settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial ‘niceness’ (as opposed to colonial snobbery): Carrie Tirado Bramen, American Niceness: A Cultural History, Harvard University Press, 2017

04Aug17

Description: Niceness is often assumed to be a superficial concept unworthy of serious analysis. Yet the distinctiveness of Americans has been shaped by values of sociality and likability for which the adjective “nice” became a catchall. In America’s fledgling democracy, niceness was understood to be the indispensable trait of a people who were refreshingly free of Old World snobbery. Bramen elucidates the role niceness plays in a particular fantasy of American exceptionalism, one based not on military and economic might but on friendliness and openness. Niceness defined the attitudes of a plucky (and white) settler nation, commonly expressed through an affect that Bramen calls “manifest cheerfulness.”

To reveal its contested inflections, Bramen shows how American niceness intersects with ideas of femininity, Native American hospitality, and black amiability. Who claimed niceness and why? Despite evidence to the contrary, Americans have largely considered themselves to be a fundamentally nice and decent people, from the supposedly amicable meeting of Puritans and Native Americans at Plymouth Rock to the early days of American imperialism when the mythology of Plymouth Rock became a portable emblem of goodwill for U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines.

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Planning for indigenous peoples: Sue Jackson, Libby Porter, Louise C. Johnson, Planning in Indigenous Australia: From Imperial Foundations to Postcolonial Futures, Routledge, 2018

04Aug17

Description: Planning in settler-colonial countries is always taking place on the lands of Indigenous peoples. While Indigenous rights, identity and cultural values are increasingly being discussed within planning, its mainstream accounts virtually ignore the colonial roots and legacies of the discipline’s assumptions, techniques and methods. This ground-breaking book exposes the imperial origins of the planning canon, profession and practice in the settler-colonial country of Australia.

By documenting the role of planning in the history of Australia’s relations with Indigenous peoples, the book maps the enduring effects of colonisation. It provides a new historical account of colonial planning practices and rewrites the urban planning histories of major Australian cities. Contemporary land rights, native title and cultural heritage frameworks are analysed in light of their critical importance to planning practice today, with detailed case illustrations. In reframing Australian planning from a postcolonial perspective, the book shatters orthodox accounts, revising the story that planning has told itself for over 100 years. New ways to think and practise planning in Indigenous Australia are advanced.

Planning in Indigenous Australia makes a major contribution towards the decolonisation of planning. It is essential reading for students and teachers in tertiary planning programmes, as well as those in geography, development studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology and environmental management. It is also vital reading for professional planners in the public, private and community sectors.

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Playing in settler colonial ways: Souvik Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back, Springer, 2017

04Aug17

Excerpt: Videogames have been analyzed from many perspectives in Humanities thinking and in recent years, a closer engagement with issues relating to gender, race, and diversity is in evidence. Despite early depictions of colonization in videogames, such as Sid Meier’s Colonization or Microsoft’s Age of Empires, there has been very little scholarship on postcolonial perspectives on gaming in almost two decades of game studies research. Despite this seeming absence, videogames in non-Western geographies have often critiqued colonialism and more recently, even mainstream titles such as Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry and Far Cry 2 have also addressed themes associated with post colonialism.

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Seeing in settler colonial ways: Danielle Taschereau Mamers, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentary Governance of Indigenous Life in Canada and its Disruption, PhD Dissertation, The University of Western Ontario, 2017

04Aug17

Abstract: Settler colonialism in Canada has and continues to dispossess Indigenous nations of their lands and authority. Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing argues that a politics of visibility has been central to these structures of invasion and dispossession. In an effort to transform sovereign Indigenous nations into “Indians”, the state has used techniques of bureaucratic documentation to naturalize the classification of Indigenous bodies as racially inferior and thus subject to a range of violent interventions. This politics of visibility fails to see Indigenous people as people who matter.

Using Indigenous feminist critique, discourse analysis, and aesthetics to analyze federal legislation, policy manuals, and archival documents, I theorize settler colonial ways of seeing as a nexus of techniques and epistemological investments with two aspects: one, the vision of a radically new society that drives settler colonial desire; two, the techniques of seeing used to manage the visibility of Indigenous life. To demonstrate how state techniques structure the visibility of Indigenous life, I investigate four techniques of visibility and erasure: i) classification under Indian Act racial taxonomy; ii) enumeration through the centralized Indian Register; iii) identity documentation with Certificates of Indian Status; and, iv) the numerical re-presentation of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW).

However, just as settler colonial statecraft operates through ways of seeing, it is also resisted by artistic and political acts that insist on and make visible Indigenous presence. Alongside examples of settler documentation, I analyze artworks by Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Christi Belcourt, and others, as practices of Indigenous resistance engaged in counter-documentation strategies that make visible and denaturalize the restrictive frames imposed upon their lives. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how racial classification and documentation attempts to naturalize a way of seeing that devalues Indigenous lives and undermines Indigenous presence, but has always been resisted by the Indigenous lives it seeks to transform.

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The (Northern Territory) Intervention is a structure not an event: Elizabeth Strakosch, Alissa Macoun, ‘Patrick Wolfe and the settler-colonial intervention’, Arena Magazine, 148, 2017

02Aug17

Abstract: In some ways it is heartbreakingly appropriate to reflect on historian Patrick Wolfe’s last book and intellectual legacy on the tenth birthday of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER, the Intervention). A decade ago, the Intervention left many of us struggling to understand what seemed like a radically changing political landscape in Indigenous policy. Into this confusion, for us and many others, came the powerful and illuminating analysis of Patrick Wolfe.

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Comparing settler colonial imaginaries: Lynn Caldwell, Darryl Leroux, ‘The settler-colonial imagination: Comparing commemoration in Saskatchewan and in Québec’, Memory Studies, 2017

02Aug17

Abstract: The authors present a comparative analysis of the Saskatchewan Centennial celebrations (2005) and the Québec quatercentenary celebrations (2008) informed by critical race theory, cultural studies, and studies of commemoration as overarching frameworks of analysis. This collaborative work considers two sites rarely analyzed together and examines how these major commemorative events narrate and represent relations among settlers and Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan and in Québec. The analysis focuses on two significant events in each commemorative celebration: the Centennial Gala in Saskatchewan and Rencontres [Encounters] in Québec. While the contexts and narratives differ in significant ways, the two commemorations reveal their mutual investments in a national settler project. The authors contend that examining how Canada as a nation is remembered and currently imagined through such disparate sites and local histories provides critical insight into ongoing contentions about its constitution as a White settler society.

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Them eating our food (the other way round and also on sovereignty): Malek Batal et al, ‘Quantifying associations of the dietary share of ultra-processed foods with overall diet quality in First Nations peoples in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario’, Public Health Nutrition, 2017

31Jul17

Abstract: To quantify associations of the dietary share of ultra-processed foods (UPF) with the overall diet quality of First Nations peoples.

A cross-sectional analysis of data from the First Nations Food, Nutrition and Environment Study, designed to contribute to knowledge gaps regarding the diet of First Nations peoples living on-reserve, south of the 60th parallel. A multistage sampling of communities was conducted. All foods from 24 h dietary recalls were categorized into NOVA categories and analyses were performed to evaluate the impact of UPF on diet quality.

Western and Central Canada.

First Nations participants aged 19 years or older.

The sample consisted of 3700 participants. UPF contributed 53·9 % of energy. Compared with the non-UPF fraction of the diet, the UPF fraction had 3·5 times less vitamin A, 2·4 times less K, 2·2 times less protein, 2·3 times more free sugars and 1·8 times more Na. As the contribution of UPF to energy increased so did the overall intakes of energy, carbohydrate, free sugar, saturated fat, Na, Ca and vitamin C, and Na:K; while protein, fibre, K, Fe and vitamin A decreased. Diets of individuals who ate traditional First Nations food (e.g. wild plants and game animals) on the day of the recall were lower in UPF.

UPF were prevalent in First Nations diets. Efforts to curb UPF consumption and increase intake of traditional First Nations foods and other fresh or minimally processed foods would improve diet quality and health in First Nations peoples [sic].

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Them drinking our water (also on sovereignty): Rami K. Isaac, ‘Transformational Host Communities: Justice Tourism and the Water Regime in Palestine’, Tourism Culture & Communication, 17, 2, 2017, pp. 139-158

31Jul17

Abstract: In this article, Isaac argues that since 1948, Israel’s control of water resources has been the result of military actions that forced between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinians into exile and claimed the most fertile part of the disputed territory for the state. It thereby paved the way for subsequent military occupation. Isaac maintains that the Israeli occupation has violated the Palestinian right to the equitable and reasonable utilization of shared water resources. In his view, from the end of the 1967 war, Israel initiated its occupation of the territories of Palestine and quickly imposed military order with a view to achieving full control over land and water resources. To Isaac, these military orders served to dissolve the pre-1967 legal systems and which consisted of Ottoman, British, Jordanian (West Bank) and Egyptian (Gaza Strip) laws. This critical review article concentrates on the concept of justice tourism as a response to these assumed Israeli violations of Palestinian rights to equitable and reasonable utilization of shared water resources. The article sheds light on why and how justice tourism conceivably contributes to the Palestine host communities’ transformation and hence to the development of higher level self-consciousness about their rights as “a sovereign nation.”

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Them eating our food (on food sovereignty): Ann Allen, ‘Indigenous Self-Determination and the Culinary Tourist’, Tourism Culture & Communication, 17, 2, 2017, pp. 131-136

31Jul17

Abstract: Some contrasting views exist about the prospective benefits of contemporary food tourism for indigenous communities. Some commentators view food tourism as a potential mechanism for reducing tourist stereotyping, bias, and negative images. Increased economic opportunities, employment, and development are commonly cited as potential benefits. However, critics have viewed these same experiences as a colonial revival. An unquestioned assumption that the food traditions, dishes, and cuisines of (usually economically and culturally marginal) indigenous populations should be available and presented for consumption evokes the colonial legacy. These colonial type assumptions, images, and experiences are being challenged deliberately and in a targeted manner. An increasing number of indigenous communities, including the New Zealand Māori, have chosen to rearticulate and re-present their culture in the context of the postcolonial period. For contemporary indigenous people, the culinary cultural field is often wider than simply supplying the touristically “exotic” or “authentic.” It may provide a location to engage with various strategies for indigenous self-determination and the reappropriation of cultural capital. Such strategies may lead to outcomes catering to culinary tourist demands. Tourists seeking out Māori food will have difficultly gaining access, except in the case of the Wharekai (the Māori social space and part of the Marae meeting complex). This research note considers the relationship between the postcolonial legacy, culinary tourism, and indigenous selfdetermination, as it applies to first nation peoples’ foodways, and specifically to the Māori. In doing so, it may contribute to developing new perspectives on food tourism and indigenous self-determination.

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The most committed indigenous peoples: Naama Blatman-Thomas, ‘From transients to residents: urban Indigeneity in Israel and Australia’, Journal of Historical Geography, 58, 2017, pp. 1–11

31Jul17

Abstract: A vast body of research has characterised urban Indigeneity as a novel phenomenon. In response, this paper historicises the presence of Indigenous people in settler-colonial cities. I argue that although Indigenous people have always been a part of the urban landscape, their presence has remained largely unheeded due to their positioning as transients. Insufficient critical engagement with Indigenous urban histories has obfuscated a shift in their status from transients to residents in cities. As transients, Indigenous groups were denied access to decision making and their presence was confined and conditional. Positioned as residents, Indigenous peoples now constitute subaltern counterpublics who partake in political processes. Adopting a comparative approach, I use archival and ethnographic material to explore narratives of policy makers, bureaucrats and urban planners in two settler-colonial cities: Karmiel in Israel/Palestine and Townsville in northern Queensland, Australia. In each location I examine the top-down (settler) positioning of Indigenous people within the city space and the contemporary manifestations of Indigenous political mobilisation. Findings show that while settler-colonial urbanism was initially predicated upon the exclusion of Indigenous people, it necessitated their provisional and restrictive inclusion. This structure inadvertently led to the emergence of Indigenous counterpublics in the city.

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