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Capitalism settles on Indigenous environments: Damien Short, ‘The Genocidal Pressures on Indigenous Peoples: Capitalism’s Cultural and Environmental Violence’, in Fiona Greenland, Fatma Müge Göçek (eds), Cultural Violence and the Destruction of Human Communities: New Theoretical Perspectives, Routledge, 2020

10Jun20

Access the chapter here.


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COVID settles (with particular viciousness) on Indigenous communities: Kaitlin Curtice, Esther Choo, ‘Indigenous populations: left behind in the COVID-19 response’, The Lancet, 2020

10Jun20

Excerpt: Globally, across countries and populations, Indigenous peoples face a greater burden of disease than non-Indigenous peoples, including cardiovascular disease and HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, and have higher infant and maternal mortality and lower life expectancy. Their health is impacted by epigenetic stressors of generational oppression and violence, including disproportionate numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women, lower educational attainment, and persistent poverty. Further, health services for Indigenous populations are typically under-resourced with language and culture appropriate care a rarity. Structural forces limit access to health care and systemic racism and discrimination towards Indigenous peoples can make it difficult to develop trusting relationships with non-Indigenous providers. The health of Indigenous populations also has a greater vulnerability to the decline of the planet’s natural resources, as their way of life is so intimately connected to waters, lands, and forests.

This is the situation into which the COVID-19 pandemic has arrived. 

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Archeology settles on indigenous land: S. Truini, The Handmaiden of Settler-Colonialism: Archaeology and Heritage in Silwan, East Jerusalem, PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2020

10Jun20

Abstract: This thesis makes a case for archaeology as a technology of settler-colonial domination, based on the in-depth study of one of the most renowned cases of contentious deployment of archaeology for political purposes, the Palestinian village of Silwān in Occupied East Jerusalem. Relying on decolonial theory and methodologies of research, this thesis proposes a radical deconstruction of the discourse about the politics of the past in Palestine, arguing for Zionist deployments of the past for political goals as being not nationalist, as the literature maintains, but settler-colonialist and aimed at the elimination of Palestinians from collective consciousness. This research also proposes a theory of affordances to articulate the relationship between archaeology and political power, reversing the common assumption that the latter univocally exploits the former. Instead, the focus on this research are the unquestioned practices of archaeology and heritage conservation, in which Israeli settler-colonial power finds a ready-made set of supposedly a-political practices through which advance its political goals. The idea that excavations are the most legitimate method to know the past in its material form, and that the antiquities should be object of special measures for protection from decay coincide with settler-colonialism’s interest in land and with its practices of surveillance of the colonised. These nodes of intersection emerged clearly from ethnographic fieldwork through the impacts that they have on the Palestinian residents of Silwān. Through the lens of their narrations, archaeology and heritage conservation emerge as part and parcel of the perpetration of settler-colonial violence.


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Satan is an arch-imperialist; Adam and Eve are peaceful settlers of a ‘New World’: Sebastian N. Peraic, Milton and Empire: Satanic and Edenic Colonization in Paradise Lost, BA Dissertation, UCLA, 2020

10Jun20

Excerpt: Within Paradise Lost are numerous themes of early European colonialism: Satan as an imperialist aggressor, Adam and Eve as peaceful settlers, and Eden as a literal New World. Dissecting these themes tends to beg the question whether John Milton supported his country’s colonialism or not. The duplicity in the poem’s colonial parallels suggests that what support Milton may have had was conditional; in the poem, Milton condones Adam and Eve’s colonialism, but not Satan’s. Satan’s colonialism may very closely resemble that of the Black Legend Spanish, but this paper will approach it differently. This thesis will suggest two colonial readings of Paradise Lost: the first, that Satan’s conquest of Eden resembles Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Jamaica; the second, that Adam and Eve’s settling in Eden resembles the Puritan settling of New England. 


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Colonising metaphors: Sarah Launius, Geoffrey Alan Boyce, ‘More than Metaphor: Settler Colonialism, Frontier Logic, and the Continuities of Racialized Dispossession in a Southwest U.S. City’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020

07Jun20

Abstract: Human geographers have long noted the colonial tropes and frontier imaginaries used to stimulate investment and normalize predatory property speculation within North American cities. Drawing on the insights of indigenous scholars and theorists of settler colonialism, in this article we argue a need to move beyond an analogical deployment of the “frontier” as a mere trope or imaginary and suggest that in settler colonial contexts, like the United States, the frontier and its structuring logic remain an ongoing feature of racial governance and capital accumulation over time. To develop this argument, we examine a genealogy of multiple and heterogeneous cycles of colonization, dispossession, and resistance in Tucson, Arizona. Attending to the racial and racist violence that shapes this history, we consider how the devaluation of nonwhite territorial and economic relations consistently structures urban real estate markets, driving the ongoing displacement and dispossession of communities of color. Viewing the frontier as a structuring logic of racial capitalism (rather than a symbolic motif or metaphorical condition) helps to explain why these racial patterns of dispossession can be observed as a hallmark outcome of processes of gentrification in settler countries like the United States. Meanwhile, through our case study we show how grassroots actors already are using the language of settler colonialism as a framework for naming and analyzing those outcomes just described, indicating a need for greater theoretical work that engages with these grassroots framings and narratives.


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Indigenous authors remind the settler that he is a settler: Halimah Beaulieu, The understated power of reading contemporary Indigenous literature in Canada, a White supremacist nation, MA dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2020

07Jun20

Abstract: This thesis offers a textual analysis of three contemporary novels by Indigenous writers in Canada – Tracey Lindberg’s (2015) Birdie, Katherena Vermette’s (2016a) The Break, and Eden Robinson’s (2017a) Son of a Trickster. Informed by critical Whiteness studies, scholarship on settler colonialism, and reader response theory, I argue how contemporary Indigenous literature facilitates the social and political transformation decolonization requires. When approached with prior knowledge about past and ongoing colonialism, the stories written by today’s Indigenous authors disrupt the settler national myths that normalizes White supremacy in Canada and demands introspection on how settlers perpetuate colonial violence against First Peoples. Their stories extend possibilities for transformative learning by re-centering Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, and by reframing kindness, reciprocity, and kinship as human obligations. In creating space for us to imagine existing beyond the limitations set by the racial settler state, these stories can instigate shifts in cultural perceptions and power relations in real ways. These stories also hold implications for meaningful and constructive human rightsbased social justice practices, by reshaping knowledge on antiracism and decolonization outside dominant frameworks that assume the colonial state’s legitimacy and permanence.


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Native title is one result of empire: Bain Attwood, Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People, Cambridge University Press, 2020

07Jun20

Description: This book provides a new approach to the historic treatment of indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and property rights in Australia and New Zealand. By shifting attention from the original European claims of possession to a comparison of the ways in which British players treated these matters later, Bain Attwood not only reveals some startling similarities between the Australian and New Zealand cases but revises the long-held explanations of the differences. He argues that the treatment of the sovereignty and property rights of First Nations was seldom determined by the workings of moral principle, legal doctrine, political thought or government policy. Instead, it was the highly particular historical circumstances in which the first encounters between natives and Europeans occurred and colonisation began that largely dictated whether treaties of cession were negotiated, just as a bitter political struggle determined the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi and ensured that native title was made in New Zealand.


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Indigeneity and class the other way around: Benjamin Balthaser, ‘From Lapwai to Leningrad: Archie Phinney, Marxism, and the Making of Indigenous Modernity’, Ab Imperio, 1, 2020, pp. 39-58

05Jun20

Abstract: Although the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was controversial, it undeniably ushered in a new era of governmentality for indigenous people in the United States. The IRA has been debated since its inauguration, but less attention has been paid to the ways in which it is part of an ongoing theorization of Native American modernity. Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé intellectual and activist who studied anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas and then later in Leningrad, became one of the few indigenous intellectuals at the time to fuse a Marxist analysis of capitalism and modernity with an indigenous epistemology of sovereignty. In a series of essays, op-eds, seminar papers, and notes, Phinney’s position is that Native Americans have been forcibly conscripted into capitalist modernity and that their question is less whether they can revive the “old ways” than whether they can alter the conditions of domination by capitalism and settler colonialism. Phinney does not reject modernity but instead asks how indigenous people can find a way to remain “alert modern communities” and autonomous democratic subjects. By analyzing Soviet forms of minority nationalism, Marxian theories of history, and modern theories of race, Phinney prefigures what Kevin Bryuneel calls the “third space of sovereignty” by arguing that Native Americans need to find modes of collective economic independence, while also forming alliances with other oppressed groups through autonomous organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), which Phinney helped found. Working within the Bureau of Indian Affairs while at the same time, as an NCAI founder, fiercely criticizing the state, Phinney both lived and theorized a dialectical sense of modernity in his life and writings.


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Indigeneity and class: Toon van Meijl, ‘Culture versus class: towards an understanding of Māori poverty’, Race & Class, 2020

05Jun20

Abstract: Interrogating why class has been demoted as a useful concept within anthropology, the author examines the ways in which issues of inequality and ethnicity have been used to explain both the enduring impact of settler colonialism on, and contemporary forms of discrimination against, New Zealand Māori. He weighs up the impact of the cultural turn in academia, the Māori Renaissance, the impact of neoliberalism, and the assumption that class coincides with ethnicity and hence the emphasis on affirmative action in education. The assumption that poverty is either class- or ethnicity-based is false. Māori themselves have been affected by social change: a few making it into a middle class, while, despite growing intermarriage, identification as Māori, appears enhanced by both enduring poverty and racism.


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Wild about the unsettler ‘wild’: Tess Lea, Wild Policy Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention, Stanford University Press, 2020

05Jun20

Description: Can there be good social policy? This book describes what happens to Indigenous policy when it targets the supposedly ‘wild people’ of regional and remote Australia. Tess Lea explores naturalized policy: policy unplugged, gone live, ramifying in everyday life, to show that it is policies that are wild, not the people being targeted. Lea turns the notion of unruliness on its head to reveal a policy-driven world dominated by short term political interests and their erratic, irrational effects, and by the less obvious protection of long-term interests in resource extraction and the liberal settler lifestyles this sustains. Wild Policy argues policies are not about undoing the big causes of enduring inequality, and do not ameliorate harms terribly well either—without yielding all hope.

Drawing on efforts across housing and infrastructure, resistant media-making, health, governance and land tenure battles in regional and remote Australia, Wild Policy looks at how the logics of intervention are formulated and what this reveals in answer to the question: why is it all so hard? Lea offers readers a layered, multi-relational approach called policy ecology to probe the related question, ‘what is to be done?’ Lea’s case material will resonate with analysts across the world who deal with infrastructures, policy, technologies, mining, militarization, enduring colonial legacies, and the Anthropocene.


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