settler colonial studies blog

The geographies of settler colonialism: Joel E. Correia, ‘Between Flood and Drought: Environmental Racism, Settler Waterscapes, and Indigenous Water Justice in South America’s Chaco’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022

17Apr22

Abstract: This article advances a novel approach to investigating geographies of settler colonialism and environmental justice through a critical physical geography (CPG) of water scarcity in the South American Chaco. Drawing from multimethod research conducted in collaboration with Enxet and Sanapaná communities in Paraguay, I evaluate how waterscape change produces social vulnerability with a focus on Indigenous access to safe drinking water. Stemming from a seemingly simple question—how have annual flood and drought events in the Chaco become malignant for Enxet and Sanapaná peoples—my analysis centers on current struggles for Indigenous rights amidst Paraguay’s booming ranching industry. I use an eclectic data set—from historical missionary accounts, seventy-two household questionnaires, mapping new waterscapes, and a political economy of cattle ranching—to show how settler waterscapes produce environmental racism by limiting Indigenous access to “good” water. I argue that the prevalence of water scarcity in Indigenous communities across the Bajo Chaco is not a natural result of biophysical geography but a socially produced outcome of how settler waterscapes rework hydrosocial relations along racial lines. CPG offers a way to bridge biophysical analysis with critical social theory to expand geographic understandings of settler colonialism and its effects on Indigenous environmental justice.

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Silicon Valley is the settler: Antti Tarvainen, ‘Review Essay’, Prometheus, 37, 4, 2022, pp. 371-381

11Apr22

Abstract: Silicon Valley has emerged as the key metaphor of the innovation-led economic development in the 21st century. As the Valley’s technology monopolies and utopias expand, there is a growing need for critical histories that help to ground and contextualize the futures that are spreading from San Francisco Bay. In this review essay, I suggest that a settler-colonial approach offers interesting possibilities for the creation of such histories. To demonstrate how such an approach works, I develop a settler-colonial reading of Margaret O’Mara’s recent book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019). By critically analysing the key metaphors in O’Mara’s celebrated book, the global and violent face of the Valley becomes visible. The settler-colonial approach, I conclude, offers one possible analytical approach to breaking the stranglehold of America-centred understanding typical of the histories of Valley.

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On Indigenous revanchism: Martina Horáková, ‘”Kin-fused” revenge: Rewriting the canon and settler belonging in Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2022

11Apr22

Abstract: One of the many rewritings of Australian Henry Lawson’s iconic 1892 short story “The Drover’s Wife” is the 2016 play The Drover’s Wife, written by Aboriginal actor, writer, and director Leah Purcell. Purcell’s rewriting evidences a much more significant presence of Indigeneity. The play not only introduces Yadaka, an Aboriginal fugitive, as a key character, but the drover’s wife herself is revealed to have Indigenous origins. This powerful twist offers several implications: a tour de force of frontier violence with disturbing and haunting images of racism, rape, lynching, and murder, the play confronts the foundations of the literary canon and of settler belonging, providing an alternative to both. Borrowing Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s term “kin-fused”, this close reading of the play’s text argues that its resolution implies a critique of Indigenous–settler reconciliation, pointing to a lingering desire to redress colonial violence, desire embodied in the play by a “kin-fused” revenge.

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Monuments are settler colonial texts: Bonnie M. McGill, Stephanie B. Borrelle, Grace C. Wu, Kurt E. Ingeman, Jonathan Berenguer, Uhuad Koch, Natchee B. Barnd, ‘Words are monuments: Patterns in US national park place names perpetuate settler colonial mythologies including white supremacy’, People and Nature, 2022

11Apr22

Abstract: Ecologists, outdoor professionals and the public work and play in lands with complex histories. Part of decolonizing our professional and recreational practices is to expose settler colonial biases and recognize the histories of colonized lands and the peoples who have stewarded these lands for millennia prior to colonization. To provide a quantitative example of settler colonial biases in a familiar context, we examined the origins of over 2,200 place names in 16 national parks in the United States (US; 26% of the parks). Through iterative thematic analysis of place name origins and meanings, we constructed a decision tree for classifying place names according to emergent categories, which enabled the quantification and spatial analysis of place name meanings. All national parks examined have place names that tacitly endorse racist or, more specifically, anti-Indigenous ideologies, thus perpetuating settler colonialism and white supremacy at the system scale for future generations. Looking east to west across the US, the proportion of place names per national park that appropriated Indigenous names increased in parallel with the westward expansion and evolution of US settler colonialism. This examination of place names, name origins and their consequences is an opportunity to make everyday complicity in systemic oppression more visible and to more actively advance decolonizing practices for land and language.

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One or two decolonisations? Andrew Curley, Pallavi Gupta, Lara Lookabaugh, Christopher Neubert, Sara Smith, ‘Decolonisation is a Political Project: Overcoming Impasses between Indigenous Sovereignty and Abolition’, Antipode, 2022

07Apr22

Abstract: In this article we seek to intervene in conversations that frame Black abolition and decolonisation as antagonistic political projects. We respond to Garba and Sorentino’s (2020) “Slavery is a metaphor”, which critiques Tuck and Yang (2012; “Decolonization is not a metaphor”) and decolonisation. Our concern is that scholarship in this vein denies Indigenous sovereignty and futurity while unnecessarily characterising decolonisation as antiblack. We contend that ontological, epistemological, and disciplinary traps lead to this problem: reductions, conflations, and taking settler-enslavers’ word as truth. We suggest that critiques of settler colonial studies shouldn’t be confused with the aims of Indigenous decolonisation, where the former is largely driven by white scholarship and the latter is an Indigenous-led project rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. We focus on questions of land and sovereignty, gesturing toward framings that are inclusive of Black, Native, and immigrant communities.

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Settler colonialism is a wound: Marinella Rodi-Risberg, ‘Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon: Trauma, Settler Colonialism, and Storytelling’, in Marinella Rodi-Risberg, Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers’ Incest Novels from the 1990s, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 113-140

07Apr22

Abstract: Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon (1994) connects sexual and racial traumas, economic disenfranchisement, and settler colonialism, situating incest against a background of land dispossession and genocide, specifically Cherokee removal and allotment. Thus, the protagonist’s individual experience of sexual abuse becomes emblematic of the treatment of Indians by the US government in a historical context. Underscoring how the traumatic effects of incest are connected with the historical trauma of land loss, the novel offers harsh critique on the harm done to the Indian population, in particular the women, on and off reservation. Bell testifies to the legacy of American Indian historical trauma through a literary technique reminiscent of Native storytelling as a form of literary activism, challenging stories that erase Native Peoples’ past and present presences from historical memory and creating new stories that not only bear witness to past struggles but also to American Indians’ current lives. Ultimately, through an appeal to the reader as witness, Bell’s story performs a belated witnessing to the trauma of incest that draws on the collective wounding of settler colonialism, reminding readers not only of the harm of injustice and oppression but also of resilience and resistance through the protagonist’s storytelling.

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What supersession? (on settler colonial wishful thinking): Esme G. Murdock, ‘Indigenous governance now: settler colonial injustice is not historically past’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 25,3, 2022, pp. 411-426

07Apr22

Abstract: This article argues against Jeremy Waldron’s supersession thesis by outlining several ways in which the historical injustice of settler colonialism is not past, but continuous. Through engaging with both contemporary settler colonial theory and contemporary Indigenous political theories, I argue that Waldron’s understanding of historical injustice and the focus on justice in the now, which may supersede historical claims, relies on both Eurowestern epistemological and temporal frameworks that are ill-suited for understanding the continuous nature of settler colonial violence, and thus what Indigenous justice requires. As such, I explain how the supersession thesis, specifically the supersession of sovereignty, contributes to a prominent theme in western liberal political theory that attempts to fix both settler colonial injustices and Indigenous nations to an irrecoverable chronological past.

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Who is welcoming immigrants? Harald Bauder, Rebecca Breen, ‘Indigenous Perspectives of Immigration Policy in a Settler Country’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2022

03Apr22

Abstract: The immigration policies in settler colonial countries rarely consider Indigenous perspectives or solicit their input—a reality that is particularly problematic given the key role that immigration policies have played and continue to play in the colonialization process. In this paper, we use Canada as a case study to examine the intersection of Indigenous experiences and the country’s immigration policy, and why and how Indigenous voices have been excluded from decision-making about immigrant selection. In addition, we review the academic and grey literature to investigate what the Indigenous perspectives that have been shared surrounding immigration policy currently are. Some perspectives affirm the need and desire for new immigrants while simultaneously engaging with the Canadian state’s problematic treatment of temporary migrants. Other perspectives fundamentally challenge the Westphalian state and its claim to regulate human mobility in the name of sovereignty. We connect these perspectives with academic open borders and no border debates.

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Primitive accumulation right now: Justin Paulson, Julie Tomiak, ‘Original and Ongoing Dispossessions: Settler Capitalism and Indigenous Resistance in British Columbia’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 2022

03Apr22

Abstract: This paper draws on archival research and theoretical work to articulate the specific histories, processes, and structures of primitive accumulation in British Columbia. Such processes of accumulation appear differently here than in the comparably more well-theorized contexts of imperial colonialisms. As we highlight the agents and infrastructures of dispossession, our research also aims to foreground the importance of agents and infrastructures of resistance. Different dispossessions generate different antagonisms, and we argue that Indigenous subjects are situated antagonistically to capital not only as laborers partially or wholly subsumed into capitalist social relations, but as Indigenous peoples as such, whose Indigeneity has been ‘in the way’ of development from the 1850s onward. Private property requires before all else the deterritorialization of those whose relations with the land do not revolve around its commodification. Violence against Indigenous nations, and especially Indigenous women, is not incidental to capitalist development but is a prerequisite to capitalist subsumption in the settler-colonial context. In requiring the death of either Indigeneity or the person, capital constitutes Indigenous struggle as an antagonist, interrupting both the subsumption of labor and the circulation of capital (even as such struggles may also self-constitute themselves in a variety of ways).

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Settler colonialism’s ‘right’ relations: Marianne O. Nielsen, Barbara M. Heather, Finding Right Relations: Quakers, Native Americans, and Settler Colonialism, University of Arizona Press, 2022

03Apr22

Description: Quakers were one of the early settler colonist groups to invade northeastern North America. William Penn set out to develop a “Holy Experiment,” or utopian colony, in what is now Pennsylvania. Here, he thought, his settler colonists would live in harmony with the Indigenous Lenape and other settler colonists. Centering on the relationship between Quaker colonists and the Lenape people, Finding Right Relations explores the contradictory position of the Quakers as both egalitarian, pacifist people, and as settler colonists. This book explores major challenges to Quaker beliefs and resulting relations with American Indians from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. It shows how the Quakers not only failed to prevent settler colonial violence against American Indians but also perpetuated it. It provides historical examples such as the French and Indian War, the massacre of the Conestoga Indians, and the American Indian boarding schools to explore the power of colonialism to corrupt even those colonists with a belief system rooted in social justice. While this truth rubs against Quaker identity as pacifists and socially conscious, justice-minded people, the authors address how facing these truths provide ways forward for achieving restitution for the harms of the past. This book offers a path to truth telling that is essential to the healing process.

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