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Settler regulation, settler oppression: Nisse Bourne, Settler Colonialism Continued: A genealogy of Indigenous regulation and oppression in Canada, MA dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2021

16Nov21

Abstract: Since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report in 2015, there has been a political and societal focus on the atrocities that occurred in residential schools. The abuse, sexual abuse, murder, and genocide of Indigenous children through the residential school system has become the main focus for many settlers in Canada. However, focusing our attention on the most heinous acts alone can obfuscate manifestations of Indigenous regulation and oppression that are subtler or more covert. This project takes a genealogical approach to allow for the exposure of naturalized settler colonial logics, while also placing residential schools within a continuum of Indigenous regulation and oppression. This project uses Foucault’s concepts of power (disciplinary power, biopower, governmentality) and contemporary colonial concepts of recognition and accommodation to uncover the governmental technologies used within the residential school system and the Correctional Service of Canada’s approach to Indigenous corrections. This project challenges the progression fallacy which states our current epoch is more ethical than any other that came before by arguing the political rationalities of Western superiority and settler colonial benevolence that justified the creation of residential schools still exist today. This project examines the Correctional Service of Canada’s approach to Indigenous corrections as a contemporary illustration of how the political rationalities of Western superiority and settler colonial benevolence not only serve as justifications for harmful policies, programs, and initiatives, but also aid in the production of new Indigenous subjects and populations. Although the manifestations of Indigenous oppression have changed throughout time, the political rationalities that underpin them have stayed the same.


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Settler space through Indigenous symbols: Michelle R. Jacobs, ‘”You Should Be Proud!” Native-Themed Mascots and the Cultural Reproduction of White Settler Space’, Sociological Inquiry, 2021

15Nov21

Abstract: My research explores the Cleveland baseball franchise’s role in the cultural reproduction of White settler space in the NE Ohio region. Using a multi-site, mixed-methods approach, I examine prominent narratives about Indian-ness and ownership circulated for over a century in NE Ohio socio-cultural spheres. I elucidate how the franchise’s storytelling regarding its “Indians” identity produces localized meanings of Indian-ness that Cleveland baseball fans reiterate and manipulate in protest narratives (what fans said in interactions with Indigenous people and allies protesting the team’s “Indians” identity outside Cleveland baseball stadium) and published narratives (what fans said in published opinions following the team’s name change announcement). Ultimately, this study reveals how settler-constructed histories that disregard US imperialism and colonialism commingle with regional stories of romanticized Indian-ness to amplify processes of colonial unknowing and reproduce White settler space. Such spaces normalize settler possession of Indigenous territories and identities, prioritize settler interests (both material and psychological), affirm White innocence, and animate racialized emotions of repulsion and disgust for Indigenous peoples.


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Capitalism and settler colonialism are like snails and white wine (they are not the same but go very well together – and it’s quite confronting anyway): Ikaika Ramones, Sally Engle Merry, ‘Capitalist Transformation and Settler Colonialism: Theorizing the Interface’, American Anthropologist, 2021

12Nov21

Abstract: Anthropological theory has approached Indigenous experiences of colonialism through frameworks of capitalist expansion or, more recently, through those of settler colonialism. Given their different attentions, these frameworks in conjunction provide a more nuanced account of the colonizing and displacement process than either does alone. The history of Hawaiʻi from 1778 to 1860 provides a valuable illustration of the entanglements of economic transformation and settler colonialism over time, showing the need to combine analyses of settler colonialism with those of political economy to understand the emergence of new systems of governance, law, and exchange. The establishment of settler colonialism was neither quick nor uncontested, entailing Indigenous strategic appropriation along with political, legal, and social changes that created the space for settler dominance. Settler colonialism was fostered by the prospect of a profitable plantation economy. In Hawai‘i, chiefs managed to avoid a Euro-American capitalist takeover during the first eighty years of contact but began to lose control as the settler population grew and the capitalist economy expanded.


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Settler law is also an invader: Daniel Rück, The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-Century Canada, UBC Press, 2021

12Nov21

Description: As the settler state of Canada expanded into Indigenous lands, settlers dispossessed Indigenous people and undermined their sovereignty as nations. One site of invasion was Kahnawà:ke, a Kanien’kehá:ka community and part of the Rotinonhsiónni confederacy. The Laws and the Land delineates the establishment of a settler colonial relationship from early contact ways of sharing land; land practices under Kahnawà:ke law; the establishment of modern Kahnawà:ke in the context of French imperial claims; intensifying colonial invasions under British rule; and ultimately the Canadian invasion in the guise of the Indian Act, private property, and coercive pressure to assimilate. Daniel Rück reveals increasingly powerful and aggressive colonial governments interfering with the affairs of one of the most populous and influential Indigenous communities in nineteenth-century Canada. What he describes is an invasion spearheaded by bureaucrats, Indian agents, politicians, surveyors, and entrepreneurs. Although these invasions were often chaotic and poorly planned, Rück shows that despite their apparent weaknesses they tended to benefit settlers while becoming sources of oppression for Indigenous peoples who attempted to navigate colonial realities while defending and building their own nations. This original, meticulously researched book is deeply connected to larger issues of human relations with environments, communal and individual ways of relating to land, legal pluralism, historical racism and inequality, and Indigenous resurgence. It is one story of the “slow violence” of Canada’s legal and environmental conquest of Indigenous peoples and lands, and the persistence of one Indigenous nation in the face of the onslaught. This book will appeal to legal historians, historical geographers, and scholars of Quebec history, Canadian history, and Indigenous studies.


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Settler geneaologies: Ashley (Woody) Doane, ‘From the “Beginning”: Anglo-American Settler Colonialism in New England’, Genealogy, 5, 4, 2021

12Nov21

Abstract: In this article, I use the lens of critical family history—and the history of the Doane family—to undertake an analysis of Anglo-American settler colonialism in the New England region of the United States. My standpoint in writing this narrative is as a twelfth-generation descendant of Deacon John Doane, who arrived in Plymouth Colony circa 1630 and whose family history is intertwined with issues of settler colonial conquest and dispossession, enslavement, erasure, and the creation of myths of origin and possession. This analysis is also grounded in the larger contexts of the history of New England and the history of the United States. I conclude with a reflection upon the implications of settler colonial myths and historical erasure for current racial politics in the United States.


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Settlers steal hope and then use it: Marjo Lindroth, Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, The Colonial Politics of Hope: Critical Junctures of Indigenous-State Relations, Routledge, 2022

12Nov21

Description: Through analyses of cases in Australia, Finland, Greenland and elsewhere, the book illuminates how states appropriate hope as a means to stall and circumscribe political processes of recognising the rights of indigenous peoples. The book examines hope in indigenous-state relations today. Engaging with hope both empirically and conceptually, the work analyses the dynamic between hope, politics and processes of rights and recognition. In particular, the book introduces the notion of the politics of hope and how it plays out in three salient cases: planned constitutional changes that would finally recognise the indigenous peoples of Australia, the lengthy debate on the ratification of ILO Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries in Finland and the prospect of Greenland’s independence after its gaining self-government in 2009. Juxtaposing these contexts, the book illustrates the ways in which hope has become a useful political tool in enabling states to sidestep the peoples’ claims for justice and redress. The book puts forward insights on the power of hope – by definition future oriented – in diminishing the urgency of present concerns. This is hope’s most potent colonial force. This book brings together studies on indigenous-state relations, social scientific discussions on hope and critical post-colonial, feminist and governmentality analyses.


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Late settler colonialism (newly digitised): David B. Gracy, Littlefield Lands: Colonization on the Texas Plains, 1912–1920, University of Texas Press, 1968 (De Gruyter 2021)

10Nov21

Description: The phenomenon of colonization by big land companies, common throughout the history of the United States, came late to the Panhandle-Plains of West Texas. Ranchers held sway there up into the 20th century. Then, realizing that the future followed the plow, they, joined by business owners and speculators, founded towns on their land, competed for railroad connections, provided irrigation wells and other improvements, and engaged in a variety of advertising activities to interest prospective settlers and to sell the land to farmers at a profit. Trainloads of such “prospectors” were brought in to tour the land; and salesmen of all kinds roamed all the more settled states painting enticing pictures of the fertile lands which their employers offered for sale. Major George W. Littlefield created the Littlefield Lands Company and founded the town of Littlefield, Texas, in 1912, in order to sell as farmland a part of his Yellow House Ranch. His sales manager, Arthur P. Duggan (his nephew by marriage, and grandfather of the author of this study), used many of the techniques then current to attract buyers for the Lamb County land in and around Littlefield. He dug wells and operated a demonstration farm; he planted trees, planned a park, and otherwise beautified the town; he helped to create and maintain a school, a bank, and a number of businesses; and he negotiated contracts and coordinated the activities of innumerable independent land agents. Because the role of the big land company in the settlement of the United States has not, on the whole, received the attention which it deserves, this detailed examination of the operations of one such company is of particular significance. Most of the book is devoted to the creation of the company, the steps taken to make the area attractive to potential settlers, and the problems which beset the building of the community. One chapter discusses the techniques and the difficulties of selling land through independent agents. The final chapter considers the people who moved onto the Littlefield tracts—where they came from, why they came, what their reactions were to the plains country, and how they learned to cope with their new environment. An appendix gives pertinent information about all land transactions conducted by the company between 1912 and 1920, and about each buyer. For this study the author made use of previously unknown records discovered while he was gathering information for a biography of Major Littlefield.


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Practicing Indigeneity at the settler university: Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem, ‘Indigenous Students’ Geographies on the Academic Fortress Campus: Palestinian Students’ Spatial Experiences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 20, 2, 2021

07Nov21

Abstract: This article addresses an under-studied phenomenon in the lived experience of Palestinian students in Israeli universities as seen from a spatial perspective. Specifically, it analyses the everyday spatial experiences of Palestinian students on the Mount Scopus Campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Situated in a contested space amid Palestinian villages, the campus’s architecture and prominent location are intended to project power and symbolic domination over the surrounding Arab environment. The study analyses the narratives of fifteen Palestinian students from this campus, underscoring the dialectical relations between their feelings of alienation and estrangement, on the one hand, and practices of resistance and subversion on campus, on the other. Moreover, the analysis reveals how, through their daily spatial behaviours, Palestinian students challenge the settler-colonial landscape-production that the Israeli authorities attempt to impose.


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An ‘Indigenousless’ era (obviously not)? John R. Legg, ‘Indigenous and Settler Violence during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 20, 4, 2021, pp. 557-560

07Nov21

Excerpt: The absence of Indigenous historical perspectives creates a predicament in the historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For the first eight years of the Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, zero articles written about or by Native Americans can be found within its pages. By 2010, however, a roundtable of leading Gilded Age and Progressive Era scholars critically examined the reasons why “Native Americans often slipped out of national consciousness by the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.”1 By 2014, the journal offered a special issue on the importance of Indigenous histories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a “period of tremendous violence perpetuated on Indigenous communities,” wrote the editors Boyd Cothran and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa.2 It is the observation of Indigenous histories on the periphery of Gilded Age and Progressive Era that inspires a reevaluation of the historiographical contributions that highlight Indigenous survival through the onslaught of settler colonial violence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


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The ‘wrong’ settlers: Catherine Ann Martin, ‘The Chinese Invasion: Settler Colonialism and the Metaphoric Construction of Race’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2021

07Nov21

Abstract: The arrival of Chinese immigrants during the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s precipitated a vehement backlash, culminating in legislation to restrict their immigration. Contemporary Australian press discourse focused on Chinese racial difference, with immigrants metaphorically constructed as invaders, influxes and hordes of barbarians. This article argues that Chinese immigrants were racialised through pre-existing metaphoric language of deviance and threat, while the metaphors became simultaneously codified as signifiers of racial difference. It further argues that this characterisation resulted from settler-colonial anxieties about legitimacy, which intensified due to Chinese immigration. The consequent racialisation of Chinese immigrants functioned as a means to displace both the violence of settler-colonial invasion and lower-class white deviance, facilitating the construction of the egalitarian white Australian subject.


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