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Decolonising as a joint effort: Mirjam B. E. Held, ‘Decolonizing Research Paradigms in the Context of Settler Colonialism: An Unsettling, Mutual, and Collaborative Effort’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 2019, 1–16

03Feb19

Abstract: All research is guided by a set of philosophical underpinnings. Indigenous methodologies are in line with an Indigenous paradigm, while critical and liberatory methodologies fit with the transformative paradigm. Yet Indigenous and transformative methodologies share an emancipatory and critical stance and thus are increasingly used in tandem by both Western and Indigenous scholars in an attempt to decolonize methodologies, research, and the academy as a whole. However, these multiparadigmatic spaces only superficially support decolonization which, in the Canadian context of settler colonialism, is a radical and unsettling prospect that is about land, resources, and sovereignty. Applying this definition of decolonization to the decolonization of research paradigms, this article suggests that such paradigms must be developed, from scratch, conjointly between Indigenous and Western researchers.


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Capturing the border: Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘Decolonizing Borders’, E-International Relations, 12/01/19

27Jan19

Excerpt: the inter-state system as a particular form of organizing authority is especially important for contemporary settler colonial states such as Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Canada and the United States. Indeed, this distribution of authority in the world has allowed these settler states to establish their own legitimacy through the imposition of state borders on top of the existing national boundaries maintained by Indigenous nations. What I aim to do here is trouble the way in which we accept the sovereign authority produced by the inter-state system at face value, using the [Unist’ot’en Action] Camp as an example of Indigenous nations complicating this view. Taking up more recent understandings of borders as a productive tool, I argue that in the case of what is today Canada, instead of reifying settler coloniality, Indigenous communities are using borders (and bordering practices more broadly) to deconstruct norms of settler sovereignty and claims to authority. In this way, instead of being tools used in service of building a colonial state, borders are being used to create the kind of decolonial futures imagined by Indigenous theorists, and which rest on a refusal of contemporary settler coloniality instead of an acceptance of it.


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Self-repressing authenticity: Dwanna L. McKay, ‘Real Indians: Policing or Protecting Authentic Indigenous Identity?’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2019

27Jan19

Abstract: Research shows that the institutionalization of legitimacy criteria has created contested meanings of being indigenous to the United States, which leads to an unrelenting debate about authentic indigeneity among indigenous people and between indigenous communities. While instituted through colonizing federal Indian policy, the “real Indian” trope is now a social fact for American Indians. Thus, indigeneity claims commonly encounter resistance in the United States, even within indigenous communities. This work explores how indigeneity claims encounter opposition at interpersonal and group levels and the consequences of authenticity policing. I ask two guiding questions: What authenticity markers hold the most value for American Indians? How do American Indians justify authenticity policing? Using a qualitative approach and an indigenous epistemology, I examine the phenomenon of internalizing the real Indian trope and the impact of policing authenticity through conversations with 45 indigenous people. I find that achieving authenticity is elusive because of its dynamic nature within the local specificity of social contexts. I present and discuss two major signifiers of American Indian identity and major sites of authenticity contestation: (1) blood as protection, culture, and belonging, and (2) Indian cards as protection, responsibility, and belonging.


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Settlers on the ground: Carla J. Mulford, ‘”Prevent[ing] … Restless Spirits from Exciting Disturbances”: Benjamin Franklin and the Wyoming Valley’, Pennsylvania History, 86, 1, 2019, pp. 1-37

25Jan19

Abstract: The controversy over the lands in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania has been the stuff of legend (in stories of the Battle of Wyoming) and the historical record. Scholars in recent years have presented the history of the region as a contest between empires, between monied classes and common people seeking to eke out a living in a border region, and between individuals unsure of the political implications of democratic institutions. Left out of the narratives of the 1780s Wyoming controversy is a key figure who assisted in resolving the dispute: Benjamin Franklin. Biographers of Franklin have omitted discussion of his important intervention in the Wyoming events. Yet Franklin had a significant role to play as the controversy reached its resolution in the formation of the county of Luzerne.


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Sociology and settlement: Stepha Velednitsky, Modernizing the Moshav: Israel’s Sociological Management of Mizrahi Jewish Settlement, 1948-1967, MA dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2018

25Jan19

Excerpt: In an effort to understand the coupling of Palestinian displacement with Mizrahi settlement, this project examines the theories and practices developed by Israeli sociologists and land settlement planners to facilitate Mizrahi settlement within the nascent nation’s periphery. I address the confluence of sociological theory and Mizrahi settlement practice to examine the significance of social management to the production of Palestine’s racial settler capitalist landscape. I argue that this synthesis of sociological knowledge and settlement “expertise” laid the groundwork not only for the physical distribution of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi settlement in Palestine, but also for the emergence of Israel’s racialized settler-colonial regime within the territory of Palestine.


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The ‘family farm’ is a settler farm: Kelly Bronson, Irena Knezevic, Chantal Clement, ‘The Canadian family farm, in literature and in practice’, Journal of Rural Studies, 2019

23Jan19

Abstract: Many sociologists and food policy activists are preoccupied with the fate of the family farm. In this paper we ask whether tacit normative beliefs among scholars regarding the family farm as an imagined site of resistance to industrialization and its ills holds up to empirical scrutiny? Using a grounded theoretical approach, we build an understanding of the relationship structures defining the contemporary family farm in its wider assemblages and food system relations. We engage 36 self-identified family farmers in Canada in qualitative interviews from which we constitute a definition of the contemporary family farm and its role in food politics. Our interviews reveal incredible variation in labour arrangements, production styles and strategies as well non-uniform commitments to sustainability among farmers. The interviews also, perhaps most crucially, reveal some of our participants trading upon normative conceptions of “family farm” and mobilizing what we claim is a “floating signifier” (Laclau, 1989) for a variety of food system interests, some arguably unsustainable.


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‘Much unsettling remains to be done’: Richard Howitt, ‘Unsettling the taken (-for-granted)’, Progress in Human Geography, 2019

23Jan19

Abstract: Histories of colonial plunder produced geographies that settler societies take for granted as settled. While some aspects of the conqueror/settler imaginary have been unsettled in specific cases, and through the negotiation of new instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, various national apologies and modern treaties, much unsettling remains to be done. New geographies of plunder, violence and abuse reinstate geographies of various kleptocracies across the planet, reinforcing the unnatural disasters of displacement, disfigurement and loss on many people, places and communities. This paper uses the framing offered by emergent discourses of Indigenous geographies to reconsider the task of unsettling the taken-for-granted privilege of settler dominance in Indigenous domains.


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Indigenous self-activity against settler colonialism: Jorge Ramirez, ‘Archives of Indigenous Self-Activity: Capitalism, Violence, and Indigeneity in the Americas’, Radical History Review, 133, 2019, pp. 149-162

23Jan19

Abstract: This essay reviews four books in Indigenous studies: María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s Indian Given (2016), Elizabeth Hoover’s The River Is in Us (2017), Dana E. Powell’s Landscapes of Power (2018), and Nancy Postero’s The Indigenous State (2018). The books address the colonial and national space-making projects that have militarized the US-Mexico Border, the Mohawk community’s confrontation with industrial pollution in Akwesasne, the Diné struggles in the Navajo Nation over sovereignty as a result of an extraction-based capitalist model since the Cold War, and the complexities of Bolivia’s Indigenous state that has called for decolonization and emphasized indigeneity. By bringing these four books together, the review demonstrates that indigeneity has been a site of struggle shaped by capitalism, violence, and militarism alongside settler colonialism in the western hemisphere. Furthermore, by examining indigenous self-activity in the western hemisphere it also reveals how systems of domination have never been absolute or complete but continuously attempt to reestablish their power.


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Settler colonialism and resurgence in relation: José Antonio Lucero, Inuit Compromise and Resurgence: The Legacies of the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement, MA dissertation, University of Washington, 2018

20Jan19

Abstract: Tension between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians is well documented, and these disparate parts have been infamously dubbed the “two solitudes.” However, there is another, often ignored solitude – the Indigenous population of Canada. When construction began on the James Bay Hydroelectric facility in the early 70s, the Inuit and Cree of Northern Québec allied to take the provincial government to court for failing to properly consult them before undertaking this project on Indigenous lands. The James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement (JBNQA) was reached in 1975. This is arguably the first modern land claims agreement in Canadian history and is often considered one of the most successful agreements for Indigenous peoples in terms of monetary compensation. For the Inuit of Northern Québec (the Nunavimmiut), this agreement resulted in $90 million in compensation as well as provisions for hunting and fishing rights, and the creation of governance institutions for the Nunavimmiut including the establishment of the Makivik Corporation and the Kativik Regional Government. While these were remarkable achievements for the Inuit negotiation team, the JBNQA has a nuanced legacy. Even today, over 40 years after the signing of the JBNQA, there is still tension and dissatisfaction among Inuit communities over the results of this agreement. How can we explain the paradoxical status of the JBNQA as both a success and a disappointment in the eyes of the Nunavimmiut? How can we better understand the disagreement surrounding the legacy of the JBNQA and the tensions that continue to exist today over this agreement? This paper argues that examining the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement through a framework of settler colonialism and resurgence explains these seemingly contradictory legacies.


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The poetry of settler colonialism: Jason R. Rudy, Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017

20Jan19

Description: Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada—often disparaged as derivative and uncouth—should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax.

Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical—including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans—and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe.

Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.


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