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Northern settler colonialism today: Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘The Deatnu Agreement: a contemporary wall of settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

12Aug20

Abstract: The Deatnu River, located in Northern Scandinavia in the heart of Sápmi, is often regarded as one of the finest salmon rivers in Europe. In the 1751 Strömstad Peace Accord, the Deatnu river was made into an international boundary, becoming one of the oldest political borders in Europe. Since 1873, salmon fishing in the Deatnu River has been regulated by bilateral agreements negotiated between Norway and Finland. The most recent agreement was reached in 2017, in spite of a very strong, uniform opposition of the local population, Sámi and non–Sámi alike. This article considers the nature, effects and objectives of the 2017 Deatnu Agreement in the context of an international boundary. I suggest that the 2017 Deatnu Agreement is a figurative wall erected by the states of Norway and Finland in the context of the post–Westphalian order. The ’post–Westphalian order’ is characterized by the erection of walls to define nation–state boundaries. Drawing on Elizabeth Strakosch’ analysis of policy as a key strategy of settle colonialism and Lorenzo Veracini’s concept of transfer, the article considers how this figurative wall is intended to target the Sámi people and how it is an emblem of Nordic settler colonialism.


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Abolishing the ‘native’: Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, Duke University Press, 2020

12Aug20

Description: In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.


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Settler composite trajectories: Ann Curthoys, ‘From Montserrat to Settler-Colonial Australia: the Intersecting Histories of Caribbean Slave-owning Families, Transported British Radicals, and Indigenous Peoples’, History Workshop Journal, 2020

09Aug20

Abstract: When the British government abolished slavery in the Caribbean and compensated the slave-owners, some of the beneficiaries and/or their children and grandchildren went to Australia to make a new life and if possible a new fortune. This essay traces the history of one such family, the Shiells of Montserrat, alongside two other contemporaneous histories – that of Yorkshire radical and convict, John Burkinshaw, and his family, into which one of the Shiells married, and that of the several Indigenous communities these families encountered. Through the experiences of these disparate and intersecting family groups, we can gain insight into both the lived experience and the wider imperial context of the expansion of Australian settler colonialism.


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Settler colonialism as a ‘Satanic plot’: Erin G. Carlston, ‘”An Inverted Eden”: Modernity and Anti-Modernism in D’Arcy Cresswell’s The Forest’, Modernist Cultures, 15, 3, 2020, pp. 341-353

09Aug20

Abstract: In 1952, D’Arcy Cresswell published a verse play, The Forest, set in New Zealand’s forested Southern Alps. In what Cresswell called a ‘tremendous defense of homosexuality’, The Forestdepicts a pair of gay male poets pitted against the archangel Lucifer and women, who are in league together to force men to work the land and thereby desacralize it. Cresswell argues that the pressures on Pākehā men to be economically productive and heterosexually reproductive are manifestations of a literally Satanic plot to alienate men from one another and Nature. While many of Cresswell’s New Zealand literary contemporaries espoused a Pākehā masculinity involving matey comradeship and a life spent working the land, Cresswell celebrates a New Zealand wilderness he perceives as the last refuge of male love and inspired poetry. Simultaneously queering Milton, inverting Judeo-Christian history by relocating Eden in the Antipodes, and reversing New Zealand history by undoing the modernity that settler colonialism had created, Cresswell counters the terms of his own exclusion from the literary canon by imagining a world upside-down – and inside-out.


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Settler lawfare and its limits: Bain Attwood, ‘The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century’, Law and History Review, 2020

09Aug20

Abstract: In the closing decades of the twentieth century, as indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand increasingly filed legal suits to regain their lands or win compensation for lands that they had lost, scholars increasingly devoted themselves to the task of explaining the ways in which European powers had laid claim to indigenous people’s territories across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Their research invariably emphasized the role of the law. This was true not only of legal scholars but of intellectual and cultural historians as well. For example, Patricia Seed asserted that the law was central to all European claims of possession in the New World, because it was “the means by which states created their legitimacy.” Most of these scholars argued that particular legal doctrines that were formulated in metropolitan Europe dictated the terms on which imperial powers claimed indigenous people’s lands at the peripheries. More particularly, it became commonplace for these scholars to argue that a doctrine called terra nulliuswas especially important in this regard.


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Sociology discovers the settlers: Dwanna L. McKay, Kirsten Vinyeta, Kari Marie Norgaard, ‘Theorizing race and settler colonialism within U.S. sociology’, Sociology Compass, 2020

09Aug20

Abstract: Settler colonialism expands race and racism beyond ideological perspectives and reveals the links between historical and contemporary racialized social relations and practices–the racial structure–of American society. In this article, we define settler colonialism, highlight sociological scholarship that uses settler colonial theoretical frameworks, and explore ways in which this work enriches, intersects with, complicates, and contradicts key assumptions within the sociology of race.


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Composting settlers: Kristen B. French, Amy Sanchez, Eddy Ullom, ‘Composting Settler Colonial Distortions: Cultivating Critical Land-Based Family History’, Genealogy, 4, 84, 2020

09Aug20

Abstract: A collective of three intergenerational and intersectional educators engage in anti-colonial and/or decolonial processes of composting colonial distortions through Land-based conceptualizations of Critical Family History. Engaging in spiral discourse through Critical Personal Narratives, the authors theorize critical family history, Land-based learning, and Indigenous decolonial and anti-settler colonial frameworks. Using a process of unsettling reflexivity to analyze and interrupt settler colonial logics, the authors share their storied journeys, lessons learned and limitations for the cultivation of Critical Land-based Family History.


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It’s emotional (on triangular relations in a settler colonial context): Jane Lydon, Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2019

07Aug20

Description: Emotions are not universal, but are experienced and expressed in diverse ways within different cultures and times. This overview of the history of emotions within nineteenth-century British imperialism focuses on the role of the compassionate emotions, or what today we refer to as empathy, and how they created relations across empire. Jane Lydon examines how empathy was produced, qualified and contested, including via the fear and anger aroused by frontier violence. She reveals the overlooked emotional dimensions of relationships constructed between Britain, her Australasian colonies, and Indigenous people, showing that ideas about who to care about were frequently drawn from the intimate domestic sphere, but were also developed through colonial experience. This history reveals the contingent and highly politicised nature of emotions in imperial deployment. Moving beyond arguments that emotions such as empathy are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, this study evaluates their concrete political uses and effects.


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The traces of indigenous history: Tiina Äikäs, Anna-Kaisa Salmi (eds), The Sound of Silence: Indigenous Perspectives on the Historical Archaeology of Colonialism, Berghahn, 2019

07Aug20

Description: Colonial encounters between indigenous peoples and European state powers are overarching themes in the historical archaeology of the modern era, and postcolonial historical archaeology has repeatedly emphasized the complex two-way nature of colonial encounters. This volume examines common trajectories in indigenous colonial histories, and explores new ways to understand cultural contact, hybridization and power relations between indigenous peoples and colonial powers from the indigenous point of view. By bringing together a wide geographical range and combining multiple sources such as oral histories, historical records, and contemporary discourses with archaeological data, the volume finds new multivocal interpretations of colonial histories.


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Settlers take more than land: Keolu Fox, ‘The Illusion of Inclusion — The “All of Us” Research Program and Indigenous Peoples’ DNA’, New England Journal of Medicine, 383, 2020 pp. 411-413

05Aug20

Excerpt: Many Indigenous populations have been geographically isolated for tens of thousands of years. Over time, these populations have developed adaptations to their environments that have left specific variant signatures in their genomes. As a result, the genomes of Indigenous peoples are a treasure trove of unexplored variation. Some of this variation will inevitably be identified by programs like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “All of Us” research program. NIH leaders have committed to the idea that at least 50% of this program’s participants should be members of underrepresented minority populations, including U.S. Indigenous communities (Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians), a decision that explicitly connects diversity with the program’s goal of promoting equal enjoyment of the future benefits of precision medicine.

But there are reasons to believe that this promise may be an illusion. 


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