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Urban agriculture as settler colonialism: Angie Sassano, Christopher Mayes, Yin Paradies, ‘The Pandemic Boom of Urban Agriculture: Challenging the Role of Resiliency in Transforming our Future Urban (Food) Systems’, Urban Policy and Research, 2022

06Oct22

Abstract: In Australia, COVID-19 has accelerated the reliance on resiliency as a tool of post-pandemic urban recovery. We draw on critical literature on resilience to examine its use in proposals for urban agriculture in cities after COVID-19. Crucially, we situate the pandemic in a longer history of settler-colonialism, and in the role of agriculture in the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We argue that the pandemic conditions which urban agriculture is currently operating within risks perpetuating urban colonial governmentality. This paper calls for a rethinking of urban agriculture for future cities by radically disrupting the foundational colonial logics of urban spatiality.


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Therapy against settler colonialism: D. C. Wendt, K. Huson, M. Albatnuni, J. P. Gone, ‘What are the best practices for psychotherapy with indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada? A thorny question’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2022

06Oct22

Abstract: This conceptual article addresses “best practices” for Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada. This topic is “thorny” both pragmatically (e.g., rare representation in clinical trials) and ethically (e.g., ongoing settler colonialism). Method: We outline four potential approaches, or “paths,” in conceptualizing best practices for psychotherapy: (a) limiting psychotherapy to empirically supported treatments, (b) prioritizing the use of culturally adapted interventions, (c) focusing on common factors of psychotherapy, and (d) promoting grassroots Indigenous approaches and traditional healing. Results: Lessons from our four-path journey include (a) the limits of empirically supported treatments, which are inadequate in number and scope when it comes to Indigenous clients, (b) the value of prioritizing interventions that are culturally adapted and/or evaluated for use with Indigenous populations, (c) the importance of common factors of evidence-based practice, alongside the danger of psychotherapy as a covert assimilative enterprise, and (d) the need to support traditional and grassroots cultural interventions that promote “culture-as-treatment.” Conclusions: A greater commitment to community-engaged research and cultural humility is necessary to promote Indigenous mental health, including greater attention to supporting traditional healing and Indigenous-led cultural interventions.


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The sovereign Indigenous dance: Travis Franks, ‘Remaking Contact in That Deadman Dance: Australian Reconciliation Politics, Noongar Welcoming Protocol, and Makarrata’, ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 53, 4, 2022, pp. 91-122

06Oct22

Abstract: In this article, I make the case for Noongar novelist Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) to be seen as an exemplar of Aboriginal-centered literary imaginings of reconciliation based primarily on adherence to traditional Laws rather than the state’s limited recognition of native title. The novel decenters settler contact narratives through its depiction of Noongar welcoming protocols, thus affirming pre-colonial Aboriginal sovereignty. Furthermore, I contend that, through the novel’s culminating scene in which settlers fail to understand protagonist Bobby Wabalanginy’s ceremonial dance, which calls for justice through truth-telling and peace-making, Scott narrativizes the settler nation’s inability to understand or accept terms of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation derived from Indigenous cultural and political beliefs. Recognizing That Deadman Dance is not merely historical fiction but a novel about remaking contact draws attention to the all-too-frequently superficial performativity of settler-centric reconciliation politics and calls for narratives that do more than just meditate on settler guilt and complicity.


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The sovereign Indigenous graffiti: Hilary Morgan V. Leathem, Joseph Weiss, ‘Sovereign Graffiti on Haida Gwaii: A Photo Essay’, BC Studies, 214, 2022

06Oct22

Abstract: This photo essay centers the graffiti painted on the ruins of a former Canadian Forces military base in the Village of Masset on the islands of Haida Gwaii. Authored by a combined class of Haida and settler high school students, the graffiti, we argue, can be read as “sovereign” both in the relatively straightforward sense that it affirms Haida Title and the Nation’s sovereign rights, but also in a more expansive sense as a means of a means of articulating the complexities of what it means to be human, to be Haida or a neighbor of the Haida Nation, and to exist politically and personally without needing to draw firm distinctions between these categories. We situate these images in the history of the military base and its relation to the Haida Nation, while ultimately arguing that the graffiti both responds to and charts new paths forward for this complex of settler colonial relations.


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Exogenous athletes in the settler colonial league: Chen Chen, ‘Professional Sport, Settler Multiculturalism, and Exalted Chinese Arrivants: Re-Remembering the “China Clippers”‘, in Steve Bien-Aimé, Cynthia Wang (eds), Perceptions of East Asian and Asian North American Athletics,  Springer, 2022, pp. 175-198

02Oct22

Abstract: This chapter examines the historically changing media discourse around two historically significant Chinese Canadian athletes, the “China Clippers”: Larry Kwong, the first player of Chinese (and Asian) descent in the National Hockey League (NHL), and Norman Kwong, the first player of Chinese descent in the Canadian Football League (CFL). Growing up in Chinese immigrant families in Western Canada in the 1920s and emerging as successful young male athletes, they initially appeared in mainstream newspapers as rare, exotic “Chinese” subjects. With the changing political and ideological context of Canada in the latter half of the twentieth century, their careers and achievements were differently represented and exalted within Canadian media in recent decades, serving the myth of Canada as a progressive, multicultural society. While their historic breakthroughs in hockey and football were symbolic of the Chinese diasporic communities and have, to some extent, served to disrupt the stereotypes of the emasculated Chinese man in Western media, I argue that the ways these stories were told should be critically scrutinized so that the normalcy of settler colonialism can be questioned and alternative visions of existence for racialized communities on Indigenous land sustained.


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The settler colonial anti-kinship: Helen Gardner, ‘Kinship acknowledged and denied: Collecting and publishing kinship materials in 19th-century settler-colonial states’, History of the Human Sciences, 2022

02Oct22

Abstract: In the second half of the 19th century, anthropology rode the coat-tails of modernity, adopting new printing technologies, following new travel networks, and gaining increasing access to Indigenous people as colonialism spread and new policies were developed to contain and control people in settler-colonial states. The early innovator in kinship studies Lewis Henry Morgan and his two greatest proteges, Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt, working respectively in the United States, Fiji, and Australia, epitomised this conflation of governance, technologies of representation, and anthropology. They corresponded on the alterity of kinship systems across increasingly regularised postal routes, and developed new forms of collecting and new diagrammatic representations of kinship using developments at the press. Nineteenth-century kinship studies were focused exclusively on relationships formed through biology and descent, and there was little recognition of kinship making beyond these forms. This was especially significant for Howitt, whose closest Aboriginal interlocutor, Tulaba, claimed him as a brogan (brother), according to Gunaikurnai kinship paradigms. This article tracks the links between the collection and publication of kinship material in the questionnaires and the books of the latter part of the 19th century across the English-speaking world and the outcomes for Indigenous peoples, as arguments for distinctive kinship systems helped define their ‘primitiveness’ and dismissed Aboriginal attempts to forge kinship links across the settler/Indigenous divide.


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The environmental injustices of settler colonialism: M. Parsons, K. Fisher, ‘Decolonising Flooding and Risk Management: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism, and Memories of Environmental Injustices’, Sustainability, 14, 2022

02Oct22

Abstract: This paper examines the history of settler-colonialism and how settler-colonial-led policies and projects to remake the landscapes and waterscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand resulted in the production of Indigenous environmental injustices. Underpinned by theorising on ecological justice and decolonisation, we draw on archival sources and oral histories of Maori and Pakeha (European) individuals living in a single river catchment—the Waipa River—to trace how actions to remove native vegetation, drain wetlands, introduce exotic biota, and re-engineer waterways contributed to intensifying incidence of floods. While Pakeha settlers interpreted environmental transformation as inherently positive, Indigenous Maori perceived it as profoundly negative, a form of ecological dispossession. We demonstrate that while Pakeha narrated floods as disaster events, Maori viewed colonisation as the true disaster, with floods and fires merely products of settlers’ mistreatment of the environment. Moreover, the colonial government’s efforts to control floods resulted in Maori being further alienated from and losing access to their rohe (ancestral lands and waters) and witnessing the destruction of their taonga (treasures including forests, wetlands, and sacred sites). For Maori of the Waipa catchment, flood risk management regimes were far more destructive (socially, economically and spiritually) than flood events.


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Colonial continuities: Jane Lydon, ‘Racial Punishment from Slavery to Settler Colonialism: John Picton Beete in Demerara and Swan River’, Slavery and Abolition, 2022

29Sep22

Abstract: The career of Captain John Picton Beete (1799–1886, later John Picton Picton), an officer of the 21st Regiment of Foot (North British Fusiliers), maps some of the continuities between slavery and settler colonization. While military punishment was practiced across a wide imperial field, by focusing on the links between slavery and the new settler colonies we see how black bodies remained vulnerable to violent techniques well after they had been abolished elsewhere. Beete’s status was owed largely to his family’s extensive business interests in slavery, and he spent his career furthering the empire’s appropriation of Indigenous land and the exploitation of black labour. Beete and the 21st Regiment played a prominent role in quelling one of the largest slave uprisings in history, the landmark Demerara Rebellion of 1823. A decade later, shortly after arriving in Swan River, Western Australia, Beete and the 21st led the most intense phase of violence between colonists and Binjareb Nyungar, climaxing in the infamous 1834 Pinjarra Massacre. The common role of spectacular punishment represents the shared strategies of legal violence that maintained racial hierarchies across the empire, and points toward the continuities between British slave and settler colonies.


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The irony of settler colonialism: Alex Trimble Young, ‘”The Vigorous New Vernacular”: Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Irony in Roughing It‘, The Mark Twain Annual, 20, 2022, pp. 158-173

29Sep22

Abstract: This article argues, contrary to the contemporary critical consensus, that Twain’s notorious representation of the Goshutes in Roughing It is a complex satire directed at both the Indigenous people he encounters and those among his white audience who attribute the Goshute’s abjection to essential racial traits. This satire does not rescue the passage from an irredeemable racial logic, but it does mark Twain’s thinking on race as substantially different from the forms of “Indian hating” common among his contemporaries. Exploring Twain’s sources and considering the function of irony in Roughing It more broadly, this article argues that the leveling effect of his irony presages a shift in the United States’ settler colonial “logic of elimination” from frontier homicide to assimilationism, and the subsequent modes of liberal thought (most notably Richard Rorty’s) that imagine irony as a necessary mode of subjectivity for a citizen in a pluralist democracy.


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The present settler colonial imperative: Judy Rohrer, ‘Imperial Dis-ease: Trump’s Border Wall, Obama’s Sea Wall, and Settler Colonial Failure’, American Quarterly, 74, 3, 2022, pp. 737-763

29Sep22

Abstract: Developing a fuller understanding of US imperialism requires engagement with settler colonial and Indigenous studies. I expand Amy Kaplan’s analysis of US empire as “riddled with instability, ambiguity and disorder” to consider how settler colonialism is fortified via walls. Walls stake settler claims and scale from individual property (home) to national borders (homeland). Examining Donald Trump’s US-Mexico border wall and a sea wall in front of beachfront property Barack Obama has purchased in Hawai’i reveals the inherent instability and impermanence of settler colonialism, and thus this particular form of imperialism. That instability manifests in three ways: (1) settler colonial anxious, repetitive insistence on its dominion, its claims, especially via the law and physical intervention; (2) the multiple ways human and other-than-human actors resist the walls, refuse capture/containment, call out the fiction/myth of the border and sea wall’s power to divide; and (3) the way “once and future ghosts” haunt settler claims, unsettle territorial and temporal assertions of possession/domination/belonging. Based on this finding and analysis drawn from Indigenous and settler colonial studies, I argue that settler colonialism, and thus US imperialism, ultimately fails because of its inherent unsustainability and the myriad of ways it is resisted. What succeeds instead is Indigenous resilience and radical resurgence.


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