settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous peoples – ‘doubly erased’ and ‘hyper-visible’: Roslynn Ang, ‘Recursion of colonial desire for differences: The doubly erased and/or hyper-visible Ainu’, New Ideas in East Asian Studies, 2017

10Feb18

Excerpt: First, instead of the usual focus on subaltern subjects, I attend to the production of the empire’s universal self – the West in the figure of the researcher and the Japanese empire – through logics that are enabled by the doubled erasure of indigenous Ainu bodies. Next, I locate the moments of Ainu hyper-visibility globally and locally across
the intersections of colonial space-time as the conditions of possibility for another version of the aforementioned universal self and the collusion of its aphasia on settler-colonialism across continents. I unsettle the empire’s internal coherence, when researchers utilize national and racial boundaries as their analytical framework, by pointing out how the heightened erasure/visibility of Ainu lives are the conditions of possibility for their recursive forms of empire and history.

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Genocide or ‘logic of elimination? Thomas Crotty, ‘Beyond Genocide: a comparative analysis of the elimination of Australia’s Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander people’, NEW: Emerging scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies, 2-3, 1, 2016-17

10Feb18

Abstract: This paper explores the applicability of the term genocide to Australian colonisation, and considers whether the scholar Patrick Wolfe’s concept of settler colonialism’s inherent “logic of elimination” provides a more useful framework for considering Australian history.

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A settler and Protestant international: Valerie Wallace, Scottish Presbyterianism and Settler Colonial Politics Empire of Dissent, Palgrave, 2018

08Feb18

Description: This book offers a new interpretation of political reform in the settler colonies of Britain’s empire in the early nineteenth century. It examines the influence of Scottish Presbyterian dissenting churches and their political values. It re-evaluates five notorious Scottish reformers and unpacks the Presbyterian foundation to their political ideas: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), a poet in Cape Town; Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), an educator in Pictou; John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), a church minister in Sydney; William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), a rebel in Toronto; and Samuel McDonald Martin (1805?-1848), a journalist in Auckland. The book weaves the five migrants’ stories together for the first time and demonstrates how the campaigns they led came to be intertwined. The book will appeal to historians of Scotland, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the British Empire and the Scottish diaspora.

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The problem of innocence: Joshua F.J. Inwood, ‘”It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”: Political geographies of white supremacy, the construction of white innocence, and the Flint water crisis’, Geography Compass, 2018

06Feb18

Abstract: Using the Flint, Michigan water crisis as a backdrop, this review piece explores the concept of white innocence. The concept of white innocence presents us with an analytic tool to understand the frustrating endurance of white supremacy within the U.S. settler state and how white supremacy operates through a range of geographically grounded practices. This paper makes an explicit link between work on settler colonialism and white innocence outlining how the burgeoning work on settler societies opens space to a productive engagement with the concept of innocence. I contend that white innocence as a concept needs to be more fully grounded in work that engages with settler colonialism and within the United States specifically. White innocence also inculcates the agency of whites in a society that is built through the explicit exploitation of persons of color as well as the way white institutions continue to expose persons of color to a range of negative impacts. This paper begins with a review of the literature on whiteness within geographic research. The last several years has seen a series of important interventions in the literature and geographers are increasingly turning to the concept of white supremacy to explain racism in 21st century U.S. society.

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Hobbes’ border guards are the settler’s border guards: Andrew Canessa, ‘Hobbes’ Border Guards or Evo’s Originary Citizens? Indigenous People and the Sovereign State in Bolivia’, New Diversities, 19, 2, 2017, pp. 69-84.

06Feb18

Abstract: Thomas Hobbes was the first major thinker to locate an imagined pre-political State of Nature in the Americas. Even his critics such as Locke and Rousseau followed him in seeing native Americans as living in a world which they imagined existed in pre-historic Europe and, most importantly, beyond meaningful dialogue. These and other thinkers used America as a tool through which to think the status of the individual political subject and his relationship with the state. This article argues that indigenous people were much more than rhetorical tools but, rather, were necessary elements for imagining the modern nation state; they were in Shaw’s words, Hobbes’ ‘border guards’ (2008: 38). Indigeneity, however, does more than act symbolically as a ‘border guard’ facing the ‘other’ across the parapet of the boundaries of the sovereign state; indigenous people were and are actively challenging those boundaries, shaping its contours, and occasionally breaching the wall altogether.

In this article, I look at Bolivia as an example of how indigenous peoples have through history contributed to, challenged, and moulded the various states – from colonial to contemporary indigenous — over the past half millennium. I also explore the contemporary indigenous state and the ways in which the indigenous subject is imagined as the canonical citizen but ask if this move forecloses the possibilities of a radical critique of the sovereign state.

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Creation, settler appropriation, indigenous reclamation: Allan Downey, The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood, UBC Press, 2018

01Feb18

Description: A gift from the Creator – that is where it all began. The game of lacrosse has been a central element of many Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation – then reclamation – of Indigenous identities. Focusing on the history of lacrosse in Indigenous communities from the 1860s to the 1990s, The Creator’s Game explores Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations and Indigenous identity formation. While the game was being stripped of its cultural and ceremonial significance and being appropriated to construct a new identity for the nation-state of Canada, it was also being used by Indigenous peoples for multiple ends: to resist residential school experiences; initiate pan-Indigenous political mobilization; and articulate Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood on the world stage.

The multilayered story of lacrosse serves as a potent illustration of how identity and nationhood are formed and reformed. Engaging and innovative, The Creator’s Game provides a unique view of Indigenous self-determination in the face of settler-colonialism.

The Creator’s Game will be of interest to scholars and students of Canadian history, Indigenous studies, political science, and sports history.

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Settler pilgrims: Robert O. Smith, ‘Sanctifying the Settler-Colonial Gaze: Nineteenth-Century American Christian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land’, Theology Today, 2018

30Jan18

Abstract: American Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land started within a historical and ideological context shaped by American territorial expansionism. The settler-colonial impulses informing that expansionism were carried to Palestine, where Palestinians were encountered as “savages” compared explicitly to American Indians. Erasure of the Holy Land’s Indigenous inhabitants is thus sanctioned. Herman Melville’s Clarel and Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad record this encounter. We must be aware of this history if it is not to be repeated in contemporary pilgrimage practices.

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Assimilation requires protection: Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘The Moment of Release: The Ideology of Protection and the Twentieth-Century Assimilation Policies of Exemption and Competency in New South Wales and Oklahoma’, Pacific Historical Review, 87, 1, 2018, pp. 128-149

30Jan18

Abstract: During the twentieth century some Australian states and the U.S. federal government enacted comparable policies that demonstrate how the discourse of protection continued to survive in an era when settler nations were focussed on “assimilating” Indigenous populations. The Australian policy of exemption and the U.S. policy of competency did not represent a true change in direction from past policies of protection. In contrast to the nineteenth century, though, these twentieth-century policies offered protection to only a deserving few. Drawing on records of exemption and competency from New South Wales and Oklahoma in the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how the policies of exemption and competency ostensibly gave the opportunity for some individuals to prove that they no longer needed the paternalism of colonial governments. They were judged using very different local criteria. In Australia, applicants were mostly judged on whether they engaged in “respectable” use of alcohol; in the United States, applicants were assessed on whether they had “business sense.”

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Settlers actively produce indigenous ‘vagrants’: Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Creating the Aboriginal Vagrant: Protective Governance and Indigenous Mobility in Colonial Australia’, Pacific Historical Review, 87, 1, 2018, pp. 79-100

30Jan18

Abstract: This article considers how shifting programs of Aboriginal protection in nineteenth-century Australia responded to Indigenous mobility as a problem of colonial governance and how they contributed over time to creating an emergent discourse of the Aboriginal “vagrant.” There has been surprisingly little attention to how the legal charge of vagrancy became applied to Indigenous people in colonial Australia before the twentieth century, perhaps because the very notion of the Aboriginal vagrant was subject to ambivalence throughout much of the nineteenth century. When vagrancy laws were first introduced into Australia’s colonies, Aboriginal people were exempt from them as a group not yet subject to the ordinary regulatory codes of colonial society. Bringing them within the protective fold of colonial social order was one of the principal tasks of the office of ‘protection’ that was introduced into three Australian jurisdictions during the late 1830s. As the nineteenth century progressed and Aboriginal people became more susceptible to social order policing, a concept of Indigenous vagrancy hardened into place, and programs of protection became central to its management.

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Indigeneity is where indigenes are: Jo Rey, Neil Harrison, ‘Sydney as an Indigenous place: “Goanna walking” brings people together’, AlterNative, 2018

29Jan18

Abstract: Sydney, Australia, is rarely seen as an Indigenous place, yet over 52,000 Indigenous people live here. “Indigeneity” persists in educational discourse as a remote phenomenon, but the research reveals otherwise for many Indigenous people who continue to live in Sydney. This is reflected in the contemporary lives of seven Dharug women who constitute the basis of a doctoral project. The seven women disclose how caring and connectivity to place and people continue to be important markers of belonging to Country in the city. This article also draws on Judith Butler’s work to investigate the conditions of possibility for sustained collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Sydney. Through a collaborative project between local Dharug artists and teacher education students, we find that cross-cultural understandings are built through vulnerabilities, as much as they are through reason. Shared vulnerability provides the conditions for meeting on Country, and “goanna walking” takes us there.

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