settler colonial studies blog

Settler ‘rewilding’: Bruno Seraphin, ‘”Paiutes and Shoshone Would Be Killed For This”: Whiteness, Rewilding, and the Malheur Occupation’, Western Folklore, 76, 4, 2017, pp. 447-478

15Nov17

Abstract: The “High Desert Wildtending Network” is a grassroots movement of mostly white and non-Native nomadic “rewilders” in the northwest United States who appropriate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, gathering and replanting wild foods in a seasonal round. Evaluating Wildtending’s potentialities for settler-indigenous solidarity, this article discusses the network’s rhetorical shifts within the context of the 2016 armed occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock.

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Settler sovereignty in space: Asgardia

15Nov17

Asgardia’s first independent territory in space.

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The parallel lives of objects: Ruth Buchanan, Jeffery G Hewitt, ‘Encountering settler colonialism through legal objects: a painted drum and handwritten treaty from Manitoulin Island’, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 68, 3, 2017

11Nov17

Abstract: Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region and the British. Two such objects, a drum painted with Anishinaabe imagery and a treaty, handwritten by a British treaty commissioner, were created in close proximity in both time and location. This paper explores the encounter between the Anishinaabe and the British through a parallel engagement with both drum and treaty; placing them in conversation with each other. We consider the divergent paths taken by these objects by comparing the material, legal and sensory landscapes in which they were produced with their current contexts. In dialogue, the objects reveal their performative contributions to the British imperial project; one as an authorised claim to (indigenous) property, the other as (British Museum) property, displayed as artefact. Read in parallel, the treaty’s assertions of authority and the drum’s mute resistance interrogate the form of law itself, and the agency of law’s objects.

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Argentina as a settler society: Tamar Miriam Blisckstein, The Native Stranger: Argentine Discourses of Race and Nation in a Vanishing Settler Frontier, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2018

11Nov17

Abstract: Indigenous people have not disappeared, yet the myth of the vanished native persists as an ideological feature of settler politics and identities today. This dissertation examines the social mechanisms of this common settler narrative through an ethnographic study among settler colonists in Argentina who identify as primeros pobladores (“first inhabitants”) despite having built their economy on local indigenous land and labor. Based on field results, I argue that settlers sustain an identity as founders by turning indigenous locals into strangers from elsewhere—a mode of racialized role-reversal that I call “native estrangement.” My argument draws on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among settler, creole and indigenous Qom populations in the Argentine cotton belt—a subtropical lowland region of the Gran Chaco conquered from the Qom and other natives by the Argentine military in 1911 for European immigrant settlement. The dissertation focuses on three case studies of “native estrangement” developed in three parts: “Labor,” “Space” and “Race.” The two chapters of Part I – entitled Labor – argue that racialized regimes of plantation labor have been central to indigenous dispossession and resistance in Chaco historically, and that they continue to shape settler imaginaries of territorial primacy to this day. The first chapter revisits the early 20th century history of joint land and labor conquest, exemplified by the state-run Napalpí reservation: designed to keep conquered natives off settler-colonized land, the reservation also sought to both exploit and “civilize” them through de-Indianizing field labor in conditions that led to a native strike, culminating in a genocidal massacre. The second chapter turns to the present, showing that today’s settlers continue to discount indigenous primacy on the land through racialized religious distinctions between the “sacrificial labor” of settler cotton farming, and the mere “gathering” of cotton-picking labor, deemed an inherent distinction of evolutionary aptitudes between sedentary and hunter-gathering peoples. Part II – Space – argues that settlers turn natives into strangers spatially by imagining them as an influx from elsewhere. A chapter examines what I call the settlers’ “imagined geographies of native origin,” which includes both nationwide Argentine patterns of attributing foreign provenance to indigenous people near the borderlands, as well as smaller-scale settler tendencies to imagine natives as migrants from a locus beyond the space and time of settler “founding.” The following chapter examines the effect of this racialized estrangement on those estranged, through a comparison between two ethnically similar Qom slums outside the settler colony that are respectively racialized as more “savage” or more “civilized.” Through archival and oral history, the precursors of this difference are traced to the “savage” slum’s ancestral ties to the colony’s terrain itself, from which they were repeatedly removed or ousted in several stages over the past century. Part III – Race – complicates the settler-native binary by exploring how criollization contributes to indigenous dispossession, through a case study of racialized ghost-stories and segregated deathways in the traditional Qom territories of Napalpí. The chapter traces criollo rumors about white settler ghosts at the inauguration of a settler landmark near a segregated gringo-criollo cemetery, all of which is built on an original Qom “burial ground”. While the state-funded landmark was meant to sacrilize a settler myth of founding, these criollo rumors disrupt that official narrative with a phantasmagoric backstory of white devil worship that highlights the ongoing segregation between the groups. Although the creoles’ segregated class position is premised on their visible indigenous trace, their rumors of resistance nevertheless disavow a third indigenous Qom deathway. Racialized rifts between dominant “melting pot” and repressed “creole” renditions of national territorial belonging generate and sustain a native absence from both narratives. A process which, as I demonstrate, is not able to eradicate the ongoing assertions to sovereignty that indigenous claims to these territories represent.

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Soldier settlements: Christian K. Melby, ‘”Of Paramount Importance to Our Race”: H. O. Arnold-Forster and South African Soldier-Settlement’, History, 102, 352, 2017, pp. 597–616

09Nov17

Abstract: In the aftermath of the opening months of the South African War, British imperialists considered the settling of retired soldiers in South Africa as an efficient way of creating a loyal colony. This article explores the 1900 South African Lands Settlement Commission, and specifically the role of its chairman, the Liberal Unionist politician Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster. It shows how the findings and recommendations of Arnold-Forster’s commission were presented as a way of keeping the British empire together through government involvement rather than private initiative. While often ignored because of its failure, the commission and the ideas behind it illustrates the link between imperialism, military planning and nationalism in British politics. Proponents of soldier-settlement in South Africa argued that only by creating a majority population of British veterans, combining the roles of farmers and military reservists, could the colony be secure. The article examines the commission and the settler plan in conjunction with Arnold-Forster’s background and imperial ideology, arguing that the commission’s failure does not mean that such ideas were unimportant. The opposition to the settler scheme could utilise the language of anti-imperialism alongside criticism of Arnold-Forster’s views on Ireland, showing how the soldier-settlement idea could be larger than the sum of its conclusions. Rather than seeing the soldier-settlement scheme in isolation, the article argues that the case of Arnold-Forster and the Lands Settlement Commission provides a valuable insight into wider British political debates at the turn of the century.

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On settler colonial studies and colonial unknowing: Alex Trimble Young, ‘A Response to “On Colonial Unknowing”‘, Theory & Event, 20, Number, 2017, pp. 1035-1041

07Nov17

Abstract: This response to the editors of “On Colonial Unknowing” both acknowledges the vital intervention of their special issue and contests their characterization of settler colonial studies as an “academic field formation” marked by dogmatic and hermetic methodological tendencies. Settler colonial studies, we argue, is a still emergent subfield marked by a dynamic interchange with related fields and disciplinary formations. Settler colonial studies and its critique of a specific and contingent structure of violence has continuing utility, we suggest, not as a hegemonic discourse (a condition the field never aspired to), but rather as a supplement to adjacent field formations engaged in the critique of racialization and empire.

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Indigenous homelessness is settler colonialism: Jesse A. Thistle, Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada, Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press, 2017

07Nov17

Definition: Indigenous homelessness is a human condition that describes First Nations, Métis and Inuit individuals, families or communities lacking stable, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect, means or ability to acquire such housing. Unlike the common colonialist definition of homelessness, Indigenous homelessness is not defined as lacking a structure of habitation; rather, it is more fully described and understood through a composite lens of Indigenous worldviews. These include: individuals, families and communities isolated from their relationships to land, water, place, family, kin, each other, animals, cultures, languages and identities. Importantly, Indigenous people experiencing these kinds of homelessness cannot culturally, spiritually, emotionally or physically reconnect with their Indigeneity or lost relationships (Aboriginal Standing Committee on Housing and Homelessness, 2012).

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On Prairie Rising: Robert Nichols, ‘Indigenous Struggles Against Participatory Power: Dhillon’s Prairie Rising’, Theory & Event, 20, 4, 2017, pp. 1063-1069

07Nov17

Excerpt: The last ten to fifteen years has seen the rapid expansion and professional consolidation of ‘Settler Colonial Studies’ as a distinct body of research. This field takes as its point of departure the observation that in many parts of the world, the dominant form of imperialism did not mimic the vast overseas extraction colonialism that was characteristic of, say, the British rule over India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, in significant swaths of the earth, imperialism entailed the large-scale transplantation of European peoples whose primary aim was to eradicate, or otherwise displace, the original Indigenous inhabitants so as to build neo-European societies in perpetuity.

As with any relatively new body of work, Settler Colonial Studies has developed with certain lacuna and limitations, two of which are most pertinent here. First, the field partially emerged through the work of such thinkers as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, whose primary initial aim was to distinguish settler colonialism from other forms of imperial domination and rule. As such, early work was characterized by a set of conceptual generalizations that were useful in differentiating the field but, for that reason, remained at a very high level of generality. Put differently, these thinkers were mostly concerned with demonstrating that settler colonialism could be analytically distinguished, and less concerned with how settler colonialism actually functioned in its internal complexity and variety. The second major area of concern and caution pertains to the relationship between Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies. Whereas the primary task of the former has been to study settler colonialism as a distinct social and political formation from the standpoint of those who designed and implemented it (i.e., European settlers and their descendants), a much longer body of scholarship has, in an important sense, already been doing this from the perspective of those who were most targeted by settler power (i.e., Indigenous peoples and their descendants).

Jaskiran Dhillon’s book, Prairie Rising, makes a sharp and important contribution at precisely these two junctures. It is a study of the governmentality of a particular settler colonial formation (a study of how power works, rather than what it ‘essentially’ is), which takes Indigenous participation and resistance as central to that operation of power. The book takes up the lived experience of settler colonial governmentality in contemporary Saskatchewan, Canada, especially as it is mediated through a set of semi-governmental agencies (paramount among them, the Indian Alliance) in the context of increased pressure on official state policy to ‘recognize’ and ‘accommodate’ Indigenous peoples in the actual working of governance over them. This book is extremely rich and complex. It makes a number of contributions to fields such as anthropology, sociology, political science, youth studies, and the like. It is moreover a model of how to bridge academic scholarship and responsible community advocacy.

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Settler colonialism in unexpected places: Rhone Fraser, ‘Confronting Prospero: Elizabeth Nunez’s Exposure and Critique of Hegemony and Its Industries in Beyond the Limbo Silence and Boundaries’, Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, 10, 8, 2017, pp. 89-105

05Nov17

Abstract: […] sociologist Robert L. Allen writes about how liberalism is defended by a kind of Black tokenism run by hegemony that puts Black individuals in high administrative places only to still continue an economic system based on these exclusions. Elizabeth Nunez crafts stories with protagonists that confront liberalism the way Prospero tried to confront and murder Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This paper will discuss how Nunez in her fiction specifically exposes liberalism in the academic and book publishing in her second and eighth novels (Beyond the Limbo Silence and Boundaries) in ways that challenge hegemony and its liberalism. Nunez shows through her protagonist Sara in Beyond the Limbo Silence, how her scholarship from her fictional College of the Sacred Heart depended on her distancing herself from the local Black population and see herself in isolation from the emerging civil rights movement. Through her protagonist Anna in Boundaries, Nunez shows how her function in the book publishing industry required her promoting books for their “commercial value” and not “their aesthetic and intellectual merits.” Through her protagonist Emile in “Even In Paradise,” Nunez shows how the newspaper industry in Jamaica is run by editors who dont want writers, like Emile’s love interest Corinne, writing pieces deeply “involved in politics.” Although Nunez’s novels make incredibly profound statements on the dysfunction of Black tokenism in these academic, book publishing and newspaper industries, her protagonists except Sara, ultimately commit to joining these tokenist systems and make profound statements on the hegemony’s still influential propaganda that discourages independent ownership by Black communities of schools and presses.

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Imperatives (from imperium): Darren Reid, ‘Imperial or Settler Imperative? Indigenous Reserves as a Case Study for a Transcolonial Analysis of British Imperial Indigenous Policy’, The Arbutus Review, 8, 1, 2017, pp. 55-71

05Nov17

Abstract: My paper presents a comparative analysis of the development of reserve systems in British North America and Western Australia across the 19th century. The existing historiography seeks to comprehend the relationship between the British metropole and the colonial periphery, and two opposing frameworks of colonial governance have been developed. One holds that the British Empire operated as an interdependent system, in which colonial Indigenous policies were determined by overarching imperial imperatives based upon imperial capitalism and liberal humanitarianism. The other holds that the explosive growth of settler communities undermined these imperial imperatives and facilitated governance guided by the settlers’ need for land, labour, and security. This paper seeks to end the tension between these two frameworks by using Indigenous reserve systems as a case study for understanding colonial governance. Through an analysis of correspondence between local and imperial administrators, this paper argues that the development of Indigenous reserve systems reveals an entrenched conflict between imperial and local administrators lasting throughout the nineteenth century, a conflict in which the local governments of British North America and Western Australia subordinated imperial imperatives of imperial capitalism and liberal humanitarianism to local concerns of security and sovereignty.

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