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Colonising metaphors: Sarah Launius, Geoffrey Alan Boyce, ‘More than Metaphor: Settler Colonialism, Frontier Logic, and the Continuities of Racialized Dispossession in a Southwest U.S. City’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020

07Jun20

Abstract: Human geographers have long noted the colonial tropes and frontier imaginaries used to stimulate investment and normalize predatory property speculation within North American cities. Drawing on the insights of indigenous scholars and theorists of settler colonialism, in this article we argue a need to move beyond an analogical deployment of the “frontier” as a mere trope or imaginary and suggest that in settler colonial contexts, like the United States, the frontier and its structuring logic remain an ongoing feature of racial governance and capital accumulation over time. To develop this argument, we examine a genealogy of multiple and heterogeneous cycles of colonization, dispossession, and resistance in Tucson, Arizona. Attending to the racial and racist violence that shapes this history, we consider how the devaluation of nonwhite territorial and economic relations consistently structures urban real estate markets, driving the ongoing displacement and dispossession of communities of color. Viewing the frontier as a structuring logic of racial capitalism (rather than a symbolic motif or metaphorical condition) helps to explain why these racial patterns of dispossession can be observed as a hallmark outcome of processes of gentrification in settler countries like the United States. Meanwhile, through our case study we show how grassroots actors already are using the language of settler colonialism as a framework for naming and analyzing those outcomes just described, indicating a need for greater theoretical work that engages with these grassroots framings and narratives.


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Indigenous authors remind the settler that he is a settler: Halimah Beaulieu, The understated power of reading contemporary Indigenous literature in Canada, a White supremacist nation, MA dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2020

07Jun20

Abstract: This thesis offers a textual analysis of three contemporary novels by Indigenous writers in Canada – Tracey Lindberg’s (2015) Birdie, Katherena Vermette’s (2016a) The Break, and Eden Robinson’s (2017a) Son of a Trickster. Informed by critical Whiteness studies, scholarship on settler colonialism, and reader response theory, I argue how contemporary Indigenous literature facilitates the social and political transformation decolonization requires. When approached with prior knowledge about past and ongoing colonialism, the stories written by today’s Indigenous authors disrupt the settler national myths that normalizes White supremacy in Canada and demands introspection on how settlers perpetuate colonial violence against First Peoples. Their stories extend possibilities for transformative learning by re-centering Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, and by reframing kindness, reciprocity, and kinship as human obligations. In creating space for us to imagine existing beyond the limitations set by the racial settler state, these stories can instigate shifts in cultural perceptions and power relations in real ways. These stories also hold implications for meaningful and constructive human rightsbased social justice practices, by reshaping knowledge on antiracism and decolonization outside dominant frameworks that assume the colonial state’s legitimacy and permanence.


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Native title is one result of empire: Bain Attwood, Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People, Cambridge University Press, 2020

07Jun20

Description: This book provides a new approach to the historic treatment of indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and property rights in Australia and New Zealand. By shifting attention from the original European claims of possession to a comparison of the ways in which British players treated these matters later, Bain Attwood not only reveals some startling similarities between the Australian and New Zealand cases but revises the long-held explanations of the differences. He argues that the treatment of the sovereignty and property rights of First Nations was seldom determined by the workings of moral principle, legal doctrine, political thought or government policy. Instead, it was the highly particular historical circumstances in which the first encounters between natives and Europeans occurred and colonisation began that largely dictated whether treaties of cession were negotiated, just as a bitter political struggle determined the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi and ensured that native title was made in New Zealand.


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Indigeneity and class the other way around: Benjamin Balthaser, ‘From Lapwai to Leningrad: Archie Phinney, Marxism, and the Making of Indigenous Modernity’, Ab Imperio, 1, 2020, pp. 39-58

05Jun20

Abstract: Although the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was controversial, it undeniably ushered in a new era of governmentality for indigenous people in the United States. The IRA has been debated since its inauguration, but less attention has been paid to the ways in which it is part of an ongoing theorization of Native American modernity. Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé intellectual and activist who studied anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas and then later in Leningrad, became one of the few indigenous intellectuals at the time to fuse a Marxist analysis of capitalism and modernity with an indigenous epistemology of sovereignty. In a series of essays, op-eds, seminar papers, and notes, Phinney’s position is that Native Americans have been forcibly conscripted into capitalist modernity and that their question is less whether they can revive the “old ways” than whether they can alter the conditions of domination by capitalism and settler colonialism. Phinney does not reject modernity but instead asks how indigenous people can find a way to remain “alert modern communities” and autonomous democratic subjects. By analyzing Soviet forms of minority nationalism, Marxian theories of history, and modern theories of race, Phinney prefigures what Kevin Bryuneel calls the “third space of sovereignty” by arguing that Native Americans need to find modes of collective economic independence, while also forming alliances with other oppressed groups through autonomous organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), which Phinney helped found. Working within the Bureau of Indian Affairs while at the same time, as an NCAI founder, fiercely criticizing the state, Phinney both lived and theorized a dialectical sense of modernity in his life and writings.


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Indigeneity and class: Toon van Meijl, ‘Culture versus class: towards an understanding of Māori poverty’, Race & Class, 2020

05Jun20

Abstract: Interrogating why class has been demoted as a useful concept within anthropology, the author examines the ways in which issues of inequality and ethnicity have been used to explain both the enduring impact of settler colonialism on, and contemporary forms of discrimination against, New Zealand Māori. He weighs up the impact of the cultural turn in academia, the Māori Renaissance, the impact of neoliberalism, and the assumption that class coincides with ethnicity and hence the emphasis on affirmative action in education. The assumption that poverty is either class- or ethnicity-based is false. Māori themselves have been affected by social change: a few making it into a middle class, while, despite growing intermarriage, identification as Māori, appears enhanced by both enduring poverty and racism.


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Wild about the unsettler ‘wild’: Tess Lea, Wild Policy Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention, Stanford University Press, 2020

05Jun20

Description: Can there be good social policy? This book describes what happens to Indigenous policy when it targets the supposedly ‘wild people’ of regional and remote Australia. Tess Lea explores naturalized policy: policy unplugged, gone live, ramifying in everyday life, to show that it is policies that are wild, not the people being targeted. Lea turns the notion of unruliness on its head to reveal a policy-driven world dominated by short term political interests and their erratic, irrational effects, and by the less obvious protection of long-term interests in resource extraction and the liberal settler lifestyles this sustains. Wild Policy argues policies are not about undoing the big causes of enduring inequality, and do not ameliorate harms terribly well either—without yielding all hope.

Drawing on efforts across housing and infrastructure, resistant media-making, health, governance and land tenure battles in regional and remote Australia, Wild Policy looks at how the logics of intervention are formulated and what this reveals in answer to the question: why is it all so hard? Lea offers readers a layered, multi-relational approach called policy ecology to probe the related question, ‘what is to be done?’ Lea’s case material will resonate with analysts across the world who deal with infrastructures, policy, technologies, mining, militarization, enduring colonial legacies, and the Anthropocene.


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Undoing settler claims to indigenous history: Peter A. Nelson, ‘Refusing Settler Epistemologies and Maintaining an Indigenous Future for Tolay Lake, Sonoma County, California’, American Indian Quarterly, 44, 2, 2020, pp. 221-242

03Jun20

Abstract: Archaeological research has traditionally been a top-down scientific process of knowledge production with little involvement from the descendant communities whose cultural resources and heritage are under investigation. The analysis of collections resulting from archaeological research and the empirical data that it provides can legitimate settler scientists’ claims to know and revise Indigenous histories and eliminate the legitimacy of Indigenous claims about these histories from the standpoint of traditional knowledges. Despite these settler colonial tendencies within the discipline of archaeology, decolonizing archaeological practices and narratives and making space for Native American peoples is possible when research is refocused on the desires of descendent communities. Using a framework of responsive justice in working with communities to co-develop questions, methodologies and interpretations, the physical and intellectual heritage and histories of Indigenous communities can be maintained. This article will discuss one case from the Tolay Valley in which Indigenous archaeological research in collaboration with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria has been leveraged to support the tribe’s goals of environmental and cultural restoration at this place and has also revised and enriched the history that can be told about Coast Miwok people’s long-term engagement with the Tolay Valley.


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Settler girls settle: Willow Samara Allen, ‘Learning to become White girls in a settler colonial context: exploring the racial socialization of White Euro-Canadian women’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

03Jun20

Abstract: This piece particularizes the subjectivities and experiences of white Euro-Canadian women to understand how they become implicated in relationships and systems of power that sustain the settler colonial state. This examination is driven by assertions from settler colonial scholars to explore the ‘everydayness’ of settler colonialism, efforts by critical Whiteness scholars to spatially locate Whiteness, and by long-time calls from critical race feminists for white women to interrogate their responsibilities in challenging white supremacy. To respond, I argue we must start at the beginning to assess how white women learn to become racialized, gendered national subjects. Drawing on findings from my qualitative study of white women in transracial/cultural families, I investigate formative spaces and discourses through which the women are socialized into settler Whiteness. My analysis demonstrates the participants’ learning occurs in the home and community, and within relationships defined by intimacy and distance. I argue by examining the white settler socialization of white women who permanently transgress ‘colourlines’, greater insight can be gained into how white settler subjectivities are formed and possibly interrupted. I contend white settler socialization processes are necessary to challenge in broader efforts towards decolonization, imperative to which is imagining what different white femininities can exist.


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Settlers inventing indigenous traditions: Darryl Leroux, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, University of Manitoba Press, 2019

03Jun20

Description: Distorted Descent examines a social phenomenon that has taken off in the twenty-first century: otherwise white, French descendant settlers in Canada shifting into a self-defined “Indigenous” identity. This study is not about individuals who have been dispossessed by colonial policies, or the multi-generational efforts to reconnect that occur in response. Rather, it is about white, French-descendant people discovering an Indigenous ancestor born 300 to 375 years ago through genealogy and using that ancestor as the sole basis for an eventual shift into an “Indigenous” identity today.

After setting out the most common genealogical practices that facilitate race shifting, Leroux examines two of the most prominent self-identified “Indigenous” organizations currently operating in Quebec. Both organizations have their origins in committed opposition to Indigenous land and territorial negotiations, and both encourage the use of suspect genealogical practices. Distorted Descent brings to light to how these claims to an “Indigenous” identity are then used politically to oppose actual, living Indigenous peoples, exposing along the way the shifting politics of whiteness, white settler colonialism, and white supremacy.


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Converting settlers: Porscha Fermanis, ‘Capital, Conversion, and Settler Colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2020

03Jun20

Abstract: Viewing capitalism as emerging primarily from within the framework of empire rather than the nation state, this essay considers the relationship between capital, conversion, and settler colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872). It looks, first, at the novel’s critique of Wakefieldian organized settlement schemes as systems sustained by various forms of capital accumulation and free/unfree labour; and second, at its over-arching evangelical conversion narrative, which both frames and structures the main body of the text. The essay argues that, far from directing its satire wholly or even primarily towards metropolitan Britain, the novel enacts two circulating mid-nineteenth-century settler colonial anxieties: concerns about a perceived crisis of diminishing industriousness and economic exhaustion in colonial Australia and New Zealand, and concerns about the efficacy of British humanitarianism and missionary conversion. It considers the former in the context of the disruptions to settlement caused by the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s, and the latter in the context of missionary and humanitarian efforts to ameliorate conditions for Indigenous peoples from the 1830s onwards. The essay’s larger claim is that Erewhon presents capital and conversion as structurally interconnected mechanisms of an evolving Anglo-settler state in New Zealand. Radicalizing a tradition of economic critique of empire beginning with Adam Smith, Butler satirizes the idea of colonialism as an essentially liberal system by showing how much it is intertwined with exploitative practices of territorial expansion, dispossession, capital accumulation, unfree labour, missionary conversion, and racial assimilation.


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