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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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Settlers are typically guilty and uncaring (non-innocent care may help): Lisa Slater, ‘Learning to Stand with Gyack: A Practice of Thinking with Non-Innocent Care’, Australian Feminist Studies, 2021

05Nov21

Abstract: Settler colonialism attempts to make invisible the labours of care that Indigenous peoples have been doing for millennia. Notably, the imposition of settler colonial ontologies-epistemologies disrupt and compromise Indigenous people’s obligations to land and ancestors. Kim Tallbear calls upon settler scholars to think more expansively about what counts as the benefits and risks of research. She asks settler scholars to learn to ‘stand with’ a community and be willing to be altered and revise one’s stake in knowledge production. What does my feminist ethics of care, which strives to unsettle my settler colonial logic of knowledge production, look like? To respond, I will reflect upon a collaborative cultural revitalisation project with Wolgalu and Wiradjuri First Nations community in Brungle-Tumut (New South Wales, Australia). The social world I am imbedded in is different from that of Wolgalu/Wiradjuri colleagues. How is meaning negotiated in the encounter between settler colonial and Aboriginal practices of care and knowledge production? It’s a methodological conundrum, which requires thinking with care. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa conceptualises thinking with care as a thick, non-innocent obligation of living in interdependent worlds. I want to practice non-innocent care.


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The familial is targeted: Claire Blencowe, ‘Family Debilitation: Migrant Child Detention and the Aesthetic Regime of Neoliberal Authoritarianism’, GeoHumanities, 2021

05Nov21

Abstract: This paper proposes the term “family debilitation” to point to the ways that institutionalized child abuse operates to perversely generate biopolitical authority, a strategy of negative biopolitics that is integral to the aesthetic regimes of settler colonialism and neoliberal authoritarianism. The paper attends to two scenes of child detention in the US: Scene 1 US/Mexico Border 2017 concerns migrant children caught up in the bordering regimes of Donald Trump’s America; Scene 2 Pennsylvania 1879 concerns indigenous children caught up in the disciplinary regimes of “civilizing” education. As we attend to the connections between these scenes an argument emerges that situates racialized child detention and abuse within the aesthetic technologies biopolitical sovereignty. The “problem” to which these practices serve as a kind of technical answer is not any kind of problem with migrant and indigenous families themselves but rather is a problem of government—specifically the legitimacy deficit that exists where biopolitical states openly participate in dispossession and the destruction of life.


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Multiple displacement (on Irish Australias): Jimmy H. Yan, ‘”‘Ourselves Alone”? Encounters Between the Irish Literary Revival and Australian Settler-Modernisms, ca. 1913 – 1919’ Australian Literary Studies, 2021

05Nov21

Abstract: This essay examines intellectual exchanges between early twentieth-century Australian literary nationalists and the Irish literary revival, with attention to the transnational and imperial differences in between. It traces the travel narratives of Vance Palmer, Esmonde Higgins and Miles Franklin in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, their performance of New World settler ‘selfhood’ in Ireland, and their encounters with Irish literary contacts including George William Russell (Æ) and Darrell Figgis. In historicising these encounters in relation to settler-colonial ambivalence, it argues that Australian literary travel narratives of revolutionary Ireland were constituted around multiple displacements of meaning between Irish nationalist and Australian settler-nativist constructions of autochthony. As urban intellectual milieux outside the networks of Irish ethnic associationalism, these literary connections offer a culturally hybrid location in which to re-examine the play of overdetermined meanings around Ireland in early interwar (‘White’) Australia. Situated in relation to Irish historical contexts external to Australian nationalist narratives, these dislocations of meaning illuminate an excess of Irelands in settler radical political imaginaries beyond stable constructions of nation or place.


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Questionable settlers? Nicole Yakashiro, ‘Daffodils and Dispossession: Nikkei Settlers, White Possession, and Settler Colonial Property in Bradner, BC, 1914–51’, BC Studies, 211, 2021

03Nov21

Abstract: This article focuses on the forced sales of property, namely daffodil bulbs and farms, owned by Nikkei farmers before 1943 in the rural community of Bradner, British Columbia, known as the “daffodil capital” of Canada. By centring the microhistorical workings of property dispossession in one local context, it connects fields commonly treated as distinct – settler colonialism and Japanese Canadian history – to reveal how settler colonial property logics and practices were employed by the state and ordinary settlers to secure white possession. Drawing primarily on state records, I trace how the federal government dispossessed four Nikkei daffodil-farming families in the 1940s by using contradictory, uneven, and contested rationales and strategies. More specifically, I identify three property characteristics – definition, value, and boundaries – that the state manipulated to reconfigure Nikkei property for white ownership. In doing so, I denaturalize common narratives of property as stable and argue that the dispossession was not an anomalous moment of state racism, as has been largely understood, but a project that renewed a regime founded on the elision of Indigenous sovereignty and the construction of white settler property. By highlighting the state’s lies, both big and small, this article demonstrates the fundamental fictions of the settler property regime in British Columbia. These were fictions that Nikkei settlers were both invested in and were betrayed by in the 1940s.


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