settler colonial studies blog

Dealing with settler archeologists: Laura Kelvin, Lisa Hodgetts, ‘Unsettling Archaeology’, Canadian Journal of Archaeology, 44, 2020, pp. 1-19

06Sep20

Abstract: In this introduction to the special issue, we examine some of the ways that settler colonialism permeates archaeology in Canada and argue for unsettling approaches to archaeology. Archaeology is a product of and remains a tool for settler colonialism, often oppressing both people of the past and people in the present, especially Indigenous People, Black People, People of Colour, and LGBTQ2S+ community members. We call for unsettling research paradigms, which aim to disrupt the settler colonial foundations that continue to permeate archaeological work and ensure that it benefits only a select few. Unsettling approaches target not only the work we do as archaeologists, but also the structures our work operates through, including universities, museums, different levels of government, and heritage policy and legislation governing private sector archaeology. They require us to acknowledge and confront our relationships to settler colonialism and the ways we participate in it, in all aspects of our lives. Unsettling paradigms play out differently within each project and for each participant, depending on individuals’ unique relationships to settler colonialism, their own experiences, and the context. As illustrated in the papers in this special issue, they encompass themes of truth, listening, learning, feeling, relinquishing control, and building strong futures. To move towards an archaeology that is anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-mysogynist, we must address the deeply embedded colonialism, racism, and misogyny in Canadian settler colonial structures and society. We must start by addressing them within ourselves and the institutions that govern and support our work. Because the unequal power relations within archaeology are so entrenched and pervasive, change may come slowly. It will involve long-term commitment to an ongoing cycle of learning, feeling (particularly when we feel uncomfortable), questioning, and most importantly, acting.

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Citizenship education for settlers: Sophie Rudolph, Melitta Hogarth, ‘Contested Citizenship Education in Settler Colonies on First Nations Land’, in Andrew Peterson, Garth Stahl, Hannah Soong (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education, Palgrave, 2020, pp. 537-548

06Sep20

Abstract: Citizenship education in British settler colonies is no straightforward issue. The history of colonization, imbued with racism, and the ongoing presence of settler peoples and their institutions and government on unceded First Nations land, creates deep citizenship dilemmas. For many years British settler states, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and America, have sought to silence and subdue First Nations peoples through policies and practices that marginalize Indigenous languages, knowledges, and histories. The institution of education has played a key role in these acts of marginalization. This chapter explores the ethical and political dilemmas of citizenship and education in these contexts. It examines the citizenship tensions produced by settler colonies occupying First Nations land, the making of the settler citizen through education systems dominated by whiteness, and the limit points for citizenship education under these conditions. It is argued that justice and citizenship education may be incompatible and that a stance of “anti-citizenship” may be the only possibility for a pathway toward justice in these settler colonial contexts.

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Substantive reservations about the reservations: Justin Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between UsNative Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance, University of Oklahoma Press, 2020

04Sep20

Description: In the 1860s and 1870s, the United States government forced most western Native Americans to settle on reservations. These ever-shrinking pieces of land were meant to relocate, contain, and separate these Native peoples, isolating them from one another and from the white populations coursing through the plains. We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us tells the story of how Native Americans resisted this effort by building vast intertribal networks of communication, threaded together by letter writing and off-reservation visiting.

Faced with the consequences of U.S. colonialism—the constraints, population loss, and destitution—Native Americans, far from passively accepting their fate, mobilized to control their own sources of information, spread and reinforce ideas, and collectively discuss and mount resistance against onerous government policies. Justin Gage traces these efforts, drawing on extensive new evidence, including more than one hundred letters written by nineteenth-century Native Americans. His work shows how Lakotas, Cheyennes, Utes, Shoshones, Kiowas, and dozens of other western tribal nations shrewdly used the U.S. government’s repressive education system and mechanisms of American settler colonialism, notably the railroads and the Postal Service, to achieve their own ends. Thus Natives used literacy, a primary tool of assimilation for U.S. policymakers, to decolonize their lives much earlier than historians have noted.

Whereas previous histories have assumed that the Ghost Dance itself was responsible for the creation of brand-new networks among western tribes, this book suggests that the intertribal networks formed in the 1870s and 1880s actually facilitated the rapid dissemination of the Ghost Dance in 1889 and 1890. Documenting the evolution and operation of intertribal networking, Gage demonstrates its effectiveness—and recognizes for the first time how, through Native activism, long-distance, intercultural communication persisted in the colonized American West.

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A close look at the settlers: Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, Cas Mudde, The Israeli Settler Movement: Assessing and Explaining Social Movement Success, Cambridge University Press, 2020

04Sep20

Description: The Israeli settler movement plays a key role in Israeli politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict, yet very few empirical studies of the movement exist. This is the first in-depth examination of the contemporary Israeli settler movement from a structural (rather than purely historical or political) perspective, and one of the few studies to focus on a longstanding, radical right-wing social movement in a non-western political context. A trailblazing systematic assessment of the role of the settler movement in Israeli politics writ large, as well as in relation to Israel’s policy towards the West Bank, this book analyzes the movement both as a whole and as a combination of its parts (i.e. branches) – institutions, networks, and individuals. Whether you are a student, researcher, or policymaker, this book offers a comprehensive and original theoretical framework alongside a rich empirical analysis which illuminates social movements in general, and the Israeli settler movement in particular.

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Digital media as decolonial practice: Ashley Cordes, ‘Revisiting Stories and Voices of the Rogue River War (1853–1856): A Digital Constellatory Autoethnographic Mode of Indigenous Archaeology’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2020

04Sep20

Abstract: The Rogue River War (RRW) between Indigenous peoples and settlers is historically overlooked and storied through settler-colonial lenses. This essay narrates participation in a digital restorying and archaeological investigation into the war in light of digital advancements in archaeology and communication. The author coins a reflexive approach referred to as a digital constellatory autoethnographic mode of Indigenous archaeology (DCAM) and details how Snapchats, iPhone images, digital memory cards, and artifacts/belongings have sets of logic, mood, and vocalic character. DCAM demonstrates how digital media not counted as “official” data enables Indigenous and ally researchers to have more honest engagements with histories.

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Nonsettler immigrants: Ana Schwartz, ‘Were There Any Immigrants in New England? The New England Quarterly, 93, 3, 2020, pp. 400-413

02Sep20

Access the article here.

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Settler colonialism today: Aweke Amare Kenaw, ‘One country – two citizenships: the status of settlers in Benishangul-Gumuz Regional Sates (BGRS) of Ethiopia’, African Identities, 2020

02Sep20

Abstract: Migration of people from a certain area to a new destination is as old as human history. It is often made as a result of factors necessitating the movement either in the form of pull and push factors. In Ethiopia too, there has been various peoples’ movements since whenever in history from their home areas to new destinations across the country. Some have resulted for permanent settlements and full-fledged citizenship in the areas they settled but it has also produced very complicated relations in some. Besides individual oriented movements in search of better opportunities, there were also state operated movements based on the severity of circumstances. This paper, therefore, is dedicated to comment on the political and citizenship status of state operated settlers in Ethiopia in light of the experiences of Settlers in Asossa woreda, Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State (BGRS) of Ethiopia.

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Can the settler listen? Ryan Ben Shuvera, Sounding Unsettlement: Rethinking Settler States of Mind and Re(-)cognition through Scenes of Cross-Cultural Listening, PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2020

02Sep20

Abstract: In this dissertation I consider how listening to music produced by Indigenous peoples might convince settler listeners to surrender settler states of mind. I focus on the elements of settler colonialism that are exemplified in and challenged by the experiences of listening to music produced by Indigenous peoples. I focus on these aesthetic encounters as a way of exposing the everyday presence and power of settler states of mind and, more importantly, exploring how settlers might go about rebuilding states of mind through these moments of aesthetic surrender that are spurred by embodied experiences of sound. My project builds on the work of writers, theorists, and musicians such as African American writer James Baldwin, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Simpson, and Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson. I think about what it means to listen cross-culturally in the context of ongoing settler colonialism in North America (Turtle Island) and increased rhetoric around “reconciliation” in response to the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) in 2015. I speak to the intimate level of listening to music from across cultures in this dissertation so that settlers might begin to engage in a critical self-reflection necessary for the rebuilding of settler states of mind—a reflection that involves a sense of surrender that requires settlers to learn how to participate in new worlds opened and led by various Indigenous peoples and nations.

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On indigenous futures: Yin Paradies, ‘Unsettling truths: modernity, (de-)coloniality and Indigenous futures’, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

30Aug20

Abstract: In our world of fractured truths, unparalleled disparities and technological wizardry, it is vital that we interrogate the largely unquestioned political axioms that have brought us to the brink of extinction. In this article, I explore the broader landscape in which settler-coloniality is ensconced through an examination of global modernity. I briefly outline some well-known, but largely subsumed, and mostly unremarked, realities of the contemporary world. I then argue that debt, property, institutions and nation states are the constituent devastations of modernity that we must simultaneously aver and avert. I suggest that the path towards decoloniality entails radical land-based re-localisation, revitalised communalism and embodied kinship with all life. This will necessitate an Indigenisation in which we, collectively across difference and distance, embrace fundamentally transformed relationships of mutuality so as to bring about flourishing egalitarian societies.

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Genocide applies: Claudia Laurel Bell, A Postcolonial Analysis of the Genocide Convention With Reference to the Lived Experiences of the Palestinian People Under Settler Colonial Rule, MA dissertation, Columbia, 2020

30Aug20

Abstract: Native people under colonial rule have suffered a multitude of human rights abuses throughout history. The human rights community has attempted to address this by granting colonised peoples self-determination, in addition to creating international laws that seek to prevent and punish the mistreatment of vulnerable people more broadly. However, a growing number of scholars have argued that international human rights law not only fails to sufficiently account for abuses that continue to be perpetrated against native peoples, but also, by doing so, actively contributes to their marginalisation. I will follow this academic trajectory, and will argue that the Genocide Convention specifically, was constructed in accordance with the vested interests of colonial powers. The resulting definition of genocide omitted acts occurring to native people, such as ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation, as it suited the political agendas of colonial countries. I will challenge this position and assert that if genocide is to be understood as the destruction of the group, rather than its individual constituent parts, then any action designed to intentionally decimate the group, (as a metaphysical entity existing beyond its human participants), should be considered genocidal. More specifically, non-lethal methods, often referred to as cultural genocide, should be included in the Genocide Convention. I will contextualise this argument within Palestine and apply a settler-colonial lens to the engagement between the Israeli State and the Palestinian people. I will argue that settler-colonisation has an intrinsically genocidal dimension; it follows therefore that the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli State can be plausibly considered. It will be concluded that if international human rights law is to effectively protect vulnerable communities from human rights abuses, such as genocide, it needs to be consistently evaluated and reconsidered from a multitude of perspectives.

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