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Can you even trust the settlers? Robbie Dillon, Responsibilities of Identity: Epistemic Trustworthiness as Resistance to Settler Colonial Domination, MA dissertation, Concordia University, 2021

01Jun21

Abstract: I argue that unsatisfying relations of political recognition between the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Turtle Island, and the Canadian state are a product of, and thereby a means of reinforcing and reproducing, hermeneutical domination, a distinct form of epistemic injustice. Remedies for hermeneutical domination require the granting of epistemic trust, which I claim is untenable absent subordinated parties’ autonomous assumption of responsibilities that establish their epistemic trustworthiness. Given the logics of elimination that are a defining feature of settler colonial projects, I claim that my approach provides a more effective defense of Indigenous alterities than proposals based on Fanon-inspired notions of ‘turning away.’


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Settler cyberbullying: Bronwyn Carlson, Ryan Frazer, ‘Attending to Difference in Indigenous People’s Experiences of Cyberbullying: Toward a Research Agenda’, in J. Bailey, A. Flynn, N. Henry (eds), The Emerald International Handbook of Technology Facilitated Violence and Abuse, Emerald Publishing, 2021

01Jun21

Abstract: Broadly understood as repeated, intentional, and aggressive behaviors facilitated by digital technologies, cyberbullying has been identified as a significant public health concern in Australia. However, there have been critical debates about the theoretical and methodological assumptions of cyberbullying research. On the whole, this research has demonstrated an aversion to accounting for context, difference, and complexity. This insensitivity to difference is evident in the absence of nuanced accounts of Indigenous people’s experiences of cyberbullying. In this chapter, we extend recent critiques of dominant approaches to cyberbullying research and argue for novel theoretical and methodological engagements with Indigenous people’s experiences of cyberbullying. We review a range of literature that unpacks the many ways that social, cultural, and political life is different for Indigenous peoples. More specifically, we demonstrate there are good reasons to assume that online conflict is different for Indigenous peoples, due to diverse cultural practices and the broader political context of settler-colonialism. We argue that the standardization of scholarly approaches to cyberbullying is delimiting its ability to attend to social difference in online conflict, and we join calls for more theoretically rigorous, targeted, difference-sensitive studies into bullying.


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On Greater Britain’s (settler colonial) afterlives: Dane Kennedy, ‘The Dream of Greater Britain’, Historical Reflections, 47, 2, 2021

01Jun21

Abstract: This article examines the enduring influence of Charles Dilke’s Greater Britain (1868), which persists today in the ambitions of Brexit’s proponents. Dilke characterized Britain as the center of a world system bound together by a common identity. Yet his explanation of that identity was riddled with inconsistencies. While he cast it mainly in racial terms, he also proposed cultural and linguistic criteria. These inconsistencies would complicate the efforts to define and delineate the reach of Greater Britain by those who followed in Dilke’s footsteps. This includes the leading Brexiteers who have advanced Greater Britain’s modern iteration, the Anglosphere, as an alternative to EU membership.


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Decolonising the maps settler colonialism made: Elspeth Iralu, ‘Putting Indian Country on the Map: Indigenous Practices of Spatial Justice’, Antipode, 2021

01Jun21

Abstract: This paper examines a visual archive of Indigenous mapping practices in relationship to theorisations of Indigenous spatialities that seek to re-centre practices of counter-mapping around Indigenous spatial justice. After examining a Google Maps initiative that takes on colonial mapping tropes to enforce Indigenous dispossession, I consider two mapping projects based at Zuni Pueblo: first, a Zuni-led response to proposed coal extraction that would have affected Zuni cultural practices; and second, the Zuni Map Art Project, an initiative that remixes tropes of colonial mapping to create spatial representations that are encoded such that the information they contain can only be understood by those who have been initiated in Zuni cultural knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Indigenous feminist spatial practices disrupt the colonial relations of power that mapping and counter-mapping often reinforce.


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Decolonising the blue spaces occupied by settler colonialism: Meg Parsons, Karen Fisher, Roa Petra Crease, Decolonising Blue Spaces in the Anthropocene: Freshwater management in Aotearoa New Zealand, Palgrave, 2021

01Jun21

Description: This open access book crosses disciplinary boundaries to connect theories of environmental justice with Indigenous people’s experiences of freshwater management and governance. It traces the history of one freshwater crisis – the degradation of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Waipā River– to the settler-colonial acts of ecological dispossession resulting in intergenerational injustices for Indigenous Māori iwi (tribes). The authors draw on a rich empirical base to document the negative consequences of imposing Western knowledge, worldviews, laws, governance and management approaches onto Māori and their ancestral landscapes and waterscapes. Importantly, this book demonstrates how degraded freshwater systems can and are being addressed by Māori seeking to reassert their knowledge, authority, and practices of kaitiakitanga (environmental guardianship). Co-governance and co-management agreements between iwi and the New Zealand Government, over the Waipā River, highlight how Māori are envisioning and enacting more sustainable freshwater management and governance, thus seeking to achieve Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ). 
The book provides an accessible way for readers coming from a diversity of different backgrounds, be they academics, students, practitioners or decision-makers, to develop an understanding of IEJ and its applicability to freshwater management and governance in the context of changing socio-economic, political, and environmental conditions that characterise the Anthropocene.


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The settlers claims vs. the indigenous ones: Jacqueline Keeler, Standoff: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story of Sacred Lands, Torrey House Press, 2021

29May21

Description: The Bundy takeover of Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s standoff against an oil pipeline in North Dakota are two sides of the same story that created America and its deep-rooted cultural conflicts. Through a compelling comparison of conflicting beliefs and legal systems, Keeler explores whether the West has really been won—and for whom.


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Possibly, but lamenting settler colonialism without knowing them is like trying to overcome capitalism without referencing the bourgeoisie: Amy Fung, ‘Is Settler Colonialism Just Another Study of Whiteness?’ Canadian Ethnic Studies, 53, 2, 2021, pp. 115-131

28May21

Abstract: This paper is part one of a much larger class-based analysis of the “settler” identity. In order to better understand the settler’s legibility and illegibility within white settler colonial nations, this paper argues that existing settler colonial scholarship has overwhelmingly favored dialectic understandings of settler/Indigenous relations alongside Eurocentric narratives centering feelings of shame, guilt, and uncertainty. This Eurocentric bias in settler colonial studies not only reinforces white supremacy, but is in itself a form of white supremacy by perpetuating the same systemic erasures of anti-Blackness, minimizing racialized stories, and decentering Indigenous knowledge. By segregating minorities from their role and complicity in benefiting from and upholding the status quo of white settler colonialism, settler colonial studies inhibits our critical understanding of the settler identity by naturalizing settler supremacy as whiteness. Reading across white and diasporic settler colonial scholarship through a lens of racial melancholia, this paper ultimately leads to its conclusion that settler and settler colonial studies are class-based categories guarded by the social hierarchy of white supremacy that continues to disrupt peaceful co-existence with Indigenous laws.


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Settler ‘democracy’ and Indigenous constituencies: David A. Armstrong, Christopher Alcantara, John Kennedy, ‘Exploring the effects of electorate size on indigenous voter turnout’, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2021

28May21

Abstract: A growing body of scholarship suggests that Indigenous peoples abstain from voting in national and subnational elections because of colonialism and so classic determinants of turnout do not apply. We investigate this argument by examining the relationship between electorate size and voter turnout in federal, provincial and regional elections in five Inuit communities in Canada, leveraging the fact that these communities are mostly similar across a range of factors. Given that these communities negotiated and established their own regional government in 2005 and given the colonial and settler nature of the federal and provincial governments, we expect classic determinants of turnout, such as electorate size, to apply only at the regional level. Surprisingly, however, we find that electorate size influences turnout at the federal and regional levels but not at the provincial level.


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South Africa’s settler colonialism: Thiven Reddy, ‘South Africa and the crisis of liberal democracy: Settler-colonial modernity and a dominant friend-enemy conception of politics’, in Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf, Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Condition of Democracy, Routledge, 2021

28May21

Abstract: This chapter interprets liberal democracy in South Africa through the lens of settler-colonial society. Because generated from a violent history of a colonizer-colonized relationship, a Schmittian conception of politics dominates the pre-1994 struggle against Apartheid-racism where recognition and personal sacrifice were valued. This conception of the political splits in the post-1994 period. The political elite instrumentally draws upon a ‘friend-enemy’ discourse for electoral mobilizational politics, while the subaltern continues with the ‘pre-1994 struggle’ to obtain citizen recognition and access to material goods. This chapter draws on Fanon, Schmitt, and Arendt to explain the troubled state of the South African liberal democratic project.


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Civic rights under settler colonialism in Israel: Ilan Pappe, ‘The discourse of exceptionalism: Civil and human rights in Israel’, in Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf, Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Condition of Democracy, Routledge, 2021

28May21

Abstract: The application of the settler-colonial paradigm to Israel is closely associated with reviewing Israel’s record of civil and human rights violation. The very nature of settler-colonial projects and their treatment of indigenous populations leads inevitably to massive violations of the natives’ basic rights, which explains the ethnic cleansing of Palestine of 1948 and Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians ever since. The chapter argues that the exceptionalism awarded to Israel, which exempts it from international scrutiny, stems from disregard for the settler-colonial nature of Israel. If the West considered it and opened a discussion of all the violations, it could play a constructive role in the struggle against them wherever they happen.


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