settler colonial studies blog

Gossiping settlers: Marek Paryż, ‘Secrecy, Suspicion, Exposure: Negotiating Authority Structures in a Settler Colonial Society as Depicted in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident’, European Journal of American Studies, 15, 4, 2021

10Jan21

Abstract: The article discusses the ways in which Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s 1940 novel The Ox-Bow Incident problematizes the issues of secrecy, suspicion, gossip and exposure as a basis for the depiction of a variety of regulatory practices in a hierarchized settler society whose structures of authority enter a phase of renegotiation. The novel can be read as a portrayal of the Far West’s transition toward a more egalitarian and modern social organization. Clark depicts a stratified society in which striving for a form of advancement is a shared necessity that powerfully influences individual mindsets, and this tendency can redefine even the entrenched hierarchies. Secrecy and suspicion exemplify the tactics through which individual interests fuel a larger process of the renegotiation of power relations within the settler collective.

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Critical Forum: On the Uses of Settler Colonial Studies (3): Robert Warrior, ‘Settler sidekick solidarity?: response to Lorenzo Veracini: “Is settler colonial studies even useful?”‘, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

05Jan21

Excerpt: Being neither a settler colonial studies practitioner nor among those who have accused it of being ‘useless’ or ‘detrimental to Indigenous struggles’, I approach the arguments Lorenzo Veracini references in his commentary as an (engaged) observer. Those of us in Indigenous studies can hardly help but be engaged observers of settler colonial studies, especially those like me who are also connected to American studies. Veracini’s defence of settler colonial studies is one I want to engage not only as a working scholar but also as someone who has been actively involved in leadership positions in scholarly associations connected to these two other fields. I was one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and I have held multiple offices in the American Studies Association (ASA), which has given me a pretty good working knowledge of these fields.

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Critical Forum: On the Uses of Settler Colonial Studies (2): Alice Te Punga Somerville, ‘OMG settler colonial studies: response to Lorenzo Veracini: “Is Settler Colonial Studies Even Useful?”‘, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

05Jan21

Excerpt: I am one of those Indigenous scholars who often finds herself in conversations where the other person says ‘but I mean “post-colonial” … like have the colonisers left?’. On the inside, each time this happens, I wrestle with four selves. My nerdy self wants to say ‘actually, that’s not what the “post” means in that term’. My Indigenous self prioritises relationships and so doesn’t want to be a patronising know-it-all. My self-doubting she’s-colonised-and-she-knows-it self wonders if all of this education has prevented me from seeing the ridiculousness of the ‘post’. And, finally, my normal human self just wants to be seen and loved and doesn’t want the other person to think of me as a very colonised person or a real buzzkill. The bout of internal wrestling can result in a wide variety of actual responses that depend on my connection with the other person, the risks and possibilities of ‘going there’ and (honestly) whether I am tired from a long day of being in explanation mode.

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Critical Forum: On the Uses of Settler Colonial Studies (1): J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘False dilemmas and settler colonial studies: response to Lorenzo Veracini: :Is Settler Colonial Studies Even Useful?”‘, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

05Jan21

Excerpt: In his provocative commentary, Lorenzo Veracini suggests that the relationship between the fields of postcolonial studies and settler colonial studies ‘is predicated on filiation, not opposition’. That may be the case in the Australian context, but my experience in both Aotearoa/New Zealand and the United States tells a different story, one fraught with push-back from postcolonial theorists.2 In my experience, postcolonial studies scholars often valorise the concepts of diaspora and hybridity, while insisting that any assertions
of Indigenous identity (let alone a distinct relationship to land) are essentialist.

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Nonsettler environmental justice: Michelle M. Jacob , Kelly L. Gonzales, Deanna Chappell Belcher, Jennifer L. Ruef, Stephany Running, Hawk Johnson, ‘Indigenous cultural values counter the damages of white settler colonialism’, Environmental Sociology, 2020

05Jan21

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a violent process that harms all beings. We build upon environmental justice frameworks and argue for Indigenous values affirmation as a strategy for countering the violence of settler colonialism. We discuss the findings of a pilot project to create an Indigenous values affirmation tool with Indigenous peoples in the U.S. to provide context for our argument. We draw from Indigenous-centered literature, including Bacon’s colonial ecological violence, and assert that settler systems, and analyses rooted in settler logics, are inadequate because of their inherent inability to meaningfully and critically engage with colonization. This ignorance causes academic fields of study to be damaged-centred in their gaze on Indigenous peoples, or to ignore or render Indigenous peoples invisible or disappeared. Equity is not imaginable, and justice is impossible, within these frameworks. Centring Indigenous people and values have great potential to contribute to environmental sociology. We urge environmental sociologists to honour Indigenous ways of knowing and being in efforts to counter settler colonial violence that plagues all peoples. Doing so will open up new possibilities for healing the environment, and humans’ relations with Mother Earth and all beings.

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Queer settlers: Xander Lenc, ‘Queer placemaking, settler colonial time, and the desert imaginary in Palm Springs’ in Cara Courage, Tom Borrup, Maria Rosario Jackson, Kylie Legge, Anita McKeown, Louise Platt, Jason Schupbach (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking, Routledge 2021

05Jan21

Abstract: In recent decades the desert resort city of Palm Springs, CA, has become an important site of queer culture, and is now by some measures the ‘gayest’ city in the United States. At the same time, the Cahuilla tribe, whose reservation intersects with the city, has recently gained considerable autonomy over their land, bringing them into conflict with a rising architectural preservationist movement led predominantly by white gay men. This chapter draws on works in geography, Native American studies, and queer theory to question enduring conceptions about the role of time and indigeneity in urban placemaking, and to contribute to our understanding of the oblique spatiotemporal logics of American settler colonialism, or what Mark Rifkin has called ‘settler common sense.’ I argue that settler common sense in Palm Springs is structured by a colonial legacy of treating the desert as a racialized space of ruination, timelessness, and queer becoming.

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Settler museums are still settler colonial: Sheila Watson, ‘Settler societies, guilt and Indigenous inhabitants of the nation’, in Sheila Watson, National Museums and the Origins of Nations, Routledge 2020

05Jan21

Abstract: Museum methods have improved considerably in some countries, where there is more sensitivity towards the feelings of Indigenous peoples, along with genuine attempts to co-curate exhibitions. There has been a gradual recognition that the founding of the nation is the story of conquest, forced assimilation and humiliation. While this is often addressed with sympathy for the Indigenous, national museums struggle to deal with traditional notions of civilisation and progress in the context of Indigenous cultures and histories. The transition from anthropology museums, where many of these peoples were first consigned, into history museums, has proved problematic. Indeed, this chapter suggests that attempts at cultural relativity, adopted from anthropology (Kerr 2019), may be misinterpreted when placed within frameworks created by national histories. It argues that theories of social evolution, when linked to certain concepts of civilisation, widespread in popular narratives of history, inadvertently offer representations of Aboriginal societies as somehow backward, or less evolved, despite the best endeavours of museum curators to present all cultures as equal.

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The ‘homelands within’ against settler colonialism: Riel Dupuis-Rossi, ‘Resisting the “attachment disruption” of colonisation through decolonising therapeutic praxis: Finding our way back to the Homelands Within’, Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal Australia, 2021

02Jan21

Abstract: Through attempted annihilation and assimilation, colonisation’s main purpose is to force us into a state of forgetfulness about who we are and where we come from—if we survive to see another day, that is. Under colonisation, we have been knocked down, repeatedly. It is this repeated violence that mirrors the relationship imposed by the settler state on Indigenous Peoples. Under colonial rule, we have not been free to be our genuine and authentic Indigenous selves, let alone thrive as nations and confederacies of Peoples.

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Settler colonial tourism: Camille Petersen, The “Oldest City” Narrative: Colorblind Settler Racism and Historical Storytelling in St. Augustine, Florida, PhD dissertation, Northeastern University, 2020

29Dec20

Abstract: This dissertation examines place-based national origins stories told in the context of the City of St Augustine and Florida tourism. Using data from two commemorations and a national monument, I examine how discourses of race and settler colonialism structure the narratives at the city, state, and national levels. Historicizing the USA as a settler colony brings together research from native studies and indigenous scholars to help sociologists move beyond the Black/White binary and more fully understand the ideological work that historical storytelling does. The City of St Augustine and the state of Florida rely on heritage tourism and colonial charm to lure visitors and new residents by the millions each year. Using Critical Race Discourse Analysis (CRDA) for this extended case study, I find that colorblind racialized discourses and representations function not only to promote racist attitudes but to shore up the dominant settler colonial ideology which claims that the USA is a White nation and White settlers are rightful owners of the land. Furthermore, the narratives dismiss colonial racist violence and centralize only White characters in the present, contributing to the maintenance of a Eurocentric White worldview in which Indians and Afro-Americans exist only in the past or on the margins. Finally, tales of resistance to racialized domination are silenced in the tourism narratives, despite an accessible archive of Indian and Black resistance in Florida. In the first chapter I lay out the theoretical interventions made by scholars in various fields and position them as contributions to a historically specific sociological understanding of race and ethnicity as a global and local power structure, proposing a an analytic of historical storytelling rather than memory or heritage. The settler colonial (as opposed to postcolonial) context of the USA is the key intervention from native/Indigenous and Settler Colonial studies and serves as the theoretical framework to understand the contradictory ideology of colorblind racism throughout the dissertation. In the following three empirical chapters, I identify the key tropes of colorblind settler racism as an ideology which forms the basis of our national origins story and prevailing cultural norms of Eurocentric Whiteness. In the first chapter I am analyzing ethnographic and textual data from the city of St Augustine’s 450th celebration, commemorating 450 years since the “encounter” between Pedro Menendez and Indigenous inhabitants at what would be named St Augustine and settled by the Spanish. As a commemoration, the 450th serves to celebrate settler colonial heroes who teach us lessons about meritocracy and the American Dream through the lens of the ‘moment of encounter’ in St Augustine as the birth of multicultural America. In the next chapter I use data from the state-wide “Viva Florida 500!” marketing campaign and year-long commemoration, including a historical “courtroom drama” written and performed for the occasion and a promotional video from the “Florida Brand” advertising campaign. In this chapter I show how settler ideology functions through historical storytelling in a knowledge economy at the confluence of history, archaeology, and marketing. Settler tropes pervade the heritage landscape through these various industries and are presented to the public as official truth, explicitly and implicitly in the images and characters chosen to represent the state. In the final empirical chapter, I analyze the historical storytelling at the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, finding that the stories told in the museum and by the St Augustine visual landscape at large are descendent from explicit settler colonial plans to make this land “our own” through institutional and legal means. The preservations of the National Park Service and Antiquities Act do ideological work to promote the idea of a White nation that “rightfully” owns land stolen through the Discovery Doctrine. Throughout this research, the findings show that diversity and inclusion of non-White historical figures in the ‘stock story’ narrative of the USA promotes racism and White Supremacy just as well as exclusion does, and both moves continue to coexist.

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Counter-institutionalisation against settler colonialism: Anthony William Persaud, Counter-institutionalization and the economic futures of First Nations in British Columbia, PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2020

29Dec20

Abstract: The legacy of settler-colonialism is manifest most potently as a dominant narrative that rationalizes First Nations compliance with Western-liberal institutions of common law, property and market-based economic growth. These have become de facto requirements for socioeconomic improvements and well-being within First Nations communities. This dissertation challenges this assumption and narrative through an examination of the efforts of several First Nations in British Columbia as they pursue self-determination as central to their institutional and economic futures. I begin from the premise that the socio-economic and cultural-ecological condition of First Nations communities today is contingent upon the rules and governance structures imposed on First Nations as they interact with the settler-colonial state. Less recognized, however, are the multiple efforts of First Nations to redraw these structures and the logics that drive them through counter-institutionalizing processes. The dissertation comprises several studies of these processes, each of which are based on qualitative research conducted across four years working as a researcher and community development practitioner with First Nations in British Columbia, Canada. Chapter 2 highlights how First Nations are strategically positioning themselves – albeit in constrained ways – by leveraging the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate in order to strengthen territorial selfgovernance and jurisdiction. Chapter 3 examines the conflicting institutional logics at play within First Nations forestry-based social enterprises. Chapter 4 demonstrates how a growing number of First Nations communities are seeking to resolve exigent local housing challenges through the creative reformulation of relations of production, allocation and redistribution. Chapter 5 focuses on the institution of property within the context of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation as they seek to re-establish an institutional framework upon which they can take control of their title lands and new jurisdictions, while maintaining their values and visions for the future. Combined these chapters aim to make real the diverse economic efforts of First Nations and open up new possibilities to establish counter-institutional frameworks which prevail alongside or independent of capitalist and colonial pressures.

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