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Bordering as decolonisation: Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘”Come out and live on your land again”: sovereignty, borders and the Unist’ot’en camp’, International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 5, 1-2, 2019

28May19

Abstract: Borders are often understood as ‘tools’ of sovereign power and as establishing the very possibility for authority in the international system of sovereign states (Salter, 2012). This paper seeks to problematise this perspective by looking at the case of the Unist’ot’en Action Camp in northern British Columbia, which has engaged bordering practices including having established a checkpoint on the roadway into the Unist’ot’en territory and actively policing helicopter traffic into the territory. Looking at the Camp, this paper argues that such bordering practices draw upon traditional Indigenous ways of being in order to contest and undo settler sovereign authority, in contrast to the traditional understanding of borders as working to organise settler authority. Understood this way, the paper argues that when inscribed with Indigenous knowledge and when relying on Indigenous authorities, borders and bordering practices can be read as gateways to ‘meaningful decolonisation.’


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Beware of the apology (excusatio non petita accusatio manifesta): Anige Wong, ‘A Sorry State of Affairs: Chinese Arrivants, Indigenous Hosts, and Settler Colonial Apologies;’, The Canadian Society for Study of Practical Ethics / Société Canadienne Pour L’étude De L’éthique Appliquée — SCEEA, 5, 2019

26May19

Abstract: We make and give gestures of apology every day, Canadians doubly so. Yet, grand acts of apology for more serious and sustained matters, such as historical and contemporary injustice against those with the least amount of social power, require far more ethical consideration and transformation than simply saying, “I am sorry.” Since the early 2000s, several political parties of the Canadian government have taken up the trend of making a spectacle out of national apologies to historically oppressed groups. Engaging with the concept of the settler colonial triad to theorize the histories of early Chinese arrivants’ experience, this work departs from the 2006 House of Commons apology made to Chinese Canadians on behalf of former PM Stephen Harper and explores the paradoxical operations behind state-sanctioned apologies, including the use of benevolence and hospitality as crisis management tactics resultant of Canada’s settler colonial configuration. Within this contradictory relation, those who identify as Chinese Canadian may find themselves questioning their belonging, given the historically- fraught social strategies used for the making of Canadian subjecthood. State-sanctioned apologies function to consolidate settler colonial reality and constitute a return to normalcy, which is why critical race scholars and scholars of settler colonial studies must look beyond unilateral relationships with the state.


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‘What’s yours is ours’: Allison M. Dussias, ‘The Reports of Our Death Are Greatly Exaggerated – Reflections on the Resilience of the Oneida Indian Nation of New York’, BYU Law Review, 2019

26May19

Excerpt: This Article examines the historical and contemporary experiences of the Oneida Indian Nation of New York in its dealings with New York State and its non-Indian citizens. Three themes, apparent at different times and taking shape in different ways, emerge from this examination. These themes resemble musical refrains—oftrepeated messages, conveyed by the State and its citizens to the Nation, like discordant sounds from a broken record:

1. What’s yours is ours.

2. Surrender your sovereignty—resistance is futile.

3. By surviving as a people, you are spoiling our plans.

Boiling down the Nation’s legal and political encounters with New York State to this basic level serves to highlight the blatant self-interest, and the settler colonialism, that are at the heart of it all, regardless of how much the State—at times aided and abetted by the Supreme Court—tries to hide behind legal niceties.


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Marxist theory and settler colonialism: Amir Locker-Biletzki, ‘Class, Capital and Colonies in India and Palestine/Israel’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 21, 2, 2019

26May19

Excerpt: In recent years the use of settler-colonialism as an analytical concept of scholarship critical of the history and social structure of Palestine/Israel has become prevalent. Mainly scholars such as Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe have developed the study of settler-colonial societies (“Introducing” 1-12; Settler; “Settler” 313-33; Wolfe). Their scholarly debate describes colonial societies as ones where white settlers attempted to eliminate the natives (not in all cases by physical annihilation). In such places the settlers created a settler nation-state, animated by the practice of invasion and removal of the native. A more explicit rendering of Zionist colonial logic is to be found in the seminal work of Israeli critical sociologist Gershon Shafir, justly regarded as one of the founders of settler-colonial studies. His groundbreaking work Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict outlines a sophisticated theory that defines the link between Zionism and settler colonialism. Land, Labor portrays the rise of Zionist colonialism out of the needs of the Eastern European settlers of the Second Aliya (literally “Ascending”: the Zionist concept of Jewish emigration into Palestine) and their encounter with Palestine and its inhabitants (Shafir). The aim of this text in not to disprove the settler-colonial rendition of Zionism, but to show its intellectual “prehistory” in the words of Communist ideologues from the 1920s to the 1950s and the way Marxists in present-day Israel think about the colonial formation of the country.

One distinguishing characteristic of past and present settler-colonial theory is its distance from Marxist theoretical debate. In the case of Palestine/Israel, Marxist anti-Zionists were the first to describe the Zionist project as a colonial one. As will be detailed in the following pages, Israeli Marxists associated with the Communist Party (CP) theorized about Zionist colonialism. Working from within a Marxist tradition – which amalgamated Karl Marx’s writings about European expansion together with V.I. Lenin’s explanation of imperialism – they described the way capital accumulation and class formation drove the Zionist settler project. This article will trace a Marxist intellectual lineage that starts with Marx and Lenin, proceeding through such Indian colonial thinkers as M.N. Roy and R.P. Dutt, and ending with Israeli Marxists like Moshe Sneh, Eliyahu (Alyosha) Gozansky, Meir Vilner and Tamar Gozansky. For these Marxists, the colonial project was driven by two main motivations: class formation and capital accumulation.


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An apology is just the beginning: Chih-Wei Tsai (Awi Mona), ‘National Apology and Reinvigoration of Indigenous Rights in Taiwan’, in Jerome A. Cohen, William P. Alford, Chang-fa Lo (eds), Taiwan and International Human Rights: A Story of Transformation, Springer 2019, pp. 609-623

24May19

Abstract: There has been a huge debate about the protection of indigenous rights in the context of legal reform. One of the focal points of the debate is how and to what extent the state’s legal system and social transformation construct indigenous cultural development and needs. On 1 August 2016 Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen delivered a National Apology to Indigenous Peoples, which laid out a comprehensive scheme to restore historical and transitional justice for indigenous rights. In brief, this chapter focuses on the deliberation of law and legal pluralism amongst indigenous diversity. By way of empirical research, this chapter demonstrates the legal web of the state’s legal system and its influence on local indigenous communities. Also, it explores how and to what extent indigenous customary laws have been incorporated and implemented through the state’s legal system. To conclude, the theoretical emphasis on ontology framing distinctive bodies and processes of indigenous jurisprudence, together with the possibility of collaboration and translation between indigenous knowledge and academic disciplines, will create space for postcolonial indigenous legal consciousness, ongoing dialogues and relationship-building of self-determination and indigenous justice paradigms.


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The violence of humanitarians: Rachel Standfield, ‘Colonial violence, humanitarianism and the colonial present’, Law & History, 6, 1, 2019, pp. 175-191

23May19

Access the article here.


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The settler-colonial matriarchy: Joanna Cruickshank, Patricia Grimshaw, White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments: Maternal Contradictions, Brill, 2019

20May19

Description: In White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments, Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw provide the first detailed study of the central part that white women played in missions to Aboriginal people in Australia. As Aboriginal people experienced violent dispossession through settler invasion, white mission women were positioned as ‘mothers’ who could protect, nurture and ‘civilise’ Aboriginal people. In this position, missionary women found themselves continuously navigating the often-contradictory demands of their own intentions, of Aboriginal expectations and of settler government policies. Through detailed studies that draw on rich archival sources, this book provides a new perspective on the history of missions in Australia and also offers new frameworks for understanding the exercise of power by missionary women in colonial contexts.


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With a chapter entitled ‘Four Frames – Israeli Self-Defense, Genocide, Apartheid, Settler Colonialism: Ethnic Cleansing/Sociocide in Understanding Israel/Palestine’: Eve Spangler, Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict, Brill, 2019

20May19

Access the chapter here.


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Women as ‘systematic’ colonisers: Sarah Sharp, ‘”Your vocation is marriage”: Systematic Colonisation, the Marriage Plot and Finding Home in Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854)’, Scottish Literary Review, 11, 1, 2019, pp. 27-45

17May19

Abstract: Scottish-born author Catherine Helen Spence’s 1854 novel Clara Morison is a landmark in Australian literary history and has often been identified as the first work of fiction about Australia written by a woman. Eschewing the now more prominent iconography of the Australian bush, the novel focuses almost exclusively on domestic spaces and women’s experiences. This article considers Spence’s preoccupation with the domestic in relation to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s ideas of ‘Systematic Colonisation’. In his writings Wakefield identified a crucial role for women in the development of the British settler colonies as wives and mothers. This article argues that Spence engages with this context by drawing upon the nationally figurative role of the marriage plot in contemporary writing to explore and complicate the gender roles which underwrote the development of Australia’s first and only Wakefieldian colony.


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The treaties are numbered: Gina Starblanket, ‘The Numbered Treaties and the Politics of Incoherency’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2019

15May19

Abstract: This article explores the role of the numbered treaties relative to the continuity of the settler colonial project in Canada. Although the treaties are often invoked to characterize the federal government’s commitment toward strengthening or renewing its relationship with Indigenous peoples at a symbolic level, there remains a disjuncture between the “nation-to-nation” depictions of treaties and the complex political relationships that Indigenous peoples have called for since their signing. This article explores the inconsistent ways in which treaties have been taken up within Canadian legal and political institutions, arguing that the incoherency surrounding treaties promulgates the notion that treaties are being implemented while simultaneously obscuring, distorting and minimizing the rights of Indigenous peoples in practice. It demonstrates that the failure to engage with treaties as the locus of Indigenous peoples’ distinct political relationship with the Canadian state functions to continually produce conditions of colonization and dispossession through the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction as affirmed in treaties.


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