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Settler colonial heritage: Kali Myers, James Lesh, ‘The Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the Limits of Values-Based Conservation’, Heritage & Society, 2022

10Oct22

Abstract: Marking the Aboriginal Tent Embassy’s fiftieth anniversary in 2022, this article adopts a historical perspective to examine the challenges encountered by Australian heritage regimes when attempting to recognize this site as a heritage place. First established in Canberra in 1972 on Ngunnawal land, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy reveals the material-discursive limits of Australia’s Burra Charter-derived values-based heritage regime in recognizing and respecting Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and protest. Recent attempts have been made to include the site on the Commonwealth Heritage List (2005), the National Heritage List (2008) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Heritage List (2015). That these nominations have not yet been successful suggests that heritage regimes of governance and management express settler-colonial ideology. Consequently, heritage becomes imbued with narratives of national identity and power and becomes a mechanism in maintaining settler-colonial dominance. This article proposes centralizing Indigenous agency as an alternative way towards formulating post-colonial heritage regimes and values-based conservation.


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Aquaculture as settler colonialism: Darcey Evans, ‘Pathogenic proliferations: Salmon aquaculture, industrial viruses, and toxic geographies of settler-colonialism’, Politics and Space, 2022

06Oct22

Abstract: In this article, I ask how a virus associated with Atlantic salmon farms in British Columbia (BC) can reveal geographies of aquaculture, ecological encounters, and colonial entanglements within the bodies and blood cells of fish. Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) travels through supply chains, ocean currents, and ecological interactions, and causes salmon to become at risk of ruptured blood cells and organ damage. This article proposes that PRV can be interpreted as a form of industrial waste that reinforces geographies of toxicity across multiple scales. I first situate the emergence of aquaculture in BC within colonial histories that continue to transform the coastal straits into contested sites of state-making. I then outline how multiple forms of life, ecological encounters, and unique hydrological conditions become entangled with industrial practices, giving rise to novel pathogenic proliferations. I end by describing how the appearance of yellow salmon hints at the potentially far-reaching presence of PRV, and I look to the bodies of salmon to consider how the expanding PRV footprint transforms regional ecologies and contributes to emergent toxic geographies of settler-colonialism. In forging connections between settler-colonialism, industrial landscape-making, and pathogenicity, I highlight how microbes can reflect and reinforce settlercolonial structures of dispossession. Moreover, in proposing that pathogens can be understood as components of industrial toxicity, I contribute to a reimagining of what industrial toxicants are and the forms they might take.


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The specific philosophy of settler colonialism: Audrey Brown, ‘Jonathan Edwards and the New World: Exploring the Intersection of Puritanism and Settler Colonialism’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, 58, 2, 2022, pp. 114-137

06Oct22

Abstract: In their Anthology, Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, Hatch and Stout argue that Edwards’ strand of Christianity is more critical to the American experience than many modern thinkers may realize. They claim that this is because his “stern Calvinism is central” (5) to this country’s historic identity and that his philosophy was not only “compatible with the theological needs of the new nation but the social and political needs as well.” (7) In this paper I would like to extend this argument. Not only was Edwards’ philosophy necessary for the shaping of this country, it provided some of the moral justification necessary for a distinct kind of colonization that gave rise to settler colonialism in British America. To make this claim, this paper will be broken down into three parts. The first section will explore the historical elements of Jonathan Edwards’ life in a settler colonial context. The second will be to explain and explore the framework of settler colonialism. Finally, this paper will argue that Edwards’ life and philosophy meet all four proposed criteria of settler-colonialism and should therefore be understood as extending a legacy of violence here in the Americas.


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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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