settler colonial studies blog

Settler occupations in unexpected places: Borys Babin, Olena Grinenko, Anna Prykhodko, ‘Legal Statute and Perspectives for Indigenous Peoples in Ukraine’, in Liat Klain Gabbay, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Fugitive and Ethnic Groups Around the Globe, IntechOpen, 2019

18Sep19

Abstract: In this chapter the specific issues of legal statute and perspectives of the development of Indigenous Peoples in Ukraine are highlighted. The situation of occupation and attempt of annexation of the Crimean peninsula as the native land of three Indigenous Peoples (Crimean Karaites, Crimean Tatars, and Krymchaks) in conditions of the ongoing interstate conflict and internal displacement are determined. The aspects of recognition of the indigenous statute in Ukrainian, Russian, and international jurisdictions for those Indigenous People will be researched, as the reparations and reconciliations for such peoples as victims of international crimes of the Soviet times.

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Dispossession in the settler city: Elya Lucy Milner, ‘Devaluation, erasure and replacement: Urban frontiers and the reproduction of settler colonial urbanism in Tel Aviv’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2019

15Sep19

Abstract: This paper examines the continuity of the Israeli settler colonial project into the contemporary moment – as manifested in the city of Tel Aviv – and its transfiguration into current socio-political and spatial processes in the urban arena. It offers a close reading of a case study from which such continuity emerges, exposing the settler colonial terms of production of Tel Aviv in current entrepreneurial real-estate projects. The case study under analysis is of the Giv’at-Amal neighbourhood, established on the emptied Palestinian village of Jamassin in the war of 1948, now facing eviction by private entrepreneurs constructing a luxurious residential compound. The paper aims to expose the ways in which the urban entrepreneurialism in Giv’at-Amal reproduces the settler colonial logic of devaluation, erasure and replacement of existing inhabitants of the land. It further conceptualises the area as an urban frontier, in which current neoliberal restructuring plays an active role in the ongoing production of the settler colonial urban space. By so doing, it aims to undermine the notion that settler colonial projects of replacing existing people and geographies are completed historical events, and to re-articulate them as ongoing contemporary processes.

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The gender of (Canada’s) settler (Indian) act: Martin J. Cannon, Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act, University of British Columbia Press, 2019

13Sep19

Description: Canada’s Indian Act is infamously sexist. Through many iterations of the legislation a woman’s status rights flowed from her husband, and even once it was amended to reinstate rights lost through marriage or widowhood, First Nations women could not necessarily pass status on to their descendants.

That injustice has rightly been subject to much scrutiny, but what has it meant for First Nations men? In an original complement to studies focused on the implications of the act for women, Martin J. Cannon challenges the decades-long assumption of case law and politics that the act has affected Indigenous people as either “women” or “Indians” – but not both. He argues that sexism and racialization must instead be understood as interlocking within the law. This double discrimination has been used to disrupt gender complementarity between Indigenous men and women, and to undercut the identities of Indigenous men through their female forebears.

By restorying historically patriarchal legislation and Indigenous masculinity, Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act encourages Indigenous men to begin to articulate the complex ways in which their life’s journey is shaped by discrimination directed at Indigenous women. Only then can a transformative discussion about Indigenous nationhood, citizenship, and reconciliation take place.

Scholars and students of Indigenous studies and gender studies will find this book of interest, as will activists, legal practitioners, and others concerned with Indigenous rights, feminism, nationhood, identity, and the Indian Act.

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Repossession: Naama Blatman‐Thomas, ‘Reciprocal Repossession: Property as Land in Urban Australia’, Antipode, 2019

11Sep19

Abstract: Repossession of land by Indigenous people is commonly understood as a legal act that unfolds within the confines of state apparatuses. But for many Indigenous urbanites, legal repossession is both impossible and irrelevant due to their histories of dispossession and dislocation. Moreover, while land repossession in Australia is predominantly non‐urban, I demonstrate that land is also reclaimed within cities. Urban repossession of land, considered here as reciprocal rather than legal, challenges the model of private ownership by asserting a territorially transferable relationship to property as land. The order of property entrenches Indigenous people’s dispossession by demanding immobility as precondition to ownership and rendering Indigenous urbanites all “too mobile”. Against this framing and the liquidation of their lands as capital, Indigenous people practice reciprocal forms of repossession that challenge both liberal and traditional meanings of ownership. This helps retrieve urban Indigenous subjectivities while compelling partial relinquishment of non‐Indigenous properties.

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Gentrification as settler colonialism (i.e., an ongoing structure): Jean‐Paul D. Addie, James C. Fraser, ‘After Gentrification: Social Mix, Settler Colonialism, and Cruel Optimism in the Transformation of Neighbourhood Space’, Antipode, 2019

11Sep19

Abstract: Social mix policies have emerged as a prominent mechanism to legitimate neighbourhood redevelopment efforts across the US. Despite integrationist rhetoric, results often disabuse marginalised communities of their claims to the city. This paper employs a hybrid spatio‐temporal analysis at the intersection of political‐economic theories of gentrification and post‐colonial and Black geographies literatures to examine underlying cultural logics and affective experiences animating such processes of neighbourhood transformation, contestation, and succession. Reflecting on 15 years of experience researching Over‐the‐Rhine (OTR), Cincinnati, we contribute a stylised distinction between the foundational, mature, and ongoing legacies of urban settler colonial relations. Our account discloses the power geometries shaping neighbourhood space by illustrating the impact of the discourses, tactics, and strategies employed by pro‐development actors and neighbourhood activists as OTR’s socio‐political landscape shifted over time. In conclusion, we engage the thorny questions these dynamics raise surrounding how inner‐city neighbourhoods are theorised and struggled over aftergentrification.

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Land, labour, settlement: Laura Maravall Buckwalter, ‘Factor endowments on the “frontier”: Algerian settler agriculture at the beginning of the 1900s’, Economic History Review, 2019

11Sep19

Abstract: This article examines rural settlement in Constantine, a département in French Algeria, at the beginning of the 1900s. By taking into account the timing of colonial settlement for almost 100 municipalities, it shows how the changing geographical conditions and the relative quantities of land and labour shaped the colonial land policy and settler modes of production. As fertile land grew scarcer on the settlement ‘frontier’, the ability of settlers to participate in the export market was increasingly dependent on the capacity to make use of modern agricultural techniques that required larger fields and intensive labour. Thus, the outcome of rural settlement was determined by the relative abundance of indigenous labour and the adaptation of the land policy to Algeria’s agricultural needs. The results demonstrate that—even within a country itself and during the settlement process—the colonial land policy and settler modes of production change significantly, depending on the region being occupied.

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Settler and working class (and claiming to be indigenous): Darren Reid, ‘Classy Subversions: Rethinking Grey Owl as a Subversive Character’, In/Versions, 2019, pp. 9-14

08Sep19

Excerpt: While Grey Owl’s ethnocultural transformation has been dismissed as failing to subvert settler-colonial power structures, I challenge scholars to begin to rethink Grey Owl’s subversion in terms other than settler colonialism, or, even better, to think about how his subversion reveals intersections between settler colonialism and other discourses. I argue that Grey Owl’s working-class perspective structured his environmentalist message so that it included and addressed the working-class in a way that other contemporary environmentalists did not. In doing so, I suggest that scholars move past an exclusively racial analysis of Grey Owl and towards an intersectional approach that includes class.

Grey Owl’s biographers routinely celebrate him as one of the most famous environmentalists of the early 20th century. The popular environmentalist Kenneth Brower goes so far as to claim that “no man was more important to Canadian environmental consciousness, or to environmental consciousness in the entire British commonwealth…In the pantheon Grey Owl belongs with Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.” Yet Grey Owl’s reputation as an environmentalist has also been severely criticized. Environmental historian Tina Loo asserts that “he was not an ecologist or even an amateur naturalist, but rather…‘a poet, recreating for us dreams of innocence.’” Geographer Bruce Erickson argues that Grey Owl didn’t actually say anything specific about the environment, but merely “established a connection between the visual codes of ‘indian’… and a generic vision of wilderness.” Dismissing the content of Grey Owl’s message, these scholars attribute his popularity as an environmentalist to his racial persona, whether through the poetic romanticism of an imagined Indigenous innocence or through the authority of “visual codes of ‘indian.’” And they have a point; of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson, Grey Owl stands out as the only non-European person within the “pantheon” of environmental writers.

However, he also stands out for another reason, a reason which no Grey Owl scholar has addressed: he is the only working-class person of the pantheon. Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Carson all attended elite universities (Harvard, Yale, Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia, respectively), and their messages ranged from ignoring to vilifying the working-class. Grey Owl, on the other hand, never received a post-secondary education. He worked as a trapper in northern Ontario and a warden in northern Saskatchewan, and his vision of the environment was not of a place of leisure, but of subsistence. Breaking the silence around the significance of Grey Owl’s working-class background, I argue that Grey Owl’s working-class perspective structured his environmentalist message so that it included and addressed the working-class in a way that Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Carson did not. In doing so, I suggest that scholars move past an exclusively racial analysis of Grey Owl and towards an intersectional approach that includes class. I begin with a brief summary of who Grey Owl was and the historiographical approaches with which he has been treated. I then survey the work that has been done on the role of class in North American environmentalism. Finally, I juxtapose the elitist discourses of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Carson with Grey Owl’s more egalitarian discourse, and show how Grey Owl’s writings reversed the elitist discourse and placed subsistence land users at center stage. Some brief concluding remarks and possible directions for further research follow.

If you have never before met the problematically subversive Grey Owl, let me introduce you. Grey Owl was born as Archibald Belaney in 1888, in the town of Hastings, England. He emigrated to Canada at the age of 16 and worked as a guide and a trapper in northern Ontario. As Archibald Belaney he married an Anishinaabe woman named Angele Egwuna in 1910. He left to fight in the First World War, and then returned and married a Haudenosaunee woman named Anahareo in 1926. But he did not marry Anahareo as Archie Belaney; by that point, he claimed to be an Anishinaabe man named Grey Owl. As Grey Owl, he became an international celebrity. He wrote several best-selling books, gave international lecture tours, and starred in his own documentary film. The news about Grey Owl’s ethnocultural transformation broke immediately after his death in 1938, and a public debate ensued over the importance of his ethnocultural transformation.

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Settler law: Irene Watson, ‘Colonial logic and the Coorong massacres’, Adelaide Law Review, 40, 1, 2019, pp. 167-171

08Sep19

Excerpt: Soon after I enrolled to study law in 1979, I read Stephen Lendrum’s article about the 1840 Coorong massacre in the ‘Adelaide Law Review’. I belong to the land and peoples of the Coorong, and had been aware of the Coorong massacre from stories told to me by my family and elders. I had an Aboriginal worldview of the colonial frontier. The Coorong massacre occurred after 26 new settlers, who had survived the ‘Maria’ shipwreck, died at the hands of Coorong Tanganekald Milmendjeri people. A punitive expedition was dispatched from Adelaide, and the number of First Nations Peoples’ lives lost to the punitive mission remains unknown. Our Aboriginal oral history maintains that it was many. The punitive mission might have been intended to bring the offenders to ‘justice’, but it was an unlawful process under British law, and unlawful in respect of Aboriginal law. The British did not declare martial law at the time, and two Aboriginal men were executed without trial.

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The settler novel (selling the farm): Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, ‘The Settler Colonial Farm Novel in Australia’, Westerly, 64, 1, 2019, pp. 194-212

08Sep19

Abstract: Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh (1925) is a settler-colonial farm novel. Grove’s novel is an exemplary Canadian instance of a mode of fiction which attended the ‘settler revolution’ – the agricultural colonisation of temperate range lands in North and South America, Eurasia, Australasia and Southern Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. The defining feature of this iconic form of settler colonialism was the presence of what the Canadian historian Peter A. Russell terms a ‘large scale open land frontier’. The settler farm – whether it was in the South African High Veld, the Western Australian wheatbelt, the prairies of Manitoba or the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand – was the main instrument in a mode of colonisation in which seized indigenous land was made available to mainly European immigrants for agricultural enterprise. In the literary sphere, the particular aura and ideological valency of the pioneer farm find expression in the appearance of novels that dramatise the taking up of land by settlers in these frontier communities. This essay uses Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh to trace how the particular forms of desire mobilised by settler colonialism are modulated in the settler-colonial farm novel.

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Dispossessing for sport: John Reid, ‘Space, Environment, and Appropriation: Sport and Settler Colonialism in Mi’kma’ki’, Journal of Sport History, 46, 2, 2019, pp. 242-254

08Sep19

Abstract: The displacement of Indigenous populations by settler societies forming within the British Empire was a global development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one in which settler sport took a significant role. Settler colonialism must be understood as a spatial and environmental phenomenon as well as a social and political one. This essay focuses on one geographical area: Mi’kma’ki, the homeland of the Mi’kmaq, corresponding to a substantial proportion of what is known in non-Indigenous terms as Canada’s Maritime region. It reflects on the direct and indirect appropriation of unceded Indigenous space for sporting purposes, along with the implications for Indigenous sport and the nature of Indigenous response to settler encroachment. Sport as an important element of social and cultural history has strong explanatory power in showing how settler colonialism and Indigenous persistence became entangled.

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