settler colonial studies blog

Tributary relations and settler colonialism: Russell Dylan Ruediger, Tributary Subjects: Affective Colonialism, Power, and the Process of Subjugation in Colonial Virginia, c. 1600 – c. 1740, PhD Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2017

13Apr17

Abstract: My dissertation explores tributary relationships between Algonquin, Siouan, and Iroquoian Indians and English settlers in Virginia, placing the process of political subjection into the heart of narratives of dispossession. Both indigenous Chesapeake and European political traditions shared ideas of tribute as a structure linking unequal, but conceptually autonomous and self-governing, polities in hierarchical relationships of power. By treating colonial tributary relations as a trans-Atlantic political institution, I interpret colonial power struggles in Virginia as a local instance of global battles over sovereignty, jurisdiction, and political subordination within the heart of the unfolding project of settler colonialism. Remarkably durable and continuously shifting, the tributary system and its central ritual of exchanging payments symbolizing subordination for the promise of protection and friendship, provides a powerful lens for understanding the collision of native and English ideas of subjugation that structured colonial interactions in the region. Framing settler colonialism as a contested but unequal political relationship in which subordinated native peoples retained considerable autonomy opens an otherwise obscure era of Virginia’s Native history, in which the English and several dozen Native peoples from the Chesapeake and the Southern Piedmont forged political ties based on a language of friendship and unequal alliance. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, I follow the efforts of small Native polities, who lived in a world of constrained options, to shape the terms of their subordination. Despite numerous disruptions, the tributary system was at the core of both dispossession and resistance in Virginia well into the eighteenth century. Moreover, tributary forms of power continue to structure the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the Chesapeake, the United States, and many of the world’s other settler-states. In Virginia, state-recognized tribes still pay tribute to the governor every fall. In the United States and beyond, indigenous people remain, both theoretically and legally, subordinated yet “sovereign,” or in John Marshall’s phrase, “domestic dependent nations.” By placing political allegiance and subjugation at the heart of settler colonialism, my work expands the scope of dispossession and offers a framework for thinking about contemporary Indigenous politics.

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Testimony is sovereignty: Brieg Capitaine, Karine Vanthuyne (eds), Power through Testimony Reframing Residential Schools in the Age of Reconciliation, UBC Press, 2017

12Apr17

Description: Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which includes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for survivors, families, and communities to share their memories and stories with the Canadian public. The commission closed and reported in 2015, and this timely volume reveals what was happening on the ground. Drawing on field research during the commission and in local communities, the contributors reveal how survivors are unsettling colonial narratives about residential schools and how churches and former school staff are receiving or resisting the new “residential school story.”

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It is apartheid; is it settler colonialism? Richard Falk, Virginia Q. Tilley, ‘Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid’, Palestine and the Israeli Occupation, 1, 1, pp. 1-65.

12Apr17

Excerpt: This report concludes that Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.

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Indigenous dispossession defines settler colonialism, dispossession defines property: Robert Nichols, ‘Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession’, Political Theory, 2017

09Apr17

Abstract: This article offers a preliminary critical-historical reconstruction of the concept of dispossession. Part I examines its role in eighteenth and nineteenth century struggles against European feudal land tenure. Drawing upon Marx’s critique of French anarchism in particular, I identify a persistent limitation at the heart of the concept. Since dispossession presupposes prior possession, recourse to it appears conservative and tends to reinforce the very proprietary and commoditized models of social relations that radical critics generally seek to undermine. Part II turns to use of the term in Indigenous struggles against colonization, both in order to better grasp the stakes of the above problematic and suggest a way beyond it. Through a reconstruction of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists, I seek to show the coherence and novelty of their formulation by suggesting that dispossession has come to name a unique historical process, one in which property is generated under conditions that require divestment and alienation from those who appear, only retroactively, as its original owners. In this way, theft and property are related in a recursive, rather than strictly unilinear, manner. Part III provides a specific historical example in the form of nineteenth-century US property law concerning squatters and homesteaders.

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Settlers and allies: Gillian Roberts, ‘Writing settlement after Idle No More: non-indigenous responses in Anglo-Canadian poetry’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 51, 1, 2017

09Apr17

Abstract: This article examines the representation of settlement in Canada in the wake of Idle No More in recent Anglo-Canadian literature. It argues that Idle No More engendered a new vocabulary for settler-invader citizens to position themselves in relation to this Indigenous movement, with non-Indigenous Canadians self-identifying as “settlers” and “allies” as a means of both orienting themselves with respect to Indigenous resistance to the settler-invader nation-state and signalling an attempted solidarity with Idle No More that would not lapse into appropriation. Four very different poetic texts by non-Indigenous authors demonstrate this reconsideration of settlement in the wake of Idle No More: Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains (2014); Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia (2014); Rita Wong’s undercurrent (2015); and Shane Rhodes’s X (2013). Although only the latter two of these collections make explicit reference to Idle No More, all four of these texts engage with historical and current colonialisms, relationships to land and water, and relationships between Indigenous peoples and settler-invaders, providing examples of new understandings and representations of (neo)colonial settlement in post-Idle No More Canada.

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On settler colonial planning: Fraser McLeod, Leela Viswanathan, Jared Macbeth, Graham S. Whitelaw, ‘Getting to Common Ground: A Comparison of Ontario, Canada’s Provincial Policy Statement and the Auckland Council Regional Policy Statement with Respect to Indigenous Peoples’, Urban Planning, 2, 1, 2017, pp. 72–87

09Apr17

Abstract: Indigenous rights are crucial to contemporary land use planning and policy in settler states. This article comparatively analyzes the manifest and latent content of the 2014 Provincial Policy Statement (PPS) of Ontario, Canada and the 1999 Auckland Council Regional Policy Statement (ACRPS) of Aotearoa New Zealand in order to evaluate their relative capacity to recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples. While the results show that jurisdiction is an impediment to fostering common ground between Indigenous peoples and settler states, the authors conclude that the PPS and the ACRPS serve vital roles in building dialogue and equitable planning outcomes.

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Petromodernity and settler colonialism: Taylor Mcholm, ‘A Formal Spilling: Leaking and Leaching in Warren Cariou’s Petrography and “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto”‘, Western American Literature, 51, 4, 2017, pp. 429-446

05Apr17

Excerpt: This essay investigates artist and scholar Warren Cariou’s aesthetic attempts to challenge the operational logic and legitimacy of petromodernity, what Stephanie LeMenager defines as “a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum” (“Aesthetics” 60). Like all forms of modernity, petromodernity has produced numerous aesthetic responses. Methods of representing petromodernity that rely on its existing operational logic ultimately replicate the same techno-scientific rationality and dislocation that produce the harmful practices these works represent. For instance, recent work by Debra Davidson, Mike Gismondi, and Jon Gordon attends to the ways that proponents of the Alberta tar sands project justify its harms through appeals to reason. As Gordon argues, what may be necessary to disrupt petromodernity and its numerous ills is a form of representation that challenges the logical premises of petromodernity (Gordon xlix). Following Gordon, I offer a formal analysis of Warren Cariou’s creative work, in particular his 2012 “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto” and his 2014 new media project that he terms petrography, referring to petroleum as both the subject matter and material of the medium. I argue that Cariou’s work spills across form and genre, thereby challenging an aesthetic and form of logic that seeks to sequester the environmental and social ills of petromodernity. Moreover, I make explicit the way irrationality serves as an implicit critique of settler colonialism throughout Cariou’s work.

Writing about Cariou’s short story “An Athabasca Story,” Gordon suggests that we understand “Cariou’s call for an ‘irrational response’ to bitumen extraction as an attempt to expose the flaws in the ‘rational’ and ‘common sense’ logic of capitalism, a move to ‘uncommon sense’”(107). In a recent essay cowritten with Cariou, Gordon extends this analysis to Cariou’s petrographs. Arguing that “literature has the potential to interrupt the relentless justifications and rationalizations of and for the status quo,” Gordon explains that petrographs “are a new medium for such interrupting” (3). Formal analysis can demonstrate the faulty logic of petromodernity, but in order to account for the amplified ways that logic affects Indigenous communities, the analysis needs to be informed by theories of settler colonialism. I argue that Cariou’s disruptive and formally innovative work is not only a critique of the logic of capitalism or petromodernity but also a critique of settler colonialism, which also operates through a logic of separation, containment, and a fantasy of elimination, as Patrick Wolfe has argued (2006). Further, the work’s irrationality performs an epistemic shift rooted in a connection to place, traditional Indigenous relationships with bitumen, and Cariou’s own Métis heritage.

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Indigenous agency when they were supposed to be passive: Robert Galler, ‘Councils, Petitions, and Delegations: Crow Creek Activism and the Progressive Era in South Dakota’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 16, 2, 2017, pp. 206-227

05Apr17

Abstract: While the Progressive Era in U.S. history featured varied examples of individuals and organizations turning to the federal government for reform and support, major narratives have mainly left American Indian tribal communities out of the story. This essay argues that Native people actually were quite active in their reservation communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among other things, they held their own political councils, sent petitions to federal officials to promote their own agendas, and supported delegations to make their case in Washington, DC. This case study of activism on the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota reveals numerous similarities and distinctions between Indian and non-Indian people in terms of progressive activism, while reinforcing the idea of American Indian political adaptations and cultural persistence during the Progressive Era.

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On settler colonial militarism: Juliet Nebolon, ‘”Life Given Straight from the Heart”: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai‘i during World War II’, American Quarterly, 69, 1, 2017, pp. 23-45

05Apr17

Abstract: This essay analyzes the interconnected regimes of US settler colonialism and militarization in Hawai‘i by examining the expansion of public health programs under martial law during World War II. I explore the biopolitics of wartime public health programs that targeted health and hygiene practices as a means of military surveillance, territorial organization, and population control. The mandatory immunization program vaccinated individuals in order to maintain an uncontaminated military base in Hawai‘i and produce able “Americanized” bodies that could contribute to the US military project. The Honolulu Blood Bank collected donations from these bodies as supplements to military strength and promoted blood donation through racialized tropes of patriotism and loyalty. I explore how the US military government employed a provisional wartime “racial liberalism” in Hawai‘i in order to incorporate all peoples in these programs regardless of race, yet these projects simultaneously intensified the classification and regulation of racially differentiated groups and erased Hawaiian indigeneity. As Hawai‘i became a biopolitical center of the Pacific War, the coercive conditions of martial law and wartime racial discourse compelled all peoples in Hawai‘i to cultivate biological health, only to then surrender it for the extraction of biomedical resources—all in the name of military security.

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Indigenous environmental knowledge as survival strategy: Heather Goodall, ‘Negotiating Survival: Aborigines, settlers and environmental knowledge on Sydney’s Botany Bay and Georges River’, Australian Zoologist, 2017

05Apr17

Abstract: This paper argues that it was environmental knowledge, which Aboriginal people held and traded, that formed the basis of the slender chances they had for survival in the changed circumstances of British settlement in Sydney. The case study is centred on the life and work of William Rowley, about whom the little evidence which exists revolves around his use of and trade in his knowledge of the resources of Botany Bay, notably oysters and mangroves. Reference is also made to Biddy Giles, who used her knowledge to act as guide and cultural interpreter but also traded in native flowers. Rowley’s life is less well known but focused on the capture of and trade in food resources. This included his employment by Thomas Holt in the series of attempts to establish oyster culture on the shore of land purchased originally as for pastoral enterprise.

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