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Science fiction’s settler colonial prophecy: Kali Simmons, ‘”The environment is us”: Settler cartographies of Indigeneity and Blackness in Prophecy (1979)’, Science Fiction Film and Television, 14, 3, 2021, pp. 315-331

20Oct21

Abstract: This article examines the triangulation of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the ‘creature feature’ sf-horror film Prophecy (Frankenheimer US 1979), arguing that the film’s renderings of environmental racism ultimately function to justify white supremacist hetero-patriarchal maintenance and surveillance of Black and Indigenous lands and bodies. A close examination of Prophecy’s representational and ideological shortfalls – in particular its renderings of Black and Indigenous maternity – reveals troubling entanglements between settler-colonial logics of geography, ecology, monstrosity, and subjectivity.


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A landmark decision? Maria Antonia Tigre, ‘Indigenous Communities of the Lhaka Honhat (Our Land) Association v. Argentina’, AJIL, 2021

20Oct21

Abstract: On February 6, 2020, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Court) declared in Lhaka Honhat Association v. Argentina that Argentina violated Indigenous groups’ rights to communal property, a healthy environment, cultural identity, food, and water. For the first time in a contentious case, the Court analyzed these rights autonomously based on Article 26 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) and ordered specific restitution measures, including actions to provide access to adequate food and water, and the recovery of forest resources and Indigenous culture. The decision marks a significant milestone for protecting Indigenous peoples’ rights and expanding the autonomous rights to a healthy environment, water, and food, which are now directly justiciable under the Inter-American human rights system.


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A treaty on personal development under settler colonialism: Jillian Fish, ‘Towards a Haudenosaunee Developmental Science: Perspectives From the Two Row Wampum’, University of Minnesota Medical School, 13/10/21

20Oct21

Abstract: The Two Row Wampum belt represents a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch about how the two nations would coexist with each other in the context of settler colonialism. The oral tradition of the Two Row Wampum states that the Haudenosaunee would travel down the river of life in a canoe containing their ways of being and knowing, while the Dutch would travel alongside them in a ship with their own orientations to the world. However, the original principles of the Two Row Wampum contrast with the colonial realities of the Haudenosaunee. In an application of the Two Row Wampum to developmental science, in which the river is the life course, Mainstream developmental science is the ship, and Haudenosaunee developmental science is the canoe, I use the Principles of the Two Row Wampum to propose a Haudenosaunee perspective of the field. I compare this with how Mainstream developmental science dominates the field, marginalizing various Indigenous developmental sciences in a manner similar to the Betrayal of the Two Row Wampum. Though I recommend that Mainstream developmental science returns to the principles of the Two Row Wampum, I demonstrate that Indigenous developmental sciences operate beyond the constraints of developmental psychology by centering Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies to promote Indigenous futures.


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The history of Indigenous vaccine hesitancy: ‘In Kawerau one thing impedes the effort to vaccinate Māori:  Morgan Godfery, New Zealand’s history’, The Guardian, 20/10/21

20Oct21

Excerpt: The vaccination rate for Pacific peoples still lags the rate for Pākehā, or European New Zealanders, and the Māori rate lags further still. Only 63% of Māori have had their first shot. For Pākehā, it’s 84%. This is partly due to geography. If you inspect the government’s vaccination map, a national register laying out every vaccine centre in New Zealand, you might notice something startling: there are barely any vaccine centres in rural Māori communities. This essay asks why.


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‘Returning’ the land? Chizuko Sato, ‘Land Tenure Reform in Three Former Settler Colonies in Southern Africa’, in Shinichi Takeuchi (ed.), African Land Reform Under Economic Liberalisation, Springer, 2021, pp 87-110

18Oct21

Abstract: This study explores the challenges of land tenure reform for three former settler colonies in southern Africa–Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa. While land redistribution programmes have been the primary focus of land reform for these countries since independence, land tenure reform for the inhabitants of communal areas is an equally important and complex policy challenge. Before independence, the administration of these areas was more or less in the hands of traditional leaders, whose roles were sanctioned by the colonial and apartheid authorities. Therefore, one of the primary concerns with respect to reforming land tenure systems in communal areas is related to the power and authority of traditional leaders in the post-independence period. This study highlights striking similarities in the nations’ land tenure reform policies. All of them gave statutory recognition to traditional leaders and strengthened their roles in rural land administration. In understanding this ‘resurgence’ or tenacity of traditional leadership, the symbiotic relationship between the ruling parties and traditional leaders cannot be ignored and should be problematised. Nonetheless, this chapter also argues that this obsession with traditional leadership may result in the neglect of other important issues related to land tenure reform in communal areas, such as the role of customary land tenure as social security.


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Moon settler colonialism: Myrriah M. Gómez, ‘Toward a Chola Consciousness: Examining Nuclear Colonialism in Lunar Braceros, 2125-2148’, Science Fiction Studies, 48, 3 2021), pp. 500-516

18Oct21

Abstract: Adding to a growing body of scholarship on Chicanafuturism and borderlands science fiction, this essay interrogates the politics of labor in Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s novella Lunar Braceros 2125-2148. It examines the breakdown of the heteronormative nuclear family and its transformation into another version of the nuclear family, one that results from radioactive contamination and exposure. I argue the protagonist Lydia becomes a chola cyborg whose cyber-consciousness is created by nuclear alienation. I demonstrate how the environmental effects of the neoliberal economy, as portrayed in Lunar Braceros, are reflective of the sociopolitical conditions of Indigenous communities in the US.


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The fire of settler colonialism: Kirsten Vinyeta, ‘Under the guise of science: how the US Forest Service deployed settler colonial and racist logics to advance an unsubstantiated fire suppression agenda’, Environmental Sociology, 2021

18Oct21

Abstract: Over the last century, the United States Forest Service (USFS) has reversed its stance on the ecological role of fire – from a militant enforcer of forest fire suppression to supporting prescribed fire as a management tool. Meanwhile, the Karuk Tribe has always prioritized cultural burning as a vital spiritual and ecological practice, one that has been actively suppressed by the USFS. This article examines the discursive evolution of USFS fire science through the critical lens of settler colonial theory. A content analysis of agency discourse reveals how the USFS deployed anti-Indigenous rhetoric to justify its own unsubstantiated forest management agenda. USFS leadership racialized light burning by deridingly referring to it as ‘Piute Forestry.’ The agency has also discredited, downplayed, and erased Indigenous peoples and knowledges in ways that invoke tropes of the ‘Indian savage,’ the ‘Vanishing Indian,’ and the concept of ‘Terra Nullius.’ It wasn’t until the 1960s – in the context of the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements – that the USFS began contemplating the value of prescribed fire. This research illustrates the complicated relationship between the settler state and Western science, as well as the malleability of scientific discourse in the face of changing social contexts.


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Japanese settler colonialism in deep time: Yuriko Furuhata, ‘Archipelagic Archives: Media Geology and the Deep Time of Japan’s Settler Colonialism’, Public Culture, 2021

18Oct21

Abstract: This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in the context of Japan’s development as an archipelagic empire. The first Japanese geological map (1876) was completed by American geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, who surveyed mineral deposits in Hokkaidō, Japan’s northern island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu people. Following decolonial and archipelagic thoughts, the author reads across earthly archives of geological strata and colonial archives of historical documents to elucidate the conceptual duality of archipelago as a geological formation and a geopolitical territory. In tracing this formative era of Japan’s resource extraction and settler colonialism, which precedes and informs the current rush to extract rare earth minerals necessary to maintain global digital infrastructures, this article aims to both de-Westernize the methodological orientation known as media geology and offer a prehistory of contemporary rare earth mining in the Pacific Ocean.


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Visualising settler colonialism: Callie Maidhof, ‘View from the Hilltop: Settler-Colonial Visuality in Palestine’, Visual Anthropology Review, 2021

16Oct21

Abstract: This article examines settler-colonial visuality in West Bank Jewish-Israeli settlements. It argues that settler visuality is attuned to a bourgeois ideal of domestic life, made possible by practices of unseeing. Reading Israeli encounters with the Wall and other artifacts of the occupation, I show that these visual encounters help settlers position themselves politically within Israel—and settlements, as Israel itself. Unseeing is a perceptual practice that makes and remakes space, one required to build the kind of settlements most Israeli settlers desire. This vision is oriented to the domestication of space, cohering with the demands of an extended military occupation.


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Childhood friendships against settler colonialism: Rose Butler, ‘Moral childhoods: the role of morality in friendship-making among children from refugee backgrounds in rural, multicultural settler Australia’, Children’s Geographies, 2021

16Oct21

Abstract: This article examines how children draw on local sources of morality and moral worth to forge connections, build friendship and enforce distinctions across difference in a rural multicultural city of settler Australia. Children’s friendship-making practices across ethnic and class differences have been widely explored in urban Australia. Far less is known about how children connect and distance in regional and rural places, notably those experiencing profound social change. This paper examines friendship work among children from humanitarian refugee backgrounds in one rural city of south-eastern Australia through the lens of morality and moral worth. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it shows how deeply classed and racialised ideas about morality and moral worth scaffold children’s social worlds, delineate which behaviours are valorised, and can exclude children whose actions do not meet the necessary moral criteria of belonging. A focus on morality provides rich insight into how children shore up familiarity and build affinities with one another while simultaneously policing and enforcing boundaries. This has important implications for understanding how children from refugee backgrounds build relationships and friendships in rural settler Australia, and the implications of such work for children’s everyday geographies of belonging.


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