settler colonial studies blog

The propriety of settler colonialism: Leslie Thielen-Wilson, ‘Feeling Property: Settler Violence in the Time of Reconciliation’, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 30, 3, 2018, pp. 494-521

23Dec18

Abstract: Two key tenets of Sherene Razack’s scholarship are that racialized violence is always an identity-making practice and that settler violence against Indigenous people, in particular, is a violence that reassures white settler subjects that they rightly occupy Indigenous lands. With reference to Razack’s idea of the “spatiality” of racialized violence, I argue that regimes and ideologies of private property remain central to the psychic life of colonial power, settler emplaced subjectivity, and the violence committed by settlers against Indigenous peoples. I also contend that the broader context of reconciliation within Canada is significant for analyzing settler subjectivity and settler violence. To illustrate my theoretical claims, I draw from three recent homicides committed by white male settlers, where settler misrecognition of Indigenous persons as trespassing upon (or stealing) settler private property seems central to the violence.

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The prostitution of settler colonialism: Robyn Bourgeois, ‘Race, Space, and Prostitution: The Making of Settler Colonial Canada’, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 30, 3, 2018, pp. 371-397

23Dec18

Abstract: This article examines the fundamental role that prostitution has played in securing settler colonial domination over Indigenous peoples and lands in the historical and ongoing making of the Canadian nation-state. Using the theoretical and methodological framework developed by critical anti-racist feminist scholar Sherene Razack, this article offers a spatial analysis tracing how prostitution has been deployed, repeatedly and in distinctly racialized and gendered ways, to secure settler colonial domination in Canada. This analysis focuses on four key examples: (1) early settlement in British Columbia; (2) the Indian Act; (3) the Pass System; and, more recently, (4) Vancouver’s Missing Women. It also focuses on how these settler colonial deployments of prostitution contributed (and, in some ways, continue to contribute) not only to violence against Indigenous women and girls but also to the justification, legitimation, and erasure of this violence and, thus, its normalization within settler colonial society.

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Knowing ignorance: Anna Cook, ‘Recognizing Settler Ignorance in the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 4, 4, #6

23Dec18

Abstract: The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance.

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Exclusion depends on presence: Christine Rogers Stanton, ‘Educational Manifest Destiny: Exclusion, Role Allocation, and Functionalization in Reservation Bordertown District Admission Policies’, American Journal of Education, 2018

21Dec18

Abstract: Towns that border American Indian reservations provide important contexts for studying relationships between educational institutions and marginalized communities. This study applies critical discourse methodologies to evaluate policies from districts bordering reservations, districts geographically distant from reservations, and districts located on reservations. Broadly, the study addresses the question, How do school admission policies perpetuate settler-colonialism? Findings reveal bordertown discourse that excludes Indigenous epistemologies, restricts self-determination, and defines the function of knowledge and peoples to reinforce Eurocentric power structures. The study offers implications for policy makers, district leaders, and community members working to enhance equity, particularly given increased pressure for school choice expansion.

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The (indigenous) mother of settler colonialism: Elizabeth Rule, ‘Seals, Selfies, and the Settler State: Indigenous Motherhood and Gendered Violence in Canada’, American Quarterly, 70, 4, 2018, pp. 741-754

19Dec18

Abstract: From residential schools and sterilizations to assimilation-driven adoption and foster care abuses, settler colonialism targets Indigenous women in their roles as the reproducers of Indigenous cultures and nations, deeming them unfit and meeting them with violence. Such policies, both historical and contemporary, fuel and inform ongoing attacks on Indigenous motherhood. In this essay, I analyze the brutality leveled against famed Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq by settler environmentalists in 2014 after she posted online a photograph of her infant daughter next to a dead seal in solidarity with the pro–seal hunt Indigenous activist “Sealfie” campaign, as a primary example of this violence. I argue that the attacks on Tagaq in her positions as an Indigenous mother, activist, and celebrity showcase an unbroken onslaught of gendered violence coordinated by the settler states and its agents and serving assimilationist efforts through the current moment. I conclude with a discussion of how a focus on attacks on Indigenous motherhood, an understudied aspect of gendered violence against Indigenous women, can provide new insights into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women tragedy and Canadian state efforts to redress it.

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Settlers are territorial: Carsten-Andreas Schulz, ‘Territorial sovereignty and the end of inter-cultural diplomacy along the “Southern frontier”‘, European Journal of International Relations, 2018

16Dec18

Abstract: European politics at the turn of the 19th century saw a dramatic reduction in the number and diversity of polities as the territorial nation-state emerged as the dominant form of political organization. The transformation had a profound impact on the periphery. The study examines how embracing the principle of territoriality transformed relations between settler societies and indigenous peoples in South America. As this shift coincided with independence from Spain, Creole elites rapidly dismantled the remnants of imperial heteronomy, ending centuries of inter-cultural diplomacy. The study illustrates this shift in the case of the “Southern frontier,” where Spain had maintained a practice of treaty making with the Mapuche people since the mid-17th century. This long-standing practice broke down shortly after Chile gained independence in 1818. What followed was a policy of coercive assimilation through military conquest and forced displacement — a policy that settler societies implemented elsewhere in the 19th century. In contrast to explanations that emphasize the spread of capitalist agriculture and racist ideologies, this study argues that territoriality spelled the end of inter-cultural diplomacy along the “Southern frontier.”

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Settler colonialism shapes settler democracy: Adam Dahl, Empire of the People Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought, UniversityPress of Kansas, 2018

12Dec18

Description: American democracy owes its origins to the colonial settlement of North America by Europeans. Since the birth of the republic, observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and J. Hector St. John de Crvecur have emphasized how American democratic identity arose out of the distinct pattern by which English settlers colonized the New World. Empire of the People explores a new way of understanding this process—and in doing so, offers a fundamental reinterpretation of modern democratic thought in the Americas.

In Empire of the People, Adam Dahl examines the ideological development of American democratic thought in the context of settler colonialism, a distinct form of colonialism aimed at the appropriation of Native land rather than the exploitation of Native labor. By placing the development of American political thought and culture in the context of nineteenth-century settler expansion, his work reveals how practices and ideologies of Indigenous dispossession have laid the cultural and social foundations of American democracy, and in doing so profoundly shaped key concepts in modern democratic theory such as consent, social equality, popular sovereignty, and federalism.

To uphold its legitimacy, Dahl also argues, settler political thought must disavow the origins of democracy in colonial dispossession—and in turn erase the political and historical presence of native peoples. Empire of the People traces this thread through the conceptual and theoretical architecture of American democratic politics—in the works of thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexis de Tocqueville, John O’Sullivan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and William Apess. In its focus on the disavowal of Native dispossession in democratic thought, the book provides a new perspective on the problematic relationship between race and democracy—and a different and more nuanced interpretation of the role of settler colonialism in the foundations of democratic culture and society.

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The ethnographer as settler spy: Susan Slyomovics, ‘”The Ethnologist-Spy Was Hanged, At That Time We Were a Little Savage”: Anthropology in Algeria with Habib Tengour, Boundary2: An Online Journal, 2018

11Dec18

Abstract: Following Mohammed Seddik Benyahia’s call to boycott, ethnology was banned outright at the twenty-fourth International Conference of Sociology in Algiers in March 1974. This essay reads Algerian poet and anthropologist Habib Tengour’s sly voicing of the violent indigene consigning ethnology to the gallows to rethink authority and expertise in the social sciences.

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Settlers name (others don’t): Karen Pennesi, ‘Differential responses to constraints on naming agency among indigenous peoples and immigrants in Canada’, Language & Communication, 64, 2019, pp. 91-103

09Dec18

Abstract: This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation.

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Settler colonialism is transnational: Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform, Harvard University Press, 2018

09Dec18

Description: The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Progressive New World demonstrates that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism.

White settlers in the United States, who saw themselves as path-breakers and pioneers, were inspired by the state experiments of Australia and New Zealand that helped shape their commitment to an active state, women’s and workers’ rights, mothers’ pensions, and child welfare. Both settler societies defined themselves as New World, against Old World feudal and aristocratic societies and Indigenous peoples deemed backward and primitive.

In conversations, conferences, correspondence, and collaboration, transpacific networks were animated by a sense of racial kinship and investment in social justice. While “Asiatics” and “Blacks” would be excluded, segregated, or deported, Indians and Aborigines would be assimilated or absorbed. The political mobilizations of Indigenous progressives—in the Society of American Indians and the Australian Aborigines’ Progressive Association—testified to the power of Progressive thought but also to its repressive underpinnings. Burdened by the legacies of dispossession and displacement, Indigenous reformers sought recognition and redress in differently imagined new worlds and thus redefined the meaning of Progressivism itself.

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