settler colonial studies blog

Universal rights? Jayes Dylan Page Sebastian, Challenging Rights-Based Redress: White Supremacy, Heteropatriarchy, Settler Colonialism and the Promise of the Universal, PhD dissertation, UC Riverside, 2021

28Oct21

Abstract: This dissertation engages how the framework of ‘universal rights’ is a modern concept inherently tied to colonialism. I show how rights-based redress is in fact a limited means for contemporary movements seeking to challenge structures of colonial state violence because the ongoing structures of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism remain intact within colonial-modernity. Using a methodological genealogy centered in Critical Ethnic Studies, legal history, and critical rights discourses, I engage this dynamic through the work of 16th century Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria as he configured a set of universal rights to justify Spanish colonialism. I trace this work to its 20th century re-uptake in the rise of International law as it bolstered the development of universal human rights regime by maintaining the colonial relationship of Mandate colonialism into neocolonialism through the United Nations. I argue that the formation of what we think of as modern and universal rights developed because of and through the colonial relation of modernity to produce and maintain power imbalances through hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, among other disciplining vectors. In locating the relationality of rights as emergent and related to colonial power, and not as separate from it or even emancipatory from it, I contend we can understand both the promise and the ‘paradox’ of rights as in fact essential to the maintenance of the current global socio-political order.

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Identity work is needed: Laurel R. Davis-Delano, Sita Strother, Joseph P. Gone, ‘Native American identity work in settler colonial context’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 85, 2021, pp. 226-235

27Oct21

Abstract: In U.S. society, Native Americans face invisibility, stereotypes, discrimination, and structural barriers. In this article, we employ a symbolic interactionist approach, embedded in critical analysis, to explore how this social context impacts the conveyance and interpretation of Native American identity among people who are not Native American. Participants, 213 White American and 104 Native American people, replied to open-ended questions about Native American identity conveyance and interpretation. We employed an inductive thematic approach to analyze their written replies. The majority of Native American participants discussed their identity in the context of limited public knowledge of, and/or oppression faced by, Native Americans. For most Native American participants, this context generated strain and struggle associated with conveyance and interpretation of their identities. Despite this, some Native American participants engaged in identity work to educate others and reduce oppression. Without prompting, some White participants expressed positive attitudes toward Native Americans and their identity revelation. These positive attitudes evidence both hope for social change and problematic fetishization based on romantic stereotypes of Native Americans. We argue that society-wide change is necessary to reduce strain in, and enhance the effectiveness of, identity work by Native American people.

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Settler schools: Ee-Seul Yoon, Victoria Grima, Corinne E. Barrett DeWiele, Lucas Skelton, ‘The impact of school choice on school (re)segregation: settler-colonialism, critical geography and Bourdieu’, Comparative Education, 2021

27Oct21

Abstract: This study assesses the extent to which public high schools become more or less socially mixed after families are allowed to choose schools outside their designated catchment areas in a mid-sized Canadian city. We draw on settler-colonial theory, critical human geography, and critical social theory while applying a critical mapping of school choice. We find that the city’s high schools are racially and socially segregated, with the most affluent families with European backgrounds concentrated on its west side, and the low-income families with Indigenous and racialised backgrounds clustered on its east side. The west side also has specialised choice programmes that facilitate the social reproduction of both the local residents and mobile students from the rest of the city who choose the programmes and are from advantaged backgrounds. Based on these findings, we argue that school choice practices reinforce school (re)segregation.

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Indigenettlers? Leyland Cecco, ‘”We know who we are”: Inuit row raises questions over identity and ancestry: Under Canada’s constitution, Indigenous groups have the right to self-govern – but there are fears that the recognition of NunatuKavut could weaken the authority of Inuit groups’, The Guardian, 24/10/21

25Oct21

Excerpt: But a new group, whose members trace their lineage to Inuit who lived in Labrador and intermarried with colonial settlers, have complicated that narrative.

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Settler colonial diasporas: Jenny Ingridsdotter, ‘A narrative of suffering and soil: Swedish migration and settler colonialism in northeast Argentina’, Cultural Studies, 2021

23Oct21

Abstract: This article examines the narrated memory of a Swedish settler colony in northeast Argentina. Recently, scholarly attention has turned to how migrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to colonizing processes in the Americas as they established themselves on lands already inhabited by Indigenous Peoples. The settlement of Swedish migrants in Misiones is here regarded as part of a strategy of settler colonialism advocated by the Argentine state in order to extend the agrarian frontier further and thereby ‘civilise’ and secure the nation’s rural landscape through the presence of white settlers. From this perspective, the aim of the article is to understand how the historical macropolitical framework of settler colonialism in Argentina is interwoven in the collective and individual narratives of Swedish descendants in present-day Misiones. The article draws on ethnographic interviews and observations made in Misiones between 2017 and 2019. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 individuals along with walk-along observations at seven Swedish community sites. The article argues that a central narrative of memory among the descendants of Swedish settlers relies upon certain elements crucial to settler colonial societies. However, while this narrative structure is intrinsic to settler colonialism, it must also be analysed as part of a migration narrative. This article brings forth new empirical material from a site in Latin America where Swedish migration history has not previously been studied ethnographically. Further, it brings the study of migration, colonial settlement, and indigenous dispossession together through its analysis of a settler narrative in the particular context of settler colonial history of Misiones.

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Settler colonialism undoes throughcare: Hilde Tubex, John Rynne, Harry Blagg, ‘Throughcare for Indigenous peoples leaving prison: Practices in two settler colonial states’, European Journal of Probation, 2021

23Oct21

Abstract: The concept of throughcare as a means to prevent recidivism continues to attract considerable attention in Australia over the last couple of years. This is particularly the case for Indigenous peoples, as the transition to life after imprisonment proves to be particularly challenging for them, resulting in high rates of recidivism and ongoing overrepresentation in Australian prisons. In this contribution, we report on research we conducted in two Australian jurisdictions. After identifying the problems in developing effective throughcare strategies for Indigenous peoples leaving prison, we turn to Canada for examples of good practice. Canada was chosen for comparison as it is also a settler colonial state, experiencing similar problems of overrepresentation of their Indigenous population in the prison. After a critical analysis of these practices, we conclude that the reasons for a problematic re-integration of Indigenous peoples are related to a tendency to impose solutions and strategies developed in the white mainstream onto Indigenous communities without acknowledging traditional cultures and structures.

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Settler colonialism in Kashmir: Samreen Mushtaq, Mudasir Amin, ‘”We will memorise our home”: exploring settler colonialism as an interpretive framework for Kashmir’, Third World Quarterly, 2021

21Oct21

Abstract: In this article, we examine the practices of India’s military occupation of Kashmir in the framework of settler colonialism to map its entrenched nature in sustaining control and countering the struggle for Azaadi (freedom). Post 5 August 2019, when the Indian state proceeded with a reading down of the laws that enabled Kashmir’s permanent residents exclusive rights over land and jobs, scholars and activists noted it to be an advancement of India’s settler logic of elimination. In this essay, we complicate its trajectory and trace these recent practices as part of long drawn processes including spatial, demographic and ecological manifestations that are now further deepening and expanding a matrix of control characteristic of such a project. The paper argues that while settler colonialism could be used as a crucial interpretive framework for Kashmir and make it legible for an international audience, the reliance on a future Indian-citizen-settler runs the risk of invisibilising the Indian armed forces already permanently stationed in Kashmir and occupying vast tracts of land. The settler colonial framework can be a useful concept for Kashmir when its shrewd combination of assimilationist and eliminationist tactics is placed within the framework of military occupation, rather than as a distinct alternative.

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Science fiction’s settler colonial prophecy: Kali Simmons, ‘”The environment is us”: Settler cartographies of Indigeneity and Blackness in Prophecy (1979)’, Science Fiction Film and Television, 14, 3, 2021, pp. 315-331

20Oct21

Abstract: This article examines the triangulation of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the ‘creature feature’ sf-horror film Prophecy (Frankenheimer US 1979), arguing that the film’s renderings of environmental racism ultimately function to justify white supremacist hetero-patriarchal maintenance and surveillance of Black and Indigenous lands and bodies. A close examination of Prophecy’s representational and ideological shortfalls – in particular its renderings of Black and Indigenous maternity – reveals troubling entanglements between settler-colonial logics of geography, ecology, monstrosity, and subjectivity.

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A landmark decision? Maria Antonia Tigre, ‘Indigenous Communities of the Lhaka Honhat (Our Land) Association v. Argentina’, AJIL, 2021

20Oct21

Abstract: On February 6, 2020, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Court) declared in Lhaka Honhat Association v. Argentina that Argentina violated Indigenous groups’ rights to communal property, a healthy environment, cultural identity, food, and water. For the first time in a contentious case, the Court analyzed these rights autonomously based on Article 26 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) and ordered specific restitution measures, including actions to provide access to adequate food and water, and the recovery of forest resources and Indigenous culture. The decision marks a significant milestone for protecting Indigenous peoples’ rights and expanding the autonomous rights to a healthy environment, water, and food, which are now directly justiciable under the Inter-American human rights system.

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A treaty on personal development under settler colonialism: Jillian Fish, ‘Towards a Haudenosaunee Developmental Science: Perspectives From the Two Row Wampum’, University of Minnesota Medical School, 13/10/21

20Oct21

Abstract: The Two Row Wampum belt represents a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch about how the two nations would coexist with each other in the context of settler colonialism. The oral tradition of the Two Row Wampum states that the Haudenosaunee would travel down the river of life in a canoe containing their ways of being and knowing, while the Dutch would travel alongside them in a ship with their own orientations to the world. However, the original principles of the Two Row Wampum contrast with the colonial realities of the Haudenosaunee. In an application of the Two Row Wampum to developmental science, in which the river is the life course, Mainstream developmental science is the ship, and Haudenosaunee developmental science is the canoe, I use the Principles of the Two Row Wampum to propose a Haudenosaunee perspective of the field. I compare this with how Mainstream developmental science dominates the field, marginalizing various Indigenous developmental sciences in a manner similar to the Betrayal of the Two Row Wampum. Though I recommend that Mainstream developmental science returns to the principles of the Two Row Wampum, I demonstrate that Indigenous developmental sciences operate beyond the constraints of developmental psychology by centering Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies to promote Indigenous futures.

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