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Settler cosmologies and the international order: Jacob Kripp, ‘The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations’, American Political Science Review, 2021

13Dec21

Abstract: This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.


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Agonistic reconciliation is better than reconciliation: Sarah Maddison, ‘Agonistic reconciliation: inclusion, decolonisation and the need for radical innovation’, Third World Quarterly, 2021

13Dec21

Abstract: In settler colonial societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, Indigenous–state relations are defined by ongoing conflict over unresolved questions of sovereignty, self-determination, and land. These conflicts have remained intractable regardless of the policy approaches engineered by the state. This article outlines an analytical approach to agonistic reconciliation by mapping the polar ends of a spectrum of responses to conflict in Indigenous–settler relations, with inclusion at one end of this spectrum and decolonisation at the other. Agonistic inclusion seeks to engage reconciliatory relations within colonial democratic institutions, while agonistic decolonisation rejects the legitimacy of these institutions and seeks radical innovation in their place. The article concludes by arguing that scholars must be alert to the seductive pull of inclusion and push instead towards the radical innovation that decolonisation demands.


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Settler conservation is … settler colonial: David Craig Baumeister, Lauren Eichler, ‘Settler Colonialism and the US Conservation Movement: Contesting Histories, Indigenizing Futures’, Ethics, Policy & the Environment, 2021

08Dec21

Abstract: Despite recent strides in the direction of achieving a more equitable and genuine place for Indigenous voices in the conservation conversation, the conservation movement must more deliberately and thoroughly grapple with the legacy of its deeply settler colonial history if it is to, in actuality and not merely in rhetoric, achieve the aim of being more equitable. In this article, we show how the conservation movement, historically and still largely today, traffics in certain ethical and political values that are, in principle or in effect, anti-Indigenous. Through this examination, we hope to reveal how present-day conservation efforts, even if ‘well-meaning’ or nominally deferential regarding Indigenous peoples and perspectives, in fact reinforce settler colonial structures. In particular, we critique the notion of the uninhabited wilderness as a conservation ideal and the disavowal of originary violence (along with a parallel positing of settler nativism) in the articulation of conservation historicity and the founding of conservation movements. We conclude by offering some steps conservationists can take to alter their practices, methods, and values in ways that recognize, respect, and reciprocate with Indigenous peoples.


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The sound of settler colonialism: Kendra Cowley, Echo Elsewhere: Settler Colonialism and the Materialization of Sound, MA dissertation, University of Alberta, 2021

08Dec21

Abstract: On July 24th 2020, members of Beaver Hills Warriors, Black Lives Matter YEG, Treaty Six Outreach, community Elders, and the Crazy Indian Brotherhood set up camp on a piece of land near downtown Edmonton in protest of police violence targeting unhoused people in the city. For the next four months the site would be known as the Pekiwewin Prayer and Relief Camp. Pekiwewin existed at the convergence and opening of the ruptures caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the reckoning of Canadian diplomatic reconciliation, decolonizing demands for land back, and the mass uprising against white supremacist police violence in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25th, 2020. Pekiwewin lasted for four months as a police-free community with resident Elders and a Sacred Fire, a kitchen serving two meals a day, a medic and harm reduction tent, community security, donations, and a library. At its peak, 400 people lived at Pekiwewin. The final residents of Pekiwewin were forcibly removed by police officers on November 12, 2020. In this thesis, I reflect on how my time as a medic at Pekiwewin has shaped my understanding of the relationship between sound, structures of perception, the material-semiotic production of knowledge, and settler-colonialism. What became clear to me — in the collision between my experience of sound at Pekiwewin, and my attempts to record sound elsewhere for a previously proposed research creation project — was the profound inability to separate the two. Not only did these two seemingly different projects, mutual aid and a creative sound recording practice, become important to think together, the literal sounds of each ‘distinct’ project were heard alongside each other, and in their co-constitutional materialization. In Echo Elsewhere, I will argue that sound is a material-semiotic force-relation always in the process of becoming. I look to Donna Haraway and Karen Barad to think through the materialization of sound as a boundary-making practice that delineates, or cuts, what is included, or considered to matter, in the construction of sound. This thesis takes seriously that sound must be located within the material, social, and political conditions of its emergence. In the first chapter I will locate myself and my research within the tradition of deep listening as practiced, theorized, and taught by the late Pauline Oliveros. I will read Oliveros alongside Dylan Robinson and his concept of Hungry listening – listening through settler-colonialism – to think through an ethico-political practice of listening that is attuned to the social resonances of our time. In the next two chapters, I will detail how I have come to understand and theorize sound and assert three primary claims that resonated throughout this project: 1) sound is always situated and must be understood as co-generative, shaping and shaped by, the conditions of its emergence; 2) sound is porous and articulates the interconnectivity of our material and social relations; 3) sound is politically relevant to a critical analysis of settler colonial social relations in the so-called state of Canada. Finally, I will propose in the form of keywords, four different sonic concepts that might help us think through sound and its relationship to settler-colonial world-making. In the conclusion, I will, in concert with Dylan Robinson, propose refusal as a useful orientation from which to ground more ethical sonic-research, including the proposal that particular technologies of remix might allow us to engage, in Karen Recollect’s term, the slipstream of sound, without relying on extractive recording practices.


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Indigenous media against settler colonial media: Lara Palombo, ‘Indigenous Media and the Countering of the Racial Insular Imaginary in Settler-Colonial Australia’, in Catherine Dewhirst, Richard Scully (eds), Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press, Palgrave, 2021, pp. 15-42

08Dec21

Abstract: In the settler colony of Australia, the racial insular imaginary of the state and the law is reconfigured by an uncritical mainstream media that denies Indigenous sovereign knowledges. This insular imaginary has been countered by the ongoing circulation of an autonomous and independent Indigenous media that asserts and territorialises Indigenous sovereign struggles. This chapter provides an overview of how Indigenous media has responded and asserted autonomous Indigenous sovereign knowledge/s across time. It considers the collectivised Indigenous sovereign struggles in The Australian Abo Call (1938) and the racial insularity of the Newspaper Act, 1898 (NSW) that banned its circulation. It demonstrates how current Indigenous media platforms counter a re-occurring racial insularity by reterritorialising Indigenous sovereign knowledges and struggles.


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Turn of the century settler transnationalism: ‘Remembering Australasie: European Settlers and Trans-imperial Thinking in the Cosmopolitan Le Courrier Australien (1892–1896)’, in Catherine Dewhirst, Richard Scully (eds), Voices of Challenge in Australia’s Migrant and Minority Press, Palgrave, 2021, pp. 43-61

08Dec21

Abstract: Le Courrier Australien was initially published as a “cosmopolitan” newspaper written in French. It was launched in 1892 by a Polish nobleman and one of its first managers was a Mauritian; its brief was local, international and pluralistic. This chapter examines the deployment of the ideal of cosmopolitanism in the first years of the newspaper as a form of universal liberalism aimed at collapsing imperial rivalries between the French and British empires in the region. Le Courrier Australien imagined a space—an Australasie—stretching across the Coral Sea from the Australian colonies to New Caledonia and the New Hebrides which served to justify the presence of non-British European migrants in British settler colonies. This strategy of belonging was underpinned by a pan-European settler colonial logic of expansion and sovereignty often obscured by national and imperial histories.


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Native title as settler mediator: Stephen Young, ‘Native title as displaced mediator’, University of New South Wales Law Journal, 44, 4, 2021, pp. 1739-1769

08Dec21

Abstract: This article considers how native title is a legal manifestation of settler colonialism that operates as a displaced mediator. Using native title cases from Australia and elsewhere, this article argues that native title displaces Indigenous laws, customs, and practices in constructing native title holders as ‘traditional’ to mediate their integration into the so-called ‘modern’ nation. Legal processes construct native title and then retroactively posit that these legal constructions pre-exist the Crown’s acquisition of sovereignty. This provides legal support for the Crown’s acquisition of sovereignty and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who assert native title claims become subjects who aver and reproduce the myth that the Crown acquired sovereignty over them. Native title displaces more unsettling, decolonising practices but produces the appearance of justice through the production of existential and material benefits for its subjects. Northern Territory v Griffiths (2019) 364 ALR 208 (‘Timber Creek’) demonstrates this.


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Is ‘visiting’ less settler colonial than ‘acknowledging’? Jo Billows, Territory Acknowledgment, Unacknowledgement, and Misacknowledgement: A Haunting, MA dissertation, University of Toronto, 2021

08Dec21

Abstract: This thesis analyzes conversations on the practice of territory acknowledgements, particularly as they are practiced in academic spaces, arts spaces and by organizations and institutions. Themes that are drawn from these conversations and attended to include: territory acknowledgements as distinctly not “traditional protocol”, territory acknowledgements and the politics of recognition (what is their purpose?), the labour of territory acknowledgements (who is doing them, and who are they for?) and the exhausting repetition of territory acknowledgements (how often?). Territory acknowledgement (as well as unacknowledgement and misacknowledgement) is then removed from the framework of reconciliation and theorized instead as haunting. The author posits, if reconciliation is dead, is territory acknowledgement a haunting? Finally, visiting practices are introduced as alternative ways to make relationships to place not based on possession or ownership. This final chapter considers the positionality of being a visitor, an ethics of care for visiting, and offers examples of visiting practices.


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The settler colonial university: Theresa Rocha Beardall, ‘Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Land-Grant Universities’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2021

08Dec21

Abstract: Moments of performative racial consciousness, however urgent and necessary, often fail to reckon with long-standing demands against injustice from communities of color. In the case of Indigenous Peoples in higher education, these demands frequently include an end to derogatory mascots and racialized campus violence. This article attends to those issues by merging and extending settler-colonial theory and racialized organization theory to examine how the logics of Indigenous elimination and dispossession permeate higher education. With a specific focus on land-grant universities, I argue that racialized organizations are embedded in institutional fields and that both operate within a broader settler-colonial project. I introduce the concept of settler simultaneity to further historicize the study of racialized organizations and uncover how they target persons, collectives, and ideas that pose obstacles to settler goals of subordination, extraction, and profiteering both locally and globally. I look to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a case study that illustrates how these logics work across time and conclude by considering how critical engagement with the logics of elimination can help us to better understand, and hold accountable, the policies and programs of racialized organizations in other areas of social life.


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Settler media representing antisettler resistance: Katie M. Grote, Jay T. Johnson, ‘Pipelines, protectors, and settler colonialism: media representations of the Dakota Access Pipeline protest’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: Indigenous Resistance to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) garnered national and international media attention in 2016 as thousands gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in protest. Increased media attention spurred enquiry concerning the representation of the Indigenous peoples leading the movement, subjecting the movement to settler assumptions about Indigenous resistance. This research employs a qualitatively-based content analysis of 80 news articles reporting on the DAPL protest. These articles range in political bias and can be categorized in one of the following groups: Conservative Bias, Liberal Bias, Mainstream News, Local News, and Indigenous News. Commonly occurring codes and themes are analysed across each category. Word count and frequency of reporting are also considered to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the media representations as they develop through time. While the non-Indigenous-led media commonly cites water security and destruction of sacred sites as the reasons for protest, the Indigenous led media also cites treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, economic vulnerability, climate change, and colonial history more frequently, indicating a multi-dimensional and more holistic understanding of the movement and the Indigenous experience. The mainstream of U.S. reporting on the DAPL protests perpetuate a reductive, one-dimensional framing of the daily struggles of Indigenous Americans by ignoring the impacts of ongoing settler colonial operations.


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