settler colonial studies blog

Native Girl Syndrome: Lilian Mengesha, ‘Deceleration as Decolonial Intervention in Lara Kramer’s NGS: Native Girl Syndrome’, ASAP/Journal, 4, 3, 2019, pp. 575-600

31Jan20

Excerpt: Native Girl Syndrome (2013), a one-hour dance piece that embodies the intimate haze and afterlife of drug use, sex work, and poverty through a dissociative and slow movement score. Kramer, a choreographer of mixed Oji-Cree and settler heritage, creates movement that confronts dispossession through aggravated and slow actions. Waste, found objects, and the detritus of self-medication litter the set of NGS. Sharing temporalities of decay, the choreography and the very nature of these discarded objects stage an embodied decomposition, a peeling away of the elements that constitute the performance as a whole. In the unraveling of embodied action, we see how trash transforms into possessions and how women’s bodies become discarded within the structural violence of settler-colonial societies.

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Settler nation vs. Métis nation: M. Max Hamon, The Audacity of His Enterprise: Louis Riel and the Métis Nation That Canada Never Was, 1840–1875, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020

31Jan20

Description: Louis Riel (1844-1885) was an iconic figure in Canadian history best known for his roles in the Red River Resistance of 1869 and the Northwest Resistance of 1885. A political leader of the Métis people of the Canadian Prairies, Riel is often portrayed as a rebel. Reconstructing his experiences in the Northwest, Quebec, and the worlds in between, Max Hamon revisits Riel’s life through his own eyes, illuminating how he and the Métis were much more involved in state-making than historians have previously acknowledged.

Questioning the drama of resistance, The Audacity of His Enterprise highlights Riel’s part in the negotiations, petition claims, and legal battles that led to the formation of the state from the bottom up. Hamon examines Riel’s early successes and his participation in the crafting of a new political environment in the Northwest and Canada. Arguing that Riel viewed the Métis as a distinct people, not caught between worlds, the book demonstrates Riel’s attempts to integrate multiple perspectives – Indigenous, French-Canadian, American, and British – into a new political environment. Choosing to end the book in 1875, at the pinnacle of Riel’s successful career as a political leader, rather than at his death in 1885, Hamon sets out to recover Riel’s agency, intentions, and imagination, all of which have until now been displaced by colonial narratives and the shadow of his execution.

Revisiting the Red River Resistance on its 150th anniversary, The Audacity of His Enterprise offers a new view of Riel’s life and a rethinking of the history of colonialism.

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The settler fantasy, literarily expressed: Katrina Kellar Pinard, Settler Feminism in Contemporary Canadian Historical Fiction, MA dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2019

29Jan20

Abstract: Canada has seen a veritable explosion in the production and popularity of historical fiction in recent decades. Works by women that present a feminist revision of national narratives have played a key part in this phenomenon. This thesis discusses three contemporary Canadian historical novels: Gil Adamson’s The Outlander (2007), Ami McKay’s The Birth House (2006), and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). By examining these novels through a settler colonial lens and with a specific interest in the critique of settler feminism, this thesis offers readings that can reveal how feminism operates within the confines of the settler fantasy. These readings suggest that women’s historical fiction offers an opportunity to consider different aspects of feminism in the settler setting and to consider different aspects of critiques of patriarchy in settler contexts. This thesis suggests that these novels present a settler women’s history that cannot be properly understood through the simplistic logic of male/female or colonizer/colonized oppositions, and that the ways the novels depict women’s interactions with patriarchal settler structures and institutions can contribute to critical understandings of a colonial history with which Canada continues to reckon.

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The population economy of nonhuman species under settler colonialism: Natalia Gutkowski, ‘Bodies that count: Administering multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s borderlands’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2020

29Jan20

Abstract: Nonhuman bodies in many sizes and diverse social roles are central to Israel’s control mechanism in the Occupied West Bank. Delving into the agricultural record of the Israeli Civil Administration, I ask how the Israeli system of control operates through animal bodies. What does a bureaucratic record so invested in monitoring animals’ production, treatment, disease, and death tell about the potential disruption of power? Through a political ecology of human–animal entanglement, I argue that nonhuman bodies both reproduce human colonial relations and allow their constant interruption. Nonhumans challenge the power regime through their unpredictable mobility as well as in their role as both objects of a political economy and subjects of potential agricultural diseases, ecological risks, or public health threats. Breaking from contemporary multispecies scholarly literature’s focus on endangered species and relations of care, I place nonhuman bodies as actors of international-interspecies relations in colonial conditions and point to nonhumans, which are here to stay in the climate change era. By doing so, I reflect on the continuous significance of nonhuman bodies to the operation of power in the “borderlands” of Israel/Palestine and beyond.

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Settler geneaolgies: Ian McKay, ‘The “Morals of Genealogy”: Liberal Settler Colonialism, the Nova Scotia Archives, and the North American Ancestor-Hunters, 1890-1980’, Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 48, 2, 2019, pp. 43-89

28Jan20

Abstract: Genealogy loomed large in the culture of Nova Scotia from the 1890s to the 1970s, yet when D.C. Harvey, the provincial archivist after 1931, defined the key purposes of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, he excluded genealogical research from the core objectives of this “historical laboratory.” He was fighting a losing battle. Like it or not, the institution he headed operated as part of a transnational mnemonic network within which genealogical approaches were becoming more influential and within a province whose White colonial elite had deep connections with New England – the epicentre of popular genealogy in the United States.

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Diasporic indigeneity: Kanako Uzawa, ‘”Crafting Our Future Together”: Urban Diasporic Indigeneity from an Ainu Perspective in Japan’, PhD dissertation, The Arctic University of Norway, 2020

28Jan20

Abstract: This dissertation discusses living experiences and stories of urban Ainu youth, Indigenous people of Japan in the twenty-first century. I have weaved my own experiences as a Tokyo Ainu into the discussion in order to illustrate forms of Ainu cultural revitalization in cities. In the thesis, I ask: What attributes in cities facilitate the process of Ainu cultural revitalization? The dissertation investigates Ainu living experiences in the cities of Tokyo and Sapporo by introducing the concept of urban diasporic Indigeneity as an analytical tool to conceptualize contemporary Ainu lifestyles in cities. The dissertation is based on three publications. Firstly, I set out to investigate how Ainu culture comes into life in Tokyo with a focus on the Ainu restaurant Rera Cise (House of Wind). This is done through various cultural practices of food culture, dance, and most importantly, sharing experiences. The dissertation later expands the discussion of Ainu cultural revitalization in cities to social encounters between Ainu and Wajin (Wajin refers to people of non-Ainu ethnicity) youth, with the case study of Sapporo University Urespa club. I argue that Urespa is a social venture that transforms individual and collective values of Ainu people and Ainu culture into more positive experiences. Lastly, the dissertation discusses the bonding of Ainu and Wajin youth together through Ainu cultural practices within Urespa. The main findings of the dissertation are (1) Ainu cultural revitalization goes beyond the boundary between the Ainu and Wajin relations, and (2) geographical locations do not limit the possibilities for Ainu cultural revitalization. Findings in my research indicate that Ainu culture is still alive, and continues to be carried forward with new inspiration and vision for the future.

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The work ethic as a technology of dispossession: Timothy Maton, ‘How Canadian Policy used the Protestant Work Ethic to Injure the Indigenous Peoples of the Northwest Plains Relationship to the Earth’, Journal of Multidisciplinary Research at Trent, 2, 1, 2020, pp. 199-214

28Jan20

Abstract: It’s only been a very short time since the occident began to think of religion as something distinct from the Commonwealth’s governing body. Likewise, to believe that Canada’s labor policy is somehow divorced from those roots, and to think in terms of a divide between political social ideas and religion would have been, until very recently, an audacious point of view. Therefore, the purpose of this essay, will be to look at how the political objectives of North Western Canada’s labor policies were derived from conceptions of work rooted in religious ideology. This essay argues that North Western Canada’s labor policies are inflected by an economy of knowledge that ideologically injures and challenges Indigenous people’s relationships to the earth using religiously defined ideas including the ubiquitous concept of the Protestant work ethic. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the contemporary conception of work became defined by the Apostolic Protestant work ethic expressed in various symbolic associations including the figure of the ox. This essay demonstrates why the metaphysical analogy associated with oxen is useful to weaponization of Apostolic notions of work; designed to destroy Indigenous people’s relationship to the earth. This paper draws upon historical evidence that shows that since ancient times, labor has been weaponized against earthly Indigenous lifeways. Central to this essay is how Canada’s North Western magistrate policies have weaponized the religious economy of knowledge called the Protestant work ethic.

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A ‘travesty’, or just settler colonialism? Leyland Cecco, ‘”National travesty”: report shows one third of Canada’s prisoners are Indigenous’, The Guardian, 23/01/20

24Jan20

Excerpt: More than 30% of inmates in Canadian prisons are Indigenous – even though aboriginal people make up just 5% of the country’s population, according to new figures released by a federal watchdog.

In a scathing report published on Tuesday, the correctional investigator of Canada, Dr Ivan Zinger, described Indigenous overrepresentation in the country’s jails and prisons as “nothing short of a national travesty”.

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The settler wants a new psychology: Konrad Szocik, Steven Abood, Chris Impey, Mark Shelhamer, Jacob Haqq-Misra, Erik Persson, Lluis Oviedo, Klara Anna Capova, Martin Braddock, Margaret Boone Rappaport, Christopher Corbally, ‘Visions of a Martian future’, Futures, 117, 2020, 102514

20Jan20

Abstract: As we look beyond our terrestrial boundary to a multi-planetary future for humankind, it becomes paramount to anticipate the challenges of various human factors on the most likely scenario for this future: permanent human settlement of Mars. Even if technical hurdles are circumvented to provide adequate resources for basic physiological and psychological needs, Homo sapiens will not survive on an alien planet if a dysfunctional psyche prohibits the utilization of these resources. No matter how far we soar into the stars, our psychologies for future generations will be forever tethered to the totality of our surroundings. By shaping our environment toward survival and welfare during the voyage to Mars and in a Martian colony, we indirectly shape our psyches and prepare them for a mission of unprecedented alienation and duration. Once on Mars, human factors such as leadership structure, social organization and code of conduct, group size, gender balance, developmental cycle, mobility, length of stay and the ecological settings and type and manner of subsistence, will create a novel Martian culture. The degree that settlers are severed from the Earth will affect how radically foreign this culture will be when compared with cultures on Earth.

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Beyond place, settler colonialism: Simone Thornton, Mary Graham, Gilbert Burgh, ‘Reflecting on place: environmental education as decolonisation’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2020

15Jan20

Abstract: We argue that to face climate change, all education, from kindergarten to tertiary, needs to be underpinned by environmental education. Moreover, as a site of reframing, education when coupled with philosophy is a possible site of influencing societal reframing in order to re-examine our relations to nature or our natural environment. However, we contend that as philosophy has been largely absent from curricula, it is vital to redress this issue. Further, the environment cannot be viewed simply as subject matter for study but, reconceptualised in the Indigenous sense as Place. Only in this way can we overcome the human-nature divide. We conclude that educators must look for what Plumwood calls ‘experiences that do not fit the dominant story’ to disrupt an important link in the chain of climate change by developing ‘traitorous identities’ able to challenge the dominant culture.

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