settler colonial studies blog

Settler-colonial dispossession is gendered: Salem Kimberley Anne Hicks, Gendered dispossession and settler colonialism: A feminist carceral analysis of the privatization of Indigenous land, PhD Dissertation, University of Leicester, 2019

20Feb19

Abstract: This theoretically based thesis employs a critical feminist analysis to examine the gendered aspects inherent in the implementation of private property on Indigenous reserve land in Canada. Although Indigenous peoples in Canada have previously rejected privatization of their reserve lands for fear of assimilation of their traditional lands to market-based commodification and rationalities, as well as fragmentation and reduction of their traditional land base, versions of privatization policies continue to be advocated by some government officials, think tanks, scholars, and a small but significant number of Indigenous peoples themselves. With the Canadian governmental shifts to neoliberal socioeconomic policies converging, in some ways, with Indigenous demands for more self-determination, it is foreseeable that both the anxiety and appeal of privatization of Indigenous reserve lands will resurface. Recent advocates of privatization of reserve lands present it as necessary for unlocking the market value of dead capital in land leading to investment certainty thereby unleashing an entrepreneurial “spirit” leading to prosperity. The neoliberal ideological linkage of private property to purportedly emancipatory entrepreneurialism is depoliticized from historical and ongoing gendered and racial colonialism. Settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous women from their traditional relationships to land and labour, coupled with current growing expectations of women as participants in entrepreneurialism, has inspired the main question of the thesis as: How does the contemporary rationalization of private property for First Nations reserve land operate as a gendered tool of dispossession for Indigenous women? To answer this question, this thesis uses an interdisciplinary socio-political lens to interrogate the First Nations Private Property Ownership Act (FNPOA) as a contemporary example of Indigenous land privatization policy. It is argued that the logic underlying the policy, including entrepreneurialism as dependent on private property, along with gender-blind historical revisionism, operates to erase and obscure not only the historical colonial dispossession of Indigenous women but also the current carceral mechanisms in capitalism that work to maintain the heteropatriarchal settler state status quo. The thesis employs an interdisciplinary framework drawing on Indigenous feminist theory and carceral geography, historicizing historical and anthropological research to elucidate how past dispossession is still operational in the contemporary state. This critical feminist analysis unsettles the common sense of private property and contributes to feminist engagement with settler colonial studies.

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Born settler-colonial, not yet capitalist: James Parisot, How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West, Pluto Press, 2019

18Feb19

Abstract: In an age of political and economic uncertainty, from the Great Recession to the election of Donald Trump, it is essential to understand the ways capitalism and imperialism are central to the American way of life. The story told in this book brings together a new interpretation of American history beyond mainstream perspectives to chart the ways in which white-settler colonialism pushed expansion on the western frontier of empire, and locates the history through which empire gradually took on a capitalist form. It follows the pathway of expansion from the making of an Atlantic world market through the creation of white colonies in New England and Virginia. From here the book charts the growth of empire across the north and south, highlighting the gendered dynamics of empire-building, and culminates in a discussion of the Civil War and the consolidation of over two centuries of capitalist development explaining how a society with capitalism became a capitalist society.

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Where do indigenous economies fit? Sarah A. Radcliffe, ‘Geography and Indigeneity III: Co-articulation of Colonialism and Capitalism in Indigeneity’s Economies’, Progress in Human Geography, 2019

10Feb19

Abstract: In this final report of three, I examine Indigenous peoples’ dynamic co-constitution with contemporary political economy in its manifestations of neoliberalism, resource extractivism, reordering production and labour relations. Indigenous subjects and spaces are not reducible to the status of capitalism’s side-effects, necessitating analytical attention to the co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in particular, variegated ways. Debates around extractivism, neoliberalism and economic want are hence recent manifestations of 500-year-old disputes over monetary and normative values, resources and livelihoods. Whether as corporations, labourers, welfare recipients, or ambassadors for culturally distinctive forms of livelihoods-exchange, Indigenous peoples occupy complex, relational positions across economic spheres. The paradox of indigeneity’s economies is that Indigenous populations have been constituted as Other to homo oeconomicus, yet their embeddedness within the economic flows, labour processes and forms of accumulation that make the modern world belie any separation. The report ends by raising questions about decolonising accounts of indigeneity’s economies.

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Breaking the settler contract one duck at a time: Miranda Johnson, ‘The Case of the Million-Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract’, The American Historical Review, 124, 1, 2019, 56–86

10Feb19

Abstract: In settler states such as Canada, indigenous peoples’ claims for sovereignty in the late twentieth century became matters of intense public and political debate. Provoked by widespread indigenous rights activism of the 1970s, the Canadian state embarked on a large-scale examination of claims for rights and restitution. By focusing on the 1962 case of a duck hunter who insisted on his treaty right to hunt as he pleased in a Canadian borderlands region that was becoming more tightly woven into the fabric of the settler nation, this article argues for the value of recovering the discursive strategies of indigenous peoples in making sovereign claims prior to 1970s activism. I suggest that such claims were effective in bending the “settler contract,” which refers to the founding of settler states in dispossession and the silencing of indigenous actors. My approach brings to the fore a distinctive form of non-elite politics, what I call “treaty talk,” or the vernacular stories, civic rituals, and political disputes concerning the treaty promises that Canadian authorities made to northern indigenous communities earlier in the twentieth century. Although treaty talk did not break the settler contract, it posed a significant challenge to settler law and led one judge to reinvent a Canadian myth of benevolent empire.

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Indigenous water and indigenous life: Christina Boyles, Hilary E. Wyss, ‘Water Is Life: Ecologies of Writing and Indigeneity’, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 30, 3-4, 2018, pp. 1-9

10Feb19

Access the article and the articles in the issue here.

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The responsibility of teaching the history of settler colonialism: James Miles, ‘Teaching History for Truth and Reconciliation: The Challenges and Opportunities of Narrativity, Temporality, and Identity’, McGill Journal of Education, 53, 2, 2018, pp. 294-311

10Feb19

Abstract: This paper argues that history educators and teachers are uniquely implicated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action through their responsibility to teach Indigenous and Canadian history, including the injustices of settler colonialism. After examining the politics of Canada’s ongoing truth and reconciliation process, this paper articulates three conceptual challenges for history education in pursuit of reconciliation: narrativity, temporality, and identity. This paper concludes by suggesting possible pedagogical opportunities for each of these challenges, taking into consideration a historical thinking approach to teaching and learning now embedded in most provincial and territorial curricula.

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Settler colonial modernism in the face of revolution: Bradley Flis, Border Ends: Anti-Imperialism, Settler Colonialism, And The Mexican Revolution In U.S. Modernism, PhD Dissertation, Wayne State University, 2018

10Feb19

Abstract: From 1910-1920, the Mexican Revolution became a source of anxiety, interest, and inspiration to those who paid attention to its political turmoil as reported in the popular press. It would lead to the reinvigorating of a debate about U.S. intervention in the political affairs of Mexico, indeed, for some, the question was one of annexation. Responding to a growing imperialist culture in the U.S., William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, John Reed and Max Eastman of The Masses were among those who looked to modernist aesthetic practice to critique military and economic expansionism in Mexico.

This dissertation explores that discursive interplay between U.S. modernism and anti-imperialism through representations of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), in writing itself conceptualized as “revolutionary.” While the writers that I take up in this study each, though in different ways, represented Mexico as a site of revolutionary modernity that points to a shared, transnational cultural affinity toward constructions of “the new” as the basis of an anti-imperialist politics, each also, confronts in their writing the disrupting presence of the American Indian within this anti-imperialist vision. Each of these writers in their own way explicitly connects an interest in the aesthetics of the “new” with the colonial history of the “New World.”

At the same time, they register self-consciously in their texts the contradiction of using an anti-imperialist discourse to consolidate national identity in the face of ongoing settler colonialism: the appropriation and occupation of native land, the genocide of native peoples, and the erasure of native culture. In key texts about Mexico written by Stein, Williams, Reed, and Eastman, references to a history of U.S. settler colonialism and the presence of the American Indian emerge as a limit to their anti-imperialist poetics and a challenge to their desires for the construction of a “new,” modernist national culture.

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Culture and water protectors: Edwin López, ‘Race, Culture, and Resistance at Standing Rock: an Analysis of Racialized Dispossession and Indigenous Resistance’, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 18, 1-2, 2019

05Feb19

Abstract: This article examines role of culture in the struggle to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. To better frame this analysis, I introduce the concept of “racialized political cultures of opposition.” I turn to the Lakota prophecy of the “Black Snake” to show how water protectors refashioned an old folkloric belief to 1) name the source of the problem, 2) connect their immediate concerns to the centuries long history of colonialism, and 3) mobilize resistance. Important to this analysis is how an assemblage of cultural elements enabled water protectors to connect their struggle to non-Lakota and non-Indigenous peoples.

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A settler-colonial history prompts a geography of responsibility: Michelle Daigle, ‘The spectacle of reconciliation: On (the) unsettling responsibilities to Indigenous peoples in the academy’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2019

03Feb19

Abstract: This paper places geographies of responsibility on stolen and occupied Indigenous lands in settler colonial Canada. Responsibilities to Indigenous lands and peoples are contextualized within the spectacle of reconciliation in Canada. In drawing on a range of critical analyses of reconciliation led by Indigenous scholars, I examine how the truth and reconciliation process has naturalized and fetishized Indigenous suffering and trauma while cultivating settler colonial spectacles whereby white settler Canadians engage in hollow performances of recognition and remorse. These spectacular spaces, I argue, become centered and severed from a larger terrain of settler colonial dispossession and violence that Indigenous peoples continue to resist on an everyday basis. I specifically focus on settler colonial spectacles and reconciliation mandates taking shape in Canadian postsecondary institutions. In doing so, I focus on how Canadian universities located on stolen Indigenous lands (actively supportive of the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands) continue to be a crucial site of settler colonial relations and a constitutive part of the settler colonial state.

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The settler’s ‘dreamwork’: May Chew, ‘Phantasmagoric City: Technologies of Immersion and Settler Histories in Montreal’s CitéMémoire’, Public, 29, 58, 2018, pp. 140-147

03Feb19

Abstract: This paper focuses on CitéMémoire, a multi-year outdoor exhibit located throughout historic Old Montreal. Organized around the confluence of Montreal’s 375th birthday, Canada’s Sesquicentennial, as well as Expo 67’s 50th anniversary, CitéMémoire uses large-scale interactive projections and augmented reality to tell the city’s history from the time of European contact onward. The exhibit’s technologies of immersion guide audiences through a spectacularized historical landscape, rendering notions of heritage and nation into palpable archives that audiences encounter directly through their bodies. This article demonstrates how archival and cultural technologies, which choreograph audiences’ bodily, imaginational, and affective positionalities, prove central to the ‘dreamwork’ of settler coloniality.

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