settler colonial studies blog

Recognising shared rule means disavowing exclusive settler rule: Aaron John Spitzer, ‘Reconciling Shared Rule: Liberal Theory, Electoral-Districting Law and “National Group” Representation in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2018

23Feb18

Abstract: Canada, like all representative democracies, apportions representation to individuals; also, like all federal states, it accords polity-based representation to federal subunits. But Canada is additionally a consociational state, comprising three constitutionally recognized “national groups”: anglophones, francophones and Indigenous peoples. These groups share power and bear rights beyond the bounds of the federal system. In recent decades, Indigenous peoples and francophones have appealed for representation as “national groups,” leading to constitutional challenges. Courts have either failed to address the constitutionality of “national group” representation or have rejected it as irreconcilable with individual voting rights. I suggest the former is unnecessary and the latter procedurally illogical. Drawing on the liberal principles of individualism, egalitarianism and universalism, I develop a framework contextualizing such representation within liberal theory. I then deploy this framework to analyze recent Canadian case law. I show that appeals for “national group” representation should be approached not through the lens of individual rights, but rather through the “constitutionally prior” lens of universalism.

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The settlements of co-ethnics (the Dutch Midwest): Douglas Firth Anderson, ‘”We Are Now Americans”: Henry Hospers, Sioux County, Iowa, and Dutch Settler Acculturation’, Northwestern Review, 3, 1, 2018

21Feb18

Abstract: Henry Hospers (1830-1901) was the leader of the Dutch kolonie (colony) of Sioux County, Iowa. When Hospers named and platted Orange City in 1870, Hendrik P. Scholte of the Pella, Iowa colony was dead and Albertus C. Van Raalte of the Holland, Michigan colony was nearing the end of his life. Compared to the more famous Scholte and Van Raalte (who settled their respective Midwestern colonies in 1847), Hospers has received little critical attention as a significant Dutch American immigrant leader. Hospers’ relative historical obscurity is understandable. Scholte and Van Raalte were clergy, while Hospers was a layman. Moreover, he was a second-generation leader. Further, the surviving records related to Hospers are spottier than those related to Scholte and Van Raalte. Even so, there is plentiful evidence of Hospers’ significance. This study of Hospers as a colony leader documents that he was a tireless promoter of the colony in particular and Sioux County more generally, particularly as a land broker, banker, and owner of the weekly De Volksvriend (The People’s Friend). He was also an office holder representing all settlers, especially as Chair of the Sioux County Board of Supervisors and as a member of the Iowa House and then the Senate. Finally, he was a founder of “church and school” (kerk en school) for the colony in his work to organize Northwestern Classical Academy (later Northwestern College) and First Reformed Church of Orange City. His experience helps fill out the tapestry of Dutch Protestant settler acculturation: retaining Dutch identity and becoming American amidst the fluidity of modernity.

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Settler ideas travel: John Hennessey, Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868-1912, Linnaeus University Press, 2018

21Feb18

Excerpt: Part I investigates the trans-imperial linkages between Japan and the United States during Japan’s colonization of Hokkaidō around the 1870s. Chapters 1 – 3 consider the role of three American professors, William Smith Clark, William Wheeler and David Pearce Penhallow, who were hired to establish an agricultural college as part of the colonial development of Hokkaidō. I argue that these American professors contributed to Japan’s colonial expansionism in at least three ways: by helping the Kaitakushi physically transform Hokkaidō into a Japanese settler colony, by spreading a colonial worldview according to which the Ainu were portrayed as a primitive, dying race similar to Native Americans, and finally by acting as propagandists for Japanese expansionism after their return. Chapter 4 considers continuing links to American technologies of settler colonialism in the next generation through the writings of Satō Shōsuke on Hokkaidō’s colonial status. Satō graduated in Sapporo Agricultural College’s first class and later studied land policy in America before returning and becoming president of his alma mater.

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Settlers in denial: Syned Mthatiwa, ‘Home and belonging in Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door and Andrea Eames’ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2018

18Feb18

Abstract: In this article I examine how, in their novels The Boy Next Door and The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, Irene Sabatini and Andrea Eames, respectively, allow us to reflect on questions of whiteness, home, and belonging in Zimbabwe. I argue that in these novels the experiences, behaviours, and attitudes of whites towards Africa and black people contest and subvert their belonging to Zimbabwe and highlight their failure to accept the end of Rhodesia. White people’s resistance to integration into Zimbabwe, their continued racializing of space, and their attempts to maintain white power and privilege bring whiteness sharply before the scrutiny of the black gaze and provoke anti-white rhetoric as well as a discourse on white unbelonging to Zimbabwe that becomes more strident and violent from the late 1990s.

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Consultation does not disrupt settler colonialism: Janelle Marie Baker, Clinton N. Westmanc, ‘Extracting knowledge: Social science, environmental impact assessment, and Indigenous consultation in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 2018

18Feb18

Abstract: This article provides a critical overview of consultation, impact assessment, and traditional land use research as these methods of extracting knowledge intersect in the oil sands region of northern Alberta. Based on our experience as anthropologists working in policy analysis, consultation, impact assessment, and community-engaged ethnographic research with impacted communities, we examine public participation and risk assessment procedures, including those conducted through documents and those conducted through personal or group interviews − primarily with Crees. Alberta’s oil sands industry has expanded exponentially in recent decades; however, consultation, impact assessment, and accommodation of Cree, Dene, and Métis interests in the region have not kept up with best practices established during the same timeframe. We point to a number of examples where consultation and impact assessment processes have supported an overall political economic push to develop the oil sands as quickly as possible. We argue for improved participatory processes to inform more open political and scientific debate.

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Settler colonialism disrupts indigenous-animal relations: Sarah Deer, Liz Murphy, ‘”Animals May Take Pity on Us”: Using Traditional Tribal Beliefs to Address Animal Abuse and Family Violence Within Tribal Nations’, Mitchell Hamline Law Review, 43, 4 , 2017

18Feb18

Excerpt: The relationship between Native people and animals has a rich, complex history. For tens of thousands of years, Native people have cultivated their symbiotic relationship with the animal world, and these relationships demonstrate a unique centralized status that animals have for many tribal cultures. Beginning with early contact with Europeans, however, the relationship between Native people and animals began to deteriorate. Europeans and Native people had fundamentally different perspectives on the relationship between humans and animals. In some cases, the cosmologies of Europeans and Natives toward animals were mutually exclusive; either animals were seen as equal to humans or were subject to the complete dominion of man. This clash of worldviews parallels many other areas of colonial power, including the treatment of women and children. Whereas many tribal cultures do not view animals and humans as occupying a hierarchy, European belief systems have historically put men in complete dominion over their property—namely women, children, and animals.

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Feminicide under settler colonialism: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Suhad Daher-Nashifin, ‘Femicide and Racism: Between the Politics of Exclusion and the Culture of Control’, in Pinar Ilkkaracan Rima Athar (eds), Sexual Politics in Muslim Societies Studies from Palestine, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, GAYa NUSANTARA, 2017, pp. 19-61

16Feb18

Abstract: This paper seeks to analyse the ways in which the interrelationship between formal and informal legal-social systems constructs women’s murders within Palestinian society. The main focus will be on the processes through which the local/global “politics of exclusion” colludes with a localized “culture of control” to generate the context within which violence against colonized women in colonial/occupied zones is fueled, strengthened and even justified, by colonized and colonizer alike. More precisely, we address how raced, classed, and gendered processes of exclusion at both the local and global levels jeopardize the lives and bodies of women in conflict zones, in this particular case those of Palestinian women. The term “politics of exclusion” refers to the mechanisms through which the Israeli occupying state and members of the international community participate in the denial of the Palestinian people’s rights to a homeland, safety, housing, freedom of movement, economic development, education, health, etc. The term “culture of control” refers to localized manifestations of patriarchal and masculine logics that are empowered by the politics of exclusion. An examination of the crime of femicide will shed light on how the global denial of Palestinian suffering (underpinned by the global “War on Terror” and current climate of “Islamophobia”) has heightened a sense of fear of the Palestinian Other, and contributed to a state of social, legal and political chaos within Palestinian society, in which Palestinians are further marginalized. This chaotic and violent state of affairs has, in turn, opened up new spaces in which hegemonic and/or patriarchal power-holders within Palestinian communities can exercise greater control over women’s lives, bodies and sexuality.

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The normality of indigenous alterity: Paula López Caballero, Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, Paul K. Eiss (eds), Beyond Alterity Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico, University of Arizona Press, 2018

15Feb18

Description: The concept of “indigenous” has been entwined with notions of exoticism and alterity throughout Mexico’s history. In Beyond Alterity, authors from across disciplines question the persistent association between indigenous people and radical difference, and demonstrate that alterity is often the product of specific political contexts.

Although previous studies have usually focused on the most visible aspects of differences—cosmovision, language, customs, resistance—the contributors to this volume show that emphasizing difference prevents researchers from seeing all the social phenomena where alterity is not obvious. Those phenomena are equally or even more constitutive of social life and include property relations (especially individual or private ones), participation in national projects, and the use of national languages.

The category of “indigenous” has commonly been used as if it were an objective term referring to an already given social subject. Beyond Alterity shows how this usage overlooks the fact that the social markers of differentiation (language, race or ethnic group, phenotype) are historical and therefore unstable. In opposition to any reification of geographical, cultural, or social boundaries, this volume shows that people who (self-)identify as indigenous share a multitude of practices with the rest of society and that the association between indigenous identification and alterity is the product of a specific political history.

Beyond Alterity is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding indigenous identity, race, and Mexican history and politics.

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The Indian history of G. W.: Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation, Oxford University Press, 2018

15Feb18

Description: George Washington dominates the narrative of the nation’s birth, yet American history has largely forgotten what he knew: that the country’s fate depended less on grand rhetorical statements of independence and self-governance than on land—Indian land. While other histories have overlooked the central importance of Indian power during the country’s formative years, Colin G. Calloway here gives Native American leaders their due, revealing the relationship between the man who rose to become the most powerful figure in his country and the Native tribes whose dominion he usurped.

In this sweeping new biography, Calloway uses the prism of Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time—Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle—and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America’s founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders’ interaction with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic’s destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country.

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The strength of analogy: Hedi Viterbo, ‘Ties of Separation: Analogy and Generational Segregation in North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine’, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, 42, 2, 2017, pp. 686-749

15Feb18

Abstract: Taking analogy as both its mode and object of inquiry, this article examines the relationship between historical-geographical analogies and generational segregation (the large-scale separation of children and adults) from three complementary perspectives.

First, due to restrictions recently introduced by the Israeli authorities, Palestinian prisoners have been prevented from reading popular study materials dealing with both Indigenous child removal and analogies concerning settler-Indigenous relations in North America and Australia. This article revives the critical potential of this encounter with analogies and accounts, by putting forward an analogy between the removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools in the United States and Canada, Australia’s Aboriginal “stolen generations,” and the increased separation of Palestinian children and adults in Israeli custody. This analogy highlights key parallels: the deleterious effects of allegedly benevolent generational segregation; the invocation of law and children’s “best interests;” the severance of unwanted intergenerational influences; the targeting of children due to their presumed plasticity; the use of separation to govern adults; and links between generational segregation, “national security,” and incarceration.

Second, these analogies—those that Palestinians explored in Israeli prison and the generational segregation analogy developed here—partly overlap with, and acquire their potential and implications from other analogies, concerning settler-Indigenous relations in North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine. This article investigates the roles such analogies have played, and their alignment with competing ideologies, across a range of legal and political discourse over the past two centuries.

Finally, in order to maximize the critical potential of such historical-geographical analogies, this article offers a conceptual critique of three relevant discourses: legalistic analogies concerning generational segregation, which leave unchallenged the broader field of child law and policy on which such segregation hinges; rigid conceptualizations of (settler) colonialism in debates on analogies between North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine; and the tendency to reduce analogy to similarity.

Bringing into conversation previously separate bodies of scholarship, these three interdependent perspectives shed new light on important yet hitherto unexamined issues at the intersection of analogy and generational segregation.

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