settler colonial studies blog

Settler Pocahontas: Kristalyn Marie Shefveland, ‘Pocahontas and Settler Memory in the Appalachian West and South’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: This article utilizes the Pocahontas coalfields in West Virginia and the Indian River Farms Company settlement of Vero Beach Florida as case studies of settler memory. As late as the nineteenth century, setters considered these two very different, but connected, Southern spaces as frontiers. Settlers in both places constructed fantasies about Native peoples that focused primarily on the idea of the Native woman Pocahontas. These are imaginative creations that both attempt to create a settlement and to hearken back to fantasies of the past that never fully existed. With selective constructions of memory, both settlements chose Pocahontas because the name evoked a settler dream of the good Indian yielding to conquest, just as they sought a pliant and willing landscape that would yield mineral and agricultural riches. In fact, both places have longer and deeper Native histories that settler and booster histories have obfuscated and hidden in favor of more “romantic” national narratives such as the Pocahontas myth, in order to sell a place and a product.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Unreconstructed settler history vs settler colonial critique (of course, one sells, the other doesn’t): Honor Sachs, ‘The Unbearable Greatness of Pioneering: Storytelling in David McCullough’s The Pioneers’, Journal of the Early Republic, 41, 2, 2021, pp. 209-216

07Jun21

Abstract: In The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, author David McCullough tells a story of the white heroes who settled the Ohio Territory. McCullough describes a story of intrepid pioneers with noble intentions who endeavored to advance the American Dream. His work, however, ignores decades of historical scholarship that challenge such triumphant narratives and reveal the darker consequences of American exceptionalism. By excluding recent scholarship, McCullough’s work excuses the violence of settler colonialism and fails to capture the complex history of this region.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Healing from history. But How? Natalie Avalos, ‘What Does It Mean to Heal From Historical Trauma?’ AMA Journal of Ethics, 2021

07Jun21

Abstract: Native American peoples’ health is impacted by structural legacies of settler colonialism, including land dispossession, racism, and poverty. Responding with care to individuals and communities experiencing past and present traumatic stress from genocide and deeply entrenched structural violence means navigating ongoing grief, restoring self-community and human-ecological relationships, and generating cultural vibrancy.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Whose apocalypse? A settler apocalypse! Natalie Koch, ‘Whose apocalypse? Biosphere 2 and the spectacle of settler science in the desert’, Geoforum, 124, 2021, 36-45

07Jun21

Abstract: Deserts have a special prominence in apocalyptic visions of the future. As a trope, the desert frequently indexes apocalyptic visions of the warming planet and future challenges of securing food, energy, and water in a changing environment. This article considers how diffuse visions of “environmental apocalypse” are spun through narratives constructions of the desert as sites of utopia and dystopia – places where humanity is simultaneously portrayed as meeting its most dire possibilities of collapse, but also places where hopeful futures might be tested out and extremes overcome in an era of climate catastrophe. This article offers a genealogy of techno-scientific schemes in the Arizona desert and the “visioneers” behind them, focusing on the most iconic example of Biosphere 2. Initiated in the mid-1980s, Biosphere 2’s history illustrates how such projects are underpinned by multiple forms of spectacle, which draw on the ideals of science, technology, and environmental salvation to build settler colonial structures of exclusion and Indigenous dispossession. By centering the question of whose apocalypse we are being sold in such techno-centric “solutions” to ecological dilemmas, this article expands recent discussions of environmental injustice and settler colonial violence to show how ostensibly “progressive” ideals and initiatives are also violent and routinely overwrite histories and presents of colonial dispossession.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonialism’s scopic regime: Jakub Zahora, ‘Occupation, Sight, Landscape: Visibility and the Normalization of Israeli Settlements’, International Political Sociology, 2021

04Jun21

Abstract: This article contributes toward the understanding of social and political mechanisms that work to normalize and naturalize contested political conditions on the part of privileged segments of the public. I engage these issues via an ethnographic study of Israel’s so-called non-ideological settlements in the occupied West Bank, which attract Israelis due to socioeconomic advantages rather than a nationalistic and/or religious appeal. Nonetheless, the settlers’ suburban experiences are in stark contrast to the geopolitical status of their communities as well as the local and international resistance they generate. I draw empirically on interviews and observations conducted in the settlement of Ariel to make sense of this dynamic. Utilizing insights from critical investigations of visuality and landscape, I argue that the normalization of everyday life in the settlements is achieved through the operation of a particular scopic regime linked to the landscape formations in the West Bank. Employing these concepts to investigate the everyday politics of seeing, I show how they channel the settlers’ sight in a way that makes the Israeli rule seem uncontested, naturalized, and even aesthetic in three registers: the depth of visual field, the surroundings, and the people who inhabit the settlements’ landscape.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Resisting multiple attacks: Kent G. Lightfoot, Peter A. Nelson, Michael A. Grone, Alec Apodaca, ‘Pathways to Persistence: Divergent Native engagements with sustained colonial permutations in North America’, in Lee M. Panich, Sara L. Gonzalez (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas, Routledge, 2021

04Jun21

Abstract: In addressing the question of how and why Indigenous people initiated diverse kinds of engagements with colonial agents, this chapter highlights two crucial variables that should be considered in any archaeological investigation of colonialism. One concerns Indigenous sociopolitical and economic organizations, including dimensions such as polity size, polity structure, landscape management practices, and regional sociopolitical relationships. The other involves the various permutations of colonial programs that encroached on tribal lands, as exemplified by managerial, missionary, and settler colonies. A significant challenge in the study of colonialism is that Indigenous people did not encounter one type of colonial program over time but rather a plethora of colonial agents with divergent policies and practices. This chapter argues for archaeological investigations of colonialism that take a long-term perspective in examining the full range of colonial succession patterns that unfolded in tribal lands and how Native people created innovative strategies for mitigating colonialism and making the most of new technologies, trade connections, settlement arrangements, and economic opportunities. The chapter concludes with several examples of resourceful pathways that Native people initiated in their entanglements with colonial agents.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The archeology of settler colonialism: Ian Kretzler, Sara L. Gonzalez, ‘Unsettling the Archaeology of Reservations: A view from Grand Ronde, Oregon’, in Lee M. Panich, Sara L. Gonzalez (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas, Routledge, 2021

04Jun21

Abstract: Native American reservations are among the most conspicuous examples of the US settler colonial project. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, federal officials developed reservations as proving grounds for assimilationist policies designed to eradicate Native lifeways. At the same time, from their inception reservations have also operated as sites of cultural contestation, community formation, and sovereignty building for hundreds of Tribal Nations. These entangled histories are central to what we call “reservation archaeology.” Drawing on our work with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in northwestern Oregon, we argue reservation archaeology stands to reveal new insights about the manifestations of settler colonialism and Indigenous survivance across time and space. Furthermore, when grounded in respect for the sovereignty of Tribal Nations and community-based participatory practice, reservation archaeology can begin to address the legacies of settler colonialism by reframing archaeological research in accordance with the cultural protocols, needs, and goals of Indigenous communities.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonialism also did it: Matthew Liebmann, ‘Colonialism and Indigenous Population Decline in the Americas’, in Lee M. Panich, Sara L. Gonzalez (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas, Routledge, 2021

04Jun21

Abstract: Native American populations decreased substantially between 1492 and 1900. But the causes, timing, and magnitude of this decline remain the source of enduring debates. This chapter outlines the contours of these debates, summarizing the history of major arguments, landmark scholarship, and recent advances in the field. During the latter twentieth century, anthropologists and historians engaged in a decades-long dispute over the absolute population of the pre-Columbian Americas dominated by documentary and ethnohistorical evidence that cleaved the field into two opposed camps. In the twenty-first century, archaeology has offered new evidence to address, if not resolve, some of these enduring questions. With the answers supplied by archaeology come new debates, with two new emerging camps: one favoring biological, geographical, and evolutionary explanations for Indigenous population decline, and the other pointing to historical contingency, settler colonial policies, and human agency. A case study of depopulation among the Pueblos of the American Southwest illustrates how these debates are playing out today.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Lockean settler colonialism today! Benjamin Geier, The Palestinian’s Venison: John Lock, Colonialism and Liberal Zionism, MA dissertation, CUNY, 2021

01Jun21

Abstract: Liberal Zionism is one of the most potent political forces with the American Jewish diaspora, as it allows for Jews living in the U.S. to support a strong Israel while still holding to the liberal values that the majority of American Jews believe in when it comes to domestic politics. Liberal Zionism can seem like a contradiction, but it is rooted in the work of the father of liberalism himself, John Locke. This paper examines portions of Locke’s Second Treatise and compares it to the pillars of liberal Zionist thought, showing the parallels between Locke’s justification for European colonialism in the Americas with the liberal Zionist’s justification for the establishment and continuing maintenance of the State of Israel in Palestine.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Controlling all life: Irus Braverman, ‘Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel’, PoLAR, 2021

01Jun21

Abstract: This article examines the underlying biopolitical premises of wildlife management in Palestine/Israel that make, remake, and unmake this region’s settler colonial landscape. Drawing on interviews with Israeli nature officials and observations of their work, the article tells several animal stories that illuminate the hierarchies and slippages between wild and domestic, nature and culture, native and settler, and human and nonhuman life in Palestine/Israel. Animal bodies are especially apt technologies of settler colonialism, I show here. They naturalize and normalize settler modes of existence, while criminalizing native livelihoods and relations. Utilizing the terra nullius doctrine, creating biblical landscapes by reintroducing extirpated wild animals, controlling the movement of Palestinians and their animals while letting Jewish settlers and their animals roam unhindered, criminalizing the Palestinians’ more-than-human relations, and introducing restrictions on native engagement with animals are all an inherent part of nature administration in Palestine/Israel. But while they serve as tools for advancing colonial practices, nonhuman animals are also subject to the same violence that afflicts humans. Understanding the more-than-human dimensions of the settler colonial order is instrumental for thinking about how to subvert this order and redirect its violence toward decolonized, or “wild,” legalities.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute