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Settler colonialism reorganises the natural world: Kari Marie Norgaard, Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action, Rutgers University Press, 2019

20Nov19

Description: Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void. Whereas much attention has (rightfully) focused on the structuring of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, few sociologists have attended to the ongoing process of North American colonialism. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today. 


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How does decolonisation look like? Dara Potts, Hybrid Government Institutions: Reconciliation or Institutional Colonialism? The Case of the Tłįchǫ Peoples, Northwest Territories, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2019

20Nov19

Abstract: On August 25, 2003, the Tłįchǫ Peoples of the Northwest Territories signed a combined comprehensive land claim and self-government agreement with the Government of Canada. In addition to transferring ancestral lands back to the Tłįchǫ Peoples, the Agreement provides the Tłįchǫ Peoples with the right and freedom to define how their lands and its resources are managed. The establishment of such an Indigenous government presents an opportunity to create new institutions of governance that meaningfully include Indigenous values and that reflect traditional knowledge and practices of the Tłı̨chǫ Peoples. This thesis poses two questions. Has Tłįchǫ self-government resulted in the creation of unique Indigenous government institutions that incorporate Indigenous approaches, customs and habits (Indigenous perspectives)? Have these Indigenous institutions been meaningfully incorporated by formal government institutions at the watershed and territorial level? This study is situated within the broader debates surrounding reconciliation. It argues that meaningful reconciliation requires more than simple acknowledgement of rights or a duty to consult; it requires meaningful integration of Indigenous practices and perspectives into formal institutions, and most importantly, formal government institutions. A combined structural institutional analysis and discourse analysis of formal government institutions and documents of the Tłı̨chǫ Government, the Mackenzie Valley Land and Water Management Board and the Government of the Northwest Territories was conducted. Analysis focused on land and water management. It was found that the Tłı̨chǫ Government has created unique hybrid government institutions, grounded upon Tłı̨chǫ history, culture and practices and augmented by modern knowledge and practices through the principle of knowing two ways. However, the integration of Indigenous practices and perspectives remains limited in the formal government institutions and documents, and therefore formal practices, at the watershed and territorial levels. This suggests the possibility of a new “two solitudes” separating Indigenous peoples and their governments from territorial, provincial and federal governments in the day-to-day activities of governance. This study also raises the question of whether hybrid formal government institutions can be created and if they can, whether these can become institutions of reconciliation or remain expressions of institutional colonialism under resilient settler colonialism.


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Can settler consciousness be transformed? Jesse Whattam, The Possibilities of Transforming Settler Consciousness: Community Spaces and White Settler Responsibility, MA Dissertation, Carleton University, 2019

20Nov19

Abstract: In Settler Colonial Theory, there is a growing body of work that looks at the ways settler colonization is being challenged. The understanding of how settlers are engaging with these potential transformations remains unclear. I build on Davis et. al’s (2017) idea of “transforming settler consciousness” to consider what conditions, spaces, and practices are facilitating white settlers to challenge settler coloniality. Working with five white settlers in community groups, I use a narrative inquiry methodology to ask what about these initiatives did, or did not, catalyze transformed settler consciousness? Through a political ontology framework, the stories shared reveal the paradoxes, challenges and complexities about what facilitates a politics of recognition (Coulthard 2014) and what facilitates spaces of ontological negotiation. While the former does not demand a transformation in settler consciousness, the later does and with that transformation, settlers have the potential to contribute to a radical transformation of settler coloniality.


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Settler digressions: Timothy Donahue, ‘Styles of Sovereignty: Parataxis, Settler–Indigenous Difference, and the Transnationalisms of the Great Basin’, American Literary History, 2019

20Nov19

Excerpt: “I digress constantly,” declares the narrator of Roughing It (1872), Mark Twain’s semi-autobiographical account of “variegated vagabondizing” in the North American West (331, xxxi).1 With this aside, Twain calls attention to the way he depicts spaces where US settlement was far from an accomplished fact. Most of Roughing It is set in early-1860s Nevada—which had been a part of Mexico just more than a decade earlier—where Indigenous people contested US occupancy and where the new territorial government struggled to assert sovereignty. The narrator’s declaration casts the presentation of this milieu in Roughing It as “constantly” digressive.


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Settler-colonial capitalism is ‘custodial’: Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Self-determination Under Settler Colonial Capitalism: Northern Territory Cattle Communities 1968–96’, Australian Historical Studies, 50, 4, 2019, pp. 503-521

17Nov19

Abstract: Using the papers of the Gibb Committee on the future of Aboriginal communities on pastoral properties in the Northern Territory (1970–72), this article contributes both theoretically and empirically to the history of self-determination policy. It reveals non-Aboriginal authorities’ thinking at a crucial moment in the history of the governing of remote Aboriginal Australians: the dissolution of the ‘pastoral-feudal’ order under the impact of ‘equal wages’ and access to cash social security. The article argues that the state and pastoralists had to consider two modalities of Aboriginal empowerment: as individual citizen-workers whose labour time had now to be valued as a commodity; and as ‘communities’ aspiring to autonomy from the authority of pastoralists. The article concludes by arguing that the settler colonial state’s imperatives are both ‘capitalist’ and ‘custodial’.


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Settler portable shrines: Susan Slyomovics, ‘The Virgin Mary of Algeria: French Mediterraneans En Miroir’, History and Anthropology, 2019

17Nov19

Abstract: Implanted in 1846 as a pilgrimage site on Algerian soil after France’s 1830 conquest, the majestic Virgin Mary of Santa Cruz statue overlooks Oran, Algeria’s second city. This essay traces transMediterranean journeys by Virgin Mary statues between France and Algeria that call for reflexive, mirrored readings. A key concept is the ‘repatriated,’ a French legal category for European settlers of Algeria that extends to objects and statues they carried with them along the ‘French Mediterraneans’ corridor. At Algerian independence in 1962, a smaller Virgin Mary statue used for mobile pilgrimages throughout Algeria was removed to Nîmes, France, where a recreated Oran Marian pilgrimage for the ‘repatriate’ settler community is celebrated to this day. Post-1962, statues and their roles have multiplied multi-directionally and trans-culturally as objects of veneration as well as reconfigured pilgrimages and cultural heritage reunions that enact and invent layered histories for the cities of Nîmes and Oran.


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The settler fantasy is weird: Travis Franks, ‘Make Settler Fantasy Strange Again: Unsettling Normative White Masculinity in Robert E. Howard’s Weird West’, Western American Literature, 54, 3, 2019, pp. 295-322

13Nov19

Excerpt: Originally published in Weird Tales in 1932, Robert E. Howard’s short story “The Horror from the Mound” blends conventions of Western and horror fictions, particularly in the characterization of the cowboy protagonist and the vampire antagonist. The story is set in the border region of west Texas around (if not exactly) 1845 and details the heroic but harrowing account of former cowboy Steve Brill, who unleashes and eventually destroys a centuries-old vampiric Spaniard, Don Santiago de Valdez. Brill unknowingly unearths Valdez while plundering what appears to be an Indian burial mound, in the process discovering, too, that his neighbor Juan Lopez, the embodiment of several anti-Mexican stereotypes, belongs to a secret order meant to safeguard against the vampire’s return. Owing largely to Brill’s greed, Lopez fails in his sworn duty and, having hurriedly penned a short history in which he reveals to Brill the truth of the mound, dies in an anticlimactic confrontation with Valdez. A much more dramatic final showdown between cowboy and vampire takes place in Brill’s home, which has accidentally been set afire in the course of their fighting. Nevertheless, the cowboy is able to break the vampire’s back and escape, leaving Valdez to burn with the house. As the story closes, Brill gives thanks to God that no one else will ever know of the evil Spaniard’s existence.

Despite not being well-known today, Howard is credited with having created the Conan the Cimmerian series and the “sword and sorcery” genre of fantasy to which it belongs. “The Horror from the Mound” is also largely overlooked, although some critics suggest that not only might it be the first “undead Western” story ever published, but that, with a handful of similar stories, Howard likely pioneered the entire genre of the weird Western. Not surprisingly, the scant scholarship that exists concerning this formative short story focuses almost exclusively on its “weird” elements. As such, critical discussion about the story has not done justice to the complex construction of Anglo frontier masculinity that Howard undertakes in “Horror.” This essay aims to do just that and, in the course of analysis, to unsettle the text, not by demonstrating the ways it establishes weird genre norms but rather by revealing several normative impulses of settler identity within the story that must be made strange.


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Settler territorialisations: Travis Hay, The Meaning of Mount McKay: Anemki-waucheau and Settler Colonial Reterritorialization in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Social History, 2019

13Nov19

Abstract: This article interrogates the settler colonial history of Thunder Bay through place names and argues that gendered forms of anti-Indigenous violence are part of the city’s social architecture. Between 1860 and 1910, settlers produced vast amounts of wealth and built a local industrial economy founded upon land-based resources such as silver, timber, and shale; at the same time, settlers forcefully relocated Anishnaabe peoples to multiple reserve sites, prevented them from participating in the emergent industrial economy, and used their sacred mountain as a quarry for brick-making and as a stop-butt for a settler rifle range. The article deploys the concept of settler colonial reterritorialization to critique the ways in which this history has been sanctioned and celebrated through local place names such as Mount McKay, Fort William, Port Arthur, and Simpson Street. Ultimately, I show that the material violence of enfolding the land and its resources into an exploitative and exclusive settler colonial economy emerged in tandem with the power to name the land in honour of white men who played primary roles in that very violent historical process.


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Undecolonised social justice isn’t: Sheelagh Daniels-Mayes, Valerie Harwood, Nyssa Murray, ‘On Settler Notions of Social Justice: The Importance of Disrupting and Displacing Colonising Narratives’, in K. Freebody, S. Goodwin, H. Proctor (eds), Higher Education, Pedagogy and Social Justice, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 37-54

13Nov19

Abstract: Universities have a unique responsibility to social justice with Aboriginal peoples. Yet settler privilege is evident in how teaching standards and research funding are determined predominantly by government, delivered and driven by universities born out of dispossessing colonisation. Consequently, research projects intended to disrupt/displace settler narratives of social justice run the risk of being sucked back into the mainstreamed system, perpetuating university privilege rather than fulfilling the university’s social justice responsibilities. This chapter explores ways universities can work alongside Aboriginal peoples and communities. Drawing on the Arendtian idea of responsibility, the authors ask: could universities better engage in social justice with Aboriginal people if responsibility meant the welcoming of initiatives that might challenge the university and its traditions?


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Settler weaponised genealogies: Ian McKay, ‘The “Morals of Genealogy”: Liberal Settler Colonialism, the Nova Scotia Archives, and the North American Ancestor-Hunters, 1890-1980’, Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 48, 2, 2019, pp. 43-89

13Nov19

Abstract: Genealogy loomed large in the culture of Nova Scotia from the 1890s to the 1970s, yet when D.C. Harvey, the provincial archivist after 1931, defined the key purposes of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, he excluded genealogical research from the core objectives of this “historical laboratory.” He was fighting a losing battle. Like it or not, the institution he headed operated as part of a transnational mnemonic network within which genealogical approaches were becoming more influential and within a province whose White colonial elite had deep connections with New England – the epicentre of popular genealogy in the United States.


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