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Is attacking identity politics settler colonial? Talia Devi Holy, Transcending identity in settler colonial states: considerations for decolonial solidarity, MA dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2022

27Aug22

Abstract: In recent years, discourses in academic and activist circles increasingly emphasize the potential failures of identity politics, highlighting the tendency of political movements based in identity to prevent unity or become co-opted by elites. Because of this, many activist groups are reformulating or transcending the role of identity in their political movements. However, critics of identity politics often fail to account for the fact that the erasure of Indigenous people’s identities is a deliberate tool of settler colonialism; challenging the role of identity in political movements thus risks furthering settler colonial processes. As such, this thesis engages with the question of how non-Indigenous people can reformulate the role of identity in their political movements without undermining a politics of solidarity with Indigenous nations and their resurgence movements. I begin by laying out the distinction between recursive and destructive power, which critically informs political movements’ differing approaches to identity. By analyzing power as predominantly recursive, or creating the subjects it intends to marginalize, many theorists of identity politics ignore the ways in which power must critically destroy or disappear Indigenous identity in order to establish settler state sovereignty. Thus, moves to reformulate non-Indigenous identity in non-Indigenous political movements should not implicate the role of identity in Indigenous political movements, given that Indigenous political – movements respond to destructive, rather than recursive, power. Further, understanding the functioning of recursive and destructive power reveals the potentially intertwined nature of resistance to these differing forms of power. With this in mind, I look to the #NoDAPL protests to argue that non-Indigenous people can reformulate the role of identity in their political movements by engaging with identity subject to destructive power. Through exploring the recursive construction of the terrorist, the role of anti-capitalism, and the existence of identity beyond destructive power at Standing Rock, it is apparent that identity can be reformulated in ways that fundamentally challenges the functioning of settler states, creating a broad-based politics of solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous political movements.


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Settler colonial credit and the question of US capitalism (when land – and slaves – can be used to satisfy debts the future is somewhere else): Claire Priest, Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America, Princeton University Press, 2021

26Aug22

Description: Even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world. Credit Nation examines how the drive to expand credit shaped property laws and legal institutions in the colonial and founding eras of the republic. In this major new history of early America, Claire Priest describes how the British Parliament departed from the customary ways that English law protected land and inheritance, enacting laws for the colonies that privileged creditors by defining land and slaves as commodities available to satisfy debts. Colonial governments, in turn, created local legal institutions that enabled people to further leverage their assets to obtain credit. Priest shows how loans backed with slaves as property fueled slavery from the colonial era through the Civil War, and that increased access to credit was key to the explosive growth of capitalism in nineteenth-century America. Credit Nation presents a new vision of American economic history, one where credit markets and liquidity were prioritized from the outset, where property rights and slaves became commodities for creditors’ claims, and where legal institutions played a critical role in the Stamp Act crisis and other political episodes of the founding period.


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The affect of settler colonialism: Katherine Natanel, ‘Affect, excess & settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

25Aug22

Abstract: What happens when we pay attention to the sensations of our research? Based on an image and encounter during fieldwork in West Jerusalem, this article traces how a feeling of discomfort both confirms and challenges what we (think we) know about settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel. Rather than dismissing the moments when narratives, objects and exchanges generate unease, I suggest that exploring this ‘data’ attunes us to how settlers navigate the complex and contradictory conditions of coloniality – how they create resources for living. Structuralist accounts of settler colonialism are not fully capable of engaging this texture, even as they might invoke or attempt to harness emotion through mechanisms including the logic of elimination, settler indigenisation and heteropatriarchy. While thinking with this existing theory, I ask scholars and activists to consider what exceeds our dominant frames, following how affects spill over, attach and circulate among settler subjects in ways that have material consequences. This uneasy approach entails letting things play out, accepting our own implication in power and taking theorisation seriously as an ethical practice. At the same time, it is profoundly future-facing, enabling us to better identify what must be done as we work toward decolonial futures.


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Indigenising by the railway: Laura Junka-Aikio, ‘Whose settler colonial state? Arctic Railway, state transformation and settler self indigenization in Northern Finland’, Postcolonial Studies, 2022

25Aug22

Abstract: Settler colonial theory has effectively highlighted the continuity of colonial structures, but less attention has been paid on how also the settler state has transformed over time, and how such changes have affected the manifold relationships between the state, the settlers and the natives. This article addresses trajectories of settler colonial change in Finland, building on theories of state spatial transformation and taking the recurring plans to build a Railway across the Sámi homeland as its point of departure. The article suggests that central to the change is the destabilization of the
relationship between the state and Northern Finland’s older, ‘endogenous’ settler communities. This has facilitated a popular turn to settler self-Indigenization, whereby settlers make new claims to being ‘Indigenous’, usually building on records of a distant (possibly) Indigenous ancestor. Since self-Indigenization directly challenges Indigenous self-determination, it articulates a new form of elimination of the native. The task for critical scholarship is not only to situate, contextualize and challenge such identity claims, but also to question the logic that continues to set especially older settler communities in opposition to Indigenous rights and self-determination, in the context of extractive.


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The outside of settler colonialism: Nisha Ramayya, ‘”Rehearsal for the World-Building Outside of Colonialism”: a Conversation with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Billy-Ray Belcourt’, Wasafiri , 37, 3, 2022, pp. 50-56

20Aug22

Access the interview here.


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The conservation of settler colonialism: Lindsey Schneider, ‘Decolonizing conservation? Indigenous resurgence and buffalo restoration in the American West’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022

20Aug22

Abstract: There has been a recent surge of interest in “decolonizing” conservation and natural resource management fields. Most of this scholarship, however, speaks to colonialism on a global scale and does not address conservation within modern settler colonial states such as the United States and Canada. This project focuses on the reintroduction of buffalo (bison) in the American West as an example of how even conservation efforts that purport to include, value, and share Indigenous perspectives can ultimately uphold settler colonial relations of power. Using an Indigenous mixed-methodology approach, it interrogates the discursive construction of buffalo as “America’s great conservation success story” and highlights the ways in which conservation has historically worked to support colonial projects of Indigenous erasure and dispossession. Some contemporary buffalo restoration projects seek to include Indigenous people as stakeholders and/or collaborators with unique cultural interests in buffalo, but these efforts do not always embody the material shift in power relations that Indigenous scholars have identified as a key component of decolonization. For Indigenous people, buffalo are more than a keystone species with cultural import; they are relatives whose well-being is deeply entwined with our own. For landscape-scale buffalo restoration projects to engage in decolonization, they must seek to not only repair the harm done to tribal nations through buffalo eradication but also work to support Indigenous resurgence by transforming structures of power.


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The vulnerability of settler ideas about Indigenous vulnerability: Kirsten Vinyeta, Ikpíkyav (To Fix Again): Drawing from Karuk World Renewal to Contest Settler Discourses of Vulnerability, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2022

18Aug22

Abstract: Klamath River Basin of Northern California has historically been replete with fire-adapted
ecosystems and Indigenous communities. For the Karuk Tribe, fire has been an indispensable tool
for both spiritual practice and ecological stewardship. Over the last century, the Tribe’s ability to
burn has been severely repressed by the United States Forest Service occupation of Karuk Ancestral
Territory. Only in recent decades has the federal agency come around to recognize the ecological
value of fire, subsequently seeking partnerships with the very Indigenous communities it once
delegitimized. This dissertation concerns itself with a critical examination of scientific and political
discourses of Indigenous vulnerability. My findings reveal how the settler state employs settler
colonial and racist logics to justify ongoing Indigenous dispossession. The irony is, of course, that
climate change and the contemporary wildfire crisis have been produced by settler colonialism. This
dissertation therefore also contests settler discourses of vulnerability by illustrating the complexity,
relationality, and resilience that characterizes Karuk World Renewal, the epistemological and spiritual
backbone of Karuk land management. In doing so, I make the case for the value of visual methods,
and specifically illustration, in serving the nascent field of Indigenous environmental sociology.


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Indigenous counterproposals: David Ress, ‘Autonomy, Not Assimilation’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, 41, 1, 2022, pp. 27-58 

16Aug22

Abstract: The first missionary efforts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony attracted the support of an aspiring Native American leader, Waban, who would become known as the first convert to Christianity in the colony. Waban’s distinctively limited confessions of faith, as related in the writings of Puritan missionaries, suggest he was pursuing a political solution to the question of how a displaced, shrunken Native American people, were to live alongside a rapidly growing settler community. His answer was a self-governing township that mixed traditional Native American practices with the structures of Puritan community governance. But his desire for independent authority and his incomplete acceptance of the Bay Colony’s mainstream Puritan theology marginalized him and cleared the way for the Bay Colony’s leaders’ own political program for Native peoples: separation and subordination.


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Controlling the population economy one marriage at a time: Rawia Aburabia, ‘Settler colonial regulation of bigamous marriage across the Israeli/Palestinian border’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2022

16Aug22

Abstract: This article examines how settler colonial states selectively enforce the law to pursue the goals of land acquisition and demographic control, focusing on Israel’s response to cross-border polygamy as practiced by Bedouins in Israel. Based on archival research and extensive textual analysis of policy debates within the Israeli authorities during the 1980s, it uncovers the selective enforcement of bigamy laws in cases involving Palestinian women, also exploring how the state manipulates ‘security’ and ‘demographic’ concerns. These manipulations are a manifestation of state power, which is applied similarly to all Palestinians across the Israeli/Palestinian border.


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On gentrification as settler colonialism: Robyn Moran, Lisbeth A. Berbary, ‘Placemaking as Unmaking: Settler Colonialism, Gentrification, and the Myth of “Revitalized” Urban Spaces’, in Brett Lashua, Simon Baker, Troy D. Glover (eds), Leisure Myths and Mythmaking, Routledge, 2022, pp. 106-120

16Aug22

Access the chapter here.


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