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The settler as curator: Bronwyn Labrum, ‘Collecting, curating and exhibiting cross-cultural material histories in a post-settler society’, in Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy (eds), Curatopia, Manchester University Press, 2018

17Jan19

Abstract: This chapter considers social history in a postcolonial contest. It specifically examines how the history of the majority culture in a post-settler society has been and might be curated. Using Aotearoa New Zealand as its case study, it considers the figure of the Pākehā (non-indigenous) curator in relation to, and also in contrast with, Indigenous collections and displays. What does a history curator look like in a post-settler society? Does the history curator continue the mutual asymmetry that has characterised relations and curatorial endeavours? Or is there a way to recognise cross-cultural material histories? In considering the development of history, and specifically social history, it suggests that a more useful concept is material history, rather than historical material cultures studies. The rest of the chapter ranges across a broad range of material history, including fashion and clothing, and design, to consider how contemporary museums deal with everyday life and its material aspects in museums, which are still to a large extent focused on discrete objects and forms of material culture, and which carry the burden of the historical development of their collections into a post-settler world.


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Migration and settler colonialism: Julia Katz, From coolies to colonials, PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2018

13Jan19

Abstract: Focusing on the period 1870-1920, my dissertation offers a social history of colonization and exclusion that integrates the experiences of Chinese migrants, indigenous Hawaiians, and white colonial and territorial officials. Drawing from government records and reports, newspaper articles, and family histories, I recover the aspirations of Chinese migrants who arrived in the islands as plantation laborers, but staked claims to alternative futures through independent, collective, creolized, and occasionally illicit economic networks, frequently capitalizing on their intimate contact with Native Hawaiians. I argue that although the management of Asian contract labor was critical to the expansion of American empire in the Pacific, migrants also undermined Americanization by pursuing autonomous endeavors. While migrant mobility and enterprise frustrated both American imperial plans for Hawai‘i as a white settler society and local elites’ development of a plantation colony, migrants cooperated as well as competed with indigenous investments in the islands. I treat American annexation and the extension of Chinese exclusion laws as a crucial hinge that profoundly changed the conditions and possibilities of Chinese settlement in Hawai‘i, incentivizing migrants’ accommodation to American empire and mobilizing the politics of Asian settler colonialism.

The dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first interrogates opium regulation in the Hawaiian kingdom as a racializing colonialist discourse that patronized Native Hawaiians and criminalized migrant Chinese, laying the ideological groundwork for both annexation and exclusion. The second chapter considers the rise and fall of Chinese rice culture, and examines immigration exclusion laws as economic policies designed to constrict non-white migrant enterprise. The third chapter investigates Chinese success in commercial food production, specifically fishpond and poi factory operation, as the result of collective financial networks, cultural appropriation, and interracial economic intimacies. My final chapter explores Chinese diplomatic and grassroots resistance to exclusion laws and the culture of racial violence that these laws fostered. I argue that legal, economic, and political insecurity around annexation freighted organized responses to everyday transgressions against Chinese subjects, overlaying concerns about the treatment of marginalized migrants with the weight of exclusion.

Ultimately, I contend that Hawai‘i Chinese mobilized settler colonial politics in response to American imperial takeover and exclusion, which curtailed the possibility of grounding migrant rights in transnational frameworks of belonging, and reduced diasporic Chinese to aliens unable to make political claims on the territory from outside the category of citizenship. As American imperial policies threatened the security of Chinese futures in the islands, migrants couched their claims to belonging in a discourse of racial and economic exceptionalism premised on their alleged superiority to Native Hawaiians.


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Conservation and settler colonialism: Anja Nygren, ‘Review of Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest’, Conservation & Society, 17, 1, 2019, pp. 120-121

13Jan19

Global conservation efforts have come under increased academic and activist scrutiny in recent years. The nature protection agendas formulated by big international conservation organisations at conflictive forest frontiers in the global South—and their ambiguous links to neoliberal agendas of payment for environmental services and market-based ecotourism—have figured prominently in academic and public discussion. Conservation through enclosure and green grabbing by primitive accumulation in different parts of Latin America has also been widely investigated in recent political-ecological and critical conservation studies. Megan Ybarra’s book, Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest, focuses on international conservation efforts to protect the 1.6 million ha Maya Forest in northern Guatemala as a hotspot of global biodiversity. Through her careful ethnographic analysis, she contributes significantly to contemporary debates, convincingly showing that global conservation efforts have turned lowland Maya Indians into immigrants on their own land.

Green Wars offers a sophisticated discussion of complicated links between conservation politics, authoritarian state-making, settler colonialism, and racialised dispossession of indigenous peoples in tropical forest-frontiers. Ybarra meticulously demonstrates the political-economic processes that have led to large-scale land transactions and sedimented trajectories of resource accumulation by dispossession in Guatemala. Moreover, drawing on feminist political ecology, postcolonial perspectives, and critical race theories, Ybarra addresses a crucial lacuna in conventional studies of conflicts over conservation that focus solely on struggles over material resources. The analysis carefully shows how seemingly benevolent conservation projects become framed by a settler logic of elimination of the Other and thus end up justifying violent displacement of Indians from their territories. Although international conservation organisations have not called for violent dispossessions, by framing their agendas with imaginaries of the Maya forest as pristine wilderness and Q’eqchi’ Indians as unruly reserve invaders, they ultimately support racialised resource-access exclusion. By defining indigenous land-tenure struggles outside their conservation mandate, global conservation organisations fail to combine efforts for sustainable conservation and sustainable livelihoods in indigenous territories.

In her ethnographic research, carried out in politically volatile circumstances, Ybarra laudably reflects her role as a gringo researcher, showing solidarity with indigenous struggles for justice and decolonisation of the racialised settler system, while at the same time negotiating with advocates of land-extensive conservation programmes. Using sophisticated archival analysis and life-history interviews, Ibarra tracks the decades-long forms of physical and symbolic violence with which state authorities, land-owning elite, and military forces have sought to dispossess Maya Indians of their territory. Recent efforts to enclose the Maya Forest for conservation violate indigenous rights to resource access, while provoking a series of injustices including state-led land dispossessions, structural state violence in the form of unavailability of basic services, and state-sanctioned private violence against non-consensual communities. Through a careful analysis of historical maps and land-registration archives, Ybarra shows that many of the lands inside the Maya Biosphere Reserve, although framed as core conservation areas with no human occupants by the park officials, consist of indigenous working lands, sacred landscapes, and places of territoriality.

Green Wars also provides an interesting analysis of how indigenous contestations against fortress conservation are not just battles over resource access and land ownership but also struggles over cultural identity and symbolic meanings in which different knowledges, ideologies, and ontologies of nature clash with each other. Ybarra shows how the collective memory of repeated state violence, accumulation by dispossession, and denial of indigenous ontologies frames Maya interpretations of contemporary conservation agendas, while the indigenous cartography of refusal rejects proposals for subsuming Q’eqchi’ territoriality under the settler logics of land ownership. Instead of portraying Maya Indians as passive victims of structural state violence, Ibarra demonstrates the indigenous stamina for land activism and alternative visions of territoriality. As Ybarra thought-provokingly asserts, Q’eqchi’ show an interruptive capacity to live within and beyond settler society by redirecting their imagination to other questions, other ideas, and other ways of knowing.

Based on the lively debate over the political ontology of nature in current political-ecological and post-colonial approaches, it would have been interesting to know even more about ontological questions related to struggles over nature protection and local livelihoods in Guatemala. Given that Ybarra carried out long-term ethnographic field research in the area, it would have been enlightening if she had analysed the Q’eqchi’ views of the political ontology of nature in greater depth. Deserving of more attention are her inspiring arguments that, in Q’eqchi’ struggles for recuperation, ontologies of territory as identity and a spiritual relationship with the landscape are intimately interwoven with an indigenous way of farming and the daily search for livelihoods.

Based on the facts that this monograph is entitled Green Wars and that Ybarra considers a feminist political ecology to offer a good way to analyse the power relations in nature conservation, providing more detailed analyses of the views of conservation experts and development practitioners of the struggles over conservation and indigenous livelihoods would have made her analysis more convincing. More discussion of how the conservation authorities perceived the environmental-social transformations within the biosphere reserve and its surroundings, and how they explained the causes and consequences of such transformations could have deepened analysis. While supporting epistemological pluralism, Ybarra’s postcolonial analysis of Indians as Other is, in parts, based on an unintentionally dichotomic view of ladinos versus indigenous people. More careful examination of the multifaceted relationship between the Indians and land-poor ladino populations in the struggles for justice in Petén and Alta Verapaz might have prevented this.

Chapters One, Two, and Four are theoretically coherent and ethnographically rich analyses, with a careful focus on the links between conservation efforts, settler colonialism, and state violence. Chapter One provides a detailed analysis of the histories of state violence that politicised Maya forests and criminalised lowland Q’eqchi’ territorial rights. Chapter Two examines the conservationists’ supposedly apolitical projects for nature protection and their representations of lowland Maya as unruly migrants, while Chapter Four offers a rich case study of settler colonialism overlaid by a questionable veneer of conservation. In contrast, Chapter Three, although analysing interesting questions of racialised ladino ideologies, suffers from clear links to conservation. Furthermore, while Chapters One and Two carefully show how advocacy of fortress conservation by conservation organisations is a reason why local civil-war survivors associate international conservation efforts with violence, analysis in Chapter Five lacks the same sort of thoroughness. This chapter, focusing on links between narco-terrorism and conservation ideologies, contains repetition and lacks sufficient empirical grounds for claiming that the “effect of twenty-first century green wars has been to subject indigenous territorial claims to narco-narratives, interpellating all communities that contest the legitimacy of protected areas to putative narcos” (p. 152). Overall, the different chapters of the book could have been woven together more coherently, although this weakness in organising structure might be the result of the material from several chapters having already been published in articles in scientific journals. The book’s maps are highly illustrative; however, the quality of the few photos included could have received more attention.

The concluding chapter emphasises the Maya Indians’ call for decolonisation by recognising the intimate relationship between indigenous peoples and the land. As the monograph presents thought-provoking, highly relevant theoretical and policy-oriented debates on conservation and livelihoods, the conclusion could have provided a more analytical synthesis of the main theoretical insights and societally relevant findings of the study. In its present form, the conclusion comprises a fairly normative list of “musts” that morally aware Northern scholars and justice advocates should take into account. Instead of such lists, it could have focused more on indigenous imaginings for decolonial futures.

Ultimately, Green Wars is a very welcome contribution to the existing literature on complex relations between global conservation efforts, struggles for local livelihoods and recognition of indigenous territorial rights. It interestingly shows how indigenous people engage with an ambiguous both/and politics when coping within settler legal systems, while going beyond settler-state subjections. It also demonstrates how indigenous calls for justice demand a collective rethinking of environmental-social relations as the locus where nature and society co-produce each other, and that land, forest, water, air, and subsoil constitute a lived landscape that cannot be commodified. In such an ontology, financial compensation is not an answer to indigenous claims for self-determination. I highly recommend this book for researchers and graduate students in geography, anthropology, political science, sociology, and environmental social science, as well as for conservation experts, environmental activists, social justice and human rights advocates, policy-makers, and development practitioners working on sustainability issues in different parts of the world.


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The continuity of sovereignty through dynamic resistance: Lee Murray Hanover, To Remain Near the ‘Water Ditch’: Paiute Sovereignty and United States Settler Colonialism, Owens Valley, California, 1870-1937, MA Dissertation, UNLV, 2018

09Jan19

Abstract: This thesis argues that Owens Valley Paiute sovereignty manifested itself both inherently and adaptively from 1870 to 1937. Sovereignty is an historically contingent term that reflects how nations deploy power to retain control over their communities and provide self-determination within economics, politics, culture, and society. This thesis illuminates Paiute sovereignty through the Peoplehood model, explaining how Paiute sovereignty existed at the moment of their creation, when Coyote placed them next to the Water Ditch—Owens River—and told them to spread throughout but never leave their homeland, the Owens Valley. This inherent mandate allowed Paiutes to adapt Coyote’s stipulation to remain in the Water Ditch to varied manifestations of settler colonialism. United States representatives and citizens attempted to erase Paiute existence in the valley through capitalist assimilation forcing Paiutes from seasonal round work to stationary wage work; U.S. map makers eliminated Paiute oral tradition and bounded geographies and claimed their homelands; literary authors supported the myth of the vanishing Indian to naturalize settler ownership of Paiute lands; and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) representatives first tried to remove Paiutes from the valley, and then attempted to eliminate Paiute identities and rights to water. Paiutes did not become dependent on settler economies; instead, they adapted wage work into their economic lives and identity to retain control over their communities. Paiutes deployed anthropological research to resist mapping erasures and explain a Paiute bounded mental geography. Paiutes worked for and with colonial literary writers, but more importantly told stories of their survival, resistance, and future as Owens Valley Paiutes. Lastly, Paiutes used congressional committees and deployed their community representatives to resist the LADWP’s water politics and remain in the “Water Ditch” on federally protected Paiute reservations.


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Broken treaties? Fix them! Xavier Scott, ‘Repairing Broken Relations by Repairing Broken Treaties: Theorizing Post-Colonial States in Settler Colonies’, Studies in Social Justice, 12, 2, 2018, pp. 388-405

06Jan19

Abstract: This article examines the British colonial theft of Indigenous sovereignty and the particular obstacles that it presents to establishing just social relations between the colonizer and the colonized in settler states. In the first half, I argue that the particular nature of the crime of sovereign theft makes apologies and reparations unsuitable policy tools for reconciliation because Settler societies owe their very existence to the abrogation of Indigenous sovereignties. Instead, Settler states ought to return sovereignty to the land’s Indigenous peoples. In the second half of this paper, I take up some of the practical questions of how this might be done and anticipate a number of objections. Giving up sovereignty would not mean dispossessing the millions of colonists who currently reside in these countries of their homes and property – but it does mean rethinking the constitutional makeup of a country and how that serves to benefit the different peoples who make their homes there.


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On the settler coloniality of yoga: Tria Blu Wakpa, ‘Decolonizing Yoga? and (Un)settling Social Justice’, Race & Yoga, 3, 1, 2018

06Jan19

Excerpt: What are our responsibilities not only to the Indigenous peoples whose lands we occupy, but also to the Indigenous peoples and people of color whose practices we benefit from? This special cluster of Race and Yoga recognizes the need to (re)center Indigenous lands, practices, and peoples locally and globally in discussions of decolonization and yoga. Settler colonial and/or dominant yoga discourses exclude peoples who are Indigenous to the partition of Turtle Island often referred to as the U.S. as well as the Indigenous South Asian, South Asian, South Asian American, and/or South Asian diasporic peoples from whose ancestors and lands yoga broadly originated. Whereas Native American/Indigenous, South Asian, and South Asian American studies have frequently overlooked embodied practices and the ways that movement means, academic fields that center the body, embodiment, and performance studies have often omitted Indigenous peoples and their contributions. With the primary exception of Native American/Indigenous studies, fields often do not account for settler colonialism or Indigenous futurities. In the U.S., discourses around “decolonizing yoga” frequently focus on globalization and likewise do not acknowledge settler colonialism or Native American sovereignties.


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The settler’s ‘human’? Alison Howell, Melanie Richter-Montpetit, ‘Racism in Foucauldian Security Studies: Biopolitics, Liberal War, and the Whitewashing of Colonial and Racial Violence’, International Political Sociology, 2018

04Jan19

Abstract: This article argues that while Foucauldian security studies (FSS) scholarship on the biopolitics of security and liberal war has not ignored racism, these works largely replicate Foucault’s whitewashing of the raciality and coloniality of modern power and violence. Drawing on Black, indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial studies, we show how Foucault’s genealogy of biopower rests on an unspecified concept of the “human,” failing to account for how notions of “human” were constituted through the savage and slave other, how enslaved people were rendered into things, and how punitive, sovereign violence persists as a (settler) colonial technique of gratuitous, not merely instrumental, violence. FSS exacerbates these problems. This article challenges two core FSS propositions on liberal war: 1. that “human life cannot ever be secured,” which replicates Foucault’s Eurocentric reliance on an unspecified “human” as the object of biopolitics; 2. that “everyone is (potentially) dangerous” and thus open to the punitive/lethal dimensions of liberal power, which reduces racism to a sorting process after the establishment of biopolitics and liberal war, rather than a precondition of it.


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The settler’s apology: Hannah Chong, ‘Reconciliation in Settler-Colonial States: A Study of the Political Apology’, The Yale Review of International Studies, 2018

04Jan19

Excerpt: In a 2016 speech in Hiroshima, former United States President Obama brought a message of peace and a call for a “moral awakening” for humanity. However, for a trip laden with symbolic gestures, such as the laying of a wreath memorializing Japanese nuclear bomb victims, a political apology was conspicuously missing; prior to the trip, it was made clear that Obama would not be apologising for his country dropping an atomic bomb on the city. non-apologetic stance despite demands from Japanese nuclear survivors hints at the significance attached to this symbolic gesture.

Despite a well-deserved reputation for being stingy with apologies, the U.S. congress did issue one in 2009. Buried in a 67-page defence appropriation spending bill was an “apology” towards particular American indigenous communities “for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted” on them. Understandably, members of the Navajo Nation were unimpressed with the “apology,” citing its lack of publicity and open acknowledgement. This episode further illustrates the importance of not only an apology, but also a proper apology to indigenous victims of settler-colonial violence. The Obama administration eventually ended in January 2017 without any significant mention of this “apology.”

Cynics decry the political apology as “mere ritual,” citing its impracticality in mending intergroup relations, since it often lacks a material dimension. Stories like this remind us otherwise: in politics, symbolic gestures matter. Hence, rather than accept the principle that political apologies are ineffective, this piece questions the role that political apologies play in the reconciliation process in settler-colonial states. With this as my primary research question, I demonstrate the symbolic contributions of the political apology towards achieving holistic reconciliation.


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The settler’s fear: Jamie Hawkins Elder, Unsettling the Colony: Gender, fear and settler colonialism during the evacuation of ‘refugee’ settler women from Land Wars conflicts at Taranaki (1860-1861) and Poverty Bay (1865, 1868), MA Dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2018

04Jan19

Abstract: Anxiety and fear were central to the condition of settler colonialism in 1860s New Zealand. The Land Wars of the 1860s in New Zealand provoked potent anxiety about the enemy, about loved ones’ lives and about survival. The anxiety could transform into full-blown fear and panic with the onset of violence, or even the prospect or threat of violence. This thesis examines and compares evacuations of ‘refugee’ settler women and children from the sites of Land Wars conflicts in Taranaki (1860-61), and at Waerenga-a-hika (1865) and Matawhero (1868) in Poverty Bay. It explores the character and response to danger of what might be described as ‘settler anxiety’. Settlers of the 1860s used the specific term ‘refugee’ to describe the displaced settler women and children. Māori also faced displacement during the wars, though their situation is not within the scope of this thesis. The story of the Land Wars thus far has focused mainly on the narrative of the military conflict and examines events primarily as a male-centric, racial conflict. However, the time has come to examine experiences off the battlefield – of non-combatants. Women and children in particular are far more central to the history of the wars than is currently acknowledged. The first part of the thesis explores how the Land Wars ‘refugees’ coped with separation from homes and family. The second part examines how settler society, both on a formal governmental basis and on a more informal community level, reacted to the presence of ‘refugees’ emotively and with practical assistance. The research examines the language settlers used and the points they emphasised in their writing or speeches to reveal the frameworks of settler colonialism. Personal diaries, letters and memoirs are used to understand the settlers’ situations. To understand the broader reaction of settler society the thesis draws on newspapers, provincial council correspondence and records, and general government debate and legislation. This thesis argues that the existence of women and children settler ‘refugees’ during the Land Wars represented the settler colonial system in turmoil, providing evidence that the wars involved a conflict off the battlefield as well as on it. Colonists dreamed of creating a safe and secure colony where settlers could acquire land and make a livelihood to support a family. Consequently, attacks on family went to the heart of settler colonialism. The ‘refugees’ symbolised the ‘unsettling’ of settler colonialism, both literally by their locational displacement and figuratively by igniting fear about the stability of the settler colony. In response to the ‘refugee’ crisis settlers vehemently asserted their attachment to ‘home’, to prove their right to live in the colony, and promoted their solidarity with the ‘refugees’ and against enemy Māori, who they saw as threatening the settler dream. The evacuation of Land Wars ‘refugees’ is also considered for its similarities and differences to other ‘refugee’ situations internationally during the colonial era.


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Neoliberal settler colonialism: Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel, Palestine and Rule of Power Local Dissent vs. International Governance, Palgrave, 2018

28Dec18

Abstract: This book explores how the rule of power relates to the case of occupied Palestine, examining features of local dissent and international governance. The project considers expressions of the rule of power in two particular ways: settler colonialism and neoliberalism. As power is always accompanied by resistance, the authors engage with and explores forms of everyday resistance to the logics and regimes of neoliberal governance and settler colonialism. They investigate wide-ranging issues and dynamics related to international governance, liberal peacebuilding, statebuilding, and development, the claim to politics, and the notion and practice of resistance. This work will be of interest for academics focusing on modern Middle Eastern politics, international relations, as well as for courses on contemporary conflicts, peacebuilding, and development.


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