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Settler thieves: Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory, Duke University Press, 2019

05Jul20

Description: Drawing on Indigenous peoples’ struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.


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Latent control and settler control: Néstor L. Silva, ‘Cattle, Fracking, and the Problem of Latent Control is American Settler Ecology’, Engagement, 2020

05Jul20

Excerpt: But, and this is a key point of this essay, some involved in the ecology of the Bakken operate under the assumption that everything is, or can be, under control. That belief—that control is latent, achievable if occasionally absent—is a persistent facet of American settler culture. In protections for the cattle and in the PPE at the frack site, control is an aspiration. In fencing, cattle guards, and coveralls—and also in the American Bison and COVID-19 as I argue below—the drawing of socioecological boundaries can be a means of reaffirming the claims to environmental control that shaped the United States.


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Risking a decolonial move: Liza Brechbill, Unsettling White Settler Subjectivity in Social Justice Education: Towards a Pedagogy of Risk, MA dissertation, University of Toronto, 2020

05Jul20

Abstract: This thesis explores the co-constitutive connections between colonial violence and white settler subjectivity in order to highlight the responsibilities that white settlers have in addressing the death, disappearance, and usurpation of Indigenous land and life. The three chapters are guided by the assertion that the “issue” at the heart of Indigenous-Settler relations in Canada is not simply settler ignorance or a lack of empathy but access to land and resources. Operating from this perspective, the thesis proposes that white settler subjects are not simply implicated in settler colonialism but also created by it. As such, the thesis rejects a rationalist approach to improving intersubjective relations through “knowing the other” and instead proposes a political and/or educational approach that invites learners to, in a sense, risk themselves and their power by unsettling their psycho-affective investment in the settler colonial project and white settler subjectivity itself.


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Immigrant and settler Sweden: Nina Carlsson, ‘Revitalizing the Indigenous, integrating into the colonized? The banal colonialism of immigrant integration in Swedish Sápmi’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020

03Jul20

Abstract: In an endeavour to understand connections between immigration policy and contemporary colonialism on Indigenous territory, this study investigates how state-led immigrant integration policies and practices reproduce colonialism in Swedish Sápmi. It explores the applicability of scholarship on settler colonialism on Sweden and develops the notion of banal colonialism by combining scholarship on settler and everyday colonialism with banal nationalism. Drawing from state documents regulating immigrant integration and semi-structured interviews conducted with integration workers in Swedish Sápmi, the study shows that immigrant integration policy largely silences the colonial past and present of Sweden. While the implementation of national-level policies on Indigenous land reproduces majority-centred narratives, also practices challenging the colonial order are identified. The study shows how the notion of banal colonialism captures mundane colonial practices, but also brings attention to instances where immigrant integration policy has the potential of challenging settler colonialism.


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Settler and indigenous gaming: Joshua D. Miner, ‘Monitoring Simulated Worlds in Indigenous Strategy Games’, The Computer Games Journal, 2020

03Jul20

Abstract: Though all video games require the player to observe the game state, the strategy genre relies on an experience of managing rule-based simulations that model real-world material systems. Designing for this experience produces a mode of interactive vision that structures gameplay as management: gamic monitoring. This article aims to develop a theory of gamic monitoring and explore its features through settler and Indigenous strategy, simulation, and resource management games. Games scholarship has yet to fully account for recent developments in Indigenous video games or how they relate to mainstream genres. Four comparative examples demonstrate how Indigenous games speak to settler-style gameplay, particularly its dynamics of monitoring and managing populations and resources. Due to their divergent frameworks for action, Indigenous strategy games intervene in mainstream genre conventions by shifting informatic play toward relational procedures of observation and decision-making. They express a paradigm of reciprocal interaction through how they mediate and critique codified game systems. Because Indigenous strategy games reconfigure resources and political engagement according to distinct models of managing the game state, they remain useful for further research in developing alternate models of strategy gameplay.


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Water conservation as settler discourse: Michael Warren Cook, Settler Discourses of Water Conservation: Addressing the Arid American West from Roosevelt to Snake Valley, MA dissertation, University of Colorado, 2020

03Jul20

Abstract: This thesis aims to foster discussion about the complex terrain of water politics by investigating the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of a hegemonic water discourse in the US today: water conservation. Its overarching question is: how do settler colonial invocations of water conservation discourse facilitate unsustainable relationships to water in the arid American West? The second chapter attempts to answer this question by drawing on rhetorical criticism. I revisit a key moment in the emergence of water conservation discourse in the US by “the conservation president,” specifically Theodore Roosevelt’s first State of the Union Address in 1901. The third chapter answers this question by drawing on rhetorical field methods and analysis of public culture. In this chapter, I analyze oral histories of water I conducted from settlers in Snake Valley, who are resisting a decades-long water grab that’s been justified in terms of “water conservation.” The two chapters engage extant conversations in the Quarterly Journal of Speech and Environmental Communication, respectively, with the hope of bringing this research into dialogue with rhetorical studies and a cultural studies approach to environmental communication.


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Settler colonial imaginings now: Dan Tout, ‘Destruction and Erasure: Juukan Gorge and the Contemporary Settler-Colonial Imagination, Arena Online, 30/06/20

30Jun20

Excerpt: In a recent article published in Arena Online, Jon Altman offered several important correctives to the narratives that have surrounded the destruction in late May of two Juukan Gorge sites belonging to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people in the Pilbara by mining giant Rio Tinto. In particular, he highlighted the underlying issues with the native title regime as an ostensible means of protecting Indigenous rights to land, and pointed towards the settler-colonial logics of contemporary Australia.

Settler colonialism is primarily about land. Settler-colonial formations are premised on the foundational projection of permanent territorial sovereignty. The clue is in the name: unlike the temporary colonial sojourner, the settler stays. The peculiarities of the sovereign intentions of the settler project, which seeks to establish exclusive territorial sovereignty over expropriated Indigenous lands, produce what Patrick Wolfe described as a ‘logic of elimination’. Access to land is, as Wolfe insisted, the primary motivation for elimination. Settlers—and the settler state—aim to displace the pre-existing (and inconveniently persisting) Indigenous presence in order to establish their own direct connection with the land. In the settler-colonial equation,  as Deborah Bird Rose has suggested, ‘to get in the way all the native has to do is stay at home’.


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The settler colonialism of pandemics (II): Bryan S. R. Grimwood, ‘On Not Knowing: COVID-19 and Decolonizing Leisure Research’, Leisure Studies, 2020

30Jun20

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has enfolded waves of uncertainty—intense doses of not knowing—into our daily experience. In this commentary, I stutter into the discomfort of not knowing as a mode of relation. Recognizing that the collective uncertainty surrounding the pandemic has marshaled vital desires to know how to respond, to cope, and even to survive, I think and write toward productive possibilities that arise when we tune attention away from knowing more and knowing better. The journey I take hitches to conceptual anchor points from settler colonial studies, and to moments of personal upheaval associated with both the current pandemic and learning to take responsibility for settler colonization. As I navigate this route of not knowing, I churn up potential decolonizing pathways for leisure researchers to debate, discard, pick up, or move through.


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The settler colonialism of pandemics: Tai S. Edwards, Paul Kelton, ‘Germs, Genocides, and America’s Indigenous Peoples’, Journal of American History, 107, 1, 2020, pp. 52–76

30Jun20

Excerpt: “Junipero Serra was a nazi not a saint!” “GENOCIDE EQUALS SAINTHOOD?” “NATIVE LIVES MATTER.” These were just a few of the slogans emblazoned on posters and banners during protests opposing the eighteenth-century priest Junípero Serra’s canonization in 2015. Accusations that Serra committed genocide also reverberated in the press. Vincent Medina—a Catholic Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Indian and the assistant to the curator at one of California’s surviving missions—told the New York Times that canonizing “the leader of the disastrous, genocidal California mission system is a way that the church further legitimized the pain and suffering of Ohlone and countless other California Indians.”


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Arrivants as weapons of settler colonialism: Kundai Manamere, ‘Remembering Tom the boss boy: the place of black immigrants in the establishment of the southeastern lowveld sugar estates, Zimbabwe, 1906–1972’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

28Jun20

Abstract: This article explores the role of black immigrants in the history of settler colonialism by demonstrating the interstitial positioning of boss boys on white owned farms in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Most of these individuals came as part of earlier settlers and they occupied a strategic position in the entrenchment of settler colonialism as they acted as intermediaries between the coloniser and the colonised. This article is about a black immigrant named Tom Dunuza, personal servant, driver and boss boy to Thomas Murray MacDougall, the pioneer of Triangle Sugar Estates in southeastern Zimbabwe. It makes use of archives and oral narratives of his two descendants, former and current estate workers and residents to capture memories of Tom Dunuza’s role in the establishment of the lowveld sugar estates and illuminates our understanding of the complex and ambiguous position that boss boys occupied on early colonial farms. Those whom he supervised remember him as a colonial collaborator. The article demonstrates that through a racialised system of violence and paternalism, the boss boy enforced the oppression and subjugation of workers on early colonial farms. It also shows how changes in farm ownership and management from individual and direct control to corporate and indirect administration influenced the development of a positive image of Dunuza among current workers and residents as new forms of paternalism emerged.


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