settler colonial studies blog

A settler stampede: Kimberly A. Williams, Stampede: Misogyny, White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism, Fernwood, 2021

07Jun22

Description: Kimberly A. Williams wants the annual Calgary Stampede to change its ways. An intrepid feminist scholar with a wry sense of humour, Williams deftly weaves theory, history, pop culture and politics to challenge readers to make sense of how gender and race matter at Canada’s oldest and largest western heritage festival. Stampede examines the settler colonial roots of the Calgary Stampede and uses its centennial celebration in 2012 to explore how the event continues to influence life on the streets and in the bars and boardrooms of Canada’s fourth-largest city. Using a variety of cultural materials—photography, print advertisements, news coverage, poetry and social media—Williams asks who gets to be part of the “we” in the Stampede’s slogan “We’re Greatest Together,” and who doesn’t.

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Indigenous haunting of settler futures: Jane Palmer, Angelia Walsh, Beata Batorowicz, ‘Parallel futures? Indigenous resurgence and the haunting of the settler’, Futures, 2022

07Jun22

Abstract: Two kinds of futures have emerged in the shadow of colonialism: the haunted futures of a white settler society that suppresses or denies knowledge of the ‘founding wound’ of colonial invasion; and Indigenous futures constituted by a refusal of defeat and a ‘radical resurgence.’ While they appear as parallel and irreconcilable trajectories, we suggest, after Ahlqvist and Rhisiart (2015, ‘Emerging pathways for critical futures research: Changing contexts and impacts of social theory’, Futures, vol. 71, pp. 91-104), that a haunting continues to link them; projects of Indigenous refusal and resurgence continue to alert non-Indigenous settler societies to a past not done with, and a futures trajectory based on denial and deception that must be unlearned. We describe one such project of Indigenous resurgence in South West Queensland, Australia, and suggest that it is an example of a local resurgence that performs, through its truth-telling, a ‘generative haunting’ of white settler society. In doing so, it forges a link between Indigenous and non-Indigenous futures, disturbing, and making more contingent, white settler imaginaries of the past and the future.

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It’s the settler economy, stupid: Courtney Lewis, ‘Agency In Economic Justice: Typology of Native Nation Sovereignty and Settler-Colonial Acts of Economic Aggression’, Interventions, 2022

04Jun22

Abstract: This essay expands upon the current theoretical construction of colonialism to make settler-colonial societies’ economic strategies more explicit. These strategies, which I term economic violence and economic hegemony, have been used by US federal and state governments to subvert the inherent sovereignty of Native Nations in order to access their resources. This essay also proposes and illustrates six categories of economic hegemony – debt creation, underfunding, mismanagement of funds and resources, blackmail, taxation jurisdiction, and regulation – to clarify the types of tools that settler-colonial states, like the United States, have available to accomplish their goals. Significantly, however, the illustrative examples also foreground Native Nations’ agency in countering and even anticipating US federal and state governments’ aggressions across time and geographies. Incorporation of these strategies into political and economic discourse leads to a more precise analysis of settler-colonial incursions while emphasizing the many ways in which Native Nations exert their sovereignty to forward economic justice.

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Settler allies: Lori Barkley, K. Linda Kivi, ‘Decolonizing Sinixt “Extinction”: Settler Allies in Indigenous Resurgence’, in Arti Nirmal, Sayan Dey (eds), Histories, Myths, and Decolonial Interventions, Routledge, 2022

04Jun22

Abstract: This chapter examines the process of constructing inter-subjective understandings of Indigenous oral traditions and lifeways. The Blood of Life Collective, initiated and directed by Sinixt knowledge-keepers Marilyn James and Taress Alexis, embarked on a multi-pronged storytelling project working towards decolonization and Sinixt resurgence. In analyzing the success of Collective projects as a model for other Indigenous-settler collaborations, research and interviews with Collective members for this chapter address two questions: 1) Could repeated exposure to Sinixt stories link settlers more deeply to the lands they inhabit? And 2) Can settler participation lend enough tangible support to Indigenous communities to invest in settler evolution and education a viable resurgence strategy?

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Settler teachers see strange things: Matt Henderson, ‘Indigenous learners in the Manitoba Teacher, 1919–2019’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: This paper analyses The Manitoba Teacher, the principal publication of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society, since its first publication in 1919. The analysis focuses on what has changed and what has remained the same in terms of how Indigenous learners have been perceived by settler educators over a century. This paper argues that over the century Indigenous people in Manitoba have been prohibited from the conception, design, and management of their own education. Coupled with this, there has always existed an intense desire on the part of settlers to provide a system of education with a variety of aims stemming from eradication, integration, and good intentions. The tension between the prohibition and intent to provide a colonial education has also been shadowed by moments and movements of resistance, resurgence, and reclamation. Indigenous communities began to counter the cultural erasure in The Manitoba Teacher by the 1970s. There are hints and glimpses of Indigenous communities and allies trying to wake teachers up and advocating for Indigenous control of education in the name of the inclusion of land, language, and culture in schools.

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Settler colonial structures (of feeling, and those over a pedestal): Janne Lahti, ‘Südwester Reiter: Fear, Belonging, and Settler Colonial Violence in Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: This article examines the continuities between the Herero and Nama genocide and the history of the Reiterdenkmal statue in Windhoek, Namibia. It interprets the statue as an extension of the lived experience of the genocide and a contested symbol of settler belonging. The Reiterdenkmal reformulated colonial violence as white victimhood and black savagery, and advanced German settler claims over African soil. Violence and the “rider” together remade black African space into white settler space. Yet, this settler belonging was and remains grounded on fears. Uncertainty over belonging and fear of the Natives had driven the killing and exploitation of black Africans in the first place, and settler
identities remain uncertain as the legacies and reckonings of past violence continue unresolved in independent Namibia.

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What counts in settler colonialism (and what does not): Morgan B. Hawes, Danielle C. Slakoff, Nikolay Anguelov, ‘Understanding the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis: An Analysis of the NamUs Database’, Criminal Justice Policy Review, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: Within the United States, there is an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Using data from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) repositories on missing and unidentified women, we examined how demographic and regional differences affected case status. Within the NamUs database, we found that American Indian/Alaska Native women are 135% more likely to be listed within the “unidentified remains” cases than women of other races. The results also showed that in states with relatively high urban population densities, women of all races were 250% more likely to be found dead and remain unidentified than women in places with a low urban population. We conclude by discussing three areas in which policy can help bring Indigenous women’s plight back to the fore: (a) in data collection efforts, (b) in increased support for Tribal police, and (c) via the media’s purposeful focus on Indigenous issues.

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Settlers want water (and take it)! James D. Parker, ‘Watering white supremacy in Kenya: settler colonialism and the disappearing of the Ewaso Ng’iro river 1919–1955’, Water History, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: Settler colonialism in Kenya and elsewhere was, amongst other things, an environmental regime based upon specific ideologies of resource use and availability. The resource rights and requirements of nomadic and pastoral communities were written away in favor of extractive uses rooted in capitalist production, as well as a mythical ideal that settlers could create a facsimile of pre-industrial Britain overseas. This article argues that settlers’ pursuit of these goals in the region of the Ewaso Ng’iro river led to a discursive and material erasure of indigenous livelihoods and claims to water downstream. In removing, diminishing, and eliminating the flow of the river into the Northern Frontier via large scale irrigation operations, the settlers of the Nanyuki region placed the river within an ethnonationalist ideology of water that elevated their new European Eden above all else. By tracking the slow diminishment of the Ewaso Ng’iro’s water level and the settler-nomad contestation over it, this article shows that the possible erasure of a rural population whose way of life was antithetical to both the racial and economic priorities of settlers was a necessary side-effect for the realization of a proto-econationalist ideology emanating from the upper middle class and elite settlers of the Ewaso Ng’iro’s catchment area.

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Settler colonialism is exigent: Dominique Salas, ‘Decolonizing Exigency: Settler Exigences in the Wisconsin Winnebago Mission Home’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: White settlers began to establish Christian schools in what is now Wisconsin in 1661. Through examining the papers of Benjamin Stucki, the headmaster of the Winnebago Mission Home—a Wisconsin boarding school in which many Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Chippewa, and Potawatomi children (and others whom were of mixed ancestry) were indoctrinated into Christianity—the author argues manipulation of chronos affects decolonial kairotic moments. Undergirding this argument is the conviction that manipulation of chronos tampers with perceiving settler colonialism’s everyday exigency. The mission school’s rhetorical obscuring and replacing of settler colonialism’s exigency with one (or multiple) they manufacture is a settler exigency. In this process, settlers segment, omit, and create new timelines that distract from the past violence that is undoubtedly stretching into the present. Through manipulating time, what surfaces as the new problem (i.e., not settler colonialism) is the Indigenous person’s vulnerability. The implications of rhetorically manipulating time are therefore central concerns in decolonial goals and coalitions.

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Urban settler colonialism is a process: Paul Sylvestre, Heather Castleden, ‘Asinabka in four transformation: how settler colonialism and racial capitalism sutured urbanization in Canada’s capital to the plunder of Algonquin territory’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

02Jun22

Abstract: This paper contributes to scholarship on settler colonial urbanism by examining the historical constitution of Canada’s National Capital Region at the intersection of racial capitalism and settler colonization. Its impetus arises from four years of solidarity work with Algonquin land defenders and accomplices struggling to reclaim Asinabka, an Algonquin sacred complex of islands and waterfalls in the Kitchissippi (Ottawa River) between the Canadian cities of Ottawa and Gatineau. Situating the current struggle within the 200 years of crisis and consolidation that produced the Ottawa Valley, we track the entwined histories of settler capitalists transforming Asinabka in response to the shifting demands of racial capitalism alongside the ceaseless effort by Algonquin people to exercise jurisdiction over the islands in the face of colonial incursion and theft. To do so, we read across 100 years of colonial archives in conjunction with settler historiographies of the lumber industry. We argue that while local in form, Asinabka’s transformations were constitutive of place- and race-making processes at a variety of scales and sites throughout Algonquin territory. We conclude by considering how traces of this history are recursively mobilized in the present to transform Asinabka into an investment property.

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