Abstract: This research study is an investigation into how children in public elementary schools are educated through social studies curricula into ways of understanding themselves and their relationships to the nation-state, the land, and people with whom they share the land. The questions that have driven this research are these: 1) How do young students construct and negotiate the figured worlds of a social studies classroom where they engage in inquiry-based learning about settler colonialism? 2) What do students connect with, and what are they doing with the stories they hear about Indigenous and Canadian history in public school classrooms? 3) How do students in public school classrooms take up or reject settler colonialism in their
learning about history? Examining these questions through the theoretical frame of figured worlds and employing a post-structural ethnographic methodology, the author relies on the fields of curriculum studies and settler colonial studies to ground this study into the experiences of young students in public schools. The frame of figured worlds allows the author to examine the ways that students talk about and enact identities-in-practice as they learn stories about Canadian and Indigenous histories. This thesis sheds light on the specific ways students configure, negotiate, and enact their own subjectivities as they learn about the settlement and growth of Canada on the Indigenous territory it now occupies. Data for this study were gathered through research groups, interviews, and classroom observations at two elementary schools in Hamilton, Ontario. Analysis and discussion of these data reveal the complex ways students both take up and\or reject discourses and narratives about settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and reconciliation. The stories and experiences of students in this research reveal ways that education works to maintain settler structures of inequality and elimination through the teaching of social studies. This work also points to ways this can be challenged, and how counter-narratives and discourses are being taken up by students as they navigate their identities-in-practice in response to what they learn, who they learn it with, and the multiple voices that they listen to for guidance.

Abstract: This article examines the language and strategies of Canadian land expansion through the founding of Manitoba in 1870. It analyses the discourse of key colonial authorities, which reveal that Canada mobilises the ideals of liberalism to promote the colonial policy of appropriating Indigenous lands. Because liberalism endures as the dominant paradigm that both structure contemporary politics and contemporary thinking about politics in the West, it is critical to clarify the connection between liberalism and the wrongs of land appropriation. Examining the role of liberal ideas in the founding of Manitoba also helps defuse the capacity of liberalism to produce dispossession, especially of Indigenous Peoples. In addition to exposing the ideas that supported the production of Canadian sovereignty, this article also analyses the various tactics Canada deployed to secure that sovereignty amidst Indigenous resistance. If Canadian officials first opted to absorb Indigenous lands through the ‘gentle’ means of administration, declaration and negotiation, they resorted to military forces when Indigenous Peoples frustrated Canadian claims to sovereignty. By bringing into focus the shifting tactics that Canadian state officials employed to annex Indigenous lands, the founding of Manitoba enriches our understanding of settler colonial statecraft and of the distinctive means of settler state expansion.

Excerpt: David McCullough’s new book, The Pioneers, provides a sweeping narrative history of the Ohio Company and the men who settled what became Marietta, Ohio, at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. Manasseh Cutler, his son, Ephraim, and other colleagues from Massachusetts, including Rufus Putnam and Joseph Barker, formed a company to speculate in land that had not yet been ceded to the United States by the Native nations who called the region home. 

Abstract: This article investigates the representation of time in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge as shaped by the writer’s British North American context as well as his political background and agenda. It pays attention to the manner in which the text prepares the ground for native identity formation by providing a version of Nova Scotia’s recent history that is nonetheless presented as bygone and ancient. In The Old Judge, temporal distance of the past, apart from its richness — both confirmed by the presence of the properly historicized settler ghost — is the condition for cultural distinctiveness, maturity and heritage. Approaching The Old Judge from the perspective of Cynthia Sugars’ Canadian Gothic and Lorenzo Veracini’s settler colonialism, I argue that the text represents the past of the province as curiously extended in time in the Old World fashion, so that it may encompass the stages of cultural development required to gain the Empire’s recognition. Simultaneously, the text’s intricate play with heterochronies suggests that Haliburton’s Nova Scotia contains heterotopic spaces in Foucauldian terms, where the ordinary time passage is necessarily breached for the colony to attain proper legacy and distinct cultural status.

Abstract: Drawing on Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book and Irene Watson’s expansive critique of Australian law, this article locates within the settler–Australian imaginary the figure of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ as a site of contest between two rival sovereign logics: First Nations sovereignty (grounded in a spiritual connection to the land over tens of millennia) and settler sovereignty (imposed on Indigenous peoples by physical, legal and existential violence for 230 years). Through the conceptual landscape afforded by these writers, the article explores how the arenas of juvenile justice and child protection stage an occlusion of First Nations sovereignty, as a disappearing of the ‘Aboriginality’ of Aboriginal children under Australian settler law. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality is also drawn on to analyse this sovereign difference
through the figures of Terra Nullius and ‘the child’.

With a section on ‘Celebrity masculinities and settler colonialism‘.

Scholars committed to decolonial activism should discuss ways in which settlers can support Indigenous struggles and consider whether Indigenous examples could inspire and guide a commitment to decolonisation. Instead, I here feel compelled to write a post about being politically confronted by scholars committed to decolonial activism like me. Perhaps this is what blogs are for …

A couple of items of housekeeping first. I never used ‘Indigenous-like’ as an expression (a metaphor is not an analogy), and that Strakosch and Macoun should cite me doing so, with inverted commas and all, as if I actually did, is disheartening (see pp. 512, 514, 515, 519). They also repeatedly refer to my intervention as ‘the settler colonial theory neoliberal argument’ (pp. 510, 512, 514, 515). Let’s be clear: the ‘theory’ is not settler colonial but about settler colonialism, and the argument is not neoliberal but about neoliberalism. This liberal use of adjectives is misleading; quite neoliberal in its determination to vandalise meaning. Then the argument, which is primarily about an analogy. Another analogy may be apt to explain an analogy: if I say that ‘2 and 3 are in a relationship that is similar to the relationship that 4 and 6 entertain with each other’, I am most definitely not saying that ‘2 is 4’; I am not even talking about 2 and 3, or about 4 and 6, but about distinct relationships. For example, if I was to say that Strakosch and Macoun’s reasoning replicates the way prosecutors crafted their arguments during the Stalinist trials, including false accusations and misrepresentations, I would not be suggesting that Strakosch and Macoun are Stalinist. What I would be saying is that the relationship between facts and inference in the Stalinist trials and in the context of this particular scholarly debate are homologous.

Strakosch and Macoun criticise my argument for saying that 2 is 4, or that settlers are indigenous or Indigenous (or ‘Indigenous-like’). I did not, and the analogy I used did not: either Strakosch and Macoun do not consider the possibility of rational numbers, of distinct relationships between concepts, or they misunderstand my argument before misrepresenting it. Because they certainly misrepresent it. I do not ‘collapse’ Indigenous peoples and settlers, and there is no ‘slippage’ between the two in my article. These collectives remain separate, and I deliberately develop a new category of analysis, ‘endogeneity’, to ensure that no slippage should be inferred. No identity or convergence between settlers and Indigenous peoples is implied or averred in my argument, and sustained difference is rendered explicit through terminological distinction.

Specifically, Strakosch and Macoun frame their critique in four segments. ‘Fantasies are not realities’ (pp. 511-512) comes first. Indeed! And the reality of my text is not about a fantastic reconstruction of it. ‘Colonisers are not workers’ comes next (pp. 513-515). A ‘change in our status as workers does not entail a comprehensive change to all aspects of our status as colonisers’, they note, adding that as ‘colonisers, we still work on stolen land in a capitalist relation that we imported; this ongoing relationship with Indigenous peoples does not alter simply because our capitalist relations are changing’ (pp. 514-515). It is a reasonable contention, and this is precisely what I have argued in my work too. Let me restate my argument: we were once (largely) colonisers and workers, we are now colonisers and no longer collectively defined primarily by waged work. Does this shift, which Strakosch and Macoun also recognise, change anything? It should (even if it does not turn colonisers into noncolonisers, a point I am more than willing to concede, especially because I have argued it in the first place).

‘Superfluity is not elimination’ they continue (pp. 515-516). This is also uncontroversial, and why I refer to a ‘logic’ rather than to actual ‘elimination’. ‘Appropriation is not possession’, Strakosch and Macoun then conclude (pp. 516-517). They then conclude: ‘capitalism does not wish to replace or become us, and there is no imperative that mirrors the settler colonial need to be the only and legitimate authority in a place’ (p. 516). This is a legitimate conclusion, and perhaps the moment when we may begin debating rather than misrepresenting. So, let me restate: the developing mode of domination I and others are talking about does not want to literally replace us, but it does want to replace the relationship we entertain with each other and with the places we inhabit. Who are we when these relationships are finally replaced by data mineable, fully surveillable transactions? Doesn’t this predicament also follow a logic of elimination (which is not elimination)? As for capitalism’s alleged unwillingness to remain the only ‘legitimate authority in a place’, Strakosch and Macoun are factually wrong. The determined destruction of all commons, historical and ongoing, is precisely about capitalism’s relentless resolve to always remain the only legitimate authority everywhere. I am surprised that an accomplished scholar and critic of neoliberal ideologies would argue differently.

There are other ways in which this reconstruction of my argument is ungenerous, but I am focusing here on the way Strakosch and Macoun turn an analogy into a similitude. I do so because it shows that they have no case, and because I recognise that I share with them a commitment to live under meaningful and substantive Indigenous sovereignty and act locally for decolonisation.

Description: The Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies is the first comprehensive overview of the rapidly expanding field of Indigenous scholarship. The book is ambitious in scope, ranging across disciplines and national boundaries, with particular reference to the lived conditions of Indigenous peoples in the first world. The contributors are all themselves Indigenous scholars who provide critical understandings of indigeneity in relation to ontology (ways of being), epistemology (ways of knowing), and axiology (ways of doing) with a view to providing insights into how Indigenous peoples and communities engage and examine the worlds in which they are immersed. Sections include: • Indigenous Sovereignty • Indigeneity in the 21st Century • Indigenous Epistemologies • The Field of Indigenous Studies • Global Indigeneity. This handbook contributes to the re-centring of Indigenous knowledges, providing material and ideational analyses of social, political, and cultural institutions and critiquing and considering how Indigenous peoples situate themselves within, outside, and in relation to dominant discourses, dominant postcolonial cultures and prevailing Western thought.

Abstract: This article examines how the person-centered approach (PCA) became established in Aotearoa New Zealand, and draws parallels between how a Western psychology lands and settles and the process of colonization. Utilizing a critical methodology of both written records and oral history, the article documents the process of ‘first contact’ of Rogers’ ideas, followed by the later ‘settlement’ of client- and person-centered influences through churches and ministry, marriage guidance, and relationship counseling, and the tertiary education sector. Drawing on the results of a contemporary survey, the article reflects on the limitations of the current practice of person-centered therapy, and of therapists influenced by the PCA. The article concludes with a challenge to the approach to adapt to be more culturally responsible, relevant, and responsive, particularly to the indigenous Māori people of the land.

Abstract: In this paper I reconsider debates in the Australian colonies in the 1830s and 1840s about Aboriginal people and rights in land. I contend that Aboriginal rights of property in land were seldom the matter at stake in these debates. Further, I argue that a notion of duties rather than rights was invoked by Christian humanitarians as they pleaded that Aboriginal people should be provided with protection as well as compensation for the loss of their lands. I suggest that the position that they adopted was determined not so much by the moral, political or legal principles they sought to uphold but by their acknowledgement of material forces at work in the colonies. I also point out that the debate that occurred about rights in land was an intra‐British one that concerned the rights of settlers vis‐à‐vis the Crown. Finally, I suggest that the principal ways in which pastoral leaseholders tried to legitimise their claims to land were rather different to that suggested by historians in recent decades.