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Retrieving native history is resistance: Kathleen Corpuz, ‘Living in Kalihi: Remembering Stories of Struggle and Resistance’, Mānoa Horizons, 2, 2017, pp. 1–6

05Nov17

Abstract: This paper exposes the various ways American settlers remove traces of Kanaka Maoli history while exemplifying colonial narratives of immigrants who struggle to survive in the present colonial space of Kalihi. I will describe the historical and political transformation of Kalihi through an analysis of devices that settlers use in the early twentieth century, such as maps and newspaper advertisements, to dispossess land from Kanaka Maoli. The evidence I have chosen illustrates how the transformation of land has shaped the experiences of residents of Kalihi. While settlers attempt to erase native history in the community, Kanaka Maoli continue to share their stories through their biographies and oral histories to oppose the dominant narrative of blankness forwarded by settler colonialism. Settler colonialism comes in different forms, and this paper reveals the importance of critiquing settler ideologies in order to return ancestral lands to Kanaka Maoli. Since many people are unaware of their participation and existence in colonialism, retrieving native histories will promote a better understanding of the current predicaments indigenous peoples face and will help create alliances among residents to make decisions that will respect the right of Kanaka Maoli to self-determination.


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A settler polity celebrating itself celebrates settler colonialism: Stacie A. Swain, Armed with an Eagle Feather Against the Parliamentary Mace: A Discussion of Discourse on Indigenous Sovereignty and Spirituality in a Settler Colonial Canada, 1990-2017, MA dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2017

05Nov17

Abstract: Canada 150, or the sesquicentennial anniversary of Confederation, celebrates a nation-state that can be described as “settler colonial” in relation to Indigenous peoples. This thesis brings a Critical Religion and Critical Discourse Analysis methodology into conversation with Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies to ask: how is Canadian settler colonial sovereignty enacted, and how do Indigenous peoples perform challenges to that sovereignty? The parliamentary mace and the eagle feather are conceptualized as emblematic and condensed metaphors, or metonyms, that assert and represent Canadian and Indigenous sovereignties. As a settler colonial sovereignty, established and naturalized partially through discourses on religion, Canadian sovereignty requires the displacement of Indigenous sovereignty. In events from 1990 to 2017, Indigenous people wielding eagle feathers disrupt Canadian governance and challenge the legitimacy of Canadian sovereignty. Indigenous sovereignty is (re)asserted as identity-based, oppositional, and spiritualized. Discourses on Indigenous sovereignty and spirituality provide categories and concepts through which Indigenous resistance occurs within Canada.


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Contradictions catch up: Astrid B. Stensrud, ‘Settlers and Squatters: The Production of Social Inequalities in the Peruvian Desert’, in M. Ystanes, I. Strønen (eds), The Social Life of Economic Inequalities in Contemporary Latin America: Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

01Nov17

Abstract: This chapter discusses the production of social inequalities in the Majes Irrigation Project (MIP) in southern Peru in terms of class, race and gender. More than 30 years after the construction of MIP, and after radical neoliberal structural adjustments in the 1990s, many of the first settlers have lost their farms or are struggling with debt. Nevertheless, Majes is known as a ‘place of opportunities’, and thousands of people have migrated from the poor rural highlands in search of work or informal business, settling in the desert surrounding the irrigated areas. The population in Majes comes from different places, with various cultural, educational and economic backgrounds. The chapter examines how Majes has been generated through relations of capital and labour and how families experience debt and uncertainty, and yet continue struggling to get ahead in a precarious informal economy. The chapter argues that inequality is embedded in the historical intersectionality of class formations, gender and conceptions of race and that these differences have not diminished with various attempts of social reform. On the contrary, social inequality has increased during the past three decades of neoliberalism, with more insecure conditions for farming and work.


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The hostility of (other) settlers: Richard G. Baker, Nadia Verrelli, ‘”Smudging, drumming and the like do not a nation make”: Temporal Liminality and Delegitimization of Indigenous Protest in Canada’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 51, 1, 2017

01Nov17

Abstract: This article explores the threat that Indigenous protest poses to Canada. However, it examines this potential for threat at an ontological level rather than a material level. In adopting a liminality framework, the article traces the capacity for Indigenous protest to menace and undermine Canada’s national identity. More specifically, it analyzes the ways in which editorial and commentary sections of Canada’s national newspapers represented protest and political activity associated with the Idle No More movement. Its findings demonstrate how these prominent social actors in Canada respond to the destabilizing presence of the Indigenous liminar by working to resolve its ambiguity in ways that protect and entrench dominant narratives of Canadian national identity. Acknowledging the role that liminality plays in structuring news media depictions of Indigenous peoples provides insight into how social actors in Canada interpret and respond to Indigenous protest. It demonstrates how such actors are able to exploit popular conceptions of indigeneity to reinforce the ongoing social dynamics working to produce and reproduce dominant narratives of Canadian identity. Moreover, a liminality framework is also valuable in demonstrating the role the news media play in delegitimizing Indigenous political advocacy and perpetuating fears relating to social disorder and violence in Canada.


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The ‘friendship’ of (some) settlers: Lucy Taylor, ‘Lifting the veil of kindness: “friendship” and settler colonialism in Argentina’s Welsh Patagonia’, LSE Latin America and Caribbean Blog, 06/09/17

01Nov17

Excerpt: Now a popular tourist attraction, the Welsh community in Patagonia began life in 1865 with the arrival of 153 Welsh-speaking families. They sought to create a new Welsh homeland forged through the Welsh language, reflecting Welsh values, and in defiance of a disparaging ‘English’ elite. The strategy chosen for this anti-colonial enterprise was, paradoxically, the creation of a settler colony.

The myth of friendship is anchored in the story of first encounter, when Cacique Francisco and his wife arrived on a trading mission. The most detailed and reliable account tells us that after initial fearfulness they shared food. However, one of the colony’s leaders suggested that: “’they are just robbers and spies… Kill them both!’”. Everyone else thought differently, though: “‘I will not do that’ said one…’. ‘Let us show more courage and more of our Christian nature than rushing to take the life of an old man and his wife’ [said another]. Everyone agreed with this… In this way we laid the foundations of friendship”.

According to this account, the Welsh resisted the ‘usual’ barbarities of colonial violence and followed the righteous path of Christian charity, adopting a policy of friendship.


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Ongoing settler colonialism, II: Samuel Sellers, Richard Bilsborrow, Victoria Salinas, Carlos Mena, ‘Population and development in the Amazon: A longitudinal study of migrant settlers in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon’, Acta Amazonica, 47, 4, 2017

29Oct17

Abstract: This paper examines changes over time for a full generation of migrant settlers in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (NEA). Data were collected from a 2014 household survey covering a subsample of households surveyed previously in 1990 and 1999. We observed changes in demographic behavior, land use, forest cover, and living conditions. As the frontier develops, human fertility is continuing to decline with contraceptive prevalence rising. Meanwhile, out-migration from colonist households, largely to destinations within the region, persists. More households have secure land tenure than in 1999, and are better off as measured by possession of assets. There is continued growth in pasture, largely at the expense of forest. Farms still serve as an important livelihood source for families, though growing cities in the NEA are creating more non-agricultural economic opportunities. Our findings provide a snapshot of demographic, economic, land use, and livelihood changes occurring in the NEA during the past quarter century, providing useful information for policymakers seeking to balance economic and environmental goals in order to promote sustainable development as well as protect biodiversity. 


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Ongoing settler colonialism, I: Santhosh Chandrashekar, ‘Not a Metaphor: Immigrant of Color Autoethnography as a Decolonial Move’, Cultural Studies = Critical Methodologies, 2017

29Oct17

Abstract: This essay argues that if “decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of (Native) land”(p. 7), then autoethnography committed to decolonization should first and foremost center Native struggles over land and life. For this task and given my own position as a postcolonial immigrant on Native lands, I elaborate an immigrant of color autoethnography to demystify the discourses that privilege select postcolonial immigrants such as myself over Indigenous people and render me as a desirable minority and settler. I start this project unpacking my journey as an international student through the higher education apparatus in the United States as I narrate how the material structures and academic knowledge that circulate within the university (re)produce the devaluation of indigeneity. Then I shift my attention to my time in Albuquerque, a border city that excludes Indigenous people through a host of policies even as international students are welcomed to make home in the city. Against these two sites, I turn to (un)Occupy Albuquerque to map coalition possibilities between postcolonial immigrants and Indigenous people. Together, these three sites allow for an understanding of the ideological and material structures that rationalize (and disrupt) settler colonialism and Native dispossession.


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On Australia’s ‘unsettled settlers’, II: Claire Corbett, ‘Nowhere to run: Repetition compulsion and heterotopia in the Australian post-apocalypse – from “Crabs” to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’, Science Fiction Film & Television, 10, 3, 2017

24Oct17

Abstract: This article argues that despite the genre status of the Mad Max films as post-apocalyptic sf, the driving force behind many of the images and concerns of the films derives from aspects of Australian history since colonisation. The article compares the way these themes appear in the Mad Max films to the way they are explored in ‘Crabs’, a 1972 short story by Australian writer Peter Carey. This story was later filmed as Dead End Drive-In, a film which itself draws on the aesthetic already developed through the Mad Max films. I use Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion to explore ways in which history is both remembered and deliberately forgotten through imagery that is dislocated from the past to the ‘future’ and thus in effect to a timeless, ever-present or ever-recurring time. The article also argues that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (a space that is populated by a selected, heterogenerous group such inmates in a prison), describes the reality of the penal colonies forming the origins of settler Australia. The colony’s status as heterotopia has led to a pervasive sense of the ‘irreality’ of Australia for many non-Indigenous Australians, expressed through numerous artworks: a sense that there is no ‘there’ out there, nowhere to run.


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On Australia’s ‘unsettled settlers’, I: Anne Rees, ‘Reading Australian modernity: Unsettled settlers and cultures of mobility’, History Compass, 2017

24Oct17

Abstract: What did Australian modernity look like? Over the last two decades, Australia’s entrenched reputation for ‘cultural belatedness’ has been displaced by the study of ‘colonial modernity’. No longer beholden to the idea that a singular modernity was disseminated from core to periphery, scholars now speak of many localised modernities that arose across colonial and provincial sites. According to this new ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm, Australia was home to its own home-grown incarnation of modern life. But what was distinctively ‘Australian’ about Australian modernity? Although widely discussed in recent historiography, scholars have yet to delineate its distinguishing features. This article posits mobility as a central component of the Australian modern. Drawing upon new scholarship in settler colonial studies and transnational history, it argues that early twentieth-century Australia was home to intense cultures of both domestic and global mobility that were entangled with the geographies and anxieties of the settler colonial project. It shows how the nation’s ‘unsettled settlers’ also became its chief agents of modernity, and in doing so draws together several strands in recent historiography. Although mobility also signified modernity beyond Australia, it was within this settler colonial nation tyrannised by distance that the modern appetite for motion reached especial heights.


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Freedom somewhere else is a settler colonial thing: Ikuko Asaka, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation, Duke University Press, 2017

22Oct17

Description: In Tropical Freedom Ikuko Asaka engages in a hemispheric examination of the intersection of emancipation and settler colonialism in North America. Asaka shows how from the late eighteenth century through Reconstruction, emancipation efforts in the United States and present-day Canada were accompanied by attempts to relocate freed blacks to tropical regions, as black bodies were deemed to be more physiologically compatible with tropical climates. This logic conceived of freedom as a racially segregated condition based upon geography and climate. Regardless of whether freed people became tenant farmers in Sierra Leone or plantation laborers throughout the Caribbean, their relocation would provide whites with a monopoly over the benefits of settling indigenous land in temperate zones throughout North America. At the same time, black activists and intellectuals contested these geographic-based controls by developing alternative discourses on race and the environment. By tracing these negotiations of the transnational racialization of freedom, Asaka demonstrates the importance of considering settler colonialism and black freedom together while complicating the prevailing frames through which the intertwined histories of British and U.S. emancipation and colonialism have been understood.


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