settler colonial studies blog

An act of settler colonialism: Mary-Ellen Kelm, Keith D. Smith, Talking Back to the Indian Act: Critical Readings in Settler Colonial Histories, University of Toronto Press, 2018

21Nov18

Description: Talking Back to the Indian Act is a comprehensive “how-to” guide for engaging with primary source documents. The intent of the book is to encourage readers to develop the skills necessary to converse with primary sources in more refined and profound ways. As a piece of legislation that is central to Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples and communities, and one that has undergone many amendments, the Indian Act is uniquely positioned to act as a vehicle for this kind of focused reading.

Through an analysis of thirty-five sources pertaining to the Indian Act—addressing governance, gender, enfranchisement, and land—the authors provide readers with a much better understanding of this pivotal piece of legislation, as well as insight into the dynamics involved in its creation and maintenance.

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Memory policy and settler colonialism: Sarah Maddison, ‘The Limits of the Administration of Memory in Settler Colonial Societies: the Australian Case’, Memory International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2018

21Nov18

Abstract: Settler colonial societies provide particular challenges for the instantiation of memory policy since the settler-colonial project was driven by a logic requiring the ‘elimination’ of Indigenous peoples and their time. This very fact challenges the legitimacy of the colonial mission for a better way of life and feeds the tensions at the very core of memory policies in these societies in coming to terms with the past. Focusing on contemporary Australia, this article first examines the challenges inherent to memory policy in settler colonial societies before reviewing three attempts at administering memory for future coexistence. This approach highlights the way public policies of memory can result in formal procedures rather than in historical narratives. This recognition of the ongoing contested nature of the settler colonial project leads to the suggestion for a different, more agonistic orientation to memory policy that is predicated on the persistence of this conflictual dynamic rather than on its resolution.

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Adoption against settler colonialism: Amar Bhatia, ‘Re-peopling in a settler-colonial context: the intersection of Indigenous laws of adoption with Canadian immigration law’, AlterNative, 2018

21Nov18

Abstract: This article examines the intersection of Indigenous and Canadian ways of making and maintaining relations through the specific examples of adoption and immigration. Canada and all Indigenous societies assert the authority to re-people themselves. Unlike Canada, Indigenous peoples must do so in the face of ongoing settler colonialism. I argue that Indigenous peoples and nations have authority to regulate these matters under Indigenous laws and systems of treaty relations. However, Canadian laws and policies have served to obscure this authority. I argue that non-metaphorical decolonization requires the continued exercise of Indigenous authority over “peopling” powers. These powers necessarily include authority over adoption at societal, familial, and individual levels via, respectively, ongoing treaty relations and customary membership. Adoption has formed part of this resistance but remains limited by Canadian sovereignty and the state’s assertions of control over borders and immigration.

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History education in settler society: Matilda Keynes, ‘History Education for Transitional Justice? Challenges, Limitations and Possibilities for Settler Colonial Australia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2018

21Nov18

Abstract: In recent times, a conception of history education as facilitating truth, remembrance and critical thinking has been positioned as useful for transitional justice in divided societies, but this analysis has not been extended to settler states which are also characterized by prolonged division and state-administered violence. To explore this, the article draws on examples from Australia where scholars have been extending the framework of transitional justice in order to better address the structural nature of injustice in settler states. By investigating the uses of temporality and historicization in history education, it concludes that while disciplinary models might contribute to the popular theses of transitional justice by encouraging students to emulate the skills of the historian, these models would likely work to strengthen rather than challenge the legitimacy of the Australian settler state. Therefore, any attempts to align history education with reconciliation in Australia will require a rethinking of current disciplinary models.

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Story painting against settler colonialism: Seán Kerins, Kirrily Jordan, ‘Mining Giants, Indigenous Peoples and Art: Challenging Settler Colonialism in Northern Australia Through Story Painting’, in Paul Cooney, William Sacher Freslon (eds), Environmental Impacts of Transnational Corporations in the Global South, Emerald Publishing, 2018, pp. 35-71

21Nov18

Abstract: The historian Patrick Wolfe reminds us that the settler colonial logic of eliminating native societies to gain unrestricted access to their territory is not a phenomenon confined to the distant past. As Wolfe writes, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” In the Gulf of Carpentaria region in Australia’s Northern Territory this settler colonial “logic of elimination” continues through mining projects that extract capital for transnational corporations while contaminating Indigenous land, overriding Indigenous law and custom and undermining Indigenous livelihoods. However, some Garawa, Gudanji, Marra, and Yanyuwa peoples are using creative ways to fight back, exhibiting “story paintings” to show how their people experience the destructive impacts of mining. We cannot know yet the full impact of this creative activism. But their body of work suggests it has the potential to challenge colonial institutions from below, inspiring growing networks of resistance and a collective meaning-making through storytelling that is led by Indigenous peoples on behalf of the living world.

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Settler modernists: Dan Tout, ‘A gumtree is not a branch of an oak’: Indigenising settler nationalism in 1930s Australia, PhD dissertation, Swinburne University, 2018

21Nov18

Abstract: Questions over what, whether and when the Australian nation is or might be have been of consistent concern throughout most of Australia’s settler-colonial history and remain so today. In attempting to construct a national culture and identity, settler Australians, like settlers elsewhere, have invested in the establishment of a national literary tradition. This project of national cultural construction has emphasised a dual process of acclimation and maturation to claim the settler collective’s attainment of maturity and legitimacy within the metropolitan domain of world literature and belonging to the land that provides the underlying imperative for settler colonisation itself. In the standard story of inevitably unfurling national cultural development towards these two ends, Britain has played the part of ‘the mother country’ (or parent oak), while Australia is the child (or seedling) that eventually and inevitably reaches maturity in the new soil. In Manning Clark’s famous application of Henry Lawson’s phrase, Britain was ‘the Old Dead Tree’, Australia ‘the Young Tree Green’.

Yet these narratives of national maturation operate to conceal the nature and the complexity of the environment the national literary culture was supposed to be acclimatising to, and becoming expressive of. In constructing narratives of Australian national cultural development in terms of bilateral oppositions between colony and metropole, such narratives neglect the complexities of the settler-colonial, as distinct from the colonial, ‘situation’. On the contrary, this thesis is premised on the central proposition that the settler-colonial situation is fundamentally conditioned by a triangular system of relationships involving settler, metropolitan and Indigenous agencies. In this schema, the settler is compelled towards both indigenisation and neo-European replication, while both trajectories are similarly founded on the prior displacement — both literal and symbolic — of pre-existing Indigenous populations.

The 1930s was a crucial moment in the project of national identity construction, in which prevailing circumstances combined to make settler nationalism simultaneously more urgent and increasingly problematic. In particular, the demise of the ‘doomed race’ ideal, which had until then envisaged the inevitable and imminent resolution of the triadic relations of settler colonialism into the dyadic ones of ‘franchise’ or ‘dependent’ colonialism, meant that settlers, and especially settler nationalists, found themselves confronting the prospect of a persistent Indigenous presence within the boundaries of the settler nation. They were therefore compelled to negotiate the more complex — for the nationalist project, at least — trilateral relations characteristic of settler colonialism, rather than the relatively more straightforward bilateral ones of colonialism proper.

This dissertation focuses on this historical and cultural context, and on three exemplary settler nationalists working within and responding to it: writer, editor and publisher, Percy Reginald ‘Inky’ Stephensen (1901–65); poet and editor, Reginald Charles (Rex) Ingamells (1913–55); and writer and polemicist, Alfred Francis Xavier Herbert (1901–84). At a historical moment marked by ambivalence in Australia’s relationship with metropolitan England, Stephensen, Ingamells and Herbert sought to establish settler Australia’s national cultural independence. In doing so, they each encountered, and responded to, the reality of a persistent and resistant Indigenous presence within the settler nation. While Stephensen posited himself and the Australian national culture he sought to construct as inheritors of both European and Indigenous traditions, and Ingamells engaged in a project of radical indigenist appropriation that separated and usurped a symbolic indigeneity from its bearers, Herbert celebrated instead the potentiality of ‘Euraustralian’ hybridity to overcome his own, and by extension his compatriots’, illegitimacy. While these approaches are ostensibly at odds, the central argument advanced in this thesis is that they share a drive towards settler indigenisation and independence as their common, overriding concerns.

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Augmented reality for decolonisation? Amanda Almond, Rob McMahon, Diane P. Janes, Greg Whistance-Smith, Diana Steinhauer, Stewart Steinhauer, ‘We are all related: Using augmented reality as a learning resource for Indigenous-settler relations’, Northern Public Affairs, October 2018, pp. 38-41

15Nov18

Excerpt: Efforts to improve Indigenous-settler relations include recognizing and learning the truths of past and ongoing settler-colonialism in Canada, as well as challenging them. Access to appropriate educational resources is one important approach, as are projects that support critical, reflective and reciprocal relationship-building through the co-development of resources by teams comprised of members from Indigenous and settler communities. In this context the We are all related: Using augmented reality as a learning resource for Indigenous-settler relations project invites participants to co-create and share digital stories to build and strengthen understandings of treaty and Indigenous-settler relations.

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A settler-colonial Garibaldi: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Postcolonial Garibaldi?’, Modern Italy, 2018

14Nov18

Abstract: This paper offers an original interpretation of Garibaldi’s political style and imaginary. The aim is to account for Garibaldi’s sustained engagement with the possibility of displacement as an alternative to revolution. It begins in an afternoon on a remote small island between two oceans. Garibaldi was considering his options. When he returned to Italy, he had seriously reflected on the possibility of colonising other places. Colonising had entered the picture. It was a postcolonial Garibaldi.

Questo saggio si propone di offirire una nuova interpretazione dell’origine dello stile politico e dell’immaginario di Garibaldi. L’obiettivo è quello di considerare la maniera in cui Garibaldi pensava la relazione tra emigrazione e rivoluzione. L’articolo inizia in un pomeriggio su un’isola remota tra due oceani. Garibaldi stava considerando diverse opzioni. Quando tornò, la possibilità di colonizzare altri luoghi ere stata ponderata attentamente. Si trattava di un Garibaldi postcoloniale.

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Settler courts uphold settler colonialism: Michael McCrossan, ‘Eviscerating Historic Treaties: Judicial Reasoning, Settler Colonialism, and ‘Legal’ Exercises of Exclusion’, Journal of Law and Society, 2018

14Nov18

Abstract: This article examines the reasoning of Canadian Supreme Court justices in the area of Aboriginal treaty rights, paying particular attention to the Grassy Narrows (2014) decision. By not only engaging with the internal logics contained within treaty rights decisions, but also by further contextualizing the decisions and comparing them to the transcripts of their respective hearings, it provides an additional perspective on the socio‐cultural relations of power inscribed within the legal field. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that members of the Supreme Court have displayed a consistent orientation towards logics predicated upon the absorption and elimination of Indigenous legal perspectives. In fact, what a reading of the hearing transcripts together with the Grassy Narrows decision reveals is a judicial privileging of established property interests and extractive impulses underpinning the settler‐colonial development of the Canadian state.

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The American West is a global settler West: Janne Lahti, The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives, Routledge, 2018

14Nov18

Description: The American West and the World provides a synthetic introduction to the transnational history of the American West. Drawing from the insights of recent scholarship, Janne Lahti recenters the history of the U.S. West in the global contexts of empires and settler colonialism, discussing exploration, expansion, migration, violence, intimacies, and ideas. Lahti examines established subfields of Western scholarship, such as borderlands studies and transnational histories of empire, as well as relatively unexplored connections between the West and geographically nonadjacent spaces. Lucid and incisive, The American West and the World firmly situates the historical West in its proper global context.

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