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Settler colonialism, engineered: John Hennessey, ‘Engineering Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido: A Postcolonial Reevaluation of William Wheeler’s Work for the Kaitakushi, Asia in Focus: A Nordic journal on Asia by early career researchers, 6, 2018, pp. 2-13

16Jul18

Abstract: In 1876, the Kaitakushi, the Japanese government agency responsible for the settlement of the northern island of Hokkaido, hired three Americans from Massachusetts Agricultural College: William Smith Clark, William Wheeler and David Pearce Penhallow. Their task was to establish a comparable institution in Hokkaido, Sapporo Agricultural College, that would spread American-style scientific agriculture among new settlers. Although recent historical research has highlighted the colonial nature of the modern settlement of Hokkaido and other American advisors’ role in transmitting modern technologies of settler colonialism, the tenure of these three professors has never been examined from a postcolonial perspective. This article will investigate the writings of engineer William Wheeler, who served as president of the new college for several years and advised the Kaitakushi on numerous infrastructure projects, to look for clues about his attitudes towards and role in Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido. Textual evidence reveals Wheeler’s awareness of and complicity in this undertaking.


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Settler colonialism requires a portable domesticity: Grace Moore, ‘Raising high its thousand forked tongues’: Campfires, Bushfires, and Portable Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2018

16Jul18

Abstract: This article explores the significance of the campfire to Australian settler culture in the nineteenth century. Considering the paradox that campfires could be both comforting and evoke terror, the piece considers how they provided a link between the northern and southern hemispheres. Drawing on a range of primary materials — many of which have been forgotten — the article addresses the thin boundary between warmth and tragedy that came to be associated with campfires. Furthermore, it examines connections between fire and the emergence of an Australian settler identity, along with the bush dweller’s role in changing the face of the wilderness and its fire ecology.


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Three ways of indigenisation: Adam Gaudry, Danielle Lorenz, ‘Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: navigating the different visions for indigenizing the Canadian Academy’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 2018

16Jul18

Abstract: Following the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, Canadian universities and colleges have felt pressured to indigenize their institutions. What “indigenization” has looked like, however, has varied significantly. Based on the input from an anonymous online survey of 25 Indigenous academics and their allies, we assert that indigenization is a three-part spectrum. On one end is Indigenous inclusion, in the middle reconciliation indigenization, and on the other end decolonial indigenization. We conclude that despite using reconciliatory language, post-secondary institutions in Canada focus predominantly on Indigenous inclusion. We offer two suggestions of policy and praxis—treaty-based decolonial indigenization and resurgence-based decolonial indigenization—to demonstrate a way toward more just Canadian academy.


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Indigenous mobilities challenge settler colonialism: Rachel Standfield (ed.), Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ANU Press, 2018

16Jul18

Description: This edited collection focuses on Aboriginal and Māori travel in colonial contexts. Authors in this collection examine the ways that Indigenous people moved and their motivations for doing so. Chapters consider the cultural aspects of travel for Indigenous communities on both sides of the Tasman. Contributors examine Indigenous purposes for mobility, including for community and individual economic wellbeing, to meet other Indigenous or non-Indigenous peoples and experience different cultures, and to gather knowledge or experience, or to escape from colonial intrusion.

‘This volume is the first to take up three challenges in histories of Indigenous mobilities. First, it analyses both mobility and emplacement. Challenging stereotypes of Indigenous people as either fixed or mobile, chapters deconstruct issues with ramifications for contemporary politics and analyses of Indigenous society and of rural and national histories. As such, it is a welcome intervention in a wide range of urgent issues. Second, by examining Indigenous peoples in both Australia and New Zealand, this volume is an innovative step in removing the artificial divisions that have arisen from “national” histories. Third, the collection connects the experiences of colonised Indigenous peoples with those of their colonisers, shifting the long-held stereotypes of Indigenous powerlessness. Chapters then convincingly demonstrate the agency of colonised peoples in shaping the actions and the mobility itself of the colonisers.


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On US settler modernity: Jodi Kim, ‘Settler Modernity, Debt Imperialism, and the Necropolitics of the Promise’, Social Text, 36, 2, 2018, pp 41-61

16Jul18

Abstract: This essay offers an investigation of US settler colonialism and military empire, a conjunction theorized as settler modernity, in the post–World War II era. It argues that settler modernity is an ensemble of relations significantly structured and continually reproduced through manifold regimes, relations, and forms of debt, and in particular through debt imperialism. Debt imperialism is a kind of temporal exception. It is a multiscalar process through which the United States imposes imperial power by rolling over its significant national debt indefinitely and not conforming to the homogeneous time of repayment that it imposes on others. Debt is not simply a financial economy but also crucially a broader social relation, production of subjectivity, and creation of a temporal exception through which US settler modernity functions and continually attemptsto re-create itself. Focusing on Asia and the Pacific as a significant site where we witness a militarized convergence of these arrangements, the essay asks: How is debt a necropolitical regime for those impoverished, gendered racial, and colonized nations and subjects whose promissory notes must be fully repaid with interest? How has US settler modernity been constituted by this usurious necropolitics of the promise, even as it continually confers upon itself the temporal exception of debt imperialism? This analysis reveals that what is at stake in US settler modernity is not only the elision of conquest and genocide as the conditions of possibility for military empire, economic power, and the avowed defense of liberal democracy but also the attempt to possess metapolitical authority.


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On the racial regimes of settler colonialism: Jodi A. Byrd, ‘”Variations under Domestication”: Indigeneity and the Subject of Dispossession’, Social Text, 36, 2, pp. 123-141

16Jul18

Abstract: This essay draws upon critical ethnic studies, Indigenous critical theory, and settler colonial studies to consider how biopolitics and biocapital have converged in North America through the racial regimes inaugurated by settler colonialism. It does so by close reading the popular science fiction television series Orphan Black to interrogate how late colonialism saturates cultural productions and to demonstrate how dispossession functions through durative and recursive structures. Providing the extractive and appropriative logics underlying racial capitalism, dispossession is both generative and procedural as it produces investments in neoliberal subjectivity, property, and territoriality—and their loss—to ensure that the originary colonization of Indigenous peoples in North America remains the condition of possibility for settler colonial social relations.


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The ‘proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism’: Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, Chandan Reddy, ‘Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities’, Social Text, 36, 2, 2018, pp. 1-18

16Jul18

Abstract: This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.


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The ‘Sixties Scoop’ as a settler-colonial moment: Sarah Carneiro, Policy, Poverty, and Indigenous Child Welfare: Revisiting the Sixties Scoop, MA Dissertation, Queen’s University, 2018

10Jul18

Abstract: I analyse the Sixties Scoop through the lens of Indigenous and feminist scholarship to contextualize the Scoop within the specific historical, political, and cultural moment of the postwar Canadian “welfare state” during which it was occurring. In the 1960s and 1970s, Canada was attempting to foment a unique “Canadian” identity that became increasingly tied to the values of cultural pluralism and tolerance. During this time, both the state and Indigenous activism questioned where and how Indigenous people would “fit” (or would not fit) into the burgeoning Canadian cultural “mosaic” of the late 20th century. Through an analysis of the 1966/67 federal government report, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: Economic, Political, and Educational Needs and Policies (The Hawthorn Report), alongside articles from the Journal – Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (JOACAS), mostly authored by social workers about reserve communities in Northern Ontario during the 1960s and 1970s, I aim to illuminate the intimate relationship between capitalist development, settler colonialism, and patriarchy in postwar Canada. I argue that one of the causes of the Scoop was the inability of governments and Children’s Aid Societies (CAS) administrators and frontline service providers to conceptualize the mass apprehension of Indigenous children from their homes during the 1960s to 1980s as holistically and inextricably connected to the social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of Indigenous people’s lives.


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Decolonising settler education: Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang (eds), Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, Routledge, 2018

04Jul18

Description: Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives on education have long persisted alongside colonial models of education, yet too often have been subsumed within the fields of multiculturalism, critical race theory, and progressive education. Timely and compelling, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education features research, theory, and dynamic foundational readings for educators and educational researchers who are looking for possibilities beyond the limits of liberal democratic schooling. Featuring original chapters by authors at the forefront of theorizing, practice, research, and activism, this volume helps define and imagine the exciting interstices between Indigenous and decolonizing studies and education. Each chapter forwards Indigenous principles – such as Land as literacy and water as life – that are grounded in place-specific efforts of creating Indigenous universities and schools, community organizing and social movements, trans and Two Spirit practices, refusals of state policies, and land-based and water-based pedagogies.


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Decolonising settler carceral archipelagos: Christopher Perreira, ‘Unsettling Archives: Cultures of Carceral States and Settler Logics’, American Quarterly, 70, 2, 2018, pp. 327-334

04Jul18

Excerpt: In the opening of “Conquest and Incarceration,” the brief introduction to City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965, Kelly Lytle Hernández begins with the statement: “Mass incarceration is mass elimination” (1). Signaling Patrick Wolfe’s influential theory, which argues that settler societies are the structures built on the logic of Native elimination, the author invites reflection on what might be gained by bringing together, and potentially expanding the parameters of, both carceral studies and settler colonial studies.


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