settler colonial studies blog

Arciving settler colonialism: Delia Chartrand, Reconciling the Archive: Creating Space for Indigenous Structured Systems of Remembrance in Canadian Archives, MA dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

18Sep23

Abstract: Indigenous ways of knowing and situating history have been historically neglected by archival institutions over the vast tradition of archives in Canada. Embodied expressions of history such as orality, storytelling and ceremony hold unique information imbedded within the performative exchanges which needs to be recognized as authentic and valid. As archives are used to promote our collective conceptions of heritage and identity, their failure to incorporate embodied expressions into their institutional frameworks has contributed to the dismissal of Indigenous histories on a broader scale by the Canadian public. In recent years, new methods of resituating archival records regarding Indigenous peoples have been explored as a means of addressing our country’s colonial pasts. These methods utilize partnerships between archival institutions and engagement with Indigenous source communities to enhance knowledge of archival collections. Conversely, national and international frameworks have recognized the importance of expressions such as oral traditions, oral histories and ceremony to Indigenous communities as valid forms of history in need of protection. While these frameworks are used by archival institutions, often cited as guiding principles in their work with Indigenous peoples, archives in general have yet to accept the embodied expression as an archival record. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report defines reconciliation as an act of mutual respect between two groups. I suggest that reconciliation within archival work can therefore only be achieved if archives acknowledge and incorporate Indigenous embodied records into their institutional frameworks.

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Settler colonialism by starvation: Kristin Burnett, Travis Hay, Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity, University of Manitoba Press, 2023

14Sep23

Description: Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways. Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s. They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination. Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project by re-evaluating northern food policy and laying bare the governmental and corporate processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities.

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Colonialism is not imperialism because of settler colonialism: Barbara Arneil, ‘Colonialism versus Imperialism’, Political Theory, 2023

12Sep23

Abstract: Contemporary scholars routinely argue colonialism and imperialism are indistinguishable. In this essay, I challenge this argument. While it is true the “colonial” and “imperial” overlap and intersect historically, I argue there is a central thread of modern colonialism as an ideology that can be traced from the seventeenth century to mid-twentieth century that was not only distinct from—but often championed in explicit opposition to—imperialism. I advance my argument in four parts. First, I identify key ways in which the colonial can be distinguished from the imperial, including most importantly the specific kind of productive power inherent in colonialism. Second, I examine how colonialism and imperialism evolve in meaning and are redefined by both champions and critics, in relation to each other in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Third, I examine the historical moment when colonialism and imperialism fully conflate after WWII through the UN process of decolonization as the “salt water thesis” delimits colonialism to mean foreign racialized domination, and it thus becomes synonymous with imperialism. I conclude with an analysis of why the distinction still matters in both theory and practice.

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Diversity settles: D. D. Squire, J. Chiarelli, S. Brown, ‘Women of color student affairs professionals’ orientations toward and away from settler colonialism’, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2023

12Sep23

Abstract: This research study aims to understand how women student affairs professionals of color orient themselves to settler colonialism and their understandings of decolonization. The researchers were interested in student affairs professionals’ knowledge and understanding how these professionals think about their relationship to settler colonialism and integrate decolonizing praxis into their life and campus roles. Participants were asked to share about their affective experiences (e.g., attitudes, self-efficacy), cognitive learning (e.g., vocabulary, knowledge), and skills regarding decolonization.

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A settler colonial node: Timothy Maton, Settler colonialism at Portage and Main, past and present, PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

12Sep23

Abstract: This dissertation examines the Portage and Main (P&M) intersection and the metropolitan business district of Winnipeg. It looks at how that location has become a reified expression of the North-western plains’ colonial and settler colonial ideology. Between 1862 and 1913, P&M would grow to become the largest settled financial engine driving Canada’s economic expansionism across the North-western plains. It drove the settler commercial economy’s growth when it was first developing on the plains and continues to enable commercial expansionism today. Winnipeg’s P&M Central Economic District remains one of the most important places representing westward and northward commercial expansionism and the processes by which non-Protestants were dispossessed of land. By the 1880s, P&M had become a physical embodiment of the financial banking and exchange processes associated with Britain’s Protestant Reformation Tradition and the Banking Reform laws of the Second Great Reformation movement. Meanwhile, its commercial processes would dispossess the established Roman Catholic and tribal First Nations Indigenous peoples who have lived in the conjoined Great Forks region for millennia of their land and territory. In this dissertation, I argue that Protestant businessmen had built P&M as a physical reflection of the economic, social, and cultural architecture of the Second Great Reform and Banking Reform movements of Britain. In my first two chapters, I show that this Protestant Reformation movement’s Victorian, Edwardian, and high modernist ideology cannot be divorced from the processes that have built Winnipeg’s contemporary business district meanwhile dispossessing both the French Catholic and non-Protestant Indigenous people’s communities downtown. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the physical, ideological, and religious ideas which have reified settler commercial ideology into P&M’s infrastructure and architecture. I do this by looking at the development of the British Commonwealth in Manitoba and at P&M, and; at how Protestant businessmen and their free market ideology got built as a reflection of the financial, social, architectural, infrastructural, and legal frameworks of the Reformation movement of Winnipeg. Close examination of the British Reform movement in Winnipeg shows that the exchange’s money-system, which was first established in the North-west at this metropolitan centre, expressed an abstract and anti-immanent financial and ideological framework that has been dispossessing, segregating, and impoverishing the French Catholic community as well as Indigenous peoples who have lived and traded in the downtown region for millennia. Making this argument, I show in particular that the long-standing anti-Catholic sentiments of the Reform Tradition remain key to comprehension of the high modernist and contemporary city planning infrastructure and architecture associated with Urban Renewal and the Unicity.

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The settler security reflex: Kate Clayton, Katherine Newman, ‘Settler Colonial Strategic Culture: Australia, AUKUS, and the Anglosphere’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 2023

12Sep23

Abstract: Australia’s history as a settler colony within the British Empire fundamentally shapes its sense
of security within the Indo-Pacific region. Australia has consistently looked outside of its region for
security and sought partners on the explicit basis of political, cultural, and ethnic similarity. What
role does Australia’s history play in shaping its foreign policy? We argue that these choices in
foreign policy are inextricable from Australia’s history as a settler colony on the farthest reaches of
the British Empire. The AUKUS Agreement (AUKUS) is an example of how Australia operates to
preserve racial hegemony in the face of non-white threat — real or perceived. This research utilises
critical discourse analysis to interrogate elite-level discourse around AUKUS to ascertain the
dominant narratives that inform its creation, the issues it seeks to address in Australian security
policy, how it is structured by historical narratives of security, and how it functions to structure
those narratives going forward. This article seeks to participate in the growing push to decolonise
International Relations by illuminating the way Australia is ontologically and epistemologically
invested in the preservation of racial hegemony.

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The ecologies of settler colonialism: Brock Cutler, Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

12Sep23

Description: Between 1865 and 1872 widespread death and disease unfolded amid the most severe ecological disaster in modern North African history: a plague of locusts destroyed crops during a disastrous drought that left many Algerians landless and starving. The famine induced migration that concentrated vulnerable people in unsanitary camps where typhus and cholera ran rampant. Before the rains returned and harvests normalized, some eight hundred thousand Algerians had died.In Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria Brock Cutler explores how repeated ecosocial divisions across an expansive ecosystem produced modern imperialism in nineteenth-century Algeria. Massive ecological crises—cultural as well as natural—cleaved communities from their homes, individuals from those communities, and society from its typical ecological relations. At the same time, the relentless, albeit slow-moving crises of ongoing settler colonialism and extractive imperial capitalism cleaved Algeria to France in a new way. Ecosocial divisions became apparent in performances of imperial power: officials along the Algerian-Tunisian border compulsively repeated narratives of “transgression” that over decades made the division real; a case of poisoned bread tied settlers in Algiers to Paris; Morocco-Algeria border violence exposed the exceptional nature of imperial sovereignty; a case of vagabondage in Oran evoked colonial gender binaries. In each case, factors in the broader ecosystem were implicated in performances of social division, separating political entities from each other, human from nature, rational from irrational, and women from men. Although these performances take place in the nineteenth-century Maghrib, the process they describe goes beyond those spatial and temporal limits—across the field of modern imperialism to the present day.

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Indigenous cities: Lindsey Claire Smith, Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

12Sep23

Description: Oklahoma is bound to both the South and the Southwest and their legacies of conquest and Indigenous survivance. At the same time, mobility, ingenuity, cultural exchange, and creative expression—all part of the experience of urbanization—have been fundamental to people of the tribes that call this place home. Tulsa, New Orleans, and Santa Fe, with their importance in histories of geopolitical upheaval and mobility that shaped the establishment of the United States, are key to uncovering the history of urbanization experienced by Native Americans from Oklahoma. Urban Homelands, while examining the overlooked histories of Oklahoma Indigenous urbanization relative to these regions, engages literature and film as not just mirrors of experience but as producers of it. Lindsey Claire Smith brings the work of three-time poet laureate Joy Harjo into conversation with the great Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs and breakout filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. Flying in the face of civic landmarks and settler histories that at once obscure Native origins and appropriate Native culture for tourism, this creative reclaiming of Indigenous cities points toward the productive possibilities of recognizing untold urban histories and the creative relationships with urban space itself.

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The settler colonial Robinsonade: Nicole Pepperell, ‘“To dream of a wildness distant from ourselves”: Capitalism, colonialism, and the Robinsonade’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2023

10Sep23

Abetract: Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe holds an iconic position, not solely as a work of literature, but also for its influence in economic and social theory. This article reflects on this influence by mobilizing Charles Mills’s concept of epistemologies of ignorance and Lorenzo Veracini’s work on psychological defence mechanisms in settler colonial societies. This theoretical framework motivates a close textual analysis of Robinson Crusoe that focuses particularly on four textual strategies: paired contrasts between Xury and Friday that frame enslavement as a sacrificial act; strategic use of “cosmopolitan” ideals; a theory of subjection as the foundation for legitimate power; and moral relativisms that rationalize Crusoe’s theft of Indigenous land. This analysis then provides the foundation for an original interpretation of Marx’s Capital as a critically inverted Robinsonade: one designed to demonstrate how global relations of colonial expropriation generate a crucible in which a particular imaginary of autonomous individuality is forged.

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Racial settler colonialism: Ronit Lentin, ‘Notes on Racial Capitalism and Palestine: Land, Labour and Jewishness as Property’, Free Radikal, 05/08/23

10Sep23

Excerpt: ‘The Racialization of Land‘ …

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