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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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Decolonial imaginaries from literature: Rebecca Lynne Fullan, Eating the Heart of Weetigo World: Decolonial Imaginaries in the Stories of Louise Erdrich and Tomson Highway, PhD dissertation, CUNY, 2020

30Sep20

Abstract: My dissertation asks what the decolonial possibilities of fiction are in the context of the settler colonial imaginaries particular to the United States and Canada. The ongoing process of settler colonialism demands various forms of conversion from Indigenous people: ecological/land based, religious, educational, legal, familial, but the construct of “conversion” obscures Indigenous worldviews, and indeed worlds, which function according to different principles. I interpret Erdrich and Highway’s work in the context of Anishinaabe and Cree narratives and story-structures. These offer examples of what can constitute broader decolonial imaginaries, through which perception and creation of other, more liveable worlds is possible. Fiction by Indigenous writers, I argue, acts as the expressions and creative tools of worlds that do exist, but, according to the truth-claims of settler colonial ontologies, are disavowed and suppressed.

The first chapter exposes weetigo institutions of Euroamerican settler colonialism through analysis of Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway and The Round House by Louise Erdrich. Wîhtikowipayi, the process of absorbing, accepting, and enacting cannibalistic appetites, with its gross misrecogition of others and insatiable violent greed, is a conversion demanded and created by settler institutions. The wîhtikowipayi of settler colonial institutions, then, facilitates not just individual persons becoming wîhtikow, but the production of settler colonial society itself as a process of weetigo worlding, which is how I name a the creation and maintenance of an ongoing network of political structures, nations, and epistemologies sustained precisely, if paradoxically, by these self-and-other-destructive greeds.

In the second chapter I look at the figure of Jesus and how people relate to him in Erdrich and Highway.In Highway, Jesus’ role as an instrument as well as a victim of violence, as well as the potential grotesquerie of the invitation to be “like” him, is more present than in Erdrich, while in Erdrich the potential variety of Jesus as enfleshed is slippery and startling, always in flux. Since orthodox Christianity assumes an all-encompassing worldview that contains, explains, and ordains all of space and time, literary interactions with Jesus according to radically different terms can make perceptible Indigenous worlds that are not contained by nor comprehensible within settler ontological assumptions.

The third chapter explores the how both Highway and Erdrich feature the Eucharist as a model of consumption that both diverges from and intersects with weetigo consumption. The relationship I am tracing centers around Eucharistic miracles: In scenes in Erdrich and Highway’s novels, the bread and wine change into edible meat. In both novels, though in very different ways, the person who experiences the miracle is on a gradual trajectory away from Catholic orthodoxy, and will eventually recognize and celebrate their immersion in Anishinaabe and Cree cosmology, respectively, as more significant than their Catholicism.

The fourth chapter looks at Erdrich’s latest novel, Future Home of the Living God, which describes a combined ecological, reproductive, governmental, and evolutionary dystopia. Future Home of the Living God is a narrative of and about inheritances–cyclical, punctuated, eruptive–nested within each other and operating on wildly different scales in terms of space, time, and impact. Future Home demonstrates how settler colonial nations depend upon a cycle of inheritance that is punctuated and eruptive. It halts along in repetitions that are both remarkably consistent in their ideologies and impacts, and remarkably flexible in how those ideologies and impacts are framed.

Through the stories of these Indigenous writers, I find a relationship of conversation that is counterposed to the transformative and destructive conversions demanded by Christian rules and by settler colonial institutions and imaginaries. The potential of conversation among incommensurable and disparate worlds that cannot be collapsed together at all without violence, nor fully even with genocidal violence across centuries, is itself small, partial, and particular. These attributes, I claim and hope, also make it potentially powerful, efficacious, and outside of the way coloniality continually frames and thinks about itself, and thus can make perceptible that which always exists outside of that world.


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Bible-mandated settlement: Mark G. Brett, ‘Settler Mandates and the Book of Joshua’, in C. L. Crouch (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 117–130

30Sep20

Abstract: The book of Joshua presents a multitude of ethical quandaries, both ancient and modern. After identifying some of the key questions about the text and its composition, our discussion will trace the distinctive kinds of influence that this book has exercised in a number of Jewish and Christian traditions. All of these elements will then figure in concluding reflections on how the book of Joshua may, and may not, help us to reflect on the legacies of imperialism and colonialism.


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