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The Western looks like what happens after settler colonialism: Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, Sara L. Spurgeon (eds), Weird Westerns Race, Gender, Genre, University of Nebraska Press, 2020

26Jun20

Description: Weird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre—an increasingly popular and visible form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, and conventions with elements drawn from other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Despite frequent declarations of the western’s death, the genre is now defined in part by its zombie-like ability to survive in American popular culture in weird, reanimated, and reassembled forms.

The essays in Weird Westerns analyze a wide range of texts, including those by Native American authors Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) and William Sanders (Cherokee); the cult television series Firefly and The Walking Dead; the mainstream feature films Suicide Squad and Django Unchained; the avant-garde and bizarre fiction of Joe R. Lansdale; the tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands: The Weird West; and the comic book series Wynonna Earp.

The essays explore how these weird westerns challenge conventional representations by destabilizing or subverting the centrality of the heterosexual, white, male hero but also often surprisingly reinforce existing paradigms in their inability to imagine an existence outside of colonial frameworks.


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Reconciliation looks like what happens after settler colonialism: Aimée Craft, Paulette Regan (eds), Pathways of Reconciliation Indigenous and Settler Approaches to Implementing the TRC’s Calls to Action, University of Manitoba Press, 2020

26Jun20

Description: Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its Calls to Action in June 2015, governments, churches, non-profit, professional and community organizations, corporations, schools and universities, clubs and individuals have asked: “How can I/we participate in reconciliation?”

Recognizing that reconciliation is not only an ultimate goal, but a decolonizing process of journeying in ways that embody everyday acts of resistance, resurgence, and solidarity, coupled with renewed commitments to justice, dialogue, and relationship-building, Pathways of Reconciliation helps readers find their way forward.

The essays in Pathways of Reconciliation address the themes of reframing, learning and healing, researching, and living. They engage with different approaches to reconciliation (within a variety of reconciliation frameworks, either explicit or implicit) and illustrate the complexities of the reconciliation process itself. They canvass multiple and varied pathways of reconciliation, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives, reflecting a diversity of approaches to the mandate given to all Canadians by the TRC with its Calls to Action.

Together the authors — academics, practitioners, students and ordinary citizens — demonstrate the importance of trying and learning from new and creative approaches to thinking about and practicing reconciliation and reflect on what they have learned from their attempts (both successful and less successful) in the process.


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Problem pioneers: Marc James Carpenter, ‘Pioneer Problems: “Wanton Murder”, Indian War Veterans, and Oregon’s Violent History’, Oregon Historical Quarterly, 121, 2, 2020, pp. 156-185

24Jun20

Abstract: In this research article, Marc James Carpenter examines the Indian War Veterans of the North Pacific Coast (IWV-NPC), an organization founded by former volunteer soldiers in Oregon and Washington, and how their efforts to reshape historical memory fit within the larger pioneer narrative of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a narrative that often skewed Euro-American violence against Native people. Pioneer societies and historians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distorted these historical narratives through omission, ignoring settlers’ violence toward Native people and condemning their retribution. As Carpenter suggests, “a true history of the Pacific Northwest must reckon with the legions of Euro-American pioneers who, during the 1840s, the 1850s, and beyond, pursued pogroms and inflicted acts of workaday racial violence in pursuit of a White ethno-state.”


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Recognition and reconciliation as decolonial work? Michael McCrossan, ‘Reconsiderations of Reconciliation and Recognition’, Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 49, 1, 2020

24Jun20

Excerpt: INDIGENOUS AND NON-INDIGENOUS SCHOLARS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED the steadfast existence of structural and ideological barriers undermining the recognition of Indigenous rights – especially pre-existing rights to land and governance. Indigenous legal scholars, for instance, have regularly drawn attention to the intricate connection between Canadian law and colonialism, particularly the manner in which violence continues to be deployed through the Canadian legal system in relation to Indigenous women and alternate relationships to land.1 More recently, in this current era of rights “recognition” and “reconciliation” with Indigenous populations, scholars in such disparate fields as anthropology and political theory have offered incisive accounts of how liberal discourses of recognition and reconciliation have served to undercut Indigenous claims and sustain structures of domination by reconfiguring and reproducing settler-colonial assemblages of power – ultimately drawing Indigenous peoples further into the ambit of the state.2 Given the presumed efficacy and prominence of discourses of reconciliation in Canada today, such concerns continue to resonate.


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Protectivism as decolonial work: Abigail Laden, Allies of the Movement to Protect Mauna Kea: Non-Indigenous Solidarity in Kanaka Maoli Protectivism, MA dissertation, University of Hawai’i, 2020

24Jun20

Abstract: As Indigenous-led movements across the globe work to protect sacred land, environmental resources, culture, and rights; non-Indigenous allies and accomplices take on supportive roles in these efforts towards protection. The coined term “protectivism” speaks to this Indigenous-led activism that is rooted in the right of original peoples to protect their sacred places and ancestral lands that are now being exploited through development by settler colonial capitalism. While this term is being used for the first time in this particular way within this thesis, I did not create the concept by any means. This word is drawn from people within the movement who define themselves over and over as “protectors, not protestors” (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua 2017:188). This MA thesis explores the roles and experiences of the allies of the Movement to Protect Mauna Kea on Hawaiʻi Island, as kiaʻi mauna (guardians and protectors of the mountain) protect their sacred mountain from the desecration that would be caused by the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). This thesis explores the benefits and complications within solidarity, analyzes current literature in this field, and highlights the interviews of seven allies who stand in solidarity with Kanaka Maoli protectors. Under the guidance of my community mentor, Aunty Pua Case, and in a two-fold collaborative process, beginning with Kanaka Maoli mentors and then expanding to collaborate with the ally community, I explore what solidarity entails on Mauna a Wākea. As a non-Indigenous ally myself and a collaborative researcher, I utilize my own experience to be consistently reflexive throughout the research and writing process. The allies I interviewed reveal themselves to be respectful of Kanaka Maoli leadership, aware of histories like settler colonialism, are critically self-reflective of their positionality, and focus on maintaining support roles within the movement.


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Re-enactment as decolonial work: Jeff Wahl, Tazim Jamal, ‘Resisting Domination and “Cultural Imperialism” Through Direct Indigenous Participation in Historical Reenactments’, Travel and Tourism Research Association: Advancing Tourism Research Globally, 28, 2020

24Jun20

Excerpt: Indigenous Tourism is a worldwide phenomenon that faces unique opportunities and challenges (Whitford & Ruhanen, 2016). Within the United States, Indigenous peoples (Native Americans) have endured different forms of discrimination through a complex settler-colonial history, and tourism’s role is not exempt. Development has willingly and unwillingly drawn Native Americans into cultural tourism activity (Markowitz, 2001), with numerous attendant issues including superficial guest-host interactions, the perpetuation of stereotypes like the “noble savage” (Laxson, 1991), omission from interpretive narratives (Pretes, 2003), and the destruction of sacred lands (Markowitz, 2001). While efforts towards more “sustainable” Indigenous tourism outcomes have included participatory forms tribally-involved tourism management (Browne & Nolan, 1989; Fletcher, Proff, & Brueckner, 2016; Piner & Paradis, 2004; Spencer, 2010), Native Americans remain a marginalized group whose cultural heritage has generally been misrepresented by dominant groups and other, more powerful, heritage stakeholders (Loewen, 2010). Despite decades of research, tourism studies have done little to address, “the socio-economic disadvantage faced by indigenous people who are still hindered by (among other things) the legacies of colonial history, ineffective and misguided government policies, and a lack of access to education, health services and employment” (Whitford and Ruhanen, 2016, p. 1083). Further, normative research examining the outcomes of Native American tourism are lacking (Whitford & Ruhanen, 2016). Case studies proliferate but as with many case studies in tourism, they rarely address more fundamental questions that can help inform just outcomes for Indigenous heritage tourism. Important questions lie unanswered, like how and why diverse ethical values arise in tourism development, and whose ethical values should/should not be taken into account (Smith, 2009). This study explores some of these issues in the context of heritage tourism, specifically, Indigenous-managed historical reenactments.


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Triangular relations under settler colonialism: Carsten Junker, ‘Invocations of Indigeneity in the Colonial Red/White/Black Triad’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 68, 2, 2020, pp. 145-158

23Jun20

Abstract: This essay takes as its assumptive backdrop the “Red/White/Black demographic triad” in the sense of Stam and Shohat that resulted from the European colonial conquest and settlement of, and the transatlantic enslavement of Africans in, the Americas. It homes in on the ambivalent functions and effects of different evocations of Indigeneity in early abolitionist discourse, considering this very discourse as a specific strand of settler colonial knowledge production during the era of the Enlightenment. While Euro-American abolitionists around 1800 centrally and critically focused on relations between the positions marked by “Black” and “White,” they also made recourse to the position of “Red.” Paradigmatic readings highlight that abolitionists mobilized Red as a trope in contradictory ways according to their argumentative needs, substantiating the hegemonic character of White self-referential knowledge practices in the early US republic and abetting the justification of settler colonialism.


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The settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are from Israel (go figure): Ronnen Ben-Arie, ‘The establishment of Natzrat Illit: setting the foundations for the Israeli settlements project’, Middle Eastern Studies, 2020

23Jun20

Abstract: Natzrat Illit (‘Upper Nazareth’) was one of the dozens of ‘new towns’ established by the state of Israel during the 1950s, following the 1948 war. However, because of its unique location, in the midst of a region widely inhabited by a Palestinian population, and the specific objectives of its establishment, the penetration of a Jewish population into the region and the reinforcement of control over Nazareth, the only Palestinian city that survived the war and remained within the borders of the newly established state, it demanded particular means and forms of action. Based on archival materials, this article delineates the particular methods and practices used to confront and overcome the specific conditions set for the establishment of Natzrat Illit. These methods and practices will later become advantageous when similar objectives would be set for the state-led expansive settlement project into new territories.


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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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