settler colonial studies blog

Undoing settler claims to indigenous history: Peter A. Nelson, ‘Refusing Settler Epistemologies and Maintaining an Indigenous Future for Tolay Lake, Sonoma County, California’, American Indian Quarterly, 44, 2, 2020, pp. 221-242

03Jun20

Abstract: Archaeological research has traditionally been a top-down scientific process of knowledge production with little involvement from the descendant communities whose cultural resources and heritage are under investigation. The analysis of collections resulting from archaeological research and the empirical data that it provides can legitimate settler scientists’ claims to know and revise Indigenous histories and eliminate the legitimacy of Indigenous claims about these histories from the standpoint of traditional knowledges. Despite these settler colonial tendencies within the discipline of archaeology, decolonizing archaeological practices and narratives and making space for Native American peoples is possible when research is refocused on the desires of descendent communities. Using a framework of responsive justice in working with communities to co-develop questions, methodologies and interpretations, the physical and intellectual heritage and histories of Indigenous communities can be maintained. This article will discuss one case from the Tolay Valley in which Indigenous archaeological research in collaboration with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria has been leveraged to support the tribe’s goals of environmental and cultural restoration at this place and has also revised and enriched the history that can be told about Coast Miwok people’s long-term engagement with the Tolay Valley.

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Settler girls settle: Willow Samara Allen, ‘Learning to become White girls in a settler colonial context: exploring the racial socialization of White Euro-Canadian women’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

03Jun20

Abstract: This piece particularizes the subjectivities and experiences of white Euro-Canadian women to understand how they become implicated in relationships and systems of power that sustain the settler colonial state. This examination is driven by assertions from settler colonial scholars to explore the ‘everydayness’ of settler colonialism, efforts by critical Whiteness scholars to spatially locate Whiteness, and by long-time calls from critical race feminists for white women to interrogate their responsibilities in challenging white supremacy. To respond, I argue we must start at the beginning to assess how white women learn to become racialized, gendered national subjects. Drawing on findings from my qualitative study of white women in transracial/cultural families, I investigate formative spaces and discourses through which the women are socialized into settler Whiteness. My analysis demonstrates the participants’ learning occurs in the home and community, and within relationships defined by intimacy and distance. I argue by examining the white settler socialization of white women who permanently transgress ‘colourlines’, greater insight can be gained into how white settler subjectivities are formed and possibly interrupted. I contend white settler socialization processes are necessary to challenge in broader efforts towards decolonization, imperative to which is imagining what different white femininities can exist.

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Settlers inventing indigenous traditions: Darryl Leroux, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, University of Manitoba Press, 2019

03Jun20

Description: Distorted Descent examines a social phenomenon that has taken off in the twenty-first century: otherwise white, French descendant settlers in Canada shifting into a self-defined “Indigenous” identity. This study is not about individuals who have been dispossessed by colonial policies, or the multi-generational efforts to reconnect that occur in response. Rather, it is about white, French-descendant people discovering an Indigenous ancestor born 300 to 375 years ago through genealogy and using that ancestor as the sole basis for an eventual shift into an “Indigenous” identity today.

After setting out the most common genealogical practices that facilitate race shifting, Leroux examines two of the most prominent self-identified “Indigenous” organizations currently operating in Quebec. Both organizations have their origins in committed opposition to Indigenous land and territorial negotiations, and both encourage the use of suspect genealogical practices. Distorted Descent brings to light to how these claims to an “Indigenous” identity are then used politically to oppose actual, living Indigenous peoples, exposing along the way the shifting politics of whiteness, white settler colonialism, and white supremacy.

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Converting settlers: Porscha Fermanis, ‘Capital, Conversion, and Settler Colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2020

03Jun20

Abstract: Viewing capitalism as emerging primarily from within the framework of empire rather than the nation state, this essay considers the relationship between capital, conversion, and settler colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872). It looks, first, at the novel’s critique of Wakefieldian organized settlement schemes as systems sustained by various forms of capital accumulation and free/unfree labour; and second, at its over-arching evangelical conversion narrative, which both frames and structures the main body of the text. The essay argues that, far from directing its satire wholly or even primarily towards metropolitan Britain, the novel enacts two circulating mid-nineteenth-century settler colonial anxieties: concerns about a perceived crisis of diminishing industriousness and economic exhaustion in colonial Australia and New Zealand, and concerns about the efficacy of British humanitarianism and missionary conversion. It considers the former in the context of the disruptions to settlement caused by the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s, and the latter in the context of missionary and humanitarian efforts to ameliorate conditions for Indigenous peoples from the 1830s onwards. The essay’s larger claim is that Erewhon presents capital and conversion as structurally interconnected mechanisms of an evolving Anglo-settler state in New Zealand. Radicalizing a tradition of economic critique of empire beginning with Adam Smith, Butler satirizes the idea of colonialism as an essentially liberal system by showing how much it is intertwined with exploitative practices of territorial expansion, dispossession, capital accumulation, unfree labour, missionary conversion, and racial assimilation.

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Settlers traditions in a changing landscape: R. Y. Fedorov, ‘The Evolution of Ethnic Tradition Transfer among Belorussian Peasant Settlers in Siberia and Russia’s Far East from 1850 to the Present’, Journal of Russian History, 19, 2, 2020, pp. 393-402

31May20

Abstract: This article examines how the transfer of ethnic traditions among Belorussian peasant settlers in Asian Russia to their descendants has evolved since 1850. Based on field data collected from different generations of Belorussian settlers born during the 20th century, the study indicates that the mechanism of this transfer went through three very distinct phases. From the second half of the 19th century until the 1920’s, the children of Belorussian settlers adopted the ethnic identity and traditions of their parents, much like their forefathers back home. During the Soviet era, i.e., from the early 1920’s until the late 1980’s, the state sought to replace Belorussian customs and conventions among the settlers’ children with its own homogenous, socialist modernity. After the USSR’s collapse in 1991, the growing influence of mass media and more contemporary socio-cultural processes began to influence how ethnic traditions were transferred to the young. All three periods left their imprint on the outlook of the descendants of Belorussian settlers today. This is largely the result of the fact that practical knowledge and skills change more rapidly than deeper values and beliefs.

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Finance to settler colonialism: Matthew Birchall, ‘History, Sovereignty, Capital: Company Colonization in South Australia and New Zealand’, Journal of Global History, 2020

31May20

Abstract: This article takes a fresh look at the history of private colonial enterprise in order to show how companies influenced British settlement and emigration to South Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s, thus connecting the settler revolution to global capitalism. Bringing into a single analytical frame the history of company colonization in the antipodes and its Atlantic predecessor, it examines how and why the actors involved in the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand invoked North American precedent to justify their early nineteenth-century colonial ventures. The article shows how the legitimating narratives employed by the colonial reformers performed two key functions. On the one hand, they supplied a historical and discursive tradition that authorized chartered enterprise in the antipodes. On the other hand, they furnished legal arguments that purportedly justified the appropriation of Aboriginal Australian and Māori tribal land. In illuminating how language and time shaped the world-making prophesies of these colonial capitalists, the article aims to extend recent work on corporations in global context.

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Enlightenment to settler colonialism: Bruce Buchan, Annemarie McLaren, ‘Edinburgh’s Enlightenment abroad: navigating humanity as a physician, merchant, natural historian and settler-colonist’, Intellectual History Review, 2020

31May20

Abstract: Scotland’s Enlightenment and Britain’s Empire were inseparably entwined, such that the former’s conceptualisation of humanity bore the indelible impression of the latter. We argue here that, by tracing the career and writings of one among a much wider range of travellers educated in Edinburgh in the last years of the eighteenth century, the connections between Scotland’s Enlightenment and colonisation can be usefully explored. Alexander Berry (1781–1873) was educated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh between 1798 and 1800 and then travelled to China, Australia, Fiji, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, before eventually becoming a prosperous landowner at Shoalhaven on the South Coast of New South Wales. Throughout it all, Berry speculated on the humanity of diverse peoples he interacted with as physician, merchant, landowner, and as a natural historian. His career exemplifies the entangled commercial, colonial, and scientific interests that characterised the global circulation of Enlightenment knowledge in the context of Britain’s expanding Empire. From the intimacy of his encounters with non-European and Indigenous peoples, and the trans-imperial networks of trade and expertise in which he was engaged, his speculations on humanity bore the marks of both Enlightenment and Empire.

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Sociologists discovering settler colonialism (in Hawaii): Jennifer Darrah‐Okike, ‘Theorizing race in Hawai‘i: Centering place, indigeneity, and settler colonialism’, Sociology Compass, 2020

31May20

Abstract: Scholars have argued that the sociology of race in the United States should be theorized within a settler‐colonial framework, while others have advanced a turn toward empire. Theories of settler colonialism are only recently gaining traction within sociology, however, and insights from Indigenous studies remain unfamiliar to many sociologists of race and ethnicity. Contemporary scholarship on Hawai‘i addresses settler colonialism and indigeneity in ways that could inform the sociology of race. The recent scholarship on Hawai‘i reviewed here advances the theorizing of race in three ways. First, it shows the complexity, endurance, and creativity of Indigenous agency, as well as resistance to colonialism. Second, by critically describing settler colonialism, it distinguishes colonial domination from racial domination, while also demonstrating their entanglements. Third, this body of literature examines how racializations are triangulated, organized by selective assimilation, and shaped by contestations over land, places, and resources. By engaging with these three themes, contemporary scholarship on Hawai‘i suggests pathways for future research at the intersection of race, place, indigeneity, and settler colonialism.

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Indigenous autoethnographic datasets as resistance (against settler colonialism): Michelle Bishop, ‘”Don’t tell me what to do”: encountering colonialism in the academy and pushing back with Indigenous autoethnography’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2020

30May20

Abstract: As an Aboriginal woman critiquing Australia’s education system as a site of ongoing colonialism, I aim to actively resist the temptation to perform research within Western hegemonic research paradigms, and instead seek ways to disrupt normative research practices with the what, how, and why of research. In this paper, I utilise Indigenous autoethnography as a cultural imperative to ‘walk my talk’, embedding an autoethnographic dataset of reflection, poetry, emotion, and subjective blurting in response to my experiences of colonialism in the academy. Indigenous autoethnography allows a space from which I can expose (and resist) the abnormality of the ‘normal’; fulfil cultural, ethical and relational obligations; and recentre axiology and ontology as a starting place for research. This paper seeks to contribute to the small but growing literature on Indigenous autoethnography, to offer another pathway for Indigenous scholars to follow, as well as illuminate normative research practices for non-Indigenous researchers.

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Humour as resistance (against settler colonialism): Jeremy A. Siegman, ‘Playing with Antagonists: The Politics of Humor in Israeli‐Palestinian Market Encounters’, PoLAR, 2020

30May20

Abstract: This article identifies playful antagonism as a defining mode of rare Israeli‐Palestinian encounters in Israeli settlement businesses. It is based on ethnographic work primarily in an Israeli settlement supermarket where the lowest‐paid workers are mostly occupied Palestinians. This playful antagonism characterizes heated Israeli‐Palestinian political exchanges as well as Palestinian workers’ mockery of their settler bosses and customers, through gestures and jokes alike. These practices navigate an incongruity between the high‐stakes antagonisms of Israeli settler‐colonization and the banality of the workplace. Rather than preventing more “serious” antagonism, this playful antagonism is itself serious, enacting and contesting existential struggles over settler‐colonization, in a context saturated with suspicion and risk to Palestinian livelihoods. Thus, rather than framing humor as standing outside of or transcending political domination and antagonism, this article frames humor as a way of enacting these forms of settler‐native politics. It thus stages a fresh conversation between the recent literature on settler colonialism in Palestine, which has understandably focused on Israeli domination but ignored Israeli‐Palestinian contact and humor, and the literature on humor, which has often ignored scaled‐up forms of power and domination. The article thus contributes to a political anthropology of humor as intertwined with power and domination.

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