settler colonial studies blog

The rule of settler colonial indifference: Kara Granzow, Invested Indifference: How Violence Persists in Settler Colonial Society, UBC Press, 2020

17Jun20

Description: In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as “indifferent” to the high rates of violence faced by Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true.

Invested Indifference offers a divergent perspective on the contemporary disappearance and murder of Indigenous women and girls in Canada. It does so by examining practices at three different historical moments in the same location, the place we now call Edmonton, juxtaposing late-nineteenth-century texts, documents concerning the former Charles Camsell Indian Hospital, and contemporary online police materials. Through a critical analysis of the seemingly disparate discourses circulating through these materials, Kara Granzow makes the claim that what we see as societal indifference does not come from an absence of feeling but from a deep-rooted and affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable.

Granzow demonstrates that through mechanisms such as the law, medicine, and control of land and space, gendered and racialized everyday violence against Indigenous people has become symbolically and politically entrenched as a central practice in the social construction of Canadian nationhood. Invested Indifference exposes the thread of violence not as past, but as running through our settler-colonial present.

Scholars of sociology, settler-colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and gender studies will find this book to be of interest, and, as national attention is finally paid to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, it will also have a broad readership among those involved in front-line services.

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Settler colonialism is metapolitical too: Aaron John Spitzer, The metapolitics of settler colonialism: Individual rights, collective boundaries, and Indigenous (de)colonization, PhD dissertation, University of Bergen, 2020

17Jun20

Abstract: Metapolitics are like the forces inside the atom, so constitutive of the world around us that they hide in plain sight. If domestic politics happens within polities, and geopolitics happens between them, metapolitics decides which is which. I contend this is one way to look at settler colonialism. Over the past few centuries, settler colonialism has transformed the globe, re-crafting Indigenous continents into a New World modelled on the European motherland. This re-crafting has been accomplished in part through metapolitics. “We” have not merely taken what is theirs, we have done so by redefining it, morally, legally, and constitutionally, as ours. Thus veiled by metapolitics, contemporary settler colonies hide in plain sight. In this dissertation my aim was to theorize settler-colonial metapolitics, making it visible. I pursued this project in three steps. First I identified an array of contemporary settler (and related) metapolitical conflicts and classified them in an original taxonomic table of cases. Second, drawing from this table, I conducted four comparative case studies – the articles of my dissertation. Each article explores theoretical, judicial and political dimensions of settler metapolitics in the three most iconic settler states, the United States, Canada and Australia. Finally, I devised a theoretical model to better identify, understand, and address settler metapolitical conflicts. At its core, the theory is this: Contemporary settler colonialism harnesses individual liberal rights, which are the core rights within polities, to problematize boundaries between polities, challenging the legitimacy of Indigenous demotic and territorial difference and thereby dissolving “them” into “us.” This dissertation is, I believe, an original contribution to three sub-fields of political science. First, it contributes to settler-colonial studies, highlighting a largely unexplored means by which contemporary settlers advance colonization and/or resist decolonization. Second, it contributes to political theory, applying a framework to a nameless theoretical space that has become busy with such unreconciled concepts as “mega-politics” (Hirschl 2008), “sovereignty studies” (Aleinikoff 2000), the “law of democracy” (Issacharoff, Karlan and Pildes 2002), “trans-polity rights” (Kant 1795 [2015]), “cosmopolitan rights” (Benhabib 2004), “democratic inclusion” (Bauböck 2017), the “boundary problem” (Whelan 1983), and of course “metapolitics” (Fraser 2009). Third, it contributes to constitutional law, by identifying metapolitics as a (critically overlooked) legal matter, by cataloging dozens of metapolitical cases from around the globe, and by showing decision-makers how they might grapple with such cases.

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Climate change is an attack against Indigenous worlds: Elizabeth J. Jackson, Changing Seasons of Resistance: Impacts of Settler Colonialism and Climate Change in Indigenous Worlds, MA dissertation, Humboldt State University, 2020

17Jun20

Abstract: This paper looks at the relationship between neoliberal capitalism, genocide, the biopolitics of settler colonialism and the impacts of climate change on the cultures and traditional lifeways of Indigenous communities. It also explores Indigenous modes and methods of adaptation and resilience. Climate Change is almost certainly the most urgent social problem in the history of human life on planet Earth. Many Indigenous people are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change due to marginalization and their commitment to land-based practices. Using in depth interviews with Indigenous Peoples, primarily from the Pacific Northwest, and the analysis of existing literature, this paper will attempt to find answers to the question of how capitalism, the practice of genocide, settler colonialism and displacement of Indigenous peoples are connected. It will also seek answers to how these processes have contributed to the climate crisis and bring to the forefront how Indigenous people are resisting corporate and governmental attempts to continue capitalistic projects that emit greenhouse gases and deplete natural resources.

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Indigenous sovereignty as cultural competence: Michael Johnston, ‘Cultural Competence and the Higher Education Sector’, in Jack Frawley, Gabrielle Russell, Juanita Sherwood (eds), Locating Human Rights in the Cultural Competence Context, Springer, 2020, pp. 43-57

14Jun20

Abstract: In settler-colonial countries, where European powers have forcibly established themselves on top of pre-existing Indigenous societies, formally recognising Indigenous sovereignty and supporting Indigenous self-determination should be central to the philosophy and praxis of cultural competence.

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Emigrant settlers facing indigenous peoples: Shino Konishi, ‘J. C. Byrne, Entrepreneurial Imperialism and the Question of Indigenous Rights’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2020

14Jun20

Abstract: This is a study of Joseph C. Byrne, an Irish entrepreneur who embarked on a number of colonial schemes and fashioned himself as an emigration expert. In 1848 he published Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies. From 1835 to 1847, followed by a number of emigrant guides to the individual Australian colonies, the Cape of Good Hope and Port Natal. Descriptions of indigenous peoples proliferate throughout Byrne’s guides. While his texts were informed by his own travels, he also quoted liberally from official correspondence, newspapers, and other contemporary works. His accounts reflect both his own opinions, and also a broad spectrum of imperial attitudes and approaches towards Indigenous peoples. This article explores Byrne’s ideas of how Indigenous peoples might best serve the interest of British emigrants: that is how they might or might not be made ‘useful’ to British subjects, and also, in some cases, how their inevitable demise would provide ‘peculiar advantages to emigrants’. His accounts of Indigenous people illustrate the problems posed by the ‘native question’ in imperial thinking, and the way in which Britain grappled to envisage the future place of indigenous people within its colonies in the face of growing settler demands for land.

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Relations (under settler colonialism): Tavleen Purewal, ‘Holding It Together: Indigeneity, (Settler-) Postcolonialism, and M. NourbeSe Philip’, ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 51, 2-3, 2020

12Jun20

Abstract: This article considers the conditions for relations between Indigenous and Black diasporic subjects, while also addressing Indigenous and South Asian relations. Concerned with the place of these subject relations within postcolonial and settler colonial paradigms and with their potential for decolonial practice, the article explores Jodi Byrd’s and Marie Battiste’s critiques of postcolonial and settler-colonial theories and M. NourbeSe Philip’s verse-novella Looking for Mr. Livingstone. It also offers a personal anecdote about South Asian settler relations with caretakers of Stl’atl’imx land in British Columbia, Canada. It examines these texts and experiences through the concept of “the hold.” “The hold,” a spatial and epistemological condition for relations between Indigenous and diasporic subjects, allows one to imagine a sovereign Indigenous space as a practice of cross-racial kinship.

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Indigenous bodies, settler colonised and biomedicalised: Joanna Ziarkowska, Indigenous Bodies, Cells, and Genes: Biomedicalization and Embodied Resistance in Native American Literature, Routledge, 2020

12Jun20

Description: This book explores Native American literary responses to biomedical discourses and biomedicalization processes as they circulate in social and cultural contexts.

Native American communities resist reductivism of biomedicine that excludes indigenous (and non-Western) epistemologies and instead draw attention to how illness, healing, treatment, and genetic research are socially constructed and dependent on inherently racialist thinking. This volume highlights how interventions into the hegemony of biomedicine are vigorously addressed in Native American literature. The chapters cover tuberculosis and diabetes epidemics, the emergence of Native American DNA, discoveries in biotechnology and the problematics of a biomedical model of psychiatry. They analyze work by writers including Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie and LeAnne Howe, Kim TallBear, Linda Hogan, Heid Erdrich, Elissa Washuta, and Frances Washburn.

The book will appeal to scholars of Native American and Indigenous Studies, as well as to others with an interest in literature and medicine.

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Indigenous peoples’ relationship to Indigenous places is healthy: Angela R. Fernandez, Tessa Evans-Campbell, Michelle Johnson-Jennings, Ramona E. Beltran, Katie Schultz, Sandra Stroud, Karina L. Walters, ‘”Being on the walk put it somewhere in my body”: The meaning of place in health for Indigenous women’, Journal Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 2020

10Jun20

Abstract: Relationship to place is integral to Indigenous health. A qualitative, secondary phenomenological analysis of in-depth interviews with four non-Choctaw Indigenous women participating in an outdoor, experiential tribally specific Choctaw health leadership study uncovered culturally grounded narratives using thematic analysis as an analytic approach. Results revealed that physically being in historical trauma sites of other Indigenous groups involved a multi-faceted process that facilitated embodied stress by connecting participants with their own historical and contemporary traumas. Participants also experienced embodied resilience through connectedness to place and collective resistance. Implications point to the role of place in developing collective resistance and resilience through culturally and methodologically innovative approaches.

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Settler education is not indigenous (I know, right?): Christopher Lamb, Anne Godlewska, ‘On the peripheries of education: (not)learning about Indigenous peoples in the 1995-2010 British Columbia curriculum’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2020

10Jun20

Abstract: This paper analyses the coverage of Indigenous topics in K-12 education in British Columbia (BC) using curriculum documents and course enrolment. It focuses on curriculum documents published between 1995 and 2010 and mandated in public education from 1995 to 2019, and argues that Indigenous topics were marginalized in the curriculum overall. Motivated by decades of work by Indigenous leaders and educators to grapple with non-Indigenous people’s prejudices, ignorance, and lack of understanding, the British Columbia Ministry of Education has increasingly recognized the importance of integrating Indigenous topics into core curricula and has offered all students Indigenous Studies course options. However, coverage remained marginalized in the core curriculum and recent curricular revisions have relied increasingly on teachers’ voluntary integration of Indigenous topics and meaningful consultation with local Indigenous educators and communities, for which insufficient support and resources are provided by the Education Ministry. The paper explores challenges to the curriculum’s ability to combat prejudice, eliminate discrimination and promote tolerance, understanding and good relations among Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the province.

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Settlers settle on Indigenous witnessing: Rosemary Nagy, ‘Settler Witnessing at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’, Human Rights Review, 2020

10Jun20

Abstract: This article offers an account of settler witnessing of residential school survivor testimony that avoids the politics of recognition and the pitfalls of colonial empathy. It knits together the concepts of bearing witness, Indigenous storytelling, and affective reckoning. Following the work of Kelly Oliver, it argues that witnessing involves a reaching beyond ourselves and responsiveness to the agency and self-determination of the other. Given the cultural genocide of residential schools, responsiveness to the other require openness to and nurturing of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. In order to illustrate the complexities and challenges of settler witnessing, the author reflects on her experiences in attending six of the TRC’s national events and, in particular, what she has learned from Frederick “Fredda” Paul, Passamaquoddy Elder, healer, storyteller, and residential school survivor. The article analyzes (1) aesthetics and emotions in the staging of TRC events and (2) making meaning over time and the temporality of transitional justice.

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