« Older posts
Newer posts »

Settler colonialism as heritage: Michael Buse, ‘The shrine of their memory’: settler colonialism and the construction of American Heritage at Metini-Fort Ross, 1845-1906, MA DIssertation, University of British Columbia, 2019

28Aug19

Abstract: This paper argues that during a broader California Heritage Movement, American colonists physically and discursively constructed a singular Fort Ross Story in an effort to claim Metini, a Kashia Pomo homeland. In making this argument, this paper considers two broad historiographical questions: why did a heritage movement emerge in late nineteenth-century California, and how does a consideration of the Heritage Movement reveal longer settler colonial processes. This look at heritage work makes two contributions to scholarship about American colonialism in California. First, it provides a history of Metini-Ross after the Russian American Company’s departure (1842-1906). Second, this paper considers the meaning of heritage work in settler colonial California. Analyzing heritage work at Fort Ross within a longer history of settler colonialism reveals how the colonizers intentionally constructed stories of settler innocence and belonging, with the intent to justify their theft and resulting possession of Pomo and Miwok land. From 1845-1885, the first forty years of American colonialism in California, settlers had little interest in history. Instead, they worked to physically take Metini-Ross from the Kashia Pomo, who had lived there for at least 12,000 years. From the late 1840s to the 1870s, American settlers poured into California and seized vast tracts of Indigenous land, initiating what has been called the California Genocide. While genocide did not end in the 1870s, colonialism took a new shape after this. One new settler colonial tactic was heritage work. It is not a coincidence that the Heritage Movement began immediately after the most violent period of colonialism in California. At Metini-Ross, it was only by 1893 that settlers became interested in its history. After this, two interweaving threads constructed a powerful story: writers wrote and preservationists built. Novelist Gertrude Atherton and made Fort Ross iv discursively significant, journalists reproduced and built upon her ideas, and heritage groups, led by the white nationalist heritage organization The Native Sons of the Golden West, physically stamped these narratives on the ground. Together, they made histories to obfuscate and consume a Kashia homeland beneath imagined layers of colonial history.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler-colonial progressivism: Rosalynd Anna Boxall, The settler colonial paradox of T.C. Douglas and the CCF in Saskatchewan, 1945 – 1962, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2019

28Aug19

Abstract: This paper uses the life and politics of one man to analyse the dynamics of settler colonialism in Saskatchewan over the years directly following the Second World War. It tracks the history of Thomas Clement Douglas (1904 – 1986) and his peers in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It examines his career and colleagues in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) party, where Douglas served as Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 – 1962 before moving to the federal government as leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP). This paper demonstrates how settler colonialism circumscribed what was ‘thinkable’ for Douglas and his peers, with the resulting effect that well-intended policies intended to help Saskatchewan’s Indigenous population had negative outcomes. Douglas’ policy goals towards Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan differed little from the ways he approached the empowerment of all minority groups, and focused on political representation, citizenship rights (notably, for Indigenous groups, liquor licensing and the provincial franchise), and the extension and improvement of provincial welfare services. This paper focuses in particular on the extension of the provincial franchise and liquor licensing policies. Although Douglas planned wide-reaching reform for almost all parts of Saskatchewan society, he never imagined that Saskatchewan society would be fundamentally altered in order to accommodate Indigenous peoples. On the contrary, he always assumed that Indigenous people would have to be shaped to fit into the existing social and political framework. Douglas’ Indian Policy was not a paradox or an anomaly within an otherwise radical, progressive agenda. Rather, his progressivism itself was situated within the tenets of settler colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The natural order of a settler colony: Tanja Hammel, Shaping Natural History and Settler Society: Mary Elizabeth Barber and the Nineteenth-Century Cape, Palgrave, 2019

28Aug19

Abstract: This book explores the life and work of Mary Elizabeth Barber, a British-born settler scientist who lived in the Cape during the nineteenth century. It provides a lens into a range of subjects within the history of knowledge and science, gender and social history, postcolonial, critical heritage and archival studies. The book examines the international importance of the life and works of a marginalized scientist, the instrumentalisation of science to settlers’ political concerns and reveals the pivotal but largely silenced contribution of indigenous African experts. Including a variety of material, visual and textual sources, this study explores how these artefacts are archived and displayed in museums and critically analyses their content and silences. The book traces Barber’s legacy across three continents in collections and archives, offering insights into the politics of memory and history-making. At the same time, it forges a nuanced argument, incorporating study of the North and South, the history of science and social history, and the past and the present.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The question of controlling indigenous reproduction: Brianna Theobald, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century, University of North Carolina Press, 2018

28Aug19

Description: This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women’s reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women’s resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government’s intrusion into Indigenous women’s reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been–and remain–reproductive politics.

By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

You and the horse you are riding on: Richard Barcham, ‘Feral horses symbol of settler conquest’, Green Left Weekly, 1232, 13/08/19

27Aug19

Abstract: Those who want to be able to show their children and grandchildren a little piece of Australia’s natural beauty need to rally, because that beauty is under threat from the ‘Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act 2018’ – a law that turns a feral animal into a heritage icon.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Teaching both rather than each: Sonia A. P. Grant, ‘”Pervasive, yet Fractured”: A Roundtable on Centering Indigenous Critiques and Teaching Settler Colonialism’, Cultural Anthropology, 20/08/19

27Aug19

Excerpt: This Teaching Tools post features a roundtable discussion between Clint Carroll, Jessica Cattelino, Jean Dennison, and Anne Spice. We discussed imperatives for teaching about settler colonialism in university classrooms, and creative strategies for doing so. The authors underscore the importance of centering Indigenous perspectives and critiques in their pedagogy and reflect on their personal experiences teaching about the continuance of Indigenous life. Throughout their responses, each scholar provides examples of texts, activities, and approaches that they’ve found helpful in their teaching for creating conditions for students to, as Clint Carroll says below, “offer critical contributions on the pervasive, yet fractured, project of settler colonialism.”


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Reversing assimilation in Chile: Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Martin Fonck, Paolo Perasso, ‘Can natives be settlers? Emptiness, settlement and indigeneity on the settler colonial frontier in Chile’, Anthropological Theory, 2019

27Aug19

Abstract: Under settler colonialism, dispossession is enabled by discursive strategies aimed at curtailing indigenous entitlement to land. One such strategy is the mutual determination of the native-settler categories whereby the native status is bound to a condition of ahistorical emplacement to specific tracts of land, while settlers can claim native status towards the nation state as a whole. The settler-native dichotomy fails to account for the possibility that settlement could be appropriated by indigenous collectivities as a process constitutive of land attachment and a sense of belonging. This analysis of memories and practices of indigenous settlement in the Mapuche frontier region in Chile indicates that, unlike dominant narratives of emptiness and environmental transformation reproduced under settler colonialism, indigenous settlement can unfold as an unstable ontological achievement aimed at both transforming and maintaining the land’s topological diversity and ability to partake in human social life. Indigenous settlement can work as a critical intervention against the reductionist determination of the category of native through which indigenous land entitlement is delegitimized under settler colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settler-colonial city is a racialised city: Heather Dorries, David Hugill, JulieTomiak, ‘Racial capitalism and the production of settler colonial cities’, Geoforum, 2019

27Aug19

Abstract: This article considers how racial capitalism can be productively mobilized to extend contemporary work on settler colonial urbanism. It argues that scholars interested in the latter have much to gain from the recent flourishing of geographical work on the former. Our contribution begins by surveying some of the core tensions and affinities between the theoretical commitments that animate the settler colonial and racial capitalism frameworks. It then examines the historical development of Winnipeg, Manitoba in an effort to ground our thinking in an empirical context. In doing so, it surveys the key dimensions of that city’s settler colonial urban history, focusing on the ways that property relations have functioned as a technique of racial domination. It concludes with a consideration of how an engagement with racial capitalism offers important opportunities to develop a more expansive understanding of racialized oppression in this and other contexts.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Global settler America: Carroll P. Kakel III, A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History: American Wests, Global Wests, and Indian Wars, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

23Aug19

Description: Challenging the still widely held notion that American history is somehow exceptional or unique, this book argues that early America is best understood as a settler-colonial supplanting society. As Kakel shows, this society undertook the violent theft of Indigenous land and resources on a massive scale, and was driven by a logic of elimination and a genocidal imperative to rid the new white settler living space of its existing Indigenous inhabitants.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Indigenous Comics (i.e., nonsettler comics): Camille Callison and Candida Rifkind, ‘Introduction: Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography’, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 11, 1, 2019, pp. 139-155

21Aug19

Excerpt: Working on this project, we have learned that Indigenous comics and graphic novels matter for the same reasons, that Indigenous characters can be just as brave, resilient, complex, messy, smart, and funny as any other comic book heroes. And we have also learned that a popular form like comics can make those “zombies, vampires, and ungentled ghosts” of settler colonialism come alive in the most literal of ways, along with the superheroes, guardians, and tricksters needed to fight and survive them. 


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »