settler colonial studies blog

Black and settler or black and indigenous? George J. Sefa Dei, ‘Blackness and Colonial Settlerhood: A Purposeful Provocation’, in George J. Sefa Dei, Reframing Blackness and Black Solidarities through Anti-colonial and Decolonial Prisms, Springer, 2017, pp. 81-117

26May17

Abstract: This chapter seeks to clarify and simultaneously trouble several key concepts that inform or have been assumed through the popular call to “decolonize anti-racism.” For example, Lawrence and Dua’s (2005) thought-provoking article Decolonizing Antiracism. These concepts include Euro-colonialism and settler colonialism; settlerhood and settler White colonial discourse and settler colonialism; complicity and implication; and responsibility. My argument is that neither I, nor any other Black/African residing on Turtle Island, can be referred as a settler, and charged with complicity as Lawrence and Dua (2005) long ago claimed. Instead, the chapter provides new coordinates for collective and global mobilization by troubling the politics of “decolonizing solidarity” as the intellectual flavor of the moment. This is done by offering Indigeneity as an international category and as a coordinate for decolonizing (and) antiracist work. Ideas put forward in the chapter are aided by many who add complexity and nuance to decolonizing (and) anti-racist scholarship and praxis. It is opined that theorizing the Indigenous as an international category allows us to mobilize as an international category and as an international collective of multiple anti-racist communities that can build solidarities with Indigenous Peoples and their decolonizing work. Indigeneity provides a category, and a collective, that can mobilize support for decolonizing work that reaches Indigenous Peoples across the world.

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Trumpism as settler colonialism? Leigh Patel, ‘Trump and Settler Colonialism’, CTheory, 2017

23May17

Excerpt: Trump’s popularity can be apprehended through the lens of settler colonialism, which relies on various technologies, including racism and heteropatriarchy, to accomplish its aims.

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Sumud and submission? Noura Alkhalili, Between Sumud and Submission: Palestinian Popular Practices on the Land in the Edge Areas of Jerusalem, PhD Dissertation, Lund University, 2017

23May17

Abstract: This thesis delves into two ‘edge areas’ located in and around East Jerusalem. It attempts to unfold and analyze the dynamics in these edge areas, while investigating the agency of the people present there through their own perceptions and practices towards the land, the urbanization processes, the power circulation and the structural impositions. Squeezed by a settler-colonial domination that continuously encroaches further on their lives, the Palestinians, in return, seek to carve out a space for their own enduring presence on the land. That pursuit combines elements of sumud (steadfastness) and adaptation, tenacity and accommodation, actions that sometimes subvert the occupation and some other times submit to its logic. The thesis traces the contradiction between a proliferating ethos of individual enrichment and the remaining collective culture of political struggle. It also scrutinizes the ways that Palestinians move between those poles as always conditioned by the pressure from the overarching structure of settler-colonial domination. Furthermore, the thesis examines how certain structural patterns are unconsciously reproduced by the agents of these specific areas, even when their intention and desire could be to resist them. The thesis argues that East Jerusalem should be approached from the theory of settler-colonial hegemony. Thus, these areas are the by-products of the settler-colonial domination present in East Jerusalem, intentionally assembled by the Israeli authorities as
“containers” that collect undesired Palestinian Jerusalemites, while leaving them trapped in a state of permanent temporariness. This situation has developed gradually through the construction of the separation wall, so as to further enhance the systematic displacement of the Palestinian Jerusalemites and achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem. The thesis claims that acts of resistance and accommodation of certain colonial practices have the inclination to collide and interact with each other, and hence obfuscate the demarcation between them. This dynamic has been unpacked through coining the concept ‘enclosures from below’. The thesis aims to contribute to scholarship on Palestine and provide a detailed analysis that could feed into a
wider analysis of the dynamics of settler-colonialism, as well as inform Palestinian strategies in the ongoing struggle for liberation.

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Nation to nation: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Review Essay on Seema Sohi’s Echoes of Mutiny and Suzan Shown Harjo’s Nation to Nation’, Tulsa Law Review, 52, 3, 2017

23May17

Excerpt: Suzan Shown Harjo, editor and multiple essay contributor to Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations, describes in the book’s introduction the experiences of her great-grandparents, “Thunderbird or Nonoma’ohtsevehtse (Richard Davis), and Nellie Aspenal,” as new “hostage-students” of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1879.1 After travelling half a continent by train, “[w]hen they arrived at Carlisle, their medicine pouches, moccasins, and comfortable clothes were confiscated. Their long hair was cut short, they were ‘deloused’ with kerosene, even though they did not have lice, and they were given scratchy uniforms and hard shoes, which never fit quite right. They often were whipped, or their mouths were rubbed raw and blistered with lye soap, for reasons they never knew. Thus began their so-called “civilization.”2 The sheer brutality, abuse, and torture of Indigenous children described here was done in the name of saving them from their own people’s seemingly primitive ways by assimilating them—‘civilizing’ them—to the western liberal individualist, capitalist practices, and norms of the settler colonial society.

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On settler placemaking: Devon Ezra Miller, Changing Landscapes: Ambiguity, Imaginations, and Amish Settlers in Northern Indiana, 1825-1850, PhD Dissertation, Michigan State University, 2017

23May17

Abstract: Over the past several decades, anthropologists and historians have recognized the diversity and fluidity of the cultural interactions in the Great Lakes region during colonization and settlement. These studies have focused either on the social processes of Indigenization, assimilation, or acculturation on the part of Indigenous communities, or the incorporation of Indigenous political alliances into European colonization. However, little scholarly attention has been given to a critical examination of the social, economic, and political processes which led settler communities such as Anabaptists to appropriate, re-appropriate, or generate new meanings of the Indigenous places they settled. The Amish community of LaGrange and Elkhart counties, Indiana, provides an excellent case study for examining the human agency involved in varying epistemologies and ideologies producing and reproducing diversity within the Great Lakes region during settlement.

Using a framework which draws from landscape, social memory, and diasporic studies, this dissertation examines the formation of the Anabaptist community located in northern Indiana. By exploring the competing histories found in the relevant archives and the built landscape, I consider the discursive processes of place-making which shaped this Anabaptist community. Since they shared pacifist ideologies and a collective memory involving displacement and oppression, how did Anabaptists understand and interact with the people and places where they settled? How did Anabaptists incorporate the changes they encountered into previous understandings of how the world should be? How do competing histories provide a fuller understanding of the formation of Anabaptist communities? How did the Anabaptist placemaking practices contribute to transforming the environment from an Indigenous landscape to a landscape dominated by European technology and agriculture?

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Settler citizenship as settler colonial imposition: Jessica Leslie Arnett, ‘Unsettled Rights in Territorial Alaska: Native Land, Sovereignty, and Citizenship from the Indian Reorganization Act to Termination’, The Western Historical Quarterly, 2017

21May17

Abstract: This article examines Alaska Native citizenship, civil rights, land, and sovereignty in territorial Alaska from the Indian Reorganization Act to Termination. I argue that during this key shift in Indian policy, territorial and federal officials, lawmakers, and corporate interests wielded the rhetoric of citizenship, equal rights, and “reverse discrimination” as tools of dispossession against Alaska Native land and sovereignty rights. I show how Alaska Natives challenged non-native assumptions that equal U.S. citizenship and native rights to land, sovereignty, and economic self-determination were mutually exclusive. Instead, Alaska Natives advanced a vision of citizenship in which their rights as native people and ownership of the land guaranteed their rights as citizens to participate fully in the social, political, and economic life of the territory and the nation.

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Discussing reconciliation: Sophie Rigney, ‘The Hopes and Discontents of Indigenous–Settler Reconciliation’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2017

21May17

Excerpt: How are Indigenous and settler relationships structured, and how is conflict addressed? In settler-colonial societies, complex patterns exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities who share the same territory, but whose relationships have been characterized by harm and violence. This violence is not just a matter of history,¹ but exists for as long as the Indigenous and settler communities are in conflict – potentially hundreds of years. Moreover, the harm is not solely acute, for example in the form of physical acts of violence; it also takes the form of less visible but nonetheless highly structured and systemic violence. These forms of violence might include discrimination, socioeconomic inequality, poorer health outcomes and denial of meaningful self-determination.

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‘Abyssinia’ was meant to be a settler colony: Fiona Paisley, ‘The Italo-Abyssinian Crisis and Australian Settler Colonialism in 1935’, History Compass, 15, 5, 2017

21May17

Abstract: By exploring the themes of settler colonialism and modernity in Australian commentary about Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, this paper sets out to consider Italy’s war in north Africa as an international crisis with significance for Australian progressive narratives about Aboriginal conditions, status and rights important to Australia’s international reputation. Thus, Australia’s role as a member of the League and a mandatory power will be read in the context of international debate about Italy, modernity, race and violence.

My case study draws from the experiences of Bessie Rischbieth, alternate delegate for Australia to the League of Nations in 1935, who observed the Abyssinian protest being made before the Assembly. Rischbieth was seemingly persuaded by Italy’s claims to the right to land and territory in the context of immigration restrictions into the United States (and we might add, in relation to Australia) and was provided evidence of slavery in Abyssinia mobilised by Italy and earlier by the Anti-Slavery Society in London in defence of the civilising influence of Europe upon a fellow (non-European) member of the League. However, Rischbieth was also an activist within liberal humanitarian networks critical of Aboriginal policy in Australia in this same era. Her responses to the crisis in African and League affairs offer some insight into the proximities between settler colonialism in Australia and the ‘race’ issues raised by the annexation of Abyssinia by Italy, and its implications for collective security and global governance.

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Settler colonial belonging is indigenous erasure: TiaAnna Tidwell, Settler Colonial Belonging and Indigenous Erasure in The Snow Child and The Raven’s Gift, MA Dissertation, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017

17May17

Abstract: This research examines two contemporary Alaskan works of literature: Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child and Don Rearden’s The Raven’s Gift. I have engaged with (post) colonial theoretical frameworks to describe the settler colonial dynamics at work in each text. By comparing these two works I find that each narrative seeks autochthonous belonging for settler colonial protagonists, which is predicated upon the elimination of indigeneity from the land. I focus on the divergent rhetorical methods of indigenous erasure in each text, and the interaction between race and gender in settler colonial identity construction. Examining the relationship between race and gender highlights the underappreciated significance of the complicity of white women in the settler colonial process and demonstrates the crucial role that indigenous women play as gatekeepers to settler colonial belonging. Within the narratives, I find examples of the formation of private property under settler colonial thought, which paved the way for the dismissal of indigenous land claims. I also look at the way that each text employs the metaphorical language of ghostliness and the supernatural to weaken indigenous presence and bring indigeneity to the precipice of extinction. Both narratives ultimately avoid active dispossession in the settler colonial quest for land by creating and landscape in which indigeneity is already gone.

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The problem with (settler) care: Lisa K. Schuelke, Nursing Reservations: White Field Nurses, Scientific Medicine, and Settler Colonialism, 1924-1955, PhD Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2017

17May17

Abstract: Field nurses, primarily white women, encountered diverse cultures when they arrived on reservations in the American West between 1924 and 1955. Diseases were rampant, and many Native Americans had little knowledge of so-called modern medicine, frequently relying upon a combination of natural and spiritual remedies associated with various Indigenous traditions. White field nurses witnessed firsthand the devastating impact numerous illnesses had on Native Americans, and there is no doubt that the majority of the women in this study genuinely sought to relieve suffering associated with illnesses. Still, most field nurses intended to replace Indigenous curing with what they regarded as the superiority of white scientific medicine, thus assimilating Native Americans, a prominent feature of the broader settler colonial project.

Enriching Native American health went hand in hand with biomedical assimilation. While field nurses worked to meet the need for better healthcare, they concluded that Indigenous models were inferior to Western medicine. At the same time, many Native Americans valued traditional healing, and were slow to adopt scientific medicine. Divergent cultural perspectives toward healthcare created tension between the two groups, fostering negotiations and resistance on both sides. White nurses in this study sometimes attempted to restrain Indigenous curing while Native Americans equally drew lines designed to restrict the invasion of white medicine. Still, until the early 1940s, field nurses were more likely to employ persuasion and public health teaching to meet their objectives. World War II fostered a sense of national unity, and after the United States entered the conflict, white nurses, physicians, and even tribal councils grew increasingly likely to employ coercion and force to attain compliance with biomedicine. During the early 1950s, medical services declined, and field nurses played a less active role in managing healthcare. Simultaneously, an uneven mixture of rising Native American authority over bodily care coexisted with repressive measures aimed at containment of contagious diseases.

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