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Settling on Indigenous fish: William Voinot-Baron, ‘A bitter taste of fish: the temporality of salmon, settler colonialism, and the work of well-being in a Yupiaq fishing village’, Ecology and Society, 25, 2, 2020

24Apr20

Abstract: In southwest Alaska, dominant narratives of subsistence and conservation are concerned predominantly with material relations with fish, with the number of fish that are killed. In Akiak, an Alaska Native (Yupiaq) village located along the Kuskokwim River, people’s relations with Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) extend beyond the material, encompassing also the temporal. In this article, I contend that state and federal fishing regulations enact and extend settler colonial representations of Indigenous disappearance. Framing Yupiaq people’s appeals for “a taste of fish” as a temporal matter, I examine how state and federal fishing regulations rupture the temporality in which Yupiaq people’s relations with Chinook salmon unfold and threaten people’s well-being. By examining the vitality of human-salmon relations through an optic of care, I describe how Yupiaq peoples in Akiak experience the adverse effects of interrupted and postponed relations with Chinook salmon in “confusion” among youth. In turn, I illustrate how people get on with living despite the limits that the present politics of fisheries management place on their ability to take care of each other on their own terms, and in their own time.


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Settler mythologies: Grace Kwan, ‘Colonialism and National Myth-Making in Canadian Museums’, The Society, 5, 1, 2020

22Apr20

Abstract: Canadian national mythology promotes the widespread idea of a peaceful, tolerant, multicultural nation built by and composed of immigrants. This mythology functions to sustain the ongoing settler colonialism and genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Using a case study of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, I demonstrate how such a national mythology denies Indigenous claims to the space, relegates Indigenous peoples to the pre-modern or already extinct, and erases their resistance to and struggles with colonization from the here and now. Institutions such as the Museum operate as part of a larger national and political context which nurtures and sustains nationalist mythologies establishing Canada’s white settler society.


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Getting the settler colonial picture: Sigrid Lien, ‘Ragnhild’s Images: Migration, Settler Colonialism and Photography’, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2020

22Apr20

Abstract: This article address photography’s embeddedness in histories of emigration and relocation. Photographs are integral pieces of life stories that take on new meanings as they circulate in history, while being told and retold. As catalysts of memories and postmemories they have the capacity to bring the hidden or difficult truths to the surface. This capacity is by no means limited to stories on the personal level. The article argues that settler immigrant’s family photographs may also have the potential to question the absence of indigenous peoples in histories of migration and settler colonialism. They may thus be considered as valuable tools in the process of contesting, ‘indigenizing’, and ultimately decolonizing these histories.


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Settlers appropriate real estate: Zach Sell, ‘Real Estate Questions: Capital, Slavery, and Empire in the Early United States’, History of the Present, 10, 1, pp. 46-66.

22Apr20

Abstract: Historians of the United States have often described slavery as guided by the chattel principle. Yet in Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “No matter how degraded the factory hand, he is not real estate.” This article builds upon Du Bois’s description of slavery’s real estate basis and considers real estate as central to both slavery and territorial expansion in the nineteenth-century United States. Real estate formed the basis of slaveholder family stability and also enabled the intergenerational transfer of wealth. The article also considers the continuing influence of real estate after black emancipation. Real estate enabled post-slavery black dispossession and also facilitated the continuation of the United States as a settler empire.


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Not settler land: Lauren Kepkiewicz, ‘Whose Land? Complicating Settler Understandings of Land in Canada’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 19, 1, 2020, pp. 245-269

22Apr20

Abstract: Indigenous food activists and scholars have encouraged settler peoples to change relationships to land in settler colonial contexts such as Canada. In this paper I examine how settler food activists are responding to these calls by drawing from 25 interviews conducted with settler food activists working to change the dominant Canadian food system. Interviewees’ responses indicate a need for settler activists to center Indigenous land struggles, question settler farmer claims to land, challenge the Canadian state and private property regimes, and give land back to Indigenous nations. Based on interviewees’ responses, I argue that while some settlers may be beginning to respond to Indigenous calls to change relationships with land, that broader settler food sovereignty movements in Canada have yet to adequately engage with these calls.


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Settler colonial infrastructure: Winona LaDuke, Deborah Cowen, ‘Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 119, 2, 2020, pp. 243-268

22Apr20

Excerpt: The question is how to move off the scorched path. In this writing, we suggest that choosing a good path requires the revolutionary but also profoundly practical work of infrastructure. At the center of the Wiindigo’s violence and destruction is infrastructure’s seemingly banal and technical world. Wiindigo infrastructure has worked to carve up Turtle Island, or North America, into preserves of settler jurisdiction, while entrenching and hardening the very means of settler economy and sociality into tangible material structures. 


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Indigenous economies are shaped by racial capitalism and settler colonialism: Shiri Pasternak, ‘Assimilation and Partition: How Settler Colonialism and Racial Capitalism Co-produce the Borders of Indigenous Economies’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 119, 2, 2020, pp. 301-324

22Apr20

Excerpt: The history of colonialism in Canada has meant both the partition of Indigenous peoples from participating (physically, politically, legally) in the economy and a relentless demand to become assimilated as liberal capitalist citizens. Assimilation and segregation are both tendencies of colonization that protect the interests of white capital. But their respective prevalence seems to depend on the regime of racial capitalism at play.


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Cinematic settler colonialisms: Janne Lahti, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (eds), Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film, Routledge, 2020

19Apr20

Description: This anthology adds to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies by examining settler colonial narratives in the underanalyzed medium of film.

Cinematic Settlers discusses different cinematic genres, national traditions, and specific movies in order to expose related threads, shared circulations of knowledge, and paralleled representations. Organized into thematic groupings—conquest, settlement, natives, and space—the contributors explore the question of how film compares to written genres and other visual media in representing and effecting settler colonialism on a global scale. Striving for inclusiveness, the volume covers different eras and settler colonial situations in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hawaii, the American West, Canada, Latin America, Russia, France, Algeria, German Africa, South Africa, and even the next frontier: outer space. By showing how films offer layered, contested, and dynamic settler colonial narratives that advance settler hegemonic readings, the essays enable students to better analyze and understand the complex history of diversity and colonialism in film.

This book is important reading for undergraduate classes on the history of empire, colonialism, and film.


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Relearning land: Debra Harwood, Pam Whitty, Carie Green, Enid Elliot, ‘Unsettling Settlers’ Ideas of Land and Relearning Land with Indigenous Ways of Knowing in ECEfS [early childhood education for sustainability]’, in Sue Elliott, Eva Ärlemalm-Hagsér, Julie Davis (eds), Researching Early Childhood Education for Sustainability: Challenging Assumptions and Orthodoxies, Routledge 2020

19Apr20

Access the chapter here.


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With an exchange on ‘Historians and Native American and Indigenous Studies’: American Historical Review, 125, 2, 2020

19Apr20

Access the exchange here.


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