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The pillars a settler memory: Susan Slyomovics, ‘Commissioning memorial reconciliation: the Stora Report and Algeria’s Ottoman Cannon in France’, Modern and Contemporary France, 2022

15Jun22

Abstract: On January 20, 2021, historian Benjamin Stora released a report commissioned by the government of Macron intended to achieve a reconciliation of memories between France and Algeria. This article focuses on the report’s proposals concerning a disputed monument, the famous Ottoman cannon known as ‘Baba Merzoug’. Seized in July 1830, the month France invaded Algeria, and spoliated to Brest, France, it was transformed into a monument renamed ‘La Consulaire’. How does ‘statuomania’ animated by the erection of numerous war memorials operate in France and what is the symbolism of columns as memorializing monuments? Moreover, how does the Stora Report for Algeria compare with the prior 2018 Macron government-commissioned Sarr-Savoy Report that called for immediate restitution of sub-Saharan artifacts housed in French museums?


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Settler colonial ‘vulnerabilities’: Emma Barnes, ‘Critiquing Settler-colonial Conceptions of “Vulnerability” through Kaona in Mary Kawena Pūku’i’s Mo’olelo, “The Pounded Water of Kekela”‘, Transmotion, 2022

12Jun22

Excerpt: As a structure, settler colonialism does not exist in isolation, but intersects with heteropatriarchy and capitalism. It is the triangulation of these structures that has produced our current climate crisis and continues to monopolise mitigation strategies. As Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill explain, “settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process” (9), and it is the gendered elements of settler colonialism and its use of “vulnerability” that this article seeks to explore in relation to climate change responses. I argue that the colonial and “masculinised nature of contemporary climate change governance” (George 115) now weaponises gendered vulnerability to climate change to perpetuate the colonial myth that Indigenous women need to be “instructed, led and managed” (Fordham et al 8) and prevents Pacific Island women from leading adaptation strategies to drought and disaster management. As Robinson suggests, “Attempts to delay solutions that effectively address climate change can thus be framed within the larger regime of US colonialism and imperialism” (320), and it is for this reason that the concept of climate change “vulnerability” needs to be analysed within the context of the Pacific’s settler-colonial history.


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The fires of settler colonialism: William J. Curtis, The Slater Fire Was the Product of Settler Colonialism, MA dissertation, California State Polytechnic University, 2022

12Jun22

Abstract: The Slater Fire of 2020 burned in Karuk aboriginal territory overseen by the Klamath National Forest. It burned over 200 homes to the ground and ravage over 100,000 acres of forest. This thesis argues that state-enforced fire suppression policies and methods are tools of settler-colonial erasure and the continuation of genocidal violence towards Karuk people. It analyzes the conflict between interests of the colonial state on one side and Indigenous resistance and survival on the other. Fire is an essential tool for the survival of Indigenous cultural identities, the material security of said populations, and the health of the environs that they have inhabited since time immemorial. In describing the history of this conflict, this work synthesizes historical narratives with critical analysis to demonstrate the aims of state sponsored fire suppression, and to illustrate the necessity of Indigenous populations’ ability to apply cultural fire. Settler colonial studies serve as the analytical foundation for this piece of research. Settler colonialism functions as a crossroads of critical theories that illuminate various ways that the settler state perpetuates regimes of erasure and genocidal violence towards Indigenous peoples and their lands. Ecological frameworks critical of settler land and resource management practices and policies are utilized to demonstrate the effects of settler-colonialism on Karuk spaces and peoples. The lived experiences and histories of Karuk people are a central feature of this thesis that have been accessed via interviews with cultural practitioners and community members and the analysis of various historical sources. This thesis illustrates the connection between genocide perpetrated towards Indigenous peoples during the 19th century and ongoing genocidal violence inherent within fire suppression and land management regimes maintained within the United States of America.


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Settler colonialism on the frontiers of discourse: Annie Rehill, ‘Taché’s Voyageur is not Cooper’s Frontiersman: Differences between Canadian and U.S. Concepts of “Frontier”’, Comparative Literature Studies, 59, 2, 2022, pp. 370-401

09Jun22

Abstract: Historically, concepts of what constituted a “frontier” developed differently in Canada and the United States. Portrayals in literature of those who inhabited these geographic spaces also are typified by notable differences between the former French and English colonies, yet U.S. literary critics today sometimes conflate the two situations, apparently under the assumption that what applies to the United States pertains in the same way to Canada. The historical reality is far more nuanced. As one example, among the Englishmen who spent time among native cultures, marriage into the culture of “the other” was rare; by contrast, the practice was not at all uncommon among the French who predated the English in Canada. A comparison of two nineteenth-century works—Forestiers et voyageurs by Canadian author Joseph-Charles Taché and The Pioneers by U.S. author James Fenimore Cooper—develops these observations to show how English-origin ideas of “frontier” and “frontiersman” cannot be assumed to apply in discussing Canadian works of literature.


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Settler colonialism on the discursive frontier: Talia E. Kibsey, Settler Colonialism on the Discursive Frontier: An Analysis of People vs. Fossil Fuels and the US Settler Carceral-State, MA dissertation, Florida Atlantic University, 2022

09Jun22

Abstract: This thesis examines Indigenous environmental justice discourse within the context of the U.S. carceral settler-state to advance a conceptual framework I name discursive frontierism. I use rhetorical analysis informed by critical and cultural theory to help make visual—and visible—the ways in which colonial frontierism operates in discursive spaces. I analyze the language of the carceral settler-state, including embodiment and affect as communicative language, as well as the language of Indigenous and Indigenous-led resistance. In the first half of the thesis, I argue that the language of the settler-state discursively constitutes Indigenous peoples as criminals and colonial subjects in order to justify their removal. The second half of this analysis finds the language of Indigenous land and water protectors to model and declare “survivance”—an active and continuing “sense of presence over absence” that both renounces dominance and victimry, and preserves traditional knowledge systems and ancestral connections (Vizenor 2018). I conclude that discursive iterations of Indigenous survivance meaningfully thwart the U.S. state’s efforts to advance occupation of discursive territory and further settle the discursive frontier.


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Mimicry subverts settler colonialism: Stephanie Haney, ‘Mimicry as a Method of Subversion in Indigenous Art’, Canvas Journal, 2022

09Jun22

Excerpt: As outlined above, mimicry in Indigenous artwork is used to undermine the colonial state and settlers by discounting its prestige and mocking its artistic integrity. Mimicry is achieved by utilising traditionally European materials or stylistic elements to express Indigenous beliefs and cultures. This enables Indigenous artists to re-establish their art as civilised and enlightened, subsequently normalising the European equivalent. Furthermore, this allows the artist to preserve and adequately depict Indigenous identity by inserting Indigenous figures and entities into Eurocentric landscapes. In their work, Monkman and Belmore do both things. Each artist uses characteristically European mediums to reimagine settler art through an Indigenous lens, specifically from the Renaissance era. The Renaissance is an epoch that reflects the pervasive and institutionalised Western bias within art history.13 This is because art that emerged from this period connoted a level of sophistication and prestige that non-Western art could not achieve under the dominant Eurocentric aesthetic. Artistic practices of non-Western countries during the Renaissance era were typically marginalised,14 as their styles were deemed “primitive” and inferior. This type of Eurocentric narcissism is also undoubtedly reflected in settler colonialism: propelled by the idea that European society was the most civilised, enlightened, and, therefore, worthy of the most land. The status of Renaissance art reinforces a binary of “civilised” and “uncivilised” cultures. Thus, mimicry of art from this era can be conceptualised as an attempt to subvert the hierarchy.


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The settler family: Avril Bell, ‘Introduction: Studies of Critical Settler Family History’, Genealogy, 6, 2, 2022

07Jun22

Excerpt: As a subset of this field, critical settler family history (CSFH) explores the roles of settler families in (and against) the work of colonialism. Given the centrality of families and home-making to the settler colonial project of taking over the homelands of Indigenous people and creating a ‘new’ society, CSFH is a highly appropriate method for exposing and undercutting the logics and dynamics of colonial violence wrapped in the seemingly benign practice of settlement. CSFH work focuses on the home-making of individual families, exposing the violence at its heart. While settler family historians—and popular history-makers in settler societies—often celebrate the pioneering exploits and spirit of early settlers, CSFH interrogates families’ relationships with Indigenous communities and centres the ways in which the settler family’s home-making is entwined with histories of Indigenous dispossession, and the various forms of violence against Indigenous communities involved in that process. Settler home-making is thus exposed as anything but benign.


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A settler stampede: Kimberly A. Williams, Stampede: Misogyny, White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism, Fernwood, 2021

07Jun22

Description: Kimberly A. Williams wants the annual Calgary Stampede to change its ways. An intrepid feminist scholar with a wry sense of humour, Williams deftly weaves theory, history, pop culture and politics to challenge readers to make sense of how gender and race matter at Canada’s oldest and largest western heritage festival. Stampede examines the settler colonial roots of the Calgary Stampede and uses its centennial celebration in 2012 to explore how the event continues to influence life on the streets and in the bars and boardrooms of Canada’s fourth-largest city. Using a variety of cultural materials—photography, print advertisements, news coverage, poetry and social media—Williams asks who gets to be part of the “we” in the Stampede’s slogan “We’re Greatest Together,” and who doesn’t.


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Indigenous haunting of settler futures: Jane Palmer, Angelia Walsh, Beata Batorowicz, ‘Parallel futures? Indigenous resurgence and the haunting of the settler’, Futures, 2022

07Jun22

Abstract: Two kinds of futures have emerged in the shadow of colonialism: the haunted futures of a white settler society that suppresses or denies knowledge of the ‘founding wound’ of colonial invasion; and Indigenous futures constituted by a refusal of defeat and a ‘radical resurgence.’ While they appear as parallel and irreconcilable trajectories, we suggest, after Ahlqvist and Rhisiart (2015, ‘Emerging pathways for critical futures research: Changing contexts and impacts of social theory’, Futures, vol. 71, pp. 91-104), that a haunting continues to link them; projects of Indigenous refusal and resurgence continue to alert non-Indigenous settler societies to a past not done with, and a futures trajectory based on denial and deception that must be unlearned. We describe one such project of Indigenous resurgence in South West Queensland, Australia, and suggest that it is an example of a local resurgence that performs, through its truth-telling, a ‘generative haunting’ of white settler society. In doing so, it forges a link between Indigenous and non-Indigenous futures, disturbing, and making more contingent, white settler imaginaries of the past and the future.


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It’s the settler economy, stupid: Courtney Lewis, ‘Agency In Economic Justice: Typology of Native Nation Sovereignty and Settler-Colonial Acts of Economic Aggression’, Interventions, 2022

04Jun22

Abstract: This essay expands upon the current theoretical construction of colonialism to make settler-colonial societies’ economic strategies more explicit. These strategies, which I term economic violence and economic hegemony, have been used by US federal and state governments to subvert the inherent sovereignty of Native Nations in order to access their resources. This essay also proposes and illustrates six categories of economic hegemony – debt creation, underfunding, mismanagement of funds and resources, blackmail, taxation jurisdiction, and regulation – to clarify the types of tools that settler-colonial states, like the United States, have available to accomplish their goals. Significantly, however, the illustrative examples also foreground Native Nations’ agency in countering and even anticipating US federal and state governments’ aggressions across time and geographies. Incorporation of these strategies into political and economic discourse leads to a more precise analysis of settler-colonial incursions while emphasizing the many ways in which Native Nations exert their sovereignty to forward economic justice.


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