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Indigenising theology: Allen G. Jorgenson, ‘Decolonizing and Indigenizing Liberation Theology’, in Hussam S. Timani, Loye Sekihata Ashton (eds), Post-Christian Interreligious Liberation Theology, Palgave, 2019, pp. 159-183

07Dec19

Abstract: This chapter engages comparative theology in imaging how liberation theology might be informed by spiritualities and worldviews from the First Peoples of North America, referencing teachings, treaties, and ceremonies from the Six Nations of the Grand River Nation. The liberation hermeneutic of “see, judge, act” is informed, in turn, by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum, the Two Row Wampum, and the Condolence Ceremony. Liberation theology thus contextualized will involve seeing with “all my relations” in service of earth-justice, judging in a way that pairs thought and feeling/intuition attentive to the whole, and acting in a fashion whereby peace refuses to demonize oppressors, using power that is balanced with harmony for the sake of a righteousness that knows that there is no justice without language of justice and justice for language. This instance of comparative theology takes its cues from a land-based religion, and so its hermeneutic is shaped in situ such that it cannot be exported without further ado. As such, it invites other liberation projects to engage local land-based religions which will school those who desire to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk in a good way with the Creator in a way appropriate to their territory.


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Environmental protection and the logic of elimination: Erin Willahan, ‘Narratives of the North: Contested geographic imaginaries and the case of Izembek National Wildlife Refuge’, Arctic Yearbook, 2019

07Dec19

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Promoting settler ‘ready made’ farms: Shona Gourlay, ‘CPR’s Ready Made Farms’, Alberta History, 2019

07Dec19

Excerpt: As early as the late 1880s, CPR mounted various campaigns to entice settlers to the West. This included railway cars, such as Baggage Car 303 that visited communities in Canada and the United States with a special agricultural exhibition showing the prospects in western Canada. A similar program ran in England, with a Travelling Exhibition Van touring rural areas to spark interest in Canadian products, and to inspire emigration. In one year (1893?), the “van visited 513 communities, travelled more than 1,800 miles (2,896 kilometres), and was inspected by more than 1.7 million people. Similar campaigns were conducted throughout Europe.” […]

In addition to print advertisements, the CPR used motion pictures as part of its publicity campaign: “the development of motion pictures coincided with the development of active publicity campaigns by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company… In order to encourage immigration and settlement to western Canada, the company developed an extensive system of promotion which included the use of films. Railway filmmaking fell broadly into two categories, those which were designed with a specific intent to educate, inform, and persuade and those which were primarily intended as entertainment.”

The CPR undertook a special advertising campaign for ready made farms. Magazines such as Popular Mechanics contained ads telling people to ‘Get your Canadian home from the Canadian Pacific’ and the “Canadian Pacific offers you the finest land on earth for grain growing, cattle, hog, sheep and horse raising, dairying, poultry, vegetables, and general mixed farming…” The February 26, 1913 issue of Country Life contained an ad directed to British residents, stating that “Canadian Pacific ‘Ready Made’ farms offer to residents of Great Britain a means of settling in Western Canada with a minimum of discomfort, and insure the production of revenue from the investment in the shortest possible time.” The CPR also made presentations overseas.


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A settler’s dream (i.e., deporting indigenous people): Helen Davidson, ‘Citizenship test: court to decide whether Indigenous people can be deported from Australia’, Guardian, 04/12/19

05Dec19

Excerpt: The high court of Australia will this week examine a complicated question: can Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders be deported as aliens if they don’t hold Australian citizenship?

The federal government says yes.

 


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Minecraft is a settler-colonial game: Bennett Brazelton, ‘On the 10-year anniversary of minecraft: two interventions in extractive colonialism’, Cultural Geographies, 2019

04Dec19

Abstract: In light of the 10-year anniversary of the release of Minecraft, the wildly popular survival/building game, this retrospective considers the game as a vastly impactful digital text of settler colonialism. The ways in which the game’s ‘survival mode’ approaches the extraction of resources from land is fundamentally entangled in colonial fictions of indigeneity, gendered systems of property, and a Euro-humanist sense of entitlement and ownership. Considering Minecraft as a colonial text allows for two theoretical and aesthetic interventions: first, the visual art of Peruvian-American Eamon Ore-Giron, who challenges colonial extractivism in the two-channel piece, Morococha, and second, the 2006 flash game released by XGen Studies, Motherload, which approaches mining-based gameplay with key differences. These two interventions highlight the importance of digital realms as a terrain of colonial space-making and thus a site of analysis for cultural geographers. Moreover, they may help to chart useful paths to the production and realization of anti-colonial digital textuality.


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The ‘settler-not’: Tryon P. Woods, ‘Marronage, Here and There: Liberia, Enslavement’s Conversion, and the Settler-Not’, International Labor and Working Class History, 96, 2019, pp. 38-59

04Dec19

Abstract: This proposed contribution to the special issue of ILWCH offers a theoretical re-consideration of the Liberian project. If, as is commonly supposed in its historiography and across contemporary discourse regarding its fortunes into the twenty-first century, Liberia is a notable, albeit contested, instance of the modern era’s correctable violence in that it stands as an imperfect realization of the emancipated slave, the liberated colony, and the freedom to labor unalienated, then such representation continues to hide more than it reveals. This essay, instead, reads Liberia as an instructive leitmotif for the conversion of racial slavery’s synecdochical plantation system in the Americas into the plantation of the world writ large: the global scene of antiblackness and the immutable qualification for enslavement accorded black positionality alone. Transitions between political economic systems—from slave trade to “re-colonization,” from Firestone occupation to dictatorial-democratic regimes—reemerge from this re-examination as crucial but inessential to understanding Liberia’s position, and thus that of black laboring subjects, in the modern world. I argue that slavery is the simultaneous primitive accumulation of black land and bodies, but that this reality largely escapes current conceptualization of not only the history of labor but also that of enslavement. In other words, the African slave trade (driven first by Arabs in the Indian Ocean region, then Europeans in the Mediterranean, and, subsequently, Euro-Americans in the Atlantic) did not simply leave as its corollary effect, or byproduct, the underdevelopment of African societies. The trade in African flesh was at once the co-production of a geography of desire in which blackness is perpetually fungible at every scale, from the body to the nation-state to its soil—all treasures not simply for violation and exploitation, but more importantly, for accumulation and all manner of usage. The Liberian project elucidates this ongoing reality in distinctive ways—especially when we regard it through the lens of the millennium-plus paradigm of African enslavement. Conceptualizing slavery’s “afterlife” entails exploring the ways that emancipation extended, not ameliorated, the chattel condition, and as such, impugns the efficacy of key analytic categories like “settler,” “native,” “labor,” and “freedom” when applied to black existence. Marronage, rather than colonization or emancipation, situates Liberia within the intergenerational struggle of, and over, black work against social death. Read as enslavement’s conversion, this essay neither impugns nor heralds black action and leadership on the Liberian project at a particular historical moment, but rather agitates for centering black thought on the ongoing issue of black fungibility and social captivity that Liberia exemplifies. I argue that such a reading of Liberia presents a critique of both settler colonialism and of a certain conceptualization of the black radical tradition and its futures in heavily optimist, positivist, and political economic terms that are enjoying considerable favor in leading discourse on black struggle today.


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The archaeology of settlers: Alfredo González-Ruibal, ‘Ethical Issues in Indigenous Archaeology: Problems with Difference and Collaboration’, Canadian Journal of Bioethics, 2, 3, 2019, pp. 34-43

04Dec19

Abstract: The critique of archaeology made from an indigenous and postcolonial perspective has been largely accepted, at least in theory, in many settler colonies, from Canada to New Zealand. In this paper, I would like to expand such critique in two ways: on the one hand, I will point out some issues that have been left unresolved; on the other hand, I will address indigenous and colonial experiences that are different from British settler colonies, which have massively shaped our understanding of indigeneity and the relationship of archaeology to it. I am particularly concerned with two key problems: alterity – how archaeologists conceptualize difference – and collaboration – how archaeologists imagine their relationship with people from a different cultural background. My reflections are based on my personal experiences working with communities in southern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America that differ markedly from those usually discussed by indigenous archaeologies.


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Criminal by design: Emma Rose Kauffman, After this, Therefore, Because of This: Refusing Settler Immunity & Abolishing Indigenous Criminality, MA dissertation, University of Alberta

29Nov19

Abstract: According to Statistics Canada, in 2016/2017 Indigenous peoples accounted for 28% of admissions to provincial/territorial prisons and 27% for federal prisons, while representing only 4.1% of the Canadian adult population. The majority of analyses drawn from these statistics continue to follow a similar line of interpretation. They begin by pointing out a pattern between the racial make-up of Canadian society and its prison population. Conclusions are then drawn between ‘over-representation’ and racialization in Canada’s prisons and tacit or overt condemnation of this system is offered. The predominant lack of acknowledgement or engagement, however, with the histories and contemporary relations of colonialism is not simply a matter of unintended ignorance or passive forgetfulness. These analyses reinforce dominant national narratives; (mis)represent Canadian governing practices and policies as fair and just embodiments of the democratic will of the people; and suspend the state’s culpability in creating and maintaining a criminal (in)justice system that produces such an abhorrently racialized demographic. I counter these narratives by rooting my analysis of the Canadian prison system in its colonial legacy and ongoing settler-colonial project, which is undercut by a certain set of logics that require the obfuscation of Indigenous presence(s). This informs my contention that, contrary to popular belief, the prison system is in fact not broken, but continues to perform the exact function it was designed to perform in the first place: the ongoing dispossession of indigenous bodies and lands, as well as a suppression of their claims to sovereignty. Overall, I am to situate the state, rather than indigeneity, in its criminality, by showing how the universalism of Canada’s sovereign ideal is constituted by the particularism in the presumptions it makes about its Self, a Self that depends on an impossible singularity.


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You can’t build an indigenous state under settler colonialism: S. Abdel Latif, The EU and Palestine: The Role of EU Financial Aid in Statebuilding in Palestine, PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2019

29Nov19

Abstract: The conditions established after the 1994 Oslo Accords, which involved Israel transferring administrative and legal powers to the Palestinians, thereby granting them limited control over fragmented parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while retaining ‘security’ control over large sections of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt), have further consolidated Israel’s colonial control. Over a 25-year period, the peace agreement did not even create a Palestinian quasi-state with sub-sovereignty over the fragmented ‘Bantustans’. But the international community, whose aid and related efforts have had limited impact on advancing the peace negotiations, are still tied to the two-state solution, which is presumed to provide the endpoint to those negotiations. There has been a failure, on the part of the international community, to accept or admit that this solution is not realistic within the context of Israel’s continued colonisation of Palestine. The unique contribution of this thesis is to provide a new understanding of the role of EU financial aid to Palestine that has been directed towards the creation of a democratic, independent and viable future Palestinian State when analysed within the settler colonialism context. This will be achieved by analysing the views of the Palestinian public and Palestinian officials on the EU financial aid to Palestine, along with its role in creating a future Palestinian state. The EU official views, in addition to the latest EU audits and evaluations will be used to provide a self-assessment of the EU role in supporting the two-state solution through PEGASE Direct Financial Support (DFS) programmes, which have been in operation between February 2008 and October 2018. The thesis concludes that the EU’s adoption of statebuilding as a means through which to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has failed because it has not acknowledged the settler colonial context that continues to frustrate a solution. In addition, this thesis argues that, despite initiating a large number of reform priorities in Palestinian public institutions, the EU did not promote the establishment of legitimate institutions with the ability to overcome the Palestinian divide. In other words, EU statebuilding efforts have failed to implement ‘democratic state-building’ or support ‘democratic governance’ in Palestine.


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Terrapolitics under settler colonialism: Christine Delucia, ‘Terrapolitics in the Dawnland: Relationality, Resistance, and Indigenous Futures in the Native and Colonial Northeast’, The New England Quarterly, XCII, 4, 2019, pp. 548-583

27Nov19

Excerpt: “Our people = Our Land = Our People.” Mashpee Wampanoag tribal members carried signs conveying this and other messages in October 2018 as they marched in protest of Trump administration actions threatening existential harm to their community. Walking along Great Neck Road, which follows a longstanding Mashpee pathway on Cape Cod, the marchers mobilized bodies and voices to push back against a recent US Department of the Interior decision reversing the placement of 321 acres of land into federal trust for the tribe. That land-in-trust status—an outcome of four centuries of profoundly contested legal, political, and cultural developments—is essential to the tribe’s ability to exercise fuller forms of sovereignty. 


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