settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism at the end of town: Desiree Poets, ‘Settler colonialism and/in (urban) Brazil: black and indigenous resistances to the logic of elimination’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

11Oct20

Abstract: How does elimination work in Brazil? After a brief history of miscegenation as assimilation/elimination, this article addresses this question through the experiences of one urban indigenous group (Aldeia Maracanã) and one urban Afro-descendant quilombo (Sacopã) in Rio de Janeiro. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017, the article traces the continuities of settler colonialism in independent Brazil, including the multicultural turn of the 1988 Constitution. I centralise the lived experiences and struggles of the two groups, whose intersecting politics are caught within the inescapability of being ‘within Empire’ while having to imagine a politics outside of it (Simpson 2014). I then contribute to Settler Colonial Theory from this perspective, challenging its land-labour binary, for blacks and indígenas have both been affected by processes of elimination, dispossession, labour exploitation, and exclusion (racism). Moreover, miscegenation/assimilation has not been merely ‘a kind of death’, as Patrick Wolfe has portrayed it (Wolfe, 2006). Miscegenation has also functioned as the space from which indigenous and black peoples have resurged, survived, and thrived. When we engage critically with the political options available to these groups within settler colonialism, we are forced to ask: What does it mean to talk about de-colonisation in Brazil?

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Settler colonialism at the end of the Earth (which for Indigenous peoples is its centre): Forrest Wade Young, ‘Unsettling the boundaries of Latin America: Rapa Nui and the refusal of Chilean settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

11Oct20

Abstract: Latin America is popularly imagined territorialized by continental Central and South America, extending to the Caribbean Islands; however, from the vantage of the Chilean government, Latin America expands thousands of miles into the Pacific Ocean within an area it legalizes as ‘the Chilean Sea’ (El Mar Chileno) given its control of ‘Easter Island’ (Isla de Pascua). Since 1888, despite persistent resistance by the Indigenous Polynesian Rapa Nui people, Chile has imposed colonial rule on the island through a variety of administrative strategies. This paper illuminates how state construction of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) around Rapa Nui can be understood as a biopolitical strategy of environmentality that strengthens Chilean settler colonialism in Rapa Nui. While settler colonialism has been rightly analyzed in terms of control of land, herein the ‘transit of Empire’ from Indigenous loci of enunciation appears to also articulate through the ocean. Despite the MPA, forces of Rapa Nui biopower mobilizing new Indigenous institutions and practices of self-determination are shown resilient in El Mar Chileno; the boundaries of settler colonial Latin America are unsettled.

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Settler rhetorics: Dionne T. Jake, The Synecdochal Bison: Rhetorical Colonialism in an Age of Territorial Dispossession, PhD Dissertation, University of Colorado, 2020

09Oct20

Abstract: From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century, European colonizers worked to eliminate bison and Indigenous peoples in the territory known today as “North America.” In this dissertation, I argue that today’s American settler institutions, or facilities established on
dispossessed lands, continue to invoke the symbol of the bison in their efforts to maintain their control of said lands. As I explain, the US federal government, media, and scholars have problematized how nineteenth century settler institutions exterminated bison to starve select
Indigenous peoples into submission, thus clearing a path to settle the American West. Notably, the logic behind this act of white settler supremacy was synecdochal in that American settlers communicated about the bison’s health, taken as an integral part of Native America, as indicative
of the health of Native America writ large. Yet, scholars have not questioned whether settler institutions have engaged in comparable patterns of communication after this tragedy. Accordingly, I employ mixed methods, including participant-observation and textual analysis of social, print, and digital media, to outline how today’s settler institutions more recently have
invoked the symbol of the bison as a figure of rhetorical colonialism when forming community, selling products, and building the nation’s symbolic profile. Ultimately, I will show how even though today’s invocations of the synecdochal bison may look harmless, the symbol of the bison has never ceased to function as the rhetorical means for settler institutions to facilitate and justify their control of dispossessed lands, including the Indigenous peoples and bison who reside on it.

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Veganism against settler colonialism: Maneesha Decka, ‘Veganism, dairy, and decolonization’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 11, 2, 2020, pp. 244–267

07Oct20

Abstract: Plant-based diets are often perceived as being antithetical to Indigenous interests in what is today colonially known as Canada. This perceived antithesis hinges on veganism’s rejection of the consumption of animals. This apparent antithesis, however, is a misperception that a reframing of ethical veganism can help correct. This article argues that veganism’s objection to dairy should be underscored as a central concern of ethical veganism. Such emphasis not only brings into view the substantial alignment between plant-based diets and Indigenous worldviews, but also highlights the related goals of decolonization and reconciliation in Canada. Veganism, in reality, rejects a practice (dairy farming) that was constitutive of settler colonialism in North America and which still promotes colonial familial ideologies while constructing Indigenous peoples and other non-Europeans (who disproportionately cannot tolerate lactose) as abnormal. Veganism – along with vegetarianism – shares the general respect for animals and interspecies relations (along with a concomitant disavowal of human exceptionalism) that many Indigenous legal orders in Canada promote. Yet, despite this shared disavowal of a principal colonial ideology, the tight correlation between hunting and Indigeneity on the one hand, and veganism and vegetarianism and an objection to killing animals on the other, makes veganism’s contributions to decolonization and reconciliation difficult to see. By framing veganism as a critique of the dairy industry, however, the associations that veganism has with decolonizing ends are not clouded by these overpowering correlations, helping to bring into view even vegetarianism’s contributions toward these ends.

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Against settler colonial mapping: Reuben Rose-Redwood, Natchee Blu Barnd, Annita Hetoevėhotohke’e Lucchesi, Sharon Dias, Wil Patrick, ‘Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings’, Cartographica, 55, 3, 2020, pp. 151-162

07Oct20

Abstract: For over five centuries, cartographic map-making has played a pivotal role as a political technology of empire-building, settler colonialism, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Yet Indigenous peoples themselves have long engaged in their own mapping practices to share ancestral knowledge, challenge colonial rule, and reclaim Indigenous “place-worlds.” Although there is now a sizable body of scholarly literature on the mapping of empire, this special issue on “Decolonizing the Map” aims to recenter Indigenous mappings and decolonial cartographies as spatial practices of world-making. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the theory and praxis of decolonial mapping and outline the key themes of the contributions to the present special issue. Drawing upon insights from this edited collection, we conclude that decolonial mapping requires a recentering of Indigenous geographical knowledge, respect for Indigenous protocols, and the active participation of Indigenous peoples in the mapping process itself if the project of decolonizing the map is to truly move beyond the colonial cartographic frame.

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Settler colonialism’s strategic opportunism: Ghassan Abu-Sittah, ‘The Virus, the Settler, and the Siege: Gaza in the Age of Corona’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 49, 4, 2020, pp. 65-76

07Oct20

Abstract: This essay explores the challenges and opportunities that the Covid-19 pandemic has afforded Israel as it broadens its settler-colonial objectives internally, in Gaza, and elsewhere. In particular, it sheds light on the heightened militaristic and economic approaches taken by Israel to further entrench its siege of Palestinians in Gaza and to export increasingly advanced technologies of surveillance and state control long deployed against the Palestinian people. This investigation thus offers an opportunity to probe settler colonialism’s strategic opportunism in the face of the historic pandemic.

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The land is not empty, not before and not after settlement: Alex Korsunsky, ‘Putting Workers on the Map: Agricultural Atlases and the Willamette Valley’s Hidden Labor Landscape’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2020

04Oct20

Abstract: Analyzing Oregon agricultural atlases from 1878 to 1958, I show that, despite these texts’ projection of impartial authority, they function to extend a discourse of natural bounty in which agricultural abundance is linked to inherent characteristics of the land, hiding the role of racialized and disenfranchised laborers in production. Using a combination of Agricultural Census data, historical and contemporary records from farmers and agricultural extension services, and GIS software, I demonstrate a method for reconstructing historical and contemporary agricultural labor landscapes, filling in—at least partially—the spatial absence of farmworkers. Using maps I have produced for a limited set of crops as a case study, alongside worker testimonies and ethnographic accounts, I argue that this sort of counter-mapping of the agricultural landscape can form the basis for an alternative spatial narrative of changing landscapes, replacing the depopulated and bountiful nature of conventional agricultural atlases with maps that reveal the agricultural landscape from a worker’s perspective that centers the hidden the toil and suffering entailed in the creation of Oregon’s agricultural bounty.

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Disturbing settlers: Sarah Heinz, ‘Unsettling Australia: Disturbing White Settler Homemaking in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang’, Humanities, 2020

04Oct20

Abstract: Proceeding from Australia’s specific situation as a settler colony, this article discusses how the ambivalences and fissures of settler subjectivity shape processes of homemaking. Settler homemaking depends on the disturbance of Indigenous Australians’ homelands via dispossession,
exclusion, and genocide, but it equally depends upon the creation of a white settler subject as innocent, entitled, and belonging to what has been called ‘white indigeneity’. The article traces this double disturbance in Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey’s rewriting
of the iconic Kelly legend uncovers the dangers of a possessive, male, white indigeneity based on effacement and exclusion. The novel’s critical staging of Ned Kelly’s construction of Australia as a home for a new class of ‘natives’ challenges an essentialist white Australianness and its narratives of embattled settlement, independence, mateship, and the Bush. The novel shows that the creation of this national character is based on the denial of Aboriginal ownership and agency. Ned’s narrative of Irish victimhood and his formation of a new sense of Australianness is therefore doomed to repeat the violence, discrimination, and exclusion of colonialism that he seems to decry.

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Incarceration as elimination: Olga Marques, Lisa Monchalin, ‘The Mass Incarceration of Indigenous Women in Canada: A Colonial Tactic of Control and Assimilation’, in Lily George, Adele N. Norris, Antje Deckert, Juan Tauri (eds), Neo-Colonial Injustice and the Mass Imprisonment of Indigenous Women, Palgrave, 2020, pp. 79-102

04Oct20

Abstract: Indigenous women in Canada are imprisoned at rates that have surpassed Indigenous men, and these numbers continue to grow. This mass imprisonment is due to the continued paternalistic assault on Indigenous women—perpetrated and fuelled by the colonial state—that has been ongoing since the initial arrival of the colonizers. Indigenous women have historically and continually been seen as a threat by the colonizers due to their power and prominence held in their communities. Due to their central roles in communities, Indigenous women have been a target of the colonial agenda to eliminate Indigenous presence. The criminal justice system in Canada became one of the major apparatuses set up to assimilate and control Indigenous presence. This mass imprisonment of Indigenous women is ongoing genocide and cannot be understood outside of the context of the colonial and necropolitical agenda. Prisons represent the epitome of the colonial apparatus which has continually tried to dismantle Indigenous peoples, communities, and families. Yet despite these genocidal colonial tactics, Indigenous women remain, which serves to show their strength and resilience.

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Following the settler trail: Lauren Harding, Walking the wild coast: territory, belonging, and tourism on the West Coast Trail, PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2020

30Sep20

Abstract: This dissertation describes the results of ethnographic research on the wilderness tourist attraction known as the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It investigates settler-colonial views of and experiences in a space that is claimed by the Canadian state and is
also part of the traditional territories of indigenous peoples. The entanglement of wilderness tourism and settler-colonialism is analyzed in the contemporary Canadian context where, it is argued, Canadian nationalism and indigenous reconciliation are in conflict. Particular attention is paid to the complex ways a space is constructed as wilderness (and therefore a-cultural and ahistorical) through both material and representational actions of the settler-colonial state. The trail is a 75 kilometre backcountry hiking trail managed as the West Coast Trail Unit of Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. It is co-managed by Parks Canada and the Huu-ay-aht, Ditidaht and Pacheedaht First Nations. Fieldwork was conducted from 2013-2014, where the investigator based herself in the settler community of Bamfield and repeatedly hiked the length of the trail interacting with both visitors and locals. Qualitative data was collected through interviews and participant observation with both locals living on and near the trail and hikers recreating in the national park. This thesis posits that Canadian settler-colonialism venerates not only idealized images of a national landscape but also the active engagement with nature through recreation. It is contended that within this active, corporeal, and material engagement there is potential for challenges to static colonial narratives of wilderness that mask Indigenous territory.

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