settler colonial studies blog

Against settler pan-Americanism: Baron Pineda, ‘Indigenous Pan-Americanism: Contesting Settler Colonialism and the Doctrine of Discovery at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues’, American Quarterly, 69, 4, 2017, pp. 823-832

27Dec17

Excerpt: On November 3, 2016, a ritual burning of the Doctrine of Discovery (the European legal concept that justified the dispossession of native lands by Europeans) was held at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in North Dakota. Episcopalian Reverend John Floberg, who was acting at the invitation of the Standing Rock Sioux, held a copy of the Doctrine of Discovery (presumably the Papal Bull titled “Inter Caetera” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493) and invited a committee of native elders to, if so moved, authorize the burning of the document. After a series of speeches and rituals, the document was burned to the applause and cheering of hundreds of native and nonnative water protectors (as many prefer to be called over “protestor”) and about five hundred clergy members. This interfaith campaign has gathered steam in the last five years and calls on churches and governments to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery. The campaign has resulted in official pronouncements from the World Council of Churches, Episcopal House of Bishops, Quakers, United Methodist Church, and Unitarian Universalists. The effort by indigenous activists received its most international notoriety when the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (where I have been conducting fieldwork since the first session in 2002) declared it the official theme of the Eleventh Session of the Permanent Forum in 2012.

I examine the anti–Doctrine of Discovery campaign at the UN, particularly the Eleventh Session, and other related contexts for two reasons. First, the movement highlights the challenges and possibilities of what I call Pan-American indigenous activism because it has been embraced by a diverse group of indigenous activists from Latin America and North America, and it frames historic grievances in a uniquely pan-hemispheric way. Although it focuses on Papal Bulls generated under Iberian colonialism and what is now Latin America, it traces the connections and continuities of the colonialist and [End Page 823] imperialist ideologies that underpinned both English and Spanish aggressions in the Americas. Second, I argue that an examination of this movement is particularly apt in the context of the analytic possibilities and limitations of the concept of settler colonialism across the indigenous Americas. In the words of Patrick Wolfe, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” This destruction and its aftermath create a unique dilemma for activists and others who attempt to redress it. This is the dilemma of (perceived) irreversibility—the larger (and more destructive) the damage, the less practical and realizable redress seems.

I demonstrate the ways indigenous activists in the United States and Latin America strategically use institutions like the UN and the news media in unexpected ways to create what Kevin Bruyneel, focusing exclusively on the United States, calls a “third space of sovereignty” that “resides neither simply inside nor outside the American political system but rather exists on these very boundaries, exposing both the practices and the contingencies of American colonial rule.” Indigenous participants have used the symbolic capital of the United Nations to put pressure on national governments and corporations that are active in their territories and communities in a way that transcends the narrow mandate the United Nations gives to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (and other venues for indigenous participation within the UN system). The Dakota Access Pipeline case is a recent example of an emergent Pan-American indigenous activism that to some extent is lodged in global governmental institutions but also defies the constraints inherently accompanying this positioning.

Settler colonialism describes a process that unmistakably has played out differently, if at all, in Latin America and North America. Surely there has been “destruction and replacement” in both hemispheres during the colonial period, but it is widely acknowledged that the North American process was oriented less toward exploitation of native labor than toward the removal of native people to make way for English settlers and other imported and forced laborers from the Old World.

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Global capital as settler: Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, Korinta Maldonado, ‘Transnational Settler Colonial Formations and Global Capital: A Consideration of Indigenous Mexican Migrants’, American Quarterly, 69, 4, 2017, pp. 809-821

27Dec17

Excerpt: The Los Angeles Central Library’s exhibition “Visualizing Language: A Zapotec Worldview,” which opened this past September, features a series of murals produced by the Oaxacan artists collective Tlacolulokos. The murals are envisioned as providing a “counter-narrative” to existing ones painted by Dean Cornwell, in 1933, depicting a history of California in four stages: Era of Discovery, Missions, Americanization, and Founding of the City of Los Angeles. In these paintings Native people are depicted as marginal and subservient figures within grander visions of colonization. The new murals are thus intended to provide a new voice by putting “a different protagonist in the center of the story.” What is of interest for the present essay is who gets to tell this story. It is not Native artists on whose land the library is built, but Oaxacan Indigenous people. In this way, this project continues a legacy of erasure embedded in current discourses of multiculturalism that reinforce settler colonial dispossession and hegemony.

Taking Indigenous Mexican migration as a point of departure, this essay joins critical scholarship on settler colonialism exploring the role of the migrant in settler processes. Following Patrick Wolfe’s theorization of settler colonialism as a structuring force rather than as a historical passage, we ask: How might a comparative framework on settler colonialisms help us articulate theoretical discussion beyond the dominant settler–Native racial binary? And in which ways does the settler colonial theoretical framework render visible the ways in which distinct bodies are racialized within and beyond national boundaries? We understand settler colonialism as the complex reverberations originating from Indigenous dispossession and white possession. As a global and transnational phenomenon, settler colonialism is a structuring force that in coproduction with the transatlantic slave trade, indentured labor, and other forms of racial ordering enables particular racial logics and forms of exclusions integral to global capital and empire.

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Violence as settler: Christopher A. Loperena, ‘Settler Violence? Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras’, American Quarterly, 69, 4, 2017, pp. 801-807

27Dec17

Excerpt: The displacement of black and indigenous peoples from sites of economic opportunity in Honduras, and the systematic enclosure of the natural resources within their territories, is intimately tethered to white socio-spatial imaginaries and the politics of frontier making. In this essay, I analyze how elite investors, with support from the state and multilateral development banks, mobilize the ideology of national progress to further disenfranchise rural communities of color and to legitimate acts of violence against land and environmental activists. This violence has increased dramatically since the 2009 coup against Manual Zelaya Rosales, which was followed by a surge in extractivist activities throughout the national territory. In the quest for land, mestizo elites harness both legal and physical coercion to seize vital natural resources within indigenous and black territories. The process of turning indigenous territories into frontier zones for economic development underscores not only the racialized dimensions of dispossession but also the ways in which violence is used to hasten the power and racial domination of mestizo settlers over indigenous and black peoples.

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The state as settler: Juan Castro, Manuela Lavinas Picq, ‘Stateness as Landgrab: A Political History of Maya Dispossession in Guatemala’, American Quarterly, 69, 4, 2017, pp. 791-799

27Dec17

Excerpt: The history of state formation in the Americas is largely a history of indigenous dispossession. But not all dispossessions function the same. In Guatemala the forms of stealing of indigenous territory varied over time. Spanish colonizers made Maya communities buy their own lands. After independence, the modern liberal state defined indigenous territories as “waste land.” Indigenous municipalities were forcefully assimilated into the nation during the 1944 revolution, while neoliberal governments expropriate Maya communities in the name of development. The landgrab of Maya territories initiated by Spanish colonizers never ceased; it evolved over time, perpetuated in times of war and peace by governments across the political spectrum.

This essay traces the changing forms of indigenous dispossession in Guatemala from colonial times to the present. We show that the stealing of Maya lands is not a historical episode linked to the Spanish invasion but a defining structure of Guatemala’s modern state. Our argument is twofold. First, various logics of colonization are at play. A historical approach illuminates a combination of settler colonial logics that erase indigenous presence and the colonial logic of racialization to control indigenous peoples. Second, the stealing of Maya territories is intrinsic to modern states. We connect colonial archives with contemporary neoliberal policies of extraction to reveal the continuation of colonial logics in Guatemala.

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‘Latin American states are settler colonial states’: Shannon Speed, ‘Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala’, American Quarterly, 69, 4, 2017, pp. 783-790

27Dec17

Excerpt: Latin American states are settler colonial states, though they are rarely analyzed in this way. Indeed, there often seems to be a kind of entrenched resistance to thinking about Latin America in settler colonial terms, for reasons that are complex, but have to do in large part to an implicit adherence to some premises of settler colonialism put forward by Patrick Wolfe, who is often credited with having popularized the term and, intentionally or not, generating the field of settler colonial studies.

Wolfe did not, of course, coin the term. Native scholars and activists had been using it for some time, as he himself regularly pointed out. Further, a group of prominent feminist scholars published Unsettling Settler Societies, edited by Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval Davis, in 1995, three years before Wolfe published Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Notably, Latin America was included in that volume (see contributions by Gutierrez and Radcliffe). That said, Wolfe’s lucid articulation of the structure and logics of settler colonialism has been and remains tremendously influential, and continues to undergird—at times a bit too rigidly—our understandings of the workings of settler power in the field of Native studies. In particular, the land–labor binary, the importance of which Wolfe elaborated in most of his works and reasserted in the recent Traces of History (2016), has become an often-unspoken and largely unexamined premise of the settler state in ways that occlude significant complexity and foreclose recognition of settler structures. I do not raise this in an antitheory sense, to challenge abstraction in favor of empirical specificity per se. Rather, I think the specificity of cases all too often discarded without further or sufficient examination may in fact add new richness and dimension to the overall theoretical analytic.

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Introducing a special issue of American Quarterly: M. Bianet Castellanos, ‘Introduction: Settler Colonialism in Latin America’, American Quarterly, 69, 4, 2017, pp. 777-781

27Dec17

Excerpt: Inspired by recent debates over the suitability of extending settler colonialism as a framework for understanding the experiences of indigenous Latinx in the United States and indigenous peoples in Latin America, this forum offers a substantive engagement with settler colonial theory that attends to the specificities of Latin American colonialism(s). Considered a key distinction of Anglophone imperial projects, it is rare to find settler colonialism applied to Latin America. This resistance reflects entrenched divisions precluding North–South dialogues, problems regarding the concept’s translatability to a Latin American context, and an emphasis on binary divisions within settler colonial theory.

Applying settler colonial theory to Latin America is hampered by the nascent relationship between American Indian studies and Latin American studies. Although both fields have been instrumental in advancing indigenous studies, these fields are rarely in conversation with each other. This divide was evident at the 2017 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association meeting. The sessions sponsored by the Abiayala Working Group, which supports indigenous studies in Latin America and the Caribbean, are seldom attended by scholars of American Indian studies. While recent forays to bring postcolonial studies in conversation with American Indian studies and to frame indigenous Latinx communities within a settler colonial paradigm gesture toward new engagements with the global South, these efforts remain focused on North America.

The term itself is difficult to translate. In Spanish, settler colonialism translates to colonialismo de asentamiento or colonialismo de colonos. Shannon Speed points out that the Spanish definition of colonialism implies settlement, making these translations redundant. As such, it is a slippery concept to apply to Latin America where nation-building projects have framed criollización/creolization as “an indigenizing process.” We are left with the quandary of debating who is a settler.

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The other side of disengagement is decolonisation (disengagement is a necessary prerequisite of decolonisation): Michael Elliott, ‘Indigenous Resurgence: The Drive for Renewed Engagement and Reciprocity in the Turn Away from the State’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2017

24Dec17

Abstract: “Indigenous resurgence” centres on three contentions: (1) that colonialism is an active structure of domination premised, at base, on Indigenous elimination; (2) that the prevailing normative-discursive environment continues to reflect this imperative; and (3) that Indigenous peoples must therefore turn away from this hostile environment and pursue independent programmes of social and cultural rejuvenation. The principal movement advocated under the resurgence paradigm thus appears as one of disengagement with the settler order. I also argue, however, that there is an important secondary drive within the movement that presses in the opposite direction. It figures further engagement both as a longer term goal (in the form of renewed dialogue on decolonization) and as an immediate imperative (in order to expose and remove obstacles to reciprocal dialogue). I aim, here, to excavate this secondary drive and consider what it connotes in terms of settler engagement.

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Acknowledging territory is an acknowledgment of history: Yasmeen Abu-Laban, ‘Narrating Canadian Political Science: History Revisited’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 50, 4, 2017, pp. 895-919

24Dec17

Abstract: The 150 mark for Confederation and the founding of the modern Canadian state comes at a moment when at universities across Canada it is now routine to acknowledge traditional territory, and in so doing to recognize a longer history, dating before 1867 and the establishment of European colonies (Canadian Association of University Teachers, 2016). Territorial acknowledgements also give recognition to the Indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live on the land, as well as the ways in which land figures into Indigenous identities and ontologies in ways that are typically very different than settlers (Battell Lowman and Barker,2015: 48–68). Such acknowledgements are also happening at cultural events and even hockey games, with a Fall 2016 Heritage Classic Game on the home turf of the Winnipeg Jets believed to be the first (Lambert, 2016). As a consequence, we are living in a moment in which we are being reminded about buried and unacknowledged history, as well as about the colonial past and the colonial present. Moreover, the Canadian government devoted $500 million to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017, (“Why Exactly Are We Spending?” 2017), but clashing historical narratives have also given rise to the question of whether Confederation is actually something to rejoice (Slowey, 2016). Consider here the striking name of the new book by Kiera Ladner and Myra Tait (2017) entitled Surviving Canada: Indigenous Peoples Celebrate 150 Years of Betrayal.

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Settler facts (the fact of ‘facts’): Rick Lybeck, ‘A Public Pedagogy of White Victimhood: (Im)Moral Facts, Settler Identity, and Genocide Denial in Dakota Homeland’, Qualitative Inquiry, 2017

24Dec17

Abstract: This article examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota’s white public pedagogy of the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, focusing specifically on hardline separations between fact and opinion that divert citizens from acknowledging the moral significance of their state’s genocidal founding. Supported by objectivist discourses enshrined in today’s Common Core Standards, the regional need to distinguish fact from opinion reveals highly situated white-supremacist roots when historicized, originating in primary-source materials that perplexingly frame white “victimhood” and Dakota “savagery” as objective moral knowledge. Critically analyzing recent acts of fact-checking performed by members of a regional settler discourse community, this article shows such “objective” knowledge at work, persistently thriving on age-old notions of white-settler identity and white community belonging. Ultimately, this article exposes the ongoing persuasive power of the primary sources’ dominant discourse, the anti-Indian sublime, and its role in erasing moral facts about regional crimes against humanity.

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When indigenes do not disappear as indigenes: Ben Schrader, ‘Native Hostelries in New Zealand’s Colonial Cities’, The Journal of New Zealand Studies, 25, 2017

24Dec17

Abstract: Historians have argued that while Māori were important players in founding and sustaining New Zealand’s colonial cities, the rapid growth of the settler population saw them excluded from city space and return to tribal homelands. This article examines the marginalisation process and how the perceived threat of Māori economic power and changes in European racial theory informed it. It then argues that marginalisation was only ever partial, with Māori continuing to engage with city life in innovative ways. In doing so they not only claimed city spaces but contributed to the production of new spaces as well.

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