settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous agency and settler colonialism: Riley Bowers, ‘Beyond a Border Conflict: Indigenous Involvement in the Mexican-American War’, West Virginia University Historical Review, 2, 2021, pp. 34-46

27Sep21

Abstract: Settled squarely in the heartlands of many Indigenous Americans’ ancestral territories, the disputed area between the United States and Mexico fought over during the Mexican-American War is often solely conceptualized as the latter definition. The Indigenous peoples of these lands themselves are often just as ignored in the historical narrative of this period as are their ties to the lands. The research presented in this article aims to bring to light this often understudied part of the Mexican-American War, being Indigenous involvement in the war itself and the lasting effects that it had upon Indigenous groups. This article focuses on Apache, Comanche, and Navajo perspectives leading up to, during, and following the war. By centering these groups in the narrative, it is clear they were not sidelined or forgotten during the conflict, but rather were active players in the overall struggle for power in the region, engaging in both warfare and diplomacy. As such, equal attention should be given to these Indigenous participants in the war in further studies of the conflict.

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On the language-race-land complex: ‘“Kom Khoi San, kry trug jou land”: Disrupting White Settler Colonial Logics of Language, Race, and Land with Afrikaaps’, Linguistic Anthropology, 31, 2, 2021, pp. 194-217

25Sep21

Abstract: This article offers a broad and deep discussion of critical issues in the study of language, race, and political economy through an analysis of the verbal art, aesthetics, and performances of South African hip hop artists. In particular, we present an in-depth analysis of the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa and theorize the language-race-land complex , the range of issues with respect to the co-constitution and refusal of the colonial logics of language, race, and land. Specifically, we address the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa. Afrikaaps is a South African hiphopera that disrupts white settler colonial logics of language, race, and land through an interrogation and revision of white supremacist constructions of Afrikaans. This reinvention of language, race, and land frees the Afrikaans-speaking, so-called Coloured community from oppressive, colonial logics and offers them new ways of envisioning their linguistic, racial, spatial, and political-economic futures. We argue that, for the artists–activists involved in this decolonial, raciolinguistic movement, Hip Hop becomes a critical vehicle for raising consciousness through language, foregrounding Indigenous knowledge systems, and upending the white supremacist legacies of apartheid through a radical re-education. Methodologically, we center Black and Indigenous artists’ voices, understanding them to be more than cultural producers but also cultural theorists. We draw upon our longitudinal, ethnographic cultural engagement with the Hip Hop artists involved in the theatre production and related forms of language activism.

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What the settler science makes up: Emma Bennett Jones, ‘The Indians Say’: Settler Colonialism and the Scientific Study of North America, 1722 to 1848, PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2021

25Sep21

Abstract: “‘The Indians Say’: Settler Colonialism and the Scientific Study of North America, 1722 to 1848” examines the issue of evidence and credibility within natural history by following the circulation of Indigenous testimony through Anglophone networks of scientific knowledge production. By merging the history of science with Native American and Indigenous studies, this dissertation makes two interrelated arguments: first, that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries information sharing between Indigenous peoples and Anglophone naturalists was both controlled by Indigenous actors and political in nature; and second, that the scientific credibility of Indigenous testimony was informed by colonial ideology and politics. Instead of prevailing scientific norms shaping American settler science, the reverse was true. Using four chronological case studies centered in the early eighteenth-century Carolina piedmont, the late eighteenth-century Eastern Woodlands, the early nineteenth-century Upper Mississippi River valley, and mid nineteenth-century Samoa, this dissertation demonstrates that colonial politics influenced naturalists’ decisions to cite Native American sources. In all four cases, Anglophone naturalists only had access to Indigenous testimony as a result of Indigenous diplomacy and information sharing practices. Moreover in each of these instances, Anglophone naturalists Mark Catesby, Benjamin Smith Barton, John James Audubon, and Titian Ramsay Peale each relied on Indigenous testimony and expertise, but the intellectual value these naturalists ascribed to this same information waxed and waned in direct response to settler colonial Indian policy.

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The settler shadow: Kira Maeve Celeste, Unsettling the Settler Shadow: an Alchemical Investigation of the Transformation of Settler Colonial Consciousness, PhD dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2021

25Sep21

Abstract: One can argue that European colonial consciousness and its actions have caused more harm in the world than any other collective psychology. Grounded in the psychology of C. G. Jung, this research investigates the cultural complexes of white colonial consciousness and the possibility of finding healing for its dysfunctions through the tending of its psychological shadow. This research uses the historical landscape of what is now known as Canada as an example of how colonial consciousness has caused harm over the last half a millennium and how it continues to oppress Indigenous people and degrade the environment of so-called Canada. This research is based on the depth psychological tenet that stories and myths from one’s own ancestry can bring about deep change of perspective, healing and meaning-making. As such, this research investigates the question: how might an alchemical way of imagining into white settler colonial consciousness contribute to its psychological healing and accountability-taking today. Alchemical models emphasize the importance of integrating one’s shadow
material in the journey towards psychological wholeness. In alchemy, the muck of one’s psyche is worked over and over until eventually it is transmuted into the creation of inner gold. Likewise, the healing and transformation of colonial consciousness requires the tending of its most unsavory aspects. This dissertation suggests ways that alchemy provides a model for this undertaking and can lead to the psychological unsettling of the settler shadow today.

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The political imagination of settler colonialism: Lorenzo Veracini, The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea, Verso, 2021

21Sep21

Description: Many would rather change worlds than change the world. The settlement of communities in “empty lands” somewhere else has often been proposed as a solution to growing contradictions. The lands were never empty. Sometimes the settlement communities failed miserably and sometimes they prospered and grew until they became entire countries. Building on a growing body of transnational and interdisciplinary research on the political imaginaries of settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, this book uncovers and subjects to critique an autonomous, influential, and coherent political tradition—a tradition still relevant today. It follows the ideas and the projects (and failures) of those who left or planned to leave growing and chaotic cities and challenging and confusing economic circumstances, those who wanted to protect endangered nationalities, and those who intended to pre-empt forthcoming revolutions of all sorts, including civil and social wars. This book outlines the global history of a resilient political idea: to seek change somewhere else as an alternative to embracing (or resisting) transformation where one is.

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The durable inequalities of settler colonialism: David W. Everson, ‘Narrating the Territorial Foundations of Privilege: Racial Discourse and Indigenous Peoples’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2021

21Sep21

Abstract: This article focuses on the cultural narratives underlying U.S. society’s racialized inequalities. Informed by settler colonial theory and Charles Tilly’s work on “durable inequality,” I outline a privilege narratives framework that centers the dual mechanisms of racial dispossession that construct white supremacy’s material foundations: (1) the exploitation of non-Indigenous bodies and (2) the opportunity hoarding of Indigenous resources. I argue that these complementary, yet divergent, mechanisms shape distinctive patterns in contemporary racial discourse. In contrast to color-blind racism’s ahistoric and spatially disembedded storylines, the hoarding of Indigenous resources requires narrations that historically legitimate the dominant culture’s territoriality. Thus, in comparison with other racialized groups, racial discourse surrounding Indigenous peoples remains rooted in the defense of the territorial foundations of white property. Empirical support for the theoretical framework is provided through a sample of purposive follow-up interviews of non-Indigenous bystanders with historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) “Red Power” activism in the 1970s.

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Recreational settler colonialism: John Reid-Hresko, Jeff R. Warren, ‘”A Lot of What We Ride Is Their Land”: White Settler Canadian Understandings of Mountain Biking, Indigeneity, and Recreational Colonialism’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 2021

21Sep21

Abstract: This article explores how White settler mountain bikers in British Columbia understand their relationship to recreational landscapes on unceded Indigenous territory. Using original qualitative research, the authors detail three rhetorical strategies settler Canadians employ to negotiate their place within geographies of belonging informed by Indigeneity and recreational colonialism: ignorance, ambivalence, and acknowledgement. In Canada’s post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission climate, the discourses settlers use to situate themselves vis-à-vis landscapes and Indigenous people contribute to the conditions of possibility for meaningful movement toward a more equitable existence for all. This work points to a growing need to problematize the seemingly apolitical landscapes of recreation as a prerequisite toward meaningful reconciliation.

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The sea as a settler! Traci Brynne Voyles, The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism, University of Nebraska Press, 2021

21Sep21

Description: Can a sea be a settler? What if it is a sea that exists only in the form of incongruous, head-scratching contradictions: a wetland in a desert, a wildlife refuge that poisons birds, a body of water in which fish suffocate? Traci Brynne Voyles’s history of the Salton Sea examines how settler colonialism restructures physical environments in ways that further Indigenous dispossession, racial capitalism, and degradation of the natural world. In other words, The Settler Sea asks how settler colonialism entraps nature to do settlers’ work for them. The Salton Sea, Southern California’s largest inland body of water, occupies the space between the lush agricultural farmland of the Imperial Valley and the austere desert called “America’s Sahara.” The sea sits near the boundary between the United States and Mexico and lies at the often-contested intersections of the sovereign lands of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla and the state of California. Created in 1905, when overflow from the Colorado River combined with a poorly constructed irrigation system to cause the whole river to flow into the desert, this human-maintained body of water has been considered a looming environmental disaster. The Salton Sea’s very precariousness—the way it sits uncomfortably between worlds, existing always in the interstices of human and natural influences, between desert and wetland, between the skyward pull of the sun and the constant inflow of polluted water—is both a symptom and symbol of the larger precariousness of settler relationships to the environment, in the West and beyond. Voyles provides an innovative exploration of the Salton Sea, looking to the ways the sea, its origins, and its role in human life have been vital to the people who call this region home.

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The settler’s wines: Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World, University of California Press, 2022

18Sep21

Description: A fascinating deep dive into the colonial roots of the global wine industry. Imperial Wine is a bold, rigorous history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Here, historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine industry exists as a result of settler colonialism and that imperialism was central, not incidental, to viticulture in the British colonies. Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonization of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as part of a civilizing mission: tidy vines, heavy with fruit, were symbolic of Britain’s subordination of foreign lands. Economically and culturally, nineteenth-century settler winemakers saw the British market as paramount. However, British drinkers were apathetic towards what they pejoratively called “colonial wine.” The tables only began to turn after the First World War, when colonial wines were marketed as cheap and patriotic and started to find their niche among middle- and working-class British drinkers. This trend, combined with social and cultural shifts after the Second World War, laid the foundation for the New World revolution in the 1980s, making Britain into a confirmed country of wine-drinkers and a massive market for New World wines. These New World producers may have only received critical acclaim in the late twentieth century, but Imperial Wine shows that they had spent centuries wooing, and indeed manufacturing, a British market for inexpensive colonial wines. This book is sure to satisfy any curious reader who savors the complex stories behind this commodity chain.

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The settler’s stereotypes: Laurel R. Davis-Delano, Jennifer J. Folsom, Virginia McLaurin, Arianne E. Eason, Stephanie A. Fryberg, ‘Representations of Native Americans in U.S. culture? A case of omissions and commissions’, The Social Science Journal, 2021

18Sep21

Abstract: In settler colonial societies, colonizers often omit contemporary Indigenous Peoples from representations, while controlling signifiers of indigeneity to legitimate their interests (e.g., stereotypes). Both omissions and commissions, including stereotyping, are central to oppression experienced by contemporary Native Americans. We employ a sample of over 5,500 non-Native survey participants to examine the extent of omissions and commissions in recalled representations of films and television shows with Native American characters and famous living and deceased Native Americans. Then, we analyze the content of the most commonly recalled representations. We find that many participants are unable to recall representations of Native Americans, especially contemporary representations. The most commonly experienced representations involve stereotyping, as well as little content that is not stereotypical. We discuss the implications of our findings, and situate them in the context of settler colonialism in the United States.

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