settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism disrupts indigenous-animal relations: Sarah Deer, Liz Murphy, ‘”Animals May Take Pity on Us”: Using Traditional Tribal Beliefs to Address Animal Abuse and Family Violence Within Tribal Nations’, Mitchell Hamline Law Review, 43, 4 , 2017

18Feb18

Excerpt: The relationship between Native people and animals has a rich, complex history. For tens of thousands of years, Native people have cultivated their symbiotic relationship with the animal world, and these relationships demonstrate a unique centralized status that animals have for many tribal cultures. Beginning with early contact with Europeans, however, the relationship between Native people and animals began to deteriorate. Europeans and Native people had fundamentally different perspectives on the relationship between humans and animals. In some cases, the cosmologies of Europeans and Natives toward animals were mutually exclusive; either animals were seen as equal to humans or were subject to the complete dominion of man. This clash of worldviews parallels many other areas of colonial power, including the treatment of women and children. Whereas many tribal cultures do not view animals and humans as occupying a hierarchy, European belief systems have historically put men in complete dominion over their property—namely women, children, and animals.

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Feminicide under settler colonialism: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Suhad Daher-Nashifin, ‘Femicide and Racism: Between the Politics of Exclusion and the Culture of Control’, in Pinar Ilkkaracan Rima Athar (eds), Sexual Politics in Muslim Societies Studies from Palestine, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, GAYa NUSANTARA, 2017, pp. 19-61

16Feb18

Abstract: This paper seeks to analyse the ways in which the interrelationship between formal and informal legal-social systems constructs women’s murders within Palestinian society. The main focus will be on the processes through which the local/global “politics of exclusion” colludes with a localized “culture of control” to generate the context within which violence against colonized women in colonial/occupied zones is fueled, strengthened and even justified, by colonized and colonizer alike. More precisely, we address how raced, classed, and gendered processes of exclusion at both the local and global levels jeopardize the lives and bodies of women in conflict zones, in this particular case those of Palestinian women. The term “politics of exclusion” refers to the mechanisms through which the Israeli occupying state and members of the international community participate in the denial of the Palestinian people’s rights to a homeland, safety, housing, freedom of movement, economic development, education, health, etc. The term “culture of control” refers to localized manifestations of patriarchal and masculine logics that are empowered by the politics of exclusion. An examination of the crime of femicide will shed light on how the global denial of Palestinian suffering (underpinned by the global “War on Terror” and current climate of “Islamophobia”) has heightened a sense of fear of the Palestinian Other, and contributed to a state of social, legal and political chaos within Palestinian society, in which Palestinians are further marginalized. This chaotic and violent state of affairs has, in turn, opened up new spaces in which hegemonic and/or patriarchal power-holders within Palestinian communities can exercise greater control over women’s lives, bodies and sexuality.

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The normality of indigenous alterity: Paula López Caballero, Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, Paul K. Eiss (eds), Beyond Alterity Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico, University of Arizona Press, 2018

15Feb18

Description: The concept of “indigenous” has been entwined with notions of exoticism and alterity throughout Mexico’s history. In Beyond Alterity, authors from across disciplines question the persistent association between indigenous people and radical difference, and demonstrate that alterity is often the product of specific political contexts.

Although previous studies have usually focused on the most visible aspects of differences—cosmovision, language, customs, resistance—the contributors to this volume show that emphasizing difference prevents researchers from seeing all the social phenomena where alterity is not obvious. Those phenomena are equally or even more constitutive of social life and include property relations (especially individual or private ones), participation in national projects, and the use of national languages.

The category of “indigenous” has commonly been used as if it were an objective term referring to an already given social subject. Beyond Alterity shows how this usage overlooks the fact that the social markers of differentiation (language, race or ethnic group, phenotype) are historical and therefore unstable. In opposition to any reification of geographical, cultural, or social boundaries, this volume shows that people who (self-)identify as indigenous share a multitude of practices with the rest of society and that the association between indigenous identification and alterity is the product of a specific political history.

Beyond Alterity is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding indigenous identity, race, and Mexican history and politics.

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The Indian history of G. W.: Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation, Oxford University Press, 2018

15Feb18

Description: George Washington dominates the narrative of the nation’s birth, yet American history has largely forgotten what he knew: that the country’s fate depended less on grand rhetorical statements of independence and self-governance than on land—Indian land. While other histories have overlooked the central importance of Indian power during the country’s formative years, Colin G. Calloway here gives Native American leaders their due, revealing the relationship between the man who rose to become the most powerful figure in his country and the Native tribes whose dominion he usurped.

In this sweeping new biography, Calloway uses the prism of Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time—Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle—and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America’s founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders’ interaction with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic’s destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country.

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The strength of analogy: Hedi Viterbo, ‘Ties of Separation: Analogy and Generational Segregation in North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine’, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, 42, 2, 2017, pp. 686-749

15Feb18

Abstract: Taking analogy as both its mode and object of inquiry, this article examines the relationship between historical-geographical analogies and generational segregation (the large-scale separation of children and adults) from three complementary perspectives.

First, due to restrictions recently introduced by the Israeli authorities, Palestinian prisoners have been prevented from reading popular study materials dealing with both Indigenous child removal and analogies concerning settler-Indigenous relations in North America and Australia. This article revives the critical potential of this encounter with analogies and accounts, by putting forward an analogy between the removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools in the United States and Canada, Australia’s Aboriginal “stolen generations,” and the increased separation of Palestinian children and adults in Israeli custody. This analogy highlights key parallels: the deleterious effects of allegedly benevolent generational segregation; the invocation of law and children’s “best interests;” the severance of unwanted intergenerational influences; the targeting of children due to their presumed plasticity; the use of separation to govern adults; and links between generational segregation, “national security,” and incarceration.

Second, these analogies—those that Palestinians explored in Israeli prison and the generational segregation analogy developed here—partly overlap with, and acquire their potential and implications from other analogies, concerning settler-Indigenous relations in North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine. This article investigates the roles such analogies have played, and their alignment with competing ideologies, across a range of legal and political discourse over the past two centuries.

Finally, in order to maximize the critical potential of such historical-geographical analogies, this article offers a conceptual critique of three relevant discourses: legalistic analogies concerning generational segregation, which leave unchallenged the broader field of child law and policy on which such segregation hinges; rigid conceptualizations of (settler) colonialism in debates on analogies between North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine; and the tendency to reduce analogy to similarity.

Bringing into conversation previously separate bodies of scholarship, these three interdependent perspectives shed new light on important yet hitherto unexamined issues at the intersection of analogy and generational segregation.

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Indigenous presences: Corinne L. Hofman, Jorge Ulloa Hung, Eduardo Herrera Malatesta, Joseph Sony Jean, Till Sonnemann, Menno Hoogland, ‘Indigenous Caribbean perspectives: archaeologies and legacies of the first colonised region in the New World’, Antiquity, 92, 361, 2018, pp. 200-216

13Feb18

Abstract: The role of pre-contact indigenous peoples in shaping contemporary multi-ethnic society in Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and elsewhere in the Caribbean, has been downplayed by traditional narratives of colonialism. Archaeological surveys in the northern Dominican Republic and open-area excavations at three (pre-)Contact-era Amerindian settlements, combined with historical sources and ethnographic surveys, show that this view needs revising. Indigenous knowledge of the landscape was key to the success of early Europeans in gaining control of the area, but also survives quite clearly in many aspects of contemporary culture and daily life that have, until now, been largely overlooked.

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The indigenous mark: Matthew Ryan Smith, ‘Indigenous Graffiti and Street Art as Resistance’, in Sarah H. Awad, Brady Wagoner (eds), Street Art of Resistance, Palgrave, 2018, pp. 251-274

13Feb18

Abstract: In this chapter, I propose that indigenous graffiti and street art are interconnected with the political mobilization of indigenous groups who actively oppose the structural and systemic histories of violence suffered by indigenous people under settler colonialism. Indigenous graffiti and street art work to destabilize colonial occupations of indigenous territory, by drawing attention to the ways that the existence of settler colonial infrastructure and architecture operates as material evidence of indigenous suffering. By attempting to reclaim the constructed spaces of colonialism through modes of socio-aesthetic intervention, I maintain that the work produced by indigenous graffiti writers and street artists unfold productive strategies of decolonization. My analysis raises questions about the radical potential of indigenous graffiti and street art to delegitimize oppressive social conditions inflicted upon indigenous people by colonial powers.

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Armed settlers: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment’, Monthly Review, 68, 8, 2018

13Feb18

Excerpt: The Anglo-American settlers’ violent break from Britain in the late eighteenth century paralleled their search-and-destroy annihilation of Delaware, Cherokee, Muskogee, Seneca, Mohawk, Shawnee, and Miami, during which they slaughtered families without distinction of age or gender, and expanded the boundaries of the thirteen colonies into unceded Native territories.

The Declaration of Independence of 1776 symbolizes the beginning of the “Indian Wars” and “westward movement” that continued across the continent for another century of unrelenting U.S. wars of conquest. That was the goal of independence, with both the seasoned Indian killers of the Revolutionary Army and white settler-rangers/militias using extreme violence against Indigenous noncombatants with the goal of total domination. These forces were met with resistance movements and confederations identified with leaders such as Buckongeahelas of the Delaware; Alexander McGillivray of the Muskogee-Creek; Little Turtle and Blue Jacket of the Miami-Shawnee alliance; Joseph Brant of the Mohawk; and Cornplanter of the Seneca; as well as the great Tecumseh and the Shawnee-led confederation in the Ohio Valley. Without their sustained resistance, the intended genocide would have been complete; the eastern half of the continent was “ethnically cleansed” of Native nations by 1850, through forced relocation to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi.

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Race and lawfare and settler colonialism: Jennifer Hayter, Racially ‘Indian’, Legally ‘White’: The Canadian State’s Struggles to Categorize the Métis, 1850-1900, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2017

13Feb18

Abstract: The Canadian state has constantly been faced with a paradox: differentiated rights and regulations required it to define the boundaries of the invented category “Indian,” yet it was never able to do so satisfactorily. The existence of mixed-ancestry and Métis people disrupted its seemingly clear categories of “Indian” and “White.” This thesis asks three central research questions: how did the Canadian state understand the category they called “half breeds;” what cultural and intellectual ideas informed these notions; and what was their impact? There was no single meaning or understanding of the term “Half Breed,” but it was in fact characterized by inconsistency, ambiguity, contradiction, and confusion. There were two significant opposing forces at play: 1) the need to consolidate the power of the emerging state, which usually meant grouping the Métis and people of mixed ancestry in with “Indians” in order to better control them, and 2) the desire to save money, which usually meant separating out “half breeds” as a way of reducing the number of status Indians (to minimize the scope of the state’s fiscal responsibilities). The Métis presented themselves as a free “civilized” Indigenous People, but for the government, the term “half breed” was most useful as a floating signifier, with no stable meaning. In an era of increasing state rationalization, the sliding signifier allowed for flexibility in otherwise rigid laws and policy, aiding the state in navigating between its often-conflicting goals. Only in a few instances did the state recognize the Métis as a distinct People. Because of discrimination and the lack of official recognition, many Métis people were dispossessed and hid their heritage. On the other hand, this very ambiguity could provide a degree of freedom, and Métis today are working to define themselves as a distinct people and to fight for their inherent Indigenous rights.

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Decolonial gestures: Kristina Aurylaite, ‘Decolonial Gestures in Canada’s Settler State: Contemporary Indigenous Writers Jordan Abel and Leanne Simpson’, Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, 7, 2017, pp. 4–25

10Feb18

Abstract: This paper discusses the ways recent texts by two Indigenous Canadian writers, Jordan Abel’s collection of conceptual poetry Un/Inhabited and Leanne Simpson’s short stories and poems Islands of Decolonial Love, engage in what Walter Mignolo terms ‘decolonial gestures’ to expose the workings of contemporary settler colonialism and counter their effects. The theoretical section explains the specificities of settler colonialism that make decolonization in the sense of regaining freedom from the colonizers impossible; it then discusses the possibilities for decolonization that exist in settler countries, particularly those that refer to cultural and artistic practices. The analytical section focuses on the different strategies Abel and Simpson use in their work to enact what Mignolo calls ‘epistemic disobedience.’ Abel resorts to decolonial violence in appropriating selected texts of the genre of the Western and erasing from them to undo their loaded ideological messages. Simpson’s work, marked by explicitly confrontational rhetoric, focuses on Indigenous characters and communities, foregrounding their colonial traumas and the role of traditional knowledge and cultural practices in healing them. The paper argues that the decolonial gestures Abel and Simpson undertake work to reject the mainstream rhetoric of reconciliation, inviting Indigenous people to recognize the workings of settler colonialism and look for ways of extricating from them.

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