settler colonial studies blog

The sexuality of settler colonialism: Deanne Linn Grant, Indigenous Women at the Heart: An Imagining of Indigenous Decolonial Sexualities, PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, 2020

06Mar20

Abstract: For Native American and Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism in the United States continues to disrupt many cultural understandings and practices. There is a particular disruption upon Indigenous sexualities, given the ways in which gender and sexuality are used to uphold white supremacy and settler colonial political objectives. Native American women’s sexuality is rarely discussed within academia or even within Native communities. The heavy silence on the topic of Native women’s sexuality must be disrupted. The high rates of gendered-based abuse against Native women represent a singular story. Instead, I research how Native women understand their own sexualities, sexual imaginations, and sexual knowledge. Native American women’s sexuality is an important topic for decolonization and represents a way to re-construct Indigenous realities. I center Native women’s views on sexuality and how Native women’s sexual experiences can be expanded. My theoretical contribution is Indigenous decolonial sexuality and it challenges the monolithic representation of Native women and argues for new Native sexualities free of violence. To decolonize sexuality, Native women must be given the opportunity to share their voices, exposing harsh experiences of sexual assault, but also their sexual imaginaries.

The first of my four body chapters centers Native women’s voices through one-on-one interviews with approximately forty Native American and Indigenous women in and around the Denver area. I propose that Native women’s sexuality is currently based on complex influences of settler colonialism, power structures, and a desire to re-construct Indigenous-based constructions on sexuality. My second chapter draws from Cheyenne Arapaho artist, Brent Learned’s, 2017 exhibition titled Native American Body of Art. This exhibit challenges the idea that Native women are only sexual assault victims within the realm of sexuality and serves as a material representation of the Indigenous erotic. My third chapter analyzes early anthropological ethnographies that document Pawnee mythologies as guidance for Pawnee people to include and value queer/Two-spirit Pawnee people as significant members of community. Chapter Four analyzes a progressive sex education curriculum, which I use as a template to theorize a sex education curriculum intended for Native Americans.

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Settlers and other catastrophes: Jackson R. Perry, ‘”Conquered by the Sparrows”: Avian Invasions in French North Africa, circa 1871–1920’, Environmental History, 2020

04Mar20

Abstract: Wheat and barley farmers in North Africa during the French colonial period often experienced plagues of migrating Spanish sparrows (Passer hispaniolensis) that significantly affected the rural economy. Each spring, breeding sparrows nested near fields to raise their young and to consume the winter crop as it matured. This article documents the extent of the avian nuisance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing especially on eastern Algeria. It argues that changes in rural infrastructure and land use, notably the establishment of large farms and the wide-scale planting of eucalyptus trees, made many European settlements more attractive to the migrating sparrows. A warmer climate following the Little Ice Age may also have contributed to an increase in the size and range of Spanish sparrow populations in North Africa. Demonstrating a deep understanding of the environmental challenge that they faced, settler communities enacted a range of collective responses to the bird plagues, which resembled local forms of an “environmental management state.” They also consistently demanded state action in response to these plagues, but metropolitan bird protection laws appear to have limited the colonial government’s options and appetite for action in French Algeria. The sparrow problem could be managed but not overcome.

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Do settlers have a right to move to their settlements? Anna Stilz, ‘Settlement and the Right to Exclude’, in Thom Brooks (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice, Oxford University Press, 2020

04Mar20

Access the chapter here.

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Indigenous incarceration is settler colonialism: Thalia Anthony, Harry Blagg, ‘Hyperincarceration and Indigeneity’, Oxford research Encyclopedias, 2020

04Mar20

Abstract: Indigenous people have been subject to policies that disproportionately incarcerate them since the genesis of colonization of their lands. Incarceration is one node of a field of colonial oppression for Indigenous people. Colonial practices have sought to reduce Indigenous people to “bare life,” to use Agamben’s term, where their humanity is denied the basic rights and expression in the pursuit of sovereign extinguishment. Across the settler colonies of Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, the colonial drive to conquer land and eliminate Indigenous peoples has left deep scars on Indigenous communities and compromised bonds to kin, culture, and country. Indigenous people have been made refugees in their own countries.

Contemporary manifestations of penal incarceration for Indigenous people are a continuation of colonial strategies rather than a distinct phase. The concept of “hyperincarceration” draws attention to the problem of incarceration and its discriminatory targets. It also turns our attention to the turnstile of incarceration in Western postmodernity. However, the prison is but one form of exclusion for Indigenous people in a constellation of eliminatory and assimilatory practices, policies, and regimes imposed by colonial governance. Rather than overemphasizing the prison, there needs to be a broader conceptualization of colonial governance through “the camp,” again in the words of Agamben. The colonial institutionalization of Indigenous people, including in out-of-home care, psychiatric care, and corrective programs, is akin to a camp where Indigenous people are relegated to the margins of society. We eschew a narrow notion of hyperincarceration and instead posit a structural analysis of colonial relations underpinning the camp.

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Indigenous and endogenous peoples together : Tracey Lindeman, ‘”Revolution is alive”: Canada protests spawn climate and Indigenous rights movement’, Guardian, 20/02/20

01Mar20

Excerpt: Since a police raid on an Indigenous territory at the start of February, a wave of civil disobedience has surged over Canada.

Mohawks in Ontario and Quebec have erected rail blockades that paralyzed passenger and freight travel on some lines. Other protesters – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – have followed suit, blockading tracks across the country. Thirty-seven people were arrested in Toronto this week for standing on commuter tracks during evening rush hour, paralyzing the city’s Union Station.

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With two chapters on South African settler colonialism: Nina G. Jablonski (ed.), Persistence of Race, AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2020

01Mar20

Description: This is the third and final group of essays emerging from the discussions of the Effects of Race Project at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) that occurred in 2016 and 2017. The authors consider the biological and social understandings of race, and how new information from both the biological and social sciences is changing our perspective on the nature of the human condition, including the association of biological and social phenomena with “race”. They also look at global events or movements which influence these processes in South Africa and the costs of a racialised world order to humans and humanity. Phenomena are examined through the lenses of many disciplines: sociology, history, geography, anthropology and writing.

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Conservation policy dispossesses indigenous peoples: Lara Domínguez, Colin Luoma, ‘Decolonising Conservation Policy: How Colonial Land and Conservation Ideologies Persist and Perpetuate Indigenous Injustices at the Expense of the Environment’, Land, 9, 65, 2020

01Mar20

Abstract: The livelihoods of indigenous peoples, custodians of the world’s forests since time immemorial, were eroded as colonial powers claimed de jure control over their ancestral lands. The continuation of European land regimes in Africa and Asia meant that the withdrawal of colonial powers did not bring about a return to customary land tenure. Further, the growth in environmentalism has been interpreted by some as entailing conservation ahead of people. While this may be justifiable in view of devastating anthropocentric breaching of planetary boundaries, continued support for “fortress” style conservation inflicts real harm on indigenous communities and overlooks sustainable solutions to deepening climate crises. In reflecting on this issue from the perspective of colonial land tenure systems, this article highlights how ideas—the importance of individualised land ownership, cultivation, and fortress conservation—are intellectually flawed. Prevailing conservation policies, made possible by global non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and statutory donors, continue to harm indigenous peoples and their traditional territories. Drawing from the authors’ experience representing the Batwa (DRC), the Ogiek and Endorois (Kenya) and Adivasis (India) in international litigation, this paper examines the human and environmental costs associated with modern conservation approaches through this colonial lens. This article concludes by reflecting on approaches that respect environmental and human rights.

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Does indigenous financial sovereignty beat settler colonialism? Maria Bargh, ”, in J. K. Gibson-Graham, Kelly Dombroski (eds), The Handbook of Diverse Economies, Edward Elgar, 2020, pp. 362-369

01Mar20

Abstract: Internationally, Indigenous peoples have experienced colonization in different ways. In some countries Indigenous peoples have extensive control over the governance of land and resources often as a result of treaties or political recognition, while in other countries their very fight for recognition as ‘peoples’ remains a priority. These histories have shaped the financial positions that Indigenous peoples find themselves in. This chapter examines the experiences of an Indigenous Māori (Indigenous) community of Aotearoa New Zealand and analyses the way their financial practices are guided by Māori values.

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Settlers as a last resort: John Britton Seitz, Science and the steppe: Agronomists, nomads, and the settler colony on the Kazakh steppe, 1881-1917, PhD dissertation, Iowa State University, 2019

28Feb20

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian officials and scientists undertook a project of exploiting the Kazakh Steppe to turn it into an agricultural breadbasket. However, this project ran into difficulties both among the indigenous nomadic Kazakh population and with the challenges of farming in a new environment. Therefore, officials and scientists turned to another group to attempt to transform the steppe: peasant settlers from European Russia. While they did not fully overcome the challenges and achieve their most extreme visions for the steppe, this process that included demographic, scientific, and economic changes would have far reaching affects on the story of Kazakhstan down to the present day.

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Indigenous settlers? Amy Reed Sandoval, ‘Settler-State Borders and the Question of Indigenous Immigrant Identity’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2020

28Feb20

Abstract: Indigenous migration from Latin America to the United States has been on the rise over the past decades. There has also been an increase in Indigenous self-identification amongst people in the United States who previously self-identified as Hispanic or Latina/o on census forms. Though Latin American Indigenous migration to the United States has been steadily on the rise since the 1990s, there remains a lack of resources—philosophical, political, and bureaucratic—to account for this migrant group. My goal in this article is to explore in greater depth why Latin American Indigenous migration is hermeneutically marginalised. First, I argue that we problematically fail to understand settler-state borders—particularly the Mexico-US border—as, in part, Indigenous spaces. Second, and relatedly, I argue that our failure to understand borders as Indigenous spaces is connected to the widespread, inaccurate presumption that Indigenous peoples ‘lose their authenticity’ (and, in turn, their very Indigenous identities) upon crossing settler-state borders. Contrary to what I describe as the dominant view of borders as de-Indigenised or non-Indigenous spaces, I argue in that many settler-state borders are spaces where Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous migrants, may experience their Indigenous identities intimately, and even publicly articulate and defend them. Importantly, this does not mean that settler-state borders do not also harm Indigenous peoples by threating Indigenous sovereignty. I end by arguing that addressing the hermeneutical marginalisation of Latin American Indigenous migration requires a rigorous reconceptualisation of borders themselves as Indigenous spaces.

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