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Indigenous environmental litigation against settler colonialism: Sakshi Aravind, Sacred Justices: Seeking Indigenous Environmental Justice in Courts, PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2022

07Feb23

Abstract: This thesis studies how courts encounter and engage with Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ) in litigation pursued by Indigenous communities in Australia, Brazil, and Canada. The thesis advances IEJ as a principle that may be framed, used and developed in juridical spaces. The research draws from existing scholarship, primarily Indigenous scholarship, and offers an intellectual map of IEJ that is a receptacle for, amongst others, plural sovereignties, Indigenous epistemologies, and land-environment-cultural relationships. To this end, the thesis proposes a conceptual understanding of law as a narrative and adjudication as knowledge production. It argues that legal knowledge production enables courts to be a part of epistemic communities that remedy present environmental harms and past injustices that are engendered in settler colonialism. Indigenous voices become paramount for such knowledge production. The thesis explores how Indigenous voices are received within adjudication through doctrinal analysis of Indigenous environmental litigation in the three jurisdictions. Further, it examines what implications such reception has for the outcome of the litigation and the framing of IEJ. The materials studied here testify to the innate ability of courts to draw from existing laws generously and innovate where necessary in order to answer the difficult questions of justice and sovereignty raised by Indigenous environmental litigation. Whilst courts are accustomed to certain forms of litigation, contemporary environmental pressures demand conceptual apparatus of a different kind. Although legitimacy and integrity are highly valued within juridical spaces, they are not immutable concepts. The thesis argues that IEJ provides an opportunity to reconfigure juridical integrity by including Indigenous voices and challenging settler colonial legality through settler courts. In addition, it also makes a case for juridical openness, where present courts may deal with questions of Indigenous sovereignty more sympathetically to allow future jurisprudence to assume more radical standpoints.


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The settlers’ ‘reanimation’ of Indigenous peoples: Kim TallBear, ‘Indigenous Genocide and Reanimation, Settler Apocalypse and Hope’, Aboriginal Policy Studies, 10, 2, 2023, pp. 93-111

05Feb23

Excerpt: In addition to belonging to Dakota people who faced a genocidal settler assault that began in the mid-nineteenth century, I am a horror film aficionado with a macabre sense of humour. In this talk, I am informed by the concept of Indigenous elimination, most notably written about by the late Patrick Wolfe in the Journal of Genocide Research, but I combine it with the idea of “reanimation” of the dead (Gordon 1985; Wolfe 2006). A troubling image that guides my work is that of the settler who would banish most Indigenous people to the land of the dead, while retaining, freezing, reanimating, and controlling Indigenous flesh, blood, and bones, both literally as valuable bio-property and figuratively, as I have written about in my book Native American DNA and elsewhere (TallBear 2013; also see TallBear 2017). Adding to the ghoulishness of settler scientific and bureaucratic control, reanimation, and capitalization on our actual bio-matter, the settler sometimes drapes his (or often her) ontological skeleton in the vanished metaphorical Native’s skin in a final assumption of our “identities” as their own (Simpson 2022). How clever. Settler state citizens can retain the benefits of our disappearance but deny those benefits when they don “red skin.”


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Settler museums reinforce settler colonialism (even when they say they’d rather not): Jason Chalmers, ‘Decolonizing the Holocaust: Curatorial Possibilities at the Montreal Holocaust Museum’, Érudit: Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 32, 2, 2022, pp. 45-72

05Feb23

Abstract: Heritage professionals across Canada and around the world are beginning to explore how decolonization can be applied to museum exhibits, collections, and programing. The Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM), which was founded by survivors in 1979 and launched its current permanent exhibit in 2003, recently announced that it will be relocating to a new building and updating its exhibit. As such, this is an ideal time to consider how the MHM can respond to the changing landscape of museum practice in the twenty-first century. Is decolonization a process that can be meaningfully applied to Holocaust museums and, if so, how can the MHM’s permanent exhibit critically engage with issues surrounding settler colonialism and Indigeneity? This article explores three narrative themes within the museum: Canadian history; human rights; and Palestine/Israel. While the exhibit reinscribes settler colonial narratives and ideologies, it also contains multiple entry points that curators can use to deploy decolonial museum practices. A decolonial MHM can retain its specific focus on the genocide of European Jewry while also illuminating the colonial structures that visitors, museum content, and Holocaust memory are entwined within.


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Settler philanthropy reinforces settler colonialism (even when they say they’d rather not): Damien Lee, ‘Remaining Unreconciled: Philanthropy and Indigenous Governance in Canada’, aboriginal policy studies, 10, 2, 2023, pp. 3-32

04Feb23

Abstract: Canadian philanthropic foundations are increasingly engaged in reconciliation-focused activities with Indigenous peoples. However, reconciliation can uphold colonial relations if care is not taken to support the resurgence of inherent Indigenous governance systems. I therefore argue that to the extent that Canada and the philanthropic community are serious about decolonizing their relationships with Indigenous nations, Canadian tax law will need to find ways to defer to Indigenous leaders who prefer not to reconcile every aspect of their political systems with the Canadian state. The paper identifies the Income Tax Act as part of what upholds settler colonialism within the philanthropic sector, specifically exploring how the concept of “qualified donee status” impedes inherent Indigenous leaders from engaging with philanthropic foundations on their own terms. Examples of inherent Indigenous governance systems are provided.


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A settler is precisely someone who thinks that settlers do not exist: Noam Leshem, Jen Bagelman, ‘Unsettling “The Settler”‘, Society + Space, 23/01/23

02Feb23

Excerpt: Who is ‘the Settler’? What does this category animate and what does it bely? Despite the vast scholarship on histories of settler colonisation, the complex figure of the settler remains largely taken for granted. This lends itself to a banal decolonial politics that urgently requires critique.


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Again, about the university as a settler colonial space: Sharon Stein, ‘Reflections on “Unsettling the University” and Its Call to Responsibility’, Critical Internationalization studies Review, 2, 1, 2023

02Feb23

Abstract: This research brief shares reflections on the author’s recent book Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education. The book traces how US universities were built on and continue to reproduce settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy, in material and epistemic ways.


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Nested settler colonialisms and their interaction: Alexandra Allweiss, ‘”Where We Are Within That”: Chuj Sovereignty and Belonging Across Overlapping Settler Borders’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2023

02Feb23

Abstract: This article centers two “zones of sovereignty” that Maya Chuj youth organizers and educators in Guatemala and the United States created from within and across nation-states and settler colonial projects. It highlights how these spaces supported Chuj young people and educators as they navigated and (re)imagined relationality and belonging across transnational and diaspora spaces in ways that refused and challenged settler colonial and imperialist nation-state logics and boundaries.


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The university was and is a settler colonial space: Bindi Bennett, Kelly Menzel, Jacob Prehn, Trevor G. Gates, ‘Australian Universities, Indigenization, Whiteness, and Settler Colonial Epistemic Violence’, in Jioji Ravulo, Katarzyna Olcoń, Tinashe Dune, Alex Workman, Pranee Liamputtong (eds), Handbook of Critical Whiteness: Deconstructing Dominant Discourses Across Disciplines, Springer, 2023

02Feb23

Abstract: This chapter argues that despite numerous strategies, reports, and scholarship, Australian universities are still largely based on White Western worldviews and as a result continue to perpetrate and perpetuate settler colonial epistemic violence. To overcome the current settler colonial epistemic violence exerted by tertiary education providers, genuine relationships with First Nation peoples and communities need to be established, and space must be made for these communities to speak for themselves within the academy. Universities and governments should follow by providing appropriate allocation of resources for the indigenization of curricula and governance structures, within faculties and campuses. If this is achieved, the Australian tertiary education sector will become an international leader by deconstructing Whiteness, providing a greater educational experience, and exposing graduates to multiple worldviews. We address social work as a discipline and suggest ways forward.


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Settler citizenship and Indigenous diasporas: Patrick Saulmatino Thomsen, Lana Lopesi, Kevin Lujan Lee, ‘Contemporary Moana Mobilities: Settler-Colonial Citizenship, Upward Mobility, and Transnational Pacific Identities’, The Contemporary Pacific, 34, 2, 2022

01Feb23

Abstract: In this article, we deploy two theoretical concepts—settler-colonial citizenship and transnational identities—to explore the complex facets of what we term “contemporary Moana mobilities.” Drawing on the Samoan methodology su’ifefiloi, which embraces Pacific forms of storytelling as sites of knowledge production, we provide three first-person vignettes that recount the experiences of a Samoan New Zealander living in South Korea to frame settler-colonial citizenship as an intergenerational symbolic and legal privilege afforded to migrants and their descendants who settle in settler-colonial states. Further, we argue that this opens additional multinational mobility pathways into other countries for children of diasporic Pacific communities within settler colonies like New Zealand, which remain blocked off to our communities and families who reside on island. Given this, we also propose that the identities of upwardly mobile transnational Pacific Islanders are constituted through simultaneous embeddedness in the racial hierarchies of multiple nation-states and are performed for specific audiences in specific national contexts, which then shape the character and politics of these complex identity expressions. Ultimately, we gesture to the importance of better understanding the conditions and consequences of empire and settler-colonial citizenship as global processes—and how this is reshaping the landscape of contemporary Moana mobilities.


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Settler colonialism is incarcerating: Judah Oudshoorn, Towards ending incarceration of Indigenous peoples in Canada: A critical, narrative inquiry of hegemonic power in the Gladue report process, PhD dissertation, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2023

01Feb23

Abstract: This study is concerned with the possibility that Gladue perpetuates the hegemonic powers of settler colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and neoliberalism. Gladue is intended to remediate systemic anti-Indigenous racism by requiring judges to consider all alternatives to incarceration when sentencing Indigenous peoples, yet Indigenous incarceration rates continue to rise precipitously. On the surface, Gladue does not appear to disrupt the hegemonic status quo. How is it that the Canadian state, even when ‘remediating,’ keeps producing the same – colonial, oppressive, and tyrannical – result? This qualitative study used a critical, narrative methodology, interviewing Gladue report writers (n=9) and judges (n=12) about their perspectives and experiences with Gladue, particularly Gladue reports. The study purposefully emphasized settler accountability – research as reparation – in the research design, data collection, and analysis. A careful, ethical protocol for researching with Indigenous peoples (n=9) was followed, premised in Truth and Reconciliation ‘Call to Action’ number 30 to reduce Indigenous incarceration in Canada. This study found that Gladue is falling short of achieving its systemic aim because of (a) a hyper-individualistic, dehumanizing configuration that discursively shifts judges away from dealing with the systemic issue of anti-Indigenous racism, towards judging the individual Indigenous person before the court; (b) colonial mentalities (e.g., whiteness and patriarchy) persisting in the process; (c) a lack of funding for Gladue writers, as well alternatives to incarceration, constraining judges’ capacities to divert Indigenous away from prisons. The study points towards the need for a more radical framework for Gladue that honours Indigenous selfdetermination and foundational treaties such as the Two Row Wampum.


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