settler colonial studies blog

Settler regionalism is settler colonialism: Katrine Barber, ‘Reflections on Pacific Northwest Regionalism on an Edge of Empire’, Middle West Review, 4, 1, 2017, pp. 93-100

18Oct17

Excerpt: The Pacific Northwest is simply this,” New York Times journalist Timothy Egan wrote in 1990, “wherever the salmon can get to.” Many agreed with him (although others were quick to point out that the range of salmon is extensive, even transnational). Regional icons like Douglas fir trees and salmon evoked the “geographical isolation and natural wealth” that historian Bill Lang identified as Pacific Northwest characteristics.³ More importantly, their anadromous life cycle meant they symbolized migration and indigeniety both, central and often opposing traits of Pacific Northwest regional identity. Salmon rely on balanced bioregions through which they journey thousands of miles–from the cool, rushing waters that course through the forest canopy to the mouth of the Columbia River, and into the Pacific Ocean, after which they return to their natal streambeds to spawn. They travel great distances and yet are deeply rooted to home.

This short essay addresses three divergent forms of Pacific Northwest regionalism and argues that each is partial and political. Regionalism tied to iconographic nature, such as in Egan’s definition, linked the vitality of the region to its resources, problematically as those resources waned. Regionalism animated by settler attachment to (and cooptation of) Indigenous material culture simultaneously froze Indian cultures in a seemingly authentic past and erased contemporary Native peoples. Alternatively, a syncretic sense of place that intertwines settler colonialism and Indigenous regionalisms while recognizing asymmetrical power relations can reintroduce Indigenous land and resource claims back into narratives of place, recentering the contests for lands that script the very debates over the meaning of the far west. While regional definitions reflect their geographic and temporally setting—they are supposed to be distinctive, after all—they are all arguments about place and people.

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Deportation derives from lynching: Ethan Blue, ‘From Lynch Mobs to the Deportation State’, Law, Culture and the Humanities Journal, 2017

18Oct17

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between mob violence, immigration control, and the early twentieth-century US deportation regime. Scholars examining the decline of lynch violence in the South typically see modern criminal justice as a new incarnation of white, heteropatriarchal violence. But they have left the deportation apparatus, a conjoined element of a US carceral assemblage, unexamined. This article argues that modern border policing’s ostensibly bloodless removal absorbed anti-immigrant mob violence within its carceral-eliminatory system. As with the diminution of the Southern, anti-black lynch mob, invocations of legality in deportation proved better suited to the biopolitics of liberal capitalist modernity. Nevertheless, the deportation regime, bolstered by an extensive federal infrastructure, still targeted migrants of color, took aim against political radicals, and policed heteropatriarchy in its production of settler-colonial citizenship via the spatial elimination of so-called undesirable aliens.

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Can settlers be responsible? Vanessa Sloan-Morgan, Learning New Relationships: Settler Responsibilities, HUU-AY-AHT First Nations’ Self-Government, and Implementing the MAA-NULTH Treaty, PhD Dissertation, Queen’s University, 2017

18Oct17

Abstract: Geographers have warned against essentializing responsibility in the geographies of responsibility literature. What responsibility is, however, and how it can be enacted remains under-explored. Yet, in published texts and public statements that seek to acknowledge relationships between Indigenous and settler peoples in Canada, the language of responsibility is used with abundance. I chose to pick up this concept of responsibility in my research. My dissertation is the result of a partnership-based project with Huu-ay-aht First Nations. I investigate what responsibility looks like with respect to new relationships under a modern treaty using the Maa-nulth Treaty as an exploratory case study. I begin by theorizing settler responsibility by extending Hannah Arendt’s work to the settler colonial context of Canada and argue that a collective responsibility is necessary to address settler colonial relationships. I then explore how settler researchers can better navigate and work through research—research with Huu-ay-aht First Nations for me as mamaałni (white person/settler)—in settler colonial contexts to support social change. Drawing from the Treaty itself and key informant interviews with Huu-ay-aht and First Nations leaders, Maa-nulth Treaty negotiators, and implementation teams (n=26), my inquiry focuses on Huu-ay-aht First Nations’ self-government as they move from under the thumb of the Indian Act through the tools provided by the Maa-nulth Treaty. Finally, I investigate the ‘new relationship’ between Federal, Provincial, and Huu-ay-aht First Nations Governments under the Treaty. My theoretical findings contribute to literature contending that settler colonialism cannot be viewed as historical or structural only, void of personal affect, or detached from everyday lived experiences. In this vein, empirical findings from the case study reveal that Huu-ay-aht First Nations’ choice to enter treaty negotiations and implement the final agreement was linked directly to visions of ʔiisaak (respect with caring) and ʔuuʔałuk (taking care of, especially for future generations), while recognizing the imperfection of the treaty process and resulting agreements. Although Huu-ay-aht First Nations accepted the Maa-nulth Treaty to move from under the Indian Act, work to define new relationship needs to occur. To conclude, I offer recommendations—informed by research participants—for how to improve the treaty process.

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Settlers know: Meredith McKittrick, ‘Talking about the Weather: Settler Vernaculars and Climate Anxieties in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa’, Environmental History, 2017

18Oct17

Abstract: This article reconstructs popular ideas about climate and climate change among early twentieth-century white southern Africans. The environmental history literature on South Africa and other settler societies has focused on the global connections formed by scientific elites as well as indigenous resistance to colonial policies. In assuming a largely homogeneous white intellectual world, this literature has overlooked the variety and longevity of settler vernaculars that drew on European and African folk traditions, direct experiences with semiarid landscapes, and ideas about weather and climate that circulated transnationally. Many, perhaps most, southern African settlers believed that diminishing rainfall threatened the long-term existence of “white civilization” in the region, and they continued to believe this for decades, despite multiple government reports insisting it was not so. Archival accounts, letters to the editor, and even testimony offered to government commissions reveal the ideas and theories that underpinned this persistent belief in declining rainfall. The stories that southern Africa’s settlers told about the weather, and their commitment to forms of knowledge rejected by their “experts,” open windows into an intellectual world that joined together town and country, educated and uneducated, Afrikaner and British. This article recreates a time when little was known for certain about the climate history of empire’s outposts and when there was little unanimity on the significance of individual weather events.

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Settlers represent themselves: Corinna Schäfer, ‘Discursive Colonialism: German Settler Communities, Their Media and Infrastructure in Africa, 1898–1914’, in Ruth Sanz Sabido (ed.), Representing Communities: Discourse and Contexts, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 77-93

18Oct17

Abstract: Within the short but brutal period of German colonialism in Africa, settlers set up their own press system. The newspapers became an important medium for them to build supportive networks, make their voices heard and bring their colonial projects forward. In this context, the settler newspapers became keen advocates for a fast expansion of colonial infrastructure, such as railways. This chapter explores the settler press both as a site that depended on technologies, and as a site of construction and circulation of discourses on infrastructure. It argues that infrastructures also communicated a message on their own, one that could be contested by African communities who were otherwise largely excluded from an active contribution to the discourse of the settlers.

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The settlers of fascism: Roberta Pergher, Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922–1943, Cambridge University Press, 2017

15Oct17

Description: Roberta Pergher transforms our understanding of Fascist rule. Examining Fascist Italy’s efforts to control the antipodes of its realm – the regions annexed in northern Italy after the First World War, and Italy’s North African colonies – she shows how the regime struggled to imagine and implement Italian sovereignty over alien territories and peoples. Contrary to the claims of existing scholarship, Fascist settlement policy in these regions was not designed to solve an overpopulation problem, but to bolster Italian claims to rule in an era that prized self-determination and no longer saw imperial claims as self-evident. Professor Pergher explores the character and impact of Fascist settlement policy and the degree to which ordinary Italians participated in and challenged the regime’s efforts to Italianize contested territory. Employing models and concepts from the historiography of empire, she shows how Fascist Italy rethought the boundaries between national and imperial rule.

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On the indistinction between colonialism and settler colonialism in Africa: Adelaja Odutola Odukoya, ‘Settler and Non-settler Colonialism in Africa’, in Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, Toyin Falola (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of African Politics, palgrave, 2017, pp 173-186

15Oct17

Abstract: Africa has celebrated five decades of independence. Yet the continent is neither free nor developed. Some scholars have argued that contemporary crises and contradictions of underdevelopment in Africa echo the path dependency of the continent’s colonial legacies. Others question the propriety of blaming colonialism for Africa’s contemporary woes given that the colonial experience was not exclusive to Africa, and that there were differences in the nature of colonialism within the continent. Against this background, this chapter interrogates the nature, character and dynamic of colonialism in Africa. It shows that though settler and non-settler colonial architectures appear seemingly heterogeneous, their divergent manifestations were but a result of strategic and tactic considerations. The chapter opines that, once the illusion of difference has been discarded, it is clear that colonialism across Africa was informed by the imperative to resolve the crises and contradictions of capitalism in Europe.

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Settler colonialism as archive: Dallas Hunt, ‘Nikîkîwân: Contesting Settler-Colonial Archives through Indigenous Oral History’, Canadian Literature, 230, 1, 2016

14Oct17

Abstract: This paper seeks to unsettle and contest the role of the small town archive in the production of local knowledges, specifically the ways in which these archives conflict with the narratives told by Indigenous elders in surrounding reserve communities. I intend to use the methodologies I have acquired in Indigenous studies to re-read my grandmother’s account of her displacement from the ‘Swan River Settlement’ and from the township that would eventually become to be known as Kinuso, Alberta (Treaty 8 Territory). I situate my grandmother’s narrative against local history texts, specifically Sodbusters: A History of Kinuso and Swan River Settlement, to locate the ways in which family and colonial histories intersect and are embodied by community members of the Swan River First Nation. My account begins with a detailing of the life of my great-grandfather, August Sound, and how the policies of the Indian Act would come to have a profound effect on him and his succeeding relations. I plot the historical trajectory of my family, or, more specifically, the historical trajectories of my grandmother and great-grandfather to demonstrate how personal archives can illuminate the processes of settler-colonialism in detailed and nuanced ways, and how these personal histories can contest the dominant narratives propagated by white settler-colonial imaginaries. The form of this paper will be an inter-weaving of academic texts and theories with the oral and experiential knowledge of my grandmother, with the ‘narrative history’ of my grandmother serving as the primary text.

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Modes of domination travel: Marie Nitta, Lost in Transplantation: Knowledge Production and Memory at U.S. Land Grant Colleges in Colonial and Cold War Japan, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2017

14Oct17

Abstract: The U.S. land grant college model was transplanted to the northern and southern islands of the Japanese archipelago in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, respectively. My dissertation investigates exactly what was transplanted and what was left behind in the history-making process of U.S.-Japan relations. While these historical events are conventionally studied in different fields, this dissertation bridges Indigenous Studies and U.S. and Japanese histories to provide transnational perspectives in its examination of the roles of U.S. land grant colleges in late nineteenth century Japanese settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism and post-1945 Cold War politics in East Asia. Drawing on multi-sited archival research in both countries and critically engaging with national and university archives, “Lost in Transplantation: Knowledge Production and Memory at U.S. Land Grant Colleges in Colonial and Cold War Japan” reveals the intimate connections between U.S. imperialism and Japanese settler colonialism via agricultural colleges that were previously obscured or lost in their different and nationally bounded ways of remembering and forgetting. My dissertation discusses how the U.S. land grant college system, which was invented as a legal device for the distribution of land in the public domain of the United States in 1862, along with land laws enacted for the purpose of U.S. settler colonialism, informed the Japanese during their colonizing projects in Hokkaido. It reveals that agricultural colleges promoted Japanese settler colonialism through land cultivation that relied on U.S. technology, ignored indigenous knowledge production, and transformed native ecology. By extending its temporal scope from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, it further examines how the United States again deployed the U.S. land grant model during its occupation of Japan and Okinawa amidst rising Cold War tension in East Asia. In this global Cold War context, this dissertation further reveals that U.S. officials, U.S. and Japanese university administrators, and Japanese student activists partially and differently invoked historical memories of U.S.-assisted Japanese colonialism, while engaging in critical acts of forgetting their shared pasts. The significance of this project lies in its use of global and transnational perspectives to unveil the material and discursive structures of U.S. and Japanese dual imperialisms and their problematic impacts on indigenous populations.

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Settler colonialism is a gendered mode of domination: Emily Macgillivray, Indigenous Trading Women of the Borderland Great Lakes,1740 to 1845, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2017

14Oct17

Abstract: This dissertation illustrates the role of indigenous trading women in significant events that shaped the borderlands Great Lakes region, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, and treaty negotiations. Understanding the role of Native women traders is necessary to understanding both how these events unfolded and how they were affected by gendered indigenous practices, including kinship and hospitality. These women influenced the flow of commerce by producing and distributing valuable trade goods and contributed to the mapping and enforcement of political borders through their participation in legal conflicts and treaty negotiations. Recognizing the lives of Great Lakes trading women is essential to understanding the intertwined development of economics and politics in the region. Furthermore, ignoring the contributions of indigenous trading women enforces male-centered, settler colonial narratives of the region that demotes the women to the accessories of their EuroAmerican partners. While previous scholarship on gender and the Great Lakes has focused on indigenous women’s role in fur trade marriages, this project examines indigenous women in the Great Lakes borderlands as independent economic and political agents and illustrates how settler colonialism operated as a gendered process. As EuroAmerican settlement increased, customs like coverture were enforced and Native kinship networks and forms of inheritance were eroded, creating fewer opportunities for indigenous women to acquire property. However, elite Native women drew on multiple subversive and gendered forms of resistance, including kinship networks, language skills, and knowledge of trade networks, to attempt to navigate a settler colonial system designed to deny indigenous land claims. This project covers the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century and is grounded in the lives of Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe women who operated as adroit transnational actors in the borderlands Great Lakes, including Sally Ainse (Oneida), Molly Brant (Mohawk), Ozhaguscodaywayquay (Ojibwe), and Magdalene Laframboise (Odawa). While Haudenosaunee women traders in the lower Great Lakes struggled to retain their political influence and control of property amidst intensifying settler colonialism after the turn of the nineteenth century, Anishinaabe women traders maintained their political and economic influence in the upper Great Lakes into the mid-nineteenth century. Indigenous women traders throughout the region were transitional figures of Native survivance who worked to preserve themselves and their families among intensifying settler colonial development in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Tracking the lives of indigenous trading women in the Great Lakes borderlands requires a broad territorial focus, including the Susquehanna and Mohawk River Valleys to the south shore of Lake Superior. By demonstrating how Ohio Valley, western Pennsylvania and New York, and the Ontario Peninsula operated as a distinctive lower Great Lakes region, this project demands a reorientation of Great Lakes geography. Trading women’s political and economic networks demonstrate connections between the political and economic systems in the lower and upper Great Lakes, while simultaneously illustrating how each region was gendered differently due to indigenous roles, EuroAmerican marriages customs, and colonialism.

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