settler colonial studies blog

Race and lawfare and settler colonialism: Jennifer Hayter, Racially ‘Indian’, Legally ‘White’: The Canadian State’s Struggles to Categorize the Métis, 1850-1900, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2017

13Feb18

Abstract: The Canadian state has constantly been faced with a paradox: differentiated rights and regulations required it to define the boundaries of the invented category “Indian,” yet it was never able to do so satisfactorily. The existence of mixed-ancestry and Métis people disrupted its seemingly clear categories of “Indian” and “White.” This thesis asks three central research questions: how did the Canadian state understand the category they called “half breeds;” what cultural and intellectual ideas informed these notions; and what was their impact? There was no single meaning or understanding of the term “Half Breed,” but it was in fact characterized by inconsistency, ambiguity, contradiction, and confusion. There were two significant opposing forces at play: 1) the need to consolidate the power of the emerging state, which usually meant grouping the Métis and people of mixed ancestry in with “Indians” in order to better control them, and 2) the desire to save money, which usually meant separating out “half breeds” as a way of reducing the number of status Indians (to minimize the scope of the state’s fiscal responsibilities). The Métis presented themselves as a free “civilized” Indigenous People, but for the government, the term “half breed” was most useful as a floating signifier, with no stable meaning. In an era of increasing state rationalization, the sliding signifier allowed for flexibility in otherwise rigid laws and policy, aiding the state in navigating between its often-conflicting goals. Only in a few instances did the state recognize the Métis as a distinct People. Because of discrimination and the lack of official recognition, many Métis people were dispossessed and hid their heritage. On the other hand, this very ambiguity could provide a degree of freedom, and Métis today are working to define themselves as a distinct people and to fight for their inherent Indigenous rights.

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Decolonial gestures: Kristina Aurylaite, ‘Decolonial Gestures in Canada’s Settler State: Contemporary Indigenous Writers Jordan Abel and Leanne Simpson’, Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, 7, 2017, pp. 4–25

10Feb18

Abstract: This paper discusses the ways recent texts by two Indigenous Canadian writers, Jordan Abel’s collection of conceptual poetry Un/Inhabited and Leanne Simpson’s short stories and poems Islands of Decolonial Love, engage in what Walter Mignolo terms ‘decolonial gestures’ to expose the workings of contemporary settler colonialism and counter their effects. The theoretical section explains the specificities of settler colonialism that make decolonization in the sense of regaining freedom from the colonizers impossible; it then discusses the possibilities for decolonization that exist in settler countries, particularly those that refer to cultural and artistic practices. The analytical section focuses on the different strategies Abel and Simpson use in their work to enact what Mignolo calls ‘epistemic disobedience.’ Abel resorts to decolonial violence in appropriating selected texts of the genre of the Western and erasing from them to undo their loaded ideological messages. Simpson’s work, marked by explicitly confrontational rhetoric, focuses on Indigenous characters and communities, foregrounding their colonial traumas and the role of traditional knowledge and cultural practices in healing them. The paper argues that the decolonial gestures Abel and Simpson undertake work to reject the mainstream rhetoric of reconciliation, inviting Indigenous people to recognize the workings of settler colonialism and look for ways of extricating from them.

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Indigenous peoples – ‘doubly erased’ and ‘hyper-visible’: Roslynn Ang, ‘Recursion of colonial desire for differences: The doubly erased and/or hyper-visible Ainu’, New Ideas in East Asian Studies, 2017

10Feb18

Excerpt: First, instead of the usual focus on subaltern subjects, I attend to the production of the empire’s universal self – the West in the figure of the researcher and the Japanese empire – through logics that are enabled by the doubled erasure of indigenous Ainu bodies. Next, I locate the moments of Ainu hyper-visibility globally and locally across
the intersections of colonial space-time as the conditions of possibility for another version of the aforementioned universal self and the collusion of its aphasia on settler-colonialism across continents. I unsettle the empire’s internal coherence, when researchers utilize national and racial boundaries as their analytical framework, by pointing out how the heightened erasure/visibility of Ainu lives are the conditions of possibility for their recursive forms of empire and history.

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Genocide or ‘logic of elimination? Thomas Crotty, ‘Beyond Genocide: a comparative analysis of the elimination of Australia’s Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander people’, NEW: Emerging scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies, 2-3, 1, 2016-17

10Feb18

Abstract: This paper explores the applicability of the term genocide to Australian colonisation, and considers whether the scholar Patrick Wolfe’s concept of settler colonialism’s inherent “logic of elimination” provides a more useful framework for considering Australian history.

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A settler and Protestant international: Valerie Wallace, Scottish Presbyterianism and Settler Colonial Politics Empire of Dissent, Palgrave, 2018

08Feb18

Description: This book offers a new interpretation of political reform in the settler colonies of Britain’s empire in the early nineteenth century. It examines the influence of Scottish Presbyterian dissenting churches and their political values. It re-evaluates five notorious Scottish reformers and unpacks the Presbyterian foundation to their political ideas: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), a poet in Cape Town; Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), an educator in Pictou; John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), a church minister in Sydney; William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), a rebel in Toronto; and Samuel McDonald Martin (1805?-1848), a journalist in Auckland. The book weaves the five migrants’ stories together for the first time and demonstrates how the campaigns they led came to be intertwined. The book will appeal to historians of Scotland, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the British Empire and the Scottish diaspora.

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The problem of innocence: Joshua F.J. Inwood, ‘”It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”: Political geographies of white supremacy, the construction of white innocence, and the Flint water crisis’, Geography Compass, 2018

06Feb18

Abstract: Using the Flint, Michigan water crisis as a backdrop, this review piece explores the concept of white innocence. The concept of white innocence presents us with an analytic tool to understand the frustrating endurance of white supremacy within the U.S. settler state and how white supremacy operates through a range of geographically grounded practices. This paper makes an explicit link between work on settler colonialism and white innocence outlining how the burgeoning work on settler societies opens space to a productive engagement with the concept of innocence. I contend that white innocence as a concept needs to be more fully grounded in work that engages with settler colonialism and within the United States specifically. White innocence also inculcates the agency of whites in a society that is built through the explicit exploitation of persons of color as well as the way white institutions continue to expose persons of color to a range of negative impacts. This paper begins with a review of the literature on whiteness within geographic research. The last several years has seen a series of important interventions in the literature and geographers are increasingly turning to the concept of white supremacy to explain racism in 21st century U.S. society.

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Hobbes’ border guards are the settler’s border guards: Andrew Canessa, ‘Hobbes’ Border Guards or Evo’s Originary Citizens? Indigenous People and the Sovereign State in Bolivia’, New Diversities, 19, 2, 2017, pp. 69-84.

06Feb18

Abstract: Thomas Hobbes was the first major thinker to locate an imagined pre-political State of Nature in the Americas. Even his critics such as Locke and Rousseau followed him in seeing native Americans as living in a world which they imagined existed in pre-historic Europe and, most importantly, beyond meaningful dialogue. These and other thinkers used America as a tool through which to think the status of the individual political subject and his relationship with the state. This article argues that indigenous people were much more than rhetorical tools but, rather, were necessary elements for imagining the modern nation state; they were in Shaw’s words, Hobbes’ ‘border guards’ (2008: 38). Indigeneity, however, does more than act symbolically as a ‘border guard’ facing the ‘other’ across the parapet of the boundaries of the sovereign state; indigenous people were and are actively challenging those boundaries, shaping its contours, and occasionally breaching the wall altogether.

In this article, I look at Bolivia as an example of how indigenous peoples have through history contributed to, challenged, and moulded the various states – from colonial to contemporary indigenous — over the past half millennium. I also explore the contemporary indigenous state and the ways in which the indigenous subject is imagined as the canonical citizen but ask if this move forecloses the possibilities of a radical critique of the sovereign state.

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Creation, settler appropriation, indigenous reclamation: Allan Downey, The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood, UBC Press, 2018

01Feb18

Description: A gift from the Creator – that is where it all began. The game of lacrosse has been a central element of many Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation – then reclamation – of Indigenous identities. Focusing on the history of lacrosse in Indigenous communities from the 1860s to the 1990s, The Creator’s Game explores Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations and Indigenous identity formation. While the game was being stripped of its cultural and ceremonial significance and being appropriated to construct a new identity for the nation-state of Canada, it was also being used by Indigenous peoples for multiple ends: to resist residential school experiences; initiate pan-Indigenous political mobilization; and articulate Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood on the world stage.

The multilayered story of lacrosse serves as a potent illustration of how identity and nationhood are formed and reformed. Engaging and innovative, The Creator’s Game provides a unique view of Indigenous self-determination in the face of settler-colonialism.

The Creator’s Game will be of interest to scholars and students of Canadian history, Indigenous studies, political science, and sports history.

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Settler pilgrims: Robert O. Smith, ‘Sanctifying the Settler-Colonial Gaze: Nineteenth-Century American Christian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land’, Theology Today, 2018

30Jan18

Abstract: American Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land started within a historical and ideological context shaped by American territorial expansionism. The settler-colonial impulses informing that expansionism were carried to Palestine, where Palestinians were encountered as “savages” compared explicitly to American Indians. Erasure of the Holy Land’s Indigenous inhabitants is thus sanctioned. Herman Melville’s Clarel and Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad record this encounter. We must be aware of this history if it is not to be repeated in contemporary pilgrimage practices.

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Assimilation requires protection: Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘The Moment of Release: The Ideology of Protection and the Twentieth-Century Assimilation Policies of Exemption and Competency in New South Wales and Oklahoma’, Pacific Historical Review, 87, 1, 2018, pp. 128-149

30Jan18

Abstract: During the twentieth century some Australian states and the U.S. federal government enacted comparable policies that demonstrate how the discourse of protection continued to survive in an era when settler nations were focussed on “assimilating” Indigenous populations. The Australian policy of exemption and the U.S. policy of competency did not represent a true change in direction from past policies of protection. In contrast to the nineteenth century, though, these twentieth-century policies offered protection to only a deserving few. Drawing on records of exemption and competency from New South Wales and Oklahoma in the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how the policies of exemption and competency ostensibly gave the opportunity for some individuals to prove that they no longer needed the paternalism of colonial governments. They were judged using very different local criteria. In Australia, applicants were mostly judged on whether they engaged in “respectable” use of alcohol; in the United States, applicants were assessed on whether they had “business sense.”

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