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Settler colonial meateaters: John Ikerd, ‘Indigenous Wisdom and the Sovereignty to Eat Meat’, Global Food Justice, 2021

13Dec21

Excerpt: Growing concerns about global climate change have rekindled an age-old controversy about eating meat. Animal agriculture is frequently indicted as a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. However, animal agriculture is not without defenders, including those who claim that holistically managed livestock grazing systems could actually “reverse climate change”. Various studies suggest that the environmental impacts of food animal production differ significantly among management systems—particularly confinement versus pasture-based systems. Due to its complexity, this controversy will not likely be resolved by science. Instead, the wisdom of Indigenous peoples may prove more useful in deciding whether to eat or not eat meat.


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Settler colonialism smells: Meg Parsons, Karen Fisher, ‘Historical smellscapes in Aotearoa New Zealand: Intersections between colonial knowledges of smell, race, and wetlands’, Journal of Historical Geography, 74, 2021, pp. 28-43

13Dec21

Abstract: This paper explores European (Pākehā) settlers’ perceptions of smells and why certain smells were labelled as threatening and transgressive, whereas others were deemed desirable and health-inducing. Whether it was the stench of dried fish, the musky odours of wetlands or the scent of flowers, representations of smell pervade the writings of Pākehā in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this paper, we draw attention to the critical role smells played in Pākehā settlers’ perceptions of and efforts to radically remake terrestrial and freshwater systems of the Waipā and Waikato Rivers (located in the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Smells, scents, and aromas were all-powerful aides connected to Pākehā settlers’ understandings of health and disease. They influenced individual settlers and settler colonial government actions to remake landscapes and waterscapes. Nevertheless, smellscapes are largely overlooked by scholars when discussing environmental change and management regimes.


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Settler colonial data: Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Data silence in the settler archive: Indigenous femicide, deathscapes and social media’, in Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese (eds), Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence, Routledge, 2022

13Dec21

Abstract: The violence of the settler state is enacted through diverse practices that render Indigenous women’s lives unsafe and has resulted in their deaths. Rarely resulting in media attention, public vigils or community outrage, the unlawful, unexpected and often violent killing of Indigenous women remains silent in the settler archive. Indigenous peoples utilise social media platforms to bring to life the lives and stories of the women who have gone missing and the circumstances and the contexts in which their lives have been taken. In doing so, Indigenous peoples are building a digital record that challenges the silence in the settler archive and maps the ongoing gendered violence of colonialism.


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Settler colonial control (of bodies at the border): Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, ‘“You have to pay with your body”: Sexual violence, border violence and the settler state’, in Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese (eds), Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence, Routledge, 2022

13Dec21

Abstract: Our concern in this essay is to disclose the mobilisation of sexual violence as a specifically embodied modality of the regime of settler colonialism. Our argument is that the border is a site where these forms of violence are concentrated and licensed, both at the legislative level and at the level of expansive discretionary powers which enable multiple forms of non-accountable force and violence to be directed against gendered nonwhite and racialized bodies that are cast as threats to national security. We signal a number of the axes along which the treatment of illegalized arrivals not only functions to reproduce ongoing forms of settler colonial violence but also ramifies and mutates into new formations: specifically, practices that reinscribe patterns of racialized punishment directed at enslaved and colonized Indigenous peoples. The technologies and practices of both slavery and continuing Indigenous dispossession, we argue, stage their historical returns in certain current practices of immigration detention.


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Settler colonialocene? Priyanka Dutt, Anastasya Fateyeva, Michelle Gabereau, Marc Higgins, ‘Redrawing Relationalities at the Anthropocene(s): Disrupting and Dismantling the Colonial Logics of Shared Identity Through Thinking with Kim Tallbear’, in Maria F. G. Wallace, Jesse Bazzul, Marc Higgins, Sara Tolbert (eds), Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 109-119

13Dec21

Abstract: What does it mean to respond to the Anthropocenes, plural, when doing science education? Specifically, can we critically engage with the Anthropocene, singular, without responding to the multiplicity in which Indigenous land and its many facets within the global community were at risk of destruction from Man? In this work, we contemplate the urgency of the inclusion of Indigenous philosophies and ways-of-knowing within the arching body politic, giving space to these practices that have been otherwise silenced within and beyond Western colonial frames. We argue that if the ways of thinking and practicing science and science education continue to stem from settler colonialism, capitalism, and toxicity, having previously and continually been responsible for the erasure of Indigeneity, the response within the Anthropocene will be multitudinously harmful. Here, we turn to Dakota scholar, Kim Tallbear, (Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic belonging, University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and her work in the intersections of identity, science, settler relations, and Indigeneity with the use of provocative imagery to the innate feeling of and within the Anthropocene(s).


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Settler cosmologies and the international order: Jacob Kripp, ‘The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations’, American Political Science Review, 2021

13Dec21

Abstract: This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.


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Agonistic reconciliation is better than reconciliation: Sarah Maddison, ‘Agonistic reconciliation: inclusion, decolonisation and the need for radical innovation’, Third World Quarterly, 2021

13Dec21

Abstract: In settler colonial societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, Indigenous–state relations are defined by ongoing conflict over unresolved questions of sovereignty, self-determination, and land. These conflicts have remained intractable regardless of the policy approaches engineered by the state. This article outlines an analytical approach to agonistic reconciliation by mapping the polar ends of a spectrum of responses to conflict in Indigenous–settler relations, with inclusion at one end of this spectrum and decolonisation at the other. Agonistic inclusion seeks to engage reconciliatory relations within colonial democratic institutions, while agonistic decolonisation rejects the legitimacy of these institutions and seeks radical innovation in their place. The article concludes by arguing that scholars must be alert to the seductive pull of inclusion and push instead towards the radical innovation that decolonisation demands.


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Settler conservation is … settler colonial: David Craig Baumeister, Lauren Eichler, ‘Settler Colonialism and the US Conservation Movement: Contesting Histories, Indigenizing Futures’, Ethics, Policy & the Environment, 2021

08Dec21

Abstract: Despite recent strides in the direction of achieving a more equitable and genuine place for Indigenous voices in the conservation conversation, the conservation movement must more deliberately and thoroughly grapple with the legacy of its deeply settler colonial history if it is to, in actuality and not merely in rhetoric, achieve the aim of being more equitable. In this article, we show how the conservation movement, historically and still largely today, traffics in certain ethical and political values that are, in principle or in effect, anti-Indigenous. Through this examination, we hope to reveal how present-day conservation efforts, even if ‘well-meaning’ or nominally deferential regarding Indigenous peoples and perspectives, in fact reinforce settler colonial structures. In particular, we critique the notion of the uninhabited wilderness as a conservation ideal and the disavowal of originary violence (along with a parallel positing of settler nativism) in the articulation of conservation historicity and the founding of conservation movements. We conclude by offering some steps conservationists can take to alter their practices, methods, and values in ways that recognize, respect, and reciprocate with Indigenous peoples.


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The sound of settler colonialism: Kendra Cowley, Echo Elsewhere: Settler Colonialism and the Materialization of Sound, MA dissertation, University of Alberta, 2021

08Dec21

Abstract: On July 24th 2020, members of Beaver Hills Warriors, Black Lives Matter YEG, Treaty Six Outreach, community Elders, and the Crazy Indian Brotherhood set up camp on a piece of land near downtown Edmonton in protest of police violence targeting unhoused people in the city. For the next four months the site would be known as the Pekiwewin Prayer and Relief Camp. Pekiwewin existed at the convergence and opening of the ruptures caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the reckoning of Canadian diplomatic reconciliation, decolonizing demands for land back, and the mass uprising against white supremacist police violence in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25th, 2020. Pekiwewin lasted for four months as a police-free community with resident Elders and a Sacred Fire, a kitchen serving two meals a day, a medic and harm reduction tent, community security, donations, and a library. At its peak, 400 people lived at Pekiwewin. The final residents of Pekiwewin were forcibly removed by police officers on November 12, 2020. In this thesis, I reflect on how my time as a medic at Pekiwewin has shaped my understanding of the relationship between sound, structures of perception, the material-semiotic production of knowledge, and settler-colonialism. What became clear to me — in the collision between my experience of sound at Pekiwewin, and my attempts to record sound elsewhere for a previously proposed research creation project — was the profound inability to separate the two. Not only did these two seemingly different projects, mutual aid and a creative sound recording practice, become important to think together, the literal sounds of each ‘distinct’ project were heard alongside each other, and in their co-constitutional materialization. In Echo Elsewhere, I will argue that sound is a material-semiotic force-relation always in the process of becoming. I look to Donna Haraway and Karen Barad to think through the materialization of sound as a boundary-making practice that delineates, or cuts, what is included, or considered to matter, in the construction of sound. This thesis takes seriously that sound must be located within the material, social, and political conditions of its emergence. In the first chapter I will locate myself and my research within the tradition of deep listening as practiced, theorized, and taught by the late Pauline Oliveros. I will read Oliveros alongside Dylan Robinson and his concept of Hungry listening – listening through settler-colonialism – to think through an ethico-political practice of listening that is attuned to the social resonances of our time. In the next two chapters, I will detail how I have come to understand and theorize sound and assert three primary claims that resonated throughout this project: 1) sound is always situated and must be understood as co-generative, shaping and shaped by, the conditions of its emergence; 2) sound is porous and articulates the interconnectivity of our material and social relations; 3) sound is politically relevant to a critical analysis of settler colonial social relations in the so-called state of Canada. Finally, I will propose in the form of keywords, four different sonic concepts that might help us think through sound and its relationship to settler-colonial world-making. In the conclusion, I will, in concert with Dylan Robinson, propose refusal as a useful orientation from which to ground more ethical sonic-research, including the proposal that particular technologies of remix might allow us to engage, in Karen Recollect’s term, the slipstream of sound, without relying on extractive recording practices.


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Indigenous media against settler colonial media: Lara Palombo, ‘Indigenous Media and the Countering of the Racial Insular Imaginary in Settler-Colonial Australia’, in Catherine Dewhirst, Richard Scully (eds), Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press, Palgrave, 2021, pp. 15-42

08Dec21

Abstract: In the settler colony of Australia, the racial insular imaginary of the state and the law is reconfigured by an uncritical mainstream media that denies Indigenous sovereign knowledges. This insular imaginary has been countered by the ongoing circulation of an autonomous and independent Indigenous media that asserts and territorialises Indigenous sovereign struggles. This chapter provides an overview of how Indigenous media has responded and asserted autonomous Indigenous sovereign knowledge/s across time. It considers the collectivised Indigenous sovereign struggles in The Australian Abo Call (1938) and the racial insularity of the Newspaper Act, 1898 (NSW) that banned its circulation. It demonstrates how current Indigenous media platforms counter a re-occurring racial insularity by reterritorialising Indigenous sovereign knowledges and struggles.


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