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The settler children’s revenge: Peter Boag, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon, University of Washington Press, 2022

10May22

Description: On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot his parents and a neighbor in a gruesome act that reverberated beyond the small confines of Montgomery’s Oregon farming community. The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery’s consequent hanging exposed the fault lines of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society and revealed the burdens of pioneer narratives boys of the time inherited. In Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon, Peter Boag examines the Brownsville parricide as an allegory for the destabilizing transitions within the rural United States at the end of the nineteenth century. While pioneer families celebrated and memorialized founders of western white settler society, their children faced a present and future in frightening decline. Connecting a fascinating true-crime story with the broader forces that produced the murders, Boag uncovers how Loyd’s violent acts reflected the brutality of American colonizing efforts, the anxieties of global capitalism, and the buried traumas of childhood in the American West.


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‘Saving’ settler America: Lorien S. Jordan, Dewey Dykes, ‘”If You Don’t Fight Like Hell, You’re Not Going to Have a Country”: An Intersectional Settler Colonial Analysis of Trump’s “Save America” Speech and Other Messages of (Non)belonging’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2022

07May22

Abstract: Donald Trump turned the presidency into a live-action reality television series comprising a chaotic blend of televised and tweeted intrigue. The nation’s collective anxiety coalesced in a nationalistic, authoritarian denouement on January 6, 2021. During Trump’s speech at the Save American Rally, he returned to familiar themes, telling the story of a ravaged America and his role as its victimized hero. As Trump concluded his speech urging supporters to “fight like hell,” rioters assailed the U.S. capitol revealing the violence of colonial invasion. To understand and, thus, respond to the insurrection, we must first recognize the dominant structures that create the conditions of its perpetration and excusal. This intersectional analysis addresses the colonial impulse for violent exclusion through the interpretive framework of settler colonialism. Examining four interlocking themes, we incorporate historical and contemporary popular culture rhetorical devices to triangulate our findings. We illustrate how social identity and settler colonialism occur in popular culture at the intersections of American, Christian nationalism, racialization, hetero-genderism, and ableism. Overall, our analysis explores how Trump prepared his base through years of cultural manipulation, promoting a populist, White vision of the world with Trump symbolic of its savior. To subvert these exploitations, we must participate in their deconstruction to destabilize the power of colonial institutions.


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Crafty settlers: Megan A. Carney, ‘Whiteness and settler colonial logics in the Pacific Northwest hops and craft beer industries’, Food, Culture & Society, 2022

07May22

Abstract: The rapidly expanding Pacific Northwest (PNW) craft beer industry and the heralding of Seattle as an epicenter of “hoppy beer” has benefited from geographic proximity to the Yakima Valley, revered by many as the “hops capital of world.” In this article, I center theory from Black studies, Native studies, and critical whiteness studies to examine the intersectional violences of settler colonialism and whiteness as structuring logics of the PNW hops and craft beer industries. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2019, I argue that the settler colonial history of PNW hops cultivation and present-day culture of exclusion that extends outward into relationships with craft brewers, sustain a hegemonic whiteness. Moreover, I suggest that craft beer culture in the United States, as a site of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, has benefitted from ongoing dispossession through gentrification and cultural appropriation. By way of conclusion, I discuss the possibilities and limitations of existing attempts to dismantle whiteness within the US craft beer industry.


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Ethnic settlers! Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, Francesco Ricatti, ‘Migrant Lives on First Nation Land: Greek-Australian Memories of Titjikala in the 1960s’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2022

07May22

Abstract: Via ethnographic and oral history methods and transcultural memory work, this article presents the complex, ambiguous and at times contradictory relationship between a Greek family and an Aboriginal community, including the traditional landowners, in Central Australia in the 1960s. Within a commonplace narrative of colonists and pastoralists buying, owning and selling First People’s land, ownership by Greek migrants and the historical presence of Aboriginal people provides an entry point into a microhistory that illustrates and reveals under-acknowledged, fraught and fragmented facets of transcultural life in 1960s rural Australia, and the place of ethnic-settler-colonisers in Australia’s history of settler-colonialism, dispossession, and pastoralism. Through this case study, we argue the importance of uncovering, recovering and reclaiming the history of Mediterranean migrants’ transcultural relationships with First Nations people.


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Indigenous! Yvonne Boyer, Larry Chartrand, Métis Rising: Living Our Present Through the Power of Our Past, UBC Press, 2022

07May22

Description: Métis Rising draws on a remarkable cross-section of perspectives to tell the histories, stories, and dreams of people from varied backgrounds, demonstrating that there is no single Métis experience – only a common sense of belonging and a commitment to justice. The contributors to this unique collection, most of whom are Métis themselves, examine often-neglected aspects of Métis existence in Canada. They trace a turbulent course, illustrating how Métis leaders were born out of the need to address abhorrent social and economic disparities following the Métis–Canadian war of 1885. They talk about the long and arduous journey to rebuild the Métis nation from a once marginalized and defeated people; their accounts ranging from personal reflections on identity to tales of advocacy against poverty and poor housing. And they address the indictment of the jurisdictional gap whereby neither federal nor provincial governments would accept governance responsibility towards Métis people. Métis Rising is an extraordinary work that exemplifies how contemporary Métis identity has been forged by social, economic, and political concerns into a force to be reckoned with.


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‘Socialist’ settler colonialism? Chris Hann, ‘Book review essay: how socialist market economy accentuates settler colonialism in Xinjiang and results in state terror’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2022

07May22

Access the article here.


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Restoration? Sara Kimberly Worl, Restoring What? and for Whom? Listening to Karuk Ecocultural Revitalization Practitioners and Uncovering Settler Logics in Ecological Restoration, MA dissertation, University of Oregon, 2022

06May22

Abstract: What does it mean to restore a landscape degraded by settler colonialism? How might a wellintentioned process like ecological restoration end up causing harm from underlying settler
colonial logics? This thesis explores these questions through interviews with nine Karuk
ecocultural practitioners and offers pathways forward for collaborative ecological restoration
processes that support Indigenous ecocultural revitalization efforts and stand-up to destructive
settler logics.


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The trouble of the world and how to settle it: Zach Sell, Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital, University of North Carolina Press, 2021

06May22

Description: In this innovative new study, Zach Sell returns to the explosive era of capitalist crisis, upheaval, and warfare between emancipation in the British Empire and Black emancipation in the United States. In this age of global capital, U.S. slavery exploded to a vastness hitherto unseen, propelled forward by the outrush of slavery-produced commodities to Britain, continental Europe, and beyond. As slavery-produced commodities poured out of the United States, U.S. slaveholders transformed their profits into slavery expansion. Ranging from colonial India to Australia and Belize, Sell’s examination further reveals how U.S. slavery provided not only the raw material for Britain’s explosive manufacturing growth but also inspired new hallucinatory imperial visions of colonial domination that took root on a global scale. What emerges is a tale of a system too powerful and too profitable to end, even after emancipation; it is the story of how slavery’s influence survived emancipation, infusing empire and capitalism to this day.


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Settler backlash! Aaron John Spitzer, ‘The settler-rights backlash: understanding liberal challenges to Indigenous self-determination’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2022

03May22

Abstract: In the archetypal settler-colonial states of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Indigenous peoples have joined the ‘rights revolution’, pressing for self-determination. They have been met by a ‘settlerrights backlash’, contraposing settler and Indigenous rights. This article makes two contributions. First, it presents a scoping study of settler-rights challenges in Anglo-settler states, revealing the extent and means of the settler backlash. Second, working within mainstream Anglo-settler political theory, it theorizes settler-rights challenges, exploring what liberal principles settlers invoke, what Indigenous protections they impugn, and what contrapositions of rights ensue. This article shows settlers invoke the liberal principle of universalism to impugn Indigenous sovereignty, the liberal principle of individualism to impugn differentiated citizenship, and the liberal principle of egalitarianism to impugn Indigenous decision-making and territorial control. In doing so, this article reveals the normative dynamics and internal contradictions of settler-rights challenges. By showing the extent, dynamics and contradictions of such challenges, it is hoped to help public decision-makers better understand and resolve them.


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Clamming settlers: Gordon Robert Lyall, Turning the tide: clams and colonialism in the Salish Sea, 1925-1994, PhD dissertation, University of Victoria, 2022

03May22

Abstract: Featuring an ethnohistory of two Coast Salish communities — the Suquamish Tribe in Washington State and the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation in British Columbia — this dissertation is a transborder study of Indigenous shellfish harvesting and foreshore rights in the Salish Sea across the twentieth century. It explores the history of the interface between land and sea within the context of treaty rights to resources and Indigenous nations’ sovereignty over marine habitats. This study also turns the ethnographic lens on the settler population. Using tools offered by recent scholarship on settler colonialism, it helps explain why the general public has resisted treaty and Aboriginal rights to fisheries and other resources. This dissertation also reveals Coast Salish nations’ responses to settler encroachment of their foreshores and state disruption of their management of the marine environment throughout the twentieth century and offers two community studies to illustrate how local Indigenous communities have re-shaped relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers on the Salish Sea. The first study examines Suquamish’s right to shellfish under the Point Elliott Treaty and affirmed by the 1994 Rafeedie decision, as well as the interrelated 1980s tidelands case for ownership of the beaches attached to the Port Madison Reservation. The second examines W̱SÁNEĆ people’s defense of Saanichton Bay from a marina development, when the SȾÁ,UTW̱ (Tsawout) community wielded its Douglas Treaty rights in Claxton v. Saanichton Marina, 1987. Utilising Karl Jacoby’s concept of a “moral ecology,” this study argues that by ignoring Indigenous Knowledge regarding marine resource management, and by creating an overly complex regulatory scheme guided by principles of capitalism, settler officials on both sides of the border missed opportunities to avoid some of the greatest challenges to marine health and resource survival in the Salish Sea.


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