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A settlers’ convoy! Peter McLaren, ‘Some thoughts on Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” and the settler colonial state’, Education Philosophy and Theory, 2022

03Apr22

Excerpt: But it is difficult to find common ground with their concept of freedom, which I wish to emphasize is historically linked to settler colonialism, that is, a form of colonialism grounded in exogenous domination, a form of colonialism that seeks to displace the original population of the colonized territory with new groups of settlers who typically justify such colonization through an identification with imperial authority.


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Camping settlers: Hope Rumford-Rodgers, Audrey R. Giles, Willow Scobie, ‘Christian summer camps for Indigenous youth in Canada: a settler colonial analysis’, Leisure, 2022

29Mar22

Abstract: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Final Report and Calls to Action highlighted the need for the truth about Indian residential schools to be known and the responsibility of churches and religious groups to take action to enact reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Summer camps for Indigenous youth run by Christian organizations in Canada are sites that have not yet been given scholarly attention. Within this context, ‘What is happening in these spaces’ is a simple question, but one behind which is the heavy weight of residential school history and the TRC’s Calls to Action. In this paper, we share the results of our research, which was informed by a settler colonial studies lens, and internet-mediated document analysis of camp websites, as well as questionnaires and semi-structured interviews completed with those who operate and work at these camps. Our research addresses an important, but neglected, area of study and makes a timely and applied contribution to leisure studies.


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Storying against settler colonialism: Cammi Murrup-Stewart, Petah Atkinson, Karen Adams, ‘Storying Ways to Reflect on Power, Contestation, and Yarning Research Method Application’, The Qualitative Report, 27, 3, 2022, pp. 777-791

29Mar22

Abstract: Internationally within academia settler-colonial processes occur in various ways alongside a growth in the use of research methods conceived with Indigenous knowledges. However, most research environments and practices are built upon and privilege dominant non-Indigenous settler-colonial knowledge systems. It is within this power imbalance and contested space that Yarning research method is being applied and interpreted. Underpinned by an Indigenous Research Paradigm, we employed storying ways to examine researcher experiences of settler-colonialism and the Yarning research method. The story outlines challenges and pitfalls that researchers can fall into and critically examines how researchers can fail to recognise the depth of Indigenous knowledge embedded within the practice. This story is gifted by creating an imagined narrative interview with a character called Settler-Colonisation, whereby we identify a litany of settler-colonial processes impacting Yarning research. Scrutinising the epistemological and methodological practices and processes enacted in academia is imperative for better-informed application of Indigenous research methods and create sustainable research more generally.


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Black and Indigenous: Laura J. Feller, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line, Oklahoma University Press, 2022

29Mar22

Description: Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state’s long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary. Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions.Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities.Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives’ sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.


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Pioneer or squatter? Settler! Leyland Cecco, ‘Pioneer or squatter? YouTuber’s cabin sparks fight over Canada’s wilderness’, The Guardian, 27/03/22

28Mar22

Excerpt: Since last year, officials have been trying to get Clarke and another self-styled pioneer, Simon Tourigny, to leave. The territory says they are illegally occupying public land and have defied orders to vacate. They are now petitioning a court to intervene. Originally from Newfoundland, Clarke operates a popular YouTube channel called “Skote outdoors”, which documented his 2020 journey up the Yukon River to stake a mining claim and a real-life tutorial on building a log cabin. In the videos, he is seen felling trees and chopping notches into the logs. “This is the real dream for me here now,” he says in one video as he speeds along a snowy landscape on a snowmobile. “It’s a good life out here. Everyone told me it was going to be a real struggle. And it was … But the hard times are vastly outweighed by the good times.”


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Restoration after settler colonialism? The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, Juan Marcellus Tauri, ‘What exactly are you restoring us to? A critical examination of Indigenous experiences of state-centred restorative justice’, 61, 1, 2022, pp. 53-67

26Mar22

Abstract: Over the past 30 years the restorative justice (RJ) movement has become increasingly accepted within the creases of formal justice systems everywhere, but most especially within the systems of settler-colonial states. From a critical Indigenous perspective one especially powerful driver for the elevation of RJ to its current exalted place in state crime control, has been the purposeful utilisation of Indigenous cultural artefacts by the movement to market their wares. Utilising research on Indigenous peoples’ experiences of state-centred RJ programmes, this article challenges claims made by RJ practitioners and state functionaries regarding the emancipatory potential of RJ practices for Indigenous peoples residing in settler colonial contexts.


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Incommensurable? Grant Arndt, ‘The Indian’s White Man: Indigenous Knowledge, Mutual Understanding, and the Politics of Indigenous Reason’, Current Anthropology, 2022

23Mar22

Abstract: This article uses three Ho-Chunk discussions of “whiteness” (from first contact to the mid-twentieth century) to outline an approach to Indigenous knowledge that challenges approaches that depict other cultures as constituting incommensurable worlds. Arguing that the idea of ontological alterity leads to a form of ethnographic entrapment, it instead theorizes Indigenous knowledge production as a process rooted in empirical observation, moral evaluation, and critical engagement within a common but contested world. The Ho-Chunk examples illustrate a long-term, collective process of inquiry that produced an understanding of settler whiteness emphasizing its relationship to practices of dispossession and governance. They also show events in which such knowledge was used by Ho-Chunk people in efforts to compel white interlocutors to self-awareness and more reasonable forms of behavior.


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Cultivating indigeneity: Jordan Stanger-Ross, Lynne Marks, ‘Remembering the Holocaust in a Settler Colonial City: The Case of Victoria, Canada’, History & Memory, 34, 1, 2022, pp. 100-132

23Mar22

Abstract: This article tells the history of Kristallnacht commemorations in the small Jewish community of Victoria, British Columbia. From their founding in the 1980s, the ceremonies were intended to include members of the general public, in addition to the Jewish community, but the events changed over time, when organizers began to include indigenous people as active participants, and the history of colonialism became a key theme in Kristallnacht remembrance. Suggesting that this orientation positioned members of the local Jewish community as implicated in historical injustice, even on the occasion of Holocaust remembrance, the authors explore the history behind this development and consider its implications today.


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Settler colonialism is biopolitical: Amy Swiffen, Shoshana Paget, ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism and the Limits of Foucault’s Historical Method’, in A. Sarat, G. Pavlich, R. Mailey (eds), Interrupting the Legal Person , Emerald Publishing Limited, 2022, pp. 89-102

19Mar22

Abstract: This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colonial legal orders. The focus is on the evolution of the definition of ‘Indian status’ in the Indian Act, which is the central piece of legislation in Canada’s Indian administration regime. Historically, the legal concept of Indian status was used as a way to constitute a population in relation to colonial sovereignty, and later was adapted as a mechanism to internally dividing the population through complex forms of legal domination. Scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and racism to understand how settler colonial sovereignty relates to a population on a territory. This chapter argues that Foucault’s analysis was radically historically embedded in a way that shapes its relevance to understanding settler colonialism. In Foucault’s original analysis, racism emerges as tool of the state in the relation between territory and sovereignty, which was characteristic in feudal Europe. In settler colonial legal orders such as Canada, however, sovereignty’s relation to the population is constituted in the absence of a prior connection to the land.


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Explorations of settler unbelonging: Yan Zhang, A settler colonial and feminist study of the journeys in Oscar and Lucinda, Gilgamesh, journey to the stone country and the swan book, PhD dissertation, Edith Cowan University, 2022

19Mar22

Abstract: This thesis investigates how four contemporary Australian novels, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Joan London’s Gilgamesh, Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, through adopting innovatively the journey motif and structure, deal with the impact of Australia’s colonial past on the country’s race and gender relationships. These journey stories variously represent Australian colonial history, explore the subjects of white guilt and settler unbelonging, and envisage an apocalyptic future for Australia. For my examination of the novels, I draw on elements of settler colonial and feminist theories, while also referring to Joseph Campbell’s and Evans Lansing Smith’s scholarship on the hero journey for the close reading of race and gender embodied in the novels. I argue that the selected novels, by means of three journeys or three phases of a journey, expose and challenge oppressive dualistic ideologies, such as white and black, male and female, the imperial centre and the empire periphery, human and Nature, and even life and death. In charting the journeys represented in the novels, I argue that i) Oscar and Lucinda, by re-enacting the scenes of early settlers’ migration to Australia and settler explorers’ expeditions into the inland of the continent, reimagines the originating moment of the colony and reveals the racist and patriarchal nature of it; ii) while Gilgamesh feminises an ancient Sumerian hero journey by having a young female embark on an epic journey, it implies the unlikelihood of white settlers’ sense of belonging in Australia; iii) the circuitous journey of the settler heroine and Aboriginal hero in Journey to the Stone Country exposes the darkness of Australia’s frontier history and reflects the uncertainty involved in Australia’s Aboriginal reconciliation movement; and iv) by likening the Aboriginal heroine’s abduction and return journey to the Aboriginal cultural practice of walkabout, in which Aboriginal Australians trek along creator ancestors’ path of creation, The Swan Book asserts Aboriginal people’s ontological sovereignty while it challenges settlers’ derivative sovereignty. The thesis contends that journeys depicted by each of the four novels evoke descent of the hero or heroine into the underworld, reminding us that until the settler authorities in Australia relinquish their colonisation of Aboriginal Australia and accommodate Aboriginal sovereignty, the country will always be beset by fraught race and gender relationships.


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