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Colonising differently (and yet colonising still): Lucy Taylor, ‘The Welsh Way of Colonisation in Patagonia: The International Politics of Moral Superiority’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2019

06Mar19

Abstract: This article explores the ‘myth of friendship’ between the Welsh and indigenous communities of Patagonia in the mid to late nineteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, it unpacks the purpose of this myth which is to demonstrate the moral superiority of the Welsh nation. The proof of Welsh righteousness derives not only from their peaceful, loving approach to colonisation in Patagonia but from stories which recount that the ‘Indians’ loved them back. This technique of elevation works because it is framed by the international politics of colonial expansion, thus the Welsh settlers compare themselves favourably to the violent and oppressive actions of the British Empire and Argentine state. This assertion of moral superiority is not only a way to raise the position of the Welsh nation on the global stage, it targets those who enforce Welsh political and linguistic subordination, both in Wales (the English elite) and as settlers (the Argentine government). In this way, their claim to high status and national dignity based on ‘righteousness’ is an act of resistance, as well as elevation. I conclude that this new interpretation of Y Wladfa (the colony) offers fresh insight to understandings of Welsh internationalism. Moreover, its reflections on the use of moral capital as a tool of resistance might find wider parallels. Certainly, I argue, the persistence of the ‘myth of friendship’ continues to conceal the brutal reality of indigenous dispossession.


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The food politics of settler colonialism: Janna L. Lafferty, Plant Pedagogies, Salmon Nation, and Fire: Settler Colonial Food Utopias and the (Un)Making of Human-Land Relationships in Coast Salish Territories, PhD Dissertation, Florida International University, 2018

06Mar19

Abstract: As knowledge about the constellating set of environmental and social crises stemming from the neoliberal global food regime becomes more pressing and popularized among US consumers, it has brought Indigenous actors asserting their political sovereignty and treaty rights with regards to their homelands into new collaborations, contestations, and negotiations with settlers in emerging food politics domains. In this dissertation, I examine solidarities and affinities being forged between Coast Salish and settler food actors in Puget Sound, attending specifically to how contested sovereignties are submerged but at play in these relations and how settler desires for belonging on and to stolen Indigenous lands animate liberal and radical food system politics.

The dissertation presents my ethnographic fieldwork in South Puget Sound over a period of 18 months with two related Coast Salish food sovereignty projects that brought Indigenous and settler food actors into weedy collaborations. One was a curriculum development project for Native and regional youth focused on the revitalization of Coast Salish plant landscapes, knowledge, pedagogies, and systems of reciprocity. The other was a campaign to counter the introduction of genetically engineered salmon into US food markets and coastal production facilities across the Western Hemisphere, which I situate within longstanding salmon-centered social and political struggles in Coast Salish territories in the context of Indigenous/settler-state relations. Throughout these engagements, I identified how multicultural, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist food movement frameworks share in common with neoliberal nature privatization schemes modes of disavowing the geopolitics of Indigenous sovereignty within the US settler state. The research reveals patterns in how Coast Salish food actors push back against the ways settler food actors are plugged into settler colonial governmentality. These insights, in turn, helped to make legible how inherited liberal mythologies of the nation-state and legal orders rooted in the doctrine of terra nulliuslimit the stakes of food system work in terms of inclusion and equality, and miss their collusion with structures that unmake the human-land relationships that Coast Salish people define as existential and (geo)political.


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The thechnopolitics of settler colonialism: Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘The Technical is Political: Settler Colonialism and the Australian Indigenous Policy System’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 54, 1, 2019, pp. 114-130

06Mar19

Abstract: Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.


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Thinking the future without settler colonialism: Emma Elliott-Groves, Stephanie A. Fryberg, ‘”A Future Denied” for Young Indigenous People: From Social Disruption to Possible Futures’, in Elizabeth Ann McKinley, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (eds), Handbook of Indigenous Education, Springer, 2018

06Mar19

Abstract: Representations of contemporary Indigenous people in the USA and Canada are poorly reflected in public institutions. Portrayals are rare and generally inaccurate, highlighting the erasure of Indigenous people from current discourse. Such erasure is an inevitable result of settler colonialism, a process that aims to replace the Indigenous inhabitants of a given region with settlers. Settler colonialism is predicated on the notion that land can be owned as private property, and that Indigenous people have no special claim to their traditional territories. The US government and its legal system have supported its ends, which have disrupted the web of relationships necessary for Indigenous identity development. These relationships include prescriptions for what it means to be an Indigenous person and how to conduct one’ s life in a good way. In conjunction with representational erasure, their disruption prevents young Indigenous people from developing positive concepts of self. In the face of cultural invisibility and widespread negative stereotypes, the attempts of young people to build healthy identities for themselves can be compromised or completely thwarted. They cannot find ways to connect the narrative thread of their past and present with their possible futures, which are effectively foreclosed. Thus, representational erasure places young Indigenous people at great psychological risk, culminating far too often in suicide. To mitigate these effects, we recommend raising social awareness of settler colonialism and reimagining public education in ways that will affirm rather than deny Indigenous values.


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Settling on the water: Shaun Stevenson, (Re)Making Indigenous Water Worlds: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Rights, and Hydrosocial Relations in the Settler Nation State, PhD Dissertation, Carleton University, 2019

03Mar19

Abstract: This dissertation examines several sites of conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples over water and water rights in Canada, from the 19th century up to current articulations of environmental policy and land rights. Through examination of a selection of public policy, land rights decisions, grassroots activism, and Canadian and Indigenous fiction and non-fiction, I probe relationships to water that have structured and limited the legibility of Indigenous rights in Canada. I track a history of settler colonialism through the lens of water, querying whether water offers a productive site that might challenge the current land-based constraints of colonial legal and policy frameworks that have led to what are often irreconcilable relationships between the settler state and Indigenous peoples.

Through Indigenous legal orders, social, cultural, and political expression, as well as strands of materialist and environmentalist Western philosophy that focus on water, ontology, and narrative, I explore the limits and potential for decolonial approaches to water governance that might better support the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I read public policy and land rights decisions in dialogue with settler and Indigenous literatures and community action in order to understand the often-competing worlding practices that materially, socially, subjectively, and figuratively construct settler and Indigenous approaches to water—what I am calling settler and Indigenous water worlds. Specifically, I analyze four sites of conflict and their various representations where competing laws, philosophies, and social registers of water come up against one another: the 19th century establishment of a liberal order in the Trent Severn Waterway, and its expression in early settler life writing and environmental policy; the mercury pollution of the English-Wabigoon River Systems in Treaty 3 Anishinaabe territory, and the ironic representation of late liberal environmentalism in M.T. Kelly’s A Dream Like Mine; the James Bay Hydroelectric conflict, and the political response of the Grand Council of the Crees, as well as the conflict’s figurative reimagining in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms; and Haudenosaunee and settler relations in Grand River territory in Southern Ontario, and the impetus to engage these relations through the historic treaty, the Two Row Wampum.


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Re-living is not relieving: Konstantin Petoukhov, Violence, Compensation, and Settler Colonialism: Adjudicating Claims of Indian Residential School Abuse Through the Independent Assessment Process, PhD Dissertation, Carleton University, 2018

03Mar19

Abstract: Under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) was established to provide financial compensation for sexual and physical abuse that took place in Indian Residential Schools – boarding schools designed to assimilate Indigenous children into Canadian settler society. In my dissertation I centre my analysis on settler colonial power to investigate how the IAP, which I theorize as a response to and a product of settler colonial violence, constitutes survivors of abuse and how it is simultaneously constituted by survivors’ agency. I explore how various actors within the IAP, including lawyers, adjudicators, and health support workers, engage in performative labour that mobilizes discourses of victimization and victimhood to construct representations of survivors’ experiences through hierarchies and ordering mechanisms. I argue that the IAP constitutes a settler colonial legal process that inflicts violence on survivors, revictimizes and disempowers them, and perpetuates settler colonial denial. I also evaluate the compensation chart, which is used by IAP lawyers and adjudicators to calculate IAP awards, as a discursive tool that transvalues abuse and harm for money and guides survivors’ interpretations of their experiences. Finally, I examine how survivors mobilize agency and engage in transgressive politics that resist the settler colonial logics of the IAP, challenge the scope of the individual financial compensation model, and re-establish themselves as Indigenous subjects.


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Settler colonialism is silence: April Anson, ‘Sounding Silence in Sundown Survivance: Ecology and John Joseph Mathews’s Bildungsroman’, Western American Literature, 53, 4, 2019, 439-467

03Mar19

Excerpt: In 2013 a photo of twenty- eight- year- old Amanda Polchies at a Mi’kmaq antifracking protest in New Brunswick, Canada, became iconic as a symbol of Indigenous resistance to industrial extraction. The image draws power in juxtaposition: Polchies silently lifts a delicate feather before a hard horizon of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whose humanness is lost in the line of force with which they mean to protect the interests of the oil and gas industry. Th e dissonance captured in this photo is disturbing but not unique. Recent images of militarized police blasting water cannons at unarmed water protectors at Standing Rock in subfreezing temperatures also elicited shock and rage. Anger is justified. Surprise is not.


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Settler colonialism and its epigenetics: Megan Warin, Emma Kowal, Maurizio Meloni, ‘Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape: The Politics of Epigenetic Hope and Reparation in Australia’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 2019

24Feb19

Abstract: A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of Country and health—views that locate health not in individual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives.


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If settler colonialism is a structure, then indigeneity is now: Julia Bello-Bravo, ‘When is indigeneity: closing a legal and sociocultural gap in a contested domestic/international term’, AlterNative, 2019

24Feb19

Abstract: Indigeneity is a much contested term, complicated by formal definitions under domestic and international law, the unlimited right to self-identification by indigenous people, conflicts and/or contradictions between these legal principles, and the political inequalities that result from variations in access to the processes and legal actions that invoke these terms. In particular, this generates a gap between legal definitions of indigeneity (framed, then and now, by hegemonic powers) and sociocultural practices of indigeneity (expressed and experienced, then as now, by cultures themselves). Reviewing the conceptual framing(s) of indigeneity both internationally and in a domestic (US) context, this article explores and offers a more flexible, resilient, and just understanding of indigeneity capable of closing the legal/sociocultural gap currently affecting indigenous people worldwide. At root, this less means asking what (or where) is indigeneity, and more instead when is indigeneity.


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Decrepit settlers in a ‘new’ land: Will Jackson, ‘No Country for Old Men: The Life of John Lee and the Problem of the Aged Pioneer’, History Workshop Journal, 2019

24Feb19

Abstract: This article uses a charity appeal made on behalf of one old white man in South Africa in 1912 as an entry into considering the importance of age for social histories of empire – and for settler colonialism in particular. John Lee, aged eighty-five when he made his appeal, demanded the restitution of a piece of land he claimed to have been given by an African king and, to gain public sympathy, had his life story published in the local press. The reception of that story by Lee’s contemporaries shows how the heroic imperial narratives of the nineteenth century were becoming less certain once the violent suppression of African peoples had been achieved and new colonial states established. Yet neither could Lee’s story be entirely discounted, not least because there were thousands of other ‘aging pioneers’ scattered across South Africa in the early twentieth century – each with his own account of the high imperial frontier. Though their memories often appeared exaggerated or deluded, the problem of these men’s credibility was made worse by the problem of their care. Lacking family members able to look after them – who might also validate the stories that they told – the problem of old age thus becomes an exploration into the consequences of heroic masculinity and the apparent invulnerability of the imperial pioneer.


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