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Settler colonialism’s back lanes: Dania Igdoura, ‘An Examination of Settler Colonialism in Canada’s Legal Institutions: 1492 Land Back Lane’, Aletheia, 1, 2, 2021

25May21

Abstract: In this paper, I will investigate how Canadian legal institutions function to serve the interests of the settler colonial state in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This investigation will be facilitated through an examination of the court proceedings of 1492 Land Back Lane, a contemporary example whereby land defenders are being criminalized by Canadian courts for re-occupying their unceded land in Caledonia to protect it from a proposed housing development. Here we see an example of oppression, and therefore, it may be useful to utilize Sensoy & DiAngelo’s (2017) definition of oppression: namely, the prejudice and discrimination of one social group, in this case, settlers, against another, here Indigenous peoples, backed by legal authority and historical, social and institutional power (p. 84). Focusing on legal authority in this case, I seek to demonstrate ultimately how anti-Indigeneity is embedded within the Canadian legal system. In order to do this, I will begin by examining key historical legal documents, namely the Constitution of Canada and the Indian Act, with an eye to the settler colonial ideology of paternalism underlying them. Then, I will turn to the court proceedings of 1492 Land Back Lane, establishing their problematic and paternalistic nature, and grounding them within existing case law on Indigenous land rights, to demonstrate how Canadian courts can serve to perpetuate settler colonialism and land dispossession, often through the legal mechanism of injunction. Ultimately, I seek to demonstrate how the very concept of land back is incompatible with Canadian law.


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Environmental settler colonialism: Thomas R. Eimer, Maliene Kip, ‘Nature conservation, indigenous rights, and settler colonialism: The politics of payments for ecosystem services in Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil)’, 2021

25May21

Abstract: Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are strongly criticized by political ecology scholars. Predominantly, their critique is rooted in notions of distributive justice, as they focus on the negative impact (e.g. land rights distribution) of PES for indigenous and other local communities. Many liberal supporters of PES do not deny that these problems are real. However, they put more emphasis on procedural justice and claim that PES may trigger an institutionalization of more inclusive dialogic procedures. As of yet, both strands of literature underestimate the impact of the postcolonial conditions in which many PES projects are situated. This is where our article steps in. We investigate initial PES politics in Mato Grosso do Sul, a Brazilian province that is dominated by ongoing settler colonialism. Our research results indicate that the implementation of inclusive procedures in PES projects may partially mitigate the consequences of ongoing settler colonialism but that this more frequently fails because of its being embedded into the structures of a colonially shaped political economy. Although PES occasionally empower indigenous actors to confront local elites more effectively and strengthen the rights of indigenous women, the resulting transformations within the communities themselves are likely to weaken their political self-organization.


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Settler colonial mathematics! Naomi W. Nishi, ‘White Hoarders: A Portrait of Whiteness and Resource Allocation in College Algebra’, The Journal of Higher Education, 2021

25May21

Abstract: This study uses Critical Race Theory, Settler Colonialism, and Critical Whiteness Studies to frame how property is recognized only under the auspices of whiteness. In the college algebra classroom, this is born out through white entitlement, racialized senses of sharing, and resource allocation. This study uses portraiture to depict how white hoarding, as the co-option of resources by white students, marginalizes and disenfranchises Students of Color.


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Democratic theory meets colonialism: Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf, Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Condition of Democracy: Volume 3: Postcolonial and Settler Colonial Contexts, Routledge, 2021

25May21

Description: Classical liberal democratic theory has provided crucial ideas for a still dominant and hegemonic discourse that rests on ideological conceptions of freedom, equality, peacefulness, inclusive democratic participation, and tolerance. While this may have held some truth for citizens in Western liberal-capitalist societies, such liberal ideals have never been realized in colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. Liberal democracies are not simply forms of rule in domestic national contexts but also geo-political actors. As such, they have been the drivers of processes of global oppression, colonizing and occupying countries and people, appropriating indigenous land, annihilating people with eliminatory politics right up to genocides. There can be no doubt that the West – with its civilizational Judeo-Christian idea and divine mission ‘to subdue the world’ – has destroyed other civilizations, countries, trading systems, and traditional ways of life and is responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of human beings in the course of colonizing the world from its Empires of trade through colonialism to settler colonialism and today’s politics of regime change. The book discusses the settler colonial regime that Israel has established in Palestine while still claiming to be a democracy. It discusses the failures of liberal democracy to overcome the structural and racist inequalities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and it presents hopeful outlooks on new ideas and forms of democracy in social movements in the MENA region.


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The indigeneity of empire: Richard Price, Empire and Indigeneity: Histories and Legacies, Routledge, 2021

25May21

Description: Indigeneity is inseparable from empire, and the way empire responds to the Indigenous presence is a key historical factor in shaping the flow of imperial history. This book is about the consequences of the encounter in the early nineteenth century between the British imperial presence and the First Peoples of what were to become Australia and New Zealand. However, the shape of social relations between Indigenous peoples and the forces of empire does not remain constant over time. The book tracks how the creation of empire in this part of the world possessed long-lasting legacies both for the settler colonies that emerged and for the wider history of British imperial culture.


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Settler women got the vote: Sarah Carter, Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice: Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces, University of British Columbia Press, 2021

25May21

Description: Many of Canada’s most famous suffragists – from Nellie McClung and Cora Hind to Emily Murphy and Henrietta Muir Edwards – lived and campaigned in the Prairie provinces, the region that led the way in granting women the right to vote and hold office. Manitoba enfranchised women in January 1916, and Saskatchewan and Alberta quickly followed in March and April. In Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice, award-winning author Sarah Carter challenges the myth that grateful male legislators simply handed western settler women the vote in recognition that they were equal partners in the pioneering process. Suffragists worked long and hard to overcome obstacles, persuade doubters, and build allies. But their work also had a dark side. Carter situates the suffragists’ struggle in the colonial history of the region, a period when Indigenous people were being cleared from the Plains and marginalized on reserves to make way for permanent settlers. Even as they pressured legislatures to grant their sisters the vote, settler suffragists often accepted and approved of that same right being denied to “foreigners” and to Indigenous men and women. This powerful and passionate account of prominent suffragists and their lesser-known allies shows that the right to vote meant different things to different people – political rights and emancipation for some, domination and democracy denied for others. This book is important reading for anyone with an interest in Canadian women’s history or the history of colonialism in Prairie Canada and on the Great Plains. It will particularly appeal to students of Canadian or political history.


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Covid and settler colonialism: Renisa Mawani, ‘A Historical Account of the Pandemic: Health, Colonialism and Racism in Canada’, in Impacts of COVID-19 in Racialized Communities, Royal Society of Canada, 2021, pp. 56-61

25May21

Abstract: In this paper, I situate the Covid-19 pandemic within a longer historical context in Canada. I argue that settler colonial state has produced the conditions in which certain (white) lives are valued, protected, and nourished while other lives (Indigenous/ Chinese) are left to die. I make this argument by focusing on two examples: the role of the Indian Act and the enactment of Canadian Immigration legislation. While the former has produced unliveable conditions for Indigenous peoples on and off reserves, the latter has suggested that certain migrants – particularly the Chinese – were “foreign” and diseased. The racial inequalities that have surfaced in the current pandemic, I suggest, requires us to consider the long histories of racial violence in Canada, the ways in which certain bodies have been made vulnerable to disease, while others have been blamed for its proliferation, all in the interests of white (re)settlement.


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Sharing? Katherine A.H. Graham, David Newhouse (eds), Sharing the Land, Sharing a Future: The Legacy of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, University of Manitoba Press, 2021

22May21

Description: Sharing the Land, Sharing a Future looks to both the past and the future as it examines the foundational work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and the legacy of its 1996 report. It assesses the Commission’s influence on subsequent milestones in Indigenous-Canada relations and considers our prospects for a constructive future. RCAP’s five-year examination of the relationships of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples to Canada and to non-Indigenous Canadians resulted in a new vision for Canada and provided 440 specific recommendations, many of which informed the subsequent work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Considered too radical and difficult to implement, RCAP’s recommendations were largely ignored, but the TRC reiterates that longstanding inequalities and imbalances in Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples remain and quite literally calls us to action. With reflections on RCAP’s legacy by its co-chairs, leaders of national Indigenous organizations and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, and leading academics and activists, this collection refocuses our attention on the groundbreaking work already performed by RCAP. Organized thematically, it explores avenues by which we may establish a new relationship, build healthy and powerful communities, engage citizens, and move to action.


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The political economy of a settler colony: Alaa Tartir, Tariq Dana, Timothy Seidel (eds), Political Economy of Palestine: Critical, Interdisciplinary, and Decolonial Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021

22May21

Description: This book explores the political economy of Palestine through critical, interdisciplinary, and decolonial perspectives, underscoring that an approach to economics that does not consider the political—a de-politicized economics—is inadequate to understanding the situation in occupied Palestine. A critical interdisciplinary approach to political economy challenges prevailing neoliberal logics and structures that reproduce racial capitalism, and explores how the political economy of occupied Palestine is shaped by processes of accumulation by exploitation and dispossession from both Israel and global business, as well as from Palestinian elites. A decolonial approach to Palestinian political economy foregrounds struggles against neoliberal and settler colonial policies and institutions, and aids in the de-fragmentation of Palestinian life, land, and political economy that the Oslo Accords perpetuated, but whose histories of de-development over all of Palestine can be traced back for over a century. The chapters in this book offer an in-depth contextualization of the
Palestinian political economy, analyze the political economy of integration, fragmentation, and inequality, and explore and problematize multiple sectors and themes of political economy in the absence of sovereignty.


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Settlers on Mars! Annette Froehlich (ed.), Assessing a Mars Agreement Including Human Settlements, Springer, 2021

19May21

Description: This book is dedicated to the nascent discussion of the legal aspects of human exploration and possible settlement of Mars, and provides fresh insights and new ideas in two key areas. The first one revolves around the broader aspects of current space law, such as intellectual property rights in outer space, the legal implications of contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence, legal considerations around the freedom of exploration and use, and the International Space Station agreement as a precedent for Mars. The second one focuses on the creation and management of a new society on Mars, and includes topics such as human reproduction and childbirth, the protection of human rights in privately-funded settlements, legal aspects of a Martian power grid, and criminal justice on the red planet. With multiple national space agencies and commercial enterprises focusing on Mars, it is more than likely that a human presence will be established on the red planet in the coming decades. While the foundation of international space law, laid primarily by the Outer Space Treaty, remains the framework within which humans will engage with Mars, new and unforeseen challenges have arisen, driven particularly by the rapid pace of technological advancement in recent years. To ensure that space law can keep up with these developments, a new scholarly work such as the present one is critical. By bringing together a number of fresh international perspectives on the topic, the book is of interest to all scholars and professionals working in the space field.


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