settler colonial studies blog

On the built environment of settler locations: Tristan R. Grunow, ‘Cultivating Settler Colonial Space in Korea: Public Works and the Urban Environment under Japanese Rule’, International Journal of Korean History, 25, 1, 2020, pp. 85-121

13Mar20

Abstract: This article makes a case for reviewing Japanese colonial rule in Korea through the lens of settler colonialism, arguing that Japanese settlers and colonial officials used public works projects to reshape Korean land-scapes into settler colonial spaces in the name of cultivating Japanese claims to ownership of Korean territory and displacing Korean inhabitants. Together, street improvements and legal codes were designed to displace Korean residents by physically dismantling their homes to make way for widened roads, tearing down those structures that did not conform to new building standards, and removing residents who did not abide by settler ways of life. Reconsidering Japanese urban development in colonial Seoul through settler colonialism suggests that Japanese public works projects were intended not only to exploit Korean resources, justify Japanese colonial rule, or promote assimilation, but to perpetuate Japanese control of Korean space.

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On neoliberal settler colonialism: Paul J. Dornan, Australian Indigenous Policy in the Neoliberal Age: Reassessing ‘Indigenous’ Responsibility, PhD dissertation, Swinburne University, 2020

13Mar20

Abstract: A neoliberal paradigm has shaped Australian Government Indigenous policy over the last twenty-five years. Neoliberal policy proscriptions are one part of a wider dialectic of domination that shapes indigenous/settler relations within Australia. This dialectic includes hegemonic processes of social and material domination, resulting in the imposition of a narrative that focuses on ‘responsibility’, imposes neoliberal economics, and apportions ‘blame’ for disadvantage on Indigenous communities through an agreement-making regime that relies on ‘consent’ to appropriate Indigenous cultural identity. This neoliberal notion of responsibility hampers and restricts possibilities for genuine reconciliation because it perpetuates a settler-colonial logic and heralds the triumph of settler cultural identity, a prospect that requires the demise of Indigenous autonomies.

The colonization of these autonomies is here explored through case-study analysis of the Noongar Agreement in Western Australia and the Victorian treaty process. In these processes neoliberal responsibility as accountability is used to transform the Indigenous estate. This is resisted by some Indigenous peoples. This thesis explores how Indigenous resistance to neoliberal logics constitutes ‘decolonising’ practices that facilitate an Indigenous reclamation of a diverse ‘responsibility’ through the articulation of an unsurrendered Indigenous alterity. These responses are premised on a self-affirmation that promotes an emancipatory Indigenous process of self-determination. This project challenges neoliberal ideologies by emphasizing Indigenous expressions of self-identity, what it sees as an Indigenous reclamation of ‘responsibility’. It also highlights the settler state’s failure to fulfill its responsibility to Indigenous peoples.

Genuine decolonization processes challenge the ‘practical reconciliation’ orthodoxy that has dominated political discourse over the last twenty-five years. To promote decolonization, this project uses a qualitative case-study analysis to highlight the limitations of neoliberal Indigenous policy and to inform a more inclusive approach to reconciliation through the promotion of a differentiated citizenship model. This model formalizes Indigenous alterity in policy and in a series of clan-based treaties that recognize Indigenous sovereignty.

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There was never an Indigenous Reconstruction: Stephen Kantrowitz, ‘White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and the Two Citizenships of the Fourteenth Amendment’, The Journal of the Civil War Era, 10, 1, 2020, pp. 29-53

11Mar20

Abstract: The Civil War era’s debates over citizenship are conventionally understood as having revolved around the status of emancipated African Americans. But they were also rooted in decades of US policy with regard to Native Americans. In Indian Country, citizenship’s intended purpose was to dissolve Native political sovereignty and to make Indian lands available for sale to white settlers. These two histories of citizenship existed in dynamic tension and were occasionally forced together, as in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. This essay traces Civil War–era policymakers’ parallel debates over African American and Native American citizenship. Exploring those debates in particular through the thinking of conservative Democrat Allen Thurman suggests that while white supremacy came under sustained attack during this era, settler-colonialism—the ideology and practice of replacing Native with settler populations—did not.

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Appreciating how settler colonialism affects our relations with animals: Kelly Struthers Montford, Chloë Taylor (eds), Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, Routledge, 2020

11Mar20

Description: The fields of settler colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies, as well as Critical Animal Studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavours intersect? Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of Indigenous persons and more-than-human animals are interconnected.

Composed of 12 chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Dinesh Wadiwel, the book is divided into four themes:

This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, as well as postdoctoral scholars, working in the areas of Critical Animal Studies, Native Studies, postcolonial and critical race studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as Cultural Studies, Animal Law and Critical Criminology.

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The current crisis has been ‘current’ for some time (and it is also about settler colonialism): Candis Callison, ‘The Twelve-Year Warning’, Isis, 111, 1, 2020, pp. 129-137

11Mar20

Abstract: The frames that get put around “the climate crisis” (whether as imminent disaster or explanation for ongoing disasters) reflect how human relations and histories have been and are configured—and what (and who) is constituted as relevant, expert, and newsworthy in efforts to address such a crisis. The dominant ways of talking about and reporting on climate change rely on assumptions that don’t take into account colonial histories and varied frameworks for understanding ecological changes suggested by Indigenous scholars and communities that are grounded in interdependent, reciprocal relations between humans and nonhumans. This essay suggests that acknowledging settler colonialism and its structures, together with a consideration of diverse Indigenous knowledges, experiences, and histories, offers profound insight into the crises and disasters associated with climate change—along with a differentiated sense of how to consider what must, should, and can be done about it.

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If settler colonialism is a relationship, its supersession will be a relationship: Steven McLeod, The White of the Wampum: Possibilities for Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships in Canadian Settler Narratives (circa 2012) and Indigenous Storywork, PhD dissertation, Carleton University, 2020

11Mar20

Abstract: The Two Row Wampum is held up to inspire relationships between Indigenous and nonIndigenous peoples in Canada that are rooted in respect and responsibility. However, Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations have been characterized by the deracination of Indigenous relational self-determination.

In this dissertation, I juxtapose settler colonial representations (circa 2012) with Indigenous stories of Indigenous-non-Indigenous relationships. I offer Foucauldian discourse analyses of selected settler colonial representations to show how these representations displace and erase Indigenous relational self-determination. I also look beyond the constraints of settler discourse to readings of Indigenous narratives guided by storywork. Storywork is an Indigenous method of reading stories as pathways towards respectful relationships between all beings of creation. These pathways are grounded in what Vanessa Watts calls place-thought, Indigenous understandings of the relational knowledge embedded in the living network of relations that make up Indigenous traditional territories.

I focus on 2012 because of the intensity of settler discourse and Indigenous resistance during this year. In 2012, the Canadian government and the CBC produced commemorations of the War of 1812, the CBC’s 8th Fire documentary and website were featured on CBC.ca, and national media produced representations of Indigenous activism that emerged in 2012 under the banner of Idle No More. I show how these selected settler colonial representations legitimize liberal democratic forms of governance and advance the demands of the neoliberal capitalist resource economy. The problem is that these political and economic discourses often undermine and efface Indigenous relational self-determination. I juxtapose settler representations of the War of 1812 with Odawa scholar Cecil King’s historical account, Balancing Two Worlds (2013); national media representations of Indigenous activism with Lee Maracle’s novel, Sundogs (1992); and 8th Fire’s representation of reconciliation with The Eeyouch of Eeyou Itschee (2010-2015), a documentary series produced by the Cree peoples of Quebec about their relations with settler governments.

Through this engagement, I aim to unsettle settler colonial productions of state sovereignty, liberal democratic institutions, and global market capitalism and to gesture towards possibilities of Indigenous-non-Indigenous relationships rooted in traditional understandings of the white of the Wampum: relationships based in respect and responsibility between self-determining peoples.

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The religious-colonial-patriarchal trap of settler colonialism: Nahed Ashqar-Sharary, Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, ‘The Colonial–Religious Institutional Contract: Muslim Women Activists in Israel’, Social Politics, 2020

08Mar20

Abstract: This study examines the growth of a progressive religious Muslim activism among Palestinian women in Israel and the challenges it poses to the religious patriarchy and colonial power structures. Based on semistructured interviews with a religious feminist organization’s activists, the study revealed that feminist Islamic activism addresses an alliance between state officials and patriarchal–religious establishment gatekeepers that interlock to block Muslim feminist reform. Unlike other Muslim activists in former settler colonial states where state and religion are separate and unlike progressive Muslim women in Muslim states who struggle to escape the religious–patriarchal trap, in Israel, these activists face a religious–colonial–patriarchal trap.

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Educative practice meets settler colonial studies: Brooke Charlebois, Megan Ewing, Adam Davies, Mithila Rajavel, Adam Wrestch, Heather Sykes, ‘Pedagogies of Re-Imagination and Unlearning: Decolonial Cracks Within/Against Settler Colonial Canada’, JCACS, 17, 2020

08Mar20

Abstract: This book review is a close reading of three book-length works by key, contemporary scholars in the field of settler colonial studies: Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s On Decoloniality; Adam Dahl’s The Empire of the People; and Emma Battell Lowman and Adam Barker’s Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada. This review provides a critical account of the significance of navigating the complexities of modern settler colonial practices and frameworks within Western settler societies to better inform and navigate our own decolonizing processes. We identify settler logics, perspectives and foundational frameworks as key factors in our current educative practices. Through this, we debate the significance of unsettling our/selves to consider extensions of our identities through a decolonial lens and how we, as a society, contribute to ongoing colonial processes. The review also provides approaches to how these resources may be used to deepen our anti-colonial lens by considering these texts as an underlying basis to reflect upon current educative curricula.

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Indigenous design sovereignty against settler colonialism: David Fortin, ‘Unceded: Land and design sovereignty’, Architecture Australia, 109, 2, 2020, pp. 60-62

08Mar20

Abstract: Canada’s pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale brought together multiple contemporary Indigenous architects, who collaborated to emphasize the collective values of Indigenous peoples, demonstrate the artificial nature of colonial borders and remind visitors of the importance of Indigenous voices in shaping a future that respects and celebrates the land.

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Trust as decolonial practice: Sana Nakata, Sarah Maddison, ‘Working through the problems: Negotiating friendship, producing results’, Griffith Review, 67, 2020, pp. 125-134

06Mar20

Abstract: We work together as co-directors of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration, a research unit at the University of Melbourne. In this context, our working relationship requires a high level of trust, but as an Indigenous person (Sana is a Torres Strait Islander) and a non-Indigenous person (Sarah is a white settler), we don’t take the trust between us for granted. We are conscious that relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers do not generally have a bank of trust for either side to draw upon in difficult times, which means Indigenous-settler relations are always contingent, always at risk. To further understanding of these challenges, we have staged a number of public conversations that explore the question of trust in our professional relationship. Prompted by a single question – ‘Do you trust me?’ – these conversations have changed over time to explore different aspects of the positionality and conditionality of trust between Indigenous peoples and settlers through the lens of our own working relationship. Here, we have edited one conversation about building trust in each other over time.

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