settler colonial studies blog

Settler legitimacy through flows of extractive capital: Lena Price, ‘The Role of the Canadian Settler-State in Facilitating Flows of Transnational Executive Capital’, On Politics, 15, 1, 2022

27Jan23

Abstract: What does the neoliberalization of extractive and border infrastructures by the Canadian settler-state illuminate about its relationship to transnational extractive capital? To answer this question, I first examine how neoliberalism has shaped border and extractive policies. In the second section, I look at how flows of transnational extractive capital are made flexible by Canadian settler-state policies, while simultaneously securitizing colonial borders against racialized migrants. In the third, I investigate how
material and epistemological challenges to extractive infrastructures from Indigenous land defenders and racialized migrants challenge the legitimation by accumulation processes the Canadian settler-state employs. Ultimately, I argue the settler-state selectively securitizes pipeline and border infrastructures to facilitate the flow and accumulation of transnational extractive capital as a means of self-legitimation that relies on normative imaginings of a white Canadian nationhood. Furthermore, these imaginings rely on upholding certain logics of racial capitalism that construct a white Canadian nationhood, such as white supremacy, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy.

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Destituency as resistance against settler colonialism? Philippe Blouin, ‘Self-Destituent Power in Iroquois Diplomacy: Interpreting the 2020 Talks on the Tyendinaga Tracks’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 122, 1, 2023, pp. 87-101

27Jan23

Abstract: Preserving the original agreement between the Rotinonhsión:ni (Iroquois) and the first settlers, the Two Row Wampum belt (Teiohá:te) displays two parallel lines, where the original peoples’ canoe and the settlers’ ship are said to sail side by side, suggesting that allied parties to move in the same direction they must respect their mutual autonomy. Drawing on the transcripts of negotiations between Canadian officials and Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) warriors in Tyendinaga, this article examines how the Two Row Wampum’s notion of alliance through separation played out in the 2020 rail blockade movement in support of the Wet’suwet’en people’s fight against the Coastal GasLink pipelines. Central to the text is Kanien’kehá:ka warriors’ suggestion that, beyond relations with settlers, the Two Row Wampum applies to relations between and among Indigenous nations, clans, genders, and even nonhumans. The intricate consensus-based decision-making protocols that compose the Rotinonhsión:ni Confederacy’s precolonial governance system likewise attest to the respect for separation that pervades all relations, as if the potential of Rotinonhsión:ni diplomacy to render sovereign power destitute had reached a constitutional stature.

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Anticolonial commons? Mimi Sheller, ‘Mobile Commoning: Reclaiming Indigenous, Caribbean, Maroon, and Migrant Commons’, praktyka teoretyczna, 4, 46, 2022, pp. 29-52

23Jan23

Excerpt: ‘Crucially, these more relational theories of commoning as a practice have leveraged the concept as a critique of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, which both have their bases in private property, enclosure, and extraction‘.

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Settler questioning? Leah Decter, Carla Taunton, ‘An Ethic of Decolonial Questioning: Exercising the Quadruple Turn in the Arts and Culture Sector’, in Heather Igloliorte, Carla Taunton (eds), The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada, Routledge, 2023

23Jan23

Abstract: Part of an ongoing series of writings began in 2012, this chapter proposes Decolonial Questioning as a methodology that aims to mobilize intergenerational white settler responsibility in the cultural sector. Committed to furthering decolonizing methodologies that contribute to unsettling contemporary settler colonial systems, structures and attitudes, Carla Taunton and Leah Decter specifically expand on a framework of questioning that will guide and support white settler artists, curators, writers and other cultural workers. They situate these methodologies as complementary practices or Critical White Settler Projects that work in conversation with Indigenous methodologies towards the goals of Indigenous-led movements.

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Accomodating Indigenous sovereignty via natural law: Samuel Piccolo, ‘Indigenous Sovereignty, Common Law, and Natural Law’, American Journal of Political Science, 2023

20Jan23

Abstract: Renewed calls for Indigenous sovereignty in North America have led some scholars to search Western philosophy for thinking that affirms these claims. Many suggest that the common law tradition offers resources to do so. In this article, I argue that common law is limited in its capacity to endorse Indigenous political legitimacy. Instead, I suggest that supportive elements in common law are trace remnants of natural law thinking. Further, natural law as a concept resonates with contemporary Indigenous philosophy that maintains that nonhuman nature is suffused with morality and normativity, making the natural law tradition worth considering for defenses of Indigenous sovereignty. I propose beginning with the work of Bartolomé de las Casas. While my aim is not to defend either Lascasian nor Indigenous natural law, I conclude that they should be part of efforts to understand the ongoing conflicts between Indigenous nations and colonial states.

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Accomodating Indigenous wildfire sovereignty: Lachlan Beggs, Cameo Dalley, ‘Wildfire bureaucracy: The affective dimensions of state engagement with Indigenous peoples in southeast Australia’, Geoforum, 138, 2023, 103675

20Jan23

Abstract: In recent years settler governments have begun to seriously engage with Indigenous peoples’ fire and other ecological knowledges in the context of managing natural hazards and resources. In Australia, Aoteroa New Zealand, Canada and the United States, Indigenous peoples and their ecological knowledge have become increasingly involved in combating such naturally—and socially constructed—threats as wildfires, floods, and storms. Nevertheless, while there has been significant research into the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous peoples’ ecological knowledges, until recently little analytic effort has been directed to understanding the other side of this intercultural interaction: what can be conceptualised as settler natural hazard management bureaucracies. Taking the emergence of government engagement with Indigenous peoples’ fire knowledge in the southeast Australian state of Victoria as a case study, this paper contributes to the nascent body of ethnographically informed research focusing on the interaction between state natural hazard bureaucracies and Indigenous peoples. We do so by asking what motivated this change in government interest in Indigenous peoples and their fire knowledge. Informed by engagement with experienced fire sector staff, our findings reveal the presence and importance of affect and other more-than-representational qualities that animate state engagements with Indigenous peoples and their cultural burning knowledge.

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With a chapter by David MacDonald on ‘Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination in Settler States’:

20Jan23

Access the chapter here.

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The Middle Ground’s antithesis: Leila K. Blackbird, ‘A Gendered Frontier: Métissage and Indigenous Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Basse-Louisiane’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 56, 2, 2023, pp. 205-212

17Jan23

Abstract: French colonialism in North America has often been typified by the histories of New France and the Great Lakes region, characterized as a middle ground that, while violent, still provided opportunity for alliance and left Indigenous cultural practices largely intact. Yet, in contrast, the founding of Lower Louisiana was explicitly settler colonial, and the Gulf Coast region was uniquely shaped by both the Trans-Atlantic and Indian slave trades. While the enslavement of Indigenous women and girls was an important component of diplomacy and trade across French North America, varying slaveries played a more crucial role in the successful colonization of the Lower Mississippi Valley through gendered and racialized forms of genocidal violence. Therefore, it is only at the intersection of Black and Native studies—and through centering the perspectives of descendant communities and tribal nations—that the history of the U.S. South can be properly recontextualized in interpretive and relational frameworks.

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Indigeneity, domesticated unders settler colonialism: Joshua David Bellin, ‘Occom’s Arrow’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 56, 2, 2023, pp. 167-173

17Jan23

Abstract: “Occom’s Arrow” explores the nature of Indigenous personhood in eighteenth century America. Focusing on Jonathan Spilsbury’s 1768 mezzotint portrait of Mohegan minister Samson Occom, the essay examines how cultural intermediaries such as Occom challenged widespread assumptions concerning the opposition of “Christian” and “Indian.” In Occom’s portrait, as well as in his life, we witness the emergence of a strategic enterprise dedicated to producing a colonial identity at once Indigenous and “civilized.” The essay thus proposes a model for reading the complex and contested quality of Indigenous lives and writings under conditions of settler colonialism.

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Settler colonial hyperincarceration: Patrick Horton, Hyperincarceration and Aboriginal Life on the Victoria River, PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2022

17Jan23

Abstract: Indigenous people in northern Australia are among the most incarcerated on the planet. I examine the impacts of this regime on the everyday lives of Aboriginal people in the Northern territory Victoria River’s region. Based on a Long-term participant observation informed by the question, ‘what happens in families and communities when people are locked up all the time?’, this thesis contributes empirically grounded material to the growing bodies of global scholarship on settler colonialism and hyperincarceration as projects concerned with the management and elimination of surplus populations. My ethnography elucidates local convictions that carcerality has little to do with justice and often perpetuates those social harms it purports to correct. A historical analysis grounded in the material and affective conditions of Aboriginal life demonstrates how hyperincarceration is only the latest iteration of strategies of containment and dehumanisation which have always characterised local settler-native relations. I attend to the role of the carceral settler state in structuring the experience of Aboriginal childhood, ways of relating amongst close kin, masculinities and father-son relations, and the impacts of this regime across and between generations, which further compound existing radical inequalities. These outcomes of hyperincarceration advance the state’s facilitation of extractive capital by erasing Aboriginal people from, and Aboriginal relations to, ancestral Country. I demonstrate that the carceral saturation of contemporary Aboriginal life renders the carceral state both pervasive and yet often seemingly not there at all, demonstrative of the haunting implications and the unfinished business of settler colonial occupation. I propose a theory of carceral genocide, identifying the central role of the carceral settler state in the destruction of a way of life.

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