settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial promises: John Truden, Indigenous-Settler Partnerships in the American West, 1875-1975, PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2023

16Mar23

Abstract: Between Reconstruction and the early Cold War, Indigenous communities in Oklahoma faced an existential crisis. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States applied intense pressure on Indigenous communities in the path of US settlers to relocate to Indian Territory, an unincorporated US territory at the center of the continent. US officials offered the “promise” – as US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch famously termed it in his groundbreaking opinion for McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) – that Indian Territory would be Indigenous land forever. In 1889, those same officials reversed themselves and began opening parts of the territory to American settlers. Faced with disaster and bereft of resources, many Indigenous people formed strategic relationships with White settlers to survive and thrive in an otherwise hostile environment. Drawing stories and perspectives from Comanche, Southern Cheyenne, Cherokee, Absentee Shawnee, Choctaw, Seminole, Kanza, Citizen Band Potawatomi, Chickasaw, Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek), Mississippi Choctaw, Sac and Fox, Kiowa, Plains Apache, Kansas Kickapoo, and Prairie Band Potawatomi communities, this dissertation follows a suppression and resurgence of Indigenous sovereignty across Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, World War II, the early Cold War, and finally the Red Power era. Over this broad swath of time, Indigenous-settler relationships varied in scope and scale, evolved, and were shaped by race, class, gender, and a host of other factors. Gradually, these partnerships became more sophisticated and involved larger groups of people. Still, Indigenous-settler relationships were never ideal; Indigenous people formed ties with White settlers as a stand in solution after the federal government suppressed their systems of self-governance during Reconstruction. Until they were able to rebuild their tribal governments, they did the best they could with the resources that they had. With the assistance of their allies, Indigenous communities in Oklahoma revitalized their governments from the 1970s onward but retained a skillset of making alliances.

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The secret life of terra nullius: Thomas H. Ford, Justin Clemens, Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius, Melbourne University Press, 2023

16Mar23

Description: What does the first poetry in Australia, written by the Judge who declared the land terra nullius, tell us about the singular nature of colonialism here? On 24 February 1817, Barron Field sailed into Sydney Harbour on the convict transport Lord Melville to a ceremonial thirteen-gun salute. He was there as the new Judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature in New South Wales – the highest legal authority in the turbulent colony. Energetic and gregarious, Field immediately set about impressing his vision of a future Australia as a liberal and prosperous nation. He courted the colony’s leading figures, engaged in scientific research and even founded Australia’s first bank. He also wrote poetry: in 1819, he published First Fruits of Australian Poetry, the first book of poems ever printed in the country. In England, Field had been the theatre critic for The Times, and a friend of such major Romantic writers as William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt. In New South Wales, he saw the chance to become a major figure himself, someone who could shape culture and society in enduring ways. Founding Australian poetry was part of that ambition; so too was law. Asked to determine whether Governor Macquarie had authority to impose taxes in the colony, Field issued a fateful judgement that established, for the first time, what is now called terra nullius. This book is an extraordinary reconstruction of the circumstances and implications of Field’s actions in New South Wales using an original and revealing method: the close reading of his poetry.

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Exogenous ‘out of placers’, Indigenous ‘out of timers’: Juliana Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements, University of North Carolina Press, 2022

16Mar23

Description: As the enduring “last frontier,” Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as “out of place” and Alaska Natives as “out of time.” Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indigenous dispossession, and labor exploitation, Space-Time Colonialism makes clear that Alaska is essential to understanding both U.S. imperial expansion and the machinations of settler colonialism.

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Mapping against settler colonialism: Eleanor Benson, Morgan Brigg, Ke Hu, Sarah Maddison, Alexia Makras, Nikki Moodie, Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘Mapping the spatial politics of Australian settler colonialism’, Political Geography, 102, 2023

15Mar23

Abstract: Cartography has historically been a weapon of colonists used to demarcate land stolen by empire. More recently, however, ‘critical cartographies’ have emerged as a means of critiquing colonial discourses, revealing maps as representations of the dominating ideologies that produce them. This article explores a series of ongoing questions raised by our own work seeking to map the intersection of colonial and Indigenous governance regimes in so-called Australia. As a visualisation of the intense intervention into Indigenous lives by the settler state, this map tells a story of colonial extraction and elimination, as well as of Indigenous survival, thriving, resistance and resurgence, “denaturalis[ing]” settler geographies of power to contextualise current tensions in governance relations within a continuing history of colonisation (Razack, 2018). Drawing on Indigenous critical theory and the Latourian concept of the immutable mobile (1986) as a way of naming the apparatus that operationalises colonial mapping, we explore the ethical and political dynamics of critical cartography, characterised by a tension between reinscribing and undoing colonial power. We argue that, in navigating and attempting to foreground these tensions, our mapping project has value in its visual inversion of conventional representations of sovereignty. It reveals the fragility, incompleteness, and material violence of colonial sovereignty, which is so often understood as neutral and inevitable. It maps this colonial project in relation to and as rendered impossible by the endurance of Indigenous sovereignty. Against the colonial imagining of Indigenous sovereignty as fragile, disappearing and mutable, it resituates this sovereignty as inhering in the land and in Indigenous peoples as “resilient existent” and as the true immutable.

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Praying against settler colonialism: Catherine E. McKinley, ‘”Prayer is universal”: How integrative faith practices enable Indigenous peoples’ persistence and resistance to transcend historical oppression’, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2023

15Mar23

Abstract: Indigenous faith practices have enabled persistence, resistance, and transcendence despite centuries of settler colonial historical oppression. Spirituality, ceremony, and religious practices are fundamental aspects of Indigenous wellness, resilience, and liberation from a colonial mindset. The purpose of this research was to understand U.S. Indigenous peoples’ perspectives of spirituality and religion from the settler colonial framework of historical oppression, resilience, and transcendence as it relates to wellness. Data from critical ethnographic interviews with 31 participants from rural reservation communities in the Southeast and an urban Northwest environment were analyzed using reconstructive thematic qualitative analysis. Themes include (a) “You’d be persecuted … for your beliefs”: historical oppression of Indigenous beliefs; (b) “I was always told that church was wherever you were”: integrative faith practices; and (c) “No matter how hard times get … never forget to pray”: prayer through adversity. Results clarified how settler colonial power differentials tended to relegate Indigenous spiritual and faith practices to a lower status than Western European religions, namely Christianity. Participants resisted this oppression by ingeniously integrating tribal and Western European faith practices to promote wellness. This article provides pathways to prevent clinical bias and harm by expanding awareness and familiarity with localized and heterogeneous faith practices among Indigenous communities. Practitioners can honor Indigenous peoples’ preferences, acknowledge Indigenous faith practices as central for wellness. They can become reflexive about how an internalized settler “colonial mindset” may cause bias and perpetuate historical oppression by delegitimizing Indigenous worldviews and faith practices.

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The second second world of settler colonialism: Nicholas Birns, ‘The Second World and Settler History: Settler Collectives, Land Fulfillment, and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo’, ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 54, 2, 2023, pp. 25-52

11Mar23

Abstract: In the Cold War-era “three worlds” model, the Second World was the socialist world, particularly the Soviet Bloc, that stood opposed to the capitalist West but—unlike the postcolonial Third World—was largely white. However, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, postcolonial critics briefly redeployed the term Second World to denote peripheral settler colonies like Australia. This essay examines the juxtaposition of these two uses of the term “Second World” through a discussion of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1929 novel Coonardoo and the history of its misrepresentation of Australian Indigenous people. Though Prichard sought to be sympathetic to the Indigenous woman at the center of the novel’s plot, Coonardoo, the teleological perspective of her authorial attitude towards the land precludes this sympathy. This essay examines how Prichard’s teleological view is connected to socialist-realist attitudes and settler collectives; how Prichard’s novel both continues and inflects settler ideology now in the neoliberal era; and how teleological settler histories of the land can no longer presume the continued solidity of the land in the wake of the Anthropocene.

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The survivance of settler colonialism: Christian Ayne Crouch, ‘Survivance: About Process and Historical Structures’, Journal of the Early Republic, 43, 1, 2023, pp. 131-138

11Mar23

Abstract: This short essay reflects on the meanings, use, and misuse of the term survivance. A key concept in Native American and Indigenous Studies, survivance offers methodological possibilities as well for researchers working in early American history but the term needs to be approached with care.

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The rubbish of settler colonialism: Galia Limor-Sagiv, Nurit Lissovsky, ‘Place and displacement: Historical geographies of Israel’s largest landfill’, Journal of Historical Geography, 2023

11Mar23

Abstract: This article explores the role of space in facilitating forms of political power, as shown in the destruction of landscape in the center of Israel by the Hiriya landfill. That failed infrastructure wrecked the delicate legacies of mankind and nature, thus sealing the area’s fate as a city’s repellent dumping ground that attracted all kinds of liminal activities. After the 1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel, the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages and the erasure of their people’s legacy, Tel Aviv begun dumping its household waste near an Arab village, the residents of which had been expelled during the conflict. The authorities promised the local inhabitants — Jewish newcomers and refugees in the nearby transit camp, as well as local city dwellers — a new and modern compost plant, but the plant’s opening was repeatedly postponed. This article reveals the rapid changes that occurred in the early 1950s in the Hiriya area, and how insistence on a modern, technologically based solution to waste treatment, suffused with Zionist ideology, resulted in the creation of an infamous site that became a symbol for environmental, infrastructural, social and health hazards. Drawing from diverse unexplored textual and visual archival sources, including aerial photographs, historical maps, printed texts and interviews, we argue that this combined method of landscape reading is crucial for understanding such a tragedy of landscape. Our study of the Hiriya landfill points to the challenges posed by infrastructure, and contributes to future research into post-industrial sites, including landfills, quarries, airfields, mines and factories.

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Virtual settler colonialism? Gabriella Friedman, ‘Illegible Histories, Invisible Movements: Indigenous Refusal in Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears’, PMLA, 2023

11Mar23

Abstract: This essay analyzes Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears to explore the complexities of rendering history visible—both viewable and knowable—in the context of settler colonial capitalism. The novel centers on a virtual reality (VR) experience called the Tsalagi Removal Exodus Point Park (TREPP), which allows tourists to experience the Cherokee Removal as an educational and entertaining experience. Through the trope of VR, the novel articulates how historicizing invested in visibility risks turning Native people and knowledge into consumable objects. Instead of seeking colonial recognition by making their history visible, characters in Riding the Trail of Tears mobilize invisibility to jam the machine of settler colonialism. Their surreptitious movement leads to direct action that counters settler appropriation. The novel thus highlights the importance of Indigenous refusal and models specific strategies for enacting it.

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Italian settlers: Alessandro Tarsia, ‘The New Ethnohistory of the Pacific Canadian Region Could Teach Italian Canadians How to Be Worse Settlers and Better Human Beings’, Italian Canadiana, 36, 2, 2022

11Mar23

Abstract: This article explores the history of the Italian diaspora in British Columbia through the lens of the New Ethnohistory, focusing on the tensions between the perceived continuity of tradition and cultural change. It argues that Italians have actively participated in three different types of colonialism in the Pacific region. First, even though Italian newcomers were almost absent in the early-nineteenth-century “exploitation” era associated with the fur trade and the salmon fisheries, they were later the backbone of the local extractive industries in the second part of the century. Second, the earliest consistent wave of Italians arrived during the “extraction” colonial era (1858–64), associated with gold mining, which also continued in certain areas long afterwards. Third, Italians benefitted from the ongoing structures of “settler colonialism” since the 1860s. This latter type of colonialism is associated with displacing Indigenous peoples and reshaping the landscape through the imposition of European-style agriculture. Indeed, this essay examines some British Columbian case studies of Italian-Indigenous peoples’ interactions as hermeneutical examples that problematize some historiographical tropes. Moreover, it presents the New Ethnohistory, particularly the Community Engaged-Scholarship (CES), as a methodology that could provide Italian Canadians with new historiographical perspectives. Finally, this article invites newcomers to engage in a meaningful reconciliation/conciliation with Indigenous peoples and their flourishing cultures to better comprehend their shared past.

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