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Settler colonialism as a relation: Sarah Maddison, Sana Nakata (eds), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Springer 2019

06Sep19

Abstract: This book examines contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality, presenting a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the what, who, when, where, and why of Indigenous-settler relations. It also explores relationality, a key analytical framework with which to explore Indigenous-settler relations in terms of what the relational characteristics are; who steps into these relations and how; the different temporal and historical moments in which these relations take place and to what effect; where these relations exist around the world and the variations they take on in different places; and why these relations are important for the examination of social and political life in the 21st century.

Its unique approach represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states on Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which predominantly focuses on how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. It explores the issues that inform, shape, and give social, legal, and political life to relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally.


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The dark (i.e., settler-colonial) side of community planning: Lyana Marie Patrick, From ceremony up: Indigenous community planning as a resurgent practice on contested lands in British Columbia, PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2019

06Sep19

Abstract: From its 19th century origins, the modern western idealization of community planning has been about social justice, including the health and well-being of people and their environment, from the “garden cities” of the late 19th century to today’s healthy built environment work. But there has always been a dark side to this ideal. In North America, sociolegal frameworks were developed that deployed the language of “health” and “hygiene” to exclude specific groups of people from cities and towns. Indigenous peoples whose ancestral lands were adjacent to towns and cities were dispossessed of their territories and became the target of colonial bylaws that sought to criminalize their presence in urbanizing areas.

Bringing together the fields of public health, planning and Indigenous studies, my research sought to understand how Indigenous experiences of health in urban areas have been discursively framed by colonization and continually impacted through settler colonialism. This case study explored how urban Indigenous community planning might be conceptualized at the nexus of health and justice in the work of one urban Indigenous organization, the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of BC (NCCABC). Through an examination of the dayto-day labours of frontline workers, I answered my primary research question: In what ways do the resurgent practices of NCCABC relate to the emerging theory and practice of Indigenous community planning? Information was gathered through immersive participation, interviews, a talking circle, and document analysis in four primary sites of study: NCCABC Health Services in downtown Vancouver, NCCABC Prince George office, and First Nations Courts in New Westminster and North Vancouver.

In spite of immense jurisdictional and administrative challenges that create barriers for urban Indigenous peoples and organizations – and a political landscape that largely denies urban Indigenous claims to sovereignty and self-determination – frontline workers with NCCABC create alternative spaces of belonging through relational practices that emphasize personal accountability, integrity, trust, and the importance of culture and ceremony. These resurgent practices, I argue, inform an Indigenous community planning paradigm shift that challenges colonially imposed categories of being and belonging and creates community for diverse urban Indigenous peoples.


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Queering as a form of settler-colonial dispossession: T. J. Tallie, Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa, University of Minnesota Press, 2019

04Sep19

Description: In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natal—established by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province—to show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools.

Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims.Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority.


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Indigenous and exogenous under settler colonialism, doubly vulnerable: Shannon Speed, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State, The University of North Carolina Press, 2019

04Sep19

Description: Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability “neoliberal multicriminalism” and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women’s vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation.

With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.


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The gender of the settler state: Sydney Rae Krill, ‘The Settler State is a White Woman: Re-Conceptualizing Audra Simpson’s Masculine State Through a Gendered Genealogy of Settler Colonial Statecraft in Canada’, MA Dissertation, University of Calgary, 2019

01Sep19

Abstract: Audra Simpson accounts for the oppressive colonial apparatus of the Canadian state with a gendered theory of settler statecraft. The ongoing evidence of heteropatriarchal violence targeting Indigenous women in Canada points her to adopt a wholly androcentric theory in which she argues that ‘the state is a man’. From an intersectional standpoint, this does not address the complex way that gender and colonial power operate together to uphold and sustain the settler colonial regime. This thesis will challenge Audra Simpson’s male-centric theory by interrogating gender and the role of both settler men and women in Canada’s historical process of statecraft. Chapter two will present an alternative perspective to the assumed relationship between men and the settler colonial regime that Simpson puts forth, offering a gendered genealogy of settler colonial statecraft that centers men and masculinity in its analysis. This chapter will argue that theorizing the settler state ‘as a man’ in its entirety does not reflect the actual gendered process of colonial state building in Canadian history. Chapter three will conduct a similar analysis but focus on the position of white women within this history, expanding the ways in which we think about and perceive the state in gendered terms. This chapter will argue that white women were fundamental to the creation of Canada’s stable sovereign settler colonial state. This conclusion offers a more historically accurate and intersectional account of how settler colonial phenomenon is constituted by and continuously sustained through gendered systems and actors. To theorize how the significance of this research might be realized moving forward, chapter four will conclude with a discussion of the importance this research has for efforts of mainstream feminism in Canada. This chapter will argue that viewing the settler state as a white woman implicates mainstream feminists in the overturning and dismantling of colonial state apparatus as political actors working towards gender justice.


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Dispossessing exogenous ‘others’: Nicole Yakashiro, Daffodils as property: settler colonial renewal and the dispossession of Nikkei farmers in the 1940s, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2019

01Sep19

Abstract: This thesis focuses on the forced sales of property, namely daffodils, daffodil bulbs, and bulb farms, owned by Nikkei farmers before 1943 in the small rural community of Bradner in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. It draws on fields commonly treated as distinct, settler colonial studies and Japanese Canadian (Nikkei) history, by focusing on the workings of property and property dispossession in local perspective. Tracing how the state, specifically the federal Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property and the Veterans’ Land Act Administration, dispossessed four Nikkei families, this thesis analyzes the uneven rationales of settler state policy and practice. Using three property characteristics – definition, value, and boundaries – as they applied to daffodil farms, it examines how the state manipulated the parameters of reasonable governance to reconfigure Nikkei property for white ownership in the 1940s. In doing so, it argues that the dispossession was not an isolated moment of state racism, but a project that renewed a private property regime in settler colonial Bradner (and British Columbia more broadly). This was a regime predicated on the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and the privileging of whiteness. By highlighting the microhistorical mechanisms of dispossession, this thesis reveals further how ordinary white settlers, predominantly British and Dutch bulb-growers, were entangled in the forced sales and, importantly, how Nikkei people contested the state’s inconsistent logics and practices. Nikkei farmers in the Fraser Valley recognized the contradictions of the dispossession process and testified to the state’s betrayals throughout the decade. At these sites of contestation, the experiences of four relatively unknown Nikkei families mired in state violence suggest that their commitment to the settler colonial property regime was not an inevitability.


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Erasing present indigenous people by focusing on long gone ones: Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, ‘Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology’, American Antiquity, 2019

01Sep19

Abstract: To understand the implications of archaeological site recording practices and associated inventories for studying Indigenous persistence after the arrival of Europeans, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Beginning with the first regional surveys conducted during the early 1900s and continuing into the present, the paper trail created by archaeologists reveals an enduring emphasis on precontact materials to the exclusion of more recent patterns of Indigenous occupation and land use. In assessing sites occupied by Indigenous people from the late sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, we discuss how the use of multiple lines of evidence—including temporally diagnostic artifacts, chronometric dating techniques, and historical documentation—may help illuminate subtle but widespread patterns of Native presence that have been obscured by essentialist assumptions about Indigenous culture change. Our findings further reveal the shortcomings of traditional site recording systems, in which archaeologists typically categorize sites within the prehistoric-protohistoric-historic triad on the basis of commonsense decisions that conflate chronology with identity. Instead, we argue for recording practices that focus specifically on the calendric ages of occupation for any given site.


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Foreclosing indigenous people, literally: K-Sue Park, ‘Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America’, Law & Social Enquiry, 41, 4, 2016, pp. 10006-1035

01Sep19

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Integration requires disintegration: Paloma E. Villegas, Breanna Barrie, Serriz Peña, Jilanch Alphonso, Alveera Mamoon, ‘Integration, Settler Colonialism, and Precarious Legal Status Migrants in Canada’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2019, pp. 1–17

01Sep19

Abstract: Drawing on research with postsecondary migrant students with precarious legal status (those without permanent residence or citizenship), this paper examines the information participants learn about the settler colonialism and the histories of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Our findings suggest that like other residents of Canada, participants often access varied, limited, and often incorrect information. We propose that such variation in the accuracy and depth of information is not accidental, as accurate histories and contexts disrupt the narrative of a welcoming Canadian state. However, we also found that despite their immigration status, and experiences of precarity and deportability, a large proportion of participants made concerted efforts to learn about Indigenous peoples, histories, and contexts. Given our findings, we recommend that scholarship on immigrant integration in white settler societies like Canada account for settler colonialism for two reasons. First, to avoid engaging in methodological nationalism, or the focusing on nation-states as discrete or bounded units of analysis through which social relations operate. We focus on a specific and less examined aspect of methodological nationalism: a disregard for Indigenous sovereignty and nations. Second, to understand how differently situated im/migrants, including precarious legal status migrants participate, uphold, and resist the structures that produce and maintain settler colonialism.


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Environmental management as settler colonialism: Samantha Muller, Steve Hemming, Daryle Rigney, ‘Indigenous sovereignties: relational ontologies and environmental management’, Geographical Research, 2019

28Aug19

Abstract: Indigenous nations have always and continue to assert their sovereignties to resist colonialism. This paper makes explicit the ways in which environmental management has been and continues to act as a tool of colonialism, particularly by privileging Western science, institutions, and administrative procedures. We argue that to decolonise environmental management, it is crucial to understand and challenge the power relations that underlie it—asking who makes decisions and on what worldview those decisions are based. Indigenous ways of being deeply challenge the foundations of environmental management and the colonising power structures that underlie it, and invite further thought about posthuman and relational ontologies. We provide a range of case studies that showcase the role of Indigenous nations in redefining and reimagining environmental management based on Indigenous sovereignties, knowledges, and ways of being. The case studies emphasise the crucial connection between Indigenous decision‐making authority and self‐governance for the enhanced protection and health of the environment. We argue that Indigenous agency, grounded in Indigenous governance and sovereignties, is driving innovation and decolonising environmental management by making space for new ways of thinking and being “in place”.


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