settler colonial studies blog

Settlers want the land – all of it: Daniel Heath Justice, Jean M. O’Brien (eds), Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege, University of Minnesota Press, 2021

20Jul23

Description: More than two dozen essays of Indigenous resistance to the privatization and allotment of Indigenous lands. Allotment Stories collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance. Ranging from the historical to the contemporary and grappling with Indigenous land struggles around the globe, these narratives showcase both scholarly and creative forms of expression, constructing a multifaceted book of diverse perspectives that will inform readers while provoking them toward further research into Indigenous resilience.

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The new frontiers of settler climate colonialism: Mindy Jewell Price, ‘Seeing Green: Lifecycles of an Arctic Agricultural Frontier’, Rural Sociology, 2023

20Jul23

Abstract: Imaginaries of empty, verdant lands have long motivated agricultural frontier expansion. Today, climate change, food insecurity, and economic promise are invigorating new agricultural frontiers across the circumpolar north. In this article, I draw on extensive archival and ethnographic evidence to analyze mid-twentieth-century and recent twenty-first-century narratives of agricultural development in the Northwest Territories, Canada. I argue that the early frontier imaginary is relatively intact in its present lifecycle. It is not simply climactic forces that are driving an emergent northern agricultural frontier, but rather the more diffuse and structural forces of capitalism, governmental power, settler colonialism, and resistance to those forces. I also show how social, political, and infrastructural limits continue to impede agricultural development in the Northwest Territories and discuss how smallholder farmers and Indigenous communities differently situate agricultural production within their local food systems. This paper contributes to critical debates in frontiers and northern agriculture literature by foregrounding the contested space between the state driven and dominant public narratives underpinning frontier imaginaries, and the social, cultural, and material realities that constrain them on a Northwest Territories agricultural frontier.

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The settler gaze, then and now: Luhui Whitebear, ‘Resisting the Settler Gaze: California Indigenous Feminisms’, Feminist Formations, 35, 1, 2023, pp. 97-116

20Jul23

Abstract: The settler gaze has created the conditions in which Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people experience high levels of violence both historically and in current times. This essay analyzes California Indigenous feminist resistance to the violences in the mission impacted region of the Californias. Toypurina, Bárbara Gandiaga, and Yaquenonsat are discussed as examples of California Indigenous feminist resistance to settler colonial systems that contributed to the murdered and missing Indigenous women, girl, and Two-Spirit (MMIWG2S+) crisis during their time period. These historic California Indigenous women are then compared with current efforts to address the MMIWG2S+ crisis in California and beyond. Counter-colonial Indigenous intergenerational storytelling is used as a methodology to read these stories and the settler records in order to resist the settler gaze.

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Spicy settler colonialism? Xiaowei R Wang, ‘Spicy red in Shrimp Town: Smart farming and settler colonialism in Guizhou province’, New Media & Society, 25, 8, 2023, pp. 1888–1912

19Jul23

Abstract: This article explores the chili pepper industry in Guizhou and how it intersects with a push toward high-tech, digital agriculture schemes as part of Guizhou’s economic development driven by a data economy. State bureaus, tech companies, and research institutes around rural development cast digital, data-driven agriculture as a broadly positive development that will provide environmental sustainability and economic benefits to small farmers. In examining Guizhou’s Chili Pepper City, I argue that such initiatives maintain state power through accelerating complexity and implementation of universalizing technologies. In the context of Guizhou, these universalizing technologies are intertwined with a legacy of China’s own settler dynamics, the political uses of poverty alleviation and environmentalism to control land, and socialist legacies of using agricultural modernization toward nationalist ends. I draw on a multitude of news articles, journals, and secondary sources, as well as repeat site visits and interviews that I conducted in Guizhou from 2017 to 2019.

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The religion of settlers, the settlements of religion (introducing a special issue): Tisa Wenger, ‘Making Religion, Making the West’, Pacific Historical Review, 92, 3, 2023, pp. 327–341

19Jul23

Abstract: This essay surveys the parallel trajectories of U.S. western history and U.S. religious history to suggest what each of them can gain from deeper mutual engagements. It argues that U.S. western history and its adjacent fields can benefit from more sustained attention not only to particular religious practices and traditions, but also to the dynamics of religion-making or, in other words, to the social processes that configure “religion” and shape assumptions, both popular and scholarly, about where it can be found and how it operates. This essay is the introduction to a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” guest edited by Tisa Wenger. The special issue consists of this introduction; articles from Carleigh Beriont, Danae Jacobson, Jonathan Calvillo, Cori Tucker-Price, Tiffany Hale, Dylan Yeats, and Jeffrey Turner; and a conclusion from Quincy Newell.

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Race shifting is settler colonialism: Darryl Leroux, ‘State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46, 2, 2023

19Jul23

Abstract: This article examines the claims to an Indigenous identity made by the four state-recognized Abenaki tribes in Vermont through an analysis of their petition for federal acknowledgement (1982–2005) and applications for state recognition (2010–2012). A detailed analysis of their claims demonstrates that the tribes are not Abenaki, but instead, represent the descendants of French Canadians who immigrated to the Champlain Valley of northwestern Vermont in the mid-nineteenth century. In this case study of what the anthropologist Circe Sturm has called “race shifting,” I demonstrate how the politics of recognition, which do not include the kin-making and relations of Indigenous nations, serve the interests of settler colonialism under the guise of decolonization. I attribute the emergence of race shifting along three vectors: the move away from white identity post-Civil Rights era; the lack of a tribal presence in Vermont; and the flaws in the state recognition process.

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Settlers are squatters (squatters are settlers): John Suval, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2022

16Jul23

Description: White squatters in the American West propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. Yet, in the lead-up to the Civil War, they became foot soldiers on the front lines of clashes that sundered the Union. These dynamics have been largely overlooked. Dangerous Ground tracks squatters across antebellum America, from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush–era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas, revealing how claiming western domains became intertwined with partisan politics and fights over slavery extension. Unlike previous generations of politicians who condemned settlers who lacked title to the lands they occupied, Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party built a strong base by celebrating white squatters as pioneering yeomen and encouraging their land grabs through preemption laws, Indian removal, and hawkish diplomacy. As America expanded, the party’s power grew. But the US-Mexican War proved a step too far, leading many to ask whether these squatters were genuine yeomen or forerunners of slavery expansion? Some northern Democrats bolted to form the Free Soil Party, while southerners denounced any hindrance to slavery’s spread. Faced with a fracturing party, Democratic chiefs promoted “squatter sovereignty,” allowing territorial inhabitants to determine whether new lands would be slave or free, leading to a destabilizing transfer of authority from Congress to frontier settlers. Squatters thus morphed from darlings of the Democratic Party and agents of Manifest Destiny into combatants in battles that ruptured the Party of Jackson and the nation.

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Youth against erasure: Erika Jiménez, ‘The occupation wants to delete us’: Palestinian youth’s interpretations of and resistance to settler colonialism’, Third World Quarterly, 2023

16Jul23

Abstract: Despite the increased application of settler colonial theory to analyse settler colonial contexts, critical scholars have highlighted its inadequacies – primarily, that it has marginalised Indigenous knowledge and agency. Palestinian scholars have questioned the paradigm’s ability to fully capture the particularities of the Israel–Palestine context. This paper seeks to contribute to these critiques by exploring Palestinian youth’s interpretations of settler colonialism in the West Bank. It draws on qualitative research that explored Palestinian youth’s views on and experiences of human rights. This article suggests that Indigenous analyses of settler colonialism seem more relevant to Palestinian youth than the settler colonial analytic. These, along with consideration of the interplay between neoliberalism and colonisation, may better assist them to understand and articulate settler colonialism and strategise against it.

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Taxing settler colonialism: Maximilien Zahnd, ‘Praise the Gardeners, Dun the Hunters: Alaska Natives, Taxation, and Settler Colonialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2023

16Jul23

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between tax law and settler colonialism by looking at the ways in which taxes can be part of the “civilizing” process of Indigenous peoples. In 1921, the Territory of Alaska enacted a “license tax on the business of fur-farming, trapping and trading in pelts and skins of fur-bearing animals.” Since most trappers were Natives, the “fur tax” de facto targeted them. This article unpacks the sociocultural and political dimensions of the fur tax against the backdrop of Alaska’s settler colonial history. Despite what the Alaska attorney general claimed was its “strict” revenue-raising function, the tax was part of a much broader settler colonial agenda. That agenda sought to turn seminomadic, “uncivilized” Native hunters into spatially grounded, “civilized” farmers, gardeners, reindeer herders, or wage workers. Ultimately, I suggest, within many if not most settler colonial spaces political and sociocultural ideologies alter the initial revenueraising function of taxes.

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Settlers and their guns (and their immigration policies): Emine Fidan Elcioglu, ‘Armed Citizens on the Border: How Guns Fuel Anti-Immigration Politics in America’, Social Problems, 2023

16Jul23

Abstract: To make a nation on stolen land using enslaved labor, the early American state relied on gun and immigration policy to create a well-armed white settler population. This legacy continues to animate modern conservativism, which is staked on supporting gun-friendly and anti-immigrant policies. Despite this history and ongoing political reality, however, the sociology of migration has largely ignored the relationship between firearms and immigration politics. To explore this relationship, the current study draws on 20 months of ethnographic data from the U.S.-Mexico border. I show how contemporary American gun culture bolsters anti-immigrant organizations through two mechanisms. First, gun shows and shooting ranges are important sites of recruitment among anti-immigrant groups. Second, the thrill of handling firearms mitigates the monotony of everyday anti-immigrant activism, while also easing the disenchantment that participants may otherwise feel about the effectiveness of their actions in bringing about long-term change. The article concludes by urging scholars of American politics to be mindful of the legacies of settler-colonialism and to take seriously the reinforcing effects of guns on nativist politics.

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