Abstract: This article notes that while sophisticated study of Scottish intellectual analyses of global Indigenous societies and their significance has been longstanding among historians, until recently less attention has been given to the implications of Scottish settlement for specific Indigenous peoples. Historians have debated whether there is a distinctly Scottish pattern of dealings with Indigenous populations, or whether such interactions are best understood as a subset of imperial-Indigenous affairs on a global basis. Through exploring the case of Mi’kma’ki, and offering brief comparisons with Scottish-Indigenous relations elsewhere, the chapter will conclude by arguing that, while the question does invite continuing global study, nevertheless no paradigm will be found. The shifting relationships among factors such as land encroachment, intellectual argument, Indigenous displacement, and Indigenous response, ensure that historiographical as well as historical complexity will prevail.

Abstract: From 1880-1910, Montana was home to one of the most vibrant and diverse African American communities in the Rocky Mountain West. By the onset of World War II, however, the black population had fallen by over fifty percent, and Montana was well on its way to being the least black state in the US by the twenty-first century. In The Erosion of the Racial Frontier, I argue that scholars of African American studies and the American West must consider the sedimented afterlife of US settler colonialism if those fields are to articulate a distinctly western narrative of African American history. My approach draws on colonial and settler colonial theories to examine the history of African Americans in Montana from 1880-1930. As a non-indigenous, non-white, community of color—or what Lorenzo Veracini would call ‘subaltern exogenous others’—black westerners fall into an uncertain space in settler colonial theory. As an ongoing structure, settler colonialism continues after the violent appropriation of Indigenous lands appears to culminate. The thesis of The Erosion of the Racial Frontier is two-fold: The logic of settlement together with the logic of anti-blackness created distinctly western categories of racial exclusion that is evident in the archive of black Montana. This western, colonial racism acted as an erosive force across the state, targeting the stability and place identity of western black communities. Moreover, the society that developed in tandem with colonial erosion necessarily continues to live with the sedimented afterlife of settler colonialism. As such, the history of Black Montana can be understood as individual and collective experiences of thousands of black Montanans struggling against and subverting the settler colonial project in western North America. 

Abstract: This project-based dissertation emerges from my engagement with theories of representation, settler colonialism, and genocide, as well as involvement with direct engagement through embodied experience of the Palestinian reality in the colonized West Bank during 2015–2017. The artworks and written components of this project seek to represent shards of the multilayered Western-Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine through a focus on the struggle and resilience of the Palestinian people and the endurance of their land. Land seizing as the aim of settler colonialism and the colonised bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance are central to the various works of the exhibition and the textual analysis. The dissertation is built on the assertion that the Western-Zionist venture in Palestine amounts to an incremental genocide that targets the existence of the Palestinian people, their material culture, and their land. It also asserts that the right of the Palestinians to resist colonial violence is a legitimate right enshrined in international law and connected to the struggle of colonized and oppressed people around the world. My experience and what I observed and documented in the West Bank—particularly in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem—represented in this project, resembles Palestinian resilience, sumud (steadfastness), and resistance in the face of a century of Zionist dispossession and military oppression. Representing active settler colonialism is hindered by continued violence on the ground in Palestine, dominant Zionist narratives, suppression and misrepresentation of the colonized peoples’ resistance, as well as by the limitations of representational forms. Obstacles that I have faced while working on this project include denial of entry to Gaza ( twelve years under blockade), restrictions of movement within the country, and access to sites, information, as well as intimidation and sometimes life threats.

Abstract: Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a ‘laboratory’ for the production and export of advanced weapons, security knowhow and technology. Critics of Israeli wars and the ongoing colonization of Palestine use the laboratory metaphor to make sense of Israeli state policies and practices used in controlling Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and fighting wars but also to address how Israeli instruments of violence come to travel elsewhere. This article brings these discussions into sharper focus by examining how the concept of the laboratory is employed in making sense of Israel’s perceived centrality in global patterns violence and militarism, here termed the laboratory thesis. The article argues that although the thesis develops powerful insights, it has analytical limitations. It further calls into question the thesis’ polemical force, suggesting that critical references to Palestine/Israel as a laboratory reinforce misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel’s settler colonial project. The article takes these concerns as an opportunity to re-assemble the policing/security laboratory as a critical concept, in relation to Palestine/Israel, the global war on terror and beyond.

Excerpt: The word “settler” tends to carry with it connotations both bucolic and nostalgic. Even certain dictionary definitions are at pains to remove it from the colonial circumstances in which it is most often employed. The Oxford Living Dictionary offers a definition and sample sentences that exemplify the willful act of erasure at the heart of everyday understandings of the word:

A person who settles in an area, typically one with no or few previous inhabitants.

“the settlers had come to America to look for land”

“Jewish settlers”

The field of settler colonial studies has worked to undo the erasure performed by this definition by theorizing settler colonialism as a distinct structure of imperial domination defined by a genocidal project aimed primarily at seizing Native territory rather than exploiting Native labor. Settler colonialism, in the United States and other settler societies around the globe, is a structure that must be dismantled in the present, rather than an event that can be consigned to the historical past. For settler colonial studies, “settler” names both the perpetrators and the beneficiaries of this form of structural violence.

Excerpt: The desire to undertake a special issue on Indigenous Food arose during a conversation that took place between the co-editors following a panel on the same topic at the annual conference of the Native American Indigenous Studies Association in 2015. The panel contained a mixture of conversations that focused on the meanings and relationships of Indigenous peoples with land and food; the efforts and importance of re-knowing and re-defining those relationships through stories centred around community and family; and the ways in which settler colonialism operates to undermine Indigenous food sovereignty at both the structural and epistemological levels.

Abstract: In the context of expanding community engagement efforts by universities and growing awareness of the past and current impacts of settler-colonialism in Canada, this study explores one Indigenous-settler, community-university partnership. Building on a framework of community-university engagement and decolonization, this case study explores a partnership between Fraser Valley Aboriginal Children and Family Services Society (Xyolhemeylh) and the Division of Health Care Communication at the University of British Columbia (UBC-DHCC). This partnership, called the “Community as Teacher” program, began in 2006 and engages groups of UBC health professional students in three-day cultural summer camps. This qualitative case study draws on analysis of program documents and interviews with Xyolhemeylh and UBC-DHCC participants. The findings of the study are framed within “Four Rs”—relevance, risk-taking, respect, and relationship-building—which extend existing frameworks of Indigenous community-university engagement. Committed to a foundation of mutual relevance to their missions, both community and university partners undertook risk-taking, based on their respective contexts, in establishing and investing in the relationship. Respect, expressed as working “in a good way,” likewise formed the basis for interpersonal relationship-building. By outlining the findings in relation to these four themes, this study provides a potential framework for practitioners and researchers in Indigenous-university partnerships

Abstract: In this overview, I reflect on how the essays of this issue exemplify a range of “entanglements” between emerging Indigenous practices and art theory. Further, I try to draw attention both to some earlier models of the experiments in the projects presented as well as to the specific history of exhibitions that has influenced the developments in the art world. Finally, following the ways in which the essays attend to the disruptions Indigenous practice presents to settler colonial hegemony, I introduce a resonance between the interventions of decolonization and the semiotic concept of defamiliarization. 

Abstract: This chapter applies a decolonial frame to the study of racism in the Italian-Australian context. The first part provides a historical outline of Australian racist and xenophobic attitudes, policies, and practices against Italians. The second part analyses the strategies these migrants employed in response to such prejudice; it highlights, in particular, Italian migrants’ constant attempts to be recognised as white and respectable, often to the detriment of other, darker, and more subaltern groups. The third part of the chapter argues for the importance of a decolonial approach to the study of Italian migration history. This section emphasises the Italian role in the dispossession of First Nations’ land and the persisting prejudice against Indigenous people, while also drawing attention to the many positive relationships between Italians and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Description: Violence and intimacy were critically intertwined at all stages of the settler colonial encounter, and yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected in the shaping of colonial economies. Extending a reading of ‘economies’ as labour relations into new arenas, this innovative collection of essays examines new understandings of the nexus between violence and intimacy in settler colonial economies of the British Pacific Rim. The sites it explores include cross-cultural exchange in sealing and maritime communities, labour relations on the frontier, inside the pastoral station and in the colonial home, and the material and emotional economies of exploration. Following the curious mobility of texts, objects, and frameworks of knowledge, this volume teases out the diversity of ways in which violence and intimacy were expressed in the economies of everyday encounters on the ground. In doing so, it broadens the horizon of debate about the nature of colonial economies and the intercultural encounters that were enmeshed within them.