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The language of settler colonialism: Adam Schwartz, ‘Language and borders revisited: Colonizing language, deporting voice and seeking discomfort in Spanish class’, Critical Education, 9, 6, 2018

10Apr18

Abstract: Spanish language education in the U.S. historically accommodates students who identify with English monolingualism and unmarked Whiteness as a normative cultural order. This distinctive practice relies on the imagination and maintenance of borders, including those realized as international geo-political divisions and discourse within Spanish classrooms themselves. The present paper offers a theoretical discussion of language ideologies in three parts. Firstly, it reviews literature from diverse disciplinary perspectives that examines intersections between language and borders. Second, Whiteness, White supremacy and White settler colonialism are named explicitly as means by which Spanish language classrooms and curricula are organized in post-secondary educational contexts. Thirdly, in the interest of understanding how students and educators may collectively disrupt traditionally oppressive discourses of foreignness and language pedagogy, an exercise in “critical photography” is examined. Finally, the article considers how we might teach language through “pedagogies of discomfort”.


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Filibustering is settler colonialism that fails: Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America, Harvard University Press, 2018

06Apr18

Description: Michel Gobat traces the untold story of the rise and fall of the first U.S. overseas empire to William Walker, a believer in the nation’s manifest destiny to spread its blessings not only westward but abroad as well.

In the 1850s Walker and a small group of U.S. expansionists migrated to Nicaragua determined to forge a tropical “empire of liberty.” His quest to free Central American masses from allegedly despotic elites initially enjoyed strong local support from liberal Nicaraguans who hoped U.S.-style democracy and progress would spread across the land. As Walker’s group of “filibusters” proceeded to help Nicaraguans battle the ruling conservatives, their seizure of power electrified the U.S. public and attracted some 12,000 colonists, including moral reformers. But what began with promises of liberation devolved into a reign of terror. After two years, Walker was driven out.

Nicaraguans’ initial embrace of Walker complicates assumptions about U.S. imperialism. Empire by Invitation refuses to place Walker among American slaveholders who sought to extend human bondage southward. Instead, Walker and his followers, most of whom were Northerners, must be understood as liberals and democracy promoters. Their ambition was to establish a democratic state by force. Much like their successors in liberal-internationalist and neoconservative foreign policy circles a century later in Washington, D.C., Walker and his fellow imperialists inspired a global anti-U.S. backlash. Fear of a “northern colossus” precipitated a hemispheric alliance against the United States and gave birth to the idea of Latin America.


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Indigenous people must have no money: Jessica R. Cattelino, ‘From Locke to Slots: Money and the Politics of Indigeneity’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60, 2, 2018, pp. 274-307

04Apr18

Abstract: With ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples’ economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.


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The beat of indigenous resurgence: Kyle T. Mays, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America, SUNY Press, 2018

04Apr18

Summary: Expressive culture has always been an important part of the social, political, and economic lives of Indigenous people. More recently, Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture, creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being Indigenous. This book documents recent developments among the Indigenous hip hop generation. Meeting at the nexus of hip hop studies, Indigenous studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing “traditional” beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is, the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous people are losing their “traditions.” Indigenous hip hop artists navigate the muddy waters of the “politics of authenticity” by creating art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of “tradition” and create alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that might look like going forward.


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‘Humanitarian’ and ‘settler colonialist’ go together: Sarah Pike, Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, British Columbia Indian reserve commissioner (1876-1880), and the “humanitarian civilizing” of indigenous peoples, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2018

04Apr18

Abstract: Gilbert Malcolm Sproat (1834-1913) was one of British Columbia’s first post-confederation Indian reserve commissioners. He served two years as the joint commissioner to the Joint Indian Reserve Commission (1876-1878) and then two more years as the sole commissioner of a reconstituted commission (1878-1880). In these capacities, Sproat left thousands of handwritten pages analyzing his decisions allotting Indian reserves and providing his thoughts more generally about Indigenous peoples and their relationship to the new settler society. His legacy remains today most obviously in surveyed Indian reserve boundaries that represent more than just lines on maps: they also represent the ideas, beliefs, and reasoning that generated them. Through a comprehensive review of Sproat’s writing and an attention to his “intellectual history,” I analyze Sproat’s own explanations to elucidate what he believed about Indigenous peoples and why, and how those beliefs affected his reserve-allotment decisions. I conclude that two fields of 19th-century thought influenced Sproat most strongly: the push for Indigenous “civilization” and humanitarianism. Further, the idea at the core of Sproat’s beliefs is that the only way Canada’s Indigenous “civilization” program would succeed is if Indigenous people were the primary actors in their own “civilization.” By reviewing Sproat’s adult life prior to becoming reserve commissioner and his four-year tenure as reserve commissioner with these new insights, one can see his drive for the “humanitarian civilizing” of Indigenous peoples running throughout his decisions. This broader knowledge about Sproat’s influences, in turn, provide additional perspectives on the Indian reserve-creation process in British Columbia. Whereas previous scholars have addressed Sproat as an adjunct to other primary investigations, I begin with Sproat. I approach him from the perspective of a legal historian interested in the intersection of land; Indigenous occupation, rights, and ownership of land; and settler law about land and Indigenous people. I conclude that he was very much a man of his time, not of ours, and he can be best understood in light of his intellectual, legal, social, and cultural context, including as part of the liberal order framework, an emerging paradigm through which to analyze and understand Canadian history.


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Settler emigrants are invisible (that is because they are settlers): Eric Richards, ‘British Emigrants and the Making of the Anglosphere’, History, 103, 355, 2018, pp. 286-306

04Apr18

Abstract: British emigrants tend to be lost in their vast numbers and in their historiographical anonymity. They feature very marginally in most interpretations of British expansion in the age of imperialism. There was a remarkable surge in emigration in the 1820s which presaged the Age of Emigration in the Victorian era. This was also a prototype of modern international migration. The origins of this momentous increase in emigration are unclear but recent emphasis gives priority to the influence of the new forms of propaganda and ‘puffery’. In this article it is contended that more consideration should be accorded to bedrock changes in British demography and agrarian life in the propulsion of this mass emigration, which eventually involved about 19 million people from the British Isles in the long nineteenth century. 


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Manu Vimalassery on Iyko Day’s Alien Capital: MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 64, 1, 2018, pp. 198-201

04Apr18

Excerpt: Operating in a framework that crosses the Canada-US border, Alien Capital argues that Asian Americans personify abstract value in North American settler colonial capitalism and provide a racial target for the anxieties of settlers reacting to capitalist abstraction. Day’s argument hinges on the ways that settler colonial glorification of the concrete—as exemplified in whiteness and the nuclear family and revolving around settler appropriations of indigenous relations with place (in which settlers substitute themselves as native)—manifests anxieties concerning the contradictions of settler capitalism. Settlers displace these anxieties onto variously racialized aliens, violently associating Asian bodies with the domination of capitalist abstraction. Elimination and exclusion, Day convincingly argues, are interlinked modes of settler colonialism. “Asians,” she writes, “are as unnatural to the landscape as Indigenous peoples are natural. This is the double edge of settler colonialism” (112). I understand North American settler sovereignty to be a reactive set of future-oriented claims articulated and levied against indigenous relationalities, which I call counter-sovereignty. Day’s argument helps me understand that alien desires, as queer desires, potentially disrupt settler futurity, and given the fact and necessity of ongoing indigenous existence to the stability of settler colonialism, futurity is all that settlers can actually claim. Settler sovereignty is preemptive. Alien desires, then, potentially disrupt settler sovereignty, and anti-Asian racism anxiously lashes out in the present against the possible displacement of settler futures.


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Settler girls play Indian too! Kiara M. Vigil, ‘Charles Eastman’s “School of the Woods”: Re-creation related to Childhood, Race, Gender, and Nation at Camp Oahe’, American Quarterly, 70, 1, 2018, pp. 25-53

04Apr18

Abstract: This essay examines a program of outdoor education created by Charles (Ohiyesa) Eastman—Dakota physician, author, and activist—which has been largely absent from scholarly work on his life and writings. The Eastman family founded Oahe in 1916 in New Hampshire as a summer camp for girls. Reading the Eastmans’ camp through the lenses of redfacing and survivance, I provide new insights into the “playing Indian” phenomenon associated with outdoors education that was part of an American youth wilderness movement promoted by groups like the Camp Fire Girls and Boy Scouts of America. For the Eastmans, “Indian play” served a broader pedagogical and political purpose. Their camp was distinct from other wilderness outfits because they did not view Native practices as “savage” and part of an early stage in child development that young people had to experience and overcome to become successful adults. Rather, the Eastman family sought to engage white girlhood to teach the future mothers of the nation about the values of Dakota teachings to recast Indian culture. Oahe was led by Eastman and his wife as well as their three eldest daughters, who were themselves exemplars of a Native cosmopolitanism that they hoped white campers would embrace to fully accept Indian people as shapers of American society and as integral to the past as well as future of the United States. The story of Oahe highlights a new venue Eastman used to represent himself as a Native intellectual and reveals his awareness of the structural limits of settler colonialism. Oahe illuminates Eastman’s cultural politics of recognition as someone poised to respond to the threats of erasure and dispossession posed by the colonial state. In this context, the Eastman family’s camp sought to counter prevalent notions of savagery and primitivism by using redfacing as an embodied performative tactic and instructive cultural force that constituted survivance. Whether performed by the Eastmans or their campers, redfacing in this context differed from the minstrel tradition of “blackface,” since Indian people remained in control of how to deploy these strategic performances of Indianness. This essay provides new analysis of early twentieth-century gender roles, dynamics, and expectations related to Indian people to reveal another dimension of outdoors education in shaping American attitudes toward identity, family, childhood, and nation.


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Indigenous futures demand indigenous self-determination when it comes to indigenous pasts: Sara L. Gonzalez, Ian Kretzler, Briece Edwards, ‘Imagining Indigenous and Archaeological Futures: Building Capacity with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde’, Archaeologies, 2018

04Apr18

Abstract: Collaborative archaeological research with indigenous communities, in addition to fostering culturally specific, community-centred research programmes, also encourages meaningful shifts in archaeological research on the ground. Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology (FMIA), a community-based research partnership between the University of Washington and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, highlights these dual possibilities. The project seeks to strengthen the tribe’s capacity to care for cultural resources, to recover histories of survivance on the Grand Ronde Reservation, and to develop a low-impact, Grand Ronde archaeological methodology. These goals are realized through a summer field school, which joins comprehensive field instruction with overviews of tribal historic preservation and engagement with the Grand Ronde community. FMIA encapsulates the ethical imperative to work with, for, and by indigenous communities in archaeological research and the opportunities such work brings in transforming archaeological method, theory, and practice.


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There is settler colonialism in German colonialism (and there is colonialism in German modernity): Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Decolonization’, Central European History, 51, 1, 2018, pp. 83-89

04Apr18

Abstract: In the past two decades, colonial studies, the postcolonial turn, the new imperial history, as well as world and global history have made serious strides toward revising key elements of German history. Instead of insisting that German modernity was a fundamentally unique, insular affair that incubated authoritarian social tendencies, scholars working in these fields have done much to reinsert Germany into the broader logic of nineteenth-century global history, in which the thalassocratic empires of Europe pursued the project of globalizing their economies, populations, and politics. During this period, settler colonies, including German South West Africa, were established and consolidated by European states at the expense of displaced, helotized, or murdered indigenous populations. Complementing these settler colonies were mercantile entrepôts and plantation colonies, which sprouted up as part of a systematic, global attempt to reorient non-European economies, work patterns, and epistemological frameworks along European lines. Although more modestly than some of its European collaborators and competitors, Germany joined Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States in a largely liberal project of global maritime imperialism.


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