settler colonial studies blog

The yeoman ideal: R. R. Henderson, ‘The ties that bind: the enduring strength of the yeoman ideal in North-West Tasmania 1860-2000’, PhD dissertation, University of Tasmania, 2020

25Feb21

Abstract: The yeoman ideal of independent land-owning family-based farming had wide political appeal in North American and Australasian colonial settlements from the eighteenth century. The Governments of each Australian colony enthusiastically encouraged and variously supported yeoman settlement for a mix of social, political and economic reasons. Merchants and migrant miners of the mid-1850s were also enthusiastic, the former because of its stimulus to trade, the latter who wanted to settle to farming. The Tasmanian Government was especially attracted to the yeoman ideal of family farming due to the loss of needed population caused by the Victorian gold rushes and later mining rushes, and the need to improve agricultural output to secure greater export income. It actively encouraged the expansion of free settlement into areas of the island previously rejected by pastoralists by offering various incentives to free settlers. Crown lands in hilly, heavily-forested areas in the island’s south and north were released for small farms of up to 320 acres. Land ownership and family labour enabled self-sufficiency during establishment, while cleared timber provided building materials and initial income. This thesis examines the settlement of one rural parish, Castra, in North-West Tasmania from first European occupation to the late twentieth century. My main argument is that the yeoman ideal underpinned family farming, and yeoman characteristics contributed to the successful progression from self-sufficiency to capitalist commodity production of potatoes and dairying. Each chapter explores key aspects of this history starting with the settlement of Castra by Anglo-Indian military retirees, before investigating the experiences of agriculturalist families, the fate of closer and soldier settlement schemes, and the development of land succession and inheritance strategies. The thesis also investigates the social history of farming in Castra, delineating the lives of yeoman children, the social and working lives of women, and men’s engagement in the public and political spheres. The main primary sources were found in the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office and the Special Collections of the Royal Society, housed by the University of Tasmania. These proved particularly useful for original documents relating to Anglo-Indian and soldier settlement. Local autobiographies, contemporary newspapers and agricultural journals were examined with a view to understanding, from differing perspectives of historical actors, how yeoman farms operated. Maps, survey plans and photographs – contemporary and recent – were closely studied, along with valuation rolls. Numerous oral histories from farming family elders were collected, which have enriched this history and illuminate how successive generations identified with their land and society from the 1940s. Bonds of brotherhood and family support have survived structural changes of the 1980s and continued to be manifest beyond 2000. The thesis contributes to an acknowledged shortcoming in twentieth-century Australian rural social histories by examining in depth one region of settlement over the full extent of its 150-year existence, and moreover, focussing attention on the region’s hinterland rather than relevant regional/urban towns. Significantly, the thesis shows that successful longevity and prosperity of farm families owed much to yeomanry characteristics and traditions, explaining how they infused virtually every aspect of life and were sustained for up to six generations. In contrast with mainland histories that have argued that yeomanry were an out-dated myth by the time of Federation, this thesis questions whether we would do well to reconsider its salience in similar contexts of settler colonialism.

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Between settler government and settler Facebook Indigenous media gets shafted: Naomi Moran, ‘First Nations media has been caught in the crossfire of Facebook’s battle with Australian news’, The Guardian, 23/02/21

24Feb21

Excerpt: Facebook has provided a free and relatively easy solution to content sharing to interest groups. It also provided us with an accessible way to share our stories globally. Social media has been a useful tool for leap-frogging commercial media in Australia who have shown scant interest in our positive outcomes. Our media is more than just doing the bare minimum – it is the avenue for telling those stories to the world, and social media has been a valuable space to broaden our audiences in this way, educating non-Indigenous people in the process. We believe Facebook has not been stealing our stories but amplifying them. Would we like to see the data they collect about our media services in the process? Sure. Would we like to better understand their algorithms to pre-empt disruptions to connecting with our audience? Of course. Is that the focus of the news bargaining code going to parliament this week? Not really. It’s about protecting the commercial news businesses who have ignored us. The reason First Nations media exists is due to the complete and ignorant failure of mainstream media to represent our interests and perspectives. That’s why Facebook’s abrupt shutdown of many of our pages, in a sweeping measure to punish the Australian government for its somewhat clumsy attempt to support Australian journalists, is a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

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The settler colonial logic of elimination: Michael Clarke, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Path toward Cultural Genocide in Xinjiang’, Global Responsibility to Protect, 13, 1, 2021, pp. 9-19

24Feb21

Abstract: The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (xuar) is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today characterised by extra-judicial detention of Uyghurs in ‘re-education’ centres, pervasive surveillance, and repression of Uyghur ethnic identity. While Beijing frames such draconian measures as necessary ‘counter-terrorism’ measures, the intersection between concern for the ‘welfare’ of subject populations and the desire to eradicate ‘defective’ elements of cultural identity central to the ‘re-education’ system in Xinjiang betray the fundamentally colonial nature of the Chinese Communist Party’s (ccp) endeavours in the region.

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Settlers focus on their firstness to dosavow some else’s: Liora R. Halperin, ‘Anniversaries of :first” settlement and the politics of Zionist commemoration’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

24Feb21

Abstract: This article centres on stylized commemorative events staged in Israel in 1962 and 1982 to mark, respectively, 80 and 100 years since the consensual beginning of the “First Aliyah,” the first wave of Jewish rural settlement in Palestine. Focusing on protocols of 1962 and 1982 Knesset sessions, commemorative medals, military parades, summer camps, and local commemorations, it shows that multiple completing Zionist parties used the rhetoric of “firstness” to negotiate and redefine primacy in light of the political present. Drawing from scholarship on settler memory in other settings, it also positions the settlement event as not a onetime historical occurrence but a sacralized referent used to frame and justify ongoing settlement and participate in historical erasures.

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Black feminism and settler colonialism III: Tiffany Lethabo King, ‘Some Black feminist notes on Native feminisms and the flesh’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021

21Feb21

Excerpt: ‘The settler colonial turn away from flesh’.

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Black feminism and settler colonialism II: Terrion L. Williamson, ‘Of serial murder and true crime: Some preliminary thoughts on black feminist research praxis and the implications of settler colonialism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021

21Feb21

Excerpt: While I admittedly enter into the discussion of settler colonialism as an “amateur” and will continue to learn from my forum colleagues, among others, as my research progresses, I am convinced that there is much to be gained by thinking about the correspondence between native genocide and serialized black death and how those phenomena are enacted upon the bodies of women and girls who are made especially vulnerable by their socioeconomic positionings. Whatever the debates we will continue to have about the theoretical relationships, or lack thereof, between black feminism, settler colonial studies, and their adjacent fields of analysis and inquiry, the routinized forms of violence to which black and native women are disproportionately subjected every single day suggests the need for a “process of relation” that will enable meaningful conversations that will not just produce more theory, but will also save more lives.

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Black feminism and settler colonialism: Iyko Day, ‘On Immanence and Indeterminacy: Black Feminism and Settler Colonialism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021

21Feb21

Wxcerpt: The essays in this forum originated out of a roundtable at the American Studies Association meeting on the occupied territory of the Kanaka Maoli (Hawaii) in 2019, sponsored by Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. Our roundtable was conceptualized around an open question about Black feminism’s relation to “settler colonialism,” a term that is understood as a critical framework, categorical description, and/or narrative genre. Among our questions: does Black feminism intervene in a settler colonial critical discourse that has become the “preferred discourse for examining colonialism in North America”? Does Black feminism even need settler colonial critique? Or does it already offer an immanent critique of conquest, accumulation, dispossession, disposability, and erasure?

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Digital mapping against settler colonialism: Janet Berry Hess (ed.), Digital Mapping and Indigenous America, Routledge, 2021

18Feb21

Description: Employing anthropology, field research, and humanities methodologies as well as digital cartography, and foregrounding the voices of Indigenous scholars, this text examines digital projects currently underway, and includes alternative modes of “mapping” Native American, Alaskan Native, Indigenous Hawaiian and First Nations land. The work of both established and emerging scholars addressing a range of geographic regions and cultural issues is also represented. Issues addressed include the history of maps made by Native Americans; healing and reconciliation projects related to boarding schools; language and land reclamation; Western cartographic maps created in collaboration with Indigenous nations; and digital resources that combine maps with narrative, art, and film, along with chapters on archaeology, place naming, and the digital presence of elders.　

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Intimate settler colonialism: Allyson Stevenson, Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship, University of Toronto Press, 2020

18Feb21

Description: Intimate Integration is an important analysis of the “Sixties Scoop” and post-World War II child welfare legislation in North America.

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Ethnogenesis on the settler frontier: Jennifer Adese, Chris Andersen (eds), A People and a Nation: New Directions in Contemporary Métis Studies, UBC Press, 2021

18Feb21

Description: In A People and a Nation, the authors, most of whom are themselves Métis, offer readers a set of lenses through which to consider the complexity of historical and contemporary Métis nationhood and peoplehood. Multidisciplinary chapters on identity, politics, literature, history, spirituality, religion, and kinship networks orient the conversation toward Métis experiences today. The chapters within are themselves also a reorientation given that the field of Métis Studies has been afflicted by a longstanding tendency to situate Métis within deeply racialized contexts, and/or by an overwhelming focus on the nineteenth century. A People and a Nation confronts such problematic characterizations head on, training a critical gaze on conventional historiographical positionings of the Métis people as a primitive intermediate force that opened up the Canadian West. A People and a Nation dismantles the impoverished notions that continue to shape political, legal, and social understandings of Métis existence. It is a timely collection that convincingly demonstrates how racialized interpretative frameworks diminish the Métis people and are incompatible with the task of understanding Métis peoplehood and nationhood. This important work will appeal not only to scholars in Métis studies but also to scholars and students of Indigenous studies, political science, sociology, history, and cultural studies, and to policy workers and others seeking a better understanding of the Métis people and the current state of Métis studies.

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