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The early Soviet stance against settler colonialism: Alexey Golubev, ‘No natural colonization: the early Soviet school of historical anti-colonialism’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2023

30May23

Abstract: This paper discusses Soviet Marxist historical narratives of the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to reframe Russian history as a process driven by commercial capital and analyzed Russian territorial expansion and its historical scholarship in terms such as settler colonialism and indigenous erasure. As of now, the corpus of works by early Soviet Marxist historians still represents the most massive and sustained effort to challenge imperial narratives of Russian history from within the Russian academic community. Resonating with current conversations about Russian imperialism and colonialism, this intellectual tradition represents a major contribution to the postcolonial turn in studies of Russian history.


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Indigenous veterans in a settler colonial system: William John Pratt,’ William John ‘Indigenous Veterans of the First World War and their Families in the Prairie West’, Canadian Military History, 32, 1, 2023, pp. 1-16

30May23

Abstract: This study of forty-five military pension files of Indigenous First World War veterans of the Treaty 4, 6 and 7 regions shows that the racist perspectives and structures of settler colonialism on the Prairies could prevent just administration of benefits. Pension files of Indigenous veterans expose the tragedy of their lives during and after the First World War. Many soldiers had lingering pains and ailments as a result of the war, as well as continuing problems shaking the gaze of settler colonialism, which seemed unable to view them as both Indigenous and veterans. Despite the numerous legal and cultural obstacles to being treated equally to other veterans, many Indigenous men and their families were paid pensions, which were valuable, especially during the hardships on First Nations reserves in the interwar years.


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On the settlerization of war: Garrett DeWayne Hall, Rangers and Rebels: The Americanization of War in the Colonial South, PhD dissertation, Liberty University, 2023

30May23

Abstract: Some historians have used the phrase Americanization of war to describe the process in which Anglo-American settlers adopted or appropriated the military tactics of American Indians. However, both proponents and opponents of the idea of the Americanization of war have focused on the northern colonies. This is likely because the Americanization of war in the colonial period has been closely associated with American rangers, most notably those commanded by Benjamin Church, John Gorham, and Robert Rogers. While these men and the soldiers they commanded are all demonstrative of the Americanization of war, Church, Gorham, and Rogers all conducted operations in New England, New York, and Canada. These studies do not address the unique process of the Americanization of war in the southern colonies. A study of the colonial wars in the South reveals that a process of Americanization of war did take place, although it varied somewhat from that in the North. Unlike their northern counterparts, the settlement patterns of the colonial South produced a ranger that was more inspired by English practices than American Indian tactics. Still, over the course of several colonial wars in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the southern ranger became exemplary of the Americanization of war, yet distinct from his northern counterpart. The Americanization of war in the South happened though a complex process that involved trade, hunting, military alliances, slavery, and frontier life. By the mid-eighteenth century, southern rangers reflected the Americanized society that was developing in the colonial South. Ultimately, understanding the distinct process of the Americanization of war in the colonial South is important to understanding southern culture and its exceptional place in American identity.


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The religion of settler colonialism (on the assimilation of indigeneity): Joseph Wiebe, Sydney Thackeray, ‘The Mennonite case for counter-sovereignty through Indigenous assimilation: Settler colonialism, self determination and relation to place in religious identity’, Studies in Religion, 2023

28May23

Abstract: This essay analyses settler colonialism’s impact on religious settler identity through one community’s perceptions and interactions with Indigenous peoples. It combines a normative commitment to Indigenous self-determination with an empirical study of Mennonite settlement narratives by drawing on Indigenous sources to interpret Mennonite descriptions of Indigenous communities between 1880 and 1939. Specifically, using two central characteristics of Indigenous religion and politics to frame the analysis – relationality and self-determination – reveals how Mennonites narrated Indigenous presence to establish their own self-determination. The study identifies the evaluative categories that Mennonites used to narrate Indigenous communities and then uses those categories with a focus on relationality and self-determination to assess North American Mennonite religious history in the same period. It demonstrates how Mennonites’ arguments for Indigenous peoples’ assimilation to settler society were motivated not just by Christian conviction but also by their desire to secure their own sovereignty. Mennonites’ interest in assimilation has at least as much to do with their relation to place as it does with their religious claims.


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Settling on area studies: Jon Solomon, ‘Lucian Pye and the Foundations of Area Studies in White Settler Colonialism’, in Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, Peter Button (eds), Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana, Routledge, 2023

28May23

Abstract: In the covenant around technological fetishism married to an aesthetic ideology of global transition, one detects the model of an unwritten social contract concerning global population management. This social contract is enjoined around the founding exclusions of race and class with which the fields of East Asian, and particularly China, studies have never reckoned to this day. In other words, the intelligibility of East Asian area studies becomes politically legible only as the palimpsest of white settler colonialism’s transformation into creedal nationalism without going through a process of decolonization. Postwar US creedal nationalism can only be fully understood from the perspective of the “Area Studies Social Pact” emblematized by Lucian Pye and Erik Erikson. Under cover of being devoted to the production of knowledge, Area Studies is, in truth, an apparatus for imperial population management.


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Settler colonialism is so instagrammable: Carrie Karsgaard, ‘Resistance to the Trans Mountain Expansion in a Settler Colonial Context’, in Carrie Karsgaard, Instagram as Public Pedagogy: Online Activism and the Trans Mountain Pipeline, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 21-74

28May23

Abstract: Across homelands of interconnected life, the Trans Mountain pipeline is being installed according to colonial decision-making that disregards Indigenous sovereignty and instead supports state investments in Canada’s resource economy. Indeed, while the pipeline results in destructive ecological impacts, pipeline politics—and their expressions over Instagram—are more nuanced and complex than environmentalism alone can explain. At material, representational, and ideological levels, the Trans Mountain intersects with colonial nation-building narratives that naturalize resource extraction and transport to the detriment of many entwined ecosystems, communities, and Indigenous nations. In detailing the pipeline in relation to Canada’s nature as a settler colonial state, this chapter, therefore, not only provides meaningful contextual information about the pipeline and its resistance on Instagram but also situates the pipeline issue in relation to settler colonialism more broadly, laying the groundwork for an examination of resistant pipeline public pedagogy toward the transformation of settler colonial relations.


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Settler colonialism in the north: Mathias Danbolt, Bart Pushaw, ‘Institutional Acknowledgements: Introduction to the Special Issue “The Art of Nordic Colonialism”‘, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 2023

25May23

Excerpt: Markerna marks one of the first attempts to introduce the practice of land acknowledgements in art institutions in Sápmi – and as such, it also marks an early attempt to frame the relationship between the institution and the land it operates on, as one defined by settler colonialism. The concept of settler colonialism has gained traction over the last few years as an analytical framework to address the nation states of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s claims of sovereignty over Sámi land, culture, and rights. The work of Sámi philosopher Rauna Kuokkanen on “Nordic settler colonialism” has been especially important in this regard. While a theoretical discussion of the framework of settler colonization is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that colonialism and settler colonialism represent different, although related and often co-existing, modalities of political and cultural domination. Whereas colonialism is often used to describe the organized exploitation of people and resources by a foreign people in colonies established at a distance from the “homeland”, settler colonialism, by contrast, is not structured around a “master-servant relationship” based on ethnic difference. The main object of settler colonization is the control of land and territories through population, thus it is a regime “not [of] exploitation but replacement”, as Patrick Wolfe has argued.


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The poetics of settler colonialism: Kyle Kohinga, ‘”Soil Is a Toil Needing All to Recoil”: Lionel Fogarty, Andrew Forrest, and the Settler-Colonial Georgic’, Australian Literary Studies, 38, 1/2, 2023

23May23

Abstract: Lionel Fogarty’s difficult, urgent verse is universally accepted as an ‘activist poetry’, yet the very axiomatic nature of this characterisation has ironically obviated critical engagement with Fogarty’s experimentalist poetry as it emerges from specific protest – as a response to, and analysis of, the particular, contemporaneous, shifting injustices faced by Aboriginal people. Proposing to bring the interpretative frame of activism to bear anew upon Fogarty’s work, this essay reads Fogarty’s ‘No Cites like the Cites Hum In’ (‘Written Land’ 2016) as a timely language of judicial and poetic intervention – one itself seeking to intervene on another, restless language of intervention – that of settler lawmaking. It considers how Fogarty’s poem enacts a ‘decolonisative’ critique of the settler poeticisation of toil operationalised by Fortescue Mining Group CEO Andrew Forrest in his 2014 report on Indigenous employment and training programs, ‘Creating Parity’. Fogarty’s poem, it argues, reckons with the centrality of a ‘battlerist’ mythos to the settler-state’s specific, contemporary, neoliberal efforts to not only expropriate Aboriginal land, but also to discipline and pathologise Aboriginal bodies. This essay demonstrates how ‘No Cites like the Cites Hum In’ provides a poignant analysis of the way settler law, time and labour regimes function together to desiccate and enervate the distinct temporal subjectivities underpinning Aboriginal political imaginaries. It contends that a stronger poetic and philosophical appreciation of Fogarty’s verse is gained from understanding it in its relation to extraliterary Aboriginal struggles.


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Settler completion now? (debating the Indigenous voice to the Australian parliament) Murray Goot, Tim Rowse, ‘The Debate Over the Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians: National Unity and Memories of the 1967 Referendum’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 2023

23May23

Excerpt: In the debate over constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians since 2010, the high “Yes” vote in 1967 has been recalled as a benchmark of national unity and goodwill towards Indigenous Australians, something to which Australians must return. The 1967 referendum has been evoked as a “step” towards reconciliation, with constitutional recognition presented as the next step. The “recognition” that the 1967 referendum enabled has been (mis)represented as allowing Indigenous Australians to be counted in the Census, hence to “count” more generally. Explaining constitutional changes to voters in the referendum on an Indigenous Voice, “Yes” and “No” campaigns are likely to describe amendments in emotively powerful terms. False memories of “recognition” obscure a political fissure within the myth of 1967. Some who celebrate 1967 have wanted the Constitution to continue to distinguish Indigenous from nonIndigenous Australians, one understanding of the 1967 amendment to Section 51(xxvi); others have hoped that the next referendum would complete the deletion of distinguishing words that had begun in 1967 with the repeal of Section 127. The myths of 1967 combine to accommodate opposing ideals of national “unity”, allowing protagonists in the debate to read the “lessons” of 1967 in ways that reinforce their own political perspectives.


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Studious settlers? Hijin Parka, Margot Francis, ‘Fraught subjects: decolonial approaches to racialized international students as “settlers of colour in the making”‘, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023

23May23

Abstract: This paper contributes to migration studies, settler colonial studies and critical internationalization studies by mapping as connected two concurrent settler colonial preoccupations, reconciliation and internationalization. In Canada, as in other Western countries, international students are a crucial resource as they increasingly sustain post-secondary funding. At the same time, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) has charged the educational sector to put reconciliation and decolonization at the heart of their mandate. Drawing on interviews with racialized international students in Ontario, Canada, this paper examines how racialized international students may have complex relationships to coloniality and be complicit in legitimating settler colonialism. We argue that the processes of reconciliation and internationalization must be understood as deeply interconnected especially because the obfuscation of coloniality is a key technology of settler rule.


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