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Indigenous reproduction is a crucial site of struggle: Brianna Theobald, ‘Settler Colonialism, Native American Motherhood, and the Politics of Terminating Pregnancies’, in Shannon Stettner, Katrina Ackerman, Kristin Burnett, Travis Hay (eds), Transcending Borders Abortion in the Past and Present, Springer International, 2017, pp. 221-237

02Apr17

Abstract: Theobald explores the intersection of colonial and reproductive politics in the United States and contends that for Native American women, the politics of abortion cannot be disentangled from the (ongoing) history of settler colonialism. The chapter provides an overview of two different historical “moments.” At the turn of the twentieth century, as policymakers and social reformers promoted the assimilation of Native peoples, Euro-American observers stigmatized Indigenous reproductive practices and shifted the blame for reservation conditions from colonial policies to Indigenous women’s bodies and behaviors. In the decades following World War II, the relative inaccessibility of abortion for Native women, both before and after Roe, served to delineate the parameters of “choice,” as Native women’s maternal rights came under attack in various forms.


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Posthumanism as settler colonialism: W. Oliver Baker, ‘”Words are Things”: The Settler Colonial Politics of Post Humanist Materialism In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian’, Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, 30, 1, 2017

30Mar17

Excerpt: Blood Meridian is a historical novel that tells story of settler colonial conquest in the borderlands of Northern Mexico in the years following the US-Mexico war of 1848. It fictionalizes the actions of a group of American scalp hunters who were paid by the Mexican state after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to help exterminate the Apache peoples and other Indigenous groups whose claims to and defense of their ancestral lands stood in the way of Mexican and US settler colonial expansion. The novel demonstrates that the essence of this history is like that of the very desert where the events of colonial conquest and violence take place: “This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.”5 In emphasizing the nature of colonial conquest and violence as “stone,” which is to say, as a history of the nonhuman, Blood Meridian becomes an important text that helps us understand the historical trajectory and political meanings of post-humanist materialism. This essay will demonstrate through a reading of McCarthy’s novel that post-humanist materialism not only embodies a neoliberal colonial politics of recognition, reconciliation and affirmation that functions to erase the structural violence found in the histories of colonialism and capitalism, but is also a theoretical and aesthetic project premised on, even as it disavows, the settler colonial (re)production of indigeneity as the social ontology of the savage, wild, nonhuman outside to modern liberal humanism. In what follows, then, I want to argue for a reading of post-humanist materialism that understands it as a neoliberal settler ideology that traces and tracks, just as much as it seeks to manage and legitimate, the ongoing role of settler colonialism in our era of late capitalism.


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It is about the land and its waters: Maura Hanrahan, ‘Water (in)security in Canada: national identity and the exclusion of Indigenous peoples’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 30, 1, 2017

28Mar17

Abstract: With the exception of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, most Canadians enjoy water security. Indigenous people are ninety times more likely than other Canadians to lack piped water. These disparities result from and maintain the colonial relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples. As displaced people with values often in opposition to neo-liberalism, Indigenous people present an existential threat to Canadian identity, this identity having been created around possession of a vast land that extends to the North Pole, and subsequent heavy resource extraction throughout this land. To maintain Canada’s national identity and the activities that support it, Indigenous people have to be pushed to the figurative and literal fringes and rendered invisible. Five short case studies of water insecurity demonstrate how neo-liberalism props up and legitimises decentralised water governance in Canada, which in turn promotes and maintains environmental inequality, Indigenous marginalisation and, ultimately, the Canadian identity.


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Settlement is imagined before it is practiced: Herman Rapaport, ‘Fantasies of Settlement: Heidegger, Tocqueville, Fichte, Faulkner’, Modern Fiction Studies, 63, 1, 2017, pp. 9-28

28Mar17

Abstract: This essay considers fantasies of human settlement in terms of political philosophy and literature and considers writings by Martin Heidegger, J. G. Fichte, Alexis de Tocqueville, and William Faulkner. Issues of race and place are examined.


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Seasteading is settler colonialism: Victor Tiberius (ed.), Seasteads: Opportunities and Challenges for Small New Societies, vdf, 2017

22Mar17

Description: Seasteads – artificial settlements on the open sea – represent a near-future chance for multiple societal restarts. Where nation states suffer from ineffectiveness and inefficiency, both politically and economically, and cannot be changed due to path-dependency and rigidity, the open sea is a clean slate. Here, we can test new ways of doing things differently.

This book discusses the opportunities and challenges of seasteads. Its focus is on socio-philosophical, political, economic, and legal aspects of founding new small societies of pro-active and productive individuals and groups. An explorative exercise, this book presents paradigmatic ideas and suggestions for partial aspects of seasteads.


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Settler mediation is settler colonialism: Margo M. Lambert, ‘Mediation, Assimilation, and German Foundations in North America: Francis Daniel Pastorius as Cultural Broker’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 84, 2, 2017, pp. 141-170

22Mar17

Abstract: One of the first Germans to settle in the Pennsylvania colony, Francis Daniel Pastorius left behind many manuscripts detailing a rich life. Studying his manuscripts reveals much about the first German settlers and the world they inhabited, a group that has been only slightly studied. One important aspect of Pastorius’s German American life was his role as a cultural broker between the English Quakers and the first German settlers. Because of his education and inclinations, Pastorius emerged as a mediator between the two cultures. He negotiated the first land purchases, encouraged William Penn’s support of German settlement, and sought naturalization—truly connecting the two cultures. This article explores how he educated one culture about the other and helped make a place for the Germans, and those to come, in their new colonial home.


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Retrieving indigenous spaces is decolonising work: Lisa Brooks, ‘”Every Swamp is a Castle”: Navigating Native Spaces in the Connecticut River Valley, Winter 1675–1677 and 2005–2015’, Northeastern Naturalist, 24, 7, 2017, pp. 45-80

22Mar17

Abstract: This essay focuses on the historical and ecological landscape of King Philip’s War (1675–1678), highlighting 2 spaces in Kwinitekw, the Western Abenaki term for the Connecticut River Valley, during the harsh winter of 1675–1676. I track the captive Mary Rowlandson’s journey with the Wampanoag leader Weetamoo through the interior Nipmuc country and Kwinitekw and discuss the Penacook leader Wanalancet’s winter refuge in the Kwinitekw headwaters. This paper highlights an indigenous studies methodology of place-based, experiential research in the land and waterways, in combination with more traditional historical and literary methodologies. It also demonstrates the importance of indigenous language and place names in mapping historical contexts, understanding ecological knowledge, and interpreting the movements of leaders. The paper focuses on the vast expanse of the Wabanaki country, which is often neglected or misrepresented in colonial-era histories, and especially the “extensive and varied ‘winterlands’” highlighted by the scholarship of Thomas Wickman. The essay features maps of areas historically inhabitated by Native peoples created with ArcGIS by a collaborative team, and highlights contemporary on-the-ground engagement with these places, the knowledge gained from reading the archive of the land, and the possibility of understanding of these spaces as vital ecological and social communities, which have much to teach us today.


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It’s ‘white magic’: Carsten Wergin, ‘The “White Magic” of Modernity: Retracing Indigenous Environmental Knowledge in Settler-Colonialist Australia’, in Eveline Dürr, Arno Pascht (eds), Environmental Transformations and Cultural Responses, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 157-185

22Mar17

Abstract: Wergin presents original material drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a conflict situation over the construction of a AUD $45 billion liquefied natural gas facility on top of an Indigenous heritage site: Walmadany/James Price Point, at the Indian Ocean coast of Northwest Australia. It discusses, from an emic point of view, the inadequacy of western science terminology to represent Indigenous knowledge about the environment in question. To overcome related shortcomings in assessment processes of natural and cultural values, Wergin argues for ways in which western law und science can be better equipped first to recognise Indigenous knowledge as ontologically different but equal, and second to overcome the impossible task of expressing Indigenous world(view)s in modernist terms.


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Settler becoming is an exorcism: Kyung-sook Boo, ‘Becoming American by Exorcising “Indian” Ghosts in Mira Jacob’s The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing’, American Fiction Studies, 23, 1, 2016

22Mar17

Abstract: Mira Jacob`s 2014 debut novel, The Sleepwalker`s Guide to Dancing, spans several decades piecing together the story of the Eapens` immigration from India to America as Syrian Christian Indians (St. Thomas Christians from India, also known as the Suriani). Throughout the novel, Thomas and Kamala Eapens use the word “American” in a vaguely racialized manner to indicate people other than Suriani “Indians,” usually white, yet the novel constantly uses “Indian” to refer to both Indian Americans and American Indians without distinction. The central locations of the novel, Albuquerque and Seattle, sites of historical dislocation of indigenous peoples and ongoing settler colonialism, renders this slippage as doubly problematic. The conflation of “Indian” is further complicated through Amina, the Eapens` daughter, who has to exorcise the ghosts of Bobby McCloud, a leader of the Puyallup tribe of Tacoma Indians whose suicide in a garish “Cherokee male” costume from Sally`s Party Supply she happened to capture on film, and of Akhil, her brother, “the Indian James Dean,” who committed suicide as a teenager and who once told Amina that “Indians don`t leave” because “they`re into the whole live forever-in-misery thing” before she can move on with her life and claim American belonging for herself. As Amina negotiates what it means to be American as a non-white immigrant dislocated herself by the legacy of colonialism participating in the settler colonialism that dislocated the indigenous population, she realizes that she has to exorcise the ghosts of both Indians, Bobby and Akhil, in order to become American. Thus, Amina`s narrative, as an extension and continuation of her parents, the Eapens`, demonstrates how non-white and non-Western European immigrants can also choose active participation in settler colonialism and its logic of elimination as an expedited path to belonging in America.


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With MANY papers dedicated to the gendered dimension of settler colonialism: The Seventeenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Gender and Sexualities, June 2017, Hofstra University

19Mar17

Access the preliminary program here.


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