settler colonial studies blog

Settler fantasies now: Cailín E. Murray, ‘Locating the Wild Man: Rain Forest Enchantments and Settler Colonial Fantasies Amid the Ruins of the Anthropocene’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 32, 2019, pp. 60–73

03May19

Abstract: The figure of the Wild Man resides at the hinge where nature meets culture. In the Pacific Northwest, the Wild Man is known locally by different names and is interpreted through a variety of cultural and historical lenses. Settler colonialism in the region, for example, situated the Wild Man within wilderness and anachronistic spaces, aligning him with a bygone and romanticized indigeneity. Conversely, Coast Salish people invigorate new stories of the Wild Man as critique of the ruins of late capitalism. The Wild Man provides them with strength to assert their autonomy and authority in leading the restoration of the natural environment. This article explores monstrous entanglements between settler colonialism, indigeneity and the Wild Man on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Further imagining the settler city: Sarah Pinto, ‘Unsettling the Settler City: Indigenous Commemoration in Central Melbourne’, in S. Pinto, S. Hannigan, B. Walker-Gibbs, E. Charlton (eds), Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space, Springer, 2019.

01May19

Abstract: Australia’s commemorative landscapes are dominated by markers of the past that marginalise or erase Indigenous peoples and histories. Although evidence of prior and ongoing Indigenous presence fill Australia’s rural and urban spaces, built commemorations typically refer to a colonial and national past without Indigenous peoples. Around Australia, monuments, memorials and other forms of commemoration are focused instead on settler stories of discovery, exploration, pioneering and war. Since the 1990s, however, Indigenous peoples and histories have been brought into some of Australia’s commemorative landscapes. Monuments, commemorative namings, installation art, public statuary, walking trails and other public markings have all been used to commemorate Australia’s Indigenous pasts. These commemorations are not particularly monumental; for the most part, they can be found in the everyday places of parks, roads, bridges and thoroughfares. Taken together, however, they represent an incursion into Australia’s commemorative cultures. This chapter considers the effects of these commemorative incursions and inclusions in the city of Melbourne in the southeast of Australia. It examines the official commemorations of Indigenous histories and peoples that have been built into central Melbourne’s commemorative landscapes since 2000. This chapter argues that these commemorations have unsettled some of the commemorative markers of Melbourne’s settler foundations, and particularly those of the city’s sometime founding father, John Batman.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Imagining the settler city: Dabney Jael Meachum, The politics of place on Lingít Aaní: regulating settler space in Juneau, Alaska, MA dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2019

01May19

Abstract: This thesis looks at how settler-colonialism materializes through the conjoined city-making projects of image-making, tourism and homelessness regulation in Juneau, Alaska. Using the analytic method of haunting, I examine how these urban processes bring historical tactics of violence and erasure from the past into the present. By bringing literatures on settler-colonialism, place-making, and homelessness in conversation, I examine the urban boosterist imagining of Alaska as the Last Frontier as a practice of colonial violence and discuss how this imaginary produces conditions and practices of harm, particularly ones that target Tlingit people and place. I argue that this imaginary is positioned within a logic of elimination that seeks to undermine Indigenous ways of knowing and being on the land and seeks to further construct structures of settler hegemony in Juneau and elsewhere. The purpose of this project is to understand the relationship between settler-colonialism and the settler imaginary of place-making in Southeast Alaska. By specifically tracing these ideas through processes of unsettling in the city through the regulation of homelessness and the project of tourism, I identify how these explicit materializations of settler-colonialism in Juneau, Alaska are tied up in “imagining”. This project is about how settler space-making through the settler-imaginary is a specific tool of settler-colonialism that continues to produce Juneau and dispossess Tlingit people.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

With a section on ‘Settler Colonialism, Forced Assimilation, and Indigenous Genocide’: Jeffrey S. Bachman (ed), Cultural Genocide Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations, Routledge, 2019

01May19

Description: This book explores concepts of Cultural genocide, its definitions,　place in international law, the systems and methods that contribute to its manifestations, and its occurrences.

Through a systematic approach and comprehensive analysis, international and interdisciplinary contributors from the fields of genocide studies, legal studies, criminology, sociology, archaeology, human rights, colonial studies, and anthropology examine the legal, structural, and political issues associated with cultural genocide. This includes a series of geographically representative case studies from the USA, Brazil, Australia, West Papua, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, and Canada.

This volume is unique in its interdisciplinarity, regional coverage, and the various methods of cultural genocide represented, and will be of interest to scholars of genocide studies, cultural studies and human rights, international law, international relations, indigenous studies, anthropology, and history.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The early education of settlers: Fikile Nxumalo, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education, Routledge, 2019

01May19

Description: This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness and settler colonial legacies. Drawing from the author’s multi-year participatory action research with educators and children in suburban settings, the book highlights Indigenous presences and land relations within ongoing settler colonialism as necessary, yet often ignored, aspects of environmental education. Chapters discuss topics such as: geotheorizing in a capitalist society, absences of Black place relations, and unsettling unquestioned Western assumptions about nature education. Rather than offer prescriptive solutions, this book works to broaden possibilities and bolster the conversation among teachers and scholars concerned with early years environmental education.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

A settler-colonial gift: Amber Dean, Angela Failler, ‘”An Amazing Gift”? Memory entrepreneurship, settler colonialism and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’, Memory Studies, 2019

28Apr19

Abstract: Drawing on research undertaken at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this article considers the role of memory entrepreneurship in the museum’s historic launch and in a sampling of its content, social media posts, points of sale and marketing campaigns. These examples are read in tension with Roger I. Simon’s conceptualization of ‘the terrible gift’ of what we come to know belatedly about events of mass violence, which calls into question the consolatory promises of learning from ‘those who came before us’ and the ‘lessons of their lives’. The museum’s involvement in the City of Winnipeg’s tourism initiatives and the revitalization of Winnipeg’s downtown are also considered, and we suggest that the museum’s participation in the creative economy might affect its tendency to situate human rights violations primarily in the past. Critiques of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ present occupation of Indigenous land and the museum (and City of Winnipeg)’s ongoing reliance on natural resources extracted at the expense of Indigenous communities remain as difficult or inassimilable knowledge. Juxtaposing Indigenous, cultural and economic critiques with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ advancement of memory entrepreneurship, our article explores the inter-implication of consumer culture, capitalism, settler colonialism and the museum’s ability to contribute to societal change. We conclude by turning to the activism of members of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, arguing that their calls for access to safe water and an all-season road in and out of their community pose both an economic and a political challenge to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and its brand of memory entrepreneurship by insisting that gestures to include and proffer representational forms of recognition to Indigenous peoples must simultaneously attend to sovereigntist calls for redistribution of land and resources in order to meaningfully address the historical and ongoing injustices of settler colonialism.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Leadership under domination: Angelique Tardivel, Navigating Indigenous Leadership in a Settler Colonial World: Ron and Patricia John ‘Come Home’ to Stó:lõ Politics, MA dissertation, University of Saskatchewan, 2019

28Apr19

Abstract: This thesis explores the evolution of Stó:lõ Leadership in the Fraser Valley from the seventies to the nineties, with a focus on Chawathil First Nation (located near Hope, BC). Through a combination of archival and oral history research, I attempt to close the gap in the literature about the post second world war generation of Stó:lõ leaders by analyzing the leadership styles and choices of two leaders from Chawathil First Nation, Patricia and Ron John. While the previous generation of Stó:lõ veterans is well studied, little has been written on Patricia and Ron’s generation, despite their experiencing significant historical events such as the civil rights movements, contemporary assimilation attempts, globalization, the rise of digital technologies, and the Constitution Express. To identify the leadership characteristics of their generation and understand their decision-making process, I analyze Patricia and Ron’s life stories through the lenses of post-colonial theory, ethnohistory, and community-engaged research. The results of this analysis suggest that this generation’s hybridity and continuation of earlier leadership practices, such as the role of task-master of early Stó:lõ leaders (si:yam), enabled them to successfully navigate both the western and the Stó:lõ worlds. From this study a model of Stó:lõ decision-making process emerges in the shape of a Stó:lõ loom, holding key Stó:lõ leadership principles and providing meaning and context to Pat and Ron’s decisions as band manager and Chief of Chawathil First Nation.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenous place-agency decolonises: Adam J Barker, Jenny Pickerill, ‘Doings with the land and sea: Decolonising geographies, Indigeneity, and enacting place-agency’, Progress in Human Geography, 2019

24Apr19

Abstract: Indigenous and decolonising geographies should be unsettling and challenging to the ontological foundations of the geographical discipline. Yet despite many scholars recognising and arguing for the need for these perspectives, Indigeneity remains marginal and Indigenous knowledge has been denied academic legitimacy within geography. Using ‘doings’ as an active, emergent, and evolving praxis, this paper examines how we can do Indigenous and settler geographies better. It illustrates how knowledge, emotions, feelings and intuition only come into being through the doings of the body with other bodies, places, and objects, including non-humans. Action and thought are indistinguishable, feeling is knowing, and the world becomes known through doing and movement. In these doings, place – particularly the land and sea – is an active agent in the making of beings and knowledge. By focusing on active doings in place, and acknowledging the temporalities of Indigenous ontologies, geographers are better able to support political and everyday struggles, situate our work in relation to colonialism, recognise and value everyday practices of resurgence, and spend time building relationships. ‘Doing’ geography differently would decentre academics as the source of knowledge production, employ more diverse voices in our teaching and provide embodied and material resistance to colonialism and neoliberal capitalism.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Colonial America: J. M. Bacon, Matthew Norton, ‘Colonial America Today: U.S. Empire and the Political Status of Native American Nations’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 61, 2, 2019, pp. 301-331

24Apr19

Abstract: The article systematically assesses U.S.-Native relations today and their historical foundations in light of a narrow, empirical definition of colonial empire. Examining three core elements of colonial empire—the formal impairment of sovereignty, the intensive practical impairment of sovereignty through practices of governance and administration, and the continuing otherness of the dominated and dominant groups—we compare contemporary U.S.-Native political relations to canonical instances of formal colonial indirect rule empires. Based on this analysis, we argue that the United States today is a paradigmatic case of formal colonial empire in the narrow, traditional sense, one that should be better integrated into the comparative, historical, and sociological study of such formal empires. Furthermore, this prominent contemporary case stands against the idea that the era of formal colonial empire is over.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The re-education of settlers: Jeannie Kerr, ‘Indigenous Education in Higher Education in Canada: Settler Re-Education Through New Materialist Theory’, in C. Taylor, A. Bayley (eds), Posthumanism and Higher Education, Palgrave, 2019, pp 313-328

24Apr19

Abstract: In this viewpoint, I consider the contributions of new materialist theorizing to the field of Indigenous educational initiatives in Canadian universities in the context of Settler colonialism. Acknowledging the important work of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I explore the decolonial pedagogical priorities in higher education that have emerged in the context of national truth-telling over longstanding violences to Indigenous peoples in Canada. Framing part of this work as ‘Settler Re-Education’, I provide detail to the material and discursive context of Settler colonialism in Canadian society, and follow with a discussion of the ways that new materialisms and Barad’s agential realism provide theoretical grounding and pedagogical possibilities in Setter re-education. I conclude by sharing my related pedagogical practices in higher education that draw on a methodology of Barad’s re-turning to explore with students the diffracted patterns that emerge through material-discursive entanglements in Settler colonial society constituted by ethical indebtedness.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute