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Science fiction as a battleground against settler colonialism: Dallas Hunt, ‘”In search of our better selves”: Totem Transfer Narratives and Indigenous Futurities’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42, 1, 2018, pp. 71-90

24Oct18

Abstract: Much contemporary science fiction urges us to focus on eco-activism and sustainable futures in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. From a critical Indigenous and anticolonial perspective, however, the question becomes “for whom are these futures sustainable”? Set in a nondescript desert dystopia, George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road 2015 alludes to the westerns of yesteryear and the Australian “outback”—spaces coded as menacing in their resistance to being tamed by settler-colonial interests. This article charts how Miller’s film, while preoccupied with issues pertaining to global warming and ecological collapse, replicates and reifies settler replacement narratives, or what Canadian literature scholar Margery Fee has referred to as “totem transfer” narratives (1987). In these narratives, ultimately the “natives” transfer their knowledges and then disappear from view, helping white settlers remedy the self-created ills that currently threaten their worlds and enabling them to inherit the land.

In the second half, I also consider how Indigenous futurist texts offer decolonizing potentials that refute the replacement narratives that persist in settler-colonial contexts. In particular, I examine how Indigenous cultural production emphasizes the importance of the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledges and refuses the hermeneutic of reconciliation that seeks to discipline Indigenous futures in the service of a settler-colonial present.


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Indigenising the carceral: Kelly Struthers Montford, Dawn Moore, ‘The Prison as Reserve Governmentality, Phenomenology, and Indigenizing the Prison (Studies)’, New Criminal Law Review: In International and Interdisciplinary Journal, 21, 4, 2018, pp. 640-663

24Oct18

Abstract: Critical scholarship on the carceral reifies two main pillars of critical thought—phenomenology and governmentality. In this study of shifting carceral logics and experiences concerning Indigenous peoples in Canada, we borrow from these traditions and also challenge their centrality in prison studies. We argue that the prison is the new reserve, and use that argument as a vehicle to illustrate the influence of less recognized forms of thought within critical prison studies—especially post-colonial and Indigenous scholarship. It is through these varied lenses that we show the paradox of Indigenizing punishment that at once disavows the further incarceration of Indigenous peoples and sets out deliberate strategies to Indigenize the carceral.


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The pattern of settlement: I. C. Wegman, Profitable and unprofitable acres: patterns of European expansion across Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-35, PhD thesis, University of Tasmania, 2018

24Oct18

Abstract: This thesis uses Historic Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) to uncover the continuing and new patterns of land use in colonial Van Diemen’s Land to 1835.
In 1817 free settlers were frst encouraged to emigrate to the colony of Van Diemen’s Land. They brought with them substantial assets, as well as ideals of British agriculture, and the following years saw a massive transformation of the island’s landscape. By the 1820s many visitors assumed these new agriculturalists were aspiring to recreate Britain, and praised what they saw as the early stages of this. They dismissed the work of the former convicts on their much smaller grants, and ignored the thousands of years of land management conducted by the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In fact, as much as the settlers sought to reshape the landscape, they themselves were reshaped by it. Their aspirations were only possible because of the work of their predecessors.
By placing land grants and sales data into an HGIS, this thesis reconstructs the sequence of European settlement in three regions of the island: New Norfolk, Bothwell and through the Midlands. These case studies are used to argue the existence of two primary European settlement patterns. The frst is riverine intensive, a pattern based on European and settler-colonial precedent. The domain of emancipist grantees, the name refects the signifcance of waterways in shaping the early colony. This pattern gave way to the open extensive in the early-1820s, as the colony’s economy shifted to fne wool exports and the settlers required larger acreages.

This thesis argues that both of these patterns were reliant on the Aboriginal mosaic patterns, as the settlers were drawn to areas kept clear with fre-stick farming. Settlers in the open extensive stage were particularly drawn to the large ‘plains’, and their land-use represented a drastic departure from accepted British methods. Nonetheless, the riverine intensive settlers also benefted from cleared lands. By combining the settlement pattern parameters with environmental data and settlement sequences, this thesis argues that it is possible to uncover details of the pre-European landscape that were not recorded before it was irrevocably altered by the arrival of large-scale pastoral pursuits.
Connecting land records to colonial survey charts also enables this thesis to measure the extent to which acreages were over- or under-measured. Using these fndings, it analyses allegations of corruptions that were frequently levelled against the colonial surveyors. Their work is critiqued within the context of surveyor work-load, changing settler and governmental priorities, and the rise of the Black War.


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Settlers as kinshipwreckers: Rachel Bryant, ‘Kinshipwrecking: John Smith’s adoption and the Pocahontas myth in settler ontologies’, AlterNative, 2018

24Oct18

Abstract: John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) canonized a settler colonial narrative activity that I call kinshipwrecking—a conventional mode of storytelling that destroys and moves to supplant traditional Indigenous kinship structures and obligations. Smith’s archetypal refusal of Indigenous kinship is arguably the most important element of his text, and yet it has been treated as an afterthought in most previous scholarship. His Historie depicts the process of colonization as a war between English patriarchal governance and Indigenous kinship systems—the latter of which are portrayed as power structures that must be infiltrated (through alliance or adoption) and exploited by the English and destroyed/transformed from within. The colony Smith wrote about is today remembered as the first permanent English settlement on Turtle Island, and Settlers in what some now call Canada and the USA continue to live their lives within the legacy of Smith’s archetypal and systematic rejection of Indigenous kinship. Using Mattaponi oral history as a counter narrative that both challenges and contextualizes Smith’s in/famous tale, this article considers the Settler mythology of Pocahontas and Wahunsenaca (Powhatan) through the lens of Indigenous customary or traditional adoption practices.


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Settler colonial statehood: Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood, Duke University Press, 2018

24Oct18

Description: In Unsustainable Empire Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state. Hawai‘i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai‘i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio tracks these disparate stories by marshaling a variety of unexpected genres and archives: exhibits at world’s fairs, political cartoons, propaganda films, a multimillion-dollar hoax on Hawai‘i’s tourism industry, water struggles, and stories of hauntings, among others. Saranillio shows that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. With clarity and persuasive force about historically and ethically complex issues, Unsustainable Empire provides a more complicated understanding of Hawai‘i’s admission as the fiftieth state and why Native Hawaiian place-based alternatives to U.S. empire are urgently needed.


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Settler empire! Charles W. A. Prior, ‘Settlers Among Empires: Conquest and the American Revolution’, in Edward Vallance (ed.), Remembering Early Modern Revolutions England, North America, France and Haiti, Routledge, 2018

20Oct18

Abstract: Standard accounts of the ideological origins of the American Revolution tend to emphasise the centrality of republican or constitutionalist ideas in the struggle for sovereignty within the British Empire. This chapter takes an alternate approach and seeks to recover how the process and ideas of conquest functioned in articulations of settler sovereignty. This requires that we look carefully at how settlers related not just to the imperial state but to the powerful and territorially extensive ‘kinetic’ empires of the Native Americans. In their diplomatic and military relations with Indians, settler governments exercised a range of sovereign powers: to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances and establish commerce. The settler imperium that emerged in the American east ultimately negated the sovereign territorial claims of the British state.


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Settler-indigenous solidarity? Rebekah Lea Kartal, The search for solidarity in the United States-Mexico borderlands/occupied O’odham territory, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2018

20Oct18

Abstract: Qualitative research in Tucson, Arizona reveals limitations to coalition building based on activists’ distinct positions and experiences, as well as their disparate understandings of the meaning of solidarity. Nonetheless, in the context of increasing militarization in the United States-Mexico borderlands/occupied O’odham territory, there is a history of coalition building to challenge the violence, at times halting the U.S. state’s plans for further militarization. Thus, it is timely to consider the (im)possibilities for solidarity amongst activist groups confronting militarization. To do so, I first examine the analysis and strategies put forward by immigrants’ rights groups, incorporating literature related to racial capitalism and imperialism. Next, I consider critiques and strategies presented by a Palestine/occupied O’odham land solidarity group, integrating scholarship on settler colonialism and indigenous resistance. Finally, I discuss challenges to and potentials for coalition building in the region based on listening to activists’ varying sentiments related to solidarity. I posit that a form of solidarity that requires finding a common struggle, despite the recognition of different experiences, may reify settler colonial ways of relating. I argue a decolonial framework may foster a form of solidarity that does not require a search for one form of oppression that is “common” to all, but rather embraces a form of solidarity that strives to listen to and learn from multiple subject positions. Additionally, a form of solidarity that embraces analyses born out of listening to various (hi)stories of those affected by the ongoing militarization in the region provides a nuanced understanding of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands/occupied O’odham territory. Such an understanding highlights the complexity and multiple technologies of power at play in the U.S. settler colonial capitalist nation, as well as various forms of ongoing resistance to oppression.


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Settler/indigenous Fredonia: Andy Doolen, ‘Claiming Indigenous Space: John Dunn Hunter and the Fredonian Rebellion’, Early American Literature, 53, 3, 2018, pp. 685-712

18Oct18

Abstract: In 1826, in Mexican Texas, a coalition of American Indians and Anglo settlers declared its short-lived independence in the name of the Fredonian Republic. This article introduces John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America, from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen (1823) as a key source for understanding the rebellion’s indigenous context. The Memoirs elucidates many of the motives, interests, and ideas that ultimately defined Hunter’s activism and galvanized the pan-Indian movement in the Red River valley. His subversive depiction of indigenous space beyond the Mississippi River rejected the settler myth of a savage civilization trapped in a primordial past; uncovered an archive of indigenous geographical knowledge; and identified the swift, destructive impact of agrarian expansion, ethnic cleansing, and fur trade capitalism on American Indians and their homelands. As an author and as a leader of the Red Fredonia confederacy, Hunter mapped an anticolonial geography, where American Indians resisted settler colonialism and articulated new forms of peoplehood.


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American Association of Geographers, Political Geography Specialty Group – CFP: Settler colonial fabrications/Fabricating settler colonialism

18Oct18
American Association of Geographers (AAG)
Annual Meeting Washington, DC, April 3-7, 2019
Organizers: Rhys Machold (University of Glasgow), Stepha Velednitsky (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sara Salazar Hughes (USC)
Both interest in settler colonial studies and critiques of that field (Simpson 2017; Snelgrove et al 2014; Macoun & Strakosch 2013; Svirsky 2017) have been on the rise in the last decade. These discussions have been animated by comparative studies of different “cases” of settler colonialism as well as a focus on the notion of certain forms/sites as “exemplars” (Lloyd 2012), often defined by heightened levels of deprivation and violence. In differentiating settler colonialism from other colonial forms but also exploring the interconnections between them, leading theorists have often focused on the guiding logics and structures behind these socio-historical formations. Indeed, settler colonial studies  “leans towards the discursive aspects and imaginative geographies of settler colonialism” (Salamanca 2014:22), often negating its material and infrastructural underpinnings and the recurring disruptions/frictions involved in practices of accumulation through violence and dispossession. This tendency among critics has produced a unidirectional, instrumental and unhindered picture of settler colonial formations that sediments rather than usettles their perceived inevitability and coherence and develops a (possibly) misplaced focus on typologies. As Laura Ann Stoler has recently argued, “Settler colonialism might better be understood not as a unique ‘type,’ but as the effect of a failed or protracted contest over appropriation and dispossession that is not over when the victories are declared, killings are accomplished, and decimation is resolved as the only ‘solution.’ Settler colonialism is only ever an imperial process in formation […] that it is always at risk of being undone” (Stoler 2016: 61). Indeed, while settler formations are built on claims of inevitability and coherence, and can appear as unidirectional, instrumental, and unhindered, their material unfoldings are riddled with failures and disruptions. Settler colonial societies are therefore invariably marked by a series of recurring settler anxieties: anxiety about how the colonized shape and are an intrinsic part of the colonizing society’s identity; existential fear of being undone by indigenous resurgence; need to keep separate ‘what we have done’ from ‘who we are’ (Veracini 2011).

Within this session, we are interested not just in the conceptual and material ways that settlers manage these psychic conflicts and psychopathologies, but also in the ways movements for decolonial resistance might leverage these fissures and disjunctures toward liberatory futures, thereby unraveling settler colonial fabrications. We seek to do so by exploring the workings of settler colonial failures and the roles of expertise within the troubled ideological and embodied interfaces of settler ideology and indigenous/decolonial resistance. Within these conversations, we are also interested in the distinctions between the more conventional representation of expertise as ‘packages’ of knowhow to be exchanged in a marketplace versus the idea of expertise in terms of relations between different sites and actors (cf. Agnew 2007). By positioning claims and practices of expertise in the latter way, we aim to probe how self-declared ‘experts’ and their claims to expertise enable connections and networks to be forged between various places and processes:

  • How do communities create and/or exploit failures within settler colonialism  for anti-colonial and decolonial resistance (Tuck and Yang 2012)?

  • How does the interface between the imagined/psychic and the material/practical inflect expressions of failure and possibly evoke struggle or resistance?

  • How is expertise deployed to address settlers’ anxieties about perceived threats?

  • In what ways are the junctions of settler ideology/knowledge/expertise and resistant knowledges/sites of material resistance productive, fraught, or disruptive?

  • How do settlers strategically mobilize/deploy anxiety through recurring claims to overcoming failure/difficulty via ‘progress’ and ‘innovation’?

  • How does geographic, economic, and political variegation shape the ways in which ideology and expertise operate within a range of settler colonial projects?

Interested applicants should send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Stepha Velednitsky at velednitsky@wisc.edu by Monday, October 15th. Accepted applicants will be notified by October 22. *Note: to enhance the quality of discussion, session participants must submit brief conference papers (approx. 10 pp.) to the session organizers by March 18, 2019 for distribution to discussant(s).


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Whose settler-colonial definition? Discussing recent contestations about Elizabeth Warren’s claims to indigeneity

17Oct18

See what the BBC makes of it.


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