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Settler parliaments as (go figure) settler colonial institutions: Harry Hobbs, ‘First Nations, Settler Parliaments, and the Question of Consultation: Reconciling Parliamentary Supremacy and Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Self-Determination’, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 58, 2, 2021, pp. 337-384

20Jul21

Abstract: First Nations peoples assert a right to a distinctive relationship with the state based on their pre-colonial
status as self-governing sovereign communities. Ascertaining the scope of First Nations peoples’
collective right to self-determination is complex, but there is broad international agreement that it
encompasses a right to be consulted on state action that will affect their interests, including in the lawmaking process. The problem is that the right to be consulted in the development of legislation appears
to place a constraint on the power of the legislature to propose, debate, amend, and enact laws as they
see fit. Does the right to consultation unduly or impermissibly fetter democratic government by imposing
a procedural or substantive restriction on the introduction of proposed laws? Can this entitlement be
reconciled with the constitutional value of parliamentary supremacy? In recent years, the highest courts in
Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand have explored these questions. This paper examines those
decisions and considers their consequences for the appropriate constitutional relationship between First
Nations Peoples and the State.


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Medieval settler colonising: Meehan, Patrick, A Promised Wilderness: Colonial Encounters and Landscape in the Late Medieval Baltic, doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2021

20Jul21

Abstract: This dissertation explores the German colonization of northeastern Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, taking the Baltic region of Prussia as a case study. It focuses primarily on the Teutonic Order, a state-like crusading institution that extended its lordship over the region by the early fourteenth century. Historians have long framed the conquest and settlement of the medieval Baltic as an early attestation of European colonialism. Prussia’s medieval archives were used through the end of the Second World War to furnish evidence for politically charged questions about race, settlement, and territoriality. Today, however, the Baltic is an understudied region among medievalists, let alone scholars of colonialism. I draw on interpretive frameworks from postcolonial studies, anthropology, and geography in order to approach this material in new ways. The result is a study at the intersection of colonial history, Indigenous history, and environmental history.
In its historical narratives and documentary records, the Teutonic Order articulated a distinctive version of a commonly held myth among settler societies: namely, that the colonization of Prussia’s “wild” landscape and the violent subjection of its Indigenous population together constituted a scripturally sanctioned mandate to settle a new Christian Promised Land. I have summarized this myth as the idea of the “Promised Wilderness,” which shapes the structure of the dissertation. Chapter two draws on three major historical chronicles of Prussia’s conquest and colonization to argue that members of the Order internalized this discourse, imagining themselves—and the settlers under their lordship—as God’s chosen people. The remaining chapters turn from narrative texts to the archival record in order to explore how discourse informed the practices of administration and rule. Chapters three and four first consider survey procedures and the negotiation of property boundaries in the context of fourteenth-century settlement and land reform. Chapters five and six then move to the eastern “wilderness” frontier region that was contested by the Teutonic Order and its Lithuanian neighbors, focusing on a collection of navigational texts that Teutonic officials produced in collaboration with Indigenous Baltic and Slavic guides. Both within Prussia and at its peripheries, new forms of knowledge and power precipitated from the encounters among colonizers, settlers, Indigenous people, and the Baltic landscape itself.
As a whole, this dissertation offers a new approach to studying the epistemological and material structures of colonialism in a medieval society. It demonstrates how these medieval European structures can be understood not as points of origin for their modern counterparts, but as analogous forms that enrich and broaden our understanding of deeper patterns in the global history of colonialism.


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Settlers after victims: David M. Spence, ‘From Victims to Colonizers: A Comparative Study of “Repatriated Indigenous Communities” in Israel and Liberia’, The SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research, 13, 2019/2020, pp. 153-171

20Jul21

Abstract: Popular discourses have painted Israelis and Liberians as two peoples who fled persecution to return to their ancestral homelands. The oppression of blacks in America and Jews in Europe is without question. However, historical analysis indicates that the migration of Americo-Liberians to West Africa and European Jews to Palestine are unique examples of settler colonialism. Previous comparative work on Israel and Liberia is almost non-existent. Therefore, my writing attempts to fill the gap in academic literature. Throughout this article, I answer the question: “How and why did these two persecuted peoples perpetuate Western colonialism?” through the lens of comparative analysis and post-colonial theory. I hope that this work will open the door for a future comparative study of Israel and Liberia, black settler colonialism, and repatriated indigenous communities. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that, although they fled America and Europe for wholly legitimate reasons, Americo-Liberians and Israelis simultaneously adopted the role of colonial aggressors in West Africa and Palestine.


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Settler colonialism as fire suppression: Tony Marks-Block, William Tripp, ‘Facilitating Prescribed Fire in Northern California through Indigenous Governance and Interagency Partnerships’, Fire, 37, 4, 2021

20Jul21

Abstract: Prescribed burning by Indigenous people was once ubiquitous throughout California. Settler colonialism brought immense investments in fire suppression by the United States Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (CAL FIRE) to protect timber and structures, effectively limiting prescribed burning in California. Despite this, fire-dependent American Indian communities such as the Karuk and Yurok peoples, stalwartly advocate for expanding prescribed burning as a part of their efforts to revitalize their culture and sovereignty. To examine the political ecology of prescribed burning in Northern California, we coupled participant observation of prescribed burning in Karuk and Yurok territories (2015–2019) with 75 surveys and 18 interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous fire managers to identify political structures and material conditions that facilitate and constrain prescribed fire expansion. Managers report that interagency partnerships have provided supplemental funding and personnel to enable burning, and that decentralized prescribed burn associations facilitate prescribed fire. However, land dispossession and centralized state regulations undermine Indigenous and local fire governance. Excessive investment in suppression and the underfunding of prescribed fire produces a scarcity of personnel to implement and plan burns. Where Tribes and local communities have established burning infrastructure, authorities should consider the devolution of decision-making and land repatriation to accelerate prescribed fire expansion.


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Settler colonialism in the Valley: Leila Ullmann, Shadows of the Silicon Valley: A Critical History of the High-Tech Industry, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2021

20Jul21

Abstract: Weaving together history, policy, economics, and personal accounts, this thesis situates the Silicon Valley within a broader history of settler colonialism, land extraction, and labor exploitation. Challenging the popular mythology that surrounds the industry, I focus on the tangible harms it has brought to the local community that surrounds it. I argue that, since its inception, the Silicon Valley has depended upon both the geographical landscape of the Santa Clara Valley and the construction of a racialized underclass to perform the labor necessary for the industry’s rise and growth. This critique uncovers the undercurrents of structural harms embedded in the Silicon Valley.


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Walking country as a better acknowledgment? Ken Wilson, Mathhew R. Anderson, ‘The Promise and Peril of Walking Indigenous Territorial Recognitions carried out by Settlers’, International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 9, 2, 2021, #7

20Jul21

Abstract: This article proposes that if the permission and guidance of local Indigenous groups is obtained, and their protocols observed, a collaborative physical act of settler, or Indigenous-settler walking across territory on which events are to be held may constitute a more constructive form of ‘territorial acknowledgement’ than a verbal statement read out at such an event. By drawing sustained attention not only to Indigenous land but also to Indigenous title, resources, and jurisdiction, and by pointedly underlining the actual land in question, walking territorial acknowledgements can help settlers to develop an embodied sense of place-in-relation. In so doing they can move forward both the relationality implicit in Indigenous territorial recognition and the claims territorial recognitions make on settler bodies. These walk-acts diminish the superficial ‘virtue-signalling’ and public performance of contrition which too often attach to such acknowledgements, threatening to render them obsolete.


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Settlers even before getting there: Fariha Shaikh, ‘Spatial synchronicities: Settler emigration, the voyage out, and shipboard literary production’, in Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis (eds), Worlding the south: Nineteenth-century literary culture and the southern settler colonies, Manchester University Press, 2021

20Jul21

Excerpt: This chapter explores the spatialising methodologies of shipboard periodicals produced on three ships as they voyaged between Britain and Australia across the oceanic expanses of the southern hemisphere in the mid-nineteenth century: the Sobraon, the Somersetshire, and the True Briton. By the 1860s, newspapers produced on board the ship by passengers between Britain and the Antipodes were a regular affair: fair copies of newspapers were produced by hand and distributed around the ship, or, if the ship carried a printing press, newspapers were produced at sea. A critical body of work within the fields of settler colonial studies and the blue humanities has slowly begun to develop around this genre, with attention being drawn to the pivotal role that they played in shaping settler colonial aspirations and the broader contours of maritime literary culture. Shipboard periodicals are an ephemeral and marginal genre, in that they were an almost ubiquitous presence on voyages and held an important function and value at the time of their production, but are often characterised as being without ‘enduring literary value’. In contradistinction to this view, this chapter embeds maritime literary culture and the production of shipboard periodicals firmly within some of the key ideological frameworks of settler colonial discourse. It argues that if the production of shipboard periodicals produced sociability at sea, then this sociability was also embedded in settler discourses of race and power.


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Settlers settling elsewhere: Jason Rudy, Aaron Bartlett, Lindsey O’Neil, Justin Thompson, ‘Australia to Paraguay: Race, class, and poetry in a South American colony’, in Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis (eds), Worlding the south: Nineteenth-century literary culture and the southern settler colonies, Manchester University Press, 2021

20Jul21

Abstract: In 1893, Queenslander William Lane embarked with 234 white Australian immigrants for Paraguay, where they were to establish a utopian socialist community. Hundreds more Australians would follow, drawn to what was promised as a worker’s paradise in South America. According to the New Australia, a newspaper published in New South Wales prior to the emigrants’ departure, in Paraguay ‘the means of working, including land and capital, should belong to the workers, who, by co-operative working, could then produce to supply all their wants, and need not produce for the profit of anybody else’.1 Lane was a notorious racist, and his motivation for the Paraguayan colony was in part a response to the influx of Asian immigrants to Australia in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Our interest in Colonia Cosme, the town eventually established and maintained in the Paraguayan jungle, centres around its newspaper, the Cosme Monthly, and its accounting of minstrel performances there. We read Cosme’s poetry and song, and its engagement with the form of minstrelsy, as part of a larger effort by Lane and his fellow émigrés to situate the colony in relation to Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, specifically in racialised terms. Our chapter begins with an overview of Australia’s late-century labour crisis, which precipitated Lane’s migration scheme. We turn then to the Cosme Monthly and its complex negotiations of race and class via poetry and song.


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settler children and their indigenous counterparts: Hedi Viterbo, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 2021

20Jul21

Description: In this book, Hedi Viterbo radically challenges our picture of law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. He reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children’s rights, has used them to hone and legitimize its violence against Palestinians. He exposes the human rights community’s complicity in this situation, due to its problematic assumptions about childhood, its uncritical embrace of international law, and its recurring emulation of Israel’s security discourse. He examines how, and to what effect, both the state and its critics manufacture, shape, and weaponize the categories ‘child’ and ‘adult.’ Bridging disciplinary divides, Viterbo analyzes hundreds of previously unexamined sources, many of which are not publicly available. Bold, sophisticated, and informative, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine provides unique insights into the ever-tightening relationship between law, children’s rights, and state violence, at both the local and global levels.


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Settler colonial food systems: Molly Stollmeyer, Tensions in fostering ‘local food’ in the Northwest Territories: Contending with Settler Colonialism in Northern Research, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2021

19Jul21

Abstract: Most food systems challenges in the Northwest Territories(NWT), including extractivism, climate change, and restrictive policies, are bound to processes of settler colonialism. Researchers working in northern contexts typically recognize the disruptive role colonialism had in shaping foodways, but often fail to contend with the ongoing realities of colonial forces and the role research has in upholding them. This thesis is situated in tensions I encountered in two research engagements working to support “local” food systems in the NWT: a community-academic partnership through FLEdGE Research and a traditional research project supported through a Mitacs fellowship. My aspirations to develop these engagements into a community-based participatory research (CBPR) thesis project brought me to the realization that settler colonialism had been insufficiently attended to. This thesis is the result of a reflexive analysis of my engagements as a southern-based settler researcher working in the North. It involves critically revisiting my preliminary fieldwork, interviews and observations, as well asliteraturesread, and writings formulated throughout my journey as a graduate student. It argues that southern-based researchers must attend to the ways our research reinforces harmful colonial narratives about the North and actively work to disrupt colonial continuities.


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