settler colonial studies blog

The urban form of settler colonialism: Naama Blatman‐Thomas, Libby Porter, ‘Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2018

30Sep18

Abstract: In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.

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Complicit? Cameron David Ian Greensmith, ‘(Unsettling) White Queer Complicities: Toward a Practice of Decolonization in Queer Organizations’, Intersectionalities, 6, 1, 2018

30Sep18

Abstract: This article expands upon important and growing dialogue around how non-Indigenous peoples can work in solidarity with Indigenous peoples to support their nationhood and sovereignty in the wake of ongoing white settler colonialism in Canada. In particular, this article centralizes queer organizations and implicates their investments in white queerness as sustaining contemporary colonial projects. While queer organizations work toward social change surrounding all things queer and trans, their connections to white supremacy and settler colonialism routinely go unexamined. In an effort to bring light to queer organizations’ and workers’ complicities in white settler colonialism, this paper makes use of the narratives of 41 non-Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) service providers who voluntarily participated in in-depth interviews. By paying attention to their stories of deflections of responsibility in ongoing white supremacist and settler colonial projects, this article considers the extent to which white service providers and service providers of colour can address and embed decolonization within queer organizations in Canada. Together, these non-Indigenous LGBTQ service providers, organizers, and activists carry the potential to utilize their own experiences and understandings of complicity to shape their relationships with Indigenous peoples in ways that support their nationhood and sovereignty.

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Settler colonialism is a kind of ecopsychology: Alysha Tylynn Jones, David Sean Segal, ‘Unsettling Ecopsychology: Addressing Settler Colonialism in Ecopsychology Practice’, Ecopsychology, 10, 3, 2018

28Sep18

Abstract: This article identifies settler colonialism as a phenomenon existing outside of awareness in the field of ecopsychology and begins to explore what “unsettling” ecopsychology may entail. Unsettling the field is a process of revealing how ecopsychology reproduces and reinforces settler colonialism. This process requires deep reflection among practitioners regarding how they can challenge the dominant colonial narratives that underpin settler privilege within the field itself. Offered as additional points of engagement in the process of unsettling are practices of accountability and relationality through the learning of history and cultural protocols and engagement in acts of solidarity with Indigenous land-based resurgence. By opening up this dialogue, we (the authors) seek to make a critical contribution to the field of ecopsychology and, as non-Indigenous/settler practitioners, to encourage a discussion of accountability for those doing therapeutic land-based nature connection work as visitors on traditional Indigenous territories.

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Native slavery and settler colonialism: John M. Monteiro, Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America, Cambridge University Press, 2019

26Sep18

Description: Beginning in the 1490s in the Caribbean, and through the slow demise of native slavery in North and South America over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Amerindians were subjected to enslavement, captivity, and forced labor. Indian slavery was practiced across the Americas, at one point in time or another, in jurisdictions claimed by every European power that engaged in New World colonialism. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Scottish, French, and Russian colonists held native Americans as slaves, exerting their mastery over them and dealing in them as chattel. In parts of the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, native slavery survived the ending of European colonial claims and the formation of independent nation-states, lasting well into the nineteenth century. By that point, however, the numbers of Amerindians held as slaves in Brazil and the United States were tiny compared to the masses of African and Afro-American captives that made up the absolute majority of the populations of the two country’s plantation zones. Indian slavery thus seemed a small thing-economically, socially, demographically-when set alongside African and Afro-American slavery, on the ascent through the first half of the new century in Brazil and the southern United States alike. Until recently-and for many good reasons-scholarly attention to Indian slavery has been similarly dwarfed by the volume of care and attention paid to African and Afro- American slavery in the Americas. Over the last fifteen years, however, the study of native slavery has undergone a remarkable boom among North American historians

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Settler colonialism’s ‘scenes of captivity’: Jonathan Nash, The Politics of Wounds, Dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2018

23Sep18

Abstract: What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to Fanon and Mbembe, I argue that settler colonialism produces what I term as “scenes of captivity,” where the settler nation-state detains, incarcerates, and interrogates brown, Indigenous, and black bodies both for producing knowledge about those bodies and protecting and securitizing the nation-state. Understanding the ways in which settler colonialism’s logics of detention, captivity, and interrogation, both then and now, provides insights into how we might begin dismantling detention centres.

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The gender of settler colonialism: Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Kyle Whyte, ‘Theorizing Indigeneity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism’, in Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, Luvell Anderson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, 2018, pp. 152-168

23Sep18

Access the chapter here.

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Probationary settlers are settlers: Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Probationary Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in the American West: American Jews and American Indians, 1850-1934, Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2018

23Sep18

Abstract: “Probationary Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in the American West: American Jews and American Indians 1850-1934,” explores Jewish encounters with American Indians in the context of white settlement in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota. In the mid-nineteenth century, immigrant Jews fought against, traded with, and lived among Indians. By 1890, however, Jews primarily sought dispossession of native land through agricultural communes across the Plains. This study examines the nuances of Jewish identification with American Indians as “Others,” as well as with American whites as settler colonists. As Jews struggled to gain the status and privilege of white settlerhood in the 19th-century West, they readily participated in the settler colonial practice of displacing Indigenous people. By following the trajectory of Jewish immigrants and their descendants, my dissertation makes sense of the national, racial-ethnic, and class boundaries that Jews crossed to promote their own interests as they both carried out and critiqued federal Indian policy. ^ Using insights from settler colonial and whiteness studies, government documents, and Indian oral histories, this project explains how Midwestern Jews participated in and benefited from Native dispossession. Not fully entitled to the privileges of whiteness, however, immigrant Jews, like American Indians, also faced pressure to assimilate into American society during the late 19th and early 20th century. American Jews eventually claimed the benefits of whiteness and economic settler structures whereas Natives remained marginalized because the federal government did not envision full citizenship and self-determination for Indigenous peoples. This dissertation also considers the role of gender and intimacy in Jewish-Native relationships and interactions to explore the converging and diverging experiences of American Indians and Jews. With these shared interactions in mind, “Probationary Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in the American West” views families as a key site of cooperation and conflict within the settler state.

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Settlers farm and graze: Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, ‘Farm Novel or Station Romance? The Geraldton Novels of Randolph Stow’, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 18, 1, 2018

23Sep18

Abstract: Against the metaphysical and postcolonial readings of Stow’s early fiction, I would like to use them to isolate a particular dialectic that is in play within the modality of settler colonialism, between the pastoral and agricultural (farming) modes of land exploitation. In the pastoral mode, land is left in its original state and the natural herbage used as pasture for livestock; in the farming mode, land is cleared and sown for crops or for feed. Pastoral occupation is characterised by large-scale, quasi-nomadic land-usage—either via lease or, indeed, without any formal title—with a central station (homestead) and satellite operations staffed by stockmen (usually men), who herd and tend the livestock (cattle or sheep). Farming in settler colonies is characterised by much smaller land allotments for mixed farming (cropping and livestock), purchased outright often through land-issuing legislation and leads to close settlement with hamlets and towns as nodes for services, transport and market.

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Indigenous mobility as resistance: Georgine Clarsen, ‘Black As: performing Indigenous diﬀerence’, in Nancy Cook, David Butz (eds), Mobilities, Mobility Justice and Social Justice, Routledge, 2018

21Sep18

Abstract: In 2014, four Yolngu men from the Arnhem Land township of Ramingining in Australia’s north emailed a video clip to David Batty, who has been making ﬁlms with Indigenous people for over 30 years.1 Chico, Jerome, Dino and their adopted white brother, Joe, sent Batty footage of their crocodile hunting exploits and invited him to create a television series with them. The result was the 24-part series Black As. Shot during the 2015 Dry season in the Djambarrpuyngu language (of the Yolngu Matha language chain) with English subtitles, this low-budget series, of which the four stars are co-owners, tells a comic story of a hunting trip.2 The series went directly to web streaming via the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and quickly became one of the broadcaster’s highest-rated Iview programs, with more than 1.2 million views nationally for full episodes and 23 million hits worldwide on one promotional clip alone. Batty’s media company, Rebel Films, has so far attracted some 150 million viewers around the world, including for the Spanish-language version on Facebook and YouTube. As I write, Batty and his crew are in post-production on the second Black As series, ﬁnanced by ABC Iview sales and a crowdfunding campaign. In this chapter, I analyze this lighthearted representation of young Indigenous men’s movement across their Country as an enactment of mobility justice. Following Tim Cresswell’s (2010) formulation of mobility as a political entanglement of movement, representation and embodied practice, I read Black As as a speciﬁcally Indigenous expression of mobility, which is necessarily politicized in the face of the ongoing settler-colonialism oppressions that have imposed deep inequalities and uneven mobilities on Indigenous subjects. Exemplifying what Audra Simpson (2014) calls a politics of refusal, the men move their unreliable vehicles across the unsmoothed terrain of their Country. They deploy their embodiment as encultured Indigenous men of that place to move on their own terms, outside settler movement regimes, to ﬁnd bush foods and tell their story to camera. They thereby reanimate (as ﬁlmic representations) for a new generation and circumstances cultural practices that are tens of thousands of years old. As Simpson demonstrates, Indigenous refusal is more than resistance to injustice; it is also a political, generative, embodied assertion of ongoing sovereignty. In this chapter I tease out the story presented in Black As as a refusal of the historical and contemporary forces that have sought to constrain Indigenous mobilities and deny Indigenous sovereignty. Dino Wanybarrnga, Chico Wanybarrnga, Jerome Lilypiyana and Joe Smith’s performances of mobilities and (essential to the humor of the series) immobilities oﬀer a proud story of self-determined movement, which they have mobilized across their immediate community and the globe with the help of non-Indigenous ﬁlmmaker allies.

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Settler care isn’t: Sarah E. Nelson, Kathi Wilson, ‘Understanding barriers to health care access through cultural safety and ethical space: Indigenous People’s experiences in Prince George, Canada’, Social Science & Medicine, 2018

21Sep18

Abstract: Almost 1.7 million people in the settler colonial nation of Canada identify as Indigenous. Approximately 52 per cent of Indigenous peoples in Canada live in urban areas. In spite of high rates of urbanization, urban Indigenous peoples are overlooked in health care policy and services. Because of this, although health care services are more plentiful in cities as compared to rural areas, Indigenous people still report significant barriers to health care access in urban settings. This qualitative study, undertaken in Prince George, Canada, examines perceived barriers to health care access for urban Indigenous people in light of how colonialism impacts Indigenous peoples in their everyday lives. The three most frequently reported barriers to health care access on the part of the 65 participating health care providers and Indigenous clients of health care services are: substandard quality of care; long wait times; and experiences of racism and discrimination. These barriers, some of which are common complaints among the general population in Canada, are interpreted by Indigenous clients in unique ways rooted in experiences of discrimination and exclusion that stem from the settler colonial context of the nation. Through the lenses of cultural safety and ethical space – frameworks developed by international Indigenous scholars in efforts to better understand and operationalize relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and societies in the context of settler colonialism – this study offers an understanding of these barriers in light of the specific ways that colonialism intrudes into Indigenous clients’ access to care on an everyday basis.

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