settler colonial studies blog | A blog for the advancement of settler colonial studies | Page 417

Reviewing settler empire: Jennifer Fuller, ‘Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty by Nathan K. Hensley, and: Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1902 by Sam Hutchinson, and: Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art by Fariha Shaikh (review)’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 51, 4, 2018, pp. 741-745

20Jan19

Excerpt: British rule in the nineteenth century was marked by forays into new lands and territories and inevitable questions about how new citizens should behave as settlers and colonists of these new territories. While Victorians may have viewed their civilization as one of order and progress, many of these interactions were marked instead by violence, confusion, and disorder. These three books each interrogate England’s position as a global empire by focusing on the networks of settlers and citizens that wrote visions of civilization on the margins of empire. In different ways, each text explores how these fractured citizens, who viewed themselves as an integral part of the home country yet permanently separated from it, worked to recreate empire to include their own voices.

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Colonisation is trauma; decolonisation is psyhoteraphy: Riel Dupuis-Rossi, Vikki Reynolds, ‘Indigenizing and Decolonizing Therapeutic Responses to Trauma-Related Dissociation’, in Nancy Arthur (ed.), Counselling in Cultural Contexts: Identities and Social Justice, Springer, 2019, pp. 181-201

18Jan19

Abstract: Trauma, as conceptualized and defined by the mainstream field of psychology, is better understood as oppression rooted in political violence. Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island (known by some as “North America”) continue to be effected by historical and contemporary forms of colonial oppression which is at the root of dissociative responses to “trauma”. Dissociation is a response to colonial violence in the form of land theft and its resulting systematic confinement of Indigenous people in residential schools, foster homes, reservations, prisons, structural poverty, etc. and is widespread in Indigenous adults seeking counselling services. Dissociative responses to colonial violence are considered in our decolonizing psychotherapy as acts of resistance that preserve parts of ourselves and internal experiences in the context of ongoing systematic attacks on the integrity of one’s person. Acknowledging colonialism and its impact is the cornerstone of indigenizing and decolonizing trauma therapy.

Indigenous clients, presenting with dissociative responses to historical and ongoing colonial violence, are best served by utilizing “culturally responsive and socially just change processes” based on culture-infused counselling (CIC; Collins & Arthur, 2010a, 2010b) and the revised CIC framework outlined in Chap. 2). In fact, it is only through the process of decolonizing our “treatment” of dissociative responses to trauma and indigenizing trauma therapy, as a whole, that Indigenous clients will reconnect to a sense of agency and be empowered to heal in culturally relevant ways.

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The settler colonial present: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Containment, elimination, settler colonialism’, Arena Journal, 51/52, 2018, pp. 18-39

17Jan19

Abstract: One of the founding statements of settler colonial studies as an autonomous scholarly field, a field that has consolidated in the last two decades, is that the ‘settler invasion is a structure, not an event’. Patrick Wolfe’s invitation was to look for settler colonialism in the ongoing subjection of indigenous peoples in the settler societies. The contemporary settler polities, he noted, have been ‘impervious to regime change’. It was an Australian-produced response to the consolidation and global spread of postcolonial studies as discourse and method (interestingly, postcolonial studies was also originally an Australian intellectual export). This article exceeds Wolfe’s invitation and looks for settler-colonial structures beyond the contemporary polities established by settlers during the age of the ‘settler revolution’ and controlled by their political descendants. After all, it is a collection of former settler colonies that eventually became the uncontested ‘global hegemon’. My most recent book argues that settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination has gone global and fundamentally defines present dispensations. This article focuses on the need to understand, and on the urgency to respond to, a new reality.

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Teaching about settler privilege: Cynthia Fabrizio Pelak, ‘Teaching and Learning about Settler-colonial Racism: A Case for “Unsettling” Minoritizing and Multicultural Perspectives’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2019

17Jan19

Abstract: This article contributes to emerging efforts to decolonize race-based approaches and antiracist pedagogies in sociology. Building on recent scholarship on settler colonialism and decolonization as well as her experiences of being unsettled, the author discusses the limitations of her critical sociological toolkit for understanding and teaching about the cultural violence associated with “Indian” sport mascots. By discussing an active-learning writing assignment and students’ work from an online course in sport and society, the author argues for sociologists to go beyond frameworks that conceptualize American Indians as a racial or ethnic group seeking greater inclusion in a multicultural nation and consider ongoing settler colonialism that structures U.S. society. The author contends that adding land back into sociological frameworks will help make visible legitimized racism and the cultural logic of elimination and replacement of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. To conclude, the author advocates for instructors to be critically self-reflective and to use sociology classrooms as sites of decolonization.

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The settler as ignorant: Anna Cook, Unable to Hear: Settler Ignorance and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, PhD Dissertation, University of Oregon, 2019

17Jan19

Abstract: My dissertation provides an epistemic evaluation of settler colonialism in terms of settlers’ disavowal of past and ongoing settler colonial violence. I seek to explain how settlers can fail to hear Indigenous testimonies in ways that disrupt structural inequality and challenge settler colonial legitimacy. This theoretical consideration of settler ignorance reveals how the elimination of Indigenous peoples requires the delegitimatization of Indigenous peoples as knowers. This insight is crucial in evaluating contemporary governmental apologies and truth commissions aimed at reconciliation. In particular, I focus on the epistemic assumptions that do not challenge what I call ‘settler ignorance’ and so do not transform settler nation-myths that disavow past and present settler colonialism. My epistemic evaluation of settler colonialism demonstrates how the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the realm of reason, what I call their ‘epistemic elimination,’ is not accidental, but integral to the settler colonial project of eliminating Indigenous presence. Using this characterization of settler ignorance, I evaluate the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in terms of its ability to accomplish its mandate of “establishing and maintaining respectful relationships” between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians. I conclude that the TRC fails on its own terms because it does not challenge epistemic assumptions that prevent testimonies of residential school survivors to be heard as expressions of Indigenous refusal of settler authority. Without challenging these epistemic assumptions, testimonies cannot disrupt structural settler ignorance and so, cannot lead to meaningful reconciliation. Meaningful reconciliation requires of settlers a reparative transformation of epistemic assumptions that work to maintain a structural ignorance of past and ongoing settler colonial violence. The goal of what I call ‘reparative knowing’ is both a personal one and a critical intervention into how settlers can become epistemically responsible agents. In the context of ongoing settler colonial violence, reparative knowing involves a troubling of settler common sense, and so, a disruption of structural settler ignorance. Without such an understanding of settler ignorance and reparative knowing, an investigation into the aims and transformations of settler colonialism would remain incomplete.

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Educating indigenous children: Rebecca Swartz, Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880, Palgrave, 2018

17Jan19

Description: This book tracks the changes in government involvement in Indigneous children’s education over the nineteenth century, drawing on case studies from the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa. Schools were pivotal in the production and reproduction of racial difference in the colonies of settlement. Between 1833 and 1880, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the Empire with it increasingly seen as a government responsibility. At the same time, children’s needs came to be seen as different to those of their parents, and childhood was approached as a time to make interventions into Indigenous people’s lives. This period also saw shifts in thinking about race. Members of the public, researchers, missionaries and governments discussed the function of education, considering whether it could be used to further humanitarian or settler colonial aims. Underlying these questions were anxieties regarding the status of Indigenous people in newly colonised territories: the successful education of their children could show their potential for equality.

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The settler as curator: Bronwyn Labrum, ‘Collecting, curating and exhibiting cross-cultural material histories in a post-settler society’, in Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy (eds), Curatopia, Manchester University Press, 2018

17Jan19

Abstract: This chapter considers social history in a postcolonial contest. It specifically examines how the history of the majority culture in a post-settler society has been and might be curated. Using Aotearoa New Zealand as its case study, it considers the figure of the Pākehā (non-indigenous) curator in relation to, and also in contrast with, Indigenous collections and displays. What does a history curator look like in a post-settler society? Does the history curator continue the mutual asymmetry that has characterised relations and curatorial endeavours? Or is there a way to recognise cross-cultural material histories? In considering the development of history, and specifically social history, it suggests that a more useful concept is material history, rather than historical material cultures studies. The rest of the chapter ranges across a broad range of material history, including fashion and clothing, and design, to consider how contemporary museums deal with everyday life and its material aspects in museums, which are still to a large extent focused on discrete objects and forms of material culture, and which carry the burden of the historical development of their collections into a post-settler world.

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Migration and settler colonialism: Julia Katz, From coolies to colonials, PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2018

13Jan19

Abstract: Focusing on the period 1870-1920, my dissertation offers a social history of colonization and exclusion that integrates the experiences of Chinese migrants, indigenous Hawaiians, and white colonial and territorial officials. Drawing from government records and reports, newspaper articles, and family histories, I recover the aspirations of Chinese migrants who arrived in the islands as plantation laborers, but staked claims to alternative futures through independent, collective, creolized, and occasionally illicit economic networks, frequently capitalizing on their intimate contact with Native Hawaiians. I argue that although the management of Asian contract labor was critical to the expansion of American empire in the Pacific, migrants also undermined Americanization by pursuing autonomous endeavors. While migrant mobility and enterprise frustrated both American imperial plans for Hawai‘i as a white settler society and local elites’ development of a plantation colony, migrants cooperated as well as competed with indigenous investments in the islands. I treat American annexation and the extension of Chinese exclusion laws as a crucial hinge that profoundly changed the conditions and possibilities of Chinese settlement in Hawai‘i, incentivizing migrants’ accommodation to American empire and mobilizing the politics of Asian settler colonialism.

The dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first interrogates opium regulation in the Hawaiian kingdom as a racializing colonialist discourse that patronized Native Hawaiians and criminalized migrant Chinese, laying the ideological groundwork for both annexation and exclusion. The second chapter considers the rise and fall of Chinese rice culture, and examines immigration exclusion laws as economic policies designed to constrict non-white migrant enterprise. The third chapter investigates Chinese success in commercial food production, specifically fishpond and poi factory operation, as the result of collective financial networks, cultural appropriation, and interracial economic intimacies. My final chapter explores Chinese diplomatic and grassroots resistance to exclusion laws and the culture of racial violence that these laws fostered. I argue that legal, economic, and political insecurity around annexation freighted organized responses to everyday transgressions against Chinese subjects, overlaying concerns about the treatment of marginalized migrants with the weight of exclusion.

Ultimately, I contend that Hawai‘i Chinese mobilized settler colonial politics in response to American imperial takeover and exclusion, which curtailed the possibility of grounding migrant rights in transnational frameworks of belonging, and reduced diasporic Chinese to aliens unable to make political claims on the territory from outside the category of citizenship. As American imperial policies threatened the security of Chinese futures in the islands, migrants couched their claims to belonging in a discourse of racial and economic exceptionalism premised on their alleged superiority to Native Hawaiians.

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Conservation and settler colonialism: Anja Nygren, ‘Review of Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest’, Conservation & Society, 17, 1, 2019, pp. 120-121

13Jan19

Global conservation efforts have come under increased academic and activist scrutiny in recent years. The nature protection agendas formulated by big international conservation organisations at conflictive forest frontiers in the global South—and their ambiguous links to neoliberal agendas of payment for environmental services and market-based ecotourism—have figured prominently in academic and public discussion. Conservation through enclosure and green grabbing by primitive accumulation in different parts of Latin America has also been widely investigated in recent political-ecological and critical conservation studies. Megan Ybarra’s book, Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest, focuses on international conservation efforts to protect the 1.6 million ha Maya Forest in northern Guatemala as a hotspot of global biodiversity. Through her careful ethnographic analysis, she contributes significantly to contemporary debates, convincingly showing that global conservation efforts have turned lowland Maya Indians into immigrants on their own land.

Green Wars offers a sophisticated discussion of complicated links between conservation politics, authoritarian state-making, settler colonialism, and racialised dispossession of indigenous peoples in tropical forest-frontiers. Ybarra meticulously demonstrates the political-economic processes that have led to large-scale land transactions and sedimented trajectories of resource accumulation by dispossession in Guatemala. Moreover, drawing on feminist political ecology, postcolonial perspectives, and critical race theories, Ybarra addresses a crucial lacuna in conventional studies of conflicts over conservation that focus solely on struggles over material resources. The analysis carefully shows how seemingly benevolent conservation projects become framed by a settler logic of elimination of the Other and thus end up justifying violent displacement of Indians from their territories. Although international conservation organisations have not called for violent dispossessions, by framing their agendas with imaginaries of the Maya forest as pristine wilderness and Q’eqchi’ Indians as unruly reserve invaders, they ultimately support racialised resource-access exclusion. By defining indigenous land-tenure struggles outside their conservation mandate, global conservation organisations fail to combine efforts for sustainable conservation and sustainable livelihoods in indigenous territories.

In her ethnographic research, carried out in politically volatile circumstances, Ybarra laudably reflects her role as a gringo researcher, showing solidarity with indigenous struggles for justice and decolonisation of the racialised settler system, while at the same time negotiating with advocates of land-extensive conservation programmes. Using sophisticated archival analysis and life-history interviews, Ibarra tracks the decades-long forms of physical and symbolic violence with which state authorities, land-owning elite, and military forces have sought to dispossess Maya Indians of their territory. Recent efforts to enclose the Maya Forest for conservation violate indigenous rights to resource access, while provoking a series of injustices including state-led land dispossessions, structural state violence in the form of unavailability of basic services, and state-sanctioned private violence against non-consensual communities. Through a careful analysis of historical maps and land-registration archives, Ybarra shows that many of the lands inside the Maya Biosphere Reserve, although framed as core conservation areas with no human occupants by the park officials, consist of indigenous working lands, sacred landscapes, and places of territoriality.

Green Wars also provides an interesting analysis of how indigenous contestations against fortress conservation are not just battles over resource access and land ownership but also struggles over cultural identity and symbolic meanings in which different knowledges, ideologies, and ontologies of nature clash with each other. Ybarra shows how the collective memory of repeated state violence, accumulation by dispossession, and denial of indigenous ontologies frames Maya interpretations of contemporary conservation agendas, while the indigenous cartography of refusal rejects proposals for subsuming Q’eqchi’ territoriality under the settler logics of land ownership. Instead of portraying Maya Indians as passive victims of structural state violence, Ibarra demonstrates the indigenous stamina for land activism and alternative visions of territoriality. As Ybarra thought-provokingly asserts, Q’eqchi’ show an interruptive capacity to live within and beyond settler society by redirecting their imagination to other questions, other ideas, and other ways of knowing.

Based on the lively debate over the political ontology of nature in current political-ecological and post-colonial approaches, it would have been interesting to know even more about ontological questions related to struggles over nature protection and local livelihoods in Guatemala. Given that Ybarra carried out long-term ethnographic field research in the area, it would have been enlightening if she had analysed the Q’eqchi’ views of the political ontology of nature in greater depth. Deserving of more attention are her inspiring arguments that, in Q’eqchi’ struggles for recuperation, ontologies of territory as identity and a spiritual relationship with the landscape are intimately interwoven with an indigenous way of farming and the daily search for livelihoods.

Based on the facts that this monograph is entitled Green Wars and that Ybarra considers a feminist political ecology to offer a good way to analyse the power relations in nature conservation, providing more detailed analyses of the views of conservation experts and development practitioners of the struggles over conservation and indigenous livelihoods would have made her analysis more convincing. More discussion of how the conservation authorities perceived the environmental-social transformations within the biosphere reserve and its surroundings, and how they explained the causes and consequences of such transformations could have deepened analysis. While supporting epistemological pluralism, Ybarra’s postcolonial analysis of Indians as Other is, in parts, based on an unintentionally dichotomic view of ladinos versus indigenous people. More careful examination of the multifaceted relationship between the Indians and land-poor ladino populations in the struggles for justice in Petén and Alta Verapaz might have prevented this.

Chapters One, Two, and Four are theoretically coherent and ethnographically rich analyses, with a careful focus on the links between conservation efforts, settler colonialism, and state violence. Chapter One provides a detailed analysis of the histories of state violence that politicised Maya forests and criminalised lowland Q’eqchi’ territorial rights. Chapter Two examines the conservationists’ supposedly apolitical projects for nature protection and their representations of lowland Maya as unruly migrants, while Chapter Four offers a rich case study of settler colonialism overlaid by a questionable veneer of conservation. In contrast, Chapter Three, although analysing interesting questions of racialised ladino ideologies, suffers from clear links to conservation. Furthermore, while Chapters One and Two carefully show how advocacy of fortress conservation by conservation organisations is a reason why local civil-war survivors associate international conservation efforts with violence, analysis in Chapter Five lacks the same sort of thoroughness. This chapter, focusing on links between narco-terrorism and conservation ideologies, contains repetition and lacks sufficient empirical grounds for claiming that the “effect of twenty-first century green wars has been to subject indigenous territorial claims to narco-narratives, interpellating all communities that contest the legitimacy of protected areas to putative narcos” (p. 152). Overall, the different chapters of the book could have been woven together more coherently, although this weakness in organising structure might be the result of the material from several chapters having already been published in articles in scientific journals. The book’s maps are highly illustrative; however, the quality of the few photos included could have received more attention.

The concluding chapter emphasises the Maya Indians’ call for decolonisation by recognising the intimate relationship between indigenous peoples and the land. As the monograph presents thought-provoking, highly relevant theoretical and policy-oriented debates on conservation and livelihoods, the conclusion could have provided a more analytical synthesis of the main theoretical insights and societally relevant findings of the study. In its present form, the conclusion comprises a fairly normative list of “musts” that morally aware Northern scholars and justice advocates should take into account. Instead of such lists, it could have focused more on indigenous imaginings for decolonial futures.

Ultimately, Green Wars is a very welcome contribution to the existing literature on complex relations between global conservation efforts, struggles for local livelihoods and recognition of indigenous territorial rights. It interestingly shows how indigenous people engage with an ambiguous both/and politics when coping within settler legal systems, while going beyond settler-state subjections. It also demonstrates how indigenous calls for justice demand a collective rethinking of environmental-social relations as the locus where nature and society co-produce each other, and that land, forest, water, air, and subsoil constitute a lived landscape that cannot be commodified. In such an ontology, financial compensation is not an answer to indigenous claims for self-determination. I highly recommend this book for researchers and graduate students in geography, anthropology, political science, sociology, and environmental social science, as well as for conservation experts, environmental activists, social justice and human rights advocates, policy-makers, and development practitioners working on sustainability issues in different parts of the world.

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The continuity of sovereignty through dynamic resistance: Lee Murray Hanover, To Remain Near the ‘Water Ditch’: Paiute Sovereignty and United States Settler Colonialism, Owens Valley, California, 1870-1937, MA Dissertation, UNLV, 2018

09Jan19

Abstract: This thesis argues that Owens Valley Paiute sovereignty manifested itself both inherently and adaptively from 1870 to 1937. Sovereignty is an historically contingent term that reflects how nations deploy power to retain control over their communities and provide self-determination within economics, politics, culture, and society. This thesis illuminates Paiute sovereignty through the Peoplehood model, explaining how Paiute sovereignty existed at the moment of their creation, when Coyote placed them next to the Water Ditch—Owens River—and told them to spread throughout but never leave their homeland, the Owens Valley. This inherent mandate allowed Paiutes to adapt Coyote’s stipulation to remain in the Water Ditch to varied manifestations of settler colonialism. United States representatives and citizens attempted to erase Paiute existence in the valley through capitalist assimilation forcing Paiutes from seasonal round work to stationary wage work; U.S. map makers eliminated Paiute oral tradition and bounded geographies and claimed their homelands; literary authors supported the myth of the vanishing Indian to naturalize settler ownership of Paiute lands; and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) representatives first tried to remove Paiutes from the valley, and then attempted to eliminate Paiute identities and rights to water. Paiutes did not become dependent on settler economies; instead, they adapted wage work into their economic lives and identity to retain control over their communities. Paiutes deployed anthropological research to resist mapping erasures and explain a Paiute bounded mental geography. Paiutes worked for and with colonial literary writers, but more importantly told stories of their survival, resistance, and future as Owens Valley Paiutes. Lastly, Paiutes used congressional committees and deployed their community representatives to resist the LADWP’s water politics and remain in the “Water Ditch” on federally protected Paiute reservations.

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