settler colonial studies blog

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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The settler colonial militaries … : Federica Caso, ‘Settler Military Politics: On the Inclusion and Recognition of Indigenous People in the Military’, International Political Sociology, 2021

01Oct21

Abstract: After decades of refusal, neglect, and tacit admittance, the service of Indigenous people in the national armed forces of settler colonial states such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States is finally gaining acknowledgment. Indigenous people are now integrated in the regular forces and represented in national war commemoration. This article maintains that while inclusion and recognition of Indigenous military service is a positive transformation in the direction of post-colonial reconciliation, it still operates within the logics of settler colonialism intended to eradicate Indigenous stories of connection to land and assimilate Indigenous people in settler society. Using the case study of Indigenous militarization in Australia, this article argues that, under conditions of settler colonialism, the inclusion and recognition of Indigenous people in national militaries advances the settler colonial project intended to dispossess Indigenous people from their land and assimilate them in the new settler society. It highlights that historically, military organization has supported settler colonialism, and positions the present inclusion and recognition of Indigenous people in the military as a continuation of this history.

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Indigenous health: LanaRay, LloyWylie, Ann MarieCorrado, ‘Shapeshifters, systems thinking and settler colonial logic: Expanding the framework of analysis of Indigenous health equity’, Social Science & Medicine, 2021

01Oct21

Abstract: Despite increased attention in the health care field to the disparate health outcomes of Indigenous peoples, inequities persist. Analytical frameworks with the capacity to account for integrated systems analysis of power and domination are underrepresented yet vital to affecting change. Narratives represent Indigenous approaches to systems thinking, yet are often excluded from the literature on theorizing health systems. Recent theorizing in systems thinking provides a conceptual toolkit to interrogate health systems in a way that emphasizes ongoing histories of settler colonialism that underpin determinants of vulnerability, risks and poor health outcomes. Walby’s (2007) approach to complexity theory provides an opportunity to re-orient the way health system researchers and practitioneers approach systems of domination in the context of Indigenous peoples’ health, including viewing settler colonialism as a shapeshifter who abounds within the possibility of their environment and is a master of time and space. We explore the concepts of attunement and restraint in complexity theory and complex adaptive systems to better understand the movements of shapeshifters. Further, we demonstrate an application of Walby’s framework to a narrative, using the highly publicized story of Brian Sinclair, an Indigenous man who died in a Winnipeg Emergency department. Noting how this approach accounts for settler colonial logics in health care system performance, we establish linkages between Walby’s articulation of complexity and the fields of Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies, anchoring this discussion in Indigenous ontology through the metaphor of shapeshifting. By focusing on the systems level, we elucidate the plethora of individual experiences as outcomes of settler colonialism played out within highly complex, adaptive social systems.

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The language of settler colonialism, II: Sarah Dowling, ‘Elimination, Dispossession, Transcendence: Settler Monolingualism and Racialization in the United States, American Quarterly, 73, 3, 2021, pp. 439-460

28Sep21

Abstract: This essay describes the US’s dominant linguistic ideology, settler monolingualism, which works with other white supremacist logics to organize social life. I show that monolingualism’s alignment of place, language, and culture plays a crucial role in settler colonialism’s temporal-territorial claims. Then, I outline settler monolingualism’s three key features: elimination, dispossession, and transcendence. Drawing on the work of Patrick Wolfe, I show that monolingualism is key to the settler colonial “logic of elimination”: it attacks Indigenous cultural continuity, and it enlarges the population of settlers. However, I complicate Wolfe’s simplistic account of racialization: engaging with work by Tiffany Lethabo King and Iyko Day, I describe how racialized populations are disqualified from possessing and belonging to the nation on a basis that is partly linguistic. Black and non-Black racialized populations are rendered alien in part through the narrowing of what counts as “English.” In the contemporary US, however, these constitutive exclusions are concealed through representations of multilingualism, which suggest that the settler colony has innovated expansive forms of belonging that transcend the European nation-state. Such representations position English as a deep historical layer supporting “new” linguistic diversity. Thus they reiterate and reinforce settler colonial claims by positioning English as natural and as native.

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The language of settler colonialism, I: Bayley J. Marquez, Juliet Rose Kunkel, ‘The Domestication Genocide of Settler Colonial–Language Ideologies’, American Quarterly, 73, 3, 2021, pp. 461-482

28Sep21

Abstract: Settler colonial–language ideologies serve as one tool of dispossession within settler colonial assemblages of genocidal accumulation. We focus on the role of settlers in learning, codifying, and teaching Indigenous languages in order to analyze the language ideologies at play when language becomes colonized alongside the colonization of land. We develop a comparative reading of Dakota and Lakota bilingual-language instruction through the materials of Stephen R. Riggs during the nineteenth century and Ann Nolan Clark during the mid-twentieth century in order to examine the instantiation and continuity of settler colonial–language ideologies. We contrast these ideologies with how language ideologies formed in Europe as a component of the formation of race, which naturalized a link between people and land through defining conceptions of the human and the rational political subject. However, in settler colonial contexts this link between people and land, through language, does not function in the same way. Instead, Indigenous peoples’ land is imagined as terra nullius and Indigenous peoples as less than human. We propose the concept of domestication genocide to demonstrate how settler language ideologies link land, legibility, and animacy as a part of these language teaching programs.

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Settler colonial land grabbing now: Andrew Crosby, ‘(Re)mapping Akikodjiwan: Spatial Logics of Dispossession in the Settler-Colonial City’, Urban History Review, 49, 1, 2021, pp. 84-107

28Sep21

Abstract: This article examines the socio-spatial reproduction of settler-colonial urbanism at a contested site of urban development in Canada’s capital city. Akikodjiwan is an Algonquin sacred site on the Ottawa River (Kichi Sibi) and the location of a large-scale private real estate development project. Using the Access to Information Act, this article demonstrates how the Canadian government—led by the National Capital Commission—orchestrated a land transfer to the developers amid long-standing calls by the Algonquins to have the land returned. This article contributes to understandings of the positioning of the settler city at the center of the spatial logic of coloniality in Canada, as a site of the deployment of socio-spatial strategies of settler-colonial governance and property relations, but also as a site of Indigenous resistance. Transpiring in a purported climate of reconciliation, the remapping of Akikodjiwan demonstrates the ongoing spatial implications and role of place making in settler-colonial city making, where racialized logics and regimes of private property are mobilized in an attempt to dispossess and exclude Indigenous peoples from their lands, alongside the simultaneous transfer of thousands of settlers onto an Algonquin sacred site.

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Far right settlers: Andrew Crosby, ‘Policing Right-Wing Extremism in Canada: Threat Frames, Ideological Motivation, and Societal Implications’, Surveillance & Society, 19, 3, 2021, pp. 359-363

28Sep21

Excerpt: Canada is a settler-colonial state built upon the foundational pillars of white supremacy, racial capitalism, territorial acquisitiveness, and the attempted elimination of Indigenous peoples (culture, political/legal authorities, and claims to land). A young, affluent country that relies on these ongoing processes for its wealth and stature, the institutions of white supremacy required to construct and develop the Canadian state permeate social, political, and economic life. It is inevitable then that far-right, white-nationalist, and racist groups seemingly thrive in this settler-colonial landscape.

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Suicide in the settler colony: Kristen Cardon, ‘Suicide justice: Adopting Indigenous feminist methods in settler suicidology’, Health, 2021

27Sep21

Abstract: White settler colonies around the world have long reported disproportionately high rates of Indigenous suicides, a consequence of the continuing violence of imperialism. This article posits a need for interdisciplinary approaches to address this crisis and therefore turns to humanist methods developed in Indigenous and feminist scholarship. I analyze texts from U.S. psychologist Edwin Shneidman to rearticulate their relationship to what I call settler suicidology. I then evoke literary critic Eve K. Sedgwick’s reparative reading method to reimagine suicide prevention as suicide justice, reading the novel There There by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) to advocate for distributive justice as a new approach to Indigenous suicide crises. My term suicide justice names increasing accountability between settler suicide workers and the communities they seek to serve.

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Settler tourists on the land: Kendra E. Fortin, Chris E.Hurst, Bryan S. R. Grimwood, ‘Land, Settler identity, and tourism memories’, Annals of Tourism Research, 91, 2021

27Sep21

Abstract: This paper draws on theoretical insights associated with settler colonial studies and a collective memory work methodology to illuminate the multiple and contested meanings of land conveyed in tourism memory narratives of Settler Canadians. As part of a multi-day nature-based tourism experience in June 2019, 16 Settler co-participants wrote, and collectively analyzed, memory texts associated with travel experiences that they felt expressed genuinely Canadian and Indigenous qualities. Thematic analysis of memory narratives and co-participant discussions show how land meanings—specifically, land as organizer, educator, connector, and sustainer—relate to the dynamics of Settler identity. The paper thus builds upon emerging scholarship on tourism and settler colonialism and contributes pathways for decolonizing Settler-Indigenous relations in tourism and tourism research.

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