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What does an Indigenous voice to a settler colonial parliament exactly does? Roger Davis, ‘More than a ‘voice’: Indigenous transmission in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2022

26Nov22

Abstract: The Uluru Statement (2017) has recently focused attention on Indigenous state relations as an Indigenous ‘voice’ to government. For decades, Indigenous peoples in Australia have sought a meaningful voice in settler state environmental planning and management regimes, with limited success. Little attention has been paid to what constitutes an effective Indigenous voice. I conceptualise Australian Indigenous environmental planning and management as a dual deliberative system where Indigenous groups must transmit their messages into settler institutions and processes. I analyse the democratic quality of this transmission between two Indigenous deliberative forums, Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations and the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations and the commonwealth Murray-Darling Basin Authority in developing the controversial Murray-Darling Basin Plan (2012). These deliberative forums improve the transmission quality of Indigenous environmental discourses. They are more than a voice; they are a democratic innovation which goes beyond the limits of state ‘inclusion’ of Indigenous environmental values.


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Financialisation as settler colonialism: Elora Lee Raymond, ‘The role of the diaspora: malaga, vā, and contesting the financialization of customary land in Samoa’, Urban Geography, 2022

26Nov22

Abstract: The settler-colonial city has been described in relative isolation, detached from the global metropole, intent on internal enrichment through the deterritorialization of Indigenous people. This urban formation deploys familiar spatial techniques: legal borders, economic regions, and segregated enclaves. Yet for many Indigenous peoples, the relationship to land is not juridical, economic, nor socio-racial, it is genealogical. These genealogical ties to land extend the boundaries of settler-colonialism – and resistance to it – beyond the islands, across diasporic space. Decolonial Pacific studies describe a geography resistance to land reform among Indigenous and immigrant Pacific Islanders which exceeds and overspills the settler-colonial city. Diasporic space – moving through and overspilling the settler-colonial city – is the spatial context for understanding resistance to customary land reform in Samoa and the struggles of other Pacific Islanders against settler-colonial processes of dispossession.


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‘Bad ecosex’ against settler colonialism? Astrida Neimanis, ‘Toxic Erotics and Bad Ecosex at Windermere Basin’, Environmental Humanities, 14, 3, 2022, pp. 699-717

26Nov22

Abstract: How do settler colonialism, control of women’s and differently gendered bodies, sex, industry, pollution—but also pleasure, love, care, desire, bodily autonomy, and survival—cleave together and apart in the inland wetland of Windermere Basin park? Starting with this question, this article explores my own attraction to this tiny place in postindustrial and settler colonial Hamilton, Ontario. I am curious about what it can teach us about the complex entanglements of these things, and the toxic desires that are both enabled and foreclosed by the relations that gather here. In the first section, I briefly rehearse the basin’s toxic history and, guided by Audre Lorde’s definition of erotics and Catriona Sandilands formative work on queer ecologies, my own desirous attachments to the life it nonetheless sustains. The next section reveals how, in the context of settler colonialism and climate catastrophe, these erotics are queerly tangled in questions of more-than-human gender, sex, and reproduction, too, in ways that invite a capacious and multivalent understanding of reproductive justice. The final section examines the performance art of white settler ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, but sets this alongside a performance by Vanessa Dion Fletcher at Windermere, in order to insist on a version of ecosexual erotics that, while joyous, remains imbricated in fraught histories, complicity, and an inalienable attention to what Michif scholar Max Liboiron parses as “differences and obligations.” Taking a cue from settler feminist artist and scholar Lindsay Kelley, I refer to this as “bad ecosex.” In its refusal of purity, bad ecosex holds the trouble of contemporary ecological relations together with the pleasurable power of erotics to build a politics of change grounded in feeling deeply.


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Honorary whiteness and honorary ignorance extend settler colonialism: Babalwa Sibango, ‘Honorary Whiteness: Delusions of Racial Hierarchy’, Filosofia Theoretica, 11, 3, 2022, pp. 51-66

26Nov22

Abstract: As a country with a history of settler-colonialism, the land question in South Africa remains one of the critical issues of redress that is highly contested. Furthermore, opinions on the land question tend to be divided along racial lines. This paper uses white ignorance as a theoretical framework to explain these polarised views on the land question in South Africa post-1994. The paper also uses the concept of honorary whiteness/brownness to explain how differences among ‘people of colour’ serve to sustain a hierarchical racial order in which whites remain the ultimate beneficiaries. While research on white ignorance mainly focuses on the socio-psychological and material benefits of white ignorance for whites, this paper argues that those classified as honorary white or ‘brown’ also benefit, albeit minimally, from endorsing willful white ignorance of past and present racial atrocities.


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Repressive authenticity at work? Michel Bouchard, Sébastien Malette, Jo-Anne Muise Lawless, ‘Academia, Twitter wars, and suffocating social justice in Canada: the case of unrecognised Indigenous peoples’, Dialectical Anthropology, 2022

26Nov22

Abstract: The “woke movement” is now under fire globally. Seeking to right social injustice and battle racism, the woke movement has laudable intentions, but its implementation can exacerbate social inequalities. In the case of Canada, a social movement seeks to ferret out “Pretendians” or those White individuals deemed to be falsely assuming, and thus appropriating, Indigenous identity. Though this movement may seem righteous, the problem arises that individuals targeted are those who are Non-Status Indians and have yet to be recognised by the state, as well as Métis (or mixed-heritage people) whose historical communities have yet to be sanctioned by governments or courts, and who are also portrayed as being “Fétis” or fake Métis. Our challenge as researchers is to do the deep ethnographic, historical, and legal research to provide a nuanced understanding of indigeneity that does not constrain it solely to colonial models as the case studies provided will demonstrate.


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The ownership of territory: Wybren Nooitgedagt, Borja Martinović, Maykel Verkuyten, Kumar Yogeeswaran, ‘Who owns the land? Territorial ownership understandings and intergroup relations in a settler society’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2022

26Nov22

Abstract: Conflicts over the ownership of territory have shaped intergroup relations between indigenous and nonindigenous groups in settler societies. Using latent profile analysis, we found four different subgroups of individuals among a sample of European New Zealanders based on their perceived ingroup (NZ European) and outgroup (Māori) ownership. Most people (75.9%) perceived shared territorial ownership, but there were also individuals predominantly recognizing ingroup ownership (8.2%), outgroup ownership (6.4%), or no territorial ownership (9.4%). These subgroups differed in meaningful ways in their support for principles of ownership, perceived rights and responsibilities, compensation for Māori, and support for strict immigration policies.


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Milk colonialism as settler colonialism: Denisa Krasna, ‘Animal Colonialismin North America: Milk colonialism, environmental racism, and Indigenous Veganism’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae Studia Territoralia, 1, 2022, pp. 61-90

26Nov22

Abstract: Combining insights from postcolonialism, ecofeminism, and critical animal studies, this article focuses on the colonial experience of nonhuman animals in North America whose exploitation has been integral to the colonial expansionist project. By tracing the history of displacement of Indigenous populations due to animal agriculture, animal colonialism is also linked to mass killing of free-living animals and to environmental degradation. Furthermore, the article delineates the entangled oppression of Indigenous women’s and nonhuman animals’ bodies that can be theorized as colonized territories, exploited for profit via the control of their reproductive cycles. To protest the violent industrial animal farming practices that involve torture, slaughter, and mass dairying and are built on racist rhetoric, some Indigenous people adopt contextual Indigenous veganism as an act of political resistance.


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The settler writes back: Kathryn Carter, ‘Transatlantic Letters and Settler Identities: Jane White Writes to Ireland, 1849–1865’, The Journal of Epistolary Studies, 3, 1, 2022, pp. 5-16

26Nov22

Abstract: This article reads one side of a transatlantic correspondence, that of Irish emigrant Jane White, who relocated to Canada in 1849, during a time of high migration from Ireland to Canada. The point of reading her one-sided correspondence is because it challenges scholars in both material and theoretical ways. Jane’s letters are a richly complicated source for such an undertaking, allowing readers to assess the impact of material circumstances and the “mechanics of colonization” as they shape and inform the epistolary platform upon which Jane White rehearses Protestant and middle-class identities. These identity affiliations—which act as connective tissue to the land of her birth, and which she reinforces in letter writing—are concretely tied to the processes of colonization and settlement, but complicated by being Irish. Despite the relative comfort of her family, Jane’s letters to Eleanor Wallace reveal a young Irish woman struggling to maintain her identity in the face of prejudice. The following examination of her letters suggests ways of situating the personal letter in settler histories by focusing on Jane White’s engagement with questions of identity, social status, and colonial relations within the epistolarium, the discursive world that is shaped by and created within the dialogic field of the letter and the material factors of its creation.


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Settler colonial famine: Alana Mann, ‘The Empty Food Bowl: Discourse Disconnection of Australian Agriculture’, Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris, Bernardo Mançano Fernandes (eds), Agriculture, Environment and Development, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 159-180

25Nov22

Abstract: In 1997 John Wilson wrote that “while the hunger of Aboriginal Australians continues to be both a national and international scandal, hunger experienced by many other Australians is best described as hidden or silent hunger, not readily acknowledged publicly”. Sadly, this is still the case. Against the backdrop of high rates of local food insecurity, worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic and the failure of the just-in-time logic of global supply chains, Australian farmers and other food producers are under increasing pressure to meet the needs of both distant and local markets under volatile trade and environmental conditions. Yet the nation lacks a long-term vision that balances agricultural exports with domestic food security and, for Aboriginal people dispossessed of their homelands and access to productive resources, the impacts of white settler colonialism persist.


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Exogene and Indigene: Andonis Piperoglou, Zora Simic, ‘Their Own Perceptions: Non-Anglo Migrants and Aboriginal Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 53, 4, 2022, pp. 519-530

22Nov22

Excerpt: Such interventions variously ‘triangulate’ historical analysis in Australia, through a focus on historicising one of three configurations in particular, encounters and relationships between non-Anglo/ethnicised settlers and Indigenous peoples. Of the three dynamics of cultural relations and interactions in settler colonial societies – the other two being relationships between Anglo settlers and Indigenous peoples and between Anglo settlers and non-Anglo/ethnicised settlers – the non-Anglo migrant and Aboriginal Australia configuration has been the least examined. Yet, as this themed issue showcases, focusing on this aspect of the triangular dynamic of Australian colonial history reveals numerous connections in which histories of empire, colonialism, migration, race, labour, and identity intersect and overlap.


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