settler colonial studies blog

The settler wants a new psychology: Konrad Szocik, Steven Abood, Chris Impey, Mark Shelhamer, Jacob Haqq-Misra, Erik Persson, Lluis Oviedo, Klara Anna Capova, Martin Braddock, Margaret Boone Rappaport, Christopher Corbally, ‘Visions of a Martian future’, Futures, 117, 2020, 102514

20Jan20

Abstract: As we look beyond our terrestrial boundary to a multi-planetary future for humankind, it becomes paramount to anticipate the challenges of various human factors on the most likely scenario for this future: permanent human settlement of Mars. Even if technical hurdles are circumvented to provide adequate resources for basic physiological and psychological needs, Homo sapiens will not survive on an alien planet if a dysfunctional psyche prohibits the utilization of these resources. No matter how far we soar into the stars, our psychologies for future generations will be forever tethered to the totality of our surroundings. By shaping our environment toward survival and welfare during the voyage to Mars and in a Martian colony, we indirectly shape our psyches and prepare them for a mission of unprecedented alienation and duration. Once on Mars, human factors such as leadership structure, social organization and code of conduct, group size, gender balance, developmental cycle, mobility, length of stay and the ecological settings and type and manner of subsistence, will create a novel Martian culture. The degree that settlers are severed from the Earth will affect how radically foreign this culture will be when compared with cultures on Earth.

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Beyond place, settler colonialism: Simone Thornton, Mary Graham, Gilbert Burgh, ‘Reflecting on place: environmental education as decolonisation’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2020

15Jan20

Abstract: We argue that to face climate change, all education, from kindergarten to tertiary, needs to be underpinned by environmental education. Moreover, as a site of reframing, education when coupled with philosophy is a possible site of influencing societal reframing in order to re-examine our relations to nature or our natural environment. However, we contend that as philosophy has been largely absent from curricula, it is vital to redress this issue. Further, the environment cannot be viewed simply as subject matter for study but, reconceptualised in the Indigenous sense as Place. Only in this way can we overcome the human-nature divide. We conclude that educators must look for what Plumwood calls ‘experiences that do not fit the dominant story’ to disrupt an important link in the chain of climate change by developing ‘traitorous identities’ able to challenge the dominant culture.

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Beyond safety, settler colonialism: Heather Dorries, Laura Harjo, ‘Beyond Safety: Refusing Colonial Violence Through Indigenous Feminist Planning’, Journal of Planning and Education Research, 2020

15Jan20

Abstract: Settler colonial violence targets Indigenous women in specific ways. While urban planning has attended to issues of women’s safety, the physical dimensions of safety tend to be emphasized over the social and political causes of women’s vulnerability to violence. In this paper, we trace the relationship between settler colonialism and violence against Indigenous women. Drawing on examples from community activism and organizing, we consider how Indigenous feminism might be applied to planning and point toward approaches to planning that do not replicate settler colonial violence.

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The musicology of giving sound back: Jessica Bissett Perea, Gabriel Solis, ‘Asking the Indigeneity Question of American Music Studies’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 13, 4, 2019, pp. 401-410

12Jan20

Excerpt: We are pleased to present this special issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music on “Music, Indigeneity, and Colonialism in the Americas.” This timely collection adds a range of case studies to the discussion of Indigenous music and the history of colonial processes, while at the same time offering theoretical resources for music scholars to connect further with these threads of interdisciplinary research. While this issue only represents one step in a larger process, we see it as a meaningful part of how the Society for American Music might attempt to grapple with coloniality and engage with moves toward decolonization and decoloniality in the contemporary academy in ways that do not exacerbate current and ongoing erasures of Indigenous Peoples’ presence and agency. In addressing myriad issues raised by keywords in our title, this volume effectively poses an “Indigeneity question” for American music historiography: what happens to American music studies if you put Indigeneity at its center?

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The geography of giving land back: Andrew Curley, Sara Smith, ‘Against colonial grounds: Geography on Indigenous lands’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020

12Jan20

Abstract: In this response to Natalie Oswin’s provocation, ‘An other geography’, we consider how we might work against settler narratives and structures from our situated positions in the discipline and in a specific academic institution in the US South. Following Diné student Majerle Lister, we ask what it would mean to consider giving the land back: what does that entail? The academic institutions we inhabit were built to insure white futurity, on fictive histories. Can they be retrofitted in the present to enable the futurity of Indigenous people and theorizations? Can we turn our discipline’s history of erasure inside out, to center the land, people, and practices that were both crucial to and absent from it except as shadowy and metaphorical presences? We draw on our own teaching, and from scholarship in Indigenous and Black Studies, to consider what it might look like to return land and reconfigure relations among those who have been cast aside by white patriarchal settler structures, but in incommensurate ways.

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Settler storying: Katrine Barber, ‘”We were at our journey’s end”: Settler Sovereignty Formation in Oregon’, Oregon Historical Quarterly, 120, 4, 2019, pp. 382-413

10Jan20

Abstract: When Esther Bell Hanna migrated to Oregon Territory in September 1852 and documented in her diary her first glimpse of the Columbia River, “she looked out over a landscape that contained relationships both legible and illegible to her.” In this research article, Barber explores those relationships through the lens of settler colonialism and White supremacy that “alienated Indigenous people from their lands through ordinary acts of fencing and plowing fields” and “disorganized terror and calculated war.” Barber also discusses acts of disruption and resistance to White supremacy, and argues that “to grapple with the foundations, legacies, and persistent characteristics of settler colonialism and its twin — White supremacy — is to grapple with the inequities that shape Oregon’s history, present, and future in ways both symbolic and material.”\

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Benevolent settlers: Eva Bischoff, Benevolent Colonizers in Nineteenth-Century Australia: Quaker Lives and Ideals, Palgrave, 2020

10Jan20

Description: This book reconstructs the history of a group of British Quaker families and their involvement in the process of settler colonialism in early nineteenth-century Australia. Their everyday actions contributed to the multiplicity of practices that displaced and annihilated Aboriginal communities. Simultaneously, early nineteenth-century Friends were members of a translocal, transatlantic community characterized by pacifism and an involvement in transnational humanitarian efforts, such as the abolitionist and the prison reform movements as well as the Aborigines Protection Society. Considering these ideals, how did Quakers negotiate the violence of the frontier? To answer this question, the book looks at Tasmanian and South Australian Quakers’ lives and experiences, their journeys and their writings. Building on recent scholarship on the entanglement between the local and the global, each chapter adopts a different historical perspective in terms of breadth and focused time period. The study combines these different takes to capture the complexities of this topic and era.

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Appropriating the settler appropriation of ‘nativeness’: Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, Duke University Press, 2020

05Jan20

Abstract: In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.

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A ‘convergence’ of settler colony and metropole? Yasmeen Abu‐Laban, ‘Immigration and Settler‐Colonies Post‐UNDRIP: Research and Policy Implications’, International Migration, 2019

05Jan20

Abstract: It is now common to identify a policy convergence around migration which is eroding the longstanding distinction made in the migration literature between “traditional” countries of immigration (like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States) and other Western states. Taking the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as instructive, this article focusses on the case of Canada, arguing that its settler‐colonial foundation has impacted and continues to impact three areas relevant to the comparative study of migration: 1) national discourse; 2) land and forms of social power; and 3) politics and forms of solidarity. The implications of settler‐colonialism for the study of international migration are broader than the case of Canada and suggest the need to link considerations of Indigeneity systematically in migration studies, and to address the particularities of settler‐colonial states in relation to other Northern states by being attuned to “divergence within convergence.”

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The crisis of the ‘crisis’ of settler colonialism: Efrat Arbel, ‘Rethinking the “Crisis” of Indigenous Mass Imprisonment’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 34, 3, 2019 , pp. 437-456

05Jan20

Abstract: In R v Gladue, the Supreme Court of Canada famously remarked that the incarceration of Indigenous people represents a “crisis.” Since Gladue’s release, the language of “crisis” has been used with frequency in Canadian legal discourse. In this article, I analyze how this language has shaped the broader legal understanding of Indigenous mass imprisonment. My focus is not on specific iterations or uses, but on the cumulative impact of the language of “crisis” over the last twenty years. I suggest that however well-meaning these representations may be, their cumulative impact is harmful. In the face of the relentless intensification of Indigenous mass imprisonment, the language of “crisis” has operated to subtly entrench the colonial structures it purports to disrupt. Urging a shift away from its use, I argue that the language of “crisis” is not only ill suited to address the problem, but is part of the problem.

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