settler colonial studies blog

The Network State is a settler colonial project: Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State, 1729, 2022

06Jul22

Excerpt: A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.

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Settler autonomous zones right now (and the struggles against them): Jeff Ernst, ‘”Go home”: Honduran islanders fight against crypto colonialists’, Guardian, 05/07/22

06Jul22

Excerpt: It’s also symptomatic of a broader phenomenon throughout the region, where foreigners – often cryptocurrency enthusiasts, libertarians or both – have flocked in recent years, supporting controversial projects – such as the proposed “Bitcoin City” in El Salvador – threatening to displace local residents and drawing comparisons to colonialists. […] When the new Honduran government repealed a pair of laws in late April that had allowed for the creation of semi-autonomous zones called a Zede, it sent a similar message. But investors in the Zede on Roatán, known as Honduras Próspera, have challenged the move.

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Transcending settler digital control: H. O. Burnam, M. S. Brett, ‘The Postdigital Settler Spectacle: An Educators’ Dérive to Unveil a ‘New Colonizer’ During Covid-19’, in P. Jandrić, D. R. Ford (eds), Postdigital Ecopedagogie: Postdigital Science and Education, Springer, 2022

05Jul22

Abstract: This chapter is meant to transcend settler space to unveil what we call the Postdigital Settler Spectacle, a mesmerizing and manipulative façade used by settler capitalist society through mass media and digital technologies, which systemically hides the truths of social inequity in our daily lives. We aim to contribute to the discourse of the postdigital age within the scope of ecopedagogies and our (post)pandemic realities, using Indigenous and allied perspectives. Through a ‘decolonized lens’ this chapter examines the lived realities of two educators who identify and attempt to move beyond the veil of the Settler Spectacle by using the theory of the dérive, drifting, or ‘mythographical’ walking during Covid-19. We examine our truths during the pandemic including the meanings of land, our individual/ collective mourning, and relationship-building, primarily in the ‘rust belt’ cities of Buffalo and Syracuse, New York, and other settler locations of the United States, situated on Indigenous Haudenosaunee lands. Through use of storytelling, we reimagine a way back home, back to the land, towards a journey of restorative healing during our individual and collective (post)pandemic realities within this postdigital age.

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Still stealing children (and still resisting): Erika Finestone, Making Kin / Unmaking the Colony: Indigenous Refusal in the Era of Colonial Child Removal, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2022

05Jul22

Abstract: The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s primary “call to action” is to reduce the number of Indigenous children in out-of-home care in this country. Yet, Indigenous children continue to be apprehended into the child welfare system at rates three times higher than at the peak of the Indian Residential School period (1831-1996). Though there is increasing research on the negative impacts of child removal on Indigenous children, families, and communities there is less research that records and analyzes existing community-based and institutional strategies that prevent, resist, or refuse child welfare interventions broadly and child removal specifically. In partnership with Indigenous caregivers on Vancouver Island, and using a combination of ethnographic and participatory action research methodologies, my dissertation aims to answer one key question: In the context of ongoing and disproportionate colonial child removal, how do Indigenous peoples make and maintain kin? This dissertation foregrounds Indigenous scholarship on refusal, resistance, and resurgence, as well as anthropological analyses of kinship and relationality to answer this question, demonstrating how Indigenous communities reconstitute ancestral care roles, resist colonial extraction, build relational solidarities, and affirm their self-determination despite ongoing colonial interference into the realm of the family. By focusing on Indigenous peoples’ resistance and resilience within the system, this research talks back to a problematic narrative of Indigenous victimhood, illuminating the creative and strategic ways Indigenous caregivers and providers sustain kin both within and on the margins of the settler state.

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Dispossession in urban settler parks: Katherine Yee, Indigenous Resurgence in Colonial Urban Parks: Possibilities and potential for urban Indigenous land-based practices, MA dissertation, University of Toronto, 2022

05Jul22

Abstract: This thesis is an exploration of colonial dispossession within cities and specifically urban parks
recognizing all parks in so-called Canada exist on the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples. Within this thesis I utilize mixed methods, first conceptual analysis is used to discuss the structural-materialist emergence of urban parks as colonial spaces. Secondly, drawing from my own embodied experience earthworking with Two-Spirit Indigiqueer community in High Park, Tkaronto, I engage with land-based theoretical frameworks including land as pedagogy, kincentric ecologies, and reciprocal restoration to story ongoing Indigenous resurgence and futurities. This research considers the colonization of urban parks, and the possibilities and need for improved access for urban Indigenous peoples to engage in land-based practices. I argue, Indigenous inclusion within urban parks, at various levels, is required for the future ecological sustainability of parks and to create safe and accessible spaces for urban Indigenous peoples to enact land-based cultural practices.

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The cancer of settler colonialism: Jennifer Fraser, ‘The Cold War on Cancer: Inuit and the Canadian Epidemiological Imagination’, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2022

05Jul22

Abstract: From the early twentieth century to the present day, health professionals have commented on the exceptional nature of Inuit cancer patterns. Over the past hundred years, Inuit have been thought to possess a unique distribution of disease—characterized, at different points, by higherthan average rates of lung, cervical and salivary gland cancer, lower than average rates of breast cancer, and substantial and growing rates of the disease overall. This thesis explores why Inuit cancer patterns have been characterized in this way and discusses their contemporary implications for Inuit health. This project argues that past and current representations of Inuit cancer incidence evolved in tandem with geographic pathology—a branch of cancer research (and predecessor of cancer epidemiology) that posited that examining the cancer rates of colonial populations could help shed light on the disease’s underlying causes. I examine how rising scientific internationalism, increased Arctic militarization, hierarchical discourses of civilization and human development, and settler policies of protectionism, segregation, assimilation, and experimentation not only allowed geographic pathology to take hold in Canada, but also transformed Inuit Nunangat into an important site in the national fight against the disease. Over the course of six-case studies, I show how Inuit served as central nodes and excluded margins of cancer knowledge production. Canadian researchers used Inuit as resources for generating etiological hypotheses and developing new diagnostic imaging devices and screening techniques. However, most of these medical insights and interventions were exported to southern Canadian urban centres—leaving Inuit to contend with the still-unfolding aftermaths of geographic pathology and its relationship to colonial rule’s historical construction, and attempted elimination, of otherness. To assess the evolution and ramifications of Arctic cancer epidemiology, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach, juxtaposing archival materials with contemporary accounts centered on Indigenous social actors. Oscillating between different methods, sources, and temporalities reveals how historical events resurface within contemporary conditions. It also contributes to growing scholarly interest in how cancer is understood and managed in the context of colonial and post-colonial relations of power and allows us to reflect on how settler-colonial structures produce and continue to pervade cancer service delivery in northern settings.

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Settler dispossessive regulation of Indigenous life: Rebecca Jane Hall, Leah F Vosko, Veldon Coburn, ‘Indigenous Access to Social Assistance and Identity: A Gendered Relational Reading of Settler Colonial Containment in Shubenacadie Indian Band v. Canada’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2022

05Jul22

Abstract: In Canada, the settler colonial state uses the regulation of the so-called Indian identity as a dispossessive strategy, a racialized and gendered means of controlling access to resources and attempting to contain Indigenous human, nonhuman, and land-based relations. This regulation is informed by Western patriarchal ideals and mechanisms. We examine settler accounts of “Indian” identity and their effects through a gendered reading of Shubenacadie Indian Band v. Canada, a legal case centering on the provision of social assistance. Our critique is grounded in a relational approach to Indigenous self-recognition, an approach that transcends the false dichotomy between individual (women’s) rights and group (cultural) rights, critiqued by Joyce Green. This case exemplifies individualized approaches to identity that obscure the relational practices seeking to retain, reproduce, and revitalize Indigenous modes of life, an ongoing terrain of de/colonizing struggle.

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The settlers control the land and the air: Angela Smith, ‘Air Deportation and the Settler Colony’, antiAtlas Journal, 5, 2022

05Jul22

Abstract: Airlines play an important role in border policing and deportation, not only in terms of aviation infrastructure but also as potent, affective national symbols that shape the contours of belonging. In the context of Australia, deportation functions as an assertive act of settler state sovereignty within broader carceral circulations of the Pacific archipelago.

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The poetics of petro-settler colonialism: Max Karpinski, ‘Isotopic Poetics: The Petrocultural Appropriations of Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons’, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 13, 1, 2022, pp. 107-128

05Jul22

Abstract: Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons (2015) broadens the scope of what might be considered a politicized ecopoetics. Battler’s collection, which I suggest works through a poetics of appropriation, links experimental poetic form with Anthropocene criticism in the humanities and critical studies of settler colonialism, addressing the contiguities between ecological degradation and land expropriation, while also making the appropriation of language one of its central formal concerns. In the context of the Canadian nation-state and its extractive economies, I argue that Battler’s “isotopic poetics” appears as a politically motivated formal praxis for working through the tangled exigencies of ongoing settler-colonial dispossession and the accelerating environmental crisis.

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Settler colonial modernism: Robert Flahive, ‘Building the United Nations Headquarters as Worldmaking? Settler Colonialism, Modernist Architecture, and the Material Infrastructure for the Post-World WarII Order’, Alternatives, 2022

04Jul22

Abstract: What does it mean for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) building to be designed through modernist architecture principles on land acquired through settler colonialism? In 1947, construction began on the United Nations Headquarters (UNHQ) in Manhattan, a name derived from Manna-hata, a site within Lenapehoking, the homeland of Indigenous Lenape peoples violently displaced by waves of Dutch, British, and American settlers starting in the 17th century. This paper analyzes the structural dynamics that is in the literal foundations of the United Nations Headquarters, the post-World War II (WWII) worldmaking project intended to safeguard international order. By marshaling the history of Lenapehoking and analyzing the design principles informing the UNGA building, this paper narrows the claim that the post-WWII worldmaking project was contingent upon settler colonialism. Through a capacious reading of settler colonial theory, architectural history, and International Relations (IR), this paper aims to open up conversations on the ongoing structural and spatial dynamics embedded in the foundations of the UNGA building that are constitutive of the post-WWII international order.

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