settler colonial studies blog

We are NOT in this together: Laura Finley, ‘COVID-19, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples’, PJSA, 2020

22Sep20

Excerpt: Already marginalized, indigenous peoples face unique challenges from COVID-19. Access to healthcare is limited, and indigenous peoples suffer higher rates of other diseases that make them more vulnerable to the pandemic. Some very isolated groups that have little interaction with outsiders have poorly developed immunity to infectious diseases. Yet outsiders are increasingly entering these areas, such as in Brazil where illegal logging and mining threatens not just the land but dramatically increases the risk for indigenous peoples, with some experts saying “ethnocide” is likely. Poor sanitation, limited provisions of other necessary items like soap, disinfectant, and even clean water, inadequately staffed medical facilities, combined with existing poverty, large multigenerational families living together, unemployment and reduced chances to retain work at home exacerbate the problems for indigenous people around the globe. This is all on top of tremendous discrimination, all of which are legacies of colonialism. Testing for COVID-19 is not widespread in areas where indigenous peoples live, nor is educational material about infectious diseases or protective materials like masks and gloves. Food insecurity, an existing problem, is worsening for indigenous peoples, according to the United Nations. Indigenous women suffer higher rates of domestic and sexual violence, both of which increase during crises of this sort. Access to help services is already sparse and jurisdictional issues on native lands mean police responses are slow if not existent.

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Mining under settler colonialism: Jennifer Jones, Confronting Settler Colonialism When Assessing the Impact of Mining on Indigenous Peoples’ Health and Well-Being, PhD dissertation, University of Guelph, 2020

22Sep20

Abstract: In Northern Canada, mechanisms governing mining designed to address health and well-being impacts find their origin in modern-day treaties. However, advancements to environmental assessments, impact benefit agreements, and health impact assessments have yet to reflect calls to redress the legacies of structural injustices in mining governance processes related to settler colonialism, such as residential schools and forced relocation. This dissertation responds to these calls, and argues that in order to better address the impact of mining on Indigenous Peoples’ health and well-being, governance mechanisms should consider how Indigenous Peoples describe the impact of mining, challenge the presumptions underlying governance mandates, and find ways to
reflect and consider impacts of settler colonialism as experienced by Indigenous Peoples. This participatory case study, premised on decolonizing research approaches, was conducted with Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation (LSCFN), a self-governing First Nation in Yukon. Data were
gathered from a total of 56 interviews with Yukon First Nations Peoples (n=42) and individuals
who operationalize mining governance (n=21), and a community focus group meeting with LSCFN,
complemented by digital storytelling, research assistant training, and a survey. Key findings,
emergent from qualitative analysis and circle sorting, reveal that: 1) attention to intersectional
Indigenous values, and not discrete impacts from mining, illustrate the important intersections
between and among the loss of culture and language, kinship ties, and access to the land with the diverse impacts of mining operations; and 2) mining governance mechanisms are institutions that often perpetuate loss of identity and dispossession of land and, as a result, undermine modern-day treaty relations. In response, this dissertation introduces potential strategies designed to confront settler assumptions and reconsider what data to assess in mining assessments, based on Indigenous values and relationships with lands. Thus, this research contributes knowledge which may assist in addressing social and political injustices related to mining governance mechanisms within Indigenous territories and homelands. Ultimately, by addressing settler colonialism in the mechanisms governing mining, governments and industry can demonstrate their participation in healing relationships with Indigenous Peoples so that the negotiated benefits and mitigation strategies result in positive health and well-being outcomes for individuals and communities.

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Self-determination is history: Laura Rademaker, Tim Rowse (eds), Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia: Histories and Historiography, ANU Press, 2020

22Sep20

Description: Histories of the colonisation of Australia have recognised distinct periods or eras in the colonial relationship: ‘protection’ and ‘assimilation’. It is widely understood that, in 1973, the Whitlam Government initiated a new policy era: ‘self-determination’. Yet, the defining features of this era, as well as how, why and when it ended, are far from clear. In this collection we ask: how shall we write the history of self-determination? How should we bring together, in the one narrative, innovations in public policy and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander initiatives? How (dis)continuous has ‘self-determination’ been with ‘assimilation’ or with what came after? Among the contributions to this book there are different views about whether Australia is still practising ‘self-determination’ and even whether it ever did or could.

This book covers domains of government policy and Indigenous agency including local government, education, land rights, the outstation movement, international law, foreign policy, capital programs, health, public administration, mission policies and the policing of identity. Each of the contributors is a specialist in his/her topic. Few of the contributors would call themselves ‘historians’, but each has met the challenge to consider Australia’s recent past as an era animated by ideas and practices of Indigenous self-determination.

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Settlers are military civilian hybrids: Mohamed Adhikari, ‘”We will utterly destroy them… and we will go in and possess the land”: reflections on the role of civilian-driven violence in the making of settler genocides’, Acta Academica, 52, 1, 2020, pp. 142-164

22Sep20

Abstract: This article seeks, in necessarily limited ways, to shed light on a neglected area by exploring aspects of the dynamic behind civilian-driven violence in settler colonial situations globally. Although civilian-driven violence against indigenous peoples was both specific and congenital to frontier relations, and has been intrinsic to settler society after the closing of the frontier, the concept has not featured in any significant way in either genocide studies or investigations of settler conquest. The focus has instead largely been on the roles of metropolitan and colonial states and their military forces. Civilian-driven violence needs to be conceptualised as distinct from other forms – with dynamics and attributes of its own – to enable a more nuanced understanding of how exterminatory impulses toward indigenous peoples have developed in settler colonial situations.

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One colony after the other: Jane Lydon, ‘A Secret Longing for a Trade in Human Flesh: the Decline of British Slavery and the Making of the Settler Colonies’, History Workshop Journal, 2020

22Sep20

Abstract: Focusing upon the achievement of the abolition of British slavery in 1833 has obscured significant continuities between slavery, apprenticeship, and the post-emancipation period, particularly in the new Anglophone settler colonies. During the decade leading up to abolition, domestic unrest intensified the tension between the elite abolitionist movement’s humanitarian concern for Caribbean slaves, and its leaders’ simultaneous implication in the repression of British workers – a corollary of which relegated convicts to the category of unreformable ‘voluntary slaves’. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s 1829 proposal for colonization entered a longstanding debate about labour discipline that was central both to ameliorative slave reform and to experiments in emigration and settler colonialism, and expressed his ambivalence regarding the benefits of ‘free labour’. In the transition to new labour regimes, systematic colonization translated categories and practices developed in the Caribbean into colonial projects, including raced and classed labour hierarchies targeted to specific climatic zones. As Caribbean slavery ended and settler colonialism began, the new colonies offered a solution to the loss of the ‘trade in human flesh’ by removing dissenters from the British social order, opening up new fields for investment, and creating a disciplined colonial labour force.

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Chasing the settlers: Aileen Friesen, ‘Omsk bishops and spiritualized travel amidst settler colonization of Siberia, 1890–1917’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2020

19Sep20

Abstract: This article examines the role episcopal visitations played in traversing, constituting, and representing religious space in the newly founded diocese of Omsk in late imperial Russia. As the Russian state encouraged the movement of millions of peasants to Siberia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Russian Orthodox Church struggled to define its role under these new conditions of settler colonization. Using travelogues from these trips, this article illustrates how diocesan officials aimed to represent the bishops of Omsk as spiritual fathers, sacralizing this vast territory historically neglected by the institutional church.

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Indigenous labour and settler colonialism: Chantal Norrgard, ‘Indigenous Labor, Settler Colonialism, and the History of the Fraser River Fishermen’s Strike of 1893’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 7, 2, 2020, pp. 114-144

19Sep20

Abstract: Despite a valuable body of scholarship on Native American and Indigenous labor, few studies explore the unionization of Indigenous workers or their participation in labor movements. The Fraser River Fishermen’s Strike of 1893 was the first major strike in British Columbia’s history. The Indigenous history of this strike illuminates how settler colonialism built the commercial fishing industry, defined the interests of settler workers, and led to the development of the labor movement. The strike also demonstrates how Indigenous people’s anticolonial struggles were embedded in their actions as workers. A range of historical sources, including provincial and federal legislation, legal cases, hearings, the reports of Indian agents, newspaper articles, and autobiographies, document the longer history of colonial expansion and Indigenous labor and resistance leading up to the 1893 Fraser River Fishermen’s Strike. I argue that Indigenous people’s early participation in British Columbia’s labor movement was tied to their efforts to resist colonial encroachment on their fishing rights. The interests of a number of Indigenous leaders from across the province in asserting their sovereignty and retaining power over their labor ultimately led to the creation of a new Indigenous political movement that centered on the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia and its counterpart, the Native Sisterhood. This history challenges labor historians to further address the gaps between labor history and Indigenous histories.

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The city as settler: Janice Barry, Julian Agyeman, ‘On belonging and becoming in the settler-colonial city: Co-produced futurities, placemaking, and urban planning in the United States’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, 2020

19Sep20

Abstract: With a few notable exceptions, settler-colonial theory has not been applied to the study of U.S. cities and urban planning. Settler-colonial theory is a relatively new field of scholarship that interrogates the destruction of Indigenous laws, ways of knowing, and connections to place to make way for a new settler futurity. This futurity is particularly pronounced in cities, where Indigenous peoples have been rendered almost completely invisible and where their opportunities to shape urban development are highly circumscribed. We use settler-colonial theory, as well as Indigenous scholars’ responses to it, to extend ideas of belonging and becoming in urban planning and placemaking. We turn to the theory and practice of co-production as one possible intervention into how the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous placemakers could be conceived and enacted in the urban environment.

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Settler colonialism as an infinite pause: John Connell, Robert Aldrich, ‘New Caledonia: The Infinite Pause? In John Connell, Robert Aldrich, The Ends of Empire: The Last Colonies Revisited, Palgrave, 2020, pp. 195-225

19Sep20

Abstract: By the end of the twentieth century, the French overseas territory of New Caledonia was relatively calm and peaceful after a protracted period of considerable, violent disorder in the 1980s, that had resulted in several deaths. Most of the indigenous Melanesian (Kanak) population had struggled for independence in the 1980s, while most other residents of the OT had opposed it. Of all the present OTs, New Caledonia is the only one where people have literally fought for independence. While peace was restored, and violence ended, it remained the OT where independence seemed most likely, but more probably through persuasion and the ballot box, rather than through the barrels of guns. However, significant pressure for independence came primarily from the indigenous Kanaks who now constituted less than half the population, the remainder being migrants from France, Asia and Polynesia, and their descendants. As in many other OTs, efforts to achieve independence were intimately linked to questions of identity in what had become, in the nineteenth century, a settler colony.

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Settler colonialism and urban space: Jessica Ty Miller, ‘Temporal analysis of displacement: Racial capitalism and settler colonial urban space’, Geoforum, 2020

16Sep20

Abstract: Researchers have often called for micro-scale analyses of residential displacement, and more recently, for work that acknowledges the importance of temporal and spatial relationships that influence current iterations of residential displacement. Relying on grounding in urban political ecology, and work in gentrification, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism, this paper highlights the historic relationships between development interests and resident groups in Gowanus, Brooklyn to examine how historic context shapes the development of displacement patterns. Relying on historic texts and images found in New York City archives, this work documents the developmental history of Gowanus, which has held a prominent place in New York City history since before the 1600s, when European settler colonists began to create farms and mills based on existing local knowledge of the landscape held by the Canarsee, a Munsee speaking Indigenous group of Lenape people who lived in the area now known as Gowanus. Over time, several groups of developers and industrialists dominated this space by morphing the tidal wetland into an industrial waterway, capitalizing on the waterfront as a commodity. Most recently, residents who can afford luxury rentals with views of waterfront have moved into the area. At the same time, city plans and the United States Environmental Protection Agency are addressing the legacy of contamination in the area. The varying access and attitude toward the canal over time continues to impact the development in the area, with some people being forced out, while others are moving in. This work builds on the growing literature on residential displacement to argue that even with embedded silence in archival materials, investigating the long-range historic patterns of development can be a useful method for understanding current iterations of development and displacement, including the most recent shift towards high-end waterfront living.

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