settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism against reproductive health: Genevieve R. Cox, Mike Anastario, Paula FireMoon, Adriann Ricker, Elizabeth Rink, ‘Narrative frames as choice over structure of American Indian sexual and reproductive health consequences of historical trauma’, Sociology of Health & Illness, 2021

27Jul21

Abstract: Emerging evidence suggests that the historical trauma associated with settler colonialism affects the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of American Indian (AI) communities today. This article examines how one AI community narratively frames the influence of historical trauma within the context of community-based participatory research (CBPR) and the implications of this framing for health behaviours, internalized oppression, SRH outcomes, and future CBPR interventions. We found that AIs framed the SRH consequences of historical trauma with renderings that favoured personal choice over structural explanations. Our findings suggest future interventions could: (1) include educational components on historical trauma and the continued role settler colonialism plays in structural violence against AI bodies and communities; and (2) recognize the role that the individualized logic of westernized/white culture may play in the erasure of traditional collectivist AI culture, internalized oppression, and SRH.

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Settlers teaching history: James Miles, ‘Redressing Historical Wrongs or Replicating Settler Colonialism? Social Studies Curriculum Reform in Canada’, in Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, Björn Norlin (eds), Historical Justice and History Education, Springer, 2021, pp 249-267

27Jul21

Abstract: This chapter examines recent curriculum reforms in Canada that emphasize historical injustice and reconciliation. Miles relies on concepts from critical Indigenous scholarship and settler colonial studies to examine how settler colonial discourses have been replicated in a revised social studies curriculum in the province of British Columbia. Through an analysis of curriculum documents and interviews with six curriculum writers, Miles explores the ways in which historical injustice and redress mechanisms have been envisioned in the curriculum and the potential consequences for teachers and students. Miles argues that British Columbia’s new social studies curriculum frames colonial injustice as a discrete event that can be isolated from larger processes and structures of settler colonialism.

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Settlers in Indigenous sports: Chen Chen, Daniel S. Mason, ‘When two worlds collide: the unsettling experiences of non-Indigenous volunteers at 2017 World Indigenous Nations Games’, Leisure / Loisir, 2021

27Jul21

Abstract: Foregrounding the ethical demands for non-Indigenous people to be relationally accountable to Indigenous Peoples in settler colonial societies as well as the potential of sport as a site for social change, this study examines the experiences of a group of non-Indigenous sport volunteers at the 2017 World Indigenous Nations Games (WIN Games), an international event hosted simultaneously with the ‘Canada 150ʹ celebration. The findings reveal four themes related to non-Indigenous volunteers’ unsettling yet meaningful experiences. This research highlights how responsible and reflexive engagement through sport, e.g., volunteering, might contain critical educational value and be mobilized as a modest way of action in unsettling settler colonialism.

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Settlers in Indigenous-led movements: J. M. Bacon, ‘”Who Had to Die So I Could Go Camping?”: Shifting non-Native conceptions of land and environment through engagement with Indigenous thought and action’, Ethics, Policy & Environment, 2021

27Jul21

Abstract: Scholarship in the area of social movements points to the importance of inter-group collaboration and alliance building. In the case of Indigenous-led movements, the issue of solidarity with non-Indigenous movement participants scholarship at the intersection of Native studies and social movements suggests that such alliances can be built and sustained but that unlearning colonial attitudes and behaviors is central to this process. Through in-depth interviews with non-Native solidarity participants this article considers how engagement with Indigenous thought and action re-shapes conceptions of environment and place. Findings suggest that such involvement calls attention to histories of violence as well as ongoing practices of dispossession causing activists to grapple not only with their personal and family histories but also with their evolving relationship with environmentalism.

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The making of settler ecologies: Lindsey Dillon, ‘Civilizing swamps in California: Formations of race, nature, and property in the nineteenth century U.S. West’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021

27Jul21

Abstract: This paper examines the production of settler ecologies through nineteenth century swamp reclamation projects in California. It focuses on the transformation of inland swamps into agricultural land and San Francisco salt marshes and tidelands into urban real estate. I argue that swamp reclamation was both an economic and a racial project. Swamp reclamation sought to transform perceived wastelands into productive property. Swamp reclamation was also a racial project, in at least three ways. First, it aimed to transform colonial environments for the health of the white settler body. Second, draining swamps and making solid land depended on a racialized labor force. Third, swamp reclamation was accelerated through government subsidies that largely benefitted white settlers at the same time the state of California disenfranchised Black, Chinese, and Indigenous residents and supported racial immigration policies. These formations of race, nature, and property were established by law and political economy, and undergirded by settler epistemologies of space and nature. By studying the discourses and practices of swamp reclamation in nineteenth century California, this paper contributes to scholarship on the production of settler ecologies under conditions of racial capitalism.

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Assimilation does not necessarily make settlers: Lilly Havstad, ‘Indígena or Não-Indígena? The Gendered Politics of Assimilation in Colonial Mozambique, 1917–61’, Gender & History, 2021

24Jul21

Abstract: This article examines the intersections of race, sex and gender that shaped the legal system of assimilation in colonial Mozambique. Between 1917 and 1961, Africans could apply for assimilated (assimilado/a) status, granting them limited rights of Portuguese citizenship. Analysis of assimilation case files, administrative reports and public debates in local newspapers reveals that assimilation was an ambiguous, changing and gendered system shaped not only by its Portuguese legislative architects, but also by the African men and women who navigated the law, and encouraged its reforms, over time. Using a feminist historical approach to challenge entrenched scholarly interpretations of the system as uniformly male gendered, this article reveals that marriage, miscegenation and women were at the centre of the assimilation system as a contested site of the politics of ‘civilisation’ in the colonial capital of Lourenço Marques.

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Settler surveys: Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘Legibility, misrecognition and the Aboriginal Peoples Survey: understanding knowledge production as a settler-colonial project’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

24Jul21

Abstract: Knowledge production has been integral to colonial projects and the making of the contemporary state. This paper brings these two processes together in the contemporary settler-colonial context of Canada, arguing that knowledge production remains a central technology in the contemporary (re)production of settler sovereignty. The paper uses the Aboriginal Peoples Survey as a case study, reading it through the lenses of legibility and a politics of misrecognition to advance an understanding of the Survey as a “settler project.” Not only does the Survey reinforce the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, but this erasure and misrecognition work together to limit the “universe of policy possibility” by establishing an evidence base that enables further colonial policymaking interventions. In doing so, such projects reaffirm the existing colonial relations of power between Indigenous nations and the settler state rather than supporting Indigenous self-determination through policymaking.

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Not all settlers are equally settler (hence their reproduction must be controlled): Bayan Abusneineh, ‘(Re)producing the Israeli (European) body: Zionism, Anti-Black Racism and the Depo-Provera Affair’, Feminist Review, 2021

24Jul21

Abstract: This article examines the Depo-Provera Affair—where Israeli doctors administered the contraceptive Depo-Provera to newly immigrated Ethiopian Jewish women—to argue that the Israeli settler colonial project depends on these forms of gendered anti-Black violence, through the management of Black African bodies. In 2013, then Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman admitted that they had administered Depo-Provera to Ethiopian immigrant women without their consent, after reproductive and civil rights activists in Israel called for an investigation after a drop in the birthrate among Ethiopian women: close to 50 per cent within the previous decade. The demarcation of Blackness as a political tool necessary to advance Israeli modernity and the situating of Black bodies as antithetical to the state of Israel are not contradictory but rather illuminate Israel’s deployment of anti-Blackness through the racial and reproductive violence necessary to become part of the superior, European West.

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Mapping settler colonial appropriation: Heidi Katter, ‘Evading the Map: The Power of Cartographic Ignorance at the White Earth and Red Lake Ojibwe Reservations’, The Yale Historical Review, 2021

24Jul21

Excerpt: In July 1889, the United States government sent a commission to northwestern Minnesota to counsel with the Ojibwe of the White Earth and Red Lake Reservations. The object of these visits was straightforward: to negotiate the terms of the newly established Nelson Act, An act for the relief and civilization of the Chippewa Indians in the State of Minnesota. The ambiguous title fails to convey its insidious intentions. The commission was charged to “negotiate…for the complete cession and relinquishment in writing of all [the Ojibwe’s] title and interest in and to all the reservations…except the White Earth and Red Lake Reservations.” The lands of White Earth and Red Lake would “be allotted…in severalty…in conformity with” the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act. Any lands remaining after granting Ojibwe individual allotments would “be disposed of by the United States to actual settlers only under the provisions of the homestead law.”1 Even though the Ojibwe at White Earth and Red Lake retained the “privilege” of remaining on their reservations, the Nelson Act powerfully advanced settler colonialism as the federal government infiltrated Ojibwe territory.

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Tourism in the settler colony (two chapters on desettlerising tourism): Andrew Peters, Simon Lambert, ‘‘Wominjeka’ / ‘Haere Mai’: The role of Indigenous ceremony in socialising tourism’; Bobbie Chew Bigby, Rebecca Jim, ‘Toxic Tourism at Tar Creek: The potential for environmental justice and tribal sovereignty through Indigenous-led tourism’, in Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, Adam Doering, Bobbie Chew Bigby (eds), Socialising Tourism: Rethinking Tourism for Social and Ecological Justice, Routledge, 2022

23Jul21

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