settler colonial studies blog

Statistics about indigenes must be accounted for: Tahu Kukutai, Maggie Walter, ‘Indigenous Statistics’, in Pranee Liamputtong (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences, Springer, 2017

22Oct17

Abstract: Statistics about Indigenous peoples are a common feature of Anglo-colonizing nation states such as Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (CANZUS). The impetus for the production of most Indigenous statistics is the shared position of Indigenous disadvantage in health and socioeconomic status. In this chapter, we contrast statistics about Indigenous peoples with statistics for Indigenous people and statistics by Indigenous people. There are very significant differences between these categories of Indigenous statistics. At the heart of these differences is the methodology that informs the research processes and practices. Statistics about Indigenous peoples often reflect the dominant social norms, values, and racial hierarchy of the society in which they are created. In the CANZUS states, these statistics are deficit focused and, at times, victim blaming. Also missing from these statistical portrayals is the culture, interests, perspectives, and alternative narratives of the Indigenous peoples that they purport to represent. We contrast these statistics with those from statistical research using processes and practices that are shaped by Indigenous methodologies. Indigenous methodologies are distinguished by their prioritization of Indigenous methods, protocols, values, and epistemologies. We conclude with two examples of what Indigenous quantitative methodologies look like in practice from Aotearoa NZ and Australia.

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Indigenous deaths in custody must be accounted for: Pauline Klippmark, Karen Crawley, ‘Justice for Ms Dhu: Accounting for Indigenous Deaths in Custody in Australia’, Social & Legal Studies, 2017

22Oct17

Abstract: Ms Dhu, an Aboriginal woman belonging to the Yamatji nation, died in police custody in South Hedland, Western Australia, in 2014 within 48 hours of being incarcerated for failing to pay fines. The coroner’s report found that both the police force and medical institution failed to discharge the duty of care owed to Ms Dhu, as their behaviour fell below what was expected of someone in their position. However, the coronial inquiry was unable to account for the ways in which state power and possessive sovereignty is invested in the deaths of Indigenous peoples. This article connects Ms Dhu’s life and death to forms of gendered, institutional and structural racism endemic to the Australian settler state. We then turn to examine the possibilities of justice for Ms Dhu through aesthetic attempts to memorialize her in public spaces of the city of Perth, which carry a promise of justice through their ability to challenge the settler-colonial logic that made possible Ms Dhu’s invisible suffering and the lack of accountability for her death.

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Fascist violence and settler violence: Michael R. Ebner,’Fascist Violence and the “Ethnic Reconstruction” of Cyrenaica (Libya), 1922–1934′, in Philip Dwyer, Amanda Nettelbeck (eds), Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 197-218

22Oct17

Abstract: This chapter examines Fascist Italy’s war against the Senussi anticolonial resistance fighters of Cyrenaica (Libya) between 1923 and 1934. It demonstrates how Italian colonial authorities’ use of military, economic, cultural, and social or ethnic violence functioned not simply to defeat the Bedouins’ resistance and take possession of their land, but also to destroy and refashion anew the people of Cyrenaica. Throughout the ‘re-conquest’ of Cyrenaica, Italian colonial officials acknowledged over and over that their policies might lead to the destruction of the entire civilian population. By the time the regime established concentration camps for civilians, colonial authorities began talking about the ‘ethnic reconstruction of Cyrenaica’, revealing an important motive behind Fascist colonial policy: creating submissive colonial subjects through atrocity.

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Violence in unexpected places: Hijin Park, ‘Racialized Women, the Law and the Violence of White Settler Colonialism’, Feminist Legal Studies, 2017, pp. 1–24

18Oct17

Abstract: In 2001, Rie Fujii, a 23-year-old Japanese national living without legal status in Calgary, Alberta, Canada left her two infant children alone in her apartment for 10 days while visiting her out-of-town boyfriend. The children, Domenic and Gemini, died of dehydration and starvation. Charged with two counts of second-degree homicide, Fujii plead guilty to manslaughter and received an 8-year sentence. Through an analysis of the publicly available judicial documents relating to the crimes of Rie Fujii, this paper explores how the law’s individualization and medicalization of crime and violence may obscure the multiple forms of everyday and structural violence that racialized women in white settler states such as Canada experience and may perpetrate. Drawing on Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’ concept of the violence continuum, I argue that the law’s conceptualization of crime and violence conceals and thus advances the violence endemic to white settler colonialism.

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Settler regionalism is settler colonialism: Katrine Barber, ‘Reflections on Pacific Northwest Regionalism on an Edge of Empire’, Middle West Review, 4, 1, 2017, pp. 93-100

18Oct17

Excerpt: The Pacific Northwest is simply this,” New York Times journalist Timothy Egan wrote in 1990, “wherever the salmon can get to.” Many agreed with him (although others were quick to point out that the range of salmon is extensive, even transnational). Regional icons like Douglas fir trees and salmon evoked the “geographical isolation and natural wealth” that historian Bill Lang identified as Pacific Northwest characteristics.³ More importantly, their anadromous life cycle meant they symbolized migration and indigeniety both, central and often opposing traits of Pacific Northwest regional identity. Salmon rely on balanced bioregions through which they journey thousands of miles–from the cool, rushing waters that course through the forest canopy to the mouth of the Columbia River, and into the Pacific Ocean, after which they return to their natal streambeds to spawn. They travel great distances and yet are deeply rooted to home.

This short essay addresses three divergent forms of Pacific Northwest regionalism and argues that each is partial and political. Regionalism tied to iconographic nature, such as in Egan’s definition, linked the vitality of the region to its resources, problematically as those resources waned. Regionalism animated by settler attachment to (and cooptation of) Indigenous material culture simultaneously froze Indian cultures in a seemingly authentic past and erased contemporary Native peoples. Alternatively, a syncretic sense of place that intertwines settler colonialism and Indigenous regionalisms while recognizing asymmetrical power relations can reintroduce Indigenous land and resource claims back into narratives of place, recentering the contests for lands that script the very debates over the meaning of the far west. While regional definitions reflect their geographic and temporally setting—they are supposed to be distinctive, after all—they are all arguments about place and people.

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Deportation derives from lynching: Ethan Blue, ‘From Lynch Mobs to the Deportation State’, Law, Culture and the Humanities Journal, 2017

18Oct17

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between mob violence, immigration control, and the early twentieth-century US deportation regime. Scholars examining the decline of lynch violence in the South typically see modern criminal justice as a new incarnation of white, heteropatriarchal violence. But they have left the deportation apparatus, a conjoined element of a US carceral assemblage, unexamined. This article argues that modern border policing’s ostensibly bloodless removal absorbed anti-immigrant mob violence within its carceral-eliminatory system. As with the diminution of the Southern, anti-black lynch mob, invocations of legality in deportation proved better suited to the biopolitics of liberal capitalist modernity. Nevertheless, the deportation regime, bolstered by an extensive federal infrastructure, still targeted migrants of color, took aim against political radicals, and policed heteropatriarchy in its production of settler-colonial citizenship via the spatial elimination of so-called undesirable aliens.

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Can settlers be responsible? Vanessa Sloan-Morgan, Learning New Relationships: Settler Responsibilities, HUU-AY-AHT First Nations’ Self-Government, and Implementing the MAA-NULTH Treaty, PhD Dissertation, Queen’s University, 2017

18Oct17

Abstract: Geographers have warned against essentializing responsibility in the geographies of responsibility literature. What responsibility is, however, and how it can be enacted remains under-explored. Yet, in published texts and public statements that seek to acknowledge relationships between Indigenous and settler peoples in Canada, the language of responsibility is used with abundance. I chose to pick up this concept of responsibility in my research. My dissertation is the result of a partnership-based project with Huu-ay-aht First Nations. I investigate what responsibility looks like with respect to new relationships under a modern treaty using the Maa-nulth Treaty as an exploratory case study. I begin by theorizing settler responsibility by extending Hannah Arendt’s work to the settler colonial context of Canada and argue that a collective responsibility is necessary to address settler colonial relationships. I then explore how settler researchers can better navigate and work through research—research with Huu-ay-aht First Nations for me as mamaałni (white person/settler)—in settler colonial contexts to support social change. Drawing from the Treaty itself and key informant interviews with Huu-ay-aht and First Nations leaders, Maa-nulth Treaty negotiators, and implementation teams (n=26), my inquiry focuses on Huu-ay-aht First Nations’ self-government as they move from under the thumb of the Indian Act through the tools provided by the Maa-nulth Treaty. Finally, I investigate the ‘new relationship’ between Federal, Provincial, and Huu-ay-aht First Nations Governments under the Treaty. My theoretical findings contribute to literature contending that settler colonialism cannot be viewed as historical or structural only, void of personal affect, or detached from everyday lived experiences. In this vein, empirical findings from the case study reveal that Huu-ay-aht First Nations’ choice to enter treaty negotiations and implement the final agreement was linked directly to visions of ʔiisaak (respect with caring) and ʔuuʔałuk (taking care of, especially for future generations), while recognizing the imperfection of the treaty process and resulting agreements. Although Huu-ay-aht First Nations accepted the Maa-nulth Treaty to move from under the Indian Act, work to define new relationship needs to occur. To conclude, I offer recommendations—informed by research participants—for how to improve the treaty process.

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Settlers know: Meredith McKittrick, ‘Talking about the Weather: Settler Vernaculars and Climate Anxieties in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa’, Environmental History, 2017

18Oct17

Abstract: This article reconstructs popular ideas about climate and climate change among early twentieth-century white southern Africans. The environmental history literature on South Africa and other settler societies has focused on the global connections formed by scientific elites as well as indigenous resistance to colonial policies. In assuming a largely homogeneous white intellectual world, this literature has overlooked the variety and longevity of settler vernaculars that drew on European and African folk traditions, direct experiences with semiarid landscapes, and ideas about weather and climate that circulated transnationally. Many, perhaps most, southern African settlers believed that diminishing rainfall threatened the long-term existence of “white civilization” in the region, and they continued to believe this for decades, despite multiple government reports insisting it was not so. Archival accounts, letters to the editor, and even testimony offered to government commissions reveal the ideas and theories that underpinned this persistent belief in declining rainfall. The stories that southern Africa’s settlers told about the weather, and their commitment to forms of knowledge rejected by their “experts,” open windows into an intellectual world that joined together town and country, educated and uneducated, Afrikaner and British. This article recreates a time when little was known for certain about the climate history of empire’s outposts and when there was little unanimity on the significance of individual weather events.

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Settlers represent themselves: Corinna Schäfer, ‘Discursive Colonialism: German Settler Communities, Their Media and Infrastructure in Africa, 1898–1914’, in Ruth Sanz Sabido (ed.), Representing Communities: Discourse and Contexts, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 77-93

18Oct17

Abstract: Within the short but brutal period of German colonialism in Africa, settlers set up their own press system. The newspapers became an important medium for them to build supportive networks, make their voices heard and bring their colonial projects forward. In this context, the settler newspapers became keen advocates for a fast expansion of colonial infrastructure, such as railways. This chapter explores the settler press both as a site that depended on technologies, and as a site of construction and circulation of discourses on infrastructure. It argues that infrastructures also communicated a message on their own, one that could be contested by African communities who were otherwise largely excluded from an active contribution to the discourse of the settlers.

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The settlers of fascism: Roberta Pergher, Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922–1943, Cambridge University Press, 2017

15Oct17

Description: Roberta Pergher transforms our understanding of Fascist rule. Examining Fascist Italy’s efforts to control the antipodes of its realm – the regions annexed in northern Italy after the First World War, and Italy’s North African colonies – she shows how the regime struggled to imagine and implement Italian sovereignty over alien territories and peoples. Contrary to the claims of existing scholarship, Fascist settlement policy in these regions was not designed to solve an overpopulation problem, but to bolster Italian claims to rule in an era that prized self-determination and no longer saw imperial claims as self-evident. Professor Pergher explores the character and impact of Fascist settlement policy and the degree to which ordinary Italians participated in and challenged the regime’s efforts to Italianize contested territory. Employing models and concepts from the historiography of empire, she shows how Fascist Italy rethought the boundaries between national and imperial rule.

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