settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial conservation: James Beattie, ‘Fashioning a future: Settlement, improvement and conservation in the European colonisation of Otago, 1840-60’, International Review of Environmental History, 6, 2, 2020, pp. 75-102

26Dec20

Abstract: This article, split into 2 parts that will be published over 2 journal issues, examines environmental attitudes and actions amongst the first generation of settlers in Otago, New Zealand, between 1840 and 1860. Based on extensive analysis of diaries, letters, artworks and official documents, it argues for the need to recognise the complexity of European environmental responses and actions, including highlighting extensive official attempts at forest conservation from the late 1840s. Part I of this article examines the complexity of settler views by demonstrating the importance of the concept of improvement as a means by which colonists sought to Europeanise Otago through introductions of familiar plants and animals, and the establishment of farms. Part II is in 2 sections: Section 1 considers the impact of Romanticism on settler interpretations of Otago’s environment, including the manner in which they framed and depicted its harbours and mountains in writing and art. Section 2 examines concerns over resource depletion and details official measures to protect forests, including through reservation, licensing of timber extraction and the appointment of forest guards.

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Apology is a start: Nicholas B. Murphy, Apology and Reconciliation in Settler States, PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2020

26Dec20

Abstract: This dissertation offers a normative account of how we should conceive of reconciliation between Indigenous people(s), states qua states, and their non-Indigenous citizens. It mines pre-theoretic understandings of reconciliation to determine appropriate governing norms for reconciled relationships, the normative expectations that attend these, and what processes or initiatives might be necessary to achieve them. In liberal democratic settler states like Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand the desirability of reconciliation is acknowledged by all parties. However, considerable ambiguity surrounds the concept ‘reconciliation.’ This is problematic because concepts influence social discourse, and the rhetoric of reconciliation not only guides public policy by prioritizing some goals over others, it also influences the process of building healthy relationships by demarcating the contours of this discourse. This makes the need for clarity with respect to the concept acute. Yet a priori judgements about the content of reconciliation are unwarranted in intercultural political contexts. Accordingly, this work takes as its first point of reference an intriguing instrument of reconciliation almost universally thought to be involved in the process: official apology for historical and enduring injustices perpetrated by settler states against Indigenous people(s). In the broadest terms, the project offers something akin to a transcendental argument: if apology of this kind is involved in reconciliatory projects, what does its use say about the process and aims of reconciliation? Chapter 1 explores how to make sense of official apology for historical and enduring injustice by grounding contemporary nonIndigenous citizens’ reparative responsibilities in the context of reconciliation. Chapter 2 delves into official apology, asking what it should look like, from whom it should come, and what it should aim to do. Chapter 3 sheds light on the process of reconciliation by examining the means by which the goals of apology can be promoted through substantive initiatives that simultaneously demonstrate apologetic sincerity. Finally, chapter 4 offers necessary conditions for reconciliation as an outcome. It argues that since apology seeks both to circumscribe the range of reasonable interpretation of history and to enact or engender reciprocal attitudes or respect and trust, so too should these elements feature in any defensible conception of reconciled relationships in the settler state context.

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Climate fiction can be settler colonial: Briggetta Pierrot, Nicole Seymour, ‘Contemporary Cli-Fi and Indigenous Futurisms’, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 9, 4, 2020, pp. 92-113

26Dec20

Abstract: In this essay, we survey recent prominent works of climate fiction, or cli-fi, through the lens of Indigenous futurism, arguing that several of these works pointedly absent or even appropriate Indigenous perspectives and traditions. We conclude that this genre potentially works to justify settler colonialism.

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The sovereign should be dual: Bruce Sieffert, Respecting sovereignties: Indigenous/state agreements in British Columbia and their alignment with a dual sovereignty concept, MA dissertation, University of Victoria, 2020

26Dec20

Abstract: This thesis explores a conception of dual sovereignty, consisting of Indigenous and state sovereignties existing and operating within the same territorial space. A dual sovereignty construct, standing in distinct contrast with the common settler-held presumption of Canadian state sovereignty and hegemony, provides a superior frame for articulating just relations between Indigenous peoples, the Canadian state, and that state’s citizens. The thesis examines the role of agreement-making in defining relations between sovereign Indigenous peoples and the state, both in treaty and non-treaty form. Focused on non-treaty agreements that pertain to land and resources in the province of British Columbia, a case study approach reveals a congruence of several such agreements with elements of a dual sovereignty construct. Some of the agreements exhibit substantial compatibility with a dual sovereignty concept, with dialogical forms of recognition and a well-articulated Indigenous land-use vision and worldview built into the agreement-making process. Those agreements centered on land-use planning seem particularly well equipped to embrace a more dialogical process that creates space for an Indigenous vision, and allows Indigenous Nations to expand their institutional and structural power meaningfully in relation to the state. Agreements designed primarily to help manage the state-driven consultation processes that are required under Canadian state law seem inherently monological by contrast, providing only a restricted space for increased institutional or structural power of Indigenous peoples.

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The sovereign should be shared: Dominic O’Sullivan, Sharing the Sovereign: Indigenous Peoples, Recognition, Treaties and the State, Palgrave, 2020

26Dec20

Description: This book explains how recognition theory contributes to non-colonial and enduring political relationships between Indigenous nations and the state. It refers to Indigenous Australian arguments for a Voice to Parliament and treaties to show what recognition may mean for practical politics and policy-making. It considers critiques of recognition theory by Canadian First Nations’ scholars who make strong arguments for its assimilationist effect, but shows that ultimately, recognition is a theory and practice of transformative potential, requiring fundamentally different ways of thinking about citizenship and sovereignty. This book draws extensively on New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi and measures to support Maori political participation, to show what treaties and a Voice to Parliament could mean in practical terms. It responds to liberal democratic objections to show how institutionalised means of indigenous participation may, in fact, make democracy work better.

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Racial capitalism and settler colonialism: Iyko Day, ‘Racial Capitalism, Colonialism, and Death-Dealing Abstraction’, American Quarterly, 72, 4, 2020, pp. 1033-1046

26Dec20

Excerpt: “Racial capitalism is all capitalism” writes Ruth Wilson Gilmore. “There was not one minute in the entire story of capitalism that it was not racial.” And so this story goes: the “explorer,” the survey, the map, the property owner, the corporation, and the shareholder stake a claim to the future that is “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The four monographs discussed here offer powerful illumination and insight to Gilmore’s words, demonstrating the need to unravel the relations of capitalism and colonialism in order to grasp the promise of abolition and decolonization. Extending the interventions of scholars working in and across Native and Indigenous studies, Black studies, and critical ethnic studies, these authors showcase the rewards of critical reassessment and reorientation, transporting us beyond conventional distinctions between land and labor, structure and event, theft and property.

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The window is a settler! Jasmine Rault, ‘Window Walls and Other Tricks of Transparency: Digital, Colonial, and Architectural Modernity’, American Quarterly, 72, 4, 2020, pp. 937-960

26Dec20

Abstract: How did transparency become the settler colonial version of justice? Answering this question involves tracking some of the ways that transparency has become a technology of communication, a medium whose message is honesty, accountability, truth, and justice. This essay offers a short history of this new medium, which includes modernist architecture, networked data, dispossession through consultation, and a lot of dead birds. I put the Toronto Dominion Centre (1969), Canada’s first and tallest wall of windows, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, into conversation with the “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969,” to consider how Canada’s investments in architectural modernity mirror its investments in techniques, structures, and aesthetics of colonial governance and nonreciprocal transparency.

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An ongoing debate: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Is settler colonial studies even useful?’ Postcolonial Studies, 2020

25Dec20

Abstract: This brief article is a response. It engages with recent critiques of settler colonial studies as an intellectual endeavour. Settler colonial studies, a number of scholars have argued, is at best useless, but worse, it may actually be detrimental to Indigenous struggles. What is the use of studying settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination when this knowledge is irrelevant to the struggle against a disempowering politics of forced recognition and for Indigenous resurgence? If this is an indictment, the following notes are meant as a provisional defence.

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Settler colonialism is a system: Nisha Nath, ‘Curated hostilities and the story of Abdoul Abdi: relational securitization in the settler colonial racial state’, Citizenship Studies, 2020

25Dec20

Abstract: This paper offers the framework of relational securitization to understand the publicly documented story of Abdoul Abdi, a former child refugee from Somalia who spent the majority of his life in government care, and, at the age of 24, faced deportation because the state failed to secure his citizenship. Drawing from a reading of the Federal Court of Canada’s 2018 ruling in Abdoulkader Abdi v The Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, I argue that we can understand Abdoul’s story as part of an organized logic, wherein the state regulates and securitizes marginalized subjects in reliant ways. Put differently, the intersecting and interacting custodial institutions of child welfare, policing, and borders and detention reveal how systemic anti-Blackness and settler colonialism are not separate enactments of the white supremacist settler colonial state but enactments that need and rely on each other; they are relational.

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Environmental justice against settler colonialism: Laura A. Bray, ‘Settler Colonialism and Rural Environmental Injustice: Water Inequality on the Navajo Nation’, Rural Sociology, 2020

25Dec20

Abstract: Environmental justice research highlights the distinct processes generating environmental problems in rural places. Rural communities of color suffer the dual disadvantage of spatial and racial marginalization, yet we know little about the role of race and racism within rural environmental inequality formation. This study draws on theories of settler colonialism and rural environmental justice to investigate the historical formation of water inequality in the American Southwest. In 1962, Congress authorized two water projects to divide the San Juan River between the Navajo Nation and New Mexico. The Navajo Indian Irrigation project (NIIP) would develop family farms on the Navajo Nation, while the San Juan‐Chama Project (SJCP) diverted water into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use. While New Mexico’s project was completed ahead of schedule in 1973, the NIIP has yet to be finished today, almost six decades later. Using archival material, government documents, and secondary accounts, this study examines racial meanings in the years leading up to NIIP approval. Findings reveal that settler officials used the NIIP as a mechanism to appropriate Native resources. I show how racial projects within NIIP negotiations contributed to colonial domination by diminishing the political sovereignty of the Navajo Nation.

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