settler colonial studies blog

An ongoing debate: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Is settler colonial studies even useful?’ Postcolonial Studies, 2020

25Dec20

Abstract: This brief article is a response. It engages with recent critiques of settler colonial studies as an intellectual endeavour. Settler colonial studies, a number of scholars have argued, is at best useless, but worse, it may actually be detrimental to Indigenous struggles. What is the use of studying settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination when this knowledge is irrelevant to the struggle against a disempowering politics of forced recognition and for Indigenous resurgence? If this is an indictment, the following notes are meant as a provisional defence.

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Settler colonialism is a system: Nisha Nath, ‘Curated hostilities and the story of Abdoul Abdi: relational securitization in the settler colonial racial state’, Citizenship Studies, 2020

25Dec20

Abstract: This paper offers the framework of relational securitization to understand the publicly documented story of Abdoul Abdi, a former child refugee from Somalia who spent the majority of his life in government care, and, at the age of 24, faced deportation because the state failed to secure his citizenship. Drawing from a reading of the Federal Court of Canada’s 2018 ruling in Abdoulkader Abdi v The Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, I argue that we can understand Abdoul’s story as part of an organized logic, wherein the state regulates and securitizes marginalized subjects in reliant ways. Put differently, the intersecting and interacting custodial institutions of child welfare, policing, and borders and detention reveal how systemic anti-Blackness and settler colonialism are not separate enactments of the white supremacist settler colonial state but enactments that need and rely on each other; they are relational.

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Environmental justice against settler colonialism: Laura A. Bray, ‘Settler Colonialism and Rural Environmental Injustice: Water Inequality on the Navajo Nation’, Rural Sociology, 2020

25Dec20

Abstract: Environmental justice research highlights the distinct processes generating environmental problems in rural places. Rural communities of color suffer the dual disadvantage of spatial and racial marginalization, yet we know little about the role of race and racism within rural environmental inequality formation. This study draws on theories of settler colonialism and rural environmental justice to investigate the historical formation of water inequality in the American Southwest. In 1962, Congress authorized two water projects to divide the San Juan River between the Navajo Nation and New Mexico. The Navajo Indian Irrigation project (NIIP) would develop family farms on the Navajo Nation, while the San Juan‐Chama Project (SJCP) diverted water into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use. While New Mexico’s project was completed ahead of schedule in 1973, the NIIP has yet to be finished today, almost six decades later. Using archival material, government documents, and secondary accounts, this study examines racial meanings in the years leading up to NIIP approval. Findings reveal that settler officials used the NIIP as a mechanism to appropriate Native resources. I show how racial projects within NIIP negotiations contributed to colonial domination by diminishing the political sovereignty of the Navajo Nation.

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On reproduction and settler colonialism: Carla Cevasco, ‘”Look’d Like Milk”: Colonialism and Infant Feeding in the English Atlantic World’, Journal of Early American History, 10, 2-3, 2020, pp. 147-178

25Dec20

Abstract: While wet nursing interactions between enslaved women of African descent and colonial women have received extensive scholarly attention, much remains to be done in understanding colonial and Native women’s interactions around breastfeeding and infant feeding. This article close-reads two captivity narratives in which baby food features prominently: God’s Protecting Providence, Jonathan Dickinson’s 1699 narrative of being shipwrecked among Ais, Jeaga, Jobé, Santaluces, and Surruque Indians in coastal Florida in 1696; and God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty, Elizabeth Hanson’s 1728 narrative of being captured by Wabanaki people during Dummer’s War in 1724. Captivity rendered the colonists dependent upon intimate Native care for the survival of their children. When Dickinson and Hanson crafted their narratives of their captivities, however, they sought to reinscribe colonial supremacy after experiences that called it into question. The complexities of colonial-Native interactions around infant feeding in these sources demonstrate the need for further scholarship on reproduction and settler colonialism.

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Indigenous land and law in Israel: Morad Elsana, Indigenous Land Rights in Israel: A Comparative Study of the Bedouin, Routledge, 2020

25Dec20

Description: Introducing the Negev–Bedouin land issue from the international indigenous land rights perspective, this comparative study suggests options for the recognition of their land. The book demonstrates that the Bedouin land dispossession, like many indigenous peoples’, progressed through several phases that included eviction and displacement, legislation, and judicial decisions that support acts of dispossession and deny the Bedouin’s traditional land rights. Examining the Mawat legal doctrine on which the State and the Court rely on to deny Bedouin land rights, this volume introduces the relevant international law protecting indigenous land rights and shows how the limitations of this law prevent any meaningful protection of Bedouin land rights. In the second part of the work, the Aborigines’ land in Australia is introduced as an example of indigenous peoples’ successful struggle for their traditional land rights. The final chapter analyzes the basic elements of judicial recognition of the land and shows that the basic elements needed for Bedouin land recognition exist in the Israeli legal system. Proposing practical recommendations for the recognition of Bedouin land, this volume is a key resource to scholars and students interested in land rights, international law, comparative studies, and the Middle East.

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‘Gazafication’ is settler colonialism: Tareq Baconi, ‘Gaza and the One-State Reality’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2020

25Dec20

Abstract: In contemporary conversations around Israel/Palestine, the Gaza Strip is construed as a state of exception, rendering the territory either hypervisible or entirely invisible. Through the prism of the Covid-19 pandemic and Israel’s possible de jure annexation of portions of the West Bank, this piece argues that rather than being exceptional, the Gaza Strip represents the very embodiment of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine. Its isolation and de-development constitute the endpoint of Israel’s policies of land theft and Palestinian dispossession. This endpoint, referred to as Gazafication, entails the confinement of Palestinians to urban enclaves entirely surrounded by Israel or Israeli-controlled territory. The Trump plan, otherwise known as the “deal of the century,” along with the Covid-19 crisis, have inadvertently exposed the reality of Gaza as an enclave of the one-state paradigm.

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No longer domestic and dependant: Damien Short, Corinne Lennox, Julian Burger, Jessie Hohmann (eds), The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: A Contemporary Evaluation, Routledge, 2021

22Dec20

Description: The development and adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was a huge success for the global indigenous movement. This book offers an insightful and nuanced contemporary evaluation of the progress and challenges that indigenous peoples have faced in securing the implementation of this new instrument, as well as its normative impact, at both the national and international levels. The chapters in this collection offer a multi-disciplinary analysis of the UNDRIP as it enters the second decade since its adoption by the UN General Assembly in 2007. Following centuries of resistance by Indigenous peoples to state, and state sponsored, dispossession, violence, cultural appropriation, murder, neglect and derision, the UNDRIP is an achievement with deep implications in international law, policy and politics. In many ways, it also represents just the beginning – the opening of new ways forward that include advocacy, activism, and the careful and hard-fought crafting of new relationships between Indigenous peoples and states and their dominant populations and interests.

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Reparative self-determination is not revolutionary: Miranda Johnson, ‘Indigenizing Self-Determination at the United Nations: Reparative Progress in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, Journal of the History of International Law, 2020

22Dec20

Abstract: When the United Nations General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, it introduced into the international legal lexicon a new dimension to the concept of self-determination. The declaration emphasizes indigenous peoples’ distinctive rights to land, culture, language, and collective identity. It does not propose political independence or sovereign statehood, instead insisting on indigenous peoples’ equal rights of citizenship within existing nation-states. The distinct dimension of self-determination that the declaration introduces is one that speaks of indigenous peoples’ particular colonial histories of dispossession and the restoration of their rights and identities in the present, but without disrupting the political continuity of the states that surround them. It is reparative rather than revolutionary. In this article, I examine the construction and contestation of an indigenous right to self-determination both in relation to earlier definitions, and among and between the peoples and states who drafted the declaration.

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Plurinationalism against settler colonialism: Aslak-Antti Oksanen, ‘The Rise of Indigenous (Pluri-)Nationalism: The Case of the Sámi People’, Sociology, 54, 6, 2020, pp. 1141-1158

22Dec20

Abstract: Indigenous peoples have found the nationalist language of peoples’ inherent right to self determination helpful in articulating their political demands. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred’s model of indigenous nationalism explains the emergence of this form of indigenous self-assertion as a reaction to settler-colonial incursions. However, it cannot account for the timing of its recent successes in unsettling the status quo of indigenous–settler-state relations. This article addresses this limitation by incorporating Michael Keating’s concept of post-sovereignty, which highlights the supranational plane constraining states’ freedom of action, while providing indigenous peoples with laws and norms above state level to appeal to. Additionally, Keating’s concept of plurinationalism is drawn upon to capture the emerging reconfiguration of indigenous–settler state relations. This combined conceptual framework is used to illuminate the Sámi people’s relations to the Nordic states as expressive of emergent indigenous nationalism, formed in reaction to settler-colonialism and enabled by international norms, laws and global indigenous peoples’ networks.

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Settler colonial and racist political ecologies: Levi Van Sant, Richard Milligan, Sharlene Mollett, ‘Political Ecologies of Race: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada’, Antipode, 2020

22Dec20

Abstract: Drawing inspiration from popular efforts to connect a wide array of political struggles, this symposium examines the ways that racial‐colonial politics unfold through nature and environmental practices linking past, present, and future across the United States and Canada. By way of introduction, we ask: What does it mean to do political ecologies of race in Canada and the United States? For us the response cannot be additive—merely grafting attention to racial/colonial politics onto established scholarly conventions. Instead, we aim for a deeper analysis that challenges and enlivens the field of political ecology. This introduction highlights what is at stake, and identifies the ways that the contributors’ research pushes the field. Ultimately, we argue that political ecologies of race can help reinvigorate intellectual projects and build liveable futures by recognising and supporting the connections between ongoing struggles. We hope this symposium contributes to the task.

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