settler colonial studies blog

Cashlessness for indigeneity: Elise Klein, ‘Settler colonialism in Australia and the cashless debit card’, Social Policy & Administration, 2020

10Feb20

Abstract: Settler colonialism continues in Australia today. One way this occurs is through processes of assimilation such as targeting First Nations subjectivities with behavioural conditions on their social security payments. In this paper, I draw on a 13‐month study examining one such programme; the Cashless Debit Card trial in the East Kimberley region in North West Australia. Through restricting cash and purchases to curb alcohol consumption, illegal drug use, and gambling, card aims to instil “responsible behaviour” such as getting a job in the capitalist economy, accumulating private property, and succeeding in English education. Through drawing on critical discourse analysis, I ask, what does the Cashless Debit Card tell us about the settler state’s attempts of continued assimilation? The paper explores specific ways the state legitimising assimilation through provoking narratives of First Nations dysfunction, depoliticising poverty and colonisation, constructing evidence around success of policy, and constructing ideas of “community” in order to regulate who speaks and who is overlooked. Although assimilation attempts are made, there is resistance and pushback in the trial site. Attempts of assimilation, not actual assimilation, can only be observed.

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On the population economy of settler colonialism: RebeccaHall, ‘Indigenous/state relations and the “Making” of surplus populations in the mixed economy of Northern Canada’, Geoforum, 2020

10Feb20

Abstract: Grounded in an analysis of the mixed economy of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, this article examines the contemporary relationship between surplus populations and colonial capitalist accumulation of new spaces. The functioning of the reserve surplus population requires that the unwaged, or under-waged, want, or need, wage labour. Thus, like all capitalist relations, a reserve surplus population is predicated on the separation of workers from their means of subsistence: what Marx calls “primitive” accumulation. Traditionally the home of the Dene and Inuit, and now home to approximately equal parts Indigenous (primarily Dene, Inuit and Métis) and non-Indigenous residents, the NWT mixed economy is a set of social relations that combine subsistence and social reproduction, wherein labour is oriented toward the daily and intergenerational wellbeing of the collective rather than the profit of the individual, with capitalist production. With a focus on the diamond industry, this article traces the shifting Canadian State approach to Indigenous labour in this space across time and the state policies and extractive projects that have both “made” Indigenous labour surplus and rhetorically justified their existence through evocations of regional unemployment and imagined dependency. In so doing, the paper identifies a move from the welfare-state era, wherein the state structured northern Indigenous “dependency”, to the neoliberal era, wherein dependency became a problem to be solved through increased Indigenous incorporation into capitalist wage labour. The northern diamond mining industry, responding to both Indigenous demands for land recognition and neoliberal imperatives for lean operations, exemplifies this latter approach.

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Settler colonialism as tribute: Dylan Ruediger, ‘”Neither Utterly to Reject Them, Nor Yet to Drawe Them to Come In”: Tributary Subordination and Settler Colonialism in Virginia’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18, 1, 2020, pp. 1-31

10Feb20

Abstract: This essay explores tributary relationships between colonists and Algonquian peoples in seventeenth-century Virginia, placing the process of political subordination into familiar narratives of indigenous dispossession. Virginia’s tributary system—a political and legal institution founded in 1646 at the conclusion of the third Anglo-Powhatan war—created a colonial order in which Indian communities became subordinated but largely autonomous polities within a composite imperial state. This idea of tribute, a form of what Hugo Grotius called an “unequal alliance,” had roots in Algonquian political traditions and the emerging European literature on international law. Drawing on these lineages, this essay provides a framework for thinking about how the tributary system developed in the decades between 1646 and 1676. The legal and political distance separating tributaries from colonists proved to be an important tool for indigenous communities struggling to maintain communal identity, but provided colonists with a flexible means of effecting dispossession. Though colonists’ resentment of the slender protections Governor William Berkeley afforded tributaries erupted into civil war in 1676, Bacon’s Rebellion failed to destroy the tributary system. It was reestablished at the Treaty of the Middle Plantation in 1677, which still provides the legal framework for Indian relations in the state of Virginia.

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Settler structures: Timothy J Stanley, ‘Commemorating John A. Macdonald: Collective Remembering and the Structure of Settler Colonialism in British Columbia’, BC Studies, 2020

10Feb20

Abstract: The 2018 controversy surrounding the decision of the mayor and council of the City of Victoria, BC, to remove a statue of John A. Macdonald from the entrance to city hall raises questions about how lived histories of colonialism and racisms are marked in landscape of collective remembering within the city and more broadly within Canada. Building of the work of James Wertsch on collective remembering, Eileen Moreton Robinson on private property and Patrick Wolfe on settler colonialism, this paper explores how the cultural markings of the City of Victoria have been produced by processes of colonization and racist exclusion. In particular, it discusses how such things as the dominance of English, the nature of place names, the marginalization Indigenous and Chinese people within the territory have come to be and how this making is erased from technologies of remembering. The paper contrasts the historical John A. Macdonald and his colonizing and racist practices his celebration by nationalists today. In so doing it show how the positions of the Macdonald apologists enact the same exclusions as those of the colonizing landscape. It conclude sby considering the implications of this structure of colonized remembering for transformative projects of decolonization and antiracism.

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Marx and the colonial: John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Hannah Holleman, ‘Marx and the Indigenous’, Monthly Review, 2020

06Feb20

Excerpt: The “turn toward the indigenous” in social theory over the last couple of decades, associated with the critique of white settler colonialism, has reintroduced themes long present in Marxian theory, but in ways that are often surprisingly divorced from Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Part of the reason for this disconnection is that the current discussions of settler colonialism have evolved out of traditions in postmodernist and postcolonial cultural theory that are distant from historical materialism. However, a deeper explanation for the gulf between current scholarly work on settler colonialism and Marxism is associated with the claims of some left critics that Marx’s work is characterized by the following: (1) a crude developmentalism and economic determinism; (2) a pro-colonialist stance; (3) a teleological conception of progress; and (4) Prometheanism or extreme productivism in relation to the environment. Such charges are often employed to cast historical materialism as irrelevant or even hostile to contemporary indigenous struggles and perspectives.

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Settler colonial ‘conservation’: Livia Gershon, ‘How Conservation Is Shaped by Settler Colonialism: The legal concept of “terra nullius”—meaning “no one’s land”—influenced European colonialism and continues to shape the practice of conservation’, J-Stor Daily, 31/01/20

06Feb20

Excerpt: Even long after the settler colonial nations of the Americas became independent from their European metropoles, they retained the same attitude toward land rights and the status of Native nations.

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Native Girl Syndrome: Lilian Mengesha, ‘Deceleration as Decolonial Intervention in Lara Kramer’s NGS: Native Girl Syndrome’, ASAP/Journal, 4, 3, 2019, pp. 575-600

31Jan20

Excerpt: Native Girl Syndrome (2013), a one-hour dance piece that embodies the intimate haze and afterlife of drug use, sex work, and poverty through a dissociative and slow movement score. Kramer, a choreographer of mixed Oji-Cree and settler heritage, creates movement that confronts dispossession through aggravated and slow actions. Waste, found objects, and the detritus of self-medication litter the set of NGS. Sharing temporalities of decay, the choreography and the very nature of these discarded objects stage an embodied decomposition, a peeling away of the elements that constitute the performance as a whole. In the unraveling of embodied action, we see how trash transforms into possessions and how women’s bodies become discarded within the structural violence of settler-colonial societies.

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Settler nation vs. Métis nation: M. Max Hamon, The Audacity of His Enterprise: Louis Riel and the Métis Nation That Canada Never Was, 1840–1875, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020

31Jan20

Description: Louis Riel (1844-1885) was an iconic figure in Canadian history best known for his roles in the Red River Resistance of 1869 and the Northwest Resistance of 1885. A political leader of the Métis people of the Canadian Prairies, Riel is often portrayed as a rebel. Reconstructing his experiences in the Northwest, Quebec, and the worlds in between, Max Hamon revisits Riel’s life through his own eyes, illuminating how he and the Métis were much more involved in state-making than historians have previously acknowledged.

Questioning the drama of resistance, The Audacity of His Enterprise highlights Riel’s part in the negotiations, petition claims, and legal battles that led to the formation of the state from the bottom up. Hamon examines Riel’s early successes and his participation in the crafting of a new political environment in the Northwest and Canada. Arguing that Riel viewed the Métis as a distinct people, not caught between worlds, the book demonstrates Riel’s attempts to integrate multiple perspectives – Indigenous, French-Canadian, American, and British – into a new political environment. Choosing to end the book in 1875, at the pinnacle of Riel’s successful career as a political leader, rather than at his death in 1885, Hamon sets out to recover Riel’s agency, intentions, and imagination, all of which have until now been displaced by colonial narratives and the shadow of his execution.

Revisiting the Red River Resistance on its 150th anniversary, The Audacity of His Enterprise offers a new view of Riel’s life and a rethinking of the history of colonialism.

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The settler fantasy, literarily expressed: Katrina Kellar Pinard, Settler Feminism in Contemporary Canadian Historical Fiction, MA dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2019

29Jan20

Abstract: Canada has seen a veritable explosion in the production and popularity of historical fiction in recent decades. Works by women that present a feminist revision of national narratives have played a key part in this phenomenon. This thesis discusses three contemporary Canadian historical novels: Gil Adamson’s The Outlander (2007), Ami McKay’s The Birth House (2006), and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). By examining these novels through a settler colonial lens and with a specific interest in the critique of settler feminism, this thesis offers readings that can reveal how feminism operates within the confines of the settler fantasy. These readings suggest that women’s historical fiction offers an opportunity to consider different aspects of feminism in the settler setting and to consider different aspects of critiques of patriarchy in settler contexts. This thesis suggests that these novels present a settler women’s history that cannot be properly understood through the simplistic logic of male/female or colonizer/colonized oppositions, and that the ways the novels depict women’s interactions with patriarchal settler structures and institutions can contribute to critical understandings of a colonial history with which Canada continues to reckon.

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The population economy of nonhuman species under settler colonialism: Natalia Gutkowski, ‘Bodies that count: Administering multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s borderlands’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2020

29Jan20

Abstract: Nonhuman bodies in many sizes and diverse social roles are central to Israel’s control mechanism in the Occupied West Bank. Delving into the agricultural record of the Israeli Civil Administration, I ask how the Israeli system of control operates through animal bodies. What does a bureaucratic record so invested in monitoring animals’ production, treatment, disease, and death tell about the potential disruption of power? Through a political ecology of human–animal entanglement, I argue that nonhuman bodies both reproduce human colonial relations and allow their constant interruption. Nonhumans challenge the power regime through their unpredictable mobility as well as in their role as both objects of a political economy and subjects of potential agricultural diseases, ecological risks, or public health threats. Breaking from contemporary multispecies scholarly literature’s focus on endangered species and relations of care, I place nonhuman bodies as actors of international-interspecies relations in colonial conditions and point to nonhumans, which are here to stay in the climate change era. By doing so, I reflect on the continuous significance of nonhuman bodies to the operation of power in the “borderlands” of Israel/Palestine and beyond.

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