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Migrants or settlers? Helen Proctor, ‘The hidden historiography of migration and Australian schooling’, History of Education Review, 2019

13Nov19

Abstract: Purpose: Despite Australia’s history as an exemplary migrant nation, there are gaps in the literature and a lack of explicit conceptualisation of either “migrants” or “migration” in the Australian historiography of schooling. The purpose of this paper is to seek out traces of migration history that nevertheless exist in the historiography, despite the apparent silences. Design/methodology/approach: Two foundational yet semi-forgotten twentieth-century historical monographs are re-interpreted to support a rethinking of the relationship between migration and settler colonialism in the history and historiography of Australian schooling. Findings: These texts, from their different school system (state/Catholic) orientations, are, it is argued, replete with accounts of migration despite their apparent gaps, if read closely. Within them, nineteenth-century British migrants are represented as essentially entitled constituents of the protonation. This is a very different framing from twentieth century histories of migrants as minority or “other”. Originality/value: Instead of an academic reading practice that dismisses and simply supersedes old work, this paper proposes that fresh engagements with texts from the past can yield new insights into the connections between migration, schooling and colonialism. It argues that the historiography of Australian schooling should not simply be expanded to include or encompass the stories of “migrants” within a “minority studies” framework, although there is plenty of useful work yet to be accomplished in that area, but should be re-examined as having been about migration all along.


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Resurgence for all: ‘Supporting resurgent Indigenous-led governance: A nascent mechanism for just and effective conservation’, Kyle A. Artelle, Melanie Zurba, Jonaki Bhattacharrya, Diana E. Chan, Kelly Brown, Jess Housty, Faisal Moola, Biological Conservation, 240, 2019

08Nov19

Abstract: Substantial increases in the pace, scale, and effectiveness of conservation will be required to abate the ongoing loss of global biodiversity and simultaneous ecological degradation. Concurrently, the need for conservation to respect inherent human rights, including the rights and title of Indigenous Peoples, is increasingly recognized. Here, we describe the often overlooked role that resurgent Indigenous-led governance could have in driving rapid, socially just increases in conservation. Whereas Indigenous resurgence spans all aspects of governance, we focus on three aspects that highlight both the necessity and nascent potential of supporting resurgent Indigenous-led governance systems as they relate to conservation of lands and seas. Firstly, much of the landscapes and seascapes of conservation interest are within Indigenous territories, so augmenting conservation within them will increasingly not be possible, justified, nor legal without Indigenous consent and partnership. Secondly, resurgent Indigenous governance provides potential for rapidly increasing the spatial coverage of conserved areas. Thirdly, resurgent Indigenous governance provides potential for increased conservation effectiveness. We focus on Canada, a country disproportionately composed of globally significant intact ecosystems and other ecosystems with considerable ecological value, comprised of Indigenous territories, and where Indigenous governments are well-positioned to advance meaningful conservation at a large scale. We discuss broader implications, with Indigenous territories covering large swaths of the globe, including in all five countries (Canada, USA, Australia, Brazil, Russia) whose borders contain the majority of the world’s remaining intact landscapes. We offer suggestions for supporting resurgent Indigenous governance to achieve biodiversity conservation that is effective and socially just.


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Settlers out of time: David Kenrick, Decolonisation, Identity and Nation in Rhodesia, 1964-1979 A Race Against Time, Palgrave, 2019

08Nov19

Description: This book explores concepts of decolonisation, identity, and nation in the white settler society of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) between 1964 and 1979. It considers how white settlers used the past to make claims of authority in the present. It investigates the white Rhodesian state’s attempts to assert its independence from Britain and develop a Rhodesian national identity by changing Rhodesia’s old colonial symbols, and examines how the meaning of these national symbols changed over time. Finally, the book offers insights into the role of race in Rhodesian national identity, showing how portrayals of a ‘timeless’ black population were highly dependent upon circumstance and reflective of white settler anxieties. Using a comparative approach, the book shows parallels between Rhodesia and other settler societies, as well as other post-colonial nation-states and even metropoles, as themes and narratives of decolonisation travelled around the world.


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Settlers incarcerate indigenous girls: Sandrina de Finney, Patricia Krueger-Henney, Lena Palacios, ‘Reimagining Girlhood in White Settler-Carceral States’, Girlhood Studies, 12, 3, 2019, pp. vii-xv

08Nov19

Excerpt: We are deeply honored to have been given the opportunity to edit this special issue of Girlhood Studies, given that it is dedicated to rethinking girlhood in the context of the adaptive, always-evolving conditions of white settler regimes. The contributions to this issue address the need to theorize girlhood—and critiques of girlhood—across the shifting forces of subjecthood, community, land, nation, and borders in the Western settler states of North America. As white settler states, Canada and the United States are predicated on the ongoing spatial colonial occupation of Indigenous homelands. In settler states, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, “the settler never left” (2012: 20) and colonial domination is reasserted every day of active occupation. White settler colonialism functions through the continued control of land, resources, and racialized bodies, and is amalgamated through a historical commitment to slavery, genocide, and the extermination of Indigenous nationhood and worldviews. Under settler colonial regimes, criminal justice, education, immigration, and child welfare systems represent overlapping sites of transcarceral power that amplify intersecting racialized, gendered, sexualized, and what Tanja Aho and colleagues call “carceral ableist” violence.


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Settlers don’t return land: Matthew Wynyard, ‘”Not One More Bloody Acre”: Land Restitution and the Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Land, 8, 162, 2019

08Nov19

Abstract: Te Tiriti o Waitangi, signed between Maori rangatira (chiefs) and the British Crown in 1840 ¯ guaranteed to Maori the ‘full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands’. In the decades ¯ that followed, Maori were systematically dispossessed of all but a fraction of their land through ¯ a variety of mechanisms, including raupatu (confiscation), the individualisation of title, excessive Crown purchasing and the compulsory acquisition of land for public works. Maori, who have deep ¯ cultural and whakapapa (genealogical) connections to the land, were left culturally, materially and spiritually impoverished. Land loss has long been a central grievance for many Maori and the return ¯ of land has been a guiding motivation for whanau (extended family), hap ¯ u (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) ¯ seeking redress from the Crown. Since the 1990s, many groups have entered into negotiations to settle their historical grievances with the Crown and while land loss and the deep yearning for its return are central to many Maori claims, precious little land is typically returned to M ¯ aori through ¯ the settlement process. This paper seeks to critically examine the Treaty settlement process in light of land restitution policies enacted elsewhere and argues that one of the many flaws in the process is the paucity of land returned to Maori. 


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Settler colonialism’s (commemorative) structures: Susan Slyomovics ‘Dismantling a world: France’s monumental military heritage in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria’, The Journal of North African Studies, 2019

05Nov19

Abstract: The history of France’s war memorials is a much-studied domain of scholarly inquiry. According to historian Antoine Prost, constructing monuments on a grand scale to commemorate wars was a response to the staggering number of 1,300,000 French dead in World War I. Among those who fought for France in 1914–18 were 343,000 conscripted and mobilised Algerians divided according to colonial categories between French citizens and indigènes, the latter drafted as French subjects. So widespread was the ‘cult of the monument’ that the term ‘statuomania’ was coined by historian Maurice Agulhon to account for 36,000 war memorials erected in the interwar period throughout France and its overseas territories, especially in Algeria, which was integrated as France’s southernmost province. The significance of French colonists implanting statues was well understood by the native Algerian population who linked a colonial Algeria known for a plethora of monuments to the visible and materialised expressions of colonial power and occupation. Analysing how the formerly colonised of Algeria address the enduring material presence of statues, steles, monuments, and other effigies of the colonial past, this essay draws on concepts such as ‘dark heritage’ and ‘difficult heritage’. My case study is the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, headquarters and cradle of the French Foreign Legion until 1962 and the different fates of its two war memorials after Algeria’s 1962 independence from France.


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A settler society reproduces architecturally: Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Designing ‘Post-Industrial Society’: Settler Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Palm Springs, California, 1876-1977, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2019

04Nov19

Abstract: The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Reservation was established in 1876, the same year as the transcontinental Southern Pacific Railroad completed a station in Palm Springs. These overlapping events would both enable and problematize the settler colonization of the Agua Caliente’s land, creating a checkerboard pattern of “fragmented jurisdiction” that was fundamental for its transformation into one of the wealthiest resorts in the United States. The territorial conflict between the Tribe and the U.S. would only begin to be legally resolved in 1977, when the Agua Caliente won the right to zone and plan their own lands. This dissertation examines how architecture, urbanism, and infrastructure mediated the technical, legal, and ideological struggles that took place in this period; sometimes enabling Imperial dispossession, other times structuring Tribal assimilation and decolonization. The dissertation historicizes and theorizes these processes by examining the modern architecture and urbanism of Palm Springs as a specific settler-colonial, “post-industrial” mode of development which was made possible by the particular territorial configuration that emerged out of nineteenth century Imperialism. It posits a correlation between settler colonialism and the settler imaginaries and material processes of technological progress, capitalist accumulation, natural resource extraction, and cultures of leisure that were uniquely developed in Palm Springs through modern architecture. Critically dismantling the connections between modern architecture, “post-industrial society,” and settler colonialism, this dissertation argues, is a necessary condition for the development of decolonial epistemologies and strategies of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist resistance.


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A settler society reproduces settler education: Margaret A. Nash, ‘Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession’, History of Education Quarterly, 2019

04Nov19

Abstract: Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration, touting the “civilizing” influence of education, emphasizing agricultural and scientific education to establish international strength, and erasing Native rights and history, the land-grant colleges can be seen as an element of settler colonialism. Native American dispossession was not merely an unfortunate by-product of the establishment of land-grant colleges; rather, the colleges exist only because of a state-sponsored system of Native dispossession.


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A settler society reproduces queerly: Ryan Tan Wander, Queer Times Out West: Genres of the Settler Colonial US West, 1868-1912, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Davis, 2019

04Nov19

Abstract: “Queer Times Out West: Genres of the Settler Colonial US West, 1868-1912” examines how frontier literatures of the US West narrate the co-constitution of sexuality and US settler colonialism. In portraying relations between and among white, Indigenous, and racialized bodies in the spatiotemporal zone of the frontier, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century frontier literatures imaginatively re-presented US settler colonialism’s reliance on white settlers who adopt the sexual backwardness associated with Natives, Mormons, and subordinated racial groups. Despite the “closing” of the frontier in 1890, US settlement remained active and contested over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. White settlers’ claims to Native “primitivity” were at the heart of the settler imperative to inhabit an indigenizing primitivity while remaining oriented toward the future. Authors and literary genres intimately tied to frontier representation, I argue, portrayed white “primitivity” on the frontier as a form of sexual backwardness that simultaneously authorizes and threatens the US national future that it is supposed to found. National modernization, evolutionary thinking, and sexology differentiated populations and individuals based on universal timelines of “progress,” imposing teleological narrative order on variegated forms of sexual, social, and economic life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Such ordering relegated Indigenous and racialized others to the past at the same time that it sutured white settlers’ appropriation of an indigenizing sexual backwardness to the settler future. Frontier literatures serve as a privileged medium for repeating or reconfiguring this narrative ordering of sexuality, offering chronotopes that incline toward multiple potential futures at a time when US sovereignty out West was not a foregone conclusion. Bringing scholarship on the imbrication of sexuality and US settler colonialism into dialogue with work on temporality in nineteenth-century US literature and culture, my project demonstrates that these frontier literatures’ narrative forms work through the threat and asset that the contradictory temporality of white settler sexuality represented in a crucial moment of settler colonial consolidation.


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Settlers take land from indigenous and ‘half breed’ peoples equally: David Ress, The Half Breed Tracts in Early National America: Changing Concepts of Land and Place, Palgrave, 2019

03Nov19

Description: In 1824 and 1830, over one hundred thousand acres across Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska were set aside as a home for descendants of Native American women and white traders and trappers. The treaties that established these so-called Half Breed Tracts left undefined exactly who held claim to the land, and by the end of the 1850s, settlers and speculators had appropriated virtually every acre for themselves. But in an era of ravenous westward expansion, why did the process of dispossession require three decades of debate and legal maneuvering? As David Ress argues, the fate of the Half Breed Tracts challenges longstanding ideas about land tenure and community in early national America.


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