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The disaster of settler colonialism: Andrew Kensinger, Unsettling Recovery: Natural Disaster Response and the Politics of Contemporary Settler Colonialism, PhD Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2019

25Sep19

Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnographic case study of the Christchurch Central City Rebuild. Following a series of severe earthquakes near Christchurch, New Zealand between September 2010 and February 2011, the central government declared a state of emergency and passed the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 (CER Act). This act mandated the creation of a new governing body, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, to oversee the development and implementation of a recovery strategy and plan for the Central City to be developed in cooperation with the Christchurch City Council and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, the local Māori tribal authority. I analyze the structure of power established by the post-earthquake recovery legislation through the lens of Rebuild discourse, a discursive regime comprised of multiple political projects that each engaged in recovery in particular ways to enact their specific vision of what future Christchurch ought to be. I argue that the passage of the CER Act and the structure of power it created in post-earthquake Christchurch drew on the legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history to enable the neoliberal settler state in its efforts to dispossess local Christchurch residents of access to their city while also maintaining the ongoing dispossession of the local indigenous group Ngāi Tahu in order to serve the interests of economic and political elites.


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Settler colonialism right now: Tatiana Dias, ‘Operation Amazon Redux’, The Intercept, 20/09/19

24Sep19

Excerpt: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is planning to push industrialization and development in the interior of the country’s Amazon basin. It is far from a new project. For more than a century, a series of Brazilian governments have sought to move into the country’s interior, developing — or, to be more precise, colonizing — the Amazon. From the populist president-turned-dictator who made one of the early industrial pushes into the forest in the 1930s to the military dictatorship that ruled the country for two decades from 1964 until 1985, the justifications have largely been the same — economic gain and geopolitical paranoia — as were the often poor results.


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The south as an indigenous place: Angela Pulley Hudson, ‘Unsettling Histories of the South’, Southern Cultures, 25, 3, 2019, pp. 30-45

22Sep19

Abstract: This essay argues for re-envisioning southern history with indigenous experiences at its center. It draws on multi-disciplinary sources, including historiography, literary criticism, anthropological studies, and archival materials to show that southern history is far more complex and contradictory than much scholarship has acknowledged and that focusing on the Native South helps lay bare those complexities. Going beyond a call to simply add more Indians to studies of the region, the essay urges a reconceptualization of time, place, and power, such as expanding the temporal frame and grappling with tensions between and among American Indians, African Americans, and others in the South. Despite tremendous advances in the field with respect to analyses of race and gender, a significant blind spot remains with regard to Native American history and the stakes of ignoring it include extending the project of settler colonialism.


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Picking up a settler fight (on the outside): Steve Marti, For Home and Empire: Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War, UBC Press, 2019

20Sep19

Description: For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization across the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. It draws together case studies from the dominion home fronts to build a history of nations and empire in wartime.

In the First World War, dominion governments relied heavily on voluntary efforts to support the expansion of their skeletal peacetime armies into formidable expeditionary forces. Communities organized to raise recruits, donate funds, and provide supplies ranging from a pair of socks to an airplane. Their efforts strengthened communal bonds, but they also reinforced class, race, and gender boundaries. Which jurisdiction should provide for a soldier’s wife if she moved from Hobart to northern Tasmania? Should Welsh women in Vancouver purchase comforts for local soldiers or for Welsh soldiers in the British Army? Should Māori volunteers enlist with their home regiment or with a separate battalion? Voluntary efforts reflected how community members understood their relationship to one another, to their dominion, and to the Empire.

Steve Marti examines the motives and actions of those involved in the voluntary war effort, applying the framework of settler colonialism to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.


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The settler search for indigeneity: David Chandler, Julian Reid, Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

20Sep19

Description: Representations of indigenous peoples, while never static, have always served the interests of settler-colonialism. Historically, the dominant framing marginalised indigenous practices as legacies of the distant past. Today indigenous approaches are demanded in order for settler-colonialism itself to have a future. Becoming indigenous, we are told, is a necessity if humanity is to survive and cope with the catastrophic changes wrought by modernist excess in the Anthropocene. 

Becoming Indigenous provides an agenda-setting critique, analysing how and why indigeneity has been reduced to instrumental imaginaries of perseverance and resilience. Indigenous ‘alternatives’ are today central to a range of governing discourses, which promise empowerment but are highly disciplinary. Critical theorists often endorse these framings, happy to instrumentalise indigenous peoples as caretakers of the environment or as teaching the moderns about their ‘more-than-human’ responsibilities. 

Chandler and Reid argue that these discourses have little to do with indigenous struggles or with challenging settler-colonial power. In fact, instrumentalising indigeneity in these ways merely reinforces neoliberal hegemony, marginalising critical alternatives for both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike.


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For settlers, ‘home’ is literally an extraction: Clinton N. Westman, Tara L. Joly, Lena Gross (eds), Extracting Home in the Oil Sands: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change in Subarctic Canada, Routledge, 2019

20Sep19

Description: The Canadian oil sands are one of the world’s most important energy sources and the subject of global attention in relation to climate change and pollution. This volume engages ethnographically with key issues concerning the oil sands by working from anthropological literature and beyond to explore how people struggle to make and hold on to diverse senses of home in the region. The contributors draw on diverse fieldwork experiences with communities in Alberta that are affected by the oil sands industry. Through a series of case studies, they illuminate the complexities inherent in the entanglements of race, class, indigeneity, gender, and ontological concerns in a regional context characterized by extreme extraction. The chapters are unified in a common concern for ethnographically theorizing settler colonialism, sentient landscapes, and multi-species relations within a critical political ecology framework, and by the prominent role that extractive industries play in shaping new relations between Indigenous Peoples, the state, newcomers, corporations, plants, animals, and the land.


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Indigenous-settler collaborations augments reality: Rob McMahon, Amanda Almond, Greg Whistance-Smith, Diana Steinhauer, Stewart Steinhauer, Diane P. Janes, ‘Sweetgrass AR: Exploring Augmented Reality as a Resource for Indigenous–Settler Relations’, International Journal of Communication, 13, 2019, pp. 4530-4552

20Sep19

Abstract: Augmented reality (AR) is increasingly used as a digital storytelling medium to reveal placebased content, including hidden histories and alternative narratives. In the context of Indigenous–settler relations, AR holds potential to expose and challenge representations of settler colonialism while invoking relational ethics and Indigenous ways of knowing. However, it also threatens to disseminate misinformation and commodify Indigenous Knowledge. Here, we focus on collaborative AR design practices that support critical, reflective, and reciprocal relationship building by teams composed of members from Indigenous and settler communities. After a short history of Indigenous media development in Canada, we describe how we operationalized a participatory AR design process to strengthen Indigenous–settler relations. We document a series of iterative design steps that teams can use to work through ethical, narrative, and technical choices made in the creation of culturally appropriate AR content, and draw attention to the potential and limitations of this emerging medium.


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It’s not the European heritage; it’s the settler heritage: Joshua Cheetham, Frances Mao, ‘The countries grappling with their European heritage’, BBC News, 19/09/19

19Sep19

Excerpt: Next month, a fleet of ships will circumnavigate New Zealand to mark 250 years since the arrival of European settlers.

Their journey is part of Tuia 250, a NZ$13.5m ($8.5m; £6.8m) government initiative to celebrate New Zealand’s “Pacific voyaging heritage”.

Among the flotilla is a replica of Captain James Cook’s HMS Endeavour, which landed in the country in 1769 and led to the first contact between Europeans and indigenous Māoris.

But not all plans have proved to be plain sailing.

After complaints by Māoris, this week organisers cancelled HMS Endeavour’s scheduled stop in the North Island village of Mangonui.

Anahera Herbert-Graves, head of the Northland Ngāti Kahu iwi, told the BBC that the idea was “historically confusing and quite rude”.

“The celebration is a renewal of the colonial myth that they discovered us,” said Ms Herbert Graves. “We’re looking at people who behaved like barbarians wherever they went in the Pacific”. […] 

In neighbouring Australia, where Captain Cook also landed, many Aboriginal groups have spoken out against the celebration of Australia Day, which marks the anniversary of British settlement. Some critics have dubbed it as Invasion Day.

“Nobody is denying that Cook arrived,” said Ms Herbert Graves. “What we’re saying is why commemorate Cook to lead on the story? You wouldn’t commemorate Adolf Hitler’s contribution to modern motorways in order to tell the story of Jewish endurance.”

 


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The business ethics of settler colonialism: Jurgen Poesche, ‘Business Ethics and Sovereignty in Settler Colonial States’, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 2019

18Sep19

Abstract: The objective of this conceptual article is to make the case that Indigenous Cemānáhuacan nations’ sovereignty is valid throughout all of Cemānáhuac (the Americas), thus rendering settler colonial laws illegitimate and illegal. This in turn means that firms need to abide by Indigenous Cemānáhuacan nations’ laws. Theories relating to business, business ethics, compliance, and sustainability reflecting the assumptions of settler colonial sovereignty need to be reworked to take into account the ethical and legal reality of Indigenous Cemānáhuacan nations’ sovereignty. Without coercion-free recognition from Indigenous Cemānáhuacan nations, firms cannot accept any claim of government authority, ownership, or sovereignty made by settler colonial states. This article closes a gap in the literature between Indigenous sovereignty and business ethics in a settler colonial context.


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Settler-colonial governmentality is not normal governmentality: Mark B Salter, ‘Arctic Security, Territory, Population: Canadian Sovereignty and the International’, International Political Sociology, 2019

18Sep19

Abstract: Canada’s policies to assert and maintain sovereignty over the High Arctic illuminate both the analytical leverage and blind spots of Foucault’s influential Security, Territory, Population (2007) schema for understanding modern governmentality. Governmental logics of security, sovereignty, and biopolitics are contemporaneous and concomitant. The Arctic case demonstrates clearly that the Canadian state messily uses whatever governmental tools are in its grasp to manage the Inuit and claim territorial sovereignty over the High North. But, the case of Canadian High Arctic policies also illustrates the limitations of Foucault’s schema. First, the Security, Territory, Population framework has no theorization of the international. In this article I show the simultaneous implementation of Canadian security-, territorial-, and population-oriented policies over the High Arctic. Next, I present the international catalysts that prompt and condition these polices and their specifically settler-colonial tenor. Finally, in line with the Foucauldian imperative to support the “resurrection of subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 2003, 7), I conclude by offering some of the Inuit ways of resisting and reshaping these policies, proving how the Inuit shaped Canadian Arctic sovereignty as much as Canadian Arctic sovereignty policies shaped the Inuit.


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