settler colonial studies blog

Excluding indigenous peoples today (transfer and repressive authenticity today): Andrea Procter, ‘Elsewhere and otherwise: Indigeneity and the politics of exclusion in Labrador’s extractive resource governance’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 2020

23Jun20

Abstract: Indigenous peoples have fought for recognition and inclusion in state-driven resource governance in Labrador for generations. At the same time, the settler state has tried to limit their inclusion by restricting the boundaries of indigeneity. By arguing that Indigenous peoples are not present in the project area or are not doing “traditional” activities, it aims to exclude some groups from the decision-making, monitoring, and benefits of extractivist projects. In rendering indigeneity as spatially and economically contained, government and industry pursue settler colonial fantasies of Indigenous erasure and absence.

This paper uses a recent public inquiry into the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project as a mechanism to trace how indigeneity has been mobilized in resource conflicts between the state, industry, and numerous Indigenous peoples of the Labrador peninsula since the 18th century. Linking hydroelectric developments with examples of mining, logging, and commercial fishing, the paper explores the dynamic between government efforts to facilitate extractive industry by containing indigeneity and Indigenous assertions of a more flexible and dynamic reality. Instead of abiding to the state’s limiting version of indigeneity, the Indigenous peoples of the Labrador peninsula are challenging and reforming environmental governance by demonstrating that they are, in fact, elsewhere and otherwise.

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Fantasies of settler indigenisation through composting: Rebecca Ream, ‘Pākehā Landhome-Making: Composting Arcadia with(in) Wairarapa’, The Journal of New Zealand Studies, 30, 2020, pp. 38-55

23Jun20

Abstract: This article offers the notion of landhome-making as a way to compost arcadia. For my doctoral research, I interviewed Pākehā women from rural Wairarapa. Here I draw on fragments from three participants’ stories to demonstrate how landhome-making can be a fertile way to trouble dominant understandings of arcadia by drawing on Donna Haraway’s composting. Arcadia, which can be understood as a rural paradise, was a key way Europeans settled New Zealand, and is still a formative way in which Pākehā relate to land. Although immersed in colonial mythologizing, in which the arcadian ideal is an intimate part, I suggest participants’ narratives also have the capacity to disrupt this problematic colonial ideal. I found this out by using feminist more-than-human ethnographic methodologies that helped me conclude that landhome-making possesses possibilities for composting dominant understandings of arcadia with(in) Wairarapa.

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Settlers and their fortress farming: Alexandra Vlachos, ‘Fortress Farming in Western Australia? The Problematic History of Separating Native Wildlife from Agricultural Land through the State Barrier Fence’, Global Environment, 13, 2, 2020, pp. 368-403

23Jun20

Abstract: The Western Australia (WA) State Barrier Fence stretches 2,023 miles (3,256 kilometres) and divides Australia’s largest state. The original ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’ fence was built from 1901–1907 to stop the westbound expansion of rabbits into the existing and potential agricultural zone of Western Australia. Starting as a seemingly straightforward, albeit costly, solution to protect what was considered a productive landscape, the fence failed to keep out the rabbits. It was subsequently amended, upgraded, re-named and used to serve different purposes: as Vermin Fence and State Barrier Fence (unofficially also Emu Fence or Dog Fence) the fence was designed to exclude native Australian animals such as emus, kangaroos and dingoes. In the Australian ‘boom and bust’ environment, characterised by extreme temperatures and unpredictable rainfall, interrupting species movement has severe negative impacts on biodiversity – an issue aggravated by the fact that Australia leads in global extinction rates (Woinarski, Burbidge and Harrison, 2015). The twentieth century history of the fence demonstrates the agrarian settlers’ struggle with the novelty and otherness of Western Australia’s ecological conditions – and severe lack of knowledge thereof. While the strenuous construction, expensive maintenance and doubtful performance of the fence provided useful and early environmental lessons, they seem largely forgotten in contemporary Australia. The WA government recently commenced a controversial $11 million project to extend the State Barrier Fence for another 660 kilometres to reach the Esperance coast, targeting dingoes, emus and kangaroos – once again jeopardising habitat connectivity. This paper examines the environmental history, purposes and impacts of the State Barrier fence, critically discusses the problems associated with European farming and pastoralism in WA, and touches on alternative land-use perspectives and futures.

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Barriers to water are a weapon of settlement: Nina Marie Nichols, Testing the limits of water as a human right: A comparison of First Nations in Canada and Palestinian Communities, MA dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2020

23Jun20

Abstract: Researchers have long questioned if legally-framed efforts, such as the UN declaration of the Human Right to Water, are adequately framed to enable universal enjoyment of the right (Singh et al, 2016; Donnelly, 2006). This document investigates these questions around the realization of the human right to water by comparing First Nations Communities in Canada and Palestinian communities. I posit that both communities continue to face lower rates of water security as a result of settler colonialism, jurisdictional fragmentation and funding patterns. I discuss how these similarities can be related directly to shortcomings of the Human Right to water, specifically its nature as a derivative right, the hegemonic framework, and limited applicability on the ground.

The objective of this research is to discuss the common barriers to water access facing these two groups and identify tools that can better serve marginalized communities in realizing the human right to water.

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Settlers above? Fred Nadis, Star Settlers: The Billionaires, Geniuses, and Crazed Visionaries Out to Conquer the Universe, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020

23Jun20

Description: The story behind the elite scientists, technologists, SF enthusiasts, and billionaires who believe that humanity’s destiny is to populate the stars . . .

Does humanity have a destiny “in the stars?” Should a species triggering massive extinctions on its own planet instead stay put? This new book traces the waxing and waning of interest in space settlement through the decades, and offers a journalistic tour through the influential subculture attempting to shape a multiplanetary future.

What motivates figures such as billionaires Elon Musk and Yuri Milner? How important have science fiction authors and filmmakers been in stirring enthusiasm for actual space exploration and settlement? Is there a coherent motivating philosophy and ethic behind the spacefaring dream?

Star Settlers offers both a historical perspective and a journalistic window into a peculiar subculture packed with members of the scientific, intellectual, and economic elite. This timely work.

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Against settler colonialism, Indigenous decolonial-democracy: David Myer Temin, ‘Our Democracy: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Decolonial-Democracy’, Perspectives on Politics, 2020

20Jun20

Abstract: In recent years, a growing body of political science scholarship has shown how territorial expansion and Indigenous dispossession profoundly shaped American democratic ideas and institutions. However, scant attention has been paid to Indigenous thinkers and activists who have reshaped the colonial and imperial facets of democracy. I reconstruct the writings of the Oneida thinker and activist Laura Cornelius Kellogg (1880–1947). I contend that Kellogg offers a political theory of “decolonial-democracy,” which challenged settler-imperial domination by bringing together a project of Indigenous self-determination with reimagined democratic narratives, values, and institutions. The first and second sections place Kellogg in pan-Indigenous debates within the Society of American Indians and among non-Indigenous Progressive reformers, in order to show how she brings together a pan-Indigenous and social-democratic critique of American democracy. The third section interprets her landmark 1920 pamphlet Our Democracy and the American Indian as a counter-narrative of the American founding read through the disavowed influence of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, a return to which she casts as a basis for democratic and Indigenous renewal. The final section outlines her vision of Indigenous self-government as “Indian communism” in the form of her “Lolomi Plan.” In sum, I trace a counter-politics envisioning a form of relational self-determination within a confederated, multinational political order, as well as the difficulty of bringing decolonization together with democracy in practice.

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Repressive authenticity in Argentina: Alicia Barreiro, Joaquin Ungaretti, Edgardo Etchezahar, Cecilia Wainryb, ‘”They Are Not Truly Indigenous People”: Social Representations and Prejudice against Indigenous People in Argentina’, Papers on Social Representations, 29, 1, 2020, pp. 6.1-6.24

17Jun20

Abstract: In Argentina, as well as in many countries, indigenous people have been the target of prejudice for centuries. This situation mostly dates to the “Conquest of the Desert”, a military campaign waged by the Argentine government against the indigenous population during the late 19th century. Although in the last three decades, indigenous groups’ claims for reparation and equal social rights have increased in visibility, most are still victims of cultural segregation and poverty. This study analyzes the relations among social representations and prejudice against indigenous people in a small city, where the descendants of both military people and the European immigrants who arrived at the beginning of the 20th century to settle in the “conquered” lands, live alongside descendants of the Mapuche indigenous groups who originally inhabited that same territory. Our analyses suggest a contradiction in the attempts to vindicate the indigenous people while maintaining their subordinated and segregated status in the community. That opposition is reinforced by imaginary frontiers created by the organization of urban spaces and representations of the relations between past and present that relegate indigenous people to the past and place them into the poorest and most violent neighborhood, implicitly marking them as criminals. Hence, social representations may be at the basis of the subtle expressions of prejudice that are very frequent. However, when the inhabitants of the city have to actually face indigenous people who are not clearly very different from them and when these indigenous people’s claims become more visible, more blatant forms of prejudice become manifest.

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Parks and Recreation occupy Indigenous lands: Chance Finegan, ‘Undergraduate Curricula in the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia: Are We Missing the Mark on Indigenous Peoples and Parks?’ Parks, 26, 1, 2020, pp. 25-35

17Jun20

Abstract: Indigenous peoples’ rights increasingly demand the attention of government agents, including protected area managers in the CANZUS states (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA). Park/Indigenous relations are a fundamental job competency for CANZUS park employees. This exploratory research draws on the curricula of 391 university major programmes to quantify the extent to which CANZUS university programmes in natural resources management, park management and allied fields might prepare aspiring CANZUS park employees to work with Indigenous peoples; I conclude the programmes generally fail to do so. Zero American park management majors in the study require Indigenous-focused coursework. In the Commonwealth countries, 52 per cent of park management programmes do so. Only 6 per cent of American natural resources management majors require such coursework, versus 45 per cent in the Commonwealth countries. This calls attention to an urgent need to improve aspiring park employees’ understanding of how their work intersects with Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialism.

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The rule of settler colonial indifference: Kara Granzow, Invested Indifference: How Violence Persists in Settler Colonial Society, UBC Press, 2020

17Jun20

Description: In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as “indifferent” to the high rates of violence faced by Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true.

Invested Indifference offers a divergent perspective on the contemporary disappearance and murder of Indigenous women and girls in Canada. It does so by examining practices at three different historical moments in the same location, the place we now call Edmonton, juxtaposing late-nineteenth-century texts, documents concerning the former Charles Camsell Indian Hospital, and contemporary online police materials. Through a critical analysis of the seemingly disparate discourses circulating through these materials, Kara Granzow makes the claim that what we see as societal indifference does not come from an absence of feeling but from a deep-rooted and affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable.

Granzow demonstrates that through mechanisms such as the law, medicine, and control of land and space, gendered and racialized everyday violence against Indigenous people has become symbolically and politically entrenched as a central practice in the social construction of Canadian nationhood. Invested Indifference exposes the thread of violence not as past, but as running through our settler-colonial present.

Scholars of sociology, settler-colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and gender studies will find this book to be of interest, and, as national attention is finally paid to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, it will also have a broad readership among those involved in front-line services.

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Settler colonialism is metapolitical too: Aaron John Spitzer, The metapolitics of settler colonialism: Individual rights, collective boundaries, and Indigenous (de)colonization, PhD dissertation, University of Bergen, 2020

17Jun20

Abstract: Metapolitics are like the forces inside the atom, so constitutive of the world around us that they hide in plain sight. If domestic politics happens within polities, and geopolitics happens between them, metapolitics decides which is which. I contend this is one way to look at settler colonialism. Over the past few centuries, settler colonialism has transformed the globe, re-crafting Indigenous continents into a New World modelled on the European motherland. This re-crafting has been accomplished in part through metapolitics. “We” have not merely taken what is theirs, we have done so by redefining it, morally, legally, and constitutionally, as ours. Thus veiled by metapolitics, contemporary settler colonies hide in plain sight. In this dissertation my aim was to theorize settler-colonial metapolitics, making it visible. I pursued this project in three steps. First I identified an array of contemporary settler (and related) metapolitical conflicts and classified them in an original taxonomic table of cases. Second, drawing from this table, I conducted four comparative case studies – the articles of my dissertation. Each article explores theoretical, judicial and political dimensions of settler metapolitics in the three most iconic settler states, the United States, Canada and Australia. Finally, I devised a theoretical model to better identify, understand, and address settler metapolitical conflicts. At its core, the theory is this: Contemporary settler colonialism harnesses individual liberal rights, which are the core rights within polities, to problematize boundaries between polities, challenging the legitimacy of Indigenous demotic and territorial difference and thereby dissolving “them” into “us.” This dissertation is, I believe, an original contribution to three sub-fields of political science. First, it contributes to settler-colonial studies, highlighting a largely unexplored means by which contemporary settlers advance colonization and/or resist decolonization. Second, it contributes to political theory, applying a framework to a nameless theoretical space that has become busy with such unreconciled concepts as “mega-politics” (Hirschl 2008), “sovereignty studies” (Aleinikoff 2000), the “law of democracy” (Issacharoff, Karlan and Pildes 2002), “trans-polity rights” (Kant 1795 [2015]), “cosmopolitan rights” (Benhabib 2004), “democratic inclusion” (Bauböck 2017), the “boundary problem” (Whelan 1983), and of course “metapolitics” (Fraser 2009). Third, it contributes to constitutional law, by identifying metapolitics as a (critically overlooked) legal matter, by cataloging dozens of metapolitical cases from around the globe, and by showing decision-makers how they might grapple with such cases.

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