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Settler colonialism is not healthy: Yara Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh, David Mills, Osama Tanous, Bram Wispelwey, ‘Reassembling the Pieces: Settler Colonialism and the Reconception of Palestinian Health’, Health and Human Rights Journal, 24, 2, 2022, pp. 229-235

13Dec22

Abstract: In health as in many disciplines, too often the perspectives and framings of the very populations in question are obscured in favor of staid and acceptable discourses born out of the Global North and its attendant neocolonial and settler-colonial logics. Indigenous scholars and practitioners across the globe have long been disregarded when assessing, examining, and tending to their own health and well-being. The health issues of Indigenous and otherwise marginalized and racialized populations are thus frequently analyzed without sufficient historical or political context, rendering them as mere victims of humanitarian misfortune rather than as groups that are deliberately harmed and discounted in service of broader political, and often territorial, aims. So while the fragmentation of the Palestinian people and land is now increasingly understood to be the legacy of more than a century of Zionist settler colonialism, the hegemonic discourses on Palestinian health often perpetuate their dismemberment in eliding this history and their ongoing dispossession.


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Settler colonialism in Tibet: Shaurir Ramanujan, ‘Reclaiming the Land of the Snows: Analyzing Chinese Settler Colonialism in Tibet’, The Columbia Journal of Asia, 1, 2, 2022, pp. 29-36

13Dec22

Excerpt: While critiques of empire are traditionally limited within Eurocentric contexts, it is this myopic vision that artificially constrains the application of settler colonialism as an analytic tool to understand state conflict beyond the Western sphere. Through examining the implementation of settler tactics such as economic development, the rhetoric of unification, and technological censorship, I argue that the Chinese government’s colonial actions in Tibet constitute and expand the logic of elimination […].


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Transindigeneity as liberation: Micaela Sahhar, ‘From Palestine to Country: Transcultural exchange beyond the settler-colony’, Artlink, 42, 3, 2022, pp. 36-40

11Dec22

Abstract: In 1967, my grandfather had been displaced for nineteen years and an Australian citizen for eleven of those. It was a(nother) painful year to be a Palestinian: the so-called six-day-war adding Naksa (setback) to Nakba (catastrophe). It was also the year my Pa was brought into acute confrontation with the Australian state, having acquired the right, and indeed obligation, to vote in the referendum to change the constitutional exclusion of First Nations peoples. But if Pa had to vote through the state, his views were less concerned with its violent intercession than with the experience of people oppressed by it. Apparently, Pa made one definitive pronouncement on that ballot: ‘I see how it is here, it’s the same as for us; the owners of this place are not wanted and they are not welcome in their own land’.


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Indigeneity as liberation: Rohan Chopra, ‘Indigeneity, Resistance, and Imagination: Palestinian Liberation as Decolonial Praxis’, Columbia Journal of Asia, 1, 1, 2022

11Dec22

Abstract: Zionist settler colonialism is grounded in the interoperating oppressive structures of capitalism, heteropatriarchy and racism. These function alongside Zionist narratives to construct a regressive “native” whose dispossession is justified to realise a Zionist goal of an ethnic nation-state, fashioned after its Euro-American counterparts. This paper comprehends Palestinian resistance to its colonisation as embedded in the opposition to these global oppressive structures, relating them to anti-colonialism movements across the world. Not just this, but Palestinian resistance is also grounded in its dreams of emancipation from these structures. These liberating imaginations draw upon indigenous knowledge and ties to the land, community and body, and in the process, reconstitute the structures on which this world is built. Through this, the paper aims to bring together a vast corpus of literature on Palestine to argue that in combining resistance, liberation and indigeneity, these imaginations present a truly “decolonial” vision for the world.


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Archival sovereignty against settler colonialism: Krystal Payne, ‘Archival Harm Reduction: A Theoretical Framework for Utilizing Harm-Reduction Concepts in Archival Practice’, Archivaria, 94, 2022

09Dec22

Abstract: Canadian archives arose from and help maintain white supremacist and settler-colonial frameworks. The inequitable power relations that exist in archives and archival practices contribute to the harms done to Indigenous people and communities;1 they do so through the ongoing entrenchment of settler colonialism and the participation in extractive colonialism that occur within the processes of archiving and through the systemic racism that comes along with these processes. This article lays out the beginnings of a theoretical framework for an archival harm-reduction approach for managing records by, about, and for Indigenous people and communities that are held in settler archival institutions and managed by settler archivists. Built upon an explicit acknowledgement of the harm that can occur within archives and through archival practices, and connecting public health harm-reduction concepts with Indigenous scholars’ ideas around relationality and power, this framework conceptualizes a process for shifting archival power by building relationships to ensure that the people and communities that records are about or from whom records originate are meaningfully involved in the stewardship of such records. The core harmreduction concept of involving people and communities as the experts in their own lives (and records) is extended to archival practice – touching on topics such as consent, agency, autonomy, and social justice as well as on practices that are community-based, participatory, and reparative – helping to further articulate a person-centred archival theory and practice and illuminating the fact that settler archives cannot simply redescribe their way out of white supremacy.


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Land methodology and sovereignty against settler colonialism: Lauren J. King, Kendra E. Fortin, Brendan Belanger, Bryan S. R. Grimwood, Łútsël K’e Dene First Nation, ‘Land-based methodologies and disrupting settler colonial legacies in parks and protected areas: lessons from Tracking Change’, Leisure/Loisir, 2022

09Dec22

Abstract: This paper examines how land-based methodologies in parks and protected areas can serve Indigenous priorities while challenging settler colonial logics and conventional aims of Eurocentric research. We report on collaborative research with the Łútsël K’é Dene First Nation (Northwest Territories) as part of a six-year (2016–2021) international partnership project entitled Tracking Change. Focus is placed on a multi-day canoe journey along an ancestral water route within Thaidene Nene National Park Reserve. We interpret lessons learned during the canoe trip to underscore how land-based methodologies prioritize outcomes of observing change, storying land, and fostering community capacities. Accordingly, land-based methodologies focus less on accumulating knowledge or claiming truths, and more on facilitating and transmitting Indigenous knowledges, histories, relations, and practices. Incorporating land-based methodologies into parks and protected areas research can therefore amplify Indigenous contributions to management and interpretation discourses and support the critical project of decolonizing the leisure field.


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Educational sovereignty against settler colonialism: Archie Thomas, ‘”We wanted to be boss”: self-determination, Indigenous governance and the Yipirinya School’, Journal of Educational Administration and History

09Dec22

Abstract: Much historical scholarship on Indigenous education policy focuses on attempts to assimilate Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, educational policy debates tend to focus on achievement, framed by deficit. Rarely considered are strategic political actions by Indigenous groups to remodel schooling. This paper examines how Indigenous groups have embraced opportunities to construct new Indigenous futures through schooling, and have built modern Indigenous governance in the process. Through a case study focusing on the successful effort to establish the Indigenous-controlled Yipirinya School for town camp children in Alice Springs (Mparntwe), Australia, between 1976-1983, I show how Indigenous educators and their allies built community-controlled schooling to support a self-governed multicultural Indigenous community. On reclaimed Indigenous land, these visionaries overtly challenged the constraints of settler colonial state-led policies of self-determination and later self-management. They were central to constituting a new Indigenous political leadership in Alice Springs which saw control of schooling as central to Indigenous futures.


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On Indigeneity without Blackness: Jodi A. Byrd, ‘Love and Secrets’, Southern Cultures, 28, 3, 2022, pp. 70-73

06Dec22

Abstract: This essay looks at Chickasaw anti-Blackness within experiences of settler colonialism, removal, and slavery in the South as well as Chickasaw refusals to address the complicities of slave-owning in the nation. Drawing on the author’s own family history to think through the possibilities and failures to link Indigeneity and slavery, the essay considers what is inherited and what is lost in the violences of dispossession.


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Settler denial and denial about settlers: Saree Makdisi, Tolerance Is a WastelandPalestine and the Culture of Denial, University of California Press, 2022

06Dec22

Description: The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals. Tolerance Is a Wasteland argues that the key to this miraculous act of political alchemy is a very specific form of denial. Here the Palestinian presence in, and claim to, Palestine is not simply refused or covered up, but negated in such a way that the act of denial is itself denied. The effects of destruction and repression are reframed, inverted into affirmations of liberal virtues that can be passionately championed. In Tolerance Is a Wasteland, Saree Makdisi explores many such acts of affirmation and denial in a range of venues: from the haunted landscape of thickly planted forests covering the ruins of Palestinian villages forcibly depopulated in 1948; to the theater of “pinkwashing” as Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of cultural inclusion; to the so-called Museum of Tolerance being built on top of the ruins of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, which was methodically desecrated in order to clear the space for this monument to “human dignity.” Tolerance Is a Wasteland reveals the system of emotional investments and curated perceptions that makes this massive project of cognitive dissonance possible.


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Dispossessory gifts: Peter Kent-Stoll, ‘Dispossessory Citizenship: The Settler Colonial State and the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Relocation Program, 1952–1972’, Social Problems, 2022

06Dec22

Abstract: Through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) relocation program starting in 1952, the United States sought to terminate federal trust restrictions for American Indians and while relocating reservation and rural-residing Indigenous people to cities to be assimilated into the American “mainstream.” I analyze the BIA’s program as part of the specifically settler colonial structure of the U.S. state. Using primary and secondary sources, I ask what explains the BIA’s shifting spatial strategies and imaginaries from the rise of the relocation program to its demise? The BIA’s project derided reservations as fiscal burdens, depicted the postwar city as a place of “Indian freedom,” engaged in gendered surveillance of Indigenous families, and negated Indigenous peoples’ histories in U.S. cities. As the program ended, the BIA shifted rhetoric from assimilation to self-determination to maintain the settler colonial relation while paying lip service to critiques of the colonial tactics of relocation. These different moments of the relocation project articulated a type of dispossessory citizenship as a racial and empire state strategy of enacting and justifying settler colonialism. This work analyzes the settler colonial dimensions of the state and its technologies of violence and territory used when it presents itself as supposedly moving past its colonial past.


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