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Queering as a form of settler-colonial dispossession: T. J. Tallie, Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa, University of Minnesota Press, 2019

04Sep19

Description: In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natal—established by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province—to show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools.

Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims.Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority.


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Indigenous and exogenous under settler colonialism, doubly vulnerable: Shannon Speed, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State, The University of North Carolina Press, 2019

04Sep19

Description: Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability “neoliberal multicriminalism” and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women’s vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation.

With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.


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The gender of the settler state: Sydney Rae Krill, ‘The Settler State is a White Woman: Re-Conceptualizing Audra Simpson’s Masculine State Through a Gendered Genealogy of Settler Colonial Statecraft in Canada’, MA Dissertation, University of Calgary, 2019

01Sep19

Abstract: Audra Simpson accounts for the oppressive colonial apparatus of the Canadian state with a gendered theory of settler statecraft. The ongoing evidence of heteropatriarchal violence targeting Indigenous women in Canada points her to adopt a wholly androcentric theory in which she argues that ‘the state is a man’. From an intersectional standpoint, this does not address the complex way that gender and colonial power operate together to uphold and sustain the settler colonial regime. This thesis will challenge Audra Simpson’s male-centric theory by interrogating gender and the role of both settler men and women in Canada’s historical process of statecraft. Chapter two will present an alternative perspective to the assumed relationship between men and the settler colonial regime that Simpson puts forth, offering a gendered genealogy of settler colonial statecraft that centers men and masculinity in its analysis. This chapter will argue that theorizing the settler state ‘as a man’ in its entirety does not reflect the actual gendered process of colonial state building in Canadian history. Chapter three will conduct a similar analysis but focus on the position of white women within this history, expanding the ways in which we think about and perceive the state in gendered terms. This chapter will argue that white women were fundamental to the creation of Canada’s stable sovereign settler colonial state. This conclusion offers a more historically accurate and intersectional account of how settler colonial phenomenon is constituted by and continuously sustained through gendered systems and actors. To theorize how the significance of this research might be realized moving forward, chapter four will conclude with a discussion of the importance this research has for efforts of mainstream feminism in Canada. This chapter will argue that viewing the settler state as a white woman implicates mainstream feminists in the overturning and dismantling of colonial state apparatus as political actors working towards gender justice.


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Dispossessing exogenous ‘others’: Nicole Yakashiro, Daffodils as property: settler colonial renewal and the dispossession of Nikkei farmers in the 1940s, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2019

01Sep19

Abstract: This thesis focuses on the forced sales of property, namely daffodils, daffodil bulbs, and bulb farms, owned by Nikkei farmers before 1943 in the small rural community of Bradner in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. It draws on fields commonly treated as distinct, settler colonial studies and Japanese Canadian (Nikkei) history, by focusing on the workings of property and property dispossession in local perspective. Tracing how the state, specifically the federal Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property and the Veterans’ Land Act Administration, dispossessed four Nikkei families, this thesis analyzes the uneven rationales of settler state policy and practice. Using three property characteristics – definition, value, and boundaries – as they applied to daffodil farms, it examines how the state manipulated the parameters of reasonable governance to reconfigure Nikkei property for white ownership in the 1940s. In doing so, it argues that the dispossession was not an isolated moment of state racism, but a project that renewed a private property regime in settler colonial Bradner (and British Columbia more broadly). This was a regime predicated on the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and the privileging of whiteness. By highlighting the microhistorical mechanisms of dispossession, this thesis reveals further how ordinary white settlers, predominantly British and Dutch bulb-growers, were entangled in the forced sales and, importantly, how Nikkei people contested the state’s inconsistent logics and practices. Nikkei farmers in the Fraser Valley recognized the contradictions of the dispossession process and testified to the state’s betrayals throughout the decade. At these sites of contestation, the experiences of four relatively unknown Nikkei families mired in state violence suggest that their commitment to the settler colonial property regime was not an inevitability.


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Erasing present indigenous people by focusing on long gone ones: Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, ‘Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology’, American Antiquity, 2019

01Sep19

Abstract: To understand the implications of archaeological site recording practices and associated inventories for studying Indigenous persistence after the arrival of Europeans, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Beginning with the first regional surveys conducted during the early 1900s and continuing into the present, the paper trail created by archaeologists reveals an enduring emphasis on precontact materials to the exclusion of more recent patterns of Indigenous occupation and land use. In assessing sites occupied by Indigenous people from the late sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, we discuss how the use of multiple lines of evidence—including temporally diagnostic artifacts, chronometric dating techniques, and historical documentation—may help illuminate subtle but widespread patterns of Native presence that have been obscured by essentialist assumptions about Indigenous culture change. Our findings further reveal the shortcomings of traditional site recording systems, in which archaeologists typically categorize sites within the prehistoric-protohistoric-historic triad on the basis of commonsense decisions that conflate chronology with identity. Instead, we argue for recording practices that focus specifically on the calendric ages of occupation for any given site.


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Foreclosing indigenous people, literally: K-Sue Park, ‘Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America’, Law & Social Enquiry, 41, 4, 2016, pp. 10006-1035

01Sep19

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Integration requires disintegration: Paloma E. Villegas, Breanna Barrie, Serriz Peña, Jilanch Alphonso, Alveera Mamoon, ‘Integration, Settler Colonialism, and Precarious Legal Status Migrants in Canada’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2019, pp. 1–17

01Sep19

Abstract: Drawing on research with postsecondary migrant students with precarious legal status (those without permanent residence or citizenship), this paper examines the information participants learn about the settler colonialism and the histories of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Our findings suggest that like other residents of Canada, participants often access varied, limited, and often incorrect information. We propose that such variation in the accuracy and depth of information is not accidental, as accurate histories and contexts disrupt the narrative of a welcoming Canadian state. However, we also found that despite their immigration status, and experiences of precarity and deportability, a large proportion of participants made concerted efforts to learn about Indigenous peoples, histories, and contexts. Given our findings, we recommend that scholarship on immigrant integration in white settler societies like Canada account for settler colonialism for two reasons. First, to avoid engaging in methodological nationalism, or the focusing on nation-states as discrete or bounded units of analysis through which social relations operate. We focus on a specific and less examined aspect of methodological nationalism: a disregard for Indigenous sovereignty and nations. Second, to understand how differently situated im/migrants, including precarious legal status migrants participate, uphold, and resist the structures that produce and maintain settler colonialism.


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Environmental management as settler colonialism: Samantha Muller, Steve Hemming, Daryle Rigney, ‘Indigenous sovereignties: relational ontologies and environmental management’, Geographical Research, 2019

28Aug19

Abstract: Indigenous nations have always and continue to assert their sovereignties to resist colonialism. This paper makes explicit the ways in which environmental management has been and continues to act as a tool of colonialism, particularly by privileging Western science, institutions, and administrative procedures. We argue that to decolonise environmental management, it is crucial to understand and challenge the power relations that underlie it—asking who makes decisions and on what worldview those decisions are based. Indigenous ways of being deeply challenge the foundations of environmental management and the colonising power structures that underlie it, and invite further thought about posthuman and relational ontologies. We provide a range of case studies that showcase the role of Indigenous nations in redefining and reimagining environmental management based on Indigenous sovereignties, knowledges, and ways of being. The case studies emphasise the crucial connection between Indigenous decision‐making authority and self‐governance for the enhanced protection and health of the environment. We argue that Indigenous agency, grounded in Indigenous governance and sovereignties, is driving innovation and decolonising environmental management by making space for new ways of thinking and being “in place”.


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Settler colonialism as heritage: Michael Buse, ‘The shrine of their memory’: settler colonialism and the construction of American Heritage at Metini-Fort Ross, 1845-1906, MA DIssertation, University of British Columbia, 2019

28Aug19

Abstract: This paper argues that during a broader California Heritage Movement, American colonists physically and discursively constructed a singular Fort Ross Story in an effort to claim Metini, a Kashia Pomo homeland. In making this argument, this paper considers two broad historiographical questions: why did a heritage movement emerge in late nineteenth-century California, and how does a consideration of the Heritage Movement reveal longer settler colonial processes. This look at heritage work makes two contributions to scholarship about American colonialism in California. First, it provides a history of Metini-Ross after the Russian American Company’s departure (1842-1906). Second, this paper considers the meaning of heritage work in settler colonial California. Analyzing heritage work at Fort Ross within a longer history of settler colonialism reveals how the colonizers intentionally constructed stories of settler innocence and belonging, with the intent to justify their theft and resulting possession of Pomo and Miwok land. From 1845-1885, the first forty years of American colonialism in California, settlers had little interest in history. Instead, they worked to physically take Metini-Ross from the Kashia Pomo, who had lived there for at least 12,000 years. From the late 1840s to the 1870s, American settlers poured into California and seized vast tracts of Indigenous land, initiating what has been called the California Genocide. While genocide did not end in the 1870s, colonialism took a new shape after this. One new settler colonial tactic was heritage work. It is not a coincidence that the Heritage Movement began immediately after the most violent period of colonialism in California. At Metini-Ross, it was only by 1893 that settlers became interested in its history. After this, two interweaving threads constructed a powerful story: writers wrote and preservationists built. Novelist Gertrude Atherton and made Fort Ross iv discursively significant, journalists reproduced and built upon her ideas, and heritage groups, led by the white nationalist heritage organization The Native Sons of the Golden West, physically stamped these narratives on the ground. Together, they made histories to obfuscate and consume a Kashia homeland beneath imagined layers of colonial history.


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Settler-colonial progressivism: Rosalynd Anna Boxall, The settler colonial paradox of T.C. Douglas and the CCF in Saskatchewan, 1945 – 1962, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2019

28Aug19

Abstract: This paper uses the life and politics of one man to analyse the dynamics of settler colonialism in Saskatchewan over the years directly following the Second World War. It tracks the history of Thomas Clement Douglas (1904 – 1986) and his peers in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It examines his career and colleagues in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) party, where Douglas served as Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 – 1962 before moving to the federal government as leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP). This paper demonstrates how settler colonialism circumscribed what was ‘thinkable’ for Douglas and his peers, with the resulting effect that well-intended policies intended to help Saskatchewan’s Indigenous population had negative outcomes. Douglas’ policy goals towards Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan differed little from the ways he approached the empowerment of all minority groups, and focused on political representation, citizenship rights (notably, for Indigenous groups, liquor licensing and the provincial franchise), and the extension and improvement of provincial welfare services. This paper focuses in particular on the extension of the provincial franchise and liquor licensing policies. Although Douglas planned wide-reaching reform for almost all parts of Saskatchewan society, he never imagined that Saskatchewan society would be fundamentally altered in order to accommodate Indigenous peoples. On the contrary, he always assumed that Indigenous people would have to be shaped to fit into the existing social and political framework. Douglas’ Indian Policy was not a paradox or an anomaly within an otherwise radical, progressive agenda. Rather, his progressivism itself was situated within the tenets of settler colonialism.


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