settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial commodification targets entire lifeworlds: Emily Bagshaw, The Commodification of Indigeneity as a Tool for Ongoing Settler Colonization in Canada, MA dissertation, Brock University, 2023

09May23

Abstract: The initial settler colonization of Canada involved the implementation of the settler colonial Doctrine of Discovery on Indigenous lands to make them ‘open’ for white settlement and ownership, along with capitalism and heteropatriarchy to assert white settler dominance over Indigenous lands, cultures, and bodies. Although it has been over 500 years since first contact between white Europeans and Indigenous peoples in Canada, the ideologies that paved the way for white settlement in Canada are continually reproduced through social institutions, such as the legal system, to maintain settler domination. This thesis explicates the connections between settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy within Saskatchewan and Canadian law to analyze the commodification of Indigeneity as a tool for ongoing settler colonization. Grounded in a Métis feminist theoretical framework, I investigate how and why The Heritage Property Act (1979-80) steals and commodifies Indigenous cultural artifacts for settler government profit. Through a critical literature review, case study of the above-mentioned act, and Métis dreamwork, I identify two themes: the Settler Timeline and the Commodification of Indigeneity. Importantly, this thesis recognizes that many Indigenous individual and community identities evolve through links between the past and present, which Indigenous peoples reflect on to move into a good future. As such, cultural artifacts are paramount to cultural identity and continuity within Indigenous nations and communities. The findings of this thesis reveal that the ongoing settler conceptualization of Indigenous peoples as uncivil epistemically justifies the commodification of Indigenous cultural artifacts. This thesis also suggests that, just as decolonization within the settler colonial context necessarily requires the repatriation of all lands, it also requires the repatriation of all stolen and commodified Indigenous cultural artifacts.

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Settler colonial genocides target a whole lifeworld: Wanda Nyx June, Social Death with Nature: A Comparative Analysis of the Cambodian and Canadian Settler Genocides and Life-Death Worldings, PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

09May23

Abstract: To date, genocide studies has maintained certain asymmetric typologies that demarcate physical from cultural forms of destruction and gendered violence as distinct from homogenous narratives of mass physical violence. In this dissertation, I argue that assumptions underlying these binaries are rooted in anthropocentrism. In genocide studies this translates into a narrow focus on physical human existence and destruction that overlooks the complex and multiple ways through which an ethnic or cultural group imagines itself, maintains collective identity, and renegotiates its social relations in and through genocide, as part of a human-ecological assemblage. Furthermore, this limited focus obscures the gendered embodiment of genocidal violence and the depth to which gendered bodies harbour pain and trauma. To date, if gendered violence is noted, most often it is relegated as secondary to the preservation of human life. I transverse these asymmetries to examine the dynamism of group life and the ecological and gendered materialities and social relations that give meaning to the individual and group’s existence. Protecting human life will always be a significant focus of genocide studies and prevention. However, when we isolate human beings from the multiple relations that bring meaning to their lives, we miss the opportunity to more fully grasp what makes genocide possible, what genocide destroys, and the complex harms it leaves in its wake. In this dissertation, I examine Khmer Cambodian and Anishinaabeg and Cree collective identities as dynamic and evolving relational assemblages. By doing so, I open genocide studies to several insights from Indigenous and settler colonial studies and feminist new material theories: 1) An understanding of the group and its attempted destruction beyond anthropocentric terms; 2) A non-linear and dynamic genocidal temporality; 3) A more expansive understanding of and response to gendered and relational harms in genocide. Importantly, the key argument that I make in this dissertation is that genocidal destruction operates on multiple fronts; ecological and gendered materialities and social relations are mutually targeted in genocide—at times conjointly, at other times, unevenly. Therefore, this dissertation provides insight into an assemblage (rather than yet another asymmetric typology) of genocidal destruction.

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Settler reproductive history: Brianna Theobald, ‘Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97, 1, 2023, pp. 39-47

04May23

Excerpt: Even as the field of reproductive history dedicates greater attention to racial subjectivities and other forms of difference, attention to Native peoples and Indian Country remains limited; this relative absence persists despite Indigenous feminists’ frequent engagement with the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. The cause of such marginalization is not a complete mystery. The marginalization of Native reproductive histories reflects continuing patterns of Indigenous erasure in the context of U.S. settler colonialism and derives from the specificity of tribal nationhood, sovereignty, and Native nations’ trust relationship with the U.S. government, all of which defy tidy integration into the field’s existing narratives. It is also a product of the methodological challenges that these realities pose for nonspecialists. I wrote Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century in part to intervene in these trends. Published in 2019, Reproduction on the Reservation is the first book-length history of reproduction that centers Native American women. It contends that in a nation like the United States, colonialism is a vital frame for understanding histories of reproduction.

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Settler counterinsurgency (it’s scary): Bruno Seraphin, ‘Settler colonial counterinsurgency: Indigenous resistance and the more-than-state policing of #NoDAPL’, Security Dialogue, 2023

04May23

Abstract: In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror tactics, brutalizing Indigenous and allied water protectors associated with the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) on Standing Rock Lakota territory. This article takes COIN as an analytic to show that US settler colonialism is a multilateral, internally conflicted, and anxious mode of power. The settler state both depends upon and disavows anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence enacted by rogue civilian individuals and organizations, a phenomenon here termed ‘more-than-state policing’. The repression of #NoDAPL was not solely a boomerang by-product of the global war on terror but rather exposes an established infrastructure of settler colonial COIN intrinsic to US normal politics, in which Indigenous resistance and sovereignty are constructed as metastasizing, viral threats to settler colonial legitimacy. As modern COIN warfare has evolved from four centuries of North American settler colonial invasion and governance, settler colonial studies are key to grasping 21st-century topics of war, imperialism, securitization, resource extraction, and climate justice.

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Settler autochthonicity: Tyler Eliot Stuart, Paradoxes for the Settler Soul: The Ascetical Philosophy of Tim Lilburn, MA dissertation, University of Victoria, 2023

04May23

Abstract: This thesis will explore the prose of Tim Lilburn, particularly his trilogy of essay collections: Living In The WorldAsIf It Were Home, Going Home, and The Larger Conversation. These books are a record of Lilburn’s project of autochthonicity — an attempt to live undivided from the places he lives — and the challenges ofsuch a journey as a European settler on stolen Indigenous land. Lilburn’s approach to this endeavour, which he considers a process of decolonization, resuscitates European contemplative thought to remedy the sapiential poverty of white settler culture and identity. Throughout this thesis, I examine the epistemological significance of Lilburn’s retrieval of these European traditionsinto NorthAmerican colonial modernity — attending to what they reveal about the interior dispositions of white settler subjectivity and the cultural trappings of late capitalism. By engaging with the paradoxes coursing through Lilburn’s body of work — a linguistic form famousfor defying logic — I make a case for the importance of epistemic impasse, or aporia. That is, I argue that the peculiarity of Lilburn’s paradoxical thought, or the difficulty of grasping it, can, if one lets it, alert one to one’s own epistemic allegiances. And these allegiances, I will argue, have had devastating consequences not only for Indigenous peoples, but also for European settlers themselves. Ultimately, I argue that the paradoxical shape of Lilburn’s thought gestures toward the need for an ascetical, and therefore countercultural, knowledge.

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Settler bondage? Ana Stevenson, ‘”Tearing Off the Bonds”: Suffrage Visual Culture in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, 1890–1920’, Gender & History, 2023

04May23

Abstract: This article will examine how transpacific suffrage visual culture imagined and reimagined an artistic tradition centred
around the figure of the bound woman. White suffragists and anti-suffragists in Australia, New Zealand and the United States used the iconography of bonds, chains and whips to mediate the possibility of women’s enfranchisement. Haunted by the legacies of settler colonialism, suffrage cartoons directly and obliquely evoked the spectre of chattel slavery, convict transportation and incarceration alongside the elusive ideals of humanitarian reform. While anti-suffrage cartoons lamented the prospect of women’s enfranchisement, pro-suffrage cartoons appropriated this iconography primarily for the benefit of white women.

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From settler colonialism to genocide: Jürgen Zimmerer, From Windhoek to Auschwitz: Reflections on the colonial-Nationalsocialist nexus, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024

30Apr23

Description: Forty years prior to Nazi Germany’s Holocaust and the war of annihilation in Eastern Europe, German colonial troops committed what is arguably the first genocide of the Twentieth Century in German Southwest Africa, known today as Namibia. There, German troops murdered up to 80000 Herero and 20000 Nama as well as ensuring many more thousands perished in the desert and during their tenure as slave labourers in concentrations camps. During the last decade, a fierce debate has emerged regarding the genocide and its historical meaning within German 20th century history, particularly the extent to which the Herero and Nama genocide can be seen as a precursor to Nazi crimes. “From Windhoek to Auschwitz” examines the relationship between colonialism and the Holocaust and situates Nazi crimes firmly within the global history of mass violence and racist policies. The volume collects key texts about the multi-facetted relationship between (German) colonialism and Nazi policies of conquest and annihilation. It thereby documents the development of an argument that has changed the way we view the Nazi crimes by pointing to continuities and parallels, thereby offering a fresh, postcolonial perspective on the Third Reich.

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Settler society fiction: Avery Esford, ‘”The Legend of Captain Michael Grass”: The Logic of Elimination and Loyalist Myth-making in Upper Canada, 1783-84’, Ontario History, 115, 1, 2023, pp. 1-20

30Apr23

Abstract: This article examines the founding myth for the community of Kingston, Ontario which holds that Associated Loyalist Michael Grass founded the city after he led eight companies of refugees from New York to Cataraqui (Kingston) in 1783-84. The legend is a “settler society fiction”, an invented founding narrative that privileges Loyalist history at the expense of other communities including the Indigenous Mississauga. Comparing the legend and documents from Grass’s lifetime, shows that the Indigenous presence at Cataraqui has been effectively eliminated. The legend justifies the dispossession of the local Mississauga, accounts for the sudden presence of White settlers on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and perpetuates a settler society fiction.

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Settler colonial gendered violence: Jerry Flores Andrea Román Alfaro, ‘Building the Settler Colonial Order: Police (In)Actions in Response to Violence Against Indigenous Women in “Canada”‘, Gender & Society, 2023

30Apr23

Abstract: In this article we focus on missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people in “Canada.” We theorize narratives that police employ to respond to this violence. Using a broad data sample of testimonies across “Canada,” this article contributes to understanding how police (in)actions make sense of, justify, and dismiss violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. We draw from 48 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Indigenous peoples in Toronto and other “Canadian” cities and 219 testimonies from the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG). The analysis finds that police repeatedly use similar frames (topics), styles (linguistic and behavioral strategies), and storylines (narratives) to respond to violence against Indigenous peoples. While framing Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people as deviants helps police make sense of and explain violence against them, the use of verbal and behavioral strategies (indifference, callousness, and lack of information) and storylines (“they were [insert pathologizing frame]” and “there’s nothing we can do”) allows police to dismiss and justify acts of violence. We argue that the frames, styles, and storylines employed by police perpetuate violence. Police (in)actions are fundamental to achieving settler colonialism’s ideological and material dimensions.

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Contrapuntal settler colonialism: Neil L. B. Kohlmann, Making Political Music: Contrapuntal Constitutionalism and Indigenous-Settler Relations, MA dissertation, University of Victoria, 2023

30Apr23

Abstract: This thesis applies Edward Said’s thought to Canadian settler colonialism. I draw upon Said’s idea of contrapuntal reading to understand settler colonialism as an interdependent and coconstitutive relationship between domination and resistance. Contrapuntal refers to counterpoint in music, where two or more distinct melodic lines occur simultaneously. Each line is independent as a musical phrase but sounds out interdependently in the composition as a whole. I use this contrapuntal approach as a method of analysis and as the foundation for a normative practice of reimagining and rebuilding political community. Using contrapuntal analysis, I examine the installation ceremony of Mary Simon as the Governor General of Canada and the installation ceremony of Kevin Hall as the President of the University of Victoria to elucidate the limits of the foundational logic that underpins these attempts to constitute political community. I then consider potential alternative constitutional perspectives, drawn from Indigenous constitutionalisms, that resist and do not rely on settler colonial domination. Contrapuntal constitutionalism, the outline of a political practice for Indigenous-settler relations, grows out of what my analysis discloses. By extending Said’s use of counterpoint, in conjunction with Indigenous, prefigurative, and music theories, I contend with what a contrapuntal approach to anti-colonial constitutional politics could look like. The goal of this thesis is threefold: to make the case for the importance of Said’s thought to understanding the present manifestations of Canadian settler colonialism; to illuminate the dominating tendencies of Canadian political community dressed in the guise of palliative narratives of multicultural harmony; and to disclose an alternative constitutional relationship that does not further entrench domination as necessary and inevitable.

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