settler colonial studies blog

A settler representing indigenous peoples: Kerry Driscoll, Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples, University of California Press, 2018

01May18

Description: Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens’s personal library—Driscoll charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Nevada mining camps of the 1860s to the progressive urban enclave of Hartford’s Nook Farm. The book also examines the impact of Clemens’s 1895–96 world lecture tour, when he traveled to Australia and New Zealand and learned firsthand about the dispossession and mistreatment of native peoples under British colonial rule. This groundbreaking work of cultural studies offers fresh readings of canonical texts such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and Following the Equator, as well as a number of Twain’s shorter works.

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The Mounties’ contribution to settler colonialism: Colleen Bell, Kendra Schreiner, ‘The International Relations of Police Power in Settler Colonialism: The “civilizing” mission of Canada’s Mounties’, International Journal: Canada’s Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 73, 1, 2018, pp. 111-128

29Apr18

Abstract: In contrast to narratives by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the United Nations, and some scholars that international police assistance is a relatively recent phenomenon, we argue that Canada’s Mounties have always been international. To develop this argument, we examine three dimensions of police power in international relations historically and with respect to the role of the Mounties specifically. First, we discuss the concept of police power and its central role in giving rise to another concept: civilization. The concept of civilization gained considerable traction as a rationale for police power in Britain’s colonies, including Canada. Second, we turn to a discussion of imperial policing in the colonial settlement of Canada involving an elaborate array of “civilizing” techniques, some of which are still in operation today. Since Confederation, the Mounties have been involved in wide-ranging state-building missions with the purpose of securing Canadian sovereignty, in part through land and resource acquisition, and the denial of Indigenous sovereignties. Third, we show that the Mounties’ contributions to settler colonialism played a role in shaping international relations from the twentieth century. In particular, the Mounties were central in constituting Canada as a member of the globally dominant Anglo-Saxon community of states. In conclusion, we suggest that current international policing practices in the global periphery are not novel phenomena, but are rooted in international police powers that made possible the colonial settlement of Canada.

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Bankrupt settlers must be rescripted: Declan Cullen, ‘Race, debt and empire: Racialising the Newfoundland financial crisis of 1933’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2018

27Apr18

Abstract: The recent global financial crisis and related sovereign debt crises in Ireland, Greece, Iceland, Puerto Rico and beyond have highlighted the pressing task of understanding how such crises reshape the spaces we live in. Geographers, most notably David Harvey, have traced the historical roots of the current crisis to the transformation of global financial capitalism since the 1970s. There has, however, been less work on understanding the nature and management of financial crises embedded in different historical geographies. This paper seeks to contribute to that task by investigating Newfoundland’s sovereign debt crisis during the Great Depression and its management by the British Empire. Newfoundland, then an independent British Dominion, uniquely relinquished self‐government in return for financial aid. Managing the crisis required difficult ideological work. I argue that to reinforce an imperial geography underpinned by racial distinctions, and to preclude the possibility of default, Newfoundland was scripted as a racially degenerate place in need of metropolitan intervention. The financial crisis produced new racialised geographies that had significant effects on Newfoundland’s future.

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Indigenous intellectual traditions defy settler colonialism: Thomas Peace, ‘Indigenous intellectual traditions and biography in the northeast: A historiographical reflection’, History Compass, 2018

27Apr18

Abstract: Over the past two decades, a substantial literature has developed probing Robert Warrior’s idea that we can trace a written Indigenous intellectual tradition back to the mid‐eighteenth century. Focused on Indigenous peoples who wrote fairly extensively, much of this literature has tended to treat the same individuals: Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Peter Jones, William Apess, and George Copway (among others). Over the past 5 years, a series of biographies have been published on other individuals who fit within this community of intellectuals. Drawing together these two streams within the historiography, this essay probes the concept of Indigenous intellectual traditions, suggesting that scholars need to look beyond print culture. Doing so will better account for Indigenous concepts of sovereignty and territory, the involvement of women, the role of class, as well as the relationship between these traditions, historiographical practices, and settler colonial systems of power.

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Intersecting approaches (including settler colonial studies): James R. Allison, ‘Beyond it all: Surveying the intersections of modern American Indian, environmental, and western histories’, History Compass, 2018

27Apr18

Abstract: At the close of the twentieth century, the related fields of American Indian, environmental, and western history produced the discipline’s most dynamic historiographies. For all their collective insights, however, these works rarely crossed into the twentieth century to examine modern Indians in the American West. This is no longer the case. This essay, thus, first explores the social and political conditions that produced the “New Indian History” and the “New Western History” by the 1990s, and then examines recent work that incorporates “post‐colonial” and “settler colonialism” approaches to reveal a more nuanced picture of the recent Indian past and the meanings indigenous people attach to it. Finally, the analysis turns to calls for a new historiography—labeled variously as the “indigenous paradigm” or the “writing back” approach—and details the benefits and challenges it poses to the study of history. Throughout, the essay demonstrates the fundamental connection between the ever‐changing present and our evolving understandings of the past.

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Settler title is a time machine: Sarah Keenan, ‘From historical chains to derivative futures: Title registries as time machines’, Social & Cultural Geography, 2018

25Apr18

Abstract: For centuries, transferring ownership of land under common law was a slow, complex process requiring the construction of a chain of paper deeds evidencing multiple decades of prior possession. In 1858, colonist Robert Torrens developed a new system for the transfer of land in South Australia, where the land was understood by colonial powers as ‘new’ and without history. With the intention of making land a liquid asset, Torrens’ system of title registration shifted the legal basis of title from a history of prior possession to a singular act of registration. Analysing the structure and effects of title registration, engaging with interdisciplinary work on time, and taking H.G Wells’ iconic time travel novella as a point of departure, I argue that title registries can usefully be understood as time machines. Like the machine H.G Wells imagined, title registries use fiction to facilitate fantastical journeys in which the subject is radically temporally dislocated from the material constraints of history. As with time machines, it tends to be a transcendental white male subject who is most likely to survive this dislocation. While based on fiction, the impacts of title registries are very much real, facilitating humanity’s arrival at racist, dystopic landscapes in the here and now.

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The narratives of settler failure and success need each other: Derek Murray, ‘A “Colony of Unrequited Dreams”? Settler colonialism and the failed-settlement narrative in the Ottawa-Huron Tract, 1850-1910’, PhD dissertation, University of Victoria, 2018

25Apr18

Abstract: In the 1850s, the government of Canada West initiated a project to colonize a vast region of the Canadian Shield known as the Ottawa-Huron Tract. Later, in his influential interpretation, Arthur Lower argued the myth of the inexorable forward movement of the settlement frontier was here shattered by a reality of lakes, rocks, and forest inherently unsuitable for farming. This refrain continues to be repeated by proponents of what I call the failed-settlement narrative. A contrasting narrative emphasizes the perseverance of settlers and their descendants. This dissertation was born of an interest in the tension between these competing narratives. On the one hand, the failed-settlement narrative ignores the fact many people succeeded in farming on the Shield. On the other hand, the romanticized image of the pioneer is disconnected from the larger historical contexts which shaped the settlement process and informed those notions of success and failure by which we judge the actions of people in the past. If the colonization project was an unmitigated failure, how do we account for the persistence of settlers and their descendants? If the landscape and soils of the Shield were unsuited to cultivation, why did people continue to cultivate the land for decades after the settlement project was condemned? What follows is an exploration of these questions, focusing on the township of Brudenell, Ontario as a site of Canadian colonial experimentation. Failure and desertion were certainly important parts of the settlement experience in the Ottawa-Huron Tract, but these themes have been overemphasized by historians. Early on, many settlers realized the variability of the landscape in places like Brudenell and found small parcels of land which they turned to a variety of purposes. Settlers took advantage of government policies that made landowning a realistic goal even for those of modest means and diverse backgrounds. By embracing new and emerging forms of local authority settlers were also able to tune the structures of the colonial state to further their own interests. They profited from the proximate shanty market for agricultural produce wherever practicable, while also pursuing economic activities oriented toward local, regional, and national markets. Economic opportunities and the accessibility of land in Brudenell allowed cultural groups to develop spatially-distinct communities, which expanded to fill much of the available land in the township. This revision of the failed-settlement narrative stands out in the historiography of the Ottawa-Huron Tract, but dovetails with histories of settlement in other agriculturally-marginal regions of nineteenth-century Canada.

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The settler-colonial politics of medicine: Nadia Rhook, ‘The Balms of White Grief: Indian Doctors, Vulnerability and Pride in Victoria, 1890–1912’, Itinerario, 42, 1, 2018 , pp. 33-49

25Apr18

Abstract: This article uses the 1898 manslaughter trial of two Indian medical practitioners in Victoria, Australia, as a lens to explore the settler colonial politics of medicine. Whereas imperial and colonial historians have long recognised the close and complex interrelationship of medicine and race, the emotional dimensions to care-giving have been under-appreciated – as has the place of the emotions within wider histories of sickness and health. Yet, this case studies shows, grief, vulnerability, catharsis and pride shaped the practice of medicine in fin-de-siecle Victoria. In particular, I argue that, like other emotions, grief does racial work.

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The settler-colonial labour of settler women: Mary Kitts, ‘She Can Never Be Happy Without All or Some of the Family with Her’: Women’s Lives on the Early National Frontier, MA dissertation, Auburn University, 2018

25Apr18

Abstract: When it comes to the early American frontier, a great deal is known about the men who moved to form the first permanent settlements. Much less has been told about the women they brought with them, the fundamental role these women played in the creation of successful frontier colonies and they labor they performed as part of that success. This blind spot limits the understanding of early American frontier spaces. Without acknowledging the labor and presence of women brought to the frontier, there cannot be a true understanding of its formation or its success. This thesis examines the emotional, reproductive, and economic labor of women who were brought to the early American frontier as part of the first generation of permanent settlers, paying attention to the political and gendered world in which they were living and subconsciously navigating. Male independence was dependent upon the labor of these women, so much so that they were a necessity to these migrations to the frontier. They participated in a type of settler colonialism that mirrored that of early American colonies both in the gendered expectations they experienced and in the success of the settlements built. In this thesis, diaries from women who migrated to the frontier of Alabama and Florida in the early 1800s are examined. Letters written from girls and women who moved to the frontier of Alabama and Kentucky ranging from the late 1700s to the early 1800s are examined as well. These primary sources come from middle to upper class white women, the source base most often available from the period, and provide rich details about what life on the frontier was life for the authors. This thesis, by examining the emotional, economic, and reproductive labor these women performed, looks to reinsert women’s labor into the narratives and understandings of the formation of the frontier and its success, as well as illustrate the integral role played by those whose labor was purposefully devalued due to their gender and dependent status.

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Settler-colonial feminism: Marjorie Johnstone, ‘Settler Feminism, Race Making, and Early Social Work in Canada’, Affilia, 2018

25Apr18

Abstract: Canada was one of the civilizing outposts that formed part of the British plan of imperial hegemony. This liberal democratic white settler society is the context where the new female-dominated social work profession developed. Using various historical archives of the mission statements and practice of early Canadian social work, I critically examine how first-wave feminisms, hegemonic imperial discourses, and settler colonial structures of governance worked as formative factors in the birth of Canadian social work and illustrate this with the life of an early Toronto social worker, Joan Arnoldi.

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