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The silence of the settlers: Bailey Hilgren, Settler Colonial Listening and the Silence of Wilderness in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, MA dissertation, University of Oregon, 2021

19Nov21

Abstract: The Boundary Waters Canoe Area soundscape in northern Minnesota has a long and contested history but is most often characterized today as a pristine and distinctly silent wilderness. This thesis traces the construction and perpetuation of the Boundary Waters as a silent space by government agencies and conservationists, as well as the ways the notion of silence has and continues to limit Ojibwe sovereignty and, in related but distinct ways, undermine non-human animal agency. As extractive industries increasingly threaten the Boundary Waters, advocacy groups continue to appeal to the idea of the place as silent despite the similarity in logics underlying both extractivism and the myth of pristine wilderness. The project also considers broader historiographical and activist consequences associated with the idea of a silent Boundary Waters and utilizes public-facing writing formats to challenge iterative processes perpetuating settler colonial soundscape control.


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Settlers incarcerate: Annie Pfingst, Wangui Kimari, ‘Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi’, Punishment & Society, 2021

19Nov21

Abstract: From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized Kenyans. Even now, colonial modes of punishment, incarceration, closure, interrogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. Initially assumed to herald a rupture from colonial modes of criminalization and punishment, the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that engendered the legacy of a seamless system of control, containment, and punishment evident in the ‘afterlives’ of empire. These are settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonial corporeality, and capitalism. The paper attends to the violence and brutality that endures in the very geographies that were the urban targets of colonial siege and links the carceral practices of settler colonialism and the everyday post-colonial governance of Nairobi’s poor neighbourhoods, encounters with the debris and ruination of empire found in the material and spatial fabric of Mathare. We take up a critical encounter with colonial files to both discern the continuity and lineage of carceral practices and to disrupt the authorial totality and continuity the colonial archive files assembled.


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Old fashioned settler colonialism right now, at the edge of the jungle: Joe Parkin Daniels, Luca Zanetti, ‘The Mennonites of Liviney, Colombia – a photo essay’, The Guardian, 17/11/21

18Nov21

Extract: In Colombia’s eastern flood plains, a group from the dry northern states of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas have started a new colony called Liviney …


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White Indigenes: Evan Freeley, White Cherokees on Red Earth: Blood and Belonging, MA dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2021

16Nov21

Abstract: In this thesis, I address White Cherokee identity, the historical trajectory it emerges from, and some of its political consequences. White Cherokee identity comes from social arrangements, place relationships, and governmental policy in the United States of America, each part of settler colonialism’s ongoing effects. White Cherokees are not unique in the fact that
other tribes certainly have White members. Instead, they are a specific example for exploring membership, place relationships, cultural practices, identity, race, ethnicity, and subjectivity. My family serves as a case study for my analysis, and I supplement it by engaging with other scholars. I focus my research on Oklahoma because the formation of Indian Territory, and subsequently the State of Oklahoma, is key to the building of White Cherokees. Beginning with the role of place-relationships, I establish that they are fundamental to developing White Cherokee identities. They help develop personal and familial histories closely tied to Indigeneity, oftentimes stories of removal. Furthermore, the social and cultural changes in thinking about identity from the 19th century to the present have also made a White Cherokee identity possible and coherent to claim. This is partly due to the ways biological race was understood in the past and how those viewpoints were written into scientific practices and public policy. Race’s legislation through blood quantum and technological advancements in genetics have allowed for new personal ethnic explorations for American consumers. While the changes in this thinking are essential, looking at them and the ways Indigenous identities have been politically and legally defined by both Indigenous and nonIndigenous people, a more robust understanding of White Cherokee identity is achieved


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Representing settlers and Indigenous peoples in fantastic places: Xine Yao, ‘Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 24, 3, 2021, pp. 471-504

16Nov21

Abstract: By bracketing whiteness, Avatar: The Last Airbender reorients us to how global colonial modernity produces biopolitical difference as a technology of management to defamiliarize Asian and Indigenous relationalities. Approaching it as a site of alternative contact, I consider Lisa Lowe’s intimacies of colonial comparative processes in apposition with insurgent counter-intimacies. This essay traces portrayals of Asian imperialism, colonialism, and Asian diasporic settler colonialism in tandem with comparative Indigeneities and decolonial solidarity. ATLA engages Asianness and Indigeneity together in a mode that is relational but not statically schematic, extending influential work by scholars thinking across Indigenous, Asian, and Asian diasporic studies.


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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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