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Settler happiness is a nonindigenous future: Daniella Bendo, Taryn Hepburn, Dale C. Spencer, Raven Sinclair, ‘”Happy” Children: The Settler Family, Happiness and the Indigenous Child Removal System’, Children & Society, 2019

05Jun19

Abstract: We analyse 4300 advertisements of children featured in the Today’s Child column, a daily written by Helen Allen in The Toronto Telegram and The Toronto Star from 1964 to 1982, to understand how the Canadian public became accepting of the adoption of Indigenous children. While children of all ethnic backgrounds were featured, the Indigenous children who were displayed were part of a larger system of child removal, known as the ‘Sixties Scoop’. We demonstrate the ways Indigenous children are described with a specific form of happiness that is conjoined with colonial conceptions of the family and nation.


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Reading as a settler-colonial act: Jeffrey Sacks, ‘The Resistance to Boycott: Palestine, BDS, and the Modern Language Association’, Radical History Review, 134, 2019, pp 233-244

05Jun19

Abstract: This article traces the relations between the 2017 vote of the Modern Language Association (MLA) against supporting the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and the practices of reading and literary interpretation upon which the MLA is founded. It argues that the MLA’s affirmation of the exteriority of literature and literature studies to boycott advances a Bildungs-centric conception of language, literature, and self-understanding, which the MLA, through its vote, expansively promotes on a global scale—across literatures and languages. And it argues that the MLA, insofar as it advocates this bildungs-centrism, participates in a history of violence—of slavery, genocide, and settler colonialism—which remains constitutive for the formation of literary fields and objects of study. In doing so this article examines a single Hebrew-language novel, S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh (1949), which dramatizes, in the colonization of Palestine, the relationships between reading, literary form, and death-imparting, genocidal violence.


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Of course everyone knows that if you target women of reproductive age genocide happens much faster: the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls

02Jun19

Excerpt: A national public inquiry into possibly thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada has called the deaths a “Canadian genocide”.


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Biculturalism as a settler weapon: Jessica Terruhn, ‘Settler Colonialism and Biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, in S. Ratuva, (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, Springer, 2019

02Jun19

Abstract: This chapter discusses biculturalism as the current political paradigm defining relations between the indigenous Māori population and the settler population of New Zealanders of European descent (Pākehā) in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Following a brief sociohistorical analysis of settler colonialism and the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi, the chapter charts how biculturalism emerged in response to an indigenous rights movement that brought settler colonial injustices into clear view. Since its inception in the 1970s, state biculturalism has broadly encapsulated a politics of redress and reconciliation for the dispossession and destruction of indigenous communities at the hand of the settler state, but its scope and goals have been contested. In highlighting how biculturalism works in three key arenas – the Waitangi Tribunal, language revitalization, and social policy – the chapter discusses some of these contestations and their implications. The chapter centrally contends that while processes of reconciliation and redress through treaty settlements, efforts to revitalize te reo Māori, and initiatives to tackle socioeconomic inequalities between Māori and Pākehā have made some difference to Māori communities, these strategies have fallen short of addressing indigenous rights to and aspirations for sovereignty.


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A settler-colonial icon: Alison K. Hoagland, The Log Cabin: An American Icon, University of Virginia Press, 2018

02Jun19

Description: For roughly a century, the log cabin occupied a central and indispensable role in the rapidly growing United States. Although it largely disappeared as a living space, it lived on as a symbol of the settling of the nation. In her thought-provoking and generously illustrated new book, Alison Hoagland looks at this once-common dwelling as a practical shelter solution–easy to construct, built on the frontier’s abundance of trees, and not necessarily meant to be permanent–and its evolving place in the public memory.

Hoagland shows how the log cabin was a uniquely adaptable symbol, responsive to the needs of the cultural moment. It served as the noble birthplace of presidents, but it was also seen as the basest form of housing, accommodating the lowly poor. It functioned as a paragon of domesticity, but it was also a basic element in the life of striving and wandering. Held up as a triumph of westward expansion, it was also perceived as a building type to be discarded in favor of more civilized forms.

In the twentieth century, the log cabin became ingrained in popular culture, serving as second homes and motels, as well as restaurants and shops striking a rustic note. The romantic view of the past, combined with the log cabin’s simplicity, solidity, and compatibility with nature, has made it an enduring architectural and cultural icon.


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A little settler neo-Europe: Aileen Leigh Stanton, David Freeland Duke, ‘The Invisible Island: Immigration, Environment, and a New Europe on Big Island, Nova Scotia’, Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 48, 1, 2019, pp. 60-87

31May19

Abstract: This article examines Scottish immigration to Nova Scotia from an environmental perspective. Big Island, which has been long absent from the historical record, is a microcosm of Alfred Crosby’s New Europe thesis. The environmental historian’s seminal theory has never been applied to the Scottish immigration story, in Canada or abroad, and applying it to Big Island reveals a strong cultural and geographic enclave that serves as a testament to the enduring power of place.


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Videogames as sites of survival? Krzysztof Ząbecki, ‘Promoting and Preserving Indigenous Languages and Cultures in the Americas Through Video Games’, in S. D. Brunn, R. Kehrein (eds), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, Springer, 2019

31May19

Abstract: Recently, video games have become one of the fastest growing and most important forms of entertainment. Their popularity among young people makes them a potentially useful tool in education, prompting research on the possibilities of implementing video games in teaching. This chapter discusses the potential of video games in promoting and preserving autochthonous languages and cultures in the Americas. Indigenous peoples of the Americas appear in video games for decades, but in most cases the depiction is strongly stereotyped and racialized. At the same time, in official versions of mainstream games, there are no indigenous language versions. However, there are possibilities to change this negative situation. Examples of possible actions include influencing and exposing developers who present indigenous peoples in a negative, oversimplified way, making indigenous-language versions of already existing games, as well as developing new ones that show autochthonous inhabitants of the Americas as subjects, and not objects. Such games may serve to promote indigenous cultures by changing the prevailing image among nonautochthonous players. However, they can also help to preserve these cultures and restore feeling of self-esteem and dignity within indigenous peoples, especially from younger generations. This chapter discusses the history of depicting native inhabitants of the Americas in video games, different forms of actions taken up to now to change their stereotypical image and help implementing indigenous languages in games, as well as economical, technical, and legal issues with putting these solutions into practice.


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With a chapter entitled ‘The Ground Beneath Our Feet: Poetry and Settler Colonialism’, by Sheila Stewart: In Sandra L. Faulkner, Abigail Cloud (eds), Poetic Inquiry as Social Justice and Political Response, Vernon Press, 2019, pp. 65-75

31May19

Access the chapter here.


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The settler colonisation of water: Nicole J.Wilson, ‘”Seeing Water Like a State?” Indigenous water governance through Yukon First Nation Self-Government Agreements’, Geoforum, 2019

28May19

Abstract: Yukon First Nations and the waters within their traditional territories face a variety of socio-political and environmental pressures including the effects of historical and ongoing settler colonialism, global environmental change and mining activity. These communities are in the process of implementing Self-Government and Modern land claim agreements, which contain powerful acknowledgements of Indigenous rights and authorities, including the right to unaltered “water quality, quantity and rate of flow” on Settlement lands (∼10 percent of their traditional territories). Self-governing Yukon First Nations have real, although limited, legal authorities on Settlement Lands including the ability to enact laws that supersede territorial legislation. Through research conducted in partnership with four Yukon First Nations (Carcross/Tagish, Kluane, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and White River First Nations), I examine how these Indigenous governments are engaging the authorities acknowledged in Modern Land Claim and Self-Government Agreements to assert their rights and responsibilities to water as a more-than-human relation. In particular, I analyze the potential for the creation of legislation pertaining to water on Settlement Land. I engage with critical Indigenous scholarship to examine the challenges facing these communities and to reveal emerging approaches to Indigenous water governance. More specifically, I analyze the “state-like” bureaucracies that First Nations must develop to assert their sovereignty in this context. While these forms of governance are critiqued for bearing little resemblance to traditional forms of governance, I demonstrate how First Nations exercise self-determination as they strategically navigate these opportunities in order to protect water in a manner, they deem consistent with the values, principles and relationships of Indigenous water governance.


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The two faces of settler decolonisation: Patrick Belanger, Rhetoric and Settler Inertia: Strategies of Canadian Decolonization, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

28May19

Description: Rhetoric and Settler Inertia: Strategies of Canadian Decolonization explores how communication might accelerate decolonial actions in Canada. Tracing a middle path between essential Indigenous-focused calls for resurgence, and idealistic appeals to settler conscience, Patrick Belanger identifies communication forms that can generate settler support for decolonization. Accenting the importance of both Indigenous and settler audiences, this book suggests the promise of decolonial rhetoric framed in the language of mutual benefit.


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