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Edugration is settler colonialism: Lisa Ruth Brunner, ‘Settler nation-building through immigration as a rationale for higher education: a critical discourse analysis’, Higher Education Research & Development, 42, 5, 2023, pp. 1086-1102

22Jun23

Abstract: As education-migration (edugration) blurs the line between international student and immigrant recruitment in some jurisdictions, higher education admission is becoming linked to settler nation-building projects. Using critical discourse analysis, this article examines the Canadian higher education sector’s response to COVID-19 through pre-budget submissions to the House of Commons of Canada Standing Committee on Finance for the 2021 federal budget. Findings demonstrate how institutions instrumentalized international students to position themselves as valuable actors in Canada’s immigration regime and justify their requests for public financial support. In this way, nation-building through immigration – both globally, as an imperial power, and domestically, as a colonial power – is now a new societal role of higher education which is becoming hegemonic within institutions. This is significant because, as higher education’s purposes align with those of economic immigration, the sector not only fails to interrupt, but itself reproduces, systemic patterns of border imperialism and settler-colonialism. The article urges higher education institutions to (1) more deeply consider how a reliance on international student enrolment is impacting its societal roles, while also (2) avoid exceptionalizing the present by recognizing that higher education has long functioned in the service of the state as a colonial and imperialist power.


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Settler political mythology 101: Steven Johnston, ‘John Ford’s Legendary Western Ambiguity and White Settler Colonialism’, in Damien K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought: A Fistful of Politics, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 47-63

22Jun23

Abstract: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a profound meditation on the paradoxical phenomenon of political founding worthy of Machiavelli (The Machiavelli of The Discourses, that is). In it, Ford tells the story of a democratic political community that comes into being thanks to the heroic intervention of an outsider, Ransom Stoddard, who happens to arrive in it one day, and effectively forces its citizens to be free.


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It is ONE Indigenous struggle against settler colonialism: Jamal Nabulsi, ‘Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023

15Jun23

Abstract: The 2021 Unity Intifada represented a vital moment in the history of Palestinian resistance. The unification of Palestinian struggle inherent to the uprising can be read as an expression of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty. Drawing on the critical thought of Palestinians and other Indigenous peoples struggling against settler colonialism, I argue for a theorization of Palestinian indigeneity. Following from this indigeneity, I show that Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is the embodied political claim to the land of Palestine. This theorization of sovereignty offers uniquely productive ways to account for and challenge Zionist/Israeli settler-colonial violence and, ultimately, to forge paths toward decolonial Palestinian futures.


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With a section on lawfare and settler colonialism: Mariful Alam, Patrick Dwyer, Katrin Roots, (eds), Violence, Imagination and Resistance: Socio-legal Interrogations of Power, AU Press, 2023

15Jun23

Excerpt: What is the story of race and settler colonialism in the legal landscape of present-day Canada? How do we tell these legal histories of settler-state racial violence in the context of the ongoing realities of Indigenous dispossession, anti-Black racism, and the experiences of civil death by migrants and displaced people? What does it mean to commit to this inquiry at a time when human rights discourse and projects of reparative justice corroborate with the legacies of white supremacy and racial colonial violence inherent in juridicopolitical mechanisms of liberal rights regimes? In this chapter, we maintain that socio-legal scholars in Canada need to do much more to address the historical, structural, and affective significance of race, racism, and settler colonialism in our socio-legal analyses and imaginations.


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Extraction is a settler religion: Jan H. Pranger, ‘Christianity, settler colonialism, and resource extraction’, Dialog, 2023

13Jun23

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between Christianity, extractivism, and Amer-European settler colonialism. It argues that Amer-European Christianity is an extractivist religion, with beliefs and practices that are deeply intertwined with an extractivist relationship to the natural world and Indigenous peoples. In conversation with the work of Willie Jennings and exploring the impact of the doctrine of Christian discovery, the extractivist theology of John Locke, and the supersessionist use of divine election and covenant, this article exemplifies how Amer-European Christianity has shaped and been shaped by settler colonial extractivism. It raises the question whether and how Amer-European settler Christians may decolonize their extractivist relationship to Indigenous peoples and the natural world by learning from Indigenous peoples in dialogue with the work of the Osage theologian “Tink” Tinker.


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Unsurveying the survey: Janet Miron, ‘The Eagle Said, “I will Take You Home Again”: Reclaiming Indigenous Histories from the Geological Survey of Canada, c. 1870–1910’, Histoire sociale / Social History, 56, 115, 2023, pp. 93-122

13Jun23

Abstract: Raymond Miron (Anishinaabe and French, Bawaating/Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario) and Robert Nolan (Anishinaabe, Batchewana First Nation, Ketegaunseebee/Garden River, Ontario) worked with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically with one of its employees, Robert Bell, a settler of Scottish descent. Miron and Nolan were two of the many Indigenous Peoples who shared their expertise, knowledge, skills, technologies, maps, and travel routes with Bell as he endeavoured to explore the northern half of North America for the GSC. However, in his published reports, Bell evaded acknowledgment of the many contributions made by Indigenous Peoples, despite the dependency of his work upon them. Nevertheless, by attending to silences in colonial archives and reading between the lines of the GSC’s sources, Indigenous stories can be uncovered and reclaimed from the narratives constructed by White explorers. What Miron, Nolan, and so many other Indigenous people shared with Bell, as well as what he took from them without consent, was based on rich geographic and geological knowledge that predated the GSC by thousands of years. Indeed, the significance and brilliance of Indigenous knowledge permeates the records of the Geological Survey, including those written by Bell, and defied colonial attempts to erase or deny it.


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The manifest undestiny of settler colonialism: Robert Rix, The Vanished Settlers of GreenlandIn Search of a Legend and Its Legacy, Cambridge University Press, 2023

13Jun23

Description: For four hundred years, Norse settlers battled to make southern Greenland a new, sustainable home. They strove against gales and winter cold, food shortages and in the end a shifting climate. The remnants they left behind speak of their determination to wrest an existence at the foot of this vast, icy and challenging wilderness. Yet finally, seemingly suddenly, they vanished; and their mysterious disappearance in the fifteenth century has posed a riddle to scholars ever since. What happened to the lost Viking colonists? For centuries people assumed their descendants could still be living, so expeditions went to find them: to no avail. Robert Rix tells the gripping story of the missing pioneers, placing their poignant history in the context of cultural discourse and imperial politics. Ranging across fiction, poetry, navigation, reception and tales of exploration, he expertly delves into one of the most contested questions in the annals of colonization.


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A postcard from settlerland: Sierra Mendez, ‘With Love from San Antonio: Settler Souvenir Postals and Mass Reproductions of “Mexicans”’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2023

13Jun23

Abstract: The persuasive power of souvenir postal cards has been overlooked in scholarship. This essay examines how settlers in San Antonio, at the turn of the twentieth century, used souvenir postal cards strategically to produce knowledge about their city and its place in the modern nation, to market it to White tourists and other settlers as a “bordertown,” and to continue to dispossess and subordinate native Coahuiltecan, Tejano, and Mexican locals. Examples in this essay are drawn from a corpus of 300 real-photo postcards (1904–17) to consider their modes of production, images, captions, messages, and affects en masse. Through this essay, I show that souvenir postal cards are a way settler colonialism and coloniality/modernity worked, evidencing on local and global scales networked interest and cooperation between dominant imperial nations and groups to mass-(re)produce themselves and impose their structural patterns of power.


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Textbook (settler) futurity: Benjamin W.  Ramirez, The (De)Colonization of Memory: A Critical Analysis of United States History Textbooks and the Struggle for Indigenous Futurity, PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2023

13Jun23

Abstract: In this dissertation, analyze how settler narratives normalize representations of the settler in relation to Indigenous peoples that bolster settler futurity through the colonization of our collective memory. Drawing on the tenets of Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) I focus on the permeation of colonization in US society while centering Ojibwe knowledge to assist in the analysis of settler colonization (Brayboy, 2005). Critical Content Analysis (CCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) complement the TribalCrit framework to reveal patterns, norms, and values of settler narratives in two US history textbooks from Pearson for California and Texas. Overall findings highlight how the forms of representation support settler discourse and related norms and values in US history textbooks that silence Indigenous voices. In my analysis, I critically highlight profit motivations, claims to scholarly authority, portrayals, Indigenous critiques of citizenship, and land relations in the textbooks. I also demonstrate how, despite minor linguistic differences between the textbooks produced for California and Texas, shared terms, and rhetorical strategies across both versions of the textbooks and accompanying materials control the characterization of Indigenous people. This includes the portrayal violence against Indigenous peoples and settler expansion, and how language frames Americanization as assimilation in ways that obscure genocide while promoting “democratic progress.” I further analyze how the framing and language used in the textbooks and accompanying materials generates settler affect (Fanon 1963/2004; Nasser & Nasser, 2008) that maintain the settler society and settler futurity. In the final chapter, I extend the concept of refusal from the work of Tuck and Yang (2014), Audra Simpson (2014), and Leanne Simpson (2017), I conceptualize a pedagogical practice that I call historical refusal, and include critical questions that teachers can utilize to identify, and critically reflect on, the construction and content of historical narratives in US textbooks to challenge settler narratives in high school classrooms.


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Stamped out: Daniel Dumas, ‘Place them on a stamp: Inuit, banal colonialism, and the “pioneer experiment” of the High Arctic Relocations’, Political Geography, 105, 2023

12Jun23

Abstract: Postage stamps are considered to be silent messengers of the state, capable of transmitting ideas, representations, and often politically-charged messages of what nation states wish to present to both domestic and international audiences. Building on calls for further research into the specific stories of individual stamps and their producers, this article focuses on the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp issued in 1955 by the Canadian Post Office Department. Representing one of the first Indigenous-themed stamps, it is argued that it can be read as an attempt by the federal government to both incorporate Inuit as full citizens of the state, while portraying the Arctic as a key geographic space belonging to the Canadian imagined community. Furthermore, a connection is made between the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp and the High Arctic Relocations, which took place in 1953 and 1955. Primarily initiated due to concerns following the precipitous drop in Arctic fox furs, several Inuit families were relocated from northern Québec and Baffin Island to uninhabited Cornwallis and Ellesmere Islands in the High Arctic, in what the federal government called a “pioneer experiment”. The relocations also subtly served as a means of bolstering Canada’s de facto sovereignty amid increased American presence in the region during the Cold War. By connecting the High Arctic Relocations with the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp as two nodes of a matrix of Postwar Canadian Arctic policy that sought to administer Inuit lives, bodies, and lands, it is argued that the stamp constitutes a prime example of what I term banal colonialism.


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