settler colonial studies blog

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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German and United States colonialisms compare (and often reflect on settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination): Janne Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World: Entangled Empires, Springer, 2021

03Feb21

Description: This book contributes to global history by examining the connected histories of German and United States colonial empires from the early nineteenth century to the Nazi era. It looks at multiple and multidirectional flows, transfers, and circulations of ideas, people, and practices as Germany and the US were embedded in, and created by, an interconnected world of empires. This relationship was not exceptional, but emblematic of the diverse entanglements that created colonial globality. Colonial entanglements between Germany and the United States took on many forms, but these shared and intersecting histories have been underanalyzed. Traditionally, Germany and the United States have been understood to have taken, respectively, an authoritarian and liberal path into modernity. But there is no neat dichotomy, as the contributors to this book illustrate. There are many more similarities than have previously been appreciated – and they are the result of multilayered entanglements made visible via conquest, settler societies, racialization, and rule of difference. Building on present historiographies of empires, colonialism, and globalization, this book introduces new analytical possibilities for examining these two relatively understudied empires alongside each other, as well as at their intersections.

Access the Introduction here.

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Settler criminal justice and settler health institutions combine: Thalia Anthony, Harry Blagg, ‘Biopower of Colonialism in Carceral Contexts: Implications for Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2021

03Feb21

Abstract: This article argues that criminal justice and health institutions under settler colonialism collude to create and sustain “truths” about First Nations lives that often render them as “bare life,” to use the term of Giorgio Agamben. First Nations peoples’ existence is stripped to its sheer biological fact of life and their humanity denied rights and dignity. First Nations people remain in a “state of exception” to the legal order and its standards of care (Agamben 1998). Zones of exception place First Nations people in a separate and diminished legal order. Medical and health agencies have been instrumental in shaping colonial “biopower,” both in and beyond carceral settings to ensure that First Nations lives are managed in accordance with the colonial settler state project. This project is able both to threaten First Nations rights to live and to maintain settler self-perceptions of decency and care. We illustrate this discussion with reference to the tragic and unnecessary deaths in custody of twenty-two-year-old Yamatji woman Ms Dhu in 2014 in South Hedland Police Station, Western Australia, and twenty-six-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay Jnr in Long Bay jail in Sydney, NSW, in 2015. Health professionals and police demonstrated callous disregard to Ms Dhu and Mr Dungay—treating them as “bare life.”

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Tourist settler colonialism: Pierre Walter, ‘Settler colonialism and the violent geographies of tourism in the California redwoods’, Tourism Geographies, 2021

31Jan21

Abstract: Hidden from view, underneath the tourism landscape of the California redwoods, is a genocidal settler colonial history of warfare, massacres, and forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands. This history has been ignored in the touristic narrative of people and place presented by a redwoods attraction in northern California, which are rife with unacknowledged histories and geographies of violence. Framed by scholarship on violent geographies in tourism development, this study shows how redwoods tourism has erased Indigenous people and history from the landscape, and how new ‘power-laden’ tourism imaginaries have been created in their place. The new tourism narrative is found in the spatial layout, interpretive signage, exhibits, website, museum of Native American artifacts, and interpretive trails in a roadside attraction called Trees of Mystery. Secondary historical literature and maps of local Yurok ancestral territory and land ownership construct a counter-narrative of the site’s geography and history. Findings reveal a fanciful settler colonial history highlighting heroic male loggers on the ‘frontier’, and representations of ingenious Native Americans as historic people who produced beautiful tools, clothing and artwork but are now defeated, dead, and exotic. In fact, white settlers, backed by the U.S. Army and local militias, appropriated and logged Native American redwood lands, and in doing so massacred resident Yurok People and forced the survivors from their traditional territories. Conversely, the Yurok People have been reclaiming ancestral lands, reviving cultural practices, and resisting settler colonialism from the early 1800s to the present-day. Across the Americas, countless other settler colonial tourism sites like these sit upon violent geographies. Unearthing the hidden geography of this particular site shows how decolonizing research might be undertaken at other tourism sites situated on stolen Indigenous lands in the U.S. and beyond.

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‘Never the submissive prey of settler colonialism’: Alison Whittaker, Nicole Watson, ‘First Nations Women: Law, Power, Story’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2021

31Jan21

Excerpt: For the greater part of our shared history, the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were absent from scholarship as understood by the Australian colony. Those who wrote about our grandmothers, mothers and aunties viewed them through broken lenses that reflected only the pall of stereotypes. Black women were represented through various stereotypes that included the licentious jezebel and the docile servant. Yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have never been the submissive prey of settler colonialism. Resistance has been manifest in diplomacy, litigation, refusal, the withholding of labour, activism and writing. It is within the latter tradition that this special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal falls.

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On settler-indigenous coordination: Nadia Naser-Najjab, Shir Hever, ‘Elite and popular contradictions in security coordination: overcoming the binary distinction of the Israeli coloniser and the colonised Palestinian’, Critical Studies on Security, 2021

31Jan21

Abstract: Settler colonial theory has made a hugely significant contribution to the theorisation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but there is a danger that its application to the specific practice of security coordination could simply render the practice as an instrument of settler colonial rule. In this article, we would like to propose the important qualification that Coordination is, in practice, deeply conflicted and subject to multiple internal pressures, which extend from elites to public opinion. In accepting that Coordination can be appropriately viewed through a settler colonial lens, we would like to argue that it can also be viewed from ‘below’, and as an object of domestic political struggle that is implicated in legitimisation processes. Coordination is therefore simultaneously renounced and retained as part of the survival strategy of assorted elite groups. In order to demonstrate this, we reference Elite theory, interviews and online materials. Moreover, internal Palestinian divides suggest that opposition is more incomplete, partial and reactive within the neoliberal and settler colonial context.

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