settler colonial studies blog

Refusal and engagement: Joel E. Correia, ‘Reworking recognition: Indigeneity, land rights, and the dialectics of disruption in Paraguay’s Chaco’, Geoforum, 2019

15Dec19

Abstract: This paper discusses the limits of recognition by investigating the politics of Indigenous rights in Paraguay. The “multicultural turn” of the 1980s–1990s promised to disrupt historical patterns of Indigenous dispossession through land titling initiatives across the Americas, yet as this case shows, recognition comes without guarantees. I draw from ethnographic research with the Xákmok Kásek Indigenous community in Paraguay’s Chaco to consider how Sanapana and Enxet-Sur Indigenous peoples are reworking the limits of recognition to disrupt settler colonial power. Rather than rejecting or refusing recognition, I argue that the Xákmok Kásek community now employs a dialectics of refusal and engagement that rewrites the terms of recognition, subsequently forcing state officials to reconcile with new articulations of indigenous self-determination that disrupt settler colonial power. Focusing on the dialectics of refusal and engagement brings nuance to the complex negotiations and evolving strategies of resistance that Indigenous peoples are employing to challenge the status quo of dispossession in pursuit of decolonial futures across the Americas, futures shaped by historic processes that draw humans and non-humans together in place to maintain existing relations and form new ones in pursuit of more just geographies This article, therefore, contributes to ongoing debates about the politics of recognition, post-multiculturalism, and decolonial geographies by bringing a focus on Latin America more fully into dialogue with analyses of settler colonial geographies in North America and Australia.

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Decolonizing the forest school: Lisa Johnston, ‘Forest School Pedagogy and Indigenous Educational Perspectives: Where They Meet, Where They Are Far Apart, and Where They May Come Together’, in Peter Pericles Trifonas (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural Studies and Education, Springer, 2019 pp 1-14

14Dec19

Abstract: While Forest Schools are increasingly popular in Canada and their work of connecting children to nature and enacting a new pedagogy for learning outdoors is important, how do Forest Schools, as places of learning in nature and on the land, connect with Indigenous ways knowing, learning, and teaching? This question is significant in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as Canada is in the midst of recognizing the injustice of its treatment of Indigenous Peoples and working toward reconciliation. Through a review of literature, this chapter examines the ways that Forest School pedagogy and Indigenous educational perspectives may meet, may be far apart, and may come together. How do notions of nature and land, risk, and resilience differ from western understandings? What does decolonization mean? How does place-based education connect with Indigenous understandings of land as first teacher? As a settler and early childhood educator, the author is situated in this learning journey as “coming to know”. Drawing on Indigenous and settler scholars offers insight into the complex differences between Forest School pedagogy and Indigenous educational perspectives and offers guidance on how (re)positioning Forest Schools in the context of settler colonialism reframes the premise of how Forest School may incorporate, embed, and be reshaped by Indigenous educational perspectives.

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The ghosts of settler colonialism: Pamela Stern, ‘The Ghosts of Mining Past: A Settler Colonial Story’, Anthropology and Humanism, 2019

14Dec19

Abstract: Ethnographic reports of ghosts, spirits, and other nonhuman agents are portrayed as very different entities depending upon whether the people perceiving them are recognized as indigenous or nonindigenous. The nonhuman agents apprehended by indigenous peoples are nearly always described as ontological, while ethnographers tend to treat ghosts and other spirits among nonindigenous peoples as a form of protest. Using ethnographic data from the former silver mining settler community of Cobalt, Ontario Canada, I challenge this dichotomization. Instead, I argue ghostly encounters may arise from the social practices of emplacement, which may be indigenous or nonindigenous. In Cobalt, heritage work and nostalgia for an earlier time causes some residents to envision ghosts or spirits of long ended mining.

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Decolonizing Shakespeare: Laura Lehua Yim, ‘Reading Hawaiian Shakespeare: Indigenous Residue Haunting Settler Colonial Racism’, Journal of American Studies, 2019

14Dec19

Abstract: As scholarly work on race in Shakespeare studies continues to develop, this article examines how important insights from critical Indigenous studies can help us to refine and enhance this work to more fully see historical moments at which Shakespeare’s works have been appropriated in response to the oppression of settler colonialism. Taking an 1893 political cartoon from a New York newspaper as a representation of settler violence against Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i, this essay traces the uses of Banquo’s ghost in Hawaiian newspapers as a figure that haunts the racializing elimination of Native rule.

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Normalising settler colonalism begins early: Brian Rouleau, ‘How the West Was Fun: Children’s Literature and Frontier Mythmaking toward the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2019

11Dec19

Abstract: This article discusses the important role that juvenile literature played in creating America’s frontier mythos. It argues that children were a crucial audience for adult authors seeking to justify and normalize settler colonial policies. But, more importantly, young people themselves were active participants in the perpetuation of a popular culture that glorified westward expansion and the eradication of Indigenous peoples. In acknowledging as much, we arrive at a richer understanding of the important intersections between western history and the history of childhood in the United States.

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Refusal as strategy: Erez Tzfadia, Avinoam Meir, Batya Roded, EliAtzmon, ‘Gray local governance and Israeli Indigenous Bedouin: Credibility, functionality and the politics of refusal’, Cities, 97, 2020

11Dec19

Abstract: Our research explores the Bedouin town of Kseife in Israel’s southern district as a case study of a local authority willing to sacrifice the credibility earnable from local population in order to maintain Indigenous symbolic presence against state attempts to eliminate it through assimilation into ‘modern’ and ‘formal’ order. Elimination of Indigenous spatiality, typical to settler-colonialism, resulted in dividing the traditional space and society into ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ spaces. Kseife and its surroundings are socially and geographically sub-divided into three social groups with contrasting interests: (a) landlords (by customary law) who live in squatter (‘informal’) localities (‘informalities’) within and (b) outside the town’s jurisdiction, and (c) landless Bedouin who live in the formally planned neighborhoods in town. However, our study on the spatiality and temporally defined function of the local authority explores that as part of the ‘politics of refusal’ to the elimination of Indigenous spatiality, the local authority functions in-between the two sets of law – state law and tradition, and in-between the dynamic interaction between these three groups. Our findings show that the municipality maneuvers between these contradictions and socio-spatial order, thus failing to achieve credibility, yet maintaining Indigenous symbolic presence. We call this functionality gray governance.

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Settler genocide in the form of a pageant: Andrea Lynn Smith, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Revolutionary War” New York’s 1929 “Pageant of Decision”‘, The Public Historian, 41, 4, 2019, pp. 7-35

11Dec19

Abstract: The centerpiece of New York State’s 150th anniversary of the Sullivan Expedition of 1779 was a pageant, the “Pageant of Decision.” Major General John Sullivan’s Revolutionary War expedition was designed to eliminate the threat posed by Iroquois allied with the British. It was a genocidal operation that involved the destruction of over forty Indian villages. This article explores the motivations and tactics of state officials as they endeavored to engage the public in this past in pageant form. The pageant was widely popular, and served the state in fixing the expedition as the end point in settler-Indian relations in New York, removing from view decades of expropriations of Indian land that occurred well after Sullivan’s troops left.

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Violence and identity: Alexander Rotard, ‘Settler Identity and Colonial Violence in French Algeria 1945-1962: An Exploration of the Relationship between Settler Identity Formation and the Justification of Violence in Settler Colonies’, Hitotsubashi Bulletin of Social Sciences, 11, 2019

11Dec19

Excerpt: Amalgamating a Fanonesque psychological approach to the broader question of colonial violence in Algeria with a modern examination of colonial and metropolitan responses to specific violent events, this paper investigates the role of settler identity formation in the legitimisation and unleashing of colonial violence in Algeria between 1945 and 1962.

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Mormon settler colonialism: Elise Boxer, ‘The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism’, in P. Jane Hafen, Brenden W. Rensink (eds), Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, University of Utah Press, 2019, pp. 3-22

08Dec19

Excerpt: The Book of Mormon is not just a reflection of Mormon settler colonialism, but has been used to create a discourse that silences Indigenous voices and perspectives regarding their own history as a people on this continent. According to P. Jane Hafen, this is a“disruptive and colonizing act.” The Book of Mormon is utilized to construct a Lamanite identity and history in which Indigenous Peoples exist only to legitimize the presence of Mormon settlers on this continent and the religious narrative found in the Book of Mormon as accurate and true. By depicting Indigenous Peoples as Lamanites, or the first immigrants to this continent, the Book of Mormon provides the necessary justification for Indigenous removal and dispossession by Mormon settlers along the Mormon Corridor (Idaho, Utah, Arizona) in what is now the United States. The Book of Mormon reflects the nuanced ways in which Mormon settler colonialism is utilized to physically remove Indigenous people from their homelands while also demarcating Indigenous worldviews, identities, and histories as the racialized “other.” The Book of Mormon reflects the nuanced ways in which Mormon settler colonialism functions by creating very distinct notions of Indigeneity. Indigeneity, as defined by the Book of Mormon, is exhibited through the construction and application of “Lamanites” to American Indian Peoples. Lamanite identity is fluid, changing over time, but always in relation to Mormon Euro-American notions of Indigeneity. The use of the Book of Mormon as a historical and religious text of Lamanite identity and history on this continent erases the way Indigenous Peoples view their own creation as a people, their connection to the land, and their identity as a people. Instead, Indigenous Peoples are made to fit into Mormon creation stories and religious belief system. The erasure of Indigenous Peoples and history by Mormon settlers is an extension of the larger American colonial project of removal and genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

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Camus as primarily a settler colonist: Gina Marie Breen, ‘Neither Algerian, nor French: Albert Camus’s Pied-Noir Identity’, Mediterranean Studies, 27, 2, 2019, pp. 210-233

08Dec19

Abstract: Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913 to white European settlers of French and Spanish origin. Hence, Camus and his parents belonged to the pied-noircommunity, a term commonly used to refer to Europeans who settled in Algeria during the French colonial occupation. While Camus chose Algeria as the setting for four of his literary texts, this article focuses on Camus’s first novel, L’Étranger, written during World War II and published in 1942, and his unfinished, posthumous, semiautobiographical novel Le Premier Homme, written during Algeria’s War of Independence and published in 1994, because they both discuss the French Algerian pied-noir community. I argue that this distinction allows them to best convey the evolution of Camus’s pied-noir identity. Through an analysis of these novels, I examine the ambivalence of Camus’s representations of French Algeria. Though his writing has left an ambivalent legacy, I contend that Camus mythologizes the past and present primarily through his piednoir origins. His poverty and loss are consolidated in his negative prognosis for Algeria’s future, a prognosis that is often mistrustful of Algerian independence. Often his pied-noir upbringing and experiences with poverty and marginality put in question the very possibility of an all-inclusive nation, rendering him incapable of imagining a hybrid community of French and Algerians living together. These works convey the complexity of Camus’s identities, and foreground his attempt and ultimate failure to navigate his past and access memories. In the end, these novels offer us a nuanced exploration of pied-noir marginality.

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