settler colonial studies blog

The intimate violence of settler colonialism: Catherine E. McKinley, ‘Land, Loss, and Violence: Contemporary Manifestations of Historical Oppression’, in Catherine E. McKinley, Understanding Indigenous Gender Relations and Violence, Springer, 2023, pp 185-191

12Jan23

Abstract: Settler colonialism attempted to reverse the treatment of land and Indigenous women, treating both at objects to possess and conquer. Land and sense of place is central, not only to the identities of Indigenous peoples, but it is inseparable from patriarchal colonialism that treats land and women as possessions. This possessive consciousness is related to intimate partner violence (IPV). Drawing from a mixed methodology, multilevel risk and protective factors associated with hurricane experiences within Southeastern tribes, specifically examining interconnections with IPV, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), historical losses, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), discrimination, and family and social support. This chapter focuses on quantitative findings, which demonstrated historical losses related to disaster, ACEs, discrimination, and IPV were risk factors for PTSD symptoms, while social and family support were proctive factors for PTSD symptoms.

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The prisons of settler colonialism: Dorceta E. Taylor, ‘Prisons, Jails, and the Environment: Why Environmentalists Should Care About Mass Incarceration?’ American Behavioral Scientist, 2023

11Jan23

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between mass incarceration and environmental inequalities. The United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and incarceration is highly racialized. The article discusses how prisons are settler colonial ecosystems that produce injustice. Prisons are located close to hazardous sites and in areas prone to extreme weather events. Food insecurity is also commonplace in jails. The article introduces concepts such as carceral food justice and carceral food sovereignty to recognize the unique circumstances that inmates experience in their quest to acquire healthy, affordable, adequate, and culturally desirable food.

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Indigenous forest management against settler colonialism: Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, Natasha Lyons, Alex C. McAlvay, Patrick Morgan Ritchie, Dana Lepofsky, Michael Blake, ‘Historical ecology of forest garden management in Laxyuubm Ts’msyen and beyond’, Ecosystems and People, 19, 1, 2023, pp. 1-13

11Jan23

Abstract: Cultural land-use is an important driver of ecosystem change, influencing the composition of species across landscapes and through time. Recent research in northwestern North America has shown that historical Indigenous land-use and forest management has resulted in relict forest gardens dominated by edible fruit, nut, and berry producing trees and shrubs – many of which continue to grow adjacent to archaeological village sites today. Our research combines archaeological and ecological methods to better understand the historical ecology of seven forest gardens in the Pacific Northwest. Vascular plant communities at all sites are evaluated for distinctiveness using ANOSIM, NMDS, and indicator species analyses. We identify 15 forest garden indicator species, all of which are culturally significant edible fruit or root-bearing species. We then present the results of an intensive historical-ecological study of one site in Laxyuubm Gitselasu (Ts’msyen). Paleoethnobotanical data, soil and tree ring analyses, and radiocarbon dates show that forest management in the Gitsaex forest garden of Gitselasu pre-dates settler colonialism and shows that people likely modified soils and otherwise enhanced their immediate environment to increase the productivity of desired plant species. Given the importance of Indigenous peoples’ role in sustaining forested foodsheds, there is an ongoing and urgent need to support their revitalization and management and better understand the integrated cultural practices and ecological processes that result in these vast cultural landscapes.

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First sovereignty, then settler colonialism: Shelisa Klassen, Land, Sovereignty, and Migration during an era of change: Manitoba, 1870s, PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2022

11Jan23

Abstract: Manitoba began the 1870s as an Indigenous province, entering Confederation in the aftermath of the well-studied period of the Red River Resistance of 1870. By the 1880s, Manitoba’s power structures and land were largely in settler hands, and the province was being promoted as a fertile land of opportunity for immigrants. This dissertation is concerned with the years of transition during the 1870s where settlers immigrated to Manitoba and through the mechanisms of laws, immigration, and violence asserted control over the region. The newspapers and immigration literature downplayed the violence and dispossession that was occurring while depicting an optimistic view of Manitoba intended to recruit immigrants. Settler fears and anxieties about life in Manitoba shaped the newspaper coverage of the first decade of the new province. The myth of Canadian sovereignty over Manitoba in the 1870s was repeated until the settler population was large enough to make the claim believable. During the 1870s the small settler population in Manitoba worked to grow their numbers through immigration and to change how land was understood and claimed, and much of this work was done in the pages of the local newspapers.

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The remoteness of settler colonialism: Lars Jensen, Remotely Australian: Environment, migrancy, sovereignty, nation (re)-building and rim, Mt Hopeless Products, 2022

07Jan23

Excerpt: Remoteness is an at once apt and fuzzy term to apply to conceptualisations of Australia as an imagined space (rather than community). Remoteness holds a double meaning in an Australian context. As a general metaphor it indicates obscurity and indeterminacy, yet in Australia is also applied prescriptively and descriptively to thinly populated areas far from population centres. In this book, however, I am more interested in the thematic potential of remoteness as a key to unlock Australia as a contentious site of belonging. Belonging in itself can be a normative assertion reflecting power relations that enable some notions of belonging to hold sway, rendering others peripheral or outside the horizon of acceptability or inclusion. This observation leads to a central preoccupation in this book, how those relegated to the periphery or beyond the horizon – the abode of the remote – produce counter narratives of selfhood and make alternative imaginings of the national space available.

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Settler colonial ecologies: Timothy L Fosbury, Shouhei Tanaka, ‘Ecologies of Empire: Annie Proulx’s Climate Colonial Realism’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2023

07Jan23

Excerpt: At the end of Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016), Sapatisia Outger, a Métis forest ecologist, witnesses glaciers disintegrate off the coast of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) with her fellow environmental activists. Seized by the unsettling episode in this moment, she apprehends the historical confluence of settler colonialism and climate change: ‘she suffered a full-force shock of recognition—the coming disappearance of a world believed immutable. She had heard for years that the earth and its life-forms were sensitive to slight temperature changes, that species prospered and disappeared as weather and climate varied, but dismissed these alarms as environmental determinism. On the ice her thinking shifted as the moon shifts its position in the sky … . “My God, how violently it is melting,” she had whispered to herself. Great fissures thousands of feet deep opened by meltwater that eroded the hard blue ice, fissures that gaped open to receive the cataract’s plunge, down to the rock beneath the great frozen bed, forcing its under-ice way to the sea, lubricating the huge cap from below. Standing near the brink of one ghastly thundering abyss someone said, “We are looking at something never before seen.” That night … everyone admitted being shaken by the living evidence’.

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The spatio-temporal dimension of settler colonialism: Johanna Adolfsson, A new storm over the Naqab: The temporality of space in Israeli settler colonialism, PhD dissertation, Stockholm University, 2023

05Jan23

Abstract: How can a posthumanist conceptualization of landscape, one that embraces temporality and practice, help us to better understand contemporary settler colonialism? This thesis explores this proposition through its analyses of the desire of the Israeli state to ‘settle’ the Naqab. The Naqab, an area located in the south of modern-day Israel and within its borders, is continuously narrated as under threat of being lost to the Palestinian Bedouins. In contrast to the breadth of scholarly attention given to the occupied Palestinian Territories, there is a relative paucity of studies focusing on the Naqab and on the Palestinian citizens of Israel living therein. Inspired by the concept of taskscape and, more broadly, by a posthumanist political ecology approach, in this thesis I seek to remedy the determinist undertones quite often found in settler colonial studies. The thesis’ empirical data draw from qualitative methods and field research in the Naqab, undertaken during multiple field visits between the 2018 and 2021. The thesis comprises a comprehensive summary (kappa) and three research papers. In Paper 1, I show how a schism between the Jewish National Fund and the civil society green movement surfaced amid land conflicts between the state and Bedouin villagers east of Beersheva. I argue that this schism offers insights into how nature is negotiated in relation to environmentalism and Zionist ideology. Further, I discuss how these negotiations point to an emerging new self-image of a post-settlement state that has abandoned pioneering, and replaced it with a planted forest (and natural) landscape as an emblem for Zionist nature. In Paper 2, I focus my attention on a network of Jewish villages in the Naqab. Based on a discourse analysis of YouTube videos produced by two Zionist organizations, I show how the narrative of Jewish relocation to the Naqab encompasses a modern re-enactment of the pioneering ideal, one mediated by a new neoliberal ethos of Israel as a ‘start-up nation’ and the Naqab as a new Israeli tech-hub. Finally, in Paper 3, I trace the cultural and political context of forest grazing in the Naqab. I argue that while the state uses afforestation as a proxy for territorialization, the irony is that it is the Bedouins who are largely responsible for everyday management of these forest areas, as grazing is a cost-effective method for keeping shrubs and other undergrowth low. I argue that in trying to accommodate grazing in the forest, policy makers struggle to juggle Bedouin land claims via continuous use and cultural connection to the land. Throughout the papers I affirm the performance of Israeli settler colonialism through the making of the natural environment. I assert that the tendency towards forest and grazing regulation, also articulated in planning policy, represents a move beyond the ‘era of pioneering’ towards a more formal type of society. I conclude by contending that the multiple spaces and temporalities presented in the paper’s case studies are indicative of contradictory narratives in the portrayal of the Naqab is and thus assemble as a necessity of the settlement ambition.

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Swedish settler colonialism: May-Britt Öhman, ‘Settler Colonialism in Ungreen, Climate-Unfriendly Disguise and As a Tool for Genocide’, in Hiuwai Chu, Meagan Down, Nkule Mabaso, Pablo Martínez, Corina Oprea (eds), NEW! CLIMATE: Our Right to Breathe, K. Verlag, 2022

05Jan23

Abstract: More recently, the concept of settler colonialism has come to be used increasingly in analyses of the colonial relationships between the Swedish state, the Swedes, and the Sámi. The history of interaction is complex, as the territory has been shared for millennia. The concept of settler colonialism is nevertheless useful to apply to strategies that aim to displace Indigenous rights to the lands and waters and replace them with those of the settlers, as if the settlers hold equal and/or authentic rights as heirs. Furthermore, a specific way of life—that of the settler—takes precedence, whereas nomadic lifestyles are considered to be outside of the normal way. The colonial state’s ethnic cleansing of Sámi forms part of these settler-colonial practices, within which racism has been, and still is, used as a tool. In this essay, I discuss some of the perspectives on “climate change” and “green transition” I have come across within my research and supradisciplinary collaboration over the last two decades. I also argue for the use of the concept of (cultural) genocide as a basis for discussing the Swedish state’s actions and policies regarding the Indigenous Sámi.

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Christian settler colonial Zionism: Ilan Pappe, ‘Christian and Jewish Colonialism Meet: Re-Evaluating the Origins of the Balfour Declaration’, The Maghreb Review, 47, 4, 2022, pp. 333-350

05Jan23

Abstract: Very few scholars noted the fact that Zionism was a Christian project before it became a Jewish one. This lecture will re-examine the making of a Jewish-Christian Zionist lobby that opened the way for the making of a British and a Jewish Palestine.

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Finnish and settlers: Rani-Henrik Andersson, Janne Lahti (eds), Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America: Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces, Helsinki University Press, 2022

04Jan23

Description: Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America reinterprets Finnish experiences in North America by connecting them to the transnational processes of settler colonial conquest, far-settlement, elimination of natives, and capture of terrestrial spaces. Rather than merely exploring whether the idea of Finns as a different kind of immigrant is a myth, this book challenges it in many ways. It offers an analysis of the ways in which this myth manifests itself, why it has been upheld to this day, and most importantly how it contributes to settler colonialism in North America and beyond. The authors in this volume apply multidisciplinary perspectives in revealing the various levels of Finnish involvement in settler colonialism. In their chapters, authors seek to understand the experiences and representations of Finns in North American spatial projects, in territorial expansion and integration, and visions of power. They do so by analyzing how Finns reinvented their identities and acted as settlers, participated in the production of settler colonial narratives, as well as benefitted and took advantage of settler colonial structures. Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America aims to challenge traditional histories of Finnish migration, in which Finns have typically been viewed almost in isolation from the broader American context, not to mention colonialism. The book examines the diversity of roles, experiences, and narrations of and by Finns in the histories of North America by employing the settler colonial analytical framework.

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