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Settler colonialism in Western Sahara: Matthew Porges, ‘Western Sahara and Morocco: Complexities of Resistance and Analysis’, in Lotje de Vries, Pierre Englebert, Mareike Schomerus (eds), Secessionism in African Politics: Aspiration, Grievance, Performance, Disenchantment, Palgrave, 2018, pp. 127-149

26Aug18

Abstract: This chapter explores some challenges of analysis faced by scholars of the Western Sahara conflict. Western Sahara is a former Spanish colony that has been largely under Moroccan occupation since the conclusion of a 1975–1991 war between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front. Although the international legal consensus regards Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara as illegitimate and illegal, a UN mission to organize a referendum on independence has so far failed to carry out its purpose. While there are insights to be gained from studying the conflict through the lenses of decolonization, secessionism, and several other frameworks, none of these fully capture the unique history of Western Sahara. This chapter explores some of the challenges that contested history poses to both scholarly analysis and the ongoing political process.


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Tracking academic apartheid: Cacey L. Wells, ‘Understanding Issues Associated with Tracking Students in Mathematics Education’, Journal of Mathematics Education, 11, 2, 2018, pp. 68-84

26Aug18

Abstract: Academic tracking, particularly in subjects like mathematics, has existed in the United States’ education system for decades. A problem with tracking is that, in many cases, students are sorted based on external factors beyond their control, rather than their abilities. This article expounds upon theory supporting these claims, providing support through literature that suggests tracking is rooted in capitalist exploitations and settler colonialism. In deconstructing tracking in schools, connections are made that illustrate how tracking creates cultures of academic apartheid, providing advantages for some and disadvantages for others. To conclude, possibilities are proposed to begin rethinking mathematical curriculum in order to disrupt tracking in education. These possibilities include creating spaces in schools for democratic learning environments to thrive, while calling for curriculum to be structured around students’ interests. Furthermore, ideas like incorporating multiple perspectives in mathematics curricula through rethinking the labels associated with mathematics courses, teaching mathematics through the context of history, and teaching mathematics for social justice, are introduced. Each proposal serves as a potential alternative to traditional, hierarchical mathematics curriculum.


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Sonic indigenous sovereignty against settler colonialism: Trevor George Reed, Itaataatawi: Hopi Song, Intellectual Property, and Sonic Sovereignty in an Era of Settler-Colonialism, PhD Dissertation, Columbia, 2018

22Aug18

Abstract: Hopi traditional songs or taatawi are more than aesthetic objects; they are sound-based expressions of Hopi authority. As I argue in this dissertation, creating, performing, circulating, and remembering taatawi are what we might call acts of sonic sovereignty: a mode of authority articulated within ongoing, sound-based networks that include Hopi people, plants, weather systems, land, and other living things within Hopi territories. I begin by exploring the generative process through which taatawi do their connective work, which includes long-term collaborations between yeeyewat (composers) and environmental actors that establish a collective vision of prosperity that is realized when these songs are performed. Hopi composer Clark Tenakhongva’s taatawi performances during Grand Canyon National Park’s Centennial (a Hopi sacred space currently controlled by settler governments) exemplify the ways Hopi people are actively using taatawi to (re)assert Hopi relations to colonized territories. Because taatawi are closely tied to Hopi relations to one another and the land, and sometimes contain specialized forms of knowledge held closely by Hopi clans and ceremonial societies, their ownership and circulation remains of vital concern to Hopi people. Laura Boulton’s recording of Hopi singers Dan Qötshongva, Thomas Bahnaqya and David Monongye in the Summer of 1940, and the travels of those recordings afterwards, show us the complex politics of Hopi song circulation in the early Twentieth Century up through the present, and how settler cultural and intellectual property laws provide only limited possibilities for indigenous groups seeking to bring their ancestors’ voices back under their control. And even if tribes could reclaim taatawi under settler property laws, these laws require physical and conceptual transformations that effectively sever them from the networks of relations from which they were created. To better support Hopi sonic sovereignty going forward, I offer brief sketches for three potential interventions: (1) an indigenous works amendment to the United States Copyright Act; (2) the use of indigenized licensing frameworks to embed indigenous protocols into the governance and circulation of indigenous creative works both on and off indigenous lands; and (3) establishing a right to indigenous care, similar to Europe’s right to forget, whereby our ancestors’ voices can be subject to indigenous care rather than preserved anonymously and perpetually as archival objects. My hope is that these will allow indigenous communities to better assert and maintain control over their modes of sonic sovereignty despite the increasing colonization of the sonic world by global intellectual property regimes.


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Controlling indigenous mobility one settler licence at a time: Fiona McGaughey, Teodora Pasca, Sarah Millman, ‘The road ahead: Driver’s licensing and the over-incarceration of Aboriginal peoples in Western Australia’, Alternative Law Journal, 2018

22Aug18

Abstract: Western Australia is the Australian state with the highest incarceration rates of Aboriginal people. This article examines the laws and policies governing driving offences, driver’s licensing, and fines in Western Australia and their implications for Aboriginal people. The Aboriginal rate of imprisonment for licensing offences in Western Australia is significantly higher than the rate for non-Aboriginal people, with the overrepresentation being particularly stark within regional areas. Geographical, cultural, financial, and social barriers inhibit the accessibility of driver’s licensing services for Aboriginal people, while an acute need to drive in Aboriginal communities can lead to unlicensed driving. As a result, Aboriginal people are imprisoned for unlicensed or disqualified driving or fine defaults, with harmful impacts on Aboriginal communities. The article makes recommendations for law reform, to be considered in consultation with Aboriginal communities in adherence with Australia’s obligations regarding self-determination, consultation, representation and consent in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.


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If it is settler-colonial, it must not be international: Trycia Bazinet, ‘Denaturalizing settler-colonial logics in international development education in Canada’, in Julie Cupples, Ramón Grosfoguel (ed.), Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, Routledge, 2018

18Aug18

Abstract: Canada, along with other settler-colonial nations such as the United States, New Zealand and Australia, was not an original signatory of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Even when Canada became a so-called “full supporter of the declaration” in 2016,1 Justice Minister Wilson-Raybould said that in retrospect adopting UNDRIP as Canadian law is “simplistic” and “unworkable” (Canada, 2016). This is only one out of the many statements and policies that demonstrate that settler governments, regardless of the effectiveness of their reconciliatory public relations, are ultimately concerned with reconciling Indigenous’ rights as long as they can be reconciled with the Crown’s sovereignty (Borrows, 2002; Mackey, 2016). Indeed, one of the recurring reason cited by Canadian authorities in their attempts to justify their refusal to endorse UNDRIP had to do with concerns over sovereignty and the management of natural resources.


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Managing intra-settler rivalries: Charles V. Reed, ‘Royalty, loyalism and citizenship in the nineteenth- century British settler empire’, in Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery (eds), Royals on tour: Politics, Pageantry and Colonialism, Manchester University Press, 2018

17Aug18

Abstract: The ethnic rivalry between the British and the Boers is one of the major narratives of South African and British imperial history. This chapter talks about the ‘Cape Dutch’ and De Zuid-Afrikaan does not intend to uproot this traditional narrative completely, but rather to interrogate and problematise it. In the cases of the Cape Dutch and the Irish Catholics of New Zealand, so-called ‘outsiders’ were themselves the authors of imperial culture and citizenship. Much recent and important work has identified the investment and contribution to the British imperial project by the Scottish, Welsh and Irish who administered, fought for, evangelised in and settled the British empire. The invention of Afrikanerdom during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was as much a response to the cultural potency of a British loyalism as it was a function of opposition to British injustices.


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German settler colonialism: Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Peter Monteath (eds), Savage worlds: German encounters abroad, 1798-1914, Manchester University Press, 2018

17Aug18

Description: With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants, and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered.

Whether in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas or Africa, within Germany’s formal empire or in the imperial spaces of other powers, Germans brought with them assumptions about the nature of extra-European peoples. These assumptions were often subverted, disrupted or overturned by their own experience of frontier interactions, which led some Germans to question European ‘knowledge’ of these non-European peoples. Other Germans, however, signally failed to shift from their earlier assumptions about indigenous people and continued to act in the colonies according to their belief in the innate superiority of Europeans.

Examining the multifaceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, the wide ranging research presented in this volume offers historians and anthropologists a clear demonstration of the complexity of frontier zone encounters. It illustrates the variety of forms that agency took for both indigenous peoples and Germans in imperial zones of contact and poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.


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Settlers need to adapt (and steal indigenous knowledges): Thomas M. Wickman, Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast, Cambridge University Press, 2018

17Aug18

Description: Snowshoe Country is an environmental and cultural history of winter in the colonial Northeast, closely examining indigenous and settler knowledge of snow, ice, and life in the cold. Indigenous communities in this region were more knowledgeable about the cold than European newcomers from temperate climates, and English settlers were especially slow to adapt. To keep surviving the winter year after year and decade after decade, English colonists relied on Native assistance, borrowed indigenous winter knowledge, and followed seasonal diplomatic protocols to ensure stable relations with tribal leaders. Thomas M. Wickman explores how fluctuations in winter weather and the halting exchange of winter knowledge both inhibited and facilitated English colonialism from the 1620s to the early 1700s. As their winter survival strategies improved, due to skills and technologies appropriated from Natives, colonial leaders were able to impose a new political ecology in the greater Northeast, projecting year-round authority over indigenous lands.


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Settlers see diseased indigenous peoples (on stubborn constructions of indigeneity as disease): Travis Hay, ‘Commentary: The Invention of Aboriginal Diabetes: The Role of the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis in Canadian Health Care Provision’, Ethnicity & Disease, 28, 2018, pp. 247-252

15Aug18

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to analyze the extent to which the ‘thrifty gene hypothesis’ remains embedded within regimes of Canadian health care. The thrifty gene hypothesis, formulated by the American geneticist and travelling scientist James V. Neel in 1962, proposed that Indigenous peoples were genetically predisposed to Type 2 diabetes due to the foodways of their ancestors. The hypothesis was functionally racist and based on what biological anthropologists now call ‘the myth of forager food insecurity.’ Importantly, Neel reconsidered his own hypothesis in 1982 before he ultimately rejected it in 1999; nonetheless, in the mid-1990s, a team of Canadian scientists led by the endocrinologist Robert Hegele of Western University conducted a genetic study on the OjiCree community of Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario. Thereafter, Hegele told the academic world and news media that he had discovered a thrifty gene in Sandy Lake. Like Neel, Hegele later came to reject his own study in 2011. Nonetheless, the ‘thrifty gene hypothesis’ and Hegele’s Sandy Lake study continue to be cited, referenced, and reproduced in the current Clinical Guidelines of the Canadian Diabetes Association, as well as across state-related health literature more broadly. The purpose of this study, then, will be to apply the PHCRP to the thrifty gene hypothesis in a Canadian context. 


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The gender of land ownership (in settler colonialism): Karen V. Hansen, Grey Osterud, Valerie Grim, ‘”Land Was One of the Greatest Gifts”: Women’s Landownership in Dakota Indian, Immigrant Scandinavian, and African American Communities’, Great Plains Quarterly, 38, 3, 2018, pp. 251-272

15Aug18

Abstract: In rural societies, equity in land is key to women’s position, much as wage labor is in urban, industrial society. Access to productive property is especially important to women in marginalized, subjugated, or newly arrived racial-ethnic groups. The ownership of land shapes the resources that women and men can differentially obtain, control, and utilize. Native American, African American, and immigrant women obtained land in a variety of ways: allotment, purchase, homesteading, and inheritance. Ownership enabled them to cultivate land to support the family, rent it out for income, and exercise the leverage it provided them throughout their lives. Using cases spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we explore landholding from the perspectives of Dakota and Scandinavian immigrant women on the Northern Plains and African American women in the South. Through careful attention to what women made of the land they owned, we can better understand gender and power in a settler colonialist society.


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