Abstract: Critical family history analyses have generated powerful insights into the history and ongoing workings of colonization by bringing to light forgotten family histories and reframing them as stories of colonialism. Such work unsettles the descendants of early colonizers by compelling them to acknowledge the ways in which they continue to benefit from the colonizing actions of their ancestors. My family were colonizers, and some not-very-distant ancestors were part of the first wave of “settlers” who dispossessed Māori of their land in coastal Taranaki. Where my family differs from the families of many writers in the critical family history field is that they remain almost to this day on the land first taken by our direct ancestors. The question I address is how these settler farmers deal with the fact that the land that is now theirs is only recently so, and only became so through acts of violent dispossession, and that the descendants of the original possessors of that land continue to live on the Coast. I argue that one way that settler-colonizers deal with this uncomfortable history is to erase it. The erasure of this history is accomplished through the simple but effective strategy of not-talking about it, which leads to not-knowing about it. This practice, I suggest is critical for the subjective security of settlers, and it remains a crucial strategy in ongoing practices of quotidian colonization. My analysis emanates from a critically reflexive exploration of my memories, of what I know and what I do not know about the history of the farm I grew up on, and demonstrates that autoethnography as a methodology is particularly useful for interrogating and breaking the silences about colonization that contribute to its perpetuation.

Abstract: This article examines two household guides produced by and for settler housewives in colonial Kenya. The article argues that these texts were part of a larger discursive project which emphasised the necessity of maintaining social and affective distance between white women and the African men who worked as domestic servants in colonial homes. Importantly, this distance was viewed as necessary to maintaining the sexual wellbeing of the colony, since both officials and settlers suggested that white women were to blame for cases of interracial rape in the colony. This discourse held that white women inculcated sexual desires in their servants by behaving towards them with excessive intimacy. This article focuses especially on ‘KiSetla’, the dialect of KiSwahili used in Kenyan settler homes. As a language native neither to mistress nor servant, KiSetla was predestined to produce daily confusion between white women and their African male employees. Yet, this was precisely the point – the production of quotidian hostilities helped diffuse anxieties about cross-racial and gendered contact. This article positions household guides as disciplinary texts which sought to manage the intimacies of the colonial home through scripting affective distance between white mistresses and African servants.

Abstract: In this essay, I discuss YouTube travel videos produced by Zapotec Indigenous communities across the US–Mexico border. These point-of-view travel videos that depict the arrival of the videographer into Indigenous communities along the International Highway 190 in Oaxaca, Mexico. To those unfamiliar with the regions depicted, they are seemingly devoid of content, but for undocumented Zapotec viewers who reside away from their homelands, these videos offer them a way to exercise an imaginative mobility. Drawing from the fields of mobility studies, media studies, and critical Indigenous studies, I examine how these YouTube videos are mobile postcards that help immigrant communities stay connect to their communities and challenge uneven structures that deny them the ability to travel freely across borders. In this essay, I contextualize how settler colonial structures in both Mexico and the US intervene in the lives of Zapotec communities in ways that attempt to dictate Indigenous people’s mobility.

Abstract: In this piece, we ask, what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with privilege? What does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? These questions are raised through an ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on Treaty 6, 7 and 8 (Alberta, Canada) and Coast Salish Territories (British Columbia, Canada) about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. In the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler colonial socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures – the mesospace where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism. For these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” In this paper, we narrow our focus to the declarations of privilege that many of our interview participants are making. We reflect on these declarations and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and Indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers working in the public sector. We argue that declarations of privilege risk reproducing settler-centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty, and we reflect on how to orient participants (and ourselves) towards the material realization of relational accountability and towards imagining otherwise.

Abstract: From the vantage point of Philadelphia and the surrounding region, this article situates refuge within a framework attentive to settler colonialism and imperialism. Through the example of Fort Indiantown Gap, a space of both temporary refuge and colonial war, I note that making refuge in the United States entails a demarcation of those deemed non-human through practices of dispossession and displacement. By articulating displacement not as a past phenomenon of nation-building but an ongoing project, this article argues for the centrality of displacement to the making of the United States; not an event, but an overarching structure which continues to endure. Such an analytic opens up the potential to articulate forms of spatial justice and repair beyond current projects of refuge-making.

Abstract: The distinctive traits of early settlers at initial stages of institutional development may be crucial for cultural formation. In 1973, the cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky postulated this in his doctrine of “first effective settlement”. There is however little empirical evidence supporting the role of early settlers in shaping culture over the long run. This paper tests this hypothesis by relating early settlers’ culture to within state variation in gender norms in the United States. I capture settlers’ culture using past female labor force participation, women’s suffrage, and financial rights at their place of origin. I document the distinctive characteristics of settlers’ populations and provide suggestive evidence in support of the transmission of gender norms across space and time. My results show that women’s labor supply is higher, in both the short and long run, in U.S. counties that historically hosted a larger settler population originating from places with favorable gender attitudes. My findings shed new light on the importance of the characteristics of immigrants and their place of origin for cultural formation in hosting societies.

Abstract: This paper explores how John Locke’s theory of property, elaborated in chapter five of his Second Treatise of Government, provided a compelling conceptual and practical justification for the appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ territories in America by the early English settler colonists of the 17th century. It examines how his property theory facilitated the nullification of Native American conceptions of land through the superimposition of European private property regimes in the settler colony. It further highlights briefly how indistinguishable dynamics also characterize the contemporary Israeli/Palestinian settler-colonial context, where the reverberations of Locke’s thought on property are pervasive. To do so, this paper examines two of the key components of Locke’s conceptualization of property (namely, human beings’ transition from a state of nature to political society, and the agricultural improvement argument) specifically in the context of their application in settler-colonial settings. Ultimately, this paper hopes to generate a more exhaustive appreciation of Locke’s theory of property by underlining its implications in settler-colonial enterprises and its function in abetting the expropriation of autochthonous lands.

Excerpt: A group of German, Austrian and Swiss immigrants has implanted an ideologically driven settlement in one of the country’s poorest regions. A 1,600-hectare (4,000-acre) gated community, dubbed El Paraíso Verde, or the Green Paradise, is being carved out of the fertile red earth of Caazapá, one of Paraguay’s poorest regions. The community’s population – consisting mainly of German, Austrian and Swiss immigrants – will eventually swell from 150 to 3,000, according to the owners. The project’s website bills it as “by far the largest urbanization and settlement project in South America”, describing the colony as a refuge from “socialist trends of current economic and political situations worldwide” – as well as “5G, chemtrails, fluoridated water, mandatory vaccinations and healthcare mandates”.

Excerpt: Sheriff Traylor did not make it out alive, and his story adds to the continuum of Indigenous stories that will be told to his grandchildren and to their grandchildren and seven generations into the future. Traylor is played by Plains Cree actor Michael Greyeyes in the 2019 zombie film Blood Quantum,
written and directed by Jeff Barnaby, who is Mi’gMaq. Traylor, as a “fullblooded” Mi’gMaq, was immune to the zombie plague, but he could no longer hold the door, behind which were infected zombies. Traylor sacrifices himself for his family’s survival. The zombies ultimately bite chunks out of his neck and disembowel him. Though Traylor is violently murdered, his soonto-born grandchild symbolizes indigenous futures not premised on blood quantum, and it continues the legacy of Indigenous stories and storytelling.

Excerpt: Since the 1970s, Darwinian scientists of the last third of the long nineteenth century have been represented in connection with the efforts of Indigenous Australian communities to have the remains of their ancestors returned for burial, as having acquired and investigated their skulls and other bodily structures to prove their evolutionary inferiority, and thereby legitimate their violent dispossession and near enslavement under so-called ‘protective’ regimes, where they struggled to maintain their families’ health and well-being, their languages and culture. Racialized perceptions of Indigenous Australians as an evolutionarily primitive human type were perniciously influential among Australian-based and metropolitan British scientists, intellectuals, politicians and government officials during the last third of the long nineteenth century. However, as this article aims to show, by contextual scrutiny of the reportage of these leading four anatomists on their investigation of the skulls and brains of the first peoples of Tasmania and mainland Australia, they had no interest in proving Indigenous inferiority. They were driven by curiosity as to what investigation of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians might disclose about the evolutionary genealogy of humankind. Hence, we would do well to see the outcomes of their investigations as having more complex connections with racialized perceptions of Australia’s first peoples beyond medico-scientific circles, and the formulation of colonialist solutions for managing their future in the aftermath of dispossession by settler colonialism.