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Indigenous sovereignty disrupts recognition: Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, ‘Making ‘Aha: Independent Hawaiian Pasts, Presents & Futures’, Daedalus, 147, 2, 2018 pp. 49-59

21Mar18

Abstract: We use Hawaiian methods of knowledge production to weave together contemporary and historical instances of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) political resistance to U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism. Our departure point is the summer of 2014, when hundreds of Kānaka came forward to assert unbroken Hawaiian sovereignty and reject a U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) proposal to create a pathway for federal recognition of a reorganized Native Hawaiian governing entity. This essay situates testimonies from these hearings within a longer genealogy of Kanaka assertions of “ea” (sovereignty, life, breath) against the prolonged U.S. military occupation of Hawai’i that began in 1898 and extends to the present.


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Indigenous refusal disrupt map making: ‘Ethnographic refusal in traditional land use mapping: Tara L. Joly, Hereward Longley, Carmen Wells, Jenny Gerbrandt, ‘Consultation, impact assessment, and sovereignty in the Athabasca oil sands region’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 2018

21Mar18

Abstract: Traditional land use (TLU) mapping is a key mechanism for Indigenous communities to defend their land use and occupancy in environmental impact assessments. Yet, when faced with TLU interview questions, some Métis community members express reluctance to share sensitive land use information. TLU mapping is linked to a broader history of cartographic colonialism that forces Indigenous peoples to subject themselves to western systems of geographic knowledge. This paper asks: what do moments of ethnographic refusal convey about TLU assessments and consultation? Refusal – a practice of rejecting state-driven recognition and asserting Indigenous sovereignty – reveals several methodological flaws with TLU studies that undermine the efficacy of consultation. Based on our TLU research with the McMurray Métis community, the authors describe how TLU studies can undervalue Indigenous geographic knowledge by deemphasizing cultural landscapes, compromising land use locations, and reducing understanding of impacts to site-specific analyses. These problems stem directly from state regulation that deems development inevitable and positions TLU studies as a catch-all mechanism for competing processes: impact assessments and the duty to consult. Attending to ethnographic refusal in TLU studies inspires a more culturally appropriate methodology that asserts Indigenous sovereignty of lands identified for resource extraction in Canada and worldwide.


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What do settlers fear? ‘[S]quatters intent on driving them off their land’: Michael Koziol, ‘Tony Abbott says Peter Dutton is “absolutely right” about white South African farmers’, SMH, 19/03/18

19Mar18

Access the article here.


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Participation in indigenous suppression sets the pace of exogenous integration (nonsettler immigrants can then transubstantiate into settlers): Laurie K. Bertram, ‘”Eskimo” Immigrants and Colonial Soldiers: Icelandic Immigrants and the North-West Resistance, 1885’, Canadian Historical Review, 99, 1, 2018, pp. 63-97

18Mar18

Abstract: How did marginalized and racialized ethnic immigrants transform themselves into active, armed colonial agents in nineteenth-century Western Canada? Approximately twenty Icelanders enlisted to fight Louis Riel’s forces during the North-West Resistance in 1885, just ten years following the arrival of Icelandic immigrants in present-day Manitoba. Forty more reportedly enlisted in an Icelandic-Canadian battalion to enforce the government’s victory in the fall. This public, armed stance of a group of Icelanders against Indigenous forces in 1885 is somewhat unexpected, since most Icelanders were relatively recent arrivals in the West and, in Winnipeg, members of the largely unskilled urban working class. Moreover, they were widely rumoured among Winnipeggers to be from a “blubber-eating race” and of “Eskimo” extraction; community accounts testify to the discrimination numerous early Icelanders faced in the city. These factors initially make Icelanders unexpected colonialists, particularly since nineteenth-century ethnic immigration and colonial suppression so often appear as separate processes in Canadian historiography. Indeed, this scholarship is characterized by an enduring belief that Western Canadian colonialism was a distinctly Anglo sin. Ethnic immigrants often appear in scholarly and popular histories as sharing a history of marginalization with Indigenous people that prevented migrants from taking part in colonial displacement. Proceeding from the neglected history of Icelandic enlistment in 1885 and new developments in Icelandic historiography, this article argues that rather than negating ethnic participation in Indigenous suppression, ethnic marginality and the class tensions it created could actually fuel participation in colonial campaigns, which promised immigrants upward mobility, access to state support, and land.


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Opening up Lefebvre scholarship to considerations of settler colonialism: Stefan Kipfer, ‘Pushing the limits of urban research: Urbanization, pipelines and counter-colonial politics’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018

16Mar18

Abstract: This article confronts debates about extended and concentrated urbanization with Indigenous claims to time and space. It does so in part by discussing the degree to which notions of extended and concentrated urbanization allow us to understand the dynamics of pipeline politics in Canada, notably Indigenous claims leveled at infrastructure projects. It argues that Lefebvre-inspired research is both promising and insufficient in this regard. Their promises can only be realized provided one considers urban research as mediation (between everyday life and the social order), contextualize urbanization as a product of non-linear histories through which ‘city’ and ‘non-city’ are transformed or reinstituted as socio-spatial forms, and take seriously imaginaries that may not only contest but also refuse the expansion of the urban field. Meeting these conditions is not possible without resorting to other, non-Lefebvrean approaches that help us understand the settler-colonial aspects of Canadian urban history and grasp the inter-national dimensions of Indigenous politics. Finally, opening up Lefebvre scholarship to considerations of settler colonialism is impossible without the distinct relational theories of time and space that inform radical Indigenous theories (and some pipeline struggles). Indigenous claims in or against urbanization thus represent a limit case of urban research.


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Settler colonialism occupies social media: Madalena Santos, ‘Settler Colonial Surveillance and the Criminalization of Social Media: Contradictory Implications for Palestinian Resistance’, in Lucas Melgaço, ‎Jeffrey Monaghan (eds), Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance, Routledge, 2018

16Mar18

Access the chapter here.


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Settlers have a special visa for settlers (note to Peter Dutton: Rohingyas do not have land either, why doesn’t he feel Australia’s ‘civilisation’ is involved in their case?) ‘Australia considers visas for white South African farmers’, BBC News, 15/03/18

15Mar18

Excerpt: South Africa has dismissed allegations its white farmers are “persecuted” after an Australian minister said they needed help from a “civilised” country. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said he was exploring giving South Africa’s white farmers access to fast-track visas on humanitarian grounds. The suggestion was made amid calls to transfer land ownership from white to black farmers in South Africa, and fears over the number of farm killings. But South Africa says it is ridiculous.


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Settlers inspect dead indigenous bodies: Deondre Smiles, ‘”…to the Grave”—Autopsy, settler structures, and indigenous counter-conduct’, Geoforum, 91, 2018, pp. 141–150

14Mar18

Abstract: In February 2015, two Anishinaabe tribal members, Mushkoob Aubid and Autumn Martineau, passed away after car accidents in Northeastern Minnesota. Their bodies were slated to undergo autopsy, sparking opposition from their families on religious grounds. This sparked a struggle that pitted the families and tribal allies against state structures, in what led to the recovery of the bodies and changes in Minnesota state laws surrounding autopsy. The role of ‘quotidian’ settler violence in the events that transpired, through a theoretical framework of settler colonialism, biopolitics and the importance of autopsy, is placed in opposition to the role of ‘quotidian’ indigenous resistance, informed by a theoretical framework of counter-conduct and indigenous modes of knowledge and being. It is argued that although settler colonial society and its associated structures are able to reconfigure themselves at will in a variety of articulations in order to subjugate indigenous peoples, indigenous people are able to resist this subjugation with resourceful and multifaceted resistance of their own. This can be seen in the ability of the Aubid and Martineau families to recover the bodies of their loved ones. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the case study for future Anishinaabe/indigenous resistance against autopsy, and in more general applications.


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‘Our’ environments: Anna Johnston, ‘”Our Antipodes”: Settler Colonial Environments in Victorian Travel Writing’, in Grace Moore, Michelle J. Smith (eds), Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture, Palgrave 2018, pp. 57-75

14Mar18

Abstract: The Australian colonies were popular destinations for mid- to late-nineteenth-century British travellers, celebrated for their modernity and their immense potential for British emigration. Mastering new nineteenth-century technologies of travel, British (and colonial) travellers flooded the antipodean settler colonies, and on return their travel accounts flooded the periodical press and book publishers.

This essay considers the disquieting differences in the southern colonies, experienced by some travellers, not only with Indigenous peoples, but with settler colonial environments. Expecting to find a perfect copy of England and the imperial self, the Greater Britain traveller could be disconcerted to find that Englishness in the colonies had mutated to something slightly different.


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The settlers’ first and most important war: Henry Reynolds, ‘Australia’s First and Most Important War’, in Stuart Pearson, Jane L. Holloway, Richard Thackway (eds), Australian Contributions to Strategic and Military Geography, Springer, 2018, pp. 177-186

14Mar18

Abstract: Australian history has been shaped by geography. The size of the continent, the physical and climatic diversity and the isolation from the other great land masses all impacted on the ancient indigenous culture and on the settlement patterns of the European colonists since the arrival of the British in 1788. Two features stand out. Much of the continent was unsuitable for European settlement. Equally large areas could only be utilised as range lands for low density pastoral farming. Contact and conflict between settlers and the resident indigenous nations persisted throughout the nineteenth and into the first part of the twentieth centuries. The manner of British colonisation predetermined much of the resulting frontier conflict. There was no recognition of indigenous sovereignty; the continent was regarded as a terra-nullius. The legal situation was dramatically overturned in the 1992 High Court judgement in the Mabo case. Historical interpretation swung in the current. The enduring conflict about ownership and control of one of the world’s great land masses had to be reassessed. It was war and because it was fought in Australia and about Australia, it must now be seen as the country’s first and most important war.


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