settler colonial studies blog

The inevitably exclusionary immigration of a settler society (on exogenous ‘others’): Shanti Fernando, Jen Rinaldi, ‘Seeking Equity: Disrupting a History of Exclusionary Immigration Frameworks’, Canadian Ethnic Studies, 49, 3, 2017, pp. 7-26

25Nov17

Abstract: We argue that Canadian immigration law, policy, and practice have historically excluded, race and disability, on a number of grounds, and that there is a common link between them, which is the perception of immigrants’ inability to adapt and integrate into a Canadian identity. The paper conducts a historical analysis of the Canadian immigration framework situated at the intersection of identities based on race and disability, which we link through Critical Race Theory analysis; and class, which is shown through the “excessive demand” standard, the origins of which we trace in relation to the commodification of immigrants based on their economic value. This paper shows how the marking of immigrant ethnic groups as medically inadmissible—currently by imposing an “excessive demand” test on health care or social services as a class-based admission criterion— both has historical grounding in turn of the century exclusionary logic of racism and ableism, and defies equality standards in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. When we apply “interest convergence,” we see how the limits to Canadian generosity or liberal tolerance are implied in current immigration restrictions. This application shows that even reforms that have now distanced immigration law from having prohibited classes and therefore do not explicitly mention race, disability or disease have only benefited disabled racialized immigrants when those reforms also aligned with the economic interests of the state. We draw upon historical exclusionary laws based on race and disability, that defined race as a disability, and more recent case law based on disability and class, regarding the denial of immigration status to persons with disabilities unless families volunteered to cover costs of care and policies surrounding immigration inspection, to show a continuing pattern of systemic exclusion. According to this pattern, ethnic groups confronting Canadian borders were read alongside and through their diagnoses of disease and disability as undesirable and unassimilable. This now confronts those with disabilities who are considered economically undesirable. The current challenge is therefore to recognize these historical, ableist (discrimination against disability) patterns, and to create policies and laws that are not based on such exclusionary understandings of difference but that instead continue to transform our definition of citizenship and identity in equitable and inclusive ways.

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Global politics does not care (does not care for indigeneity, for example): Marjo Lindroth, Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, Global Politics and Its Violent Care for Indigeneity: Sequels to Colonialism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

25Nov17

Description: This book challenges the common perception that global politics is making progress on indigenous issues and argues that the current global care for indigeneity is, in effect, violent in nature. Examining the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Arctic Council, the authors demonstrate how seemingly benevolent practices of international political and legal recognition are tantamount to colonialism, the historical wrong they purport to redress. By unveiling the ways in which contemporary neoliberal politics commissions a certain type of indigenous subject—one distinguished by resilience in particular—the book offers a pioneering account of how international politics has tightened its grip on indigeneity.

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The (indigenous) buffalo world and the (settler) horse world: Tangi Villerbu, ‘A Colonial History of the American West: Horses and Buffaloes in the Great Plains, 1750-1900’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 1, 2017, pp. 95-111

25Nov17

Abstract: Historians of the American West are faced with a periodization problem when they want to understand the specificities of the 19th century. Studying horses and buffaloes can shed light on new ways of analyzing the United States both as a decolonized and colonizing nation. The history of the American West is at its heart colonial history, and this aspect will be scrutinized in this article in two parts. From the end of the 18th century to the 1830s, the American West can still be seen as a native ground, even as the world of horses and buffaloes was being reconfigured. But from the 1830s to the end of the 19the century, when the American state and settlers intensified they conquest and colonisation process, this buffalo world disappeared and new equestrian cultures appeared.

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Settler eugenics (settler colonialism is about a sociopolitical body that reproduces in the place of another): Diane B. Paul, John Stenhouse, Hamish G. Spencer (eds), Eugenics at the Edges of Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

25Nov17

Deascription: This volume explores the history of eugenics in four Dominions of the British Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. These self-governing colonies reshaped ideas absorbed from the metropole in accord with local conditions and ideals. Compared to Britain (and the US, Germany, and Scandinavia), their orientation was generally less hereditarian and more populist and agrarian. It also reflected the view that these young and enterprising societies could potentially show Britain the way — if they were protected from internal and external threat. This volume contributes to the increasingly comparative and international literature on the history of eugenics and to several ongoing historiographic debates, especially around issues of race. As white-settler societies, questions related to racial mixing and purity were inescapable, and a notable contribution of this volume is its attention to Indigenous populations, both as targets and on occasion agents of eugenic ideology.

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Building a settler society: Ernesto Bassi, ‘The “Franklins of Colombia”: Immigration Schemes and Hemispheric Solidarity in the Making of a Civilised Colombian Nation’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 2017

25Nov17

Abstract: During the 1820s, Colombia’s diplomats in London, Washington and Philadelphia worked hard to obtain diplomatic recognition for their nascent republic. Their efforts were also geared towards making Colombia attractive to European and North American settlers whose industry and work ethic would, they hoped, turn it into a civilised and modern Euro-Atlantic nation. The immigration schemes they promoted enable us to understand the type of nations the nation-makers of post-independence Spanish America envisioned and how, by appealing to sentiments of hemispheric solidarity – among other means – they sought to turn their visions into reality. A comparison with similar eighteenth-century schemes promoted by the Bourbons, moreover, reveals the persistence, albeit with some critical modifications, of late-colonial ways of thinking and envisioning society.

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The struggle over memoryscapes: Christine DeLucia, ‘An “Indian Fishing Weir” at Musketaquid: Marking Northeastern Indigenous Homelands and Colonial Memoryscapes’, Environmental History, 2017

25Nov17

Excerpt: If you meander through the center of Concord, Massachusetts, perhaps touring the habitations of celebrated local resident Ralph Waldo Emerson or retracing the perambulations of “Walking” enthusiast Henry David Thoreau, you will encounter a sign commemorating the location of an “Indian fishing weir” (figure 1). The weir itself is no longer extant, you are given to understand, having been replaced by a dam constructed in the seventeenth century that later became the namesake of a town street. The sign stands just above a brook that winds through the small downtown, close to the confluence of the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers at “Egg Rock,” where they become the Concord River. The sign’s mission is to relay certain histories…

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Black liberation AND indigenous decolonisation: Manu Karuka, ‘Black and Native Visions of Self-Determination’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 3, 2, 2017, pp. 77-98

18Nov17

Abstract: This essay loiters among conversations on self-determination emerging out of Black radical and critical Indigenous intellectual and political traditions, conversations that raise fundamental questions about radical imaginations beyond the settler state, radical imaginations based on practices of survival grounded in relationship to place. My method is a contrapuntal genealogy of histories and ideas about self-determination driving toward Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization, which destabilize commonplace understandings of the form and function of the nation concept in North America. I focus here on self-determination, and not Black freedom, or Indigenous sovereignty, in order to contemplate the distinctions and interrelationships between Black and Indigenous internationalisms, proposals, and practices of territorial autonomy beyond the partitioning violence of the nation-state form that also challenge the limits of twentieth-century decolonization. The perspectives and demands of Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization potentially unravel U.S. claims to legitimacy and coherence. Self-determination, in the contemporary moment, has the potential to yield authority from governing states. In Black and Indigenous contexts, self-determination calls into question the nature of North American nations, decolonization, and relationship to place.

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Sovereignty is negotiation, negotiation is sovereignty: Jean Dennison, ‘Entangled sovereignties: The Osage Nation’s interconnections with governmental and corporate authorities’, American Ethnologist, 44, 4, 2017, pp. 684–696

18Nov17

Abstract: Even as Indigenous authority over land remains under attack through ongoing settler-colonial processes, Native nations continue to pursue their own agendas. Like the negotiations around sovereignty across the globe, the result is a web of interconnected authorities. Native nations, US counties and states, the federal government, and various corporations constantly deploy creative tactics, calculated disruptions, and negotiated compromises in an effort to gain and maintain authority over a territory. As demonstrated by Osage political history, tobacco sales tax negotiations, and battles over industrial wind parks, acting as a sovereign creates interconnection with other governments. Considered in light of these ongoing negotiations, sovereignty is not freedom from external control but is, rather, an inescapable web of negotiation, contention, and concession that leads to further entanglement.

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Against heteronormativity and settler colonialism: Garrett W. Nichols, ‘Queer Settlers in a One-Room Schoolhouse: A Decolonial Queerscape Pedagogy’, in Elizabeth McNeil, James E. Wermers, Joshua O. Lunn (eds), Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy, Springer, 2017, pp. 39-56

18Nov17

Abstract: Garrett W. Nichols calls for a rethinking of the classroom as space for disrupting heteronormative discourses—discourses that Nichols links to settler colonialism—to open a space where we can hear, or sometimes re-hear, queer voices. Settler colonialism is a heteronormative project that relies on rhetorics of reproductive “inheritance” to naturalize the erasure of indigenous cultures. Pedagogies attuned to the realities of heteronormativity and settler colonialism require a pedagogical commitment to interrupting these discourses, especially in institutional structures whose existence relies on and supports settler ideologies. Queerscapes, per Gordon Brent Ingram, are spaces and planes of queer alliances formed within and overlapping with heteronormative spaces; the university classroom, with its imbricated personal histories, institutional memories, and power dynamics, is always-already a queerscape. Importantly, the classroom is also a “settlerscape,” composed of the multiple subjectivities that constitute modern settler society and made meaningful through histories of indigenous displacement. Recognizing this dynamic opens a space for unheard queer voices, argues Nichols, and lets us “re-hear” how non-queer stories and perspectives are made meaningful through their unspoken proximity to queerness and colonization. Nichols proposes a decolonial queerscape pedagogy that foregrounds the marginalized and oppressed identities that populate every classroom, while also denaturalizing the supposedly “natural” and “inevitable” rhetorics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and settler colonization that inform the American academy.

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Biocultura as anticolonialism: Yessica Dahiana Rostan, Towards Pedagogies of the Living: An Anticolonial Biocultura Approach to Settler Colonialism, Land Movements and Community Re-organization, MA Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2017

18Nov17

Abstract: Biocultura is an anticolonial theory, praxis and pedagogical framework that brings settler colonialism ‘home’ through the interrogation of biocultural Humxn relationships to Nature – Self, Land, and one another – as Living. EuroWestern Lifeviews (biology, science, philosophy, and politics) that produce colonial biopower are imposed in schooling and society at large, making the biological-cultural complex a necessary front for resistance. I connect principles between Indigenous/ancestral ethnobiology (as opposed to Western ethnobiology) and anticolonial thought to develop the biocultura framework, centering subjectivity, diversity, interconnection/community, co-learning/co-creating, and continual change. Anticolonial biocultura in (what is colonially known as) Canada must locate us bioculturally within settler colonialism and respond to First Nations, Metis and Inuit Nations of Canada, as well as Indigenous Land movements of Turtle Island and Abya Yala. Biocultura is learning and re-organizing as Living communities, with dreams of tangibly connecting Indigenous resistance to the responsibilities of settlers, diaspora and migrants.

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