settler colonial studies blog

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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Public lands are dispossessed lands: Tai Kondo Koester, Joseph Bryan, ‘The cartographic dispossession of Bears Ears: Confronting settler colonialism in contemporary struggles over “public land”’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: This paper relates the cartographic construction of public lands by topographic surveys of the Colorado Plateau in the 19^th Century to contemporary debates over the management of public lands. We focus our attention on the Bears Ears National Monument that was established by President Barack Obama via Executive Order in 2016, only to be significantly reduced in size by President Donald Trump one year later. Debates over the Monument hinged on competing notions of the public interest, where the public was conceived as a singular entity in ways that marginalized the leading role played by the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, Ute, and Ute Mountain Ute tribes in securing designation of the Monument. These debates featured competing claims of “federal overreach” and theft that glossed over the Tribes’ role in creating the Monument, let alone how the land became public in the first place. This paper considers the role that surveys by the US Army Corps of Topographic Engineers, John Wesley Powell, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, and others played in papering over the theft of Indigenous lands. Their cartographic depictions of the region underpin current debates over management of public lands. They also shape the terrain on which the five tribes in the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition have worked to protect the area through designation of the Bears Ears National Monument. Framing struggles over Bears Ears as a public lands issue embraces a history of erasure and dispossession and shifts focus from returning land to tribal control.

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The slow violence of settler colonialism: Saad Amira, ‘The slow violence of Israeli settler-colonialism and the political ecology of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: This paper uses the concept of ‘Slow Violence’ in a Palestinian village to explore the political ecology of the Israeli settlers-colonial paradigm. Slow Violence is violence that manifests gradually and often invisibly, in contrast to spectacular violence that more frequently garners media and political attention. My research explores and maps out the structure of slow violence in Palestine, where the politics of the curtailed Palestinian National Authority and the Israeli settler-colonial enterprise converge. It addresses a significant scholarly gap as attention to these issues focuses almost exclusively on violence as a spectacle, overlooking the centrality of nature as a productive political and developmental space in settler-colonial discourse and practice. Here I focus on three aspects of the slow violence of settler colonialism and its relationship to political ecology: the unleashing of wild boars into Palestinian villages and the decimation of seasonal agriculture, the dumping of sewage waste of Israeli settlements onto Palestinian villages, and the curtailment of indigenous centered modes of production and mobility. These practices transform the meanings of security and stability for Palestinians. They have served to weaponize landscapes against Palestinian inhabitants.

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Latin American settler colonialisms: Lucy Taylor, Geraldine Lublin, ‘Settler colonial studies and Latin America’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: This introduction to the Special Issue of Settler Colonial Studies on Latin America locates the articles within the field of settler colonial theory and places it within the context of Latin American Studies. It reflects on the potential of settler colonial theory to provide fresh perspectives on the Latin American reality, and opens discussion about how Latin American experiences and critical analysis might complicate and enrich theorising about settler colonialism in Anglophone locations and beyond. These broad aims are explored in detail in the articles whose main topics and conclusions are also described in the text. Overall, this introduction sets the intellectual scene and identifies for the reader the central arguments developed by the contributing authors, thus providing a solid foundation from which readers – whether they are familiar with Latin America or not – can engage with the articles collected here.

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Settler colonial placemaking at the margins: Nicole D. Brandsma, Uprooting and Re-Routing a Settled Sense of Place: Reading Settler Literary Cartographies of Northwestern British Columbia, PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: The places of northwestern British Columbia, and the Indigenous and settler peoples who find work, build homes, establish communities, and sustain culture in these places, are often perceived as peripheral or overlooked, existing on the edge or outside of the notice, care, and understanding of the people and places seemingly at the centre of national or global significance. When attention is turned to northwestern British Columbia, it is often to report on issues related to the legacy and ongoing work of settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, including missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, particularly along the infamous Highway of Tears; the successes and failures of the federal and provincial governments to respect Indigenous rights and title, such as in the landmark Delgamuukw-Gisdaywa court case; and First Nations’ acts of resistance, like the Unist’ot’en Camp, to resource transportation or extraction projects on their territories that they have not consented to. In this project, I turn to the work of writers and poets in northwestern British Columbia who portray and examine in their writing what it means—and what it could mean—for both Indigenous and settler peoples to call the same land home. In particular, I argue that the poetry and literary nonfiction of settler poet, essayist, and cultural geographer Sarah de Leeuw constructs creative narrative maps that unsettle readers from the certainty they might have in the success of settler colonialism. Additionally, her creative representations of personal experiences in the distinct physical and cultural geographies of the region call for reorienting ourselves in the way we think about and move through northwestern British Columbia so that we might envision other ways—potentially decolonial ways that respect Indigenous rights and title and dismantle settler privilege—of living, working, profiting, and building futures in these places. Each chapter in this dissertation takes up a significant theme in de Leeuw’s collections of literary nonfiction, Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (2004) and Where It Hurts (2017), and her long poem, Skeena (2015), and locates my critical close reading of the texts at the intersections of scholarly and public dialogues, especially as they are unfolding in British Columbia, related to reconciliation and decolonization, settler colonialism, and literary cartography as a form and methodology of creative writing and reading practice. As the literary writing and culture of northwestern British Columbia continues to flourish and to grow its readership, I hope this critical analysis of the work of one of its emerging authors meaningfully contributes to and highlights the ongoing opportunity for examining the
ways in which settler stories about the places they call home can collaborate in the work
of creating and sustaining a more just world.

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Corporate settler colonialism: Albert Schrauwers, ‘The liberal corporate order and the market transition in colonial Upper Canada, 1825–1841’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: This analysis of the corporate ‘franchise state’ in the settler colony of Upper Canada (Ontario) highlights its role in introducing both a liberal market and a corporate revolution. I contrast the liberal legislative project to create laissez faire markets with the private corporate agenda of those legislators, a group of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ known as the Family Compact. The corporation became the vehicle by which these oligarchs controlled trade and introduced managed markets in the fictitious commodities of land, labor and money; the fictitious commodities were legal reifications (as was the corporation itself) used to govern the trade in real commodities.¹ Control of these corporations allowed these gentlemanly capitalists to also assume control of British emigration and thereby introduce new forms of ‘systemic colonization’ and settler colonialism; and change conceptions of colonial citizenship from loyalism to liberalism. The corporate revolution was thus key to the formation of liberal settler colonialism in the province.

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E-settler colonialism: Ivana Bevilacqua, ‘E-scaping apartheid: Digital ventures of Zionist settler colonialism’, Human Geography, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: The ongoing “Intifada of Unity” against Israel’s settler colonialism has resuscitated discussions about the liberatory potential of digital emancipation due to the massive data traffic circulation through its international media coverage. In fact, in a process that has intensified since the outbreak of the global pandemic at the very least, social media platforms and geospatial mapping tools have been subverted from more mundane uses, developing into new forums for organizing, imagining, and practicing more just futures. Yet, the centrality of infrastructure both as a means of digital extractivism and as a site for rupture and resistance demonstrates that the path toward new trajectories of e-scaping cannot be conceived as a virtual venture directed at designing alternative volatile geographies alone, but should always involve facing and challenging power in its everyday forms. By investigating the materiality of cyber colonialism, this paper explores the entanglement between imperial cartography and digital map-making which has reduced Palestinians and their space to a pixelated terra nullius, sanitized from the paradigmatic sites of the occupation and overwritten by a pseudo-biblical narrative that aims to legitimize the re-indigenization of the Zionist settlers. At the same time, it unpacks online processes of hyper-visibility through which Palestine suddenly materializes as a signifier for its dangerous nature, yet fragmented and enclaved by an intangible and discretional regime of im/mobility enforced through the neglect of permits and visas, as well as by the material constraints posed by apartheid roads, barriers, checkpoints, gates, and walls. Finally, it retraces the rationality of Israeli violence diluted through the technical means of built environment, infrastructure, machines and algorithms which, on one hand, contributes to the dedevelopment of Palestine and the censorship of its people, and on the other, normalizes Israel’s position in the region due to its perceived technological superiority vis-à-vis its neighboring counterparts.

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Settler colonial history as a minefield: Elizabeth Russell, ‘Crossing the Minefield of Anxiety, Guilt, and Shame: Working With and Through Pākehā Emotional Discomfort in Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Education’, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: Compulsory teaching of Aotearoa New Zealand histories has potential to change how this country’s young people think and feel about themselves. However, achieving the new curriculum’s vision of a more thoughtful and responsible citizenry is unlikely to be straightforward. For Pākehā secondary school students, descendants of European settlers, the emphasis on te ao Māori could challenge a sense of centredness within the nation, and learning about colonial violence and injustice may be a source of emotional discomfort. For the new teaching framework to reach its transformative potential, these moments must be harnessed rather than allowed to block learning and engagement. This paper analyses three possible emotional responses of Pākehā students when monoculturalism is confronted and conflictual local histories are remembered: anxiety, guilt, and shame. While these emotions are usually framed as unnecessary or immobilising, I argue that they signal important starting points for Pākehā in responding to the complexity of colonialism and their complicity within it. Anxiety draws Pākehā attention to the constructed nature of the ‘New Zealander’ identity, and thus possibilities to de- and re-construct it, guilt pinpoints injustices that Pākehā must collectively address and monitor, and shame alerts Pākehā to their moral ideals. Yet, I also propose that if such feelings are to be harnessed constructively, they must be supplemented with a sense of mutual vulnerability and critical hope. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how discomforting emotions can either thwart or enrich learning and are therefore worth working with and through.

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