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Recoding settler colonialism: Susan Collis, ‘W(h)ither the Indian Act? How Statutory Law Is Rewriting Canada’s Settler Colonial Formation’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: This article documents how the Indian Act, the historic legal regime structuring settler colonialism in Canada, is being displaced by new statutory law, as nearly fifty federal statutes passed by successive governments between 2005 and 2020 rewrite First Nations land, taxation, resource, and governance regimes. I focus attention on these new laws, asking how they differ in instrument and ideology from the Indian Act. Particularly, I explore how new legislation responds to the Indian Act’s (unintended) affirmation of the unique political status of Indigenous peoples and manages the long-sedimented legal and regulatory differences between reserve and Canadian jurisdictions. Transferring our attention from the Indian Act to actual sites of legislative activity, we are better positioned to perceive, critique, and challenge the evolving formation of settler colonialism in Canada today.


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On settler political theory: Yann Allard-Tremblay, Elaine Coburn, ‘The Flying Heads of Settler Colonialism; or the Ideological Erasures of Indigenous Peoples in Political Theorizing’, Political Studies, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: This essay relies on the insight that settler colonialism is an ongoing structure geared toward the elimination of Indigenous presence to argue that ideologies that legitimate and naturalize settler occupation are equally ongoing. More specifically, the ideologies that justify settler colonialism in major states like Australia, Canada, and the United States, are like Flying Heads that shape-shift and recur over time. We explore how two notorious ideological tropes—terra nullius and the myth of the Vanishing Race—recur in the work of contrasting contemporary theorists. Ultimately, Flying Head ideologies of settler colonialism cannot be defeated by reasoned argument alone, but by structural transformations beyond the settler-colonial relations that necessitate and sustain them. Following diverse Indigenous theorists and activists, we briefly explore prefigurative resurgent practices and how Indigenous political imaginaries, like the Dish with One Spoon, offer alternatives to transcend the settler colonial present


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Settlers levitate? Peter Adey, ‘Floating with Kim Scott’s Benang: Vertigo, settler-colonial mobilities and levitation’s geographies’, Emotion, Space and Society, 40, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: In this paper I explore the strange figure of the levitator within Kim Scott’s (1999) Miles Franklin Prize winning novel Benang: From the Heart. Through different genres of art and creative practice, mysticism, religion, science-fiction, magic, and even civil disobedience, the levitator is a poorly acknowledged mobile subject who seems to refuse scholarly enquiry. Levitation is more readily understood as a maligned form of fraud, fakery and social frippery, a figure of esoteric interest. Building on recent attempts to resurrect and reconsider levitators (Adey, 2017; Young, 2018), as well as floating, lighter-than-air atmospheres and elements (McCormack, 2018; Engelmann, 2015), this paper argues that floatations like levitation provide a crucial addition to critical and radical thinking in mobilities, affective life and studies of settler-colonialism. Through Benang, Kim Scott’s vast historical and yet intimate novel, the paper works with the floating encounters woven through the politics and ecologies of Western Australia and its racist policies which sought to regulate the Noongar people, an Aboriginal people recognised as the traditional owners of south west Western Australia. Within Benang, levitation, lightness and detachment, become expressions of vertiginous (post)colonial distance, fear, anxiety and escape.


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Settler insecurities: Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘Comfort and insecurity in the reproduction of settler coloniality’, Critical Studies on Security, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: Understood as a practice, citizenship can bring benefits across affective and material registers; however, its possibility also rests on logics of exclusion. This is especially the case in Anglosphere settler colonial contexts in which citizenship is both a function of settler state authority while simultaneously reproducing that very authority. Using Canada as an illustration, the paper reads citizenship through the concepts of implicated subjecthood and colonial liberalism. In doing so it puts forward a phenomenon described as ‘settler insecurity’ to underscore one aspect of how this reproduction occurs. Relating this insecurity to mythologies of the settler geographic imaginary and the affective and material benefits of citizenship, the paper argues the comforts of settler colonial citizenship and this insecurity are co-constitutive. When understood in relation to the un-realised nature of settler coloniality as a genocidal project, the paper outlines how these interconnected phenomena represent important logics in ongoing processes of remaking settler sovereignty through the domestication of Indigenous nationhood and erasure of colonial relations.


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Penal settler colonialism: Jessica Evans, ‘Penal nationalism in the settler colony: On the construction and maintenance of “national whiteness” in settler Canada’, Punishment & Society, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: The summer of 2020 was one of unprecedented mass protest and a growing critical awareness around the racist operation of criminal justice systems in North America. Consequently, criminal justice systems have been placed squarely at the forefront of struggles for racial equality and social change. While activists, critical researchers, and legal experts have argued racial justice requires a diversion of communities and resources away from criminal justice systems, the focus in mainstream policy, media, and academic circles has been on reform. In Canada, a focus on reformist responses to this racial violence has been justified through a distorted view of Canada’s criminal justice system. Drawing on the concept of penal nationalism, I argue that Canadian carceral practices must be understood as constitutive of the settler-colonial state and its ideological, material and institutional mooring in racial whiteness as the locus of settler power and sovereignty. To this end, it is not enough to reform specific penal practices, while leaving intact the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in general. What is at stake is the very definition and protection of a national identity, which in the settler colony is predicated
on colonial whiteness, Indigenous erasure, and racialized exploitation.


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Settler preppers: Allison E. Ford, ‘”They Will Be Like a Swarm of Locusts”: Race, Rurality, and Settler Colonialism in American Prepping Culture’, Rural Sociology, 2021

13Jun21

Abstract: Preppers represent a sub-culture of Americans who prepare for the collapse of society, or “the end of the world as we know it,” via emergency preparedness and self-sufficiency. Securing access to land and the rights to access natural resources are the tenets of self-sufficiency. Preppers associate access to land, water, resources, and distance from the presumed danger of the urban core with the national myth of a white, settler-colonial rural idyll. Rural living is thus an ideal of self-sufficiency. Based on thematic narrative analysis of data derived from multi-method ethnographic research (participant observation, digital ethnography, and interviews [n = 22]), I examine the relationship between settler-colonialism, white hegemony, and environmental privilege in preppers’ discourse about the rural. Preppers rely on racially based frameworks that align with hegemonic whiteness, color-blind racism, and settler-colonialism. Even as they deny the salience of structural racism, preppers make claims to superiority based on cultural capacities like individualism, meritocracy, rationality, and objectivity. They invoke these claims to justify individualized, defensive response to socio-environmental risk that reproduces white possession of rural lands. Racialized prepper discourse informs the environmental practices that preppers adopt, based on claims to superiority and cultural entitlement to land rooted in settler-colonial ethics.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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