settler colonial studies blog

Celebrations of settler futurity: Georgia Rose Twiss, ‘Hail to the Queen of the May!’: settler futurity, childhood, and the May Queens of New Westminster, 1858-1939, MA dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2022

26Apr22

Abstract: This thesis examines the intimate relationship forged between the traditional British festival May Day, the celebration’s main figure the May Queen, and white settler society in New Westminster between the event’s earliest beginnings in 1858 and the end of the interwar years in 1939. In doing so, this thesis argues that the advent and ongoing celebration of May Day in the city was part of a larger project of collective aspiration—what scholars term settler futurity—that fundamentally defined settler colonialism in British Columbia, and elsewhere, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The May Queen, performed in these years through the body of a white settler girl between the ages of ten and sixteen, served as the ultimate symbol of this futurity and a powerful community figure around which gendered and racialized notions of collective identity, civic loyalty and belonging took shape. In this, the annual embodied performance of the May Queen – supported by her Maids of Honour and the Honour Guard.

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A very settler colonial pandemic: Nigel Mantou Lou, KimberlyNoels, Ying Shan, DorisZhang, Shachi Kurl, ‘Ethnic minority, immigrants, and Indigenous people’s well-being disparities in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic: The mediating role of threat perceptions’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2022

26Apr22

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic’s differential impact on ethnic minorities, immigrants, and Indigenous peoples (e.g., mortality and infection rate, as well as psychological well-being) may exacerbate existing disparities. This study examined some psychological mechanisms that might explain the apparently more negative emotional experiences of ethnic minority Canadians during the pandemic compared with non-immigrant European Canadians (i.e., the majority/mainstream ethno-cultural group). We investigated group differences in negative affect and three possible threat mechanisms (perceived health, material, and cultural threat) for these differences using an online survey completed by a self-selected Canadian sample (N = 1,918). The results suggest that compared to the European Canadians, ethnic minority members, immigrants, and Indigenous peoples have on average perceived higher levels of pandemic threat, which in turn is associated with negative affect. These findings support the hypothesis that the amount of perceived threat perceived by different groups during the pandemic may partially explain reported group differences in well-being.

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The gender of settler colonialism: Susan Bernardin (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West, Routledge, 2022

26Apr22

Description: This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts: Genealogies, Bodies, Movements, Lands. The volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students studying modernism and queer theory across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.

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Disney is settler colonial: Rachel E Bonini, Imagineered Imperial Tourism: Disney & US Empire in Hawai’i, PhD dissertation, Purdue University, 2022

26Apr22

Abstract: Many viewers—especially those from the continental United States—have praised Disney for such recent actions as casting Pacific Islanders in the animated feature film Moana (2016) and assembling a group of cultural advisors (named the Oceanic Story Trust) to guide the filmmakers’ creative decisions. However, my project contends that Disney continues to play a significant role in the maintenance of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, despite these seemingly progressive attempts at challenging Hollywood’s whitewashing. In this project, I argue that Disney creates and replicates the structures of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i through a mechanism that I term imagineered imperial tourism. In my formulation, imagineered imperial tourism involves commodifying historical narratives of colonization to serve the Disney brand by “innocently” repackaging them for the purpose of settler tourist consumption. To signal a Disney-specific branding and reproduction of settler colonial tropes and ideologies, I use the term “imagineered”—a play on Disney’s trademarked term Imagineering, which names the work of the creative team tasked with engineering the company’s most innovative devices, built environments, and technologies. Through a sustained study of Disney’s relevant productions—from the feature films Lilo & Stitch (2002) and Moana to its built environments at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL, and Aulani, A Disney Resort & Spa in Ko Olina, Hawai‘i—I suggest that over time, Disney has normalized a version of Native Hawaiian people and history in US popular culture that reproduces common settler colonial discourses which have structured popular perceptions of Hawai‘i. The company’s almost century-long history of media production has cemented these discourses into a set of public pedagogies that have been reproduced across generations. Disney’s Pacific Island-themed productions and attractions are rife with tropes of native primitivism and imperialist nostalgia. They also reveal the primacy of the discursive framework of hegemonic multiculturalism vis-à-vis the commodified “spirit of aloha,” a sentiment which is superficially rooted in Native Hawaiian epistemologies and branded as a key selling point by the tourism industry. Furthermore, Disney has actively colonized Hawaiian lands since 2007, capitalizing on the Islands’ exploitative tourist industry while also obscuring longstanding battles over land ownership and denying Native Hawaiians sovereignty over their stolen lands. Ultimately, I suggest that Disney’s ostensibly “innocent” repackaging contributes to the violent erasure of Native Hawaiian history in popular culture.

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Contested land (under settler colonialism): Clifford Atleo, Jonathan Boron, ‘Land Is Life: Indigenous Relationships to Territory and Navigating Settler Colonial Property Regimes in Canada’, Land, 11, 2022, 609

26Apr22

Abstract: Respectful and reciprocal relationships with land are at the heart of many Indigenous
cultures and societies. Land is also at the core of settler colonialism. Indigenous peoples have not
only been dispossessed of land for settler occupation and resource extraction, but the transformation
of land into property has created myriad challenges to ongoing struggles of land repatriation and
renewal. We introduce several perspectives on land rooted in diverse Indigenous worldviews and
contrast them with settler colonial perspectives rooted in Eurocentric worldviews. We then examine
several examples in Canada where Indigenous nations attempt to reconnect with their homelands,
protect them, and/or engage with them for economic development. We look at land relationships
rooted in historical treaties, contemporary comprehensive claims/self-government agreements, the
Indian Act, and the defence of unceded territories. The Indigenous communities we look at include
the Six Nations of the Grand River, the Nisga’a Lisims Government, the Westbank First Nation, and
the Wet’suwet’en. We contend that a complex configuration of settler colonial institutions challenges
long-term efforts for Indigenous land reclamation, protection, and sustainable development, however,
Indigenous nations remain steadfast in asserting their self-determination in diverse relational ways
inside and outside of settler state systems.

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A settler sin of Commission: Trycia Bazinet, ‘Tracing understanding of sovereignty and settler-colonial violence in the Quebec’s Viens Commission (2016–2019)’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

25Apr22

Abstract: The Val d’Or crisis began in 2015 with local Indigenous women naming the violence they faced at the hands of police officers in a news report, which culminated in 37 documented cases yet no criminal charges. In response to the outcry, the provincial ‘Viens Commission: Listening, Reconciliation and Progress’ was launched in 2016. The mandate of the commission was to determine if Indigenous people faced discrimination in Quebec’s public services. This paper reviews the terms and limits of this commission when it is understood as a discursive production of modern liberal settler-colonial nations. My analysis proposes that the commission, unwittingly or not, is bound by the conditions of existence of ongoing settler-colonization, that is the imperative of land access. The issue of discrimination against Indigenous people can then be discussed and ‘resolved’ as disconnected from issues of land sovereignty. As per Goeman’s conception of scales of spatial injustices, it mostly leaves the alienation between the interconnected scales targeted by settler-colonial violence (such as body and land) unchanged. By paying attention to the way violence is presented and managed, I discuss how the commission may be oriented by larger conditions interested in re-settling the present and in veiling land sovereignty questions.

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Settler racist metaphors: Catherine Ann Martin, ‘The Chinese Invasion: Settler Colonialism and the Metaphoric Construction of Race’, Journal of Australian Studies, 45, 4, 2021, pp. 543-559

20Apr22

Abstract: The arrival of Chinese immigrants during the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s precipitated a vehement backlash, culminating in legislation to restrict their immigration. Contemporary Australian press discourse focused on Chinese racial difference, with immigrants metaphorically constructed as invaders, influxes and hordes of barbarians. This article argues that Chinese immigrants were racialised through pre-existing metaphoric language of deviance and threat, while the metaphors became simultaneously codified as signifiers of racial difference. It further argues that this characterisation resulted from settler-colonial anxieties about legitimacy, which intensified due to Chinese immigration. The consequent racialisation of Chinese immigrants functioned as a means to displace both the violence of settler-colonial invasion and lower-class white deviance, facilitating the construction of the egalitarian white Australian subject.

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On gendered settler borderlands: Karen R. Roybal, ‘Forgetting the Alamo and Male Privilege: Settler Colonialism and Gendered Resistance Along the Borderlands’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 43, 2, 2022, pp. 62-87

19Apr22

Abstract: Settler colonialism in the early- to mid-nineteenth century ushered in social, political, racial, and religious unrest across what we know today as the US/Mexico borderlands. This essay examines this significant period of settler colonialism in Texas through two novels, written 150 years apart: Augusta Evans’s 1855 novel, Inéz: A Tale of the Alamo, and Emma Pérez’s 2009 novel, Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory. Drawing on Richard Flores’s and Marita Sturken’s conceptions of cultural memory, the essay illustrates how the novels challenge colonialist ideologies by critiquing the Catholic Church, the settlement and claiming of the Texas/Mexico borderlands, and the conflicted gender and sexual relations and privileging of heteropatriarchy that reinforce the settler colonial structure. In so doing, Evans’s and Pérez’s novels produce distinct gendered cultural memories that challenge popular conceptions of 1830s, male-centric versions of Texas history. Though Evans and Pérez write from different subject positions, each author reveals how, in literature, cultural memory allows for an alternative narration of history that privileges voices often rendered silent in the historical record. The gendered cultural memories illuminated in these novels disrupt dominant normative assumptions about history and historical events by drawing attention to the active process of forgetting that erases ethnic Mexican women’s experiences.

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On settler panics: Steven Kohm, Katharina Maier, ‘“The darkest time in our history”: An analysis of news media constructions of liquor theft in Canada’s settler colonial context’, Crime Media Culture, 2022

19Apr22

Abstract: In September 2018, there was a surge of news stories about liquor store theft in Winnipeg,
Canada that resulted in public and political calls for action, and ultimately led to the
introduction of a range of new security and surveillance measures at government owned
liquor stores. This brief news cycle provided opportunities for various social actors, politicians,
and authorities to make claims about the nature of crime and society more broadly. This
article analyzes recent news media coverage of liquor store theft in Winnipeg, Canada and
the social construction of an ostensibly new crime trend in the city: “brazen” liquor store
thefts. We employ a qualitative content analysis of news articles about liquor store theft
published in local Winnipeg news media between 2018 and 2020 (n = 147). Drawing on the
social constructionist paradigm, and Fishman’s conceptualization of “crime waves,” we argue
that the framing of liquor theft via news media reflects longstanding cultural tropes and
myths about crime, as well as hinting at but never fully confronting, deeply engrained colonial
and racialized stereotypes. This paper contributes to our understanding of the ways putative
social problems are made intelligible in the media. We demonstrate how “crime waves” are
shaped by and shape dominant tropes about crime, safety, and citizenship. We argue that
something as mundane as liquor theft reveals much about the historical, colonial and social
roots of crime in local and national contexts.

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Educating the settler educators: Cornel Pewewardy, Anna Lees, Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn (eds), Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education: The Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model, Teachers College Press, 2022

19Apr22

Description: This book presents the Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model (TIPM), an innovative framework for promoting critical consciousness toward decolonization efforts among educators. The TIPM challenges readers to examine how even the most well-intentioned educators are complicit in reproducing ethnic stereotypes, racist actions, deficit-based ideology, and recolonization. Drawing from decades of collaboration with teachers and school leaders serving Indigenous children and communities, this volume will help educators better support the development of their students’ critical thinking skills. Representing a holistic balance, the text is organized in four sections: Birth–Grade 12 and Community Education, Teacher Education, Higher Education, and Educational Leadership. Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education centers the needs of teachers, children, families, and communities that are currently engaged in public education and who deserve an improved experience today, while also committing to more positive Indigenous futurities.

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