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The settler colonial logic of elimination is endangering: Wesley Y. Leonard, ‘Refusing “Endangered Languages” Narratives’, Daedalus, 2023

31Aug23

Abstract: Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative “endangered languages” narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for wider society’s consumption, while deemphasizing or even outright omitting the extreme injustices that beget language endangerment. The objective of this essay is to promote social justice praxis first by detailing how language shift results from major injustices, and then by offering possible interventions that are accountable to the communities whose languages are endangered. Drawing from my experiences as a member of a Native American community whose language was wrongly labeled “extinct” within this narrative, I begin with an overview of how language endangerment is described to general audiences in the United States and critique the way it is framed and shared. From there, I shift to an alternative that draws from Indigenous ways of knowing to promote social justice through language reclamation.


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Settler colonialism in unexpected places (in India, for example): Pankhuree R. Dube, ‘Theorizing the Adivasi’s absence in partition histories: indigenes, refugees, and the settler state in Dandakaranya forest’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

29Aug23

Abstract: This research article examines the contest between indigenous forest-dwelling communities and settler colonial policy in post-Partition central India. According to official estimates, from 1961–71 the population of indigenous communities declined by nearly 50% in Dandakaranya within central India even as overall the population grew by a large margin during the same period. Despite perceptions of India as a post-colony committed to decolonization, this article examines how this state project, one of the earliest acts of governmentality, was deeply implicated in a settler colonial logic of elimination. Following the mass migration of Partition refugees in 1947 across newly demarcated borders, the Indian government earmarked Dandakaranya Forest as the site of a refugee resettlement project for lower-caste Partition refugees from East Bengal (now Bangladesh). Drawing on Lorenzo Veracini’s notion of ‘probationary settlers’ as exogenous others without prior claims to land, refugees are understood within this argument as probationary settlers reliant on the state for their survival. Rather than narrating the biography of the state through its various experts and institutions, this paper foregrounds the perspective of the marginalized on their environment: displaced forest-dwelling indigenous communities and lower-caste (Dalit) refugees.


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Lesbian settler colonialism: K. J. Janeschek, ‘Love doesn’t cancel colonialism’: land, lesbians, and settler colonialism, MA dissertation, University of Alaska, 2023

29Aug23

Abstract: This thesis examines the relationship between lesbians, land, and settler colonialism through an analysis of several texts written about Antarctica by lesbians. In the introduction, this thesis identifies the three fields of study which it draws upon–rural queer studies, queer nature studies, and queer indigenous studies–and notes the absence of settler colonialism as a point of analysis in rural queer studies despite the field’s focus on the relationship between queer people and land. The following section, “Lesbians, Land, and Settler Homonationalism,” provides both historical background of lesbian land-based movements such as the landdykes and theoretical considerations important for the thesis, namely how non-Native queer people and identities often uphold settler colonialism. In the next chapter, “The Antarctica Question,” the thesis explores Antarctica’s colonial history and its current queer relationship to settler colonialism. This is followed by a discussion of three texts–Approaching Ice and Towards Antarctica by Elizabeth Bradfield and On the Ice by Gretchen Legler–which examines the ways these writers’ relationship with Antarctica resembles other lesbian land movements, their negotiations with settler colonialism and a masculine Antarctic explorer history, and the personal (queer) transformations enabled by lived experiences on land (or ice). The conclusion identifies how a settler colonial logic might lapse through a relationship with land and the transformations that such a relationship forges, but ultimately will heal over the lapse in its framework unless challenged directly.


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Nice try, but there is no separation between settlement and exclusion, one is the other: Daniel Guillery, ‘Separating the Wrong of Settlement from the Right to Exclude’: Territory and Sociocultural Stability, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 25, 2, 2023, pp. 346-375

29Aug23

Excerpt:  An important part of the history of modern colonialism has been a history of settlement. One major form that colonial subjugation has taken has been that of settler colonialism, in which a group of settlers moves and together establishes a home in a new, already-inhabited geographical location, aiming in some sense to replace its existing inhabitants and create an outpost of the society from which they came.1 (The settlers aimed to replace existing inhabitants often in a literal sense, through extermination or enforced displacement, though not always; sometimes the project of replacement was rather one of shaping the territory according to the settlers’ practices, goals, and ideals.) 


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Settler colonial repressions for some: Tariq D. Khan, The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression, University of Illinois Press, 2023

24Aug23

Description: The colonizing wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Tariq D. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonizing wars to repress anarchists, labor unions, and a host of others labeled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist”.


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Are Muslims settler colonists? Shadaab Rahemtulla, ‘Decolonising Islam: Indigenous Peoples, Muslim Communities, and the Canadian Context’, Religions, 14, 9, 2023 

24Aug23

Abstract: The problem of empire has been a key theme in Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT). However insightful, ILT’s engagement with the category of empire has generally presumed a particular colonial configuration in which Muslims are located on the receiving “end” of power, being occupied by an external, non-Muslim force. But what about the presence of Islam within settler colonies, in which voluntary Muslim migrants are structurally complicit in the ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples? Focusing on the Canadian context, I ask: How can we decolonise Islam in the settler colony? That is, how can Muslims address their own complicity with the settler colonial project, standing in solidarity with native peoples and revisiting their own faith tradition in the light of that praxis? I argue that decolonising Islam entails three hermeneutical moves: (I) gaining a critical understanding of the socio-historical context, namely, the history of empire on the land; (II) deconstructing the boundaries between “migrant” and “settler”, which actually serves to vindicate the former group, releasing them of accountability and responsibility; and (III) engaging in bold theological reflection on the Islamic tradition. This final theological step, I maintain, is a two-fold dynamic: expounding Islam as both a radical subject that decolonises and a problematic object requiring decolonisation.


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Military inclusion and settler colonialism: Federica Caso, ‘Indigenous Military Inclusion: A Settler Colonial Critique of the Regional Force Surveillance Units’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 2023

23Aug23

Abstract: In the context of this special issue’s inquiry into whether it is possible to decolonise Australian
international relations, this article investigates the service of Indigenous people in the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The military is a crucial site to investigate the colonial state of Australian international relations not only because it is an institution that performs key international relations practices such as war and diplomacy, but also because it defines and projects the identity of the state both domestically and internationally. In the past two decades, there has been a sustained effort to include Indigenous people in the ADF. An inclusive and multicultural defence purports to represent a post-colonial state where Indigenous and nonIndigenous people stand next to one another for the defence of their shared country. However, in Australia, Indigenous people do not enjoy the wealth of the nation equally and remain dispossessed from their land and economically disadvantaged. Using discourse analysis of publicly available materials praising Indigenous military inclusion, this article argues that the inclusion of Indigenous people in the Australian Defence Force risks further entrenching the settler colonial project.


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Settler colonial access (in New Caledonia): Anaïs Duong-Pedica, ‘Mixed-Race Kanak in “a World Cut in Two”: Contemporary Experiences in Kanaky/New Caledonia’, Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, 2, 1, 2023, pp. 71-92

23Aug23

Abstract: This article interrogates how the profound history of spatial segregation across colonial, racial,and cultural lines appears in contemporary narratives of mixed-race people in Kanaky/New Caledonia (K/NC). By tracing the moments that specific spaces, such as “the city” and “the tribe,” are mentioned in these narratives, the article shows how the colonial divide structures selves, relations, spaces,and society and manifests itself in discussions with self identified métis/ses KanakWhite people, especially in the context of the formal decolonization process K/NC is going through. The research draws primarily on interviews with self-identified métis/ses Kanak-White people that took place a few months before the 2018 referendum for independence. The primary question this article seeks to answer is: how does French colonialism spatially determine the lives of métis/ses in K/NC? For this purpose, it analyzes how métis/ses Kanak-White people navigate the variety of spaces they inhabit through experiences of everyday racism and explores how spatial polarization appears in their stories, particularly given the significance of the land for Kanak identity. Notably, the article shows how colonial rhetoric transpires in these different spaces by way of regulating whether the métis/se body belongs within a particular space.


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Settler colonial recreation: Austin Nunis, Managing With Land: Embracing Blackfoot Systems of Belief as a Catalyst for Post-Colonial Conservation in Glacier National Park, graduate dissertation, University of Oregon, 2023

23Aug23

Abstract: Though conservation and preservation are inherently “positive” movements with beneficial results to individuals, outdoor spaces, and entire ecosystems, their roots may be entrenched in settler colonial values. This deep connection continues to influence contemporary and future land management initiatives, its breadth rendering Indigenous populations collateral damage to outdoor recreation. This thesis specifically explores the relation of settler colonial theory in shaping Glacier National Park, and how this history eclipsed conservation strategies and beliefs of the Blackfoot Confederacy to ultimately erode their connection to their ancestral homeland. In a broad sense this project aims to distinguish between land management and managing with land, a distinction necessary to create a more robust foundation for anthropogenic interaction with the more than human world. Understanding what land management and conservation mean to the National Park Service and the Blackfoot people respectively will help to promote initiatives such as co-management and circular conservation strategies centered around relation to land instead of recreation-based profit. At its core, this project discusses the influence that settler colonialism has on dominant western conservation ideology and explores alternative avenues of recentering Indigenous systems of belief and conservation strategies to create a more inclusive land management framework moving forward. 


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The ‘placental politics’ of US settler colonialism: Christine Taitano DeLisle, Placental Politics: CHamoru Women, White Womanhood, and Indigeneity under U.S. Colonialism in Guam,University of North Carolina Press, 2022

20Aug23

Description: From 1898 until World War II, U.S. imperial expansion brought significant numbers of white American women to Guam, primarily as wives to naval officers stationed on the island. Indigenous CHamoru women engaged with navy wives in a range of settings, and they used their relationships with American women to forge new forms of social and political power. As Christine Taitano DeLisle explains, much of the interaction between these women occurred in the realms of health care, midwifery, child care, and education. DeLisle focuses specifically on the pattera, Indigenous nurse-midwives who served CHamoru families. Though they showed strong interest in modern delivery practices and other accoutrements of American modernity under U.S. naval hegemony, the pattera and other CHamoru women never abandoned deeply held Indigenous beliefs, values, and practices, especially those associated with inafa’maolek–a code of behavior through which individual, collective, and environmental balance, harmony, and well-being were stewarded and maintained. DeLisle uses her evidence to argue for a “placental politics”–a new conceptual paradigm for Indigenous women’s political action. Drawing on oral histories, letters, photographs, military records, and more, DeLisle reveals how the entangled histories of CHamoru and white American women make us rethink the cultural politics of U.S. imperialism and the emergence of new Indigenous identities.


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