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A settler colonial conversion: Dani Pickering, ‘Harm Received, Harm Caused: A Scottish Gael’s Journey to Becoming Pakeha’, Genealogy, 6, 82, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: Beurla an donais. The language of the devil. This is how my great-great-great grandfather, Neil McLeod, described English in his native Gaelic as he grieved the loss of his wife Rebecca Henry in 1886. Even as he tried to distance himself socially and linguistically from the Anglophone world, however, he had already long since been caught up in its colonial machinery. After being cleared from his ancestral homeland of Raasay, Scotland in 1864 and relocated to the colonial frontier in Aotearoa New Zealand, Neil went on to spend more than fifteen years in the New Zealand Armed Constabulary and its reconstituted form, the New Zealand Police Force, before being killed on the job in 1890. Drawing on critical family history literature, firsthand accounts from Neil’s personal diaries, other family accounts and additional historical research, this article retraces Neil’s assimilation into white New Zealand. By unsettling the “constitutive forgetting” by which Neil and his descendants forsook our connection to Raasay and the Scottish Gàidhealtachd to become Pakeha settlers, I explore a history prior to and concurrent with the colonisation of Aotearoa which accounts for multi-ethnic Pakeha origins, beyond the Anglo-Saxon, and enables a deeper understanding of how and why Gaels such as Neil participated in the British Empire. I conclude by considering how Neil’s story deepens our understanding of how the settler-colonial subject is produced by highlighting the occasionally fine but always distinct line between coloniser and colonised.


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A settler colonial education: Arathi Sriprakash, Sophie Rudolph, Jessica Gerrard, Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State, Pluto Press, 2022

16Oct22

Description: Whiteness is not innate – it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life. Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state. To see whiteness as learned is to recognise that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.


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Settler colonial triangulations: Conor Joseph Donnan, ‘An Empire Of Liberty?’ Irish Immigrants, Native Americans, And American Imperialism In The Trans-Mississippi West Between 1840 And 1940, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2022

11Oct22

Abstract: This dissertation examines the ways in which Indigenous peoples and Irish people combatted or contributed to U.S. imperialism in the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1840 and 1940, the United States engaged in Westward expansion, displacing Native Americans in the name of imperialism, capitalism, and Anglo-Protestantism. Simultaneously, Anglo colonization in Ireland prompted millions of Irish people to flee to the United States. This dissertation follows the complex interactions between the Irish, Native Americans, and Anglo-Protestants in Ireland and North America. In the American West, the Irish became the unwitting foot soldiers for U.S. expansion, engaging in bloody assaults on Indigenous people. They worked with Anglo-Protestants to undermine Native American nations in exchange for wealth and social mobility. Despite this, some Irish Catholics and Indigenous peoples found common ground in shared colonial experiences. They expressed political solidarity, used anti-Anglo language, cooperated to challenge Anglo-Protestantism, and promoted alternative visions of the world based on their traditional values. The mutual admiration and transatlantic solidarity led to intermarriage, joint political campaigns, innovations in the labor movement, and weapon exchanges. The project draws on government reports, military records, newspapers, memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews, business records, and artwork. It also utilizes Indigenous letters and pictographs such as the Waníyetu iyáwapi, known as Winter Counts. Reading Anglo-Protestant sources against the grain in conjunction with Irish and Indigenous material helps provide insight into a neglected tale of transatlantic solidarity. In privileging the voices of Indigenous and Irish peoples, the dissertation offers valuable insights into alternatives to Anglo-Protestant hegemony, imperial expansion, and capitalist economic structures.


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Settler assimilation far away: Samantha J. Kramer, Arctic Assimilation: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in the Canadian Arctic and Carlisle Indian Industrial School,  MA dissertation, The College of William and Mary, 2022

11Oct22

Abstract: Previous generations of Canadian historians have focused on welfare when examining the twenty-first century colonization of the territory of Nunavut. Patrick Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism, on the other hand, presents a form of colonialism that allows for examination through a more cultural-centric lens, while still recognizing the exploitation of economics for purposes of assimilation. Using government reports, Truth and Reconciliation Committee findings, and first-hand accounts from local Inuit, this paper takes Wolfe’s theory and analyzes how his idea of “logics of elimination” were exemplified in the Canadian government’s actions after the 1930s. The “going away” focus of settler colonialism appeared in both the physical and cultural sense within methods used by the government and the RCMP. Physical logics of elimination occurred in projects such as the various High Arctic Relocations and the building of settlements, used for the purposes of showing sovereignty and effective occupation in the north. Cultural logics of elimination took the form of actions like wildlife and game management laws, the slaughter of sled dogs, residential schools, disc numbers, Project Surname, and healthcare removal. All the above elements are examined within the paper to showcase how the theory of settler colonialism can and should be used to examine the history of the Canadian Arctic.


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The settlers and their prisons: Carl D. Lindskoog, ‘Migration, Racial Empire, and the Carceral Settler State’ The Journal of American History, 109, 2, 2022, pp. 388-398

11Oct22

Abstract: The 1920s saw the triumph of nativism and xenophobia. The Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 excluded groups labeled undesirable by American lawmakers. At the same time, the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol and the Immigration Act of 1929 gave the state new powers to control the movement and exploit the labor of racialized minorities that entered U.S. territory. Immigration restriction and enforcement in the 1920s thus represents a critical chapter in America’s history of migration, race, and empire. But this history begins long before the pivotal 1920s and continues well after. This essay argues that immigration detention and other forms of incarceration are tools of state violence that have been used to advance ongoing projects of U.S. settler colonialism and racial empire. A process that seeks to eliminate Indigenous people so that the land can be permanently occupied by the white settler population, settler colonialism also seeks the permanent marginalization and perpetual exploitability of other nonwhite groups whose labor is crucial to colonialism. From its foundation as a settler colony, the United States has grown to become a racial empire that extends beyond North America. Tracing the government’s use of immigration detention back to its origins in the nineteenth century, this essay documents the evolution of incarceration as one tool of removal, elimination, and social control used by American officials. It finds that incarceration worked in tandem with other tools of state violence such as immigration restriction and counterinsurgent warfare, all of which were designed to impose order on the unstable frontiers of empire and to eliminate anticolonial resistance. This is a story of how the United States grew from a settler colony into a racial empire and became a carceral settler state by the turn of the twenty-first century.


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The settler city back: Julie Tomiak, ‘Land back / cities back’, Urban Geography, 2022

11Oct22

Abstract: This intervention highlights that Land Back – the demand for the return of lands and waters and the transformation of social relations based on Indigenous systems of law, governance, and care – also means Cities Back. It encourages an understanding of the myriad of Indigenous reclamations of urban space in conceptually, materially, and temporally expansive ways. Land Back names diverse movements that include urban movements. In addition to struggles to reclaim land and restore jurisdiction in cities, Indigenous practices and relationalities that normalise cities as land and that centre Indigenous infrastructures of care and futurity disrupt settler-colonial urbanisms.


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The invested settler: Robyn Green, ‘The economics of reconciliation: tracing investment in Indigenous–settler relations’, Journal of Genocide Research , 17, 4, 2015, pp. 473-493

11Oct22

Abstract: The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state remains fraught due to ongoing violence and mistrust. Numerous attempts have been made to ‘reconcile’ this beleaguered relationship over the past three decades. Indigenous peoples have advocated for the decolonization of the settler state and a suitable land base using the language of public investment. In response, settler governments reframe these requests as opportunities for economic investment that is guaranteed to produce self-esteem and social inclusion for Indigenous peoples. This article documents and problematizes an ideological shift whereby holistic decolonial approaches to reconciliation give way to an investment rationale that is used to bypass demands for Indigenous peoples’ jurisdiction and self-determination. The ramifications of this shift are examined in three ‘eras of reconciliation’ (Section 37 Constitutional Talks, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, reparations for Indian residential school [IRS] Survivors) that also coincide with three types of investment: a) national; b) social; and c) therapeutic.


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Settler colonial heritage: Kali Myers, James Lesh, ‘The Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the Limits of Values-Based Conservation’, Heritage & Society, 2022

10Oct22

Abstract: Marking the Aboriginal Tent Embassy’s fiftieth anniversary in 2022, this article adopts a historical perspective to examine the challenges encountered by Australian heritage regimes when attempting to recognize this site as a heritage place. First established in Canberra in 1972 on Ngunnawal land, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy reveals the material-discursive limits of Australia’s Burra Charter-derived values-based heritage regime in recognizing and respecting Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and protest. Recent attempts have been made to include the site on the Commonwealth Heritage List (2005), the National Heritage List (2008) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Heritage List (2015). That these nominations have not yet been successful suggests that heritage regimes of governance and management express settler-colonial ideology. Consequently, heritage becomes imbued with narratives of national identity and power and becomes a mechanism in maintaining settler-colonial dominance. This article proposes centralizing Indigenous agency as an alternative way towards formulating post-colonial heritage regimes and values-based conservation.


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Aquaculture as settler colonialism: Darcey Evans, ‘Pathogenic proliferations: Salmon aquaculture, industrial viruses, and toxic geographies of settler-colonialism’, Politics and Space, 2022

06Oct22

Abstract: In this article, I ask how a virus associated with Atlantic salmon farms in British Columbia (BC) can reveal geographies of aquaculture, ecological encounters, and colonial entanglements within the bodies and blood cells of fish. Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) travels through supply chains, ocean currents, and ecological interactions, and causes salmon to become at risk of ruptured blood cells and organ damage. This article proposes that PRV can be interpreted as a form of industrial waste that reinforces geographies of toxicity across multiple scales. I first situate the emergence of aquaculture in BC within colonial histories that continue to transform the coastal straits into contested sites of state-making. I then outline how multiple forms of life, ecological encounters, and unique hydrological conditions become entangled with industrial practices, giving rise to novel pathogenic proliferations. I end by describing how the appearance of yellow salmon hints at the potentially far-reaching presence of PRV, and I look to the bodies of salmon to consider how the expanding PRV footprint transforms regional ecologies and contributes to emergent toxic geographies of settler-colonialism. In forging connections between settler-colonialism, industrial landscape-making, and pathogenicity, I highlight how microbes can reflect and reinforce settlercolonial structures of dispossession. Moreover, in proposing that pathogens can be understood as components of industrial toxicity, I contribute to a reimagining of what industrial toxicants are and the forms they might take.


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The specific philosophy of settler colonialism: Audrey Brown, ‘Jonathan Edwards and the New World: Exploring the Intersection of Puritanism and Settler Colonialism’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, 58, 2, 2022, pp. 114-137

06Oct22

Abstract: In their Anthology, Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, Hatch and Stout argue that Edwards’ strand of Christianity is more critical to the American experience than many modern thinkers may realize. They claim that this is because his “stern Calvinism is central” (5) to this country’s historic identity and that his philosophy was not only “compatible with the theological needs of the new nation but the social and political needs as well.” (7) In this paper I would like to extend this argument. Not only was Edwards’ philosophy necessary for the shaping of this country, it provided some of the moral justification necessary for a distinct kind of colonization that gave rise to settler colonialism in British America. To make this claim, this paper will be broken down into three parts. The first section will explore the historical elements of Jonathan Edwards’ life in a settler colonial context. The second will be to explain and explore the framework of settler colonialism. Finally, this paper will argue that Edwards’ life and philosophy meet all four proposed criteria of settler-colonialism and should therefore be understood as extending a legacy of violence here in the Americas.


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