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On indigeneity and migrations: Josué López, ‘CRT and Immigration: Settler Colonialism, Foreign Indigeneity, and the Education of Racial Perception’, University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class, 19, 1, 2019

06Jul19

Excerpt: A wall will not end immigration, and neither will immigration laws and policies. Rather, these policies and practices serve to dehumanize immigrants and position them in precarious legal positions where their personhood is constantly called into question. Analyses of immigration from Latin America do not usually focus on Indigenous peoples. When Indigeneity is centered, an examination of immigration policies is made more complex due to the relationship between the State’s power over regulating the movement of people across its borders and a legacy of settler colonialism that recognizes the State exists on stolen lands. Immigration policies are a contemporary manifestation of the legacy of settler colonialism. In this article, I specifically examine the power of the United States to set the standard for what constitutes a legitimate asylum claim. I ask two principal questions: (1) What happens to the lived experience of Indigenous peoples when filtered through an asylum claim? (2) How does a settler colonial framework illuminate the relationship between facts and asylum claims for Indigenous peoples?


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The optimism of decolonisation (alongside, Gramsci-style, the pessimism of reason): Sheryl R. Lightfoot, ‘The Pessimism Traps of Indigenous Resurgence’, in T. Stevens, N. Michelsen (eds), Pessimism in International Relations, Palgrave, 2019, 155-172

06Jul19

Abstract: The main focus of Indigenous political theory is the assertion of Indigenous nationhood. Despite this seemingly positive orientation, a branch of Indigenous political theory, the resurgence school, is caught in three pessimism traps that limit its ability to create better Indigenous-state relationships. By characterising all Indigenous individuals who engage with states as ‘co-opted’, viewing all states as unified, deliberate and unchanging in their desire to dispossess Indigenous peoples, and viewing all engagement as futile, if not dangerous, the resurgence school forecloses any possibility of negotiated and peaceful co-existence with even the most progressive government. It also creates unnecessary negative feelings and divisions among Indigenous resistance movements who should be pooling limited resources and working together towards better futures for Indigenous peoples.


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Health under settler colonialism: Paul Sylvestre, Heather Castleden, Jeff Denis, Debbie Martin, AmyBombay, ‘The tools at their fingertips: How settler colonial geographies shape medical educators’ strategies for grappling with Anti-Indigenous racism’, Social Science & Medicine, 2019

06Jul19

Abstract: Settler colonialism implicates settler and Indigenous populations differently within ongoing projects of settlement and nation building. The uneven distribution of benefits and harms is a primary consequence of settler colonialism. Indeed, it is a central organizing feature of the settler state’s governance of Indigenous societies and is animated, in part, through pervasive settler ignorance and anti-Indigenous racism, which has manifested in persistent health disparities amongst Indigenous peoples. This broader socio-political context surrounding medical schools, which are seeking to develop teaching and learning about Indigenous health presents a significant challenge. Understanding the cognitive and affective tools that settler educators use when grappling with questions of race, racialization, and Indigenous difference is an important step in addressing anti-Indigenous racism in health care provision. This paper reports on findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with educators at one Canadian medical school. Our intent was to elicit respondents’ understandings, experiences, and attitudes regarding Indigenous-settler relations, Indigenous health and healthcare, and the inclusion of Indigenous health in the curriculum as a means of identifying facilitators and barriers to improving Indigenous health and health care experiences. Respondents were generally sympathetic and evinced an earnest desire to include more Indigenous-related content in the curriculum. What became clear over the course of the data collection and analysis, however, was that most respondents lacked the tools to engage critically with questions of race and racialization and how these are manifested in the context of asymmetrical settler colonial power. We argue that this inability, at best, limits the effectiveness of much needed efforts to incorporate more content relating to Indigenous health, but worse yet, risks re-entrenching anti-Indigenous racism and settler dominance.


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Non-indigenous and indigenous decolonisations: Andy Fisher, ‘Ecopsychology as Decolonial Praxis’, Ecopsychology, 2019

06Jul19

Abstract: In this article, I advance the idea of ecopsychology as a form of decolonial praxis. If, as I suggest, ecopsychology is a project to overcome the fracturing of reality into the separate regions of Psyche, Nature, and Society, then we must ask how these regions became so disconnected in the first place. The answer I offer here is that these divisions are inherent in modern capitalist civilization, which survives to this day only through continuous processes of disconnection and colonization. It follows that decolonization is the deepest context for developing ecopsychology’s theory and practice aimed at reintegrating Psyche, Nature, and Society. In order not to conflate non-Indigenous or settler decolonization with Indigenous decolonization, I introduce the term “lifeworld decolonization” for the former. This distinction allows us to recognize the complex overlap between these two forms of decolonization, which makes room for solidarity, while granting a specific primacy to Indigenous decolonization and underscoring how non-Indigenous peoples have historically benefited from colonialism. Indeed, turning toward the topic of Indigenous decolonization forces an “unsettling” of ecopsychology, which may lead the field toward a more coherent, mature, reflexive, and historically relevant understanding of itself. In the course of my argument, I engage with the ontological and decolonial turns in social theory in order to demonstrate what the transformation of Psychology into ecopsychology might involve when the field both learns from and commits itself toward Indigenous decolonization.


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Tomonori Sugimoto, ‘Urban Settler Colonialism: Policing and Displacing Indigeneity in Taipei, Taiwan’, City & Society, 2019

06Jul19

Abstract: This article argues that colonialism needs to be explicitly foregrounded in analyses of urban processes in settler colonial cities. Urban settler colonialism is an ongoing process that affects urban indigenous subjects, a force that builds on the longue durée of settler colonialism that has dispossessed them for centuries. My article draws on ethnographic research conducted with a group of indigenous Pangcah/Amis people who have migrated to the Taipei region in Taiwan over the last forty years. While paying attention to the long history of settler colonialism on the island and specifically in the Taipei region—the erasure of indigenous Ketagalan heritage in northern Taiwan, indigenous land dispossession in rural villages, and a consequent post‐WWII influx of indigenous people into Taipei, and the displacement of urban indigenous squatter settlements since the 1990s—I will ethnographically focus on a group of indigenous public housing residents who have continued to face urban settler colonialism. I discuss how they have negotiated with surveillance and policing from their on‐site housing management team, charges of incivility from Han state agents and neighbors, and displacement from urban redevelopment.


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Settler-colonialism requires surveillance: Jenna Harb, Kathryn Henne, ‘Disinformation and Resistance in the Surveillance of Indigenous Protesters’, in Blayne Haggart, Kathryn Henne, Natasha Tusikov (eds), Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World: Understanding Power Structures in the 21st Century, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 187-211

28Jun19

Abstract: The U.S. and Canadian governments have long engaged in the surveillance of Indigenous peoples. Such practices have garnered public attention in light of recent events. This chapter reflects on two examples: protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline that crossed over the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the United States and the release of details regarding Project SITKA—a Canadian Royal Mounted Police “dataveillance” operation identifying and tracking Indigenous activists. It examines them to illuminate the strategic use of information, particularly disinformation and misinformation, by government actors, media, private security personnel, and protesters. In particular, the analysis highlights how settler colonialism informs the asymmetrical power dynamics at work, illustrating connections between Project SITKA and the Standing Rock protests.


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Settler-colonial science fiction: Phillip Smith, ‘The American Yeoman in Andy Weir’s The Martian’, Science Fiction Studies, 46, 2, 2019, pp. 322-341

28Jun19

Abstract: In this essay I seek to place Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011) in discourse with two imbricated genres: the political and cultural history of the American frontier, embodied, in this case, in the archetype of the yeoman, and the scientific and fictional history of Mars. The red planet has historically served as a site where, by way of the mythic American frontier, authors have sought imaginary solutions to contemporary anxieties. In the case of The Martian, Andy Wier draws upon the intellectual heritage of the American yeoman to present Mars as a habitable alternative to the Earth. His rhetoric is problematic not only because it lessens the apparent urgency of interventions into global climate change, but also because it reinforces the apparent verisimilitude of a certain version of American history. The Martian, I argue, represents the latest fold in the Martian fantasy of American frontierism in that it presents a version of the America’s mythic past centered upon the white male experience and free of human or ecological victims. It thus seeks to sustain and invigorate a literary tradition predicated upon cultural, environmental, and physical violence as well as the marginalization of people of color in narratives of American history.


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Settler commons over indigenous property: April Anson, ‘The President Stole Your Land: Public Lands and the Settler Commons’, Western American Literature, 54, 1, 2019, pp. 49-62

26Jun19

Excerpt: In the United States what constitutes “public lands” has never been stable. Notions of the public and their commons were a fickle matter of political contest and power relations before the beginning of what is currently called America. Today, who and what serve to underwrite, define, and profit from “public lands” is a debate often expressed in cataclysmic language. Militarized government officials and extrastate militias extend across our shared social, political, and physical landscapes, as our terrains seem to scar, wither, blister, and combust in ways even our most apocalyptic and dystopic imaginations struggle to comprehend. Can we protect a piece of this world for all of us? Can we fight for the land that we live in and love? How do we survive the end of the world that seems so fast approaching? Who are the “we” in these questions?

The issues that immediately arise in discussions of the commons—namely whose commons and for what purposes—often still assume a public that is, in fact, particular to white settler subjects. As a settler scholar raised by uninvited hippies, loggers, and mill workers on Kalapuyailihi (Kalapuya homelands), I frequently find myself implicit in the publics universalized in, and made invisible by, current debates over public lands. From my vantage point in the middle of this “we” supposedly anticipating or already suffering the beginning of the end of the world of public lands, it is difficult to decipher the apocalyptic language commoning settler colonial capitalism, making it, as it were, so ordinary as to be almost imperceptible. Almost.

This article takes two examples of contemporary debates over public lands as paradigmatic case studies for the ways apocalyptic appeals populate and naturalize the “settler commons” across the spectrum of US politics. 


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Staging settler colonialism: Jennifer Ladino, ‘Setting the Stage for Justice: The Politics of Public Lands in the Contemporary US West’, Western American Literature, 54, 1, 2019 pp. ix-xv

26Jun19

Excerpt: October 2016 ended with dramatic irony on the Western stage as two high-profile standoffs came to a head. Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan, and five other members of their self-styled militia were acquitted after a forty-one-day armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge; on the very same day, October 27, unarmed water protectors in North Dakota were shot with tear gas while engaging in nonviolent political action on behalf of clean water and the protection of Indigenous lands. The protests on the Standing Rock reservation had been gaining momentum since early 2016, as tribes and allies resisted the Dakota Access Pipeline, slated to carry hundreds of thousand of barrels of oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to southern Illinois, crossing the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and threatening water supplies and sacred lands at Standing Rock. Under unifying slogans such as “Water is Life,” diverse publics formed and collaborated in digital and face-to-face activism to support tribal sovereignty. Black Lives Matter activists joined their #resistance energies to #NoDAPL efforts, and, at one point, a group of veterans formed a human shield between water protectors and the US military, vowing the pipeline would not be built on their watch.

The Oregon occupation, by contrast, featured the usual suspects: rural white people, mostly men, wielding weapons and antigovernment ideologies. The Bundy brothers are sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who had, two years earlier, held an armed standoff with the federal government over the years of unpaid fees he had incurred for allowing his cattle to graze on BLM land—fees amounting to more than $1 million. The crew at Malheur was inspired by this earlier standoff, by long-simmering antigovernment sentiments in the West, as well as by Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who had been imprisoned for arson after setting fires that burned federally managed land. 


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Enduring frontiers undo the settler: Mattias Borg Rasmussen, ‘Institutionalizing precarity: Settler identities, national parks and the containment of political spaces in Patagonia’, Geoforum, 2019

26Jun19

Abstract: Enduring frontier spaces are key sites if one seeks to trace the subtle workings of power through the effects of the shifting rationalities of territorial governance. This article focuses on a particular group of people, the descendants of the first settler families to enter an area that would later become one of Argentina’s flagship national parks. The figure of the settler occupied a shifting position within the racialized geographies of the protected areas of northwestern Patagonia, a remarkable descent from pioneers consolidating state-space to second-class citizens and tolerated squatters brought low by the institutionalization of precarity. The article asks what it means to be a descendant of settlers during the current period of multicultural recognition and the emergence of territorial claims based on indigenous identities in Argentina. It argues, that while the settlers within the protected area, the pobladores, hold a firm place in the territorial genealogy of Patagonia, they remain in these territories as relics of the past and are thus denied a meaningful existence within the Argentine settler state of the present. Contemporary maps of racialized power in the settler territories condition the politics of subject formation but are also met with resistance as settlers claim rights to full citizenship and recognition of their role as frontier pioneers and state space consolidators.


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