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Indigenous activism against settler colonialism: Kiara M. Vigil, ‘Who Was Henry Standing Bear? Remembering Lakota Activism from the Early Twentieth Century’, Great Plains Quarterly, 37, 3, 2017, pp. 157-182

12Sep17

Excerpt: High atop Thunderhead Mountain in South Dakota, the Crazy Horse monument aims to commemorate America, the power of nature, and the greatness of Native Americans in general, if not Crazy Horse in particular. This memorial seems not only impressive due to its size but extravagant based on its claims to Native heritage, authenticity, and support. Included alongside the controversial sculpture is an Indian Museum of North America, Native American Cultural Center, and sculptor’s studio as well as a new 40,000-square-foot Orientation Center and theaters. Considering the expansiveness of the Crazy Horse Memorial it seems almost shocking that so little is known about the Lakota man, Henry Standing Bear, who was tied to the creation of this site within prominent scholarship about Native American history. It is equally striking that the other less-publicized aspects of Standing Bear’s life have remained on the margins of historical research, in some ways obscured by the published writings and public persona of his better-known older brother, Luther Standing Bear. This article aims to recover Henry Standing Bear. In the following biography I acknowledge, first, that he was a complicated figure who poses a series of hard-to-understand questions regarding the Native activism rooted in the social and political geographies of the Great Plains, and second, that as a resistant intellectual, he was a distinctive figure in shaping the different approaches to Native social and political activism that became necessary during the early twentieth century. Third, I delineate the ways in which his challenges to federal Indian policy pertaining to Native societies in the Great Plains lay bare the oppression and abuses inherent in these policies and some of the structures underlying settler logics, such as assimilation. Fourth, I examine how Native people educated at institutions like Carlisle could successfully use tools from their schooling to their advantage even if their actions were mischaracterized and misunderstood by government officials, agents, and other non-Natives who embraced ideologies that perpetuated settler colonialism in the United States.


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Settlers in one place, not settlers in another: Karin Elizabeth Speedy, ‘Transformative Mobilities and the Non-dit: Constructing Whiteness Across Two French Colonial Spaces’, Open Library of Humanities, 3, 2, 2017

12Sep17

Abstract: Between 1860 and 1890, several thousand migrants from Reunion Island settled in New Caledonia. Most were fleeing poverty after the collapse of the sugar industry. While local legend has it that these settlers comprised a handful of rich, white planters and a contingent of Indian coolies, recent research into this group has demonstrated that the migration was on a far greater scale and was racially and socially diverse. Indeed, most Reunionese migrants, both indentured and free, were of African, Malagasy or Creole ancestry. They had either been slaves themselves or were the descendants of slaves in Reunion. Welcomed by a new colony that was desperate for settlers and workers, the racial and social characteristics of these new French citizens were erased as was their presence in the New Caledonian historical narrative. The tradition of the non-dit (the unsaid or unspoken) teamed with French social structures and the needs of a settler colonial society facilitated this disappearing act as descendants melded into the local white settler population. Yet, there were cracks in this colonial whitewash (photographs, recipes, language, songs), traces of a hidden black migration to the Pacific. With reference to these traces and artefacts, and drawing on oral histories of descendants, I highlight in this article some of the voices, faces and stories of these settlers, while reflecting on their social transformation and the extent of their agency in constructing their whiteness in New Caledonia.


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On the settlers that co-operate (with each other to build better settlements): David J. Gilchrist, Imperial Theory and Colonial Pragmatism Charles Harper, Economic Development and Agricultural Co-operation in Australia, Palgrave, 2017

09Sep17

Description: This book considers the role played by co-operative agriculture as a critical economic model which, in Australia, helped build public capital, drive economic development and impact political arrangements. In the case of colonial Western Australia, the story of agricultural co-operation is inseparable from that of the story of Charles Harper. Harper was a self-starting, pioneering frontiersman who became a political, commercial and agricultural leader in the British Empire’s most isolated colony during the second half of the Victorian era. He was convinced of the successful economic future of Western Australia but also pragmatic enough to appreciate that the unique challenges facing the colony were only going to be resolved by the application of unorthodox thinking.

Using Harper’s life as a foil, this book examines Imperial economic thinking in relation to the co-operative form of economic organisation, the development of public capital, and socialism. It uses this discussion to demonstrate the transfer of socialistic ideas from the centre of the Empire to the farthest reaches of the Antipodes where they were used to provide a rhetorical crutch in support of purely pragmatic co-operative establishments.


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Language revitalisation undoes settler colonialism: William A. Geiger, ‘From the Logic of Elimination to the Logic of the Gift: Towards a Decolonial Theory of Tlingit Language Revitalization’, Open Linguistics, 3, 2017, pp. 219–235

09Sep17

Abstract: In this article, Tlingit language revitalization is approached through theories of decolonization, critiques of colonialism, and philosophies of liberation. Instructional programs for the endangered Tlingit language are urgently necessary, but the residual structures of colonialism make the successful implementation and reception of such programs extremely difficult. Patrick Wolfe’s notion of the “logic of elimination” is used to demonstrate the persistent nature of colonialism in the Tlingit context. Through that lens, the dispossession of Tlingit territory, culture, and language by the settler-colonial system can be viewed as ongoing processes rather than concluded past events. Concrete examples are used to demonstrate the empirical effects of colonial elimination campaigns in the Tlingit context. The work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres is also enlisted, as he articulates a notion of decolonization predicated on “the logic of the gift.” I bring together these “logics” of (de)colonization to advance a speculative theory of revitalization as a movement from the logic of elimination to the logic of the gift. This has implications for language revitalization in general and Tlingit language revitalization in particular. I argue that revitalization must begin in an affirmation of the Tlingit language based on critical, militant, and loving acts of listening.


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Settler culture normalises ecocide: Andrew F. Smith, ‘From Victims to Survivors? Struggling to Live Ecoconsciously in an Ecocidal Culture’, Environmental Philosophy, 2017

07Sep17

Abstract: It’s hardly news that settler culture normalizes ecocide. Those of us raised as settlers who are nevertheless ecoconscious routinely blame ourselves for our failure to live up to our own best expectations when it comes to challenging the norms and practices of our culture. This leads us to overlook that we’re also—and, I think, much more so—among its victims. I outline five manifestations of victimhood routinely exhibited by the ecoconscious settler activists, scholars, and students with whom I interact. I then consider how we can transition from being victims to survivors of our culture, which is vital for ending ecocide. These two concepts, victimhood and survivorship, are regularly juxtaposed when discussing recovery for those subject to abuse, violence, and other trauma-inducing phenomena. Together they provide the basis for a clearer understanding of how we ecoconscious settlers should engage in the ongoing fight for our lives and our futures.


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Theorising religious freedom in a settler colonial context: Tisa Wenger, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal, UNC Press, 2017

07Sep17

Description: Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse–Wenger calls it “religious freedom talk–that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire.

More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.


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Parallel: Sophie Spencer-Zavos, ‘The Case of Rasmea Odeh: The parallel biopolitics of the US and Israel’, Radicle: Reed Anthropology Review, 2, 1, 2017

05Sep17

Abstract: Using Foucault and Agamben’s theories of the state’s project of nation building through the inclusive exclusion of bodies, the author casts the Israel-Palestine conflict in different light. The forcible removal of Palestinians is reexamined and situated in the larger narratives surrounding both the creation of the Israeli state and the nature of US biopolitics.


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Health? Caleb Eckert, Unsettling Spring Health, Graduate dissertation, Haverford College, 2017

05Sep17

Abstract: Studying the work of the Springs Stewardship Institute in Northern Arizona, this project considers how springs ecologists work within and against settler colonialism. First, I consider Flagstaff as a settler society, arguing that early settler military expeditions were formative in producing knowledge about and settler dispositions towards springs. Putting Aldo Leopold’s writings on land health in conversation with feminist and Indigenous scholarship, a relational definition of health can be found in springs’ scientific study. Boundaries between discourses on health are blurrier than one might think. Spring health is also political in its knowledge production and research practice. The frame of woven ecosystem, human, and more-than-human health posed by springs scientists is one that understands the world in place-based particularity and communication, implicating settler colonial manifestations and structural paradigms as drivers of springs’ degradation. Making kin, which requires personal and structural work of unsettling, can challenge settlers and scientists alike to recognize relational communicative reality and fulfill ethical obligations with the land, humans, and more-than-human others. Health, for springs and humans, is a vital concept that presents scientists, land managers, and residents with unsettling realities while offering possibilities for flourishing.


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Predating producers: Michael D. Wise, Producing Predators Wolves, Work, and Conquest in the Northern Rockies, University of Nebraska Press, 2016

02Sep17

Description: In Producing Predators, Michael D. Wise argues that contestations between Native and non-Native people over hunting, labor, and the livestock industry drove the development of predator eradication programs in Montana and Alberta from the 1880s onward. The history of these anti-predator programs was significant not only for their ecological effects, but also for their enduring cultural legacies of colonialism in the Northern Rockies.

By targeting wolves and other wild carnivores for extermination, cattle ranchers disavowed the predatory labor of raising domestic animals for slaughter, representing it instead as productive work. Meanwhile, federal agencies sought to purge the Blackfoot, Salish-Kootenai, and other indigenous peoples of their so-called predatory behaviors through campaigns of assimilation and citizenship that forcefully privatized tribal land and criminalized hunting and its related ritual practices. Despite these colonial pressures, Native communities resisted and negotiated the terms of their dispossession by representing their own patterns of work, food, and livelihood as productive. By exploring predation and production as fluid cultural logics for valuing labor, rather than just a set of biological processes, Producing Predators offers a new perspective on the history of the American West and the modern history of colonialism more broadly.


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Listening colonialism: Lee Veeraraghavan, Dirty Ears: Hearing and Hearings in the Canadian Liberal Settler Colony, PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2017

31Aug17

Abstract: Despite vocal opposition from the indigenous people, public hearing processes in Canada play an important part in determining whether or not oil and gas pipeline development projects will be approved. Attention to hearing as an aesthetic and political practice has been theorized by the Canadian composer and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer as a fundamental part of culture and nation building. This dissertation explores the ways the Canadian government and settler society use hearing as a silencing technique, mobilizing the field of aurality to place limits on the expression of indigenous dissent. The research is based on two years of ethnographic work among activists fighting oil and gas development in Vancouver, and indigenous sovereigntists resisting pipelines in the province of British Columbia’s north. Juxtaposing case studies from different struggles over land use in British Columbia with a deconstruction of R. Murray Schafer’s writings and select compositions, this dissertation shows how the field of aurality shapes land and people.


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