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Settlers steal children now: Theresa Rocha Beardall, Frank Edwards, ‘Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and the Persistent Threat of Indian Child Welfare, SOCArXiv, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Family separation is a defining feature of the relationship between the U.S.government and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) families and tribal nations. The historical record catalogues this relationship in several ways including the mass displacement of Native children into boarding schools throughout the 19th century and the widespread adoption of Native children into non-Indian homes in the 20th century. Child removal was commonplace, and explicitly directed at the elimination of Native cultures and nations through aggressive assimilation. This violent legacy eventually prompted the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978. TheICWA introduced federal protections for Native children, families, and tribes against unnecessary removal and affirmed the role of the tribe as an important partner in child welfare proceedings. To what extent has this landmark legislation changed the prevalence and frequency of Native family separation since 1978? What can be done to reduce the threat of the child welfare system on the well-being of Native families today? In this Article, we use administrative and historical data to statistically evaluate the magnitude of change in AIAN family separation since the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act and locate the institutional pathways by which AIAN families are funneled into the child welfare system.Our findings reveal that despite long-standing treaty responsibilities to support the health and well-being of tribal nations, high rates of separation among AIAN children persist. In particular, we find that the frequency ofAIAN children’s placement into foster care has remained relatively stable since the passage of the ICWA, that AIAN children remain at incredibly high risk of family separation through the child welfare system, and that the post-investigation removal decision by child welfare agencies is a key mechanism of inequality in family separation. We situate these findings within theories about settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession to illustrate that the continuous removal of Native children from their families and tribal communities is not an anomaly. Instead, we argue that the very intent of aWhite supremacist settler-state is to dismantle Native families and tribal nations. Based upon these findings, we shift our focus away from the particularities of Indian child welfare and argue that the child welfare system more broadly must be abolished in order to stop the routine separation of Native children from their families by the state. Left intact, child protection systems prioritize surveillance and separation over welfare and support, affecting non-White children and families in immeasurable ways. We suggest that the ICWA has provided, and will continue to provide, a necessary intervention to protect Native families so long as this intrusive system remains. We conclude by exploring how an abolitionist approach to child welfare might positively impact Native families by immediately redirecting social and financial resources into the hands of Native families and working cooperatively with tribal communities to promote Indigenous communities of care.


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Settler colonialism as infrastructural mediation: Rafico Ruiz, Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier, Duke University Press, 2021

30Mar21

Description: From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador’s coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission’s infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony’s environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission’s history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.


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Refusing reconciliation and teaching how and why: Kevin Lowe, Nikki Moodie, Sara Weuffen, ‘Refusing Reconciliation in Indigenous Curriculum’, in Bill Green, Philip Roberts, Marie Brennan (eds), Curriculum Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World: Transnational Perspectives in Curriculum Inquiry, Springer, 2021, pp. 71-86

25Mar21

Access the chapter here.


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The Western outside the West: Alex Trimble Young, ‘Settler Colonial Studies and/as the Transnational Western: Resistance and Representation in Academic Discourse and Cultural Production ‘, History of the Present 11, 1, 2021, pp 80–105

24Mar21

Abstract: The article explores contemporary debates regarding the representation of Indigenous resistance in the field of settler colonial studies by putting the work of Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe into conversation with the political allegories articulated in two contemporary Western films. Its first section, tracing what Wolfe called his “pharmacological indebtedness” to Gayatri Spivak, considers the methodological problems for settler colonial studies that have emerged from Wolfe’s critique of the settler intellectual’s representation of Indigenous resistance. The second section suggests an alternative direction for transnational settler colonial studies by undertaking a comparative reading of two films—Hell or High Water (2016) written by US settler filmmaker Taylor Sheridan, and Goldstone (2016) written and directed by Indigenous Australian (Gamilaroi) director Ivan Sen. Both films collapse the detective genre with settler colonialism’s most recognizable representational genre: the Western. In so doing, they articulate narratives about the ongoing crimes of settler colonialism that offer novel perspectives on the question of what is knowable—and by whom—under settler colonialism’s structure of violence.


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The settler’s home by invitation: Deanne Aline Marie Leblanc, ‘The Roles of Settler Canadians within Decolonization: Re-evaluating Invitation, Belonging and Rights’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2021

23Mar21

Abstract: This article, grounded within the argument that liberal citizenship and recognition-based approaches to decolonization are inappropriate responses to Indigenous calls to decolonize, proposes an alternative approach premised on re-evaluating non-Indigenous understandings of invitation, belonging and rights within the Canadian settler state. I suggest that non-Indigenous peoples consider themselves “foreigners” in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands and that, as colonial denizens, non-Indigenous Canadians take up an ethos that encourages them to re-evaluate their lives and relations with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous lands and the settler state. Such re-evaluations would encourage settlers to question the sovereignty of the state and their daily relations, as well as encourage them to place responsibilities to others above inwardly focused rights. I contend that identifying and acting upon such an ethos can provide a way through which non-Indigenous peoples can appropriately and seriously meet Indigenous peoples’ calls for change.


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The settler’s home through walking: Stephanie Bartlett, ‘Walking on This Earth, Finding Belonging: Ruminations of an Unsettled Settler’, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 18, 2, 2021, pp. 212-237

23Mar21

Abstract: In this paper, I contemplate my positionality as a non-Indigenous settler of Scottish, English and German descent. I (re)visit places that have shaped my life-journey and engages in a thoughtful participation between language, land and my positionality as an emerging researcher within an Indigenist paradigm. I consider Regan’s (2010) concept of the unsettled settler, defined as nonIndigenous people learning to embrace the struggle to face truths of colonialism and the consequences of the Indian Residential School system. Through photovoice and poetic inquiry, I reflect on my own encounters with the land and more-than-human relatives as a way to disrupt colonial assumptions. Ruminations, pictures and a collection of poems invite an exploration of the curricular implications of land-based teachings and reconciling ways of knowing with the land. By delving into and sharing my own personal experiences on the land, I hope to invite non-Indigenous educators to consider their own positionality and relationship with the land as part of their response to the Truth and Reconciliation (2015) calls to action.


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The settler’s home through composting: Avril Bell, Rebecca Ream, ‘Troubling Pākehā Relations to Place: Composting Home Stories ‘, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 10, 1, 2021, pp. 97–116

23Mar21

Abstract: In this duoethnographic essay, united in our desire as white settler scholars to trouble the settler colonial legacies still steeped in what counts as our “home,” we have written personal accounts of our connections to certain places. Building on these musings, we explore the ontological perspectives of Donna J. Haraway and Karen Barad to navigate the more-than-human dimensions of our home places as well as their troubling colonial histories. Using composting as theory making, we make tentative conclusions about the practice of white settler response-ability and the possibilities of a more response-able relationship with Indigenous people and with our home places.


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An emergent paradigm: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Tracing Settler Colonialism: A Genealogy of a Paradigm in the Sociology of Knowledge Production in Israel’, Politics & Society, 2021

21Mar21

Abstract: Knowledge is inextricably bound to power in the context of settler colonialism where apprehension of the Other is a tool of domination. Tracing the development of the “settler colonial” paradigm, this article deconstructs Zionist and Israeli dispossession of Palestinian land and sovereignty, applying the sociology of knowledge production to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm’s reformulation. This article offers a phenomenology of Palestinian positionality, a critical potential for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, to consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research into the Israeli-Palestinian case but approaches to decolonization and liberation.


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Settler colonial slow violence: Pauline Wakeham, ‘The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism: Genocide, Attrition, and the Long Emergency of Invasion’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2021

21Mar21

Abstract: In recent decades, scholarship has sought to redress genocide studies’ lack of attention to assaults against Indigenous group life in settler colonial contexts. While this scholarship has made important interventions into a field dominated by the Holocaust prototype, work on genocides targeting Indigenous peoples has still laboured under the shadow of this paradigm’s norms, including the prioritization of time-intense direct violence enacted with explicit intent. Studies of settler colonial genocide have consequently tended to focus upon specific, temporally-bound historical policies and events despite the fact that such assaults are part of settler colonialism’s persistent structure of invasion. In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada challenged this case-specific approach, arguing that violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people is part of a protracted, ongoing genocide against Indigenous nations. In this article, I expand upon the Inquiry’s consideration of slower, less direct modes of group destruction. To do so, I draw upon scholarship on genocide by attrition—a concept not mentioned in the Inquiry’s report. Despite their shared concerns, studies of genocide by attrition and settler colonial genocide have yet to engage each other substantially. I consider how cross-pollination between these fields helps to challenge restrictive equations of genocide with time-intensive direct violence. Additionally, I develop a framework for addressing the cumulative harms that accrue when multiple genocidal processes are waged upon Indigenous nations as part of settler colonialism’s long emergency. Finally, I consider how settler colonial genocidal processes necessitate a more nuanced, knowledge-based interpretation of intent—an approach that illuminates how the consequences of protracted assaults become undeniable and, therefore, undeniably intended as they proceed in slow motion.


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The invisibility of indigenous nonviolence: Michelle Pace, Muhammad Shehada, Ziad Abu Mustafa, ‘Interpolating Gazans’ non-violence: Responsibilities in the academy and the media’, Partecipazione e conflitto, 2, 2021

21Mar21

Abstract: Since the creation of Israel in 1948 its strategies of suppressing Palestinian resistance reveal a conscious scheme of slow elimination of the natives. What concerns us in this article is that, in light of all Israel’s intentional violence, episodes of Palestinian non-violence do not capture and sustain the world’s attention in the way that violent acts do. In order to fill this gap, and conceptually, we draw upon the rich works of Puar and de Sousa Santos, as well as others, to show how Gazans’ heterogeneous ontologies and experiences with Israel’s settler colonialism have, over the years, shaped a multiplicity of strategies for resistance. Empirically, we draw upon ethnographic observations and interviews conducted with Gazan Great March of Return (GRM) protesters to analyze their strategies of nonviolence. We conclude that, in spite of the lack of sustained focus by academics and the media (in general) on the embedded resilience of Palestinians to Israel’s settler colonial regime, and in spite of Israel’s targeting of resistance itself, Palestinians’ resolve remains as alive as ever in pursuit of their right to have rights. Our analysis in turn has implications for how the media and the academy interpolate and write about nonviolence.


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