settler colonial studies blog

Praying against settler colonialism: Catherine E. McKinley, ‘”Prayer is universal”: How integrative faith practices enable Indigenous peoples’ persistence and resistance to transcend historical oppression’, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2023

15Mar23

Abstract: Indigenous faith practices have enabled persistence, resistance, and transcendence despite centuries of settler colonial historical oppression. Spirituality, ceremony, and religious practices are fundamental aspects of Indigenous wellness, resilience, and liberation from a colonial mindset. The purpose of this research was to understand U.S. Indigenous peoples’ perspectives of spirituality and religion from the settler colonial framework of historical oppression, resilience, and transcendence as it relates to wellness. Data from critical ethnographic interviews with 31 participants from rural reservation communities in the Southeast and an urban Northwest environment were analyzed using reconstructive thematic qualitative analysis. Themes include (a) “You’d be persecuted … for your beliefs”: historical oppression of Indigenous beliefs; (b) “I was always told that church was wherever you were”: integrative faith practices; and (c) “No matter how hard times get … never forget to pray”: prayer through adversity. Results clarified how settler colonial power differentials tended to relegate Indigenous spiritual and faith practices to a lower status than Western European religions, namely Christianity. Participants resisted this oppression by ingeniously integrating tribal and Western European faith practices to promote wellness. This article provides pathways to prevent clinical bias and harm by expanding awareness and familiarity with localized and heterogeneous faith practices among Indigenous communities. Practitioners can honor Indigenous peoples’ preferences, acknowledge Indigenous faith practices as central for wellness. They can become reflexive about how an internalized settler “colonial mindset” may cause bias and perpetuate historical oppression by delegitimizing Indigenous worldviews and faith practices.

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The second second world of settler colonialism: Nicholas Birns, ‘The Second World and Settler History: Settler Collectives, Land Fulfillment, and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo’, ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 54, 2, 2023, pp. 25-52

11Mar23

Abstract: In the Cold War-era “three worlds” model, the Second World was the socialist world, particularly the Soviet Bloc, that stood opposed to the capitalist West but—unlike the postcolonial Third World—was largely white. However, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, postcolonial critics briefly redeployed the term Second World to denote peripheral settler colonies like Australia. This essay examines the juxtaposition of these two uses of the term “Second World” through a discussion of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1929 novel Coonardoo and the history of its misrepresentation of Australian Indigenous people. Though Prichard sought to be sympathetic to the Indigenous woman at the center of the novel’s plot, Coonardoo, the teleological perspective of her authorial attitude towards the land precludes this sympathy. This essay examines how Prichard’s teleological view is connected to socialist-realist attitudes and settler collectives; how Prichard’s novel both continues and inflects settler ideology now in the neoliberal era; and how teleological settler histories of the land can no longer presume the continued solidity of the land in the wake of the Anthropocene.

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The survivance of settler colonialism: Christian Ayne Crouch, ‘Survivance: About Process and Historical Structures’, Journal of the Early Republic, 43, 1, 2023, pp. 131-138

11Mar23

Abstract: This short essay reflects on the meanings, use, and misuse of the term survivance. A key concept in Native American and Indigenous Studies, survivance offers methodological possibilities as well for researchers working in early American history but the term needs to be approached with care.

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The rubbish of settler colonialism: Galia Limor-Sagiv, Nurit Lissovsky, ‘Place and displacement: Historical geographies of Israel’s largest landfill’, Journal of Historical Geography, 2023

11Mar23

Abstract: This article explores the role of space in facilitating forms of political power, as shown in the destruction of landscape in the center of Israel by the Hiriya landfill. That failed infrastructure wrecked the delicate legacies of mankind and nature, thus sealing the area’s fate as a city’s repellent dumping ground that attracted all kinds of liminal activities. After the 1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel, the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages and the erasure of their people’s legacy, Tel Aviv begun dumping its household waste near an Arab village, the residents of which had been expelled during the conflict. The authorities promised the local inhabitants — Jewish newcomers and refugees in the nearby transit camp, as well as local city dwellers — a new and modern compost plant, but the plant’s opening was repeatedly postponed. This article reveals the rapid changes that occurred in the early 1950s in the Hiriya area, and how insistence on a modern, technologically based solution to waste treatment, suffused with Zionist ideology, resulted in the creation of an infamous site that became a symbol for environmental, infrastructural, social and health hazards. Drawing from diverse unexplored textual and visual archival sources, including aerial photographs, historical maps, printed texts and interviews, we argue that this combined method of landscape reading is crucial for understanding such a tragedy of landscape. Our study of the Hiriya landfill points to the challenges posed by infrastructure, and contributes to future research into post-industrial sites, including landfills, quarries, airfields, mines and factories.

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Virtual settler colonialism? Gabriella Friedman, ‘Illegible Histories, Invisible Movements: Indigenous Refusal in Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears’, PMLA, 2023

11Mar23

Abstract: This essay analyzes Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears to explore the complexities of rendering history visible—both viewable and knowable—in the context of settler colonial capitalism. The novel centers on a virtual reality (VR) experience called the Tsalagi Removal Exodus Point Park (TREPP), which allows tourists to experience the Cherokee Removal as an educational and entertaining experience. Through the trope of VR, the novel articulates how historicizing invested in visibility risks turning Native people and knowledge into consumable objects. Instead of seeking colonial recognition by making their history visible, characters in Riding the Trail of Tears mobilize invisibility to jam the machine of settler colonialism. Their surreptitious movement leads to direct action that counters settler appropriation. The novel thus highlights the importance of Indigenous refusal and models specific strategies for enacting it.

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Italian settlers: Alessandro Tarsia, ‘The New Ethnohistory of the Pacific Canadian Region Could Teach Italian Canadians How to Be Worse Settlers and Better Human Beings’, Italian Canadiana, 36, 2, 2022

11Mar23

Abstract: This article explores the history of the Italian diaspora in British Columbia through the lens of the New Ethnohistory, focusing on the tensions between the perceived continuity of tradition and cultural change. It argues that Italians have actively participated in three different types of colonialism in the Pacific region. First, even though Italian newcomers were almost absent in the early-nineteenth-century “exploitation” era associated with the fur trade and the salmon fisheries, they were later the backbone of the local extractive industries in the second part of the century. Second, the earliest consistent wave of Italians arrived during the “extraction” colonial era (1858–64), associated with gold mining, which also continued in certain areas long afterwards. Third, Italians benefitted from the ongoing structures of “settler colonialism” since the 1860s. This latter type of colonialism is associated with displacing Indigenous peoples and reshaping the landscape through the imposition of European-style agriculture. Indeed, this essay examines some British Columbian case studies of Italian-Indigenous peoples’ interactions as hermeneutical examples that problematize some historiographical tropes. Moreover, it presents the New Ethnohistory, particularly the Community Engaged-Scholarship (CES), as a methodology that could provide Italian Canadians with new historiographical perspectives. Finally, this article invites newcomers to engage in a meaningful reconciliation/conciliation with Indigenous peoples and their flourishing cultures to better comprehend their shared past.

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The health of the Indigenous population (another’s settler predicament): Osama Tanous, ‘”You, as of Now, Are Someone Else!”: Minoritization, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Health’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023

08Mar23

Abstract: This article challenges the dominant notion that the health of Palestinians inside the Green Line can be framed or understood as an issue of “minority health” characterized by a “gap” that needs bridging in order for health equity to be attained. It situates the health of Palestinians in Israel within the realm of Indigenous health and claims that the settler-colonial nature of the state of Israel, the minoritization of Palestinians, and their depeasantization through land policies and water infrastructures have produced an Indigenous community alienated from its lands and from nature. These processes, I argue, contribute to adverse health outcomes that are then reported simply as “minority health” phenomena, chalked up to behavioral patterns or biology. The article seeks to challenge the entire notion of “minority health” as a purportedly neutral statistical unit and to launch a conversation on the health effects of minoritization in settler-colonial contexts.

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How to best remove? (the settler’s predicament): Noura Erakat, ‘”A thorn in their throat”: planning for settler colonial removal in Hizma’, Human Geography, 2023

08Mar23

Abstract: Hizma is a Palestinian village historically located within the Jerusalem Governate that Israel has arbitrarily severed from it in its quest to expand and entrench a Greater Jerusalem. To eliminate the village and its natives, the settler state has incrementally deployed a series of urban planning policies that together constitute an eliminatory infrastructure. These have included overlapping and tenuous jurisdictional areas; movement restrictions imposed through closures, checkpoints, and surveillance regimes; transformation of common lands into a state-run nature preserve; and the construction of the Apartheid Wall through the village. These measures have concentrated Hizma’s residents into an urban area and severely isolated them from their agricultural lands, places of worship, education, families, and health facilities. Based on field work conducted between 3 August and 18 August 2019, this essay sets out to explore two phenomena. First, it seeks to understand how Palestinians navigate and resist Israel’s eliminatory infrastructure. Second, it explores what this infrastructure revealed about the relationship between the violence of settler colonialism and the banal administration of urban planning. Using autoethnography, this essay documents the journey of Palestinians in Hizma across three eliminatory terrains erected by planning policies: through the Apartheid Wall, within the suffocating physical and juridical bounds of entrapment, and into the community’s expropriated spring.

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Annexing or not-annexing? (the settler’s dilemma): Merav Amir, ‘Unfastening Israel’s Future from the Occupation: Israeli Plans for Partial Annexation of West Bank Territory’, Antipode, 2023

08Mar23

Abstract: Israeli plans to partially annex West Bank territory have mainly been perceived as frustrating the two-state solution, and as putting Palestine/Israel on a path leading to the one-state alternative. This paper analyses partial annexation plans without assuming that the future of Palestine/Israel would necessarily abide by either statist resolution. It argues that by ostensibly distancing Israel’s hold of the West Bank from an identifiable configuration of a belligerent occupation, partial annexation is offered to Jewish Israelis as a path for detaching the futurity of the two nations, and as a trajectory for normalising the Israeli state, without having to make what much of this public would see as painful concessions. It further explores settlers’ objections to such plans, claiming that even a partial incorporation of West Bank territory into formal Israel is expected to erode the exclusivity of Jewish domination which Israel has been upholding in its settlercolonial frontier.

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Imagining the settler (literarily): Brian Reinken, ‘Unsettlement: Destabilizing Development in Southern Africa’s Settler Fiction’, ELH, 90, 1, 2023, pp. 205-235

08Mar23

Abstract: In the midst of a turbulent decade, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) registered the uncertain future of British colonialism in southern Africa by endowing their white protagonists with alternative possible selves whose pluralism complements the alternative possible instantiations of the settler colony. Forking, parallel, and recursive developmental trajectories lead these novels’ characters toward multiple, sometimes contradictory, future states. What results is a dynamic, antiteleological model of Bildung that conceives of the self as a pluralized assortment of potential subjects.

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