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Decolonising and colonising: Gracelynn Chung-yan Lau, ‘Decolonizing my Hong Kong Identity as a Settler in Canada: An Expressive Arts-based Inquiry’, Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, 6, 2, 2020. pp. 153-170

09Feb21

Abstract: This paper documents an intermodel arts-based inquiry through engaging in expressive arts therapy. The author responded to reflexive questions: Who am I as a Hong Kong Chinese Canadian
in the indigenous-colonial context of the 21st century? How can I carry my own decolonization
through the arts? Carried out in Hong Kong and Ontario, Canada, this inquiry explored indigeneity, settler colonialism, personal and collective history, and family memories.


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Terra nullius? Bain Attwood, ‘The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century’, Law and History Review, 38, 4, 2020

09Feb21

Access the article here.


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The settler garden: A. L. Constantine-Rogers, Space to Grow: ‘the Garden’ as a Place of Colonial and Capitalist Displacement, Control, and Social Transformation, MA dissertation, Utrecht University, 2021

09Feb21

Abstract: ‘The garden’ as both a conceptual framework and a material locality acts as a lush site of cultural analysis that helps investigate multiple phenomena, including climate change, colonialism, capitalism, and social transformation. This thesis analyzes these multiple interlocking systems of oppression through using ‘the garden’ as both a lens to help reveal these power structures, as well as an avenue to view how power operates within them. By analyzing the Anthropocene, including its universalizing language that does not consider the unequal causes and effects of climate change, ‘the garden’ is located within a temporal spatiality. Moreover, implicating colonialism and capitalism in the deleterious effects of climate change through Heather Davis and Zoe Todd’s critique of the Anthropocene, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s critique of capitalist systems, Sara Ahmed’s discourse on ‘anxiety,’ and José Esteban Muñoz’s ‘queerness as horizon,’ the universalizing narratives of ‘the end’ due to climate disaster are challenged. As new diverse and subversive ways of countering capitalism, colonialism, and environmental degradation are emerging, they frequently do not critically examine how those systems of oppression are intricately related to each other. Given this gap in research, this thesis discusses how the garden operates in settler colonial, capitalist societies as well as how it operates outside or in opposition to these frameworks. Grounding the analysis in settler colonial studies, gender studies, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, and anti-racist frameworks, this thesis investigates power structures that hinder the necessary deconstruction of oppressive systems. Only through active subversion of hierarchies of oppression can ‘the garden’ become a means of challenging hegemony. When these systems are challenged, the ways in which it created splintered versions of ‘futurity’ emerges, allowing us to imagine how the garden can be utopic, dystopic, and transformative, and thus a location of social transformation.


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The power of settler naming: Carrie Karsgaard, Maggie MacDonald, Michael Hockenhull, ‘Rename and resist settler colonialism: Land acknowledgments and Twitter’s toponymic politics’, First Monday, 2021

08Feb21

Abstract: Connected with various resurgent and decolonizing projects, Canada has seen a surge of renaming and Indigenous land acknowledgement, which draw attention to Indigenous territories that have been overwritten through colonial naming practices. While renaming practices and land acknowledgments are contested for having merely representational effects, they may also be linked with decolonizing efforts. Our paper explores subversive (re)naming practices afforded by the free-form location identifying function on Twitter’s user profiles. It then draws a connection to issue-alignment in relation to the contested Trans Mountain pipeline as a means of considering to what extent toponymic selection is linked with actual issue alignment within the colonial context of resource extraction in Canada. We apply a mixed methods approach, based in digital methods that work with Twitter’s user profile location category. We extend our analysis through a qualitative reading of key subsets of the Twitter data, using a grounded theory approach to identify prevalent themes. In keeping with the anti-colonial nature of the tweets, we resist colonial categorization of the data and instead share an “un-typology” of Twitter toponyms, which we then connect to various expressions of anti-pipeline positioning. These mixed methods help us explore the entanglement of representational toponymic significance, infrastructural, in relation to the platform and the colonial nature of geolocational regimes online, and grounded, in relation to issue expression regarding the Trans Mountain pipeline.


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New dealing, not a new deal: Benjamin Balthaser, ‘New Deal Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity, and the 1930s Literary Left’, PMLA, 2021

08Feb21

Excerpt: At the conclusion of his 1932 cross-country travelogue, American Jitters, the critic Edmund Wilson reaches the end of the continental United States to gaze upon the sugar magnate John Speckles’s iconic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. Wilson describes the hotel as “white as a wedding cake” and, in a nod to the imperial “Great White Fleet” of San Diego, notes also that it is “polished and trim as a ship” and that its presence is a monument intended to “dominate” the coast before the “shoreline gives way to Mexico” (254). This image of whiteness and imperial domination stretching off into the infinity of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean is then coupled with a dialectical image of Wilson reaching back in time, to the history that brought the hotel into existence: “it was the same year the first vestibule train was put on the tracks by George Pullman and the revolt of the Apaches under Geronimo . . . to assert their independence . . . had been put down by the government and the Apaches penned up in a reservation.” Wilson’s construction, in which he simultaneously looks forward, over the ocean to the “sugar plantations of Honolulu,” and backward, into the connection between settler colonialism and capitalist industry, topped by an absurdly white hotel, marks a troubling convergence of settler-colonial time and capitalist space in left-wing thought in the United States.


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Settler colonial pandemics: Brianna Johns, Michael Caslin, Michael Lewis, Karletta Chief, Madhusudan Katti, ‘Settler colonialism and pandemics: Native Americans misrepresented in health data pay a heavy COVID-19 price’, Science for the People, 23, 3, 2021

08Feb21

Excerpt: In March 2020, New York City became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, as the virus spread exponentially through the densely populated city. But, almost unnoticed by national media, the virus was spreading at an even faster rate in an unlikely community at the other end of the spectrum of American life. By May, the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American tribe in the United States, overtook New York with the highest per capita infection rate of COVID-19.1 Our maps, included below, show the spread of COVID-19 across the Navajo Nation by September 2020. We combined data from the four states—Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah—that the Nation overlaps with to visualize the severity of the pandemic. As of this writing, the virus has infected more than 26,000 people and taken more than 900 lives from the Diné (as people of the Navajo Nation call themselves).


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Race and law under settler colonial conditions: Natsu Taylor Saito, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists, UPSO, 2020

08Feb21

Description: The master narrative of American history depicts the triumph of “civilization” over “savagery,” with Angloamerican settlers braving the wilderness to assert their “right” to establish a state over which they would exert complete control. It is a story of constant and inevitable progress, of racial and gendered hierarchies, and of the transformation of land and people into property. It overwrites the stories of others—particularly the peoples indigenous to these lands—erasing their histories, worldviews, and often even their existence, masking the violence inherent to colonization. This chapter sets the stage for the construction of narratives that better account for the actual histories of all peoples within the United States, thereby providing a more realistic basis for meaningful change.


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Or big settler colonialism? Eric Gary Anderson, ‘Big Indigeneity’, PMLA, 2021

08Feb21

Excerpt: As a global epoch and as a critical-theoretical center of gravity, the Anthropocene is big, amorphous, and daunting, not only because of its scale but also because of its trajectory. Its scale is massive, comprehending the entire human history of intervening in and imposing on geologic and ecological processes. Somewhat like the inception of the witchery in the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, the Anthropocene’s origins are hard to date with specificity, but the more urgent concern with both the witchery and the Anthropocene is not when they began but how and whether they will ever end. Certainly, one of the most challenging characteristics of the Anthropocene is that it has come to seem unstoppable as its present course arcs, with plausible inevitability, toward doom.


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The settler self: Hagar Kotef, The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine, Duke University Press, 2020

08Feb21

Description: Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people’s homes. Kotef demonstrates how the mass and structural modes of violence that are necessary for the establishment and sustainment of the colony dwell within settler-colonial homemaking, and through it shape collective and individual identities. She thus powerfully shows how the possibility to live amid the destruction one generates is not merely the possibility to turn one’s gaze away from violence but also the possibility to develop an attachment to violence itself. Kotef thereby offers a theoretical framework for understanding how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one’s sense of self.


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Settler bureaucrats: David Vogt, ‘In the Best Interest of the Indians’: An Ethnohistory of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs, 1897-1913, PhD dissertation, University of Victoria, 2020

04Feb21

Abstract: Drawing on insights from recent ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of bureaucracy by scholars such as Akhil Gupta and Ann-Laura Stoler, this dissertation turns the ethnohistorical lens back upon the colonial state to offer a ground-level view of how statecraft functioned on a day-to-day basis within the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs between approximately 1897 and 1913. I seek to pierce the artifice of clearly settled policy and elite micromanagement perpetuated by the official documentary record, and the tendency in both official documents and the literature to speak of “the Indian Department” and “the government” as a collective historical agent, to explore how settler privilege, Indigenous marginalization, and structural violence were enacted through the day-to-day operations of the Indian Department bureaucracy, especially its poorly-understood Ottawa headquarters. The first chapter represents the turn-of-the-century Canadian government bureaucracy through the metaphor of a house society, exploring the seasonal round, composition, and rituals of bureaucratic society. The second chapter analyzes the central role played by political patronage in the civil service – not merely hampering the efficient carrying out of the state’s Indigenous policy, but actually in some ways constituting Indigenous policy – through a close reading of the Liberal purge of Conservative officials carried out between 1896 and 1898. Chapter three explores how clerks, most of them working anonymously, attempted to create meaning and make decisions through the management of files in the Ottawa headquarters. I trace two pleas as they made their way through the bureaucracy: one from the bottom up, an Indigenous request for a new church furnace; and one from the top down, a politically connected merchant hoping to collect on an Indigenous debt. The final two chapters explore the implications of this more granular reading of the bureaucratic state for understanding two areas of “Indian policy” of more conventional interest to historians: the evolution of “Indian status,” which in important ways was shaped and improvised at the field agent level, in the absence of central control and outside of the vision of race embedded in the Indian Act of 1876; and the surrender and sale of land from reserves, which was driven by senior and ambitious officials, though often for personal advancement and profit rather than adherence to official state policies. Overall, I offer a vision of the state that moves away from abstract conceptions of “the state,” “the Indian Department,” and “Indian policy,” towards implicating and interrogating the roles played by bureaucrats and files in the day-to-day operations of the colonial state.


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