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Subterranean settler colonialism: Isabel Lockhart, Storytelling and the Subsurface: Indigenous Fiction, Extraction, and the Energetic Present, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: Storytelling and the Subsurface concerns the relationship between Indigenous land and the generation of energy. Specifically, it reads contemporary literature as responsive to the enormous economic growth of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Under the dispossessive structure of settler colonialism, exponential growth has a particular bearing on Indigenous peoples, whose lands are tapped for energy resources and critical minerals for infrastructure. The project moves across carbon and non-carbon fuels to consider energy as a system of social relations that eats up lands, waters, and ecologies. Showing how seemingly the most “settled” lands are charged with other attachments, meanings, and values, I argue that contemporary Indigenous literatures offer a form of critical transition storytelling into not just a “green” future but a decolonized one. This reveals some of the tensions between Indigenous resistance and environmentalism at large and provides new ways of considering the fraught intersection of Indigenous studies and the environmental humanities. In each of my first three chapters, I look to the ways that Indigenous literatures on subsurface extraction diverge from or nuance the dominant environmental motifs of urgency, rights, and trans-localism, and I analyze how Indigenous storying constitutes a specific form of environmental narrative related to rebuilding kinship relations in an extractive zone. The project moves from Cree, Dene, and Métis lands in Alberta, Canada, to Waanyi country in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia, to Laguna Pueblo in the U.S. Southwest, and finally to Ngāi Tahu lands on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. It moves from tar, to zinc, to uranium, and to alluvial gold across literature by Warren Cariou, Alexis Wright, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Eleanor Catton. I am interested in the textures of struggle across situated but globally resonant locales, which together build an impression of the conceptually and aesthetically distinct character of Indigenous resistance. With a turn to the nineteenth-century Anglophone gold rushes, my fourth and final chapter shifts the lens to the storied, nostalgic place of subsurface extraction in cultures of settler colonialism.


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Settler colonialism is also an encounter: Katsuya Hirano, ‘Settler Colonialism as Encounter: On the Question of Racialization and Labor Power in the Dispossession of Ainu Lands’, in Yasuko Takezawa, Akio Tanabe (eds), Race and Migration in the Transpacific, Routledge, 2022

16Oct22

Access the chapter here.


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Solidarity against settler colonialism: Connor Woodman, ‘The West Papuan liberation movement, Indonesian settler colonialism and Western imperialism from an international solidarity perspective’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: Getting solidarity right, as West Papuans struggle against a colonial genocide, is crucial. Distilling a non-Papuan UK citizen’s experience of several years working with the West Papuan liberation movement, this article offers a historical, anti-imperialist framework for thought and action in solidarity with West Papua. Counter-posing its approach to the depoliticised framework of leading Western human rights organisations, the article places three terrains of the struggle – the Indonesian settler colonial state, the West Papuan liberation movement, and Western solidarity networks – in a global historical perspective, examining the dynamic interactions between them in order to unravel the ties that bind the Indonesian state to West Papua. The collaborations and connections between Indonesian elites and dominant Western sections are counter-posed to the possibility of an alliance between West Papuans and poorer Indonesians – but only if Western solidarity organisers are attentive to the role Western (neo)imperialism plays in structurally determining the genocidal form Indonesia’s colonisation takes.


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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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