settler colonial studies blog

Settler allies: Lori Barkley, K. Linda Kivi, ‘Decolonizing Sinixt “Extinction”: Settler Allies in Indigenous Resurgence’, in Arti Nirmal, Sayan Dey (eds), Histories, Myths, and Decolonial Interventions, Routledge, 2022

04Jun22

Abstract: This chapter examines the process of constructing inter-subjective understandings of Indigenous oral traditions and lifeways. The Blood of Life Collective, initiated and directed by Sinixt knowledge-keepers Marilyn James and Taress Alexis, embarked on a multi-pronged storytelling project working towards decolonization and Sinixt resurgence. In analyzing the success of Collective projects as a model for other Indigenous-settler collaborations, research and interviews with Collective members for this chapter address two questions: 1) Could repeated exposure to Sinixt stories link settlers more deeply to the lands they inhabit? And 2) Can settler participation lend enough tangible support to Indigenous communities to invest in settler evolution and education a viable resurgence strategy?

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Settler teachers see strange things: Matt Henderson, ‘Indigenous learners in the Manitoba Teacher, 1919–2019’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: This paper analyses The Manitoba Teacher, the principal publication of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society, since its first publication in 1919. The analysis focuses on what has changed and what has remained the same in terms of how Indigenous learners have been perceived by settler educators over a century. This paper argues that over the century Indigenous people in Manitoba have been prohibited from the conception, design, and management of their own education. Coupled with this, there has always existed an intense desire on the part of settlers to provide a system of education with a variety of aims stemming from eradication, integration, and good intentions. The tension between the prohibition and intent to provide a colonial education has also been shadowed by moments and movements of resistance, resurgence, and reclamation. Indigenous communities began to counter the cultural erasure in The Manitoba Teacher by the 1970s. There are hints and glimpses of Indigenous communities and allies trying to wake teachers up and advocating for Indigenous control of education in the name of the inclusion of land, language, and culture in schools.

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Settler colonial structures (of feeling, and those over a pedestal): Janne Lahti, ‘Südwester Reiter: Fear, Belonging, and Settler Colonial Violence in Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: This article examines the continuities between the Herero and Nama genocide and the history of the Reiterdenkmal statue in Windhoek, Namibia. It interprets the statue as an extension of the lived experience of the genocide and a contested symbol of settler belonging. The Reiterdenkmal reformulated colonial violence as white victimhood and black savagery, and advanced German settler claims over African soil. Violence and the “rider” together remade black African space into white settler space. Yet, this settler belonging was and remains grounded on fears. Uncertainty over belonging and fear of the Natives had driven the killing and exploitation of black Africans in the first place, and settler
identities remain uncertain as the legacies and reckonings of past violence continue unresolved in independent Namibia.

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What counts in settler colonialism (and what does not): Morgan B. Hawes, Danielle C. Slakoff, Nikolay Anguelov, ‘Understanding the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis: An Analysis of the NamUs Database’, Criminal Justice Policy Review, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: Within the United States, there is an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Using data from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) repositories on missing and unidentified women, we examined how demographic and regional differences affected case status. Within the NamUs database, we found that American Indian/Alaska Native women are 135% more likely to be listed within the “unidentified remains” cases than women of other races. The results also showed that in states with relatively high urban population densities, women of all races were 250% more likely to be found dead and remain unidentified than women in places with a low urban population. We conclude by discussing three areas in which policy can help bring Indigenous women’s plight back to the fore: (a) in data collection efforts, (b) in increased support for Tribal police, and (c) via the media’s purposeful focus on Indigenous issues.

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Settlers want water (and take it)! James D. Parker, ‘Watering white supremacy in Kenya: settler colonialism and the disappearing of the Ewaso Ng’iro river 1919–1955’, Water History, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: Settler colonialism in Kenya and elsewhere was, amongst other things, an environmental regime based upon specific ideologies of resource use and availability. The resource rights and requirements of nomadic and pastoral communities were written away in favor of extractive uses rooted in capitalist production, as well as a mythical ideal that settlers could create a facsimile of pre-industrial Britain overseas. This article argues that settlers’ pursuit of these goals in the region of the Ewaso Ng’iro river led to a discursive and material erasure of indigenous livelihoods and claims to water downstream. In removing, diminishing, and eliminating the flow of the river into the Northern Frontier via large scale irrigation operations, the settlers of the Nanyuki region placed the river within an ethnonationalist ideology of water that elevated their new European Eden above all else. By tracking the slow diminishment of the Ewaso Ng’iro’s water level and the settler-nomad contestation over it, this article shows that the possible erasure of a rural population whose way of life was antithetical to both the racial and economic priorities of settlers was a necessary side-effect for the realization of a proto-econationalist ideology emanating from the upper middle class and elite settlers of the Ewaso Ng’iro’s catchment area.

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Settler colonialism is exigent: Dominique Salas, ‘Decolonizing Exigency: Settler Exigences in the Wisconsin Winnebago Mission Home’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: White settlers began to establish Christian schools in what is now Wisconsin in 1661. Through examining the papers of Benjamin Stucki, the headmaster of the Winnebago Mission Home—a Wisconsin boarding school in which many Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Chippewa, and Potawatomi children (and others whom were of mixed ancestry) were indoctrinated into Christianity—the author argues manipulation of chronos affects decolonial kairotic moments. Undergirding this argument is the conviction that manipulation of chronos tampers with perceiving settler colonialism’s everyday exigency. The mission school’s rhetorical obscuring and replacing of settler colonialism’s exigency with one (or multiple) they manufacture is a settler exigency. In this process, settlers segment, omit, and create new timelines that distract from the past violence that is undoubtedly stretching into the present. Through manipulating time, what surfaces as the new problem (i.e., not settler colonialism) is the Indigenous person’s vulnerability. The implications of rhetorically manipulating time are therefore central concerns in decolonial goals and coalitions.

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Urban settler colonialism is a process: Paul Sylvestre, Heather Castleden, ‘Asinabka in four transformation: how settler colonialism and racial capitalism sutured urbanization in Canada’s capital to the plunder of Algonquin territory’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: This paper contributes to scholarship on settler colonial urbanism by examining the historical constitution of Canada’s National Capital Region at the intersection of racial capitalism and settler colonization. Its impetus arises from four years of solidarity work with Algonquin land defenders and accomplices struggling to reclaim Asinabka, an Algonquin sacred complex of islands and waterfalls in the Kitchissippi (Ottawa River) between the Canadian cities of Ottawa and Gatineau. Situating the current struggle within the 200 years of crisis and consolidation that produced the Ottawa Valley, we track the entwined histories of settler capitalists transforming Asinabka in response to the shifting demands of racial capitalism alongside the ceaseless effort by Algonquin people to exercise jurisdiction over the islands in the face of colonial incursion and theft. To do so, we read across 100 years of colonial archives in conjunction with settler historiographies of the lumber industry. We argue that while local in form, Asinabka’s transformations were constitutive of place- and race-making processes at a variety of scales and sites throughout Algonquin territory. We conclude by considering how traces of this history are recursively mobilized in the present to transform Asinabka into an investment property.

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Immigration and settler colonialism: Karl Martin Adam, Justice, Colonialism, and the State, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: My dissertation explores ways that engaging with the history of settler colonialism should matter to work in contemporary political philosophy. I begin by critiquing the state of the debate in the philosophy of immigration. The most popular arguments for open borders–the view that people should nearly always be able to live and travel wherever they wish– are parallel to arguments historically made to justify settler colonialism. Unless seriously qualified, these arguments have the counterintuitive consequence that most historical settler colonialism was justified; they also have dire consequences for the rights of indigenous peoples today. However, most of the popular arguments for immigration restrictions also fail to account for the rights of indigenous peoples. How, then, can we understand the principled basis of those rights? I offer my own justification of territorial rights and (some) border controls based on NeoRoman republicanism. This is the view that the purpose of political institutions is to protect people from domination, where domination is understood as subjection to the arbitrary will of another. There is a growing literature on the question of what (if anything) is wrong with colonialism apart from obvious wrongs that are often perpetrated by colonizers such as physical violence, enslavement, and the displacement of colonized people from their homes. I argue that colonialism is a wrong even in the absence of violence etc. because it involves domination in the sense just mentioned. Furthermore, I argue that rights to control territory and impose (some) restrictions on immigration are justified as a means of preventing domination by settlers. Philip Pettit, the most influential neo-Roman republican, has argued that a state is necessary to secure non-domination. This would seem to imply that my justification of territorial rights as a means of preventing domination does not apply to non-state societies. In response to this objection, I draw on defenses of non-state forms of governance in American Indian/First Nations philosophy as well as the actual history of non-state societies to rebut Pettit’s arguments: non-state societies can successfully protect their members from domination and have actually done so.

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Settler colonialism’s unhoming: Megan Nethercote, ‘Racialized geographies of home: Property, unhoming and other possible futures’, Progress in Human Geography, 2022

27May22

Abstract: This article interrogates the racial logics of home and homemaking. It opens up the conceptual terrain of home to property – a technology of racial dispossession and handmaid of racial capitalism. I reconceptualize home as dominion and as belonging. Unhoming names the synergies between these modalities that authorizes the unmaking of racialized subjects’ homes. I argue unhoming is a structural feature of racial capitalism and position resistance to unhoming as homemaking that might rescript propertied landscapes. Repositioning home as practised in propertied landscapes centres homemaking’s life-giving and death-dealing contradictions and excavates the work home does for – and (might do) to disrupt – liberal property regimes.

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Settler colonial fantasies of curation: Jean Hillier, Donna Houston, ‘Centring, rather than connecting with, nature’, 10th State of Australasian Cities National Conference, 1-3 December 2021, Melbourne, Australia

27May22

Abstract: This paper argues that the ‘living with nature’ movement and technocratic responses, such as Nature-based Solutions, are ideological fantasies of curation. Technocratic responses tend to reify a neo-liberal notion of the nonhuman as an ‘ecosystem service’ to humans which can be nurtured, abandoned or sacrificed. The so-called ‘living with nature’ debate often hinges on anthropocentric notions of whether human/nonhuman habitation is compossible. Arguments that urban residents should ‘get close to nature’, frequently assume that living with nature is ‘good’ for the planet and, in particular, good for people. Critics, however, point out the zoonotic threats which arise from encounters with nonhuman-borne pathogens and vectors. Planned interventions involve censorship, editing and curation. We explain curation as a power-laden activity of selection and organisation, inclusion and exclusion which, in relation to urban planning, perpetuates settler colonialism. This paper argues the need to appreciate that many human and nonhuman residents are uninvited guests in nonhuman habitat on unceded Indigenous lands. In agreement with Smith that ‘ecological disruption is a symptom of a way of life — an imperial mode of existence’ which perpetuates the colonial settler regime, this paper suggests that many planners, developers and suburban dwellers in Australia demonstrate what Baldwin terms ‘culpable innocence’. This is not an innocence of blameless lack of knowledge, but rather a disavowal that settler colonialism, land fragmentation and urban expansion have caused, and continue to be implicated in, the disruption and destruction of hundreds of thousands of human and non-human lives. Australia, and its urban fringes in particular, are antagonistic landscapes. As Sen explains, antagonistic landscapes ‘require the erasure of what already exists’, where powerful actors antagonise ‘unwanted’ communities of humans and non-humans. Colonisation, therefore, is ongoing, undertaken with the complicity of planners as space curators. In the view of the authors, planners must attend to inherited settler-colonial practices of curating nonhuman life and death in settler cities. It is time for planners to ask the question about decoloniality. Decoloniality, unlike decolonisation, does not assume that colonialism has ended and it can, therefore, be historicised. Decolonisation, as popularly used, risks domestication, recentring whiteness and resettling theory in one more form of settler colonialism. Decoloniality, in contrast, seeks to delink from Western-centric epistemologies that silence or marginalise non-white voices. It seeks to transgress the borders of Western thinking, to avoid universalism and emphasise the epistemic locus of enunciation of the human and nonhuman subjects.

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