settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism constitutes: M. Masri, ‘Colonial Imprints: Settler-Colonialism as a Fundamental Feature of Israeli Constitutional Law’, International Journal of Law in Context, 2016

25Jan17

Abstract: Many constitutional questions in Israel are dealt with through the lens of the nation-state paradigm where the state is constitutionally associated with an ethnically and religiously defined majority group. Thus, many of the challenges that face Israeli society and the legal system are often presented as a result of an exceptionally antagonistic majority-minority relationship in a nation-state. This article offers a novel way of analysing the Israeli constitutional regime using the framework of settler-colonialism. It argues that adding the settler-colonial lens will help better understand many features of Israeli constitutional law. Drawing on theoretical frameworks developed by theorists of colonialism, the article explores a number of foundational aspects of Israeli constitutional law and demonstrates how they were shaped, and continue to be shaped, by settlercolonialism. The article argues that settler-colonialism is one of the central features that animate Israeli constitutional law.

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Do nonindigenous activists have a role? Elizabeth Christine Carlson, Living in Indigenous Sovereignty: Relational Accountability and the Stories of White Settler Anti-colonial and Decolonial Activists, PhD DisUniversity of Manitoba, 2016

25Jan17

Abstract: Canadian processes such as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and Comprehensive Land Claims as well as flashpoint events (Simpson & Ladner, 2010) such as the Kanien’kehaka resistance at Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke (the “Oka Crisis”) and more recently, the Idle No More movement, signal to Canadians that something is amiss. What may be less visible to Canadians are the 400 years of colonial oppression experienced and the 400 years of resistance enacted by Indigenous peoples on their lands, which are currently occupied by the state of Canada. It is in the context of historical and ongoing Canadian colonialism: land theft, dispossession, marginalization, and genocide, and in the context of the overwhelming denial of these realities by white settler Canadians that this study occurs.

In order to break through settler Canadian denial, and to inspire greater numbers of white settler Canadians to initiate and/or deepen their anti-colonial and/or decolonial understandings and work, this study presents extended life narratives of white settler Canadians who have engaged deeply in anti-colonial and/or decolonial work as a major life focus. In this study, such work is framed as living in Indigenous sovereignty, or living in an awareness that we are on Indigenous lands containing their own protocols, stories, obligations, and opportunities which have been understood and practiced by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.

Inspired by Indigenous and anti-oppressive methodologies, I articulate and utilize an anticolonial research methodology. I use participatory and narrative methods, which are informed and politicized through words gifted by Indigenous scholars, activists, and Knowledge Keepers. The result is research as a transformative, relational, and decolonizing process. In addition to the extended life narratives, this research yields information regarding connections between social work education, social work practice, and the anti-colonial/decolonial learnings and work of five research subjects who have, or are completing, social work degrees. The dissertation closes with an exploration of what can be learned through the narrative stories, with recommendations for white settler peoples and for social work, and with recommendations for future research.

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Settler colonialism is primarily about mobility: Alice Wilson, ‘Ambivalences of mobility: Rival state authorities and mobile strategies in a Saharan conflict’, American Ethnologist, 2017

22Jan17

Abstract: How do ongoing histories of physical mobility in economic and political life affect rival state authorities’ claims over a disputed territory? In the conflict over Western Sahara, wide-ranging strategies of mobility challenge familiar tropes of migration scholarship, in which states constrain people’s movements while subjects seek to escape such control. Both the Moroccan state and its rival, the liberation movement Polisario Front, have curbed mobility while their mobile Sahrawi subjects evade their authority. Simultaneously, however, both these state authorities encourage people to circulate in order to support claims over territory, while Sahrawis move to strengthen their position vis-à-vis either state authority. Mobility, then, emerges as an ambivalent means of mediating and transforming power relations, especially between governing authorities and their subjects.

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Debt is spatial dispossession; debt is setter colonialism: Christopher Harker, ‘Debt space: Topologies, ecologies and Ramallah, Palestine’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2017

22Jan17

Abstract: Debt is widely conceived as temporal – present consumption bought with future labour. This paper advances conceptualisations of debt by incorporating the active role space plays in creating, maintaining and undermining debt relations. Debts are topological binds – a particular kind of spatial connection, which are entangled with topographic spaces to produce debt ecologies. This argument is developed by tracing the creation, maintenance and/or destruction of spatial connections between different people, communities, institutions and sites in the Palestinian conurbation of Ramallah – Al Bireh. Attending to the spatiality of debt offers a better understanding of debt itself, and extends relational approaches to finance that deploy network imaginaries, which cannot account for topological spacings that fold or dissolve distance and divisions. The extensive range of time-spaces that co-constitute specific debt ecologies also reveal a more-than-economic geography, which in the context of Ramallah enfolds family and geopolitics. These entanglements emerge from a methodological approach that uses ethnography to move beyond statistical representations of debt. Thinking debt topologically also responds to postcolonial concerns about the locatedness of theory.

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Dispossession (i.e., forcefully acquiring indigenous land): AAP, ‘Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sues to buy Hawaii land for sprawling estate’, Domain, 22/01/17

22Jan17

Excerpt: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to court to gain ownership of isolated pockets of land tucked away within his sprawling estate in Hawaii, many of which are less than an acre and could be split between hundreds of owners in a situation unique to the islands.

The 14 parcels on the north shore of Kauai initially belonged to Native Hawaiians who were awarded the land during mid-19th century, when private property was established in the islands.

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A broken treaty is a broken treaty: Georgia Walker, ‘Big Oil and Broken Treaties: Settler Colonialism at Standing Rock’, The Grid: Platform for Creative Thinkers, 5, 2017

20Jan17

Excerpt: Settler colonialism is not one historical event. It is a structure, and the process of settling continues today. That process is not more evident in North America than at Standing Rock.

The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,172 mile long oil pipeline, constructed to carry hydraulically fractured crude oil from the Bakken fields of North Dakota to an existing oil tank farm in Illinois. Originally planned upriver from the predominantly white town of Bismarck, the pipeline was rerouted after residents voiced concern over the safety of their drinking water. The new route skirts Standing Rock reservation and crosses directly under Lake Oahe, the primary drinking water source for the reservation and another 17 million people downriver.

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Settlement fever! Lewis H Siegelbaum, ‘Paradise or Just a Little Bit Better? Siberian Settlement “Fever” in Late Imperial Russia’, The Russian Review, 76, 1, 2017, pp.22–37

15Jan17

Abstract: Why did the lands east of the Urals–long associated by Russians with the hard labor of convicts, fearsome nomads, and an unbearable climate–attract so many Russian peasant settlers at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Historians usually cite a combination of push-pull factors. They represent migration as a consequence of stagnation in the agrarian economy (push) and state policies promoting migration (pull), rather than interpreting migration as a dynamic element that contributed to these factors. These explanations therefore suffer from being tautological. They are at best incomplete and at worst distort the culture and agency of the migrants themselves. In seeking to comprehend the motivations of the millions of peasants who migrated to Siberia, we confront, much like contemporary observers, an epistemological question: how to know for sure what millions of mostly illiterate people were thinking when, after all, their subaltern position encouraged them to obfuscate, prevaricate, and produce “hidden transcripts?” In this article I argue that “settlement fever” (pereselencheskaia goriachka), a metaphor employed by A. A. Kaufman, Imperial Russia’s leading expert on peasant migration to Siberia, best expresses the diffusion of knowledge about and enthusiasm for resettlement to that part of the empire. In supporting this argument, I draw on the research and insights of Jose Moya concerning analogous “fevers” that impelled more or less simultaneous trans-Atlantic migrations. I then analyze the Siberian settlement fever’s epistolary and other microbial elements, and conclude by constructing a fever chart for the early Soviet years. This endorsement of Kaufman’s fever metaphor is meant to emphasize an essential element of the migratory process, namely, its communicability. Moya relied on diffusion theory to understand how, like germs, information spread “microsocially,” encompassing ever-widening “sociogeographic spaces.” He discovered that such factors as proximity to ports and socio-economic condition paled in significance compared to kinship, friendship, and other microsocial networks. This, I suggest, is how to explain the predominance of “irregular” (samovol’noe) resettlement: peasants went according to their own timetables and scouts. The state adjusted to them, rather than the other way around. Rumor and letters from relatives already settled also played a role. Migration fever abated during World War I and the revolution when it was overtaken by other fevers–self-demobilization, seizures of landlords’ property, and push-back from rebellious Kazakhs. It returned though in the 1920s, presumably spreading by the same means as before.

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Problem settlers? Adam Burke Carmichael, Problematic settlers: settler colonialism and the political history of the Doukhobors in Canada PhD Dissertation, University of Victoria, 2017

15Jan17

Abstract: Over the last ten years, there has been extensive scholarly debate about the nature of settler colonialism and the category ‘settler’. The central problem animating this dissertation is the question of how we understand the position of a settler group like the Doukhobors in Canadian settler colonialism. In 1899 approximately 7,500 members of the Doukhobor religious movement fled oppression in Russia and arrived in Canada with the hope of creating an earthly paradise based on communal economy, mutual aid, pacifism, and an anarchistic theology. Less than a decade after fleeing Tsarist oppression in Russia and settling in the Canadian prairies, the Doukhobors once again came into conflict with a government; this time the conflict revolved around land and compliance with homestead regulations. This moment marked the beginning of more than half a century of provincial and federal government attempts to assimilate recalcitrant factions of the Doukhobor community. A number of tactics including opportunistic land policy, imprisonment, removal and forced education of children, legislation targeting communal property and inducements to integrate into mainstream Canadian society were employed by provincial and federal governments to make the Doukhobors into proper settler subjects. By examining these government attempts to re-make Doukhobor subjectivity in the image of an idealized Anglo-settler identity, this project sheds light on the broad process through which ‘settlers’ are ‘made’ by government action. Drawing on archival iv sources, this dissertation exposes the intersection of Canadian government policy, and colonial ideas, directed towards Indigenous peoples and the Doukhobors from 1899 until 1960. I examine this intersection through the themes of land, education, and colonial knowledge creation in government reports. The dissertation finds that the twin elements of settler colonialism—settlement and dispossession—must be considered as a unified political project. During the period under study there is significant transfer of ideologies and policies between those officials working on the assimilation of settlers and those working toward the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The dissertation concludes that an important element of the category ‘settler’ is its political nature, and therefore its contingent and contestable nature.

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On the other settlers: Laura Pulido, ‘Geographies of race and ethnicity III: Settler colonialism and nonnative people of color’, Progress in Human Geography, 2017

11Jan17

Abstract: In this third progress report I consider the politics of settler colonialism in relation to nonnative people of color. Settler colonialism has become an increasingly important concept over the past decade, and while geographers typically think about it from a white/native perspective, I explore how ethnic studies, specifically, Chicana/o studies, has responded to it. For different reasons both disciplines have hesitated to fully interrogate the significance of the concept. In the case of geography, the whiteness of the discipline has caused it to overlook vibrant debates within ethnic studies. Chicana/o studies has not directly engaged with settler colonialism because, I argue, it has the potential to disrupt core elements of Chicana/o political subjectivity. Specifically, it unsettles Chicanas/os’ conception of themselves as colonized people by highlighting their role as colonizers. Acknowledging such a role is difficult not only because it challenges key dimensions of Chicana/o identity, as seen in Aztlán, Chicanas/os’ mythical homeland, but also because of the precarious nature of Chicana/o indigeneity. Examining Chicana/o studies’ muted response to settler colonialism illustrates the impoverished nature of geography’s study of race.

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It begins with the notion of an open land: John Stuart Miller, It’s hip to unzip: open land communes and their neighbours in northern California, 1966-1979, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2016

11Jan17

Abstract: This essay considers the histories of two countercultural, back-to-the-land communes located in northern California: Siskiyou County’s Black Bear Ranch and Sonoma County’s Morning Star Ranch. Both of these communes were highly influenced by the concept of Open Land, according to which anyone may freely live in a given space, particularly those individuals rejected or alienated by urban modernity. I examine the ways in which these communes related to and were shaped by their rural neighbours, as well as the local state, asserting the importance of the surrounding community in effecting events at each commune. I argue that positive relations with neighbours determined the continued viability of these communes, and that these positive relations in turn required a compromise of original founding principles including Open Land. I further uncover the changing perceptions rural people held of hippie communards, and contextualize the back-to-the-land ideal within broader American traditions of frontier settlement and reinvention.

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