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The Indian agent is a settler agent: Ann Fayles, The American Indian Agent, 1791-1861: Questioning the Literary and Cinematic Stereotype as well as Historical Narratives to find the real Indian Agent, PhD dissertation, Swansea University, 2023

04Apr23

Abstract: The American Indian Agent is a known figure in the national drama. Originally defined by nineteenth century political opponents, settlers, frontier business interests, the American military, Indian policy reformers and even Indians, the Indian agent ranges from inept to cupidinous; cruel to inhuman. Western fiction writers, screenwriters and episodic television dramatists of the twentieth century took the agent’s tarnished reputation and created a stereotype stock character for Westerns emphasising all his malevolent attributes. The historical profession has largely perpetuated the cultural and literary perception of the Indian agent, until some historians began to identify individualized exceptions to agent perfidy. As examples of benevolent agents grew, the profession revised its analysis allowing that some agents assisted Indians while most remained obdurately delinquent.Most historical research on Indian agents has focused on the period from 1861–1888, the Civil War to the end of the Apache Wars. Large swaths of history remain lightly explored as the Indian agent existed from 1791–1908. This thesis examines the Indian agent in the early years of the Republic, from 1791–1861, interacting with Indians from New York to Puget Sound, from Georgia to New Mexico and the vast Great Plains in between. Crucially this thesis places the agent in the world of the Indian agency as well as the competing worlds of politics, business, religion, settlement, and government administration of which he was also a part.The results are surprising. Although there were a few criminals and several men overwhelmed by conditions, most agents of Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Antebellum America were honest, sincere public servants, many coming to favor the Indians and spending their own money, and in a few cases, their blood to aid Indian development and freedom.This conclusion runs counter to both popular and historical perceptions. It seems almost everyone has adopted the old Aristotelian idea of petitio principii or “begging the question”. The bad and inept Indian agent must be bad and inept. No longer. These are the real Indian agents of 1791–1861.


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The reproductive labour of Indigenous women: Jessica O’Leary, ‘The Uprooting of Indigenous Women’s Horticultural Practices in Brazil, 1500–1650’, Past & Present, 2023

30Mar23

Abstract: In the land now known as Brazil, Indigenous women were responsible for cultivating and preparing a tuberous root called mandioca (cassava). Following the arrival of Europeans in 1500, mandioca replaced wheat bread to become the staple carbohydrate in settlers’ diets. Travellers’ accounts between 1500 and 1550 describe how Indigenous women taught settlers to prepare the tubers for consumption through the use of special tools and processes of soaking, drying and pulverizing. However, with the arrival of the Jesuits, European sources began to elide or problematize knowledge among Indigenous women that did not cohere with Christian normative values. By the mid seventeenth century, naturalists were no longer acknowledging the original female informants who had taught Europeans how to identify and cultivate the plant. In line with recent scholarship on the history of science and medicine in colonial contexts, a close reading of the sources reflects the importance of Indigenous knowledges to imperial expansion, on the one hand, and the interactive nature of cross-cultural knowledge sharing that became hidden by early modern European epistemological practices. Drawing on a broad body of colonial documentation, this article examines how European representations of the cultivation of mandioca identified, exploited, assimilated, suppressed and, finally, alienated Indigenous women’s knowledges from their original holders between 1500 and 1650.


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A Swedish apology for settler colonialism: Dirk Gindt, ‘“The Long Road of Reconciliation”: The Church of Sweden’s Performative Apology to the Sámi People’, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, 30, 2023

30Mar23

Abstract: Grounded in performance theories and Indigenous methodologies, this essay focuses on the 2021 solemn service in Uppsala Cathedral, when the Church of Sweden apologized for its historical complicity in the colonization of Sápmi. The essay discusses key rhetorical features of the Archbishop’s apology and analyses how the service incorporated Sámi visual, material, oral, and performance cultures. Of specific interest are five Sámi testimonies about settler colonialism and artist Anders Sunna’s redesign of the sanctuary. To tease out the contextual specificities (and limitations) of the apology and situate it as part of unfolding decolonial processes across the circumpolar North, the essay draws selective comparisons to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 formal apology to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples.


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Indigenous conquerors of fugitive republics (the settler colonial triangle): Marc A. Hertzman, ‘The “Indians of Palmares”: Conquest, Insurrection, and Land in Northeast Brazil’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 2023

30Mar23

Abstract: This article examines a group that has received little scholarly attention: the Indigenous people of Palmares, the site of one of history’s largest fugitive slave communities, defeated by the Portuguese in 1695. What studies do exist emphasize origins: Did Indigenous people help build the fugitive settlements of Palmares? I instead focus on the post-1695 period, when competing actors sought land in the interior regions that the settlements once occupied. Shaped by displacement and diaspora, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some Indigenous people rebelled, while others referenced their role as conquerors of Palmares to make land claims. Though discursive representations of Indigenous roles as conquerors rarely prevented material dispossession, the communities persisted despite remarkable challenges. Their trajectories indicate new ways to think about Palmares and Indigenous history and provide suggestive points of comparison with Spanish America and better-known examples from the Age of Revolution.


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A special section on Settler colonialism in the Brown Journal of World Affairs

30Mar23

Access it here.


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The tree and the settler colonial forest: Sinead Kathleen Earley, ‘Deadwood: People, place, and neoliberal forest policy in British Columbia, Canada’, Nature and Space, 2023

30Mar23

Abstract: This article describes the people and forests in traditional Secwépemc territory in the Interior Plateau of British Columbia (BC), Canada. It examines the intersection of neoliberal forest policy and profound ecological change in the south-central region of the province, with careful attention paid to the wider contexts of settler colonialism. The article critiques the implementation of forest policy reform (the Forest and Range Practices Act, enacted in 2004) as it coincided with one of the first major climate change events of landscape-altering magnitude in BC – the mountain pine beetle outbreak. Between 1998 and 2014, the outbreak resulted in tree mortality for roughly half of the mature lodgepole pine trees in the province. It left an expanse of ‘deadwood’ on the landscape, leading to heightened social and political conflict over how the beetle-affected areas were managed. Research methods include transcripts from a public hearing in Tk’emlúps/Kamloops, supplemented by eighteen semi-structured interviews. The article argues that the confluence of neoliberal forest policy and climate change has further entrenched the settler colonial and corporate capture of forests.


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Settler nonsettlers: Daphne Arapakis, ‘Ethnic Compartmentalisation: Greek Australian (Dis)Associations with White Australia and Indigenous Sovereignty’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2023

30Mar23

Abstract: Based on Greek diasporic articulations of historical consciousness in Australia, this article introduces an analytical framework called ethnic compartmentalisation. Bringing Australian studies of ethnicity into dialogue with settler colonial scholarship, ethnic compartmentalisation examines how Greek migrants/settlers fragment their sense of belonging to Australia. By compartmentalising their sense of history, race, and migration, the segments of the Greek diaspora in Australia justify their ongoing settlement on Indigenous lands by separating or leveraging the multiple parts of their inherited migrant histories as insiders and outsiders.


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Erasing class divisions, or observing attempts to erase them? Max Ajl, ‘Logics of Elimination and Settler Colonialism: Decolonization or National Liberation?’ Middle East Critique, 2023

28Mar23

Abstract: This article engages with Patrick Wolfe’s theoretical underpinnings and programmatic consequences of his settler-colonial theory. It contextualizes the renaissance of the settler-colonial paradigm, scrutinizing its theoretical innovations. In doing so, the article traces Wolfe’s work back to its origin in the work of Marcel Mauss and his notion of total social facts, discussing this theory’s political orientation around anti-racism and liberal subjectivity. It then shows how Wolfe applies his theory to Palestine, erasing class divisions and imperialism, militating against the theory and practice of national liberation. In conclusion it reflects on the use and limits of this theory for supporting anti-systemic struggle.


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Settler industry: Gustave Lester, ‘Land, Fur, and Copper: The Union of Settler Colonialism and Industrial Capitalism in the Great Lakes Region, 1815–1842’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21, 1, 2023, pp. 122-165

28Mar23

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and the rise of mineral-intensive industrial manufacturing in the United States. Land expropriated from Anishinaabe nations in what is currently the Upper Peninsula of the state of Michigan was one of the largest sources of copper for nineteenth-century U.S. industrial capitalists. The U.S. takeover of mineral-rich Anishinaabe land reflects the early union of settler colonial ambitions for the Great Lakes region with an emerging political economy of national self-sufficiency by way of continental supplies of raw materials typically imported from overseas. After the War of 1812, U.S. officials imagined the transformation of Anishinaabewaki into the material basis of an independent U.S. copper industry. Accordingly, they employed geologists to conduct fieldwork within Indigenous territories to help guide and facilitate the process of treaty making. However, the authority of the United States remained weak where they had little control over commerce and could not depend on the pressures of encroaching settler populations. Only by granting and enforcing a trade monopoly with the American Fur Company were U.S. leaders able to make inroads toward their goals of acquiring territorial control over the raw materials of industrial capitalism and dispossessing the Anishinaabeg.


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The education of settlers: Maura Lucking, Settler Campus: Racial Uplift, Free Labor, and Land Tenure in American Design Education, 1866-1929, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2023

28Mar23

Abstract: This dissertation situates the emergence of practices of building and making in design classrooms in the late nineteenth century expansion of the public college as an instrument of settler colonialism. In doing so, it connects both industrial design pedagogy and the new design typologies of the campus to histories of enslaved Black labor and levied Indigenous lands that have long enabled the American university system. At land grant universities, industrial institutes, and Indian boarding schools, industrialization and colonialism were concomitant; prescriptive racial identity categories were manufactured alongside standardized single-family cottages, faux Navajo rugs, and technical drawing and blueprint processes. The emphasis on self-sufficiency and manual labor by students, though differentiated throughout, aligned with narratives of respectability, free labor, and individual land tenure as political, social, and economic ideal integral to the nation in the destabilized years following the U.S. Civil War. Racialized perceptions of labor power were visually indexed through the commodity value of the designed object itself, an important difference from European theories of universal design reform that rendered the public college as an ongoing site of extraction and dispossession.Few sites are more associated with the spatialization of liberal values than the American campus, yet it is often interpreted benignly as an adhoc vernacular landscape. But the typology of the campus, as it emerged in the 1860s, was a purposefully didactic space, one designers approached using theories of environmental determinism to instill in its users both vocational skills and racial habitus. Moreover, schools for Black and Native students inflected the larger mission of the Land Grant system: just as physical university plants for the states were funded through real estate speculation on far-off dispossessed territories, the proximate built environment of the campus was often a site where federal policies were negotiated and socially tested. The dissertation tracks case study schools from their campus origins in the labor and administration practices of enslavement, the Indian removal and allotment campaigns, and the military administration of the Civil War. I underscore knowledge produced by these curricula–from the integration of Indigenous cultural practices within homebuilding programs intended for assimilation to the development of new techniques of drawing, applied ornament, and representations of labor that responded to the implicit racial politics of architectural style and new identity-based markets for Black artisanal labor and Indian craft objects. The dissertation concludes by tracing the afterlives of this model as exported to new geographies in Liberia and the Philippines, arguing that both industrial pedagogy and the settler colonial triad were integral to the expansion of American empire. The material and visual artifacts of these schools, as well as the practices of making and knowing intimate to them, reveal the contradictions underpinning this supposed model for an equitable liberal society.


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