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On the world turned inside out of settler colonialism: Thomas Kingston, ‘An interview with Lorenzo Veracini’, New Books Network: New Books in Intellectual History, 05/10/21

06Oct21

Access the podcast here.


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On the settler city: David Hugill, Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2021

06Oct21

Description: Revealing the enduring link between settler colonization and the making of modern Minneapolis. Examining several distinct Minneapolis sites, Settler Colonial City tracks how settler-colonial relations were articulated alongside substantial growth in the Twin Cities Indigenous community during the second half of the twentieth century—creating new geographies of racialized advantage. It reveals how non-Indigenous people in Minneapolis produced and enforced a racialized economy of power that directly contradicts the city’s “progressive” reputation.


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Indigenous peoples facing settler borders: Brendan W. Rensink, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Euro-American Frontiers, Borderlands, and Borders in North America’, Oxford Research Encyclopedias: American History, 2021

05Oct21

Abstract: On July 27, 1882, a group of at least seventy-five “Turtle Mountain Indians from Canada” crossed the US–Canada border near Pembina, Dakota Territory, ordered white settlers off the land, and refused to pay customs duties assessed against them. “We recognize no boundary line, and shall pass as we please,” proclaimed their leader, Chief Little Shell. Native to the Red River region long before the Treaty of 1818 between the United States and Great Britain drew imaginary cartographies across the region or the 1872 International Boundary Survey left physical markers along the 49th parallel, Little Shell’s Chippewas and Métis navigated expansive homelands bounded by the natural environment and surrounding Native peoples, not arbitrary latitudinal coordinates. Over a century later, Indigenous leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico formed the Tribal Border Alliance and hosted a “Tribal Border Summit” in 2019 to assert that “Tribes divided by international borders” had natural inherent and treaty-bound rights to cross for various purposes. These Indigenous sentiments, expressed over centuries, reveal historic and ongoing conflicts born from the inherent incongruity between Native sovereignty and imposed non-Native boundaries and restrictions. Issues of land provide a figurative bedrock to nearly all discussion of interactions between and boundary making by non-Native and Native peoples in North America. Indigenous lands and competing relations to it, natural resources and contest over their control, geography and territoriality: these issues underpin all North American history. Adjacent to these more familiar topics are complex stories of boundaries and borders that were imposed, challenged, ignored, violated, or co-opted. Native histories and experiences at the geographic edges of European empires and nation-states uncover rough and untidy processes of empire-building and settler colonial aspirations. As non-Natives drew lines across maps, laying claim to distant Indigenous lands, they also divided the same in arbitrary manners. They rarely gave serious consideration to Native sovereignty or rights to traditional or evolving relationships to homelands and resources. It is a wonder, therefore, that centuries of non-Natives have been surprised when Indigenous peoples refused to recognize the authority of imposed borders or co-opted their jurisdictional “power” for their own uses. Surveying examples of Indigenous peoples and their histories across imposed boundaries in North America forces historians to ask new questions about intercultural exchange, geopolitical philosophies, and the histories of nations, regions, and peoples. This is a worthy, but complex, pursuit that promises to greatly enrich all intersecting topics and fields.


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Settler affirmations: Liana MacDonald, Avery Smith, Hine Funaki, ‘”When Am I Supposed to Teach Māori and Find the Time to Learn it?“: Settler Affirmations in Aotearoa New Zealand Schools’, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2021

05Oct21

Abstract: The Ministry of Education, Teaching Council and other groups aligned with the teaching profession are increasingly acknowledging the impact of racism, yet there is a dearth of research that moves beyond unconscious bias to examine how race is socially constructed in schools. In this paper, we present four autoethnographic accounts from Tracey to draw attention to the phenomenon of settler affirmations; a form of interpersonal and institutional racial bonding that reaffirms settler perspectives and sensibilities in schools. Settler affirmations are exchanges that pass between educators who are perceived to be Pākehā (New Zealanders primarily of European descent.) to sustain silencing. Silencing is a racial discourse that aims to keep the descendants of settlers in a state of racial comfort by reinforcing historically resolved and equitable bicultural relations and ignorance and denial of the structuring force of colonisation. Moreover, the discursive process is exacerbated by the organisation and administrative design of the institution. Indeed, our analysis of Tracey’s vignettes brings to the fore everyday ways that the cultural and environmental norms of schooling affirm the settler colonial heart of New Zealand education. We conclude the paper by considering how settler affirmations can affect the compulsory roll out of the Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories curriculum in 2022. In doing so, we highlight the need for an urgent and earnest focus by policy makers, researchers, and teachers to respond to the social construction of race in education.


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The settler colonial algorithm: Bronwyn Frederick, Abraham Bradfield, Jenny Nguyen, Samar Ansell, ‘Disrupting the colonial algorithm: Indigenous Australia and social media’, Media International Australia, 2021

05Oct21

Abstract: Indigenous voices and outlooks are often overlooked within public discourses in Australia and throughout the world. Settler-colonialism has resulted in centuries of dispossession, manifesting in the denial of Indigenous citizenship, autonomy and sovereignty. Throughout this article we discuss how Indigenous people are increasingly turning to social media to illuminate how colonialism continues to oppress Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. In doing so, Indigenous people are disrupting what we call the ‘colonial algorithms’ that shape misguided perceptions of Indigenous people and identities. Analysing Indigenous use of social media and centring our discussion around several Indigenous-led online campaigns, we demonstrate how online platforms are bringing an array of social issues to light in ways that privilege Indigenous voices and perspectives, ultimately disrupting and shifting oppressive colonial algorithms.


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Settlerless art:  Daria Sleiman, ‘A Little Give and Take: What Garneau’s Paintings Give When They Take, and Other Stories From Future Past’, International Journal of Canadian Studies, 59, 2021 

05Oct21

Abstract: This article examines the possibilities related to conciliation that are closed, and those that might be opened, through Métis contemporary visual artist David Garneau’s paintings, Aboriginal Curatorial Collective Meeting and Aboriginal Advisory Circle Meeting. I argue that Garneau’s explicit and manifest exclusion of settlers and the colonial gaze on his paintings is also, at the same time and in actuality, a form of invitation into something else. To do this, I first briefly explore how thinkers have problematized settlers’ recognition of Indigenous knowledge, ways of knowing, and art. I then pose the question of what ought to be the normative limits around settlers’ access to Indigenous knowledge and spaces, using Garneau’s own written work about his paintings. I then bring several scholars into conversation around why certain spaces should remain exclusive, some or all of the time, to Indigenous peoples. Finally, I conclude by explaining how the existence of these spaces—and the communication of their existence—is a necessary and otherwise impossible step in the conciliation process. Indeed, I propose in this paper that to experience and confront our own limits to comprehension, as settlers, is a gift; that by creating and sharing his paintings with settlers, Garneau simultaneously reveals settlers’ exclusion from Indigenous spaces to ourselves and invites us into new imaginary spaces of conciliation—ones that are actually possible, because not predicated on an ongoing colonial system of power distribution, but instead on uncertainty, a condition of continued and active relatedness.


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Indigenous graphic novels against settler colonialism: Raven Lovering, ‘Graphic Reminders: Confronting Colonialism in Canada through Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story’, Contemporary Kanata, 2021, pp. 17-21

04Oct21

Abstract: David Alexander Robertson’s 2015 graphic novel Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story connects non-Indigenous Canadians to the racial realities of Canada’s intentionally forgotten past. Robertson translates Helen Betty Osborne’s biography into the accessible format of the graphic novel which allows for a wide range of readers to connect present day racial injustices to the past, generating new understandings surrounding violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada. Helen Betty Osborne, a young female Cree student was abducted and murdered in 1971, targeted for her race and gender. The horrors Betty experienced reveal the connection between her story and the contemporary narrative of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada. Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story deconstructs Betty’s life from the violence she is subjected to, personifying a historical figure. The graphic novel allows for a visual collision of past and present to express the cycle of colonial violence in Canada ignored by non-Indigenous Canadians despite its continued socio-economic and political impact on Indigenous peoples. As an Indigenous author, Robertson preserves the integrity of Indigenous voice and revives an integral gendered and racialized historical perspective that is necessary to teach. This close reading of Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story explores how Robertson uses the graphic novel to revive history and in doing so, demonstrates connections between past and present patterns of racial injustice against Indigenous women in Canada today.


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Gambling Indigenous sovereignty: Theodor P. Gordona, Tribal Casino Labor Relations and Settler Colonialism’, Critical Gambling Studies, 2, 2, 2021, pp. 151-158

04Oct21

Abstract: Sovereignty provides the legal basis for tribal casinos in the United States. However, since the industry’s rapid growth (valued at $34 billion for 2019), courts are now revisiting decades-old precedents in federal Indian law to reinterpret policies in ways that add new constraints to tribal sovereignty. Because tribal casinos often employ large numbers of non-Native Americans, tribal casino labor relations have become a new arena for contests over the boundaries of tribal sovereignty. This article investigates recent tribal casino labor relations court rulings (e.g., Little River, Soaring Eagle, and Pauma) through the lens of settler colonialism in order to understand new revisions to legal precedents. It argues that settler colonialism continues to underlie federal policies and that the growth of tribal casinos reveal that the federal government may intervene to undercut tribal sovereignty.


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Settlement, weaponised: Alexandra Lunn Montgomery, Projecting Power i n the Dawnland: Weaponizing Settlement in the Gulf of Maine, 1710-1800, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2021

01Oct21

Abstract: After the British “conquest” of the French colony of Acadia in 1710, the British Empire sought ways to transform what was in practice the sovereign homeland of several Wabanaki nations into a loyal Protestant colony. In addition to subduing French and Indigenous populations militarily, British plans centered on increasing the number of loyal, white, Protestant settlers. These settlers, however, proved stubbornly illusive, forcing British imperial and colonial governments to turn to experimental strategies which ranged from using Parliamentary money to pay for settlers’ transportation, provisions, and land to encouraging private speculative companies. This study examines these colonization schemes in the far northeast of North America from 1710 to 1800. It makes two key interventions. The first is to bring state power into the discussion of settler colonialism and expansion in the colonial era. My research shows that rather than an unstoppable herd of white settlers that only incidentally overwhelmed Native communities, white Protestant expansion was a process actively pursued from the top down as early as the first decade of the eighteenth century. The second argument is that government officials and others in a position to plan settlements were well aware of the disruptive and dispossessive power of settlers. Throughout the eighteenth century, British men in power tried to deploy planned settlements of “loyal” settlers in an attempt to control or eliminate “non-loyal” populations — Indigenous, French, and, later, citizens of the nascent United States. I refer to this vision of state-directed expansion as weaponized settlement. Weaponized settlement is an approach to colonization that is directed from the top down, rather than led by settlers themselves, and that sees settlers as a means to achieve greater geopolitical goals. Despite a large expenditure of money and effort, however, these schemes were almost all failures until after the American Revolution. Ultimately, the cost of a loyal British northeast would be the majority of the British North American empire. For Wabanaki people, it would be far higher.


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Sporting reconciliation: Yasmin Rajwani, Audrey R. Giles, Shawn Forde, ‘Canadian National Sport Organizations’ Responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Calls to Action and Settler Silence’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 2021

01Oct21

Abstract: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 Calls to Action identified societal measures necessary for a successful reconciliation process between Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada, five of which were specific to sport. Half a decade after the Calls to Actionwere published, the response by national sport organizations in Canada has escaped scholarly attention. Through a lens informed by settler colonial studies, the authors employed summative content analysis to examine the ways, if any, in which national sport organizations in Canada have implemented relevant Calls to Action. The results indicate a lack of response by most national sport organizations which, we argue, represents settler silence.


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