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Settler colonial agroecologies: Kase W. Wheatley, Beyond Land Grab Settler Agriculture: Toward a Transformative University Agroecology, MA dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2022

11Sep22

Abstract: As a practice, agroecology can trace its roots to Indigenous and peasant farmer knowledge developed over centuries, yet as a term, agroecology has existed for over ninety years. The term has become institutionalized through universities like the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a Land Grant University where a number of staff and faculty from different disciplinary backgrounds practice agroecology, often in collaborative efforts. At the same time, through efforts like the High Country News exposé Land Grab U, more attention is being brought to the settler colonial origins of Land Grant universities like UW-Madison and the ongoing implications of these origins on research. Through twenty-one interviews with UW-Madison practitioners affiliated with the Agroecology program and others from the university who work with Indigenous communities, I sought to understand 1) perceptions of agroecology, 2) how settler colonialism and Indigeneity are considered in this work, and 3) what a “transformative university agroecology” could look like. Since its inception as an academic program at UW in the early 2000s, agroecology has steadily embraced a more explicit political orientation challenging individual disciplinary boundaries and the broader “productivist” paradigm of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. However, what actually constitutes the broader social context of agroecology was contested among interviewees, especially across disciplinary boundaries. Interviewees from the social sciences and humanities acknowledged settler colonialism more frequently than interviewees However, among all Agroecology program-affiliated interviewees, the depth to which settler colonialism was integrated into their work was generally limited. Interviewees from outside the agroecology program called upon their colleagues to do more and begin these efforts by building relationships based in collaboration.


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Indigenous cinematics: Robert Jackson, ‘Grounded abstractions: an interview with Conor McNally‘, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 61, 2022

11Sep22

Excerpt: McNally’s documentary practice is rooted in Indigenous philosophies that emphasize balanced and healthy relationships between humans and the more than human world. Read in and against the framework of settler colonialism—which attempts to reinscribe all social relations within capital’s grammars of possession, accumulation, and domination—McNally’s focus on Indigenous social relations offers both a critique of settler colonialism’s dispossessive order and an affirmation of Indigenous lives, lifeways, and aesthetics.


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A complex settler colonial past must be represented: David A. Nichols, ‘Telling Hoosier Stories: Promised Lands and Proving Grounds’, Indiana Magazine of History, 118, 3, 2022, pp. 222-228

11Sep22

Abstract: Originally a living history museum celebrating Indiana’s homogeneous pioneer past, Conner Prairie began in the late 1990s to tell a more complicated story, one that included the expulsion of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans. With the new “Promised Land as Proving Ground” exhibit, scheduled to open in 2023, Conner Prairie will even more radically enlarge its subject matter, examining the lives that free persons of color voluntarily built in a state with an antagonistic white majority. Curatorial Director Charlene Fletcher, who designed the new exhibit from the ground up, described in an interview with David A. Nichols the layout, media components, and modern community partners of “Promised Land.” Dr. Fletcher also explained the exhibit’s goals: to introduce visitors to antebellum Black Hoosiers, who were some of central Indiana’s pioneer settlers (and the ancestors of future Black professionals), and to remind audiences of modern Hoosiers’ ongoing struggle for inclusion and equity.


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Dickens studies and the question of settlers abroad and what they do: Dominic Rainsford, ‘Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict by Dorice Williams Elliott, and: Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel by Elahe Haschemi Yekani, and: Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876 by Josephine McDonagh, and: Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire by Philip Steer (review)’, Dickens Quarterly, 39, 3, 2022, pp. 394-400

06Sep22

Excerpt: Each of these recent books touches on international relations, empire, and race in the nineteenth century. Each contains a single chapter that focuses specifically on Dickens. Each might have been written slightly differently, perhaps, if the authors had all had the chance fully to digest one another’s work. As it is, they collectively provide a significant unfolding of the map of Dickens studies.


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Nordic settler colonialism: Lynette McGuire, ‘The Fragmentation of Sápmi: A Nordic Model of Settler Colonialism’, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, 29, 2022

05Sep22

Abstract: While the Nordic countries are frequently renowned as some of the most peaceful societies in the world, such a conception of peace cannot fully encapsulate the experiences of the Sámi. Likewise, the global movement toward settler-Indigenous reconciliation since the 1960s has set the Nordic response apart from the rest of the world. Building upon existing understandings of internal colonialism and structural violence, this paper analyzes how pragmatic attempts by Finland, Norway, and Sweden to reconcile with the Sápmi have constituted a unified Nordic model of continued settler colonialism, as well as how differences between the National Sámi parliaments contribute to that model. Finally, this paper examines the impact that the Nordic model of settler colonialism has had on pan-Sámi politics, particularly concerning problems of Sámi reunification since the fall of the Soviet Union.


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An interview with Shannon Speed on settler colonialism and Latin American Studies: Lynn Stephen, Settler colonialism in Latin American and Native studies’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2022

05Sep22

Excerpt: ‘Well, as you know, it has been a lifelong or career-long preoccupation of mine as a citizen of a Native nation located in what we currently call the United States to do academic and political work in what we now refer to as Latin America. I have long been frustrated by the lack of engagement between Indigenous scholars north and south of the US-Mexico border, which, of course, is a settler-imposed distinction and one that we too often reify with our scholarly work‘. 


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Reforming settler colonial education is easier said and not done: Ellen Bees, Manitoba Education Reforms, White Settler Discourses, and the Marginalization of Indigenous Perspectives, MA dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2022

05Sep22

Abstract: In 2019, the province of Manitoba started a process of reforming the education system, however it is important to question the role of white settler colonialism in this process. This critical discourse analysis examined how white settler colonialism is normalized and advanced through the discourses found in selected Manitoba education reform documents. Contrasting discourses emerged in the government documents and the briefs submitted from education organizations and school divisions. The dominant discourse, found particularly in the government documents and other documents, featured colour-blind ideology that normalized whiteness. Indigenous students were frequently discussed using a deficit narrative, while ideological discourse structures put distance between the Indigenous community and the education system. Neoliberal views of learning and achievement were emphasized in the dominant discourse, which conflicted with definitions of achievement put forth by Indigenous scholars. Attributes of Indigenous learning were often omitted or instrumentalized to further neoliberal views of learning and achievement. Superficial integration of Indigenous content and perspectives was evident, running counter to a more transformative trans-systemic integration of Indigenous and Eurocentric knowledge systems. In summary, these discourses worked to normalize and advance white settler colonialism and marginalize Indigenous perspectives, while contrasting discourses offered a transformative vision of an education system based in principles of equity.


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The settlers in Africa wanted land: Prisca A. Gobo, Uwadiunor Nkem Isaac, ‘Land Alienation in Settler Colonies Compared: Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa’, South-South Journal of Humanities and international Studies, 4, 4, 2021, pp. 281-298

05Sep22

Abstract: This paper embarks on a comparative analysis of land alienation in three settler colonies namely Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa. This article is a five-part work. The first part of this work highlights the definitions and importance of land studies in Africa. Land as a factor of production is the mother of all crises in Africa. The second part of this work outlines the history of settlers in South Africa,
Zimbabwe and Kenya. Dutch-East India Company, British South Africa Company and British East Africa Company were all actors in the setting up of settlers in Africa. The third part of this work examines the similarities and differences among the various settler colonies in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya in Africa. The fourth part of this work reviews the causes of land alienation in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya. The causes and course revealed that disputes grew out of hostilities over land invasion. And the final part of this research is an appraisal of the colonial enterprise in settler colonies. A multidisciplinary approach to historical writing will be employed in this research to interrogate the facts and arrive at an objective conclusion.


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With a chapter on Finnish settler colonialism: Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘All I See Is White: The Colonial Problem in Finland’, in Josephine Hoegaerts, Tuire Liimatainen, Laura Hekanaho, Elizabeth Peterson (eds), Finnishness, Whiteness and Coloniality, 2022, pp. 291-314

05Sep22

Access the chapter here.



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The pollution of Indigenous waters: Nicole Van Lier, ‘Regulating Improvement: Industrial Water Pollution, White Settler Authority, and Capitalist Reproduction in the St. Clair–Detroit River Corridor, 1945–1972’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022

01Sep22

Abstract: This article explores the postwar racialization of socionatural metabolisms as Michigan consolidated its capacities to regulate water pollution in the St. Clair–Detroit River corridor. These unceded waters flow through the traditional territories of the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Mississauga, and Wyandot nations, as well as the heavily industrialized, urbanized, and racially segregated geographies of southeast Michigan. Drawing on archival records, I examine discursive constructions of White settler and Indigenous water metabolisms that coarticulated with Michigan’s growing concern that unchecked water pollution posed a metabolic barrier to industrial manufacturing. I situate these representations against the state’s emerging objective to reconcile two interconnected forms of waste: (1) the material degradation of water attributed to Michigan’s advanced capitalist economy, and (2) the wasted economic potential long used to denigrate Indigenous societies that “failed” to extract capitalist value from nature. This case study demonstrates how Michigan’s discursive approach to managing a potential crisis of capitalist reproduction also reconfigured the logic of improvement as the racial and economic basis for settler colonial authority over nature. “Improving” nature was not only about facilitating access to nature for capitalist production, but reproducing—indefinitely—the ecological conditions on which capitalist production relied. This article builds on two lines of inquiry in critical geographic scholarship exploring mutually constitutive relationships between race and socionatural metabolisms, and between settler colonialism and environmental degradation, to interrogate the postwar discourses flowing through water management in southeast Michigan, a region where water remains at the center of multiple racialized dispossessions and their ongoing contestation.


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