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The gender of anti-settler colonialism: Matthias André Voigt, ‘Between powerlessness and protest: Indigenous men and masculinities in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul and the emergence of the American Indian Movement’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

12Apr21

Abstract: The Red Power era (1969-1978), the most pivotal time for Indigenous people in the twentieth century, is commonly associated with a fundamental restructuring of Indigenous-settler colonial relations and a major cultural renewal of self and society across Indian Country. This article examines the social formation of those Indigenous men and masculinities who instigated that profound change and became politically active, questioning domestic colonialism and challenging their subaltern status vis-à-vis dominant U.S. society. More specifically, this article explores the shared experiences of Indigenous male activists within the American Indian Movement (AIM) during its early beginnings between 1968 through mid-1972. AIM (1968–1978) originated in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St-Paul and rose to become the most significant player in Indigenous protest politics at its time. Indigenous men in AIM shared key experiences with settler colonial institutions and the forces of modernity (boarding schools, military service, prisons, the urban experience) that affected their male identities in multiple, complex, and contradictory ways. Western-centric concepts of race, gender, and nation have consistently worked towards the marginalization and oppression of the Indigenous ‘other’ -commonly through the imposition of colonial standards as a ‘civilizing force.’ This article argues that the inculcation of Indigenous men with hegemonic ideals, together with experiences of emasculation, have led to an unintended outcome, namely the emergence of a ‘protest masculinity.’ This ‘protest masculinity’ arose as a result of and in reaction to assimilationist policies. Paradoxically, Indigenous male activists contested dominant concepts of masculinity, yet at the same time conformed to the very cultural ideals they struggled against. This article offers an understanding of how gender and race bias intersect to disadvantage Indigenous men and how this in turn constitutes a powerful catalyst for change.


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Deforestation as (settler colonial) ideology: Danilo Urzedo, Pratichi Chatterjee, ‘The Colonial Reproduction of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Violence Against Indigenous Peoples for Land Development’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2021

12Apr21

Abstract: This article argues that land clearing of the Amazon rainforest has been historically determined by colonial plans that lead to high rates of tropical deforestation and social injustice. We explore how deforestation has been organized by different imaginaries of modernization and progress, which equate land development with varying economic, social, and environmental agendas. We identify distinct historical phases of land use change in the Brazilian Amazon, where resource extraction, agricultural and infrastructure development, and commodity production are shaped by colonial logics that work to eliminate or exploit Indigenous peoples. In the most recent phase, Bolsonaro’s far-right authoritarianism is reproducing the land development goals of the former military dictatorship with a concerted effort to displace Indigenous groups for agricultural and infrastructure expansion. The Amazon destruction has resulted in ecocide through large-scale environmental degradation accompanied by historical genocide and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This article demonstrates that tropical deforestation is a continuing ideological process underpinned by narratives of progress, which in the case of the Brazilian Amazon takes the form of settler imaginaries of prosperous regional development. We emphasize the necessity of recognizing these commonly overlooked colonial dynamics as an essential starting point for returning political power to Indigenous communities.


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Rhetorical sovereignty: Ian Khara Ellasante, ‘Radical sovereignty, rhetorical borders, and the everyday decolonial praxis of Indigenous peoplehood and Two-Spirit reclamation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

12Apr21

Abstract: As settler colonialism has forcibly constricted vast expanses of Indigenous lands, criss-crossing them with superimposed borders, it has sought to redraw the boundaries of Indigenous identity by imposing definitions and categories that invariably lead to Indigenous diminishment. Strategic and eliminatory categorization is essential to the settler-colonial imperative. This essay explores settler-colonial exercises of rhetorical imperialism that deploy language, connotation, and categorization to dismantle Indigenous cultural systems. The author discusses the political stake in who is designated Indigenous, the drive to remake Indigenous nations in the image of the settler-state, the enforcement of cis-heteropatriarchal capitalist norms, and assimilationist strategies aiming to disrupt Indigenous formations of gender and kinship. The author argues that Indigenous assertions of peoplehood as a definitional and unifying framework and Two-Spirit as a self-identifier are acts of resistance that they term “oppositional identification” and “contrast mechanisms.” They are exercises of rhetorical and radical sovereignty, tantamount to everyday decolonization.


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Indigenous cosmovision against settlervision: Ranjeeva Ranjan, Alexis Castillo, Karla Morales, ‘Mapuche cosmovision and territorial rights: An interdisciplinary approach to understand the conflict of Wallmapu, Chile’, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021

08Apr21

Abstract: The indigenous population of Latin America has been suffering from a sense of alienation since the arrival of Columbus in 1492 who referred to this land as “Nuevo Mundo”. There is a long history of environmental exploitation in Chile which has severely strained the relationship amongst the Mapuche community, the State and private entities (hydroelectric and timber industry). Although this conflict seems to be economic-productive associated with land, wherein land attains a “tangible material good”, in the Mapuche cosmovision, land (Mapu means land in Mapudungun, the language of Mapuche) acquires a connotation of “intangible material and immaterial good”. There is a profound imperceptible connection between nature and Mapuche and their traditions and culture are strongly rooted in the land. The industrial expansion has promoted a series of negative externalities like habitat fragmentation, loss of native forest, biodiversity reduction, water availability, etc. These affect the “idiosyncrasy” of this community (Mapuche-Nature relationship) and loss of their land could represent an identity loss. The Chilean indigenous policy appears to be inadequate and fail to recognize the socio-cultural and territorial rights for all indigenous peoples, including Mapuche, given the multidimensionality of the land under the indigenous cosmovision. The socio-political measures imposed by the Chilean government until now to make their life “modern” boomeranged alienating them further from society. This paper proposes to look at the territorial rights of the Mapuche with an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on developing the conceptual framework of Mapuche cosmovision of land and territory. The study follows a brief analysis of the historical context of the territorial conflict between the Chilean State and the Mapuche people and how the implementation of national and international normative framework on indigenous rights has not been effective in resolving this territorial conflict. The study tries to synthesize and talks about integrating the Mapuche land cosmovision in the socio-political discourse and be considered while formulating any land policy involving Mapuche and other indigenous peoples inhabiting in Chile in future. The discussions and analysis have been carried out through a comprehensive literature review and integrate an interdisciplinary approach to look at this issue, both from the philosophical perspective and from the socio-political policy framework of government.


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Settler colonialism in ancient texts: Anand Venkatkrishnan, ‘Skeletons in the Sanskrit closet’, Religion Compass, 2021

08Apr21

Abstract: This essay proposes that we cannot write a history of Sanskrit studies without locating it in the settler colonial history of the United States. It provides examples of anti‐Black racism in the writings of early Sanskritists, and recommends that we understand them as Americans. It concludes by arguing for alternative minority histories in the field.


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Authenticity is repressive! Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, ‘Beyond the Coloniality of Authenticity’, American Quarterly, 73, 1, 2021, pp. 161-167

06Apr21

Excerpt: I begin with a story about my initial encounter with the concept of authenticity, during my undergraduate studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in the 1970s. In Hawai‘i, youth and young adults had begun to question the socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement of indigenous Hawaiian people in our ancestral homeland, and to repudiate the waves of Americanization following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and especially following admission to statehood in 1959. An awakening of consciousness brought to light the suppression of Hawaiian language and cultural practices and laid bare the dispossession of land and livelihood razed by the unrelenting march of capitalist political economies during decades of settler colonial government. These energies coalesced into a movement that became known as “the Hawaiian Renaissance.”


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Decolonising law, one mode of colonial domination at a time: Sujith Xavier, Beverley Jacobs, Valarie Waboose, Jeffery G. Hewitt, Amar Bhatia (eds), Decolonizing Law: Indigenous, Third World and Settler Perspectives, Routledge, 2021

06Apr21

Description: This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.


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The poverty of settler colonialism: Jerome Tharaud, ‘Western Salvage: Scarcity, Settler Colonialism, and Adaptation in Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021

03Apr21

Excerpt: Wallace Stegner is perhaps best known as a chronicler of the arid West. As he put it in his 1987 lecture “Living Dry,” “The West is defined … by inadequate rainfall, which means a general deficiency of water . . . . Aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one” (American West 6, 8). But if Stegner anticipated an environmental historian’s definition of the West as “a region of scarcity, where water sources are few and far between,” he also explored scarcity as a cultural condition (Worster, Under 31). From his ruminations on John Wesley Powell’s “homemade education” (Beyond 8) to his account of the “deprivation” of his own “frontier” upbringing (Wolf Willow 25, 23), Stegner mapped another geography of Western scarcity: information deserts where books are rare treasures; aging towns whose young people have left in search of opportunity; places where entire histories have eroded away, replaced by imported traditions. This essay examines that alternative geography through its most eloquent statement, Wolf Willow (1962). As Stegner reconstructs his family’s failed venture homesteading a borderland wheat farm and his formative experiences in the nearby town of “Whitemud” (his fictionalized name for Eastend, Saskatchewan), he illuminates the relationship between different forms of scarcity, the historical process that has produced them, and possible strategies for adapting to them. Wolf Willow thus offers an opportunity to reconsider not only the history of Western regionalism and its relationship to settler colonialism, but also the potential futures of the region—considered both as a particular geography and as a general concept—in an age of global climate crisis.


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Or trapped outside of history? Darryl Cronin, Trapped by History: The Indigenous-State Relationship in Australia, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021

01Apr21

Description: The Australian nation has reached an impasse in Indigenous policy and practice and fresh strategies and perspectives are required. Trapped by History will highlight a fundamental issue that the Australian nation must confront to develop a genuine relationship with Indigenous Australians. The existing relationship between Indigenous people and the Australian state was constructed on the myth of an empty land – terra nullius. Therefore, interactions with Indigenous people have been constrained by eighteenth-century assumptions and beliefs that Indigenous people did not have organised societies, had neither land ownership nor a recognisable form of sovereignty, and that they were ‘savage’ but could be ‘civilized’ through the erasure of their culture. These incorrect assumptions and beliefs are the foundation of the legal, constitutional and political treatment of Indigenous Australians over the course of the country’s history. They remain ingrained in governmental institutions, Indigenous policy making, judicial decision making and contemporary public attitudes about Indigenous people. Trapped by History shines new light upon several historical and contemporary examples where Indigenous people have attempted to engage and dialogue with state and federal governments. These governments have responded by trying to suppress and discredit Indigenous rights, culture and identities and impose assimilationist policies. In doing so they have rejected or ignored Indigenous attempts at dialogue and partnership. Other settler countries such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States of America have all negotiated treaties with Indigenous people and have developed constitutional ways of engaging cross culturally. In Australia, the limited recognition that Indigenous people have achieved to date shows that the state is unable to resolve long standing issues with Indigenous people. Movement beyond the current colonial relationship with Indigenous Australians requires a genuine dialogue to not only examine the legal and intellectual framework that constrain Indigenous recognition but to create new foundations for a renewed relationship based on intercultural negotiation, mutual respect, sharing and mutual responsibility. This must involve building a shared understanding around addressing past injustices and creating a shared vision for how Indigenous people and other Australians would associate politically in the future.


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Indigenous resistance against settler terraforming: Michael Dockry, Kyle Whyte, ‘Improving on Nature: The Legend Lake Development, Menominee Resistance, and the Ecological Dynamics of Settler Colonialism’, American Indian Quarterly, 45, 2, 2021, pp. 95-120

01Apr21

Abstract: In 1968 a large- scale recreational vacation property development, Legend Lake, was carved out of the recently terminated Menominee reservation to create a tax base for Wisconsin’s newly formed Menominee County. Menominee peoples’ resistance to the Legend Lake project and land sales expressed multiple concerns about settler colonialism and the process of terraforming and ecological change, land dispossession, cultural erasure, and implications for the future. Th e Menominee people came together to respond to this twentieth- century manifestation of the ecological dynamics of settler colonialism by asserting their tribal identity, culture, and relationships to their land. In this paper, we argue that the ecological changes created by the Legend Lake project was one of the major catalysts for Menominee resistance to settler colonialism that ultimately led to the restoration of the Menominee tribe.


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