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Indigenising by the railway: Laura Junka-Aikio, ‘Whose settler colonial state? Arctic Railway, state transformation and settler self indigenization in Northern Finland’, Postcolonial Studies, 2022

25Aug22

Abstract: Settler colonial theory has effectively highlighted the continuity of colonial structures, but less attention has been paid on how also the settler state has transformed over time, and how such changes have affected the manifold relationships between the state, the settlers and the natives. This article addresses trajectories of settler colonial change in Finland, building on theories of state spatial transformation and taking the recurring plans to build a Railway across the Sámi homeland as its point of departure. The article suggests that central to the change is the destabilization of the
relationship between the state and Northern Finland’s older, ‘endogenous’ settler communities. This has facilitated a popular turn to settler self-Indigenization, whereby settlers make new claims to being ‘Indigenous’, usually building on records of a distant (possibly) Indigenous ancestor. Since self-Indigenization directly challenges Indigenous self-determination, it articulates a new form of elimination of the native. The task for critical scholarship is not only to situate, contextualize and challenge such identity claims, but also to question the logic that continues to set especially older settler communities in opposition to Indigenous rights and self-determination, in the context of extractive.


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The outside of settler colonialism: Nisha Ramayya, ‘”Rehearsal for the World-Building Outside of Colonialism”: a Conversation with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Billy-Ray Belcourt’, Wasafiri , 37, 3, 2022, pp. 50-56

20Aug22

Access the interview here.


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The conservation of settler colonialism: Lindsey Schneider, ‘Decolonizing conservation? Indigenous resurgence and buffalo restoration in the American West’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022

20Aug22

Abstract: There has been a recent surge of interest in “decolonizing” conservation and natural resource management fields. Most of this scholarship, however, speaks to colonialism on a global scale and does not address conservation within modern settler colonial states such as the United States and Canada. This project focuses on the reintroduction of buffalo (bison) in the American West as an example of how even conservation efforts that purport to include, value, and share Indigenous perspectives can ultimately uphold settler colonial relations of power. Using an Indigenous mixed-methodology approach, it interrogates the discursive construction of buffalo as “America’s great conservation success story” and highlights the ways in which conservation has historically worked to support colonial projects of Indigenous erasure and dispossession. Some contemporary buffalo restoration projects seek to include Indigenous people as stakeholders and/or collaborators with unique cultural interests in buffalo, but these efforts do not always embody the material shift in power relations that Indigenous scholars have identified as a key component of decolonization. For Indigenous people, buffalo are more than a keystone species with cultural import; they are relatives whose well-being is deeply entwined with our own. For landscape-scale buffalo restoration projects to engage in decolonization, they must seek to not only repair the harm done to tribal nations through buffalo eradication but also work to support Indigenous resurgence by transforming structures of power.


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The vulnerability of settler ideas about Indigenous vulnerability: Kirsten Vinyeta, Ikpíkyav (To Fix Again): Drawing from Karuk World Renewal to Contest Settler Discourses of Vulnerability, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2022

18Aug22

Abstract: Klamath River Basin of Northern California has historically been replete with fire-adapted
ecosystems and Indigenous communities. For the Karuk Tribe, fire has been an indispensable tool
for both spiritual practice and ecological stewardship. Over the last century, the Tribe’s ability to
burn has been severely repressed by the United States Forest Service occupation of Karuk Ancestral
Territory. Only in recent decades has the federal agency come around to recognize the ecological
value of fire, subsequently seeking partnerships with the very Indigenous communities it once
delegitimized. This dissertation concerns itself with a critical examination of scientific and political
discourses of Indigenous vulnerability. My findings reveal how the settler state employs settler
colonial and racist logics to justify ongoing Indigenous dispossession. The irony is, of course, that
climate change and the contemporary wildfire crisis have been produced by settler colonialism. This
dissertation therefore also contests settler discourses of vulnerability by illustrating the complexity,
relationality, and resilience that characterizes Karuk World Renewal, the epistemological and spiritual
backbone of Karuk land management. In doing so, I make the case for the value of visual methods,
and specifically illustration, in serving the nascent field of Indigenous environmental sociology.


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Indigenous counterproposals: David Ress, ‘Autonomy, Not Assimilation’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, 41, 1, 2022, pp. 27-58 

16Aug22

Abstract: The first missionary efforts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony attracted the support of an aspiring Native American leader, Waban, who would become known as the first convert to Christianity in the colony. Waban’s distinctively limited confessions of faith, as related in the writings of Puritan missionaries, suggest he was pursuing a political solution to the question of how a displaced, shrunken Native American people, were to live alongside a rapidly growing settler community. His answer was a self-governing township that mixed traditional Native American practices with the structures of Puritan community governance. But his desire for independent authority and his incomplete acceptance of the Bay Colony’s mainstream Puritan theology marginalized him and cleared the way for the Bay Colony’s leaders’ own political program for Native peoples: separation and subordination.


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Controlling the population economy one marriage at a time: Rawia Aburabia, ‘Settler colonial regulation of bigamous marriage across the Israeli/Palestinian border’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2022

16Aug22

Abstract: This article examines how settler colonial states selectively enforce the law to pursue the goals of land acquisition and demographic control, focusing on Israel’s response to cross-border polygamy as practiced by Bedouins in Israel. Based on archival research and extensive textual analysis of policy debates within the Israeli authorities during the 1980s, it uncovers the selective enforcement of bigamy laws in cases involving Palestinian women, also exploring how the state manipulates ‘security’ and ‘demographic’ concerns. These manipulations are a manifestation of state power, which is applied similarly to all Palestinians across the Israeli/Palestinian border.


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On gentrification as settler colonialism: Robyn Moran, Lisbeth A. Berbary, ‘Placemaking as Unmaking: Settler Colonialism, Gentrification, and the Myth of “Revitalized” Urban Spaces’, in Brett Lashua, Simon Baker, Troy D. Glover (eds), Leisure Myths and Mythmaking, Routledge, 2022, pp. 106-120

16Aug22

Access the chapter here.


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Reverse anthropology and settler violence: Kelly Menzel, Tyson Yunkaporta, ‘Settler-on-Settler Violence: ritual protocols in YouTube street fight videos’, Journal of Indigenous Research, 10, 2022

13Aug22

Abstract: This is part one of a series of two papers exploring a project that was conducted by two Australian Aboriginal researchers, one male and one female, and might be described as ‘reverse anthropology’, in the same way that people sometimes refer to positive discrimination as ‘reverse racism’. But we would just call it anthropology; a tidal river is still a river when it flows back the other way. The project could hardly be acknowledged as anthropology though, as it was based on Indigenous methods of inquiry that do not yet belong to a formal discipline. Initially the goal was to disrupt Australian colonial narratives of ‘black-on-black violence’ and hold up a mirror to the occupying culture, by applying customary Indigenous conflict protocols to an analysis of online street fight videos featuring settlers from various colonies. However, our early encounters with the field revealed that public violence in settler communities is a lot more rule-governed than we had expected, inspiring us to a deeper investigation that went beyond critique and culture jamming. These findings are reported in the second paper, while the first contains the literature review and outlines the Indigenous methods of inquiry and theoretical approach to the field, which will be of utility to researchers even in unrelated disciplines.


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Is colonialism of a special type settler colonialism?Ran Greenstein, Anti-Colonial Resistance in South Africa and Israel/Palestine: Identity, Nationalism, and Race, Routledge, 2023

13Aug22

Description: This book provides a comparative historical study of the rise and evolution of anti-colonial movements in South Africa and Israel/Palestine. It focuses on the ways in which major political movements and activists conceptualised their positions vis-a-vis historical processes of colonial settlement and indigenous resistance over the last century. Drawing on a range of primary sources, the author engages with theoretical debates involving key actors operating in their own time and space. Using a comparative framework, the book illustrates common and divergent patterns of political and ideological contestations and focuses on the relevance of debates about race and class, state and power, ethnicity and nationalism. Particular attention is given to South Africa and Israel/Palestine’s links to global campaigns to undermine foreign domination and internal oppression, tensions between the quests for national liberation and equality of rights, the role of dissidents from within the ranks of settler communities, and the various attempts to consolidate indigenous resistance internally while forging alliances with other social and political forces on the outside. This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of African History, Middle East History, and African Studies, and to social justice and solidarity activists globally.


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Stealing children in the settler colony: Annabel Ahuriri-Driscoll, Denise Blake, Helen Potter, Kim McBreenc, Ani Mikaere, ‘A “forgotten” whakapapa: historical narratives of Māori andclosed adoption’, Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 2022

13Aug22

Abstract: The era of closed stranger adoption is a significant part of Aotearoa New Zealand’s social and colonial history; some 80,000 children were legally adopted between the years 1955–1985. Māori children constituted a considerable proportion of these legal adoptions, although little attention has been given to their experiences. The relative silence surrounding this phenomenon exists alongside narratives of colonisation and a professed abhorrence by Māori to closed adoption practice, producing a narrative discrepancy. This article aims to understand and account for some of the discrepancies in public narratives by providing an accurate historical account of engagement with the 1955 Adoption Act and its 1962 amendments from a Māori perspective, and unpacking the legal, political, social and cultural aspects from a historical experience. The complexities and nuances of settler colonialism are highlighted, as well as the effects for Māori adoptees of not being publicly and historically narrated – forgotten subjects.


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