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Floating settlers! Elizabeth Walsh, ‘Like Ice Floes’: Iñupiaq Sovereignty and Settler Migration on Alaska’s North Slope, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2022

11Apr23

Abstract: My dissertation examines relations between Iñupiat in the village of Utqiaġvik on Alaska’s North Slope and a number of non-Iñupiat transient workers who, enticed by generous salaries, have temporarily relocated there. A focus of my study is the North Slope Borough, founded by Iñupiat to preserve their political autonomy and funded by taxes collected on the nearby Prudhoe Bay oil fields. My research tests and refines theoretical frameworks concerning settler colonialism. I draw on political, economic, and environmental literatures in sociocultural anthropology, as well as Native American and Indigenous studies and interdisciplinary settler colonial studies, to show how Iñupiat and non-Iñupiat village residents engage in day-to-day interactions guided by differing economic motivations and different understandings of community, place, and value. By working in an Indigenous community with both Iñupiat and non-Iñupiat, my research adds contemporary, on-the-ground, ethnographic insight into the ways in which individuals’ perspectives and attitudes are shaped by settler colonial ideologies as they are experienced in the present. I explicitly locate the origins of attitudes and dispositions of both non-Iñupiat transient workers and Iñupiat in the settler colonial past, while also tracing how these norms have endured structurally into the present. Long-term participant observation has allowed me to explore the ways in which socio-political norms are felt in, and inform, everyday life. In the first two chapters, I contextualize contemporary transient worker passage through the village within a history of colonial comings and goings to the region initiated by European explorers and Yankee whalers pursuing similar economic goals. I locate Native Alaska, the North Slope, and Utqiaġvik within the legal and political frameworks of United States settler colonialism and demonstrate that contemporary relations among non-Iñupiat transient workers and Alaska Natives are grounded in norms and understandings derived from these frameworks. In the remaining chapters, I describe the findings of my ethnographic research. I detail how many economically motivated transient worker employees at Iḷisaġvik College, a tribal college founded to provide local, culturally informed higher education, socially segregate themselves from the majority-Iñupiat community. I show how their ethical, social, and political commitments to fellow residents and the Arctic landscape are informed by the settler colonial and capitalist ideological structures familiar to them. This puts them at odds with Iñupiat, for whom the ethical and the economic, the individual and the community, are all connected through the Iñupiaq value of sharing and the hunting and community-wide distribution of the bowhead whale.


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Settler semiotics: Sonja Dobroski, ‘The Feathered Headdress: Settler Semiotics, US National Myth, and the Legacy of Colonized Artifacts’, in Benjamin Abrams, Peter Gardner (eds), Symbolic Objects in Contentious Politics, University of Michigan Press, 2023, pp. 101-126

11Apr23

Excerpt: On February 2, 2020, the Kansas City Chiefs played the San Francisco 49ers in the 54th Super Bowl, the annual apex event of American football. Thousands of fans entered the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Florida, in support of their respective teams. America’s devoted football aficionados wear a wide variety of adornments to identify themselves as fans of their chosen team. For instance, the Green Bay Packers wear giant foam cheese heads, while Minnesota Vikings fans don horned helmets. In the 54th Super Bowl, as fans screamed, cried, and clutched one another, waves of feathers could be seen in the stadium.


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Naming is settler sovereignty: Neil Lindsay, Robin Kearns, ‘The New Zealand Geographic Board and the Contested Nature of Place Names in New Zealand’, in Gerry O’Reilly (ed.), Place Naming, Identities and Geography: Critical Perspectives in a Globalizing and Standardizing World, Springer, 2023, pp. 241-257

11Apr23

Abstract: Processes of naming the landscape are inherently political as how, why, and what names are used can create conflict between competing groups, beliefs or ideas. This chapter examines place names in New Zealand and how they are implemented and changed. In doing so, we detail the work of the New Zealand Geographic Board Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa and how decisions for place names are made. We assert that naming practices in New Zealand have evolved in response to social and political shifts since the 1970s particularly with changes in attitude towards restoring indigenous Māori rights and the importance of place names as ‘taonga’ (treasures), giving practical and tangible effect to the Treaty of Waitangi principles of participation, protection and partnership. We detail the key issues surrounding the politics of place names in New Zealand, using case studies of recent place name changes. We also examine how the New Zealand Geographic Board reflects broader changes to New Zealand society.


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For the settler, every Indigenous person is a terrorist: Joanne Barker, Red ScareThe State’s Indigenous Terrorist, University of California Press, 2021

11Apr23

Description: How the rhetoric of terrorism has been used against high-profile movements to justify the oppression and suppression of Indigenous activists. New Indigenous movements are gaining traction in North America: the Missing and Murdered Women and Idle No More movements in Canada, and the Native Lives Matter and NoDAPL movements in the United States. These do not represent new demands for social justice and treaty rights, which Indigenous groups have sought for centuries. But owing to the extraordinary visibility of contemporary activism, Indigenous people have been newly cast as terrorists—a designation that justifies severe measures of policing, exploitation, and violence. Red Scare investigates the intersectional scope of these four movements and the broader context of the treatment of Indigenous social justice movements as threats to neoliberal and imperialist social orders. In Red Scare, Joanne Barker shows how US and Canadian leaders leverage the fear-driven discourses of terrorism to allow for extreme responses to Indigenous activists, framing them as threats to social stability and national security. The alignment of Indigenous movements with broader struggles against sexual, police, and environmental violence puts them at the forefront of new intersectional solidarities in prominent ways. The activist-as-terrorist framing is cropping up everywhere, but the historical and political complexities of Indigenous movements and state responses are unique. Indigenous criticisms of state policy, resource extraction and contamination, intense surveillance, and neoliberal values are met with outsized and shocking measures of militarized policing, environmental harm, and sexual violence. Red Scare provides students and readers with a concise and thorough survey of these movements and their links to broader organizing; the common threads of historical violence against Indigenous people; and the relevant alternatives we can find in Indigenous forms of governance and relationality.


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When eviction is settler colonial: Sarah Buhler, Patricia Barkaskas, ‘The Colonialism of Eviction’, Journal of Law and Social Policy, 36, 2023, pp. 23-43

08Apr23

Abstract: Very little scholarship has specifically considered the phenomenon of eviction as a colonial process, or examined the role of the eviction legal system in reproducing colonial structures and relations. Our aim in this article is to address this gap and
thereby extend to the eviction legal system context the work of scholars who have theorized the colonialism of the criminal justice, child welfare, and carceral systems. This article begins with an overview of current issues relating to urban Indigenous housing in Canada. The next section introduces Indigenous concepts of home and homelessness, which are distinct from dominant understandings. We then place the discussion within the larger context of settler colonialism and critiques of this relation of power. We look specifically at Indigenous conceptions of home and homelessness, as well as how settler colonialism has shaped dominant ideas about property and ownership that underlie the right to evict in Canadian law. The paper then turns to a discussion of how the eviction legal system functions in a “classical” colonial sense to both destabilize and dispossess Indigenous families, and to reinscribe settler claims to property. Fundamentally, we believe there is a need for research and storytelling about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and eviction legal systems in Canada, and we think there is room to imagine decolonizing the eviction legal system.


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The poetic importance of Indigenous life against settler death: Khadija El Alaoui, Maura Pilotti, ‘Laudable Madness: Seizing Life from the Teeth of Death’, Interventions, 2023

08Apr23

Abstract: This essay zooms in on the story of the Palestinian body condemned to suffer unspeakable injustices so that a system based on inequity keeps working for the few. It relies on poetic texts written or performed by those whose bodies are controlled by the interrelated forces of settler colonialism, authoritarianism, and imperialism. The storms these forces unleash and the prices they exact in terms of human life cement the condition of the body whose life bears witness to the fall of justice. The essay argues that these poets practice what we would like to call “seizing life from the teeth of death” wherein their determination to fight oppression exceeds national and regional boundaries to embrace and learn from the indigenous nations in the United States.


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Resurgence vs. Reconciliation: Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, Aimée Craft, Hōkūlani K. Aikau (eds), Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation, University of Toronto Press, 2023

08Apr23

Description: What would Indigenous resurgence look like if the parameters were not set with a focus on the state, settlers, or an achievement of reconciliation? Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation explores the central concerns and challenges facing Indigenous nations in their resurgence efforts, while also mapping the gaps and limitations of both reconciliation and resurgence frameworks. The essays in this collection centre the work of Indigenous communities, knowledge, and strategies for resurgence and, where appropriate, reconciliation. The book challenges narrow interpretations of indigeneity and resurgence, asking readers to take up a critical analysis of how settler colonial and heteronormative framings have infiltrated our own ways of relating to our selves, one another, and to place. The authors seek to (re)claim Indigenous relationships to the political and offer critical self-reflection to ensure Indigenous resurgence efforts do not reproduce the very conditions and contexts from which liberation is sought. Illuminating the interconnectivity between and across life in all its forms, this important collection calls on readers to think expansively and critically about Indigenous resurgence in an age of reconciliation.


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Playful settler colonialists: Thomas Lecaque, ‘Against the Grain? Native Farming Practices and Settler-Colonial Imaginations in Empire: Total War’, Age of Revolutions, 27/03/23

08Apr23

Excerpt: All of this is, of course, a representation of ongoing white supremacist mythologies, the narrative of settler-colonialism that demands replacement of indigenous peoples—much like in the game itself. Native groups are put in place only to die. Quests are given to destroy them. Playing as them is impossible. 


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On the Indigenous origins of settler colonial studies: Kēhaulani Vaughn, ‘The Slyly Reproductive Lessons of Haunani-Kay Trask’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46, 1, 2023, pp. 99-113

08Apr23

Excerpt: In her seminal work, Haunani-Kay Trask (HKT) brilliantly named and articulated the contours of what we call settler colonial violence and laid the important groundwork for the theorization of Indigenous feminisms. Trask’s influential scholarship is accessible and clear, and written years before the aforementioned fields became acceptable in current scholarship. Trask’s definition of settler colonialism emphasizes the need to identify who is a Native and who is a settler in any locale and the responsibility to do so for future generations. Emphasizing the genealogical caretakers in a given place, Trask contests Native erasure in settler colonial societies.


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Theological assessments of settler colonialism: Marthie Momberg, ‘Apartheid then and now – where are we heading? The case of Israel’, Stellenbosch Theological Journal, 9, 3, 2023, pp. 1-19

06Apr23

Excerpt: These stark ecclesial differences prompted the writing of this article. The questions churches face is whether or not Israel has an apartheid regime, and how to respond. My aim is to critically assess the possibility of Israel as an apartheid regime and to construct knowledge for critical theological discernment. The interdisciplinary research in the field of theological ethics offered here starts with a brief overview of the influence of Zionism on theological views. I then contextualise the concepts “ethnic cleansing”, “occupied” and “settler-colonialism” to argue that …


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