Native American Perspectives’, The Public Historian, 45, 2, 2023, pp. 108-133

09May23

Abstract: Just over a hundred years ago, the state of Florida created Dade Memorial Park to commemorate 108 US soldiers killed by Seminole Indians in 1835, an engagement at the time labeled “Dade’s Massacre.” Whereas the event itself briefly gained much attention throughout the United States and triggered the Second Seminole War (1835–42), the site’s creation and interpretations tell us much about the factors that shaped historical memorialization in public spaces in Florida and the Deep South. Specifically, this article examines the role of settler colonialism theory and Native American perspectives in the setting’s evolution into today’s Dade Battlefield Historic State Park.


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Settler colonial commodification targets entire lifeworlds: Emily Bagshaw, The Commodification of Indigeneity as a Tool for Ongoing Settler Colonization in Canada, MA dissertation, Brock University, 2023

09May23

Abstract: The initial settler colonization of Canada involved the implementation of the settler colonial Doctrine of Discovery on Indigenous lands to make them ‘open’ for white settlement and ownership, along with capitalism and heteropatriarchy to assert white settler dominance over Indigenous lands, cultures, and bodies. Although it has been over 500 years since first contact between white Europeans and Indigenous peoples in Canada, the ideologies that paved the way for white settlement in Canada are continually reproduced through social institutions, such as the legal system, to maintain settler domination. This thesis explicates the connections between settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy within Saskatchewan and Canadian law to analyze the commodification of Indigeneity as a tool for ongoing settler colonization. Grounded in a Métis feminist theoretical framework, I investigate how and why The Heritage Property Act (1979-80) steals and commodifies Indigenous cultural artifacts for settler government profit. Through a critical literature review, case study of the above-mentioned act, and Métis dreamwork, I identify two themes: the Settler Timeline and the Commodification of Indigeneity. Importantly, this thesis recognizes that many Indigenous individual and community identities evolve through links between the past and present, which Indigenous peoples reflect on to move into a good future. As such, cultural artifacts are paramount to cultural identity and continuity within Indigenous nations and communities. The findings of this thesis reveal that the ongoing settler conceptualization of Indigenous peoples as uncivil epistemically justifies the commodification of Indigenous cultural artifacts. This thesis also suggests that, just as decolonization within the settler colonial context necessarily requires the repatriation of all lands, it also requires the repatriation of all stolen and commodified Indigenous cultural artifacts.


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Settler colonial genocides target a whole lifeworld: Wanda Nyx June, Social Death with Nature: A Comparative Analysis of the Cambodian and Canadian Settler Genocides and Life-Death Worldings, PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

09May23

Abstract: To date, genocide studies has maintained certain asymmetric typologies that demarcate physical from cultural forms of destruction and gendered violence as distinct from homogenous narratives of mass physical violence. In this dissertation, I argue that assumptions underlying these binaries are rooted in anthropocentrism. In genocide studies this translates into a narrow focus on physical human existence and destruction that overlooks the complex and multiple ways through which an ethnic or cultural group imagines itself, maintains collective identity, and renegotiates its social relations in and through genocide, as part of a human-ecological assemblage. Furthermore, this limited focus obscures the gendered embodiment of genocidal violence and the depth to which gendered bodies harbour pain and trauma. To date, if gendered violence is noted, most often it is relegated as secondary to the preservation of human life. I transverse these asymmetries to examine the dynamism of group life and the ecological and gendered materialities and social relations that give meaning to the individual and group’s existence. Protecting human life will always be a significant focus of genocide studies and prevention. However, when we isolate human beings from the multiple relations that bring meaning to their lives, we miss the opportunity to more fully grasp what makes genocide possible, what genocide destroys, and the complex harms it leaves in its wake. In this dissertation, I examine Khmer Cambodian and Anishinaabeg and Cree collective identities as dynamic and evolving relational assemblages. By doing so, I open genocide studies to several insights from Indigenous and settler colonial studies and feminist new material theories: 1) An understanding of the group and its attempted destruction beyond anthropocentric terms; 2) A non-linear and dynamic genocidal temporality; 3) A more expansive understanding of and response to gendered and relational harms in genocide. Importantly, the key argument that I make in this dissertation is that genocidal destruction operates on multiple fronts; ecological and gendered materialities and social relations are mutually targeted in genocide—at times conjointly, at other times, unevenly. Therefore, this dissertation provides insight into an assemblage (rather than yet another asymmetric typology) of genocidal destruction.


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Settler reproductive history: Brianna Theobald, ‘Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97, 1, 2023, pp. 39-47

04May23

Excerpt: Even as the field of reproductive history dedicates greater attention to racial subjectivities and other forms of difference, attention to Native peoples and Indian Country remains limited; this relative absence persists despite Indigenous feminists’ frequent engagement with the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. The cause of such marginalization is not a complete mystery. The marginalization of Native reproductive histories reflects continuing patterns of Indigenous erasure in the context of U.S. settler colonialism and derives from the specificity of tribal nationhood, sovereignty, and Native nations’ trust relationship with the U.S. government, all of which defy tidy integration into the field’s existing narratives. It is also a product of the methodological challenges that these realities pose for nonspecialists. I wrote Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century in part to intervene in these trends. Published in 2019, Reproduction on the Reservation is the first book-length history of reproduction that centers Native American women. It contends that in a nation like the United States, colonialism is a vital frame for understanding histories of reproduction.


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Settler counterinsurgency (it’s scary): Bruno Seraphin, ‘Settler colonial counterinsurgency: Indigenous resistance and the more-than-state policing of #NoDAPL’, Security Dialogue, 2023

04May23

Abstract: In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror tactics, brutalizing Indigenous and allied water protectors associated with the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) on Standing Rock Lakota territory. This article takes COIN as an analytic to show that US settler colonialism is a multilateral, internally conflicted, and anxious mode of power. The settler state both depends upon and disavows anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence enacted by rogue civilian individuals and organizations, a phenomenon here termed ‘more-than-state policing’. The repression of #NoDAPL was not solely a boomerang by-product of the global war on terror but rather exposes an established infrastructure of settler colonial COIN intrinsic to US normal politics, in which Indigenous resistance and sovereignty are constructed as metastasizing, viral threats to settler colonial legitimacy. As modern COIN warfare has evolved from four centuries of North American settler colonial invasion and governance, settler colonial studies are key to grasping 21st-century topics of war, imperialism, securitization, resource extraction, and climate justice.


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