settler colonial studies blog

Food security through displacement is a settler colonial thing: Anelyse M. Weiler, Janet McLaughlin, Donald C. Cole, ‘Food Security at Whose Expense? A Critique of the Canadian Temporary Farm Labour Migration Regime and Proposals for Change’, International Migration, 55, 4, 2017, pp. 48–63

23Jul17

Abstract: Temporary farm labour migration schemes in Canada have been justified on the premise that they bolster food security for Canadians by addressing agricultural labour shortages, while tempering food insecurity in the Global South via remittances. Such appeals hinge on an ideology defining migrants as racialized outsiders to Canada. Drawing on qualitative interviews and participant observation in Mexico, Jamaica and Canada, we critically analyse how Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program is tied to ideological claims about national food security and agrarianism, and how it purports to address migrant workers’ own food insecurity. We argue remittances only partially, temporarily mitigate food insecurity and fail to strengthen migrant food sovereignty. Data from our clinical encounters with farm workers illustrate structural barriers to healthy food access and negative health consequences. We propose an agenda for further research, along with policies to advance food security and food sovereignty for both migrants and residents of Canada.

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Place-based education as decolonial practice: Michelle Daigle, Juanita Sandberg, ‘From where we stand: unsettling geographical knowledges in the classroom’, Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, 2017

23Jul17

Abstract: This piece reflects on the challenging process of implementing decolonial theory and practice in designing and co-teaching an introductory human geography course. We share these reflections in dialogue with others striving to unsettle colonial and racist knowledge production. Our main objective is to encourage geographers to learn from Indigenous movements for decolonisation and self-determination, as we work to unsettle geographical knowledges through our teaching.

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Resistance is mobile: Tricia D. McGuire-Adams, Audrey Giles, ‘Anishinaabekweg Dibaajimowinan (Stories) of Decolonization through Running’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 2017

21Jul17

Abstract: Indigenous women’s perspectives on physical activity and the ways in which it fosters decolonization have yet to be considered from an Indigenous feminist perspective. Therefore, in this paper, we present four Anishinaabekweg (that is, Anishinaabeg women’s) dibaajimowinan (personal stories) of physical activity, specifically running, and their views on its contribution to decolonization. This study used an Anishinaabeg research paradigm, storytelling, and Anishinaabeg informed thematic analysis. Findings from the dibaajimowinan revealed three themes: running as ceremony and healing; the significance of running as a group; and running for health and personal goals. The dibaajimowinan from the Anishinaabekweg runners show how decolonization through physical activity can occur, which is an important addition to the field of sociology of sport.

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Pre-emption on the space frontier; NOW (note the keywords in the following lines: ‘pioneers’ and ‘domain’): Paola Totaro, ‘Luxembourg pioneers property rights laws for planets and asteroids, and use of space resources’, domain.com.au, 16/07/17

20Jul17

Excerpt: Luxembourg ha[s] become the first European country to offer a legal framework ensuring that private operators can be confident about their rights over resources extracted in space.

The law will come into force on August 1 and is based on the premise that space resources are capable of being owned. The country’s law also establishes the procedures for authorising and supervising space exploration missions.

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Settlers preserve the land because they are settlers (and because they are sovereign): Marcos Mendoza, Robert Fletcher, George Holmes, Laura A. Ogden, Colombina Schaeffer, ‘The Patagonian Imaginary: Natural Resources and Global Capitalism at the Far End of the World’, Journal of Latin American Geography, 16, 2, 2017, pp. 93-116

19Jul17

Abstract: This paper examines how Southern Andean Patagonia has been increasingly incorporated within networks of global capital since the 1990s. Once defined by military violence against indigenous societies, white settler colonialism, and livestock farming, this remote region has become an iconic center for green development in Latin America. This article develops the argument that a regional territorial imaginary—grounded in a history of borderland geopolitics—has facilitated this recent shift towards green development across the resource domains of land conservation, hydropower, and forestry. The discussion addresses the different ways in which forests, waterways, and protected areas (public and private) have been integrated into a hegemonic vision promoting eco-regionalism among state, corporate, and civil society actors. This analysis thus contributes to scholarship on global capitalism, natural resource governance, and green development in Latin America by developing the concept of the regional territorial imaginary to describe these dynamics. This analytic highlights how processes of capitalist specialization and regionalization occur through the open-ended consolidation of master images that build upon spatial histories, transnational regimes of representational value, and political struggles among diverse actors.

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Settlers re-change the land because they are settlers (and because they are sovereign): James J. A. Blair, ‘Settler indigeneity and the eradication of the non-native: self-determination and biosecurity in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2017

19Jul17

Abstract: This article analyses how settlers of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) construct themselves as ‘natives’ through environmental management. Taking a multispecies ethnographic and historical approach to studying the Falkland Islanders’ self-determination claim, I explore a series of ecological practices that demonstrate how some nonhumans become institutionalized into systems of racial and colonial classification whereas others appear natural. I show how agroindustrial and technoscientific value systems categorize human and nonhuman cohabitants according to degrees of political, economic, and ecological status through particular periods in the Falklands: from the eradication of ‘native pests’ (1833-1982) to defence against ‘alien invaders’ (1982-present). Towards a conclusion, I analyse how Islanders have begun to uproot their own ecological imperial past through removal of British-introduced ‘invasive’ species and native habitat restoration. The article argues that attention to how settlers colonize with natives contributes significantly to a critical multispecies anthropology with broader implications for debates on ethnogenesis and indigeneity.

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Settlers change the land because they are settlers (and because they are sovereign): Maura Capps, ‘Fleets of Fodder: The Ecological Orchestration of Agrarian Improvement in New South Wales and the Cape of Good Hope, 1780–1830’, Journal of British Studies, 56, 3, 2017, pp. 532-556

19Jul17

Abstract: This article challenges the dominant historical paradigms used to analyze imperial plant and animal transfers by examining the role of fodder crops in early colonial development in New South Wales and the Cape of Good Hope. In Alfred Crosby’s enduring formulation of ecological imperialism—that is, the ecological transformation of temperate colonies of settlement by European plants, animals, and pathogens—was a largely independent process. To Crosby’s critics, his grand narrative fails to acknowledge the technocratic management of plant and animal transfers on the part of increasingly long-armed colonial states from the mid-nineteenth century. Yet neither approach can adequately explain the period between the decline of Britain’s Atlantic empire in the 1780s and the rise of its global empire in the 1830s, a period dominated by an aggressive ethos of agrarian improvement but lacking the institutional teeth of a more evolved imperial state. Traveling fodder crops link these embryonic antipodean colonies to the luminaries of the Agricultural Revolution in Britain. The attempt to transfer fodder-centric mixed husbandry to these colonies points to an emerging coalition of imperial ambition and scientific expertise in the late eighteenth-century British Empire.

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OK, but isn’t asserting the obvious denial itself? Bain Attwood, ‘Denial in a Settler Society: the Australian Case’, History Workshop Journal, 2017

19Jul17

Abstract: In this article I assume that denial is particularly marked in settler societies since their very foundations lie in the dispossession, destruction and displacement of aboriginal peoples and they have never experienced any event like those that have forced other nations to repudiate the oppressive discourses that lie at their heart. Examining the case of Australia I argue that there are intriguing connections between historical denial and contemporary denial and suggest that the former has been especially marked in this case because of the nature of the latter. I contend that the nature of remembering and forgetting depended a great deal on the nature of the cultures of memory, historical discourses, and the disciplines or genres that story-tellers chose to relate their stories about the past, paying particular attention to the peculiar manner in which these conceived of the relationship between the past and the present in such a way as to render Aboriginal people as though they were out of time and so out of place in Australia. Finally, I trace a revolutionary change in the nation’s culture of memory in recent decades, which has seen Aboriginal people and culture assume a central place in the nation’s history-making.

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Making Arizona settler: Kristin Sargeant, Sharlot Hall and the Naturalization of Settler Colonialism, MA dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017

19Jul17

Abstract: Sharlot Hall was an author, poet, historian, booster, ranch woman, presidential elector, clubwoman, and development advocate for the territory and subsequently state of Arizona at the turn of the twentieth century. As an influential public figure regionally and nationally, she helped to shape a collective understanding of Arizona’s geography, past, and its future potential. Examined holistically, Hall’s work is best understood within a settler colonial context. She described a backdrop of an empty, untamed wilderness, which she then peopled with peaceful, hardworking, law-abiding Anglo settlers to the region in her historical writing, preservation, and educational work. When combined with a carefully curated, timeless depiction of Native Americans and her fervent advocacy for Arizona’s full and equal inclusion into the nation, Hall’s narratives and actions lay the groundwork for the naturalization and justification of a settler colonialist project.

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Most settlers would not dream of doing what they dream of doing: Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, ‘Animating the Indigenous, Colonial Affects, and “Going Native” in the City: Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles’, Western American Literature, 52, 1, 2017, pp. 75-94

17Jul17

Excerpt: Released in 1961, The Exiles follows a day in the life of a group of Indigenous migrants—Yvonne, the lead, Homer, her onscreen partner, and their friends Mary, Claudine, Cliff, and Tommy—as they drink, shop, sing, fight, and wander the spaces of Yaanga, the Gabrielino-Tongva village which is currently occupied by downtown Los Angeles. The Exiles was written and directed by Kent Mackenzie, a relatively unknown white male British filmmaker, who was then a graduate student in film production at the University of Southern California.

In a voiceover that opens the film, Mackenzie declares The Exiles to be “an authentic account of twelve hours in the lives of a group of Indians who have come to Los Angeles. . . . It reflects a life that is not true of all Indians today, but typical of many.”

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