settler colonial studies blog

Settlers and allies: Gillian Roberts, ‘Writing settlement after Idle No More: non-indigenous responses in Anglo-Canadian poetry’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 51, 1, 2017

09Apr17

Abstract: This article examines the representation of settlement in Canada in the wake of Idle No More in recent Anglo-Canadian literature. It argues that Idle No More engendered a new vocabulary for settler-invader citizens to position themselves in relation to this Indigenous movement, with non-Indigenous Canadians self-identifying as “settlers” and “allies” as a means of both orienting themselves with respect to Indigenous resistance to the settler-invader nation-state and signalling an attempted solidarity with Idle No More that would not lapse into appropriation. Four very different poetic texts by non-Indigenous authors demonstrate this reconsideration of settlement in the wake of Idle No More: Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains (2014); Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia (2014); Rita Wong’s undercurrent (2015); and Shane Rhodes’s X (2013). Although only the latter two of these collections make explicit reference to Idle No More, all four of these texts engage with historical and current colonialisms, relationships to land and water, and relationships between Indigenous peoples and settler-invaders, providing examples of new understandings and representations of (neo)colonial settlement in post-Idle No More Canada.

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On settler colonial planning: Fraser McLeod, Leela Viswanathan, Jared Macbeth, Graham S. Whitelaw, ‘Getting to Common Ground: A Comparison of Ontario, Canada’s Provincial Policy Statement and the Auckland Council Regional Policy Statement with Respect to Indigenous Peoples’, Urban Planning, 2, 1, 2017, pp. 72–87

09Apr17

Abstract: Indigenous rights are crucial to contemporary land use planning and policy in settler states. This article comparatively analyzes the manifest and latent content of the 2014 Provincial Policy Statement (PPS) of Ontario, Canada and the 1999 Auckland Council Regional Policy Statement (ACRPS) of Aotearoa New Zealand in order to evaluate their relative capacity to recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples. While the results show that jurisdiction is an impediment to fostering common ground between Indigenous peoples and settler states, the authors conclude that the PPS and the ACRPS serve vital roles in building dialogue and equitable planning outcomes.

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Petromodernity and settler colonialism: Taylor Mcholm, ‘A Formal Spilling: Leaking and Leaching in Warren Cariou’s Petrography and “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto”‘, Western American Literature, 51, 4, 2017, pp. 429-446

05Apr17

Excerpt: This essay investigates artist and scholar Warren Cariou’s aesthetic attempts to challenge the operational logic and legitimacy of petromodernity, what Stephanie LeMenager defines as “a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum” (“Aesthetics” 60). Like all forms of modernity, petromodernity has produced numerous aesthetic responses. Methods of representing petromodernity that rely on its existing operational logic ultimately replicate the same techno-scientific rationality and dislocation that produce the harmful practices these works represent. For instance, recent work by Debra Davidson, Mike Gismondi, and Jon Gordon attends to the ways that proponents of the Alberta tar sands project justify its harms through appeals to reason. As Gordon argues, what may be necessary to disrupt petromodernity and its numerous ills is a form of representation that challenges the logical premises of petromodernity (Gordon xlix). Following Gordon, I offer a formal analysis of Warren Cariou’s creative work, in particular his 2012 “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto” and his 2014 new media project that he terms petrography, referring to petroleum as both the subject matter and material of the medium. I argue that Cariou’s work spills across form and genre, thereby challenging an aesthetic and form of logic that seeks to sequester the environmental and social ills of petromodernity. Moreover, I make explicit the way irrationality serves as an implicit critique of settler colonialism throughout Cariou’s work.

Writing about Cariou’s short story “An Athabasca Story,” Gordon suggests that we understand “Cariou’s call for an ‘irrational response’ to bitumen extraction as an attempt to expose the flaws in the ‘rational’ and ‘common sense’ logic of capitalism, a move to ‘uncommon sense’”(107). In a recent essay cowritten with Cariou, Gordon extends this analysis to Cariou’s petrographs. Arguing that “literature has the potential to interrupt the relentless justifications and rationalizations of and for the status quo,” Gordon explains that petrographs “are a new medium for such interrupting” (3). Formal analysis can demonstrate the faulty logic of petromodernity, but in order to account for the amplified ways that logic affects Indigenous communities, the analysis needs to be informed by theories of settler colonialism. I argue that Cariou’s disruptive and formally innovative work is not only a critique of the logic of capitalism or petromodernity but also a critique of settler colonialism, which also operates through a logic of separation, containment, and a fantasy of elimination, as Patrick Wolfe has argued (2006). Further, the work’s irrationality performs an epistemic shift rooted in a connection to place, traditional Indigenous relationships with bitumen, and Cariou’s own Métis heritage.

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Indigenous agency when they were supposed to be passive: Robert Galler, ‘Councils, Petitions, and Delegations: Crow Creek Activism and the Progressive Era in South Dakota’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 16, 2, 2017, pp. 206-227

05Apr17

Abstract: While the Progressive Era in U.S. history featured varied examples of individuals and organizations turning to the federal government for reform and support, major narratives have mainly left American Indian tribal communities out of the story. This essay argues that Native people actually were quite active in their reservation communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among other things, they held their own political councils, sent petitions to federal officials to promote their own agendas, and supported delegations to make their case in Washington, DC. This case study of activism on the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota reveals numerous similarities and distinctions between Indian and non-Indian people in terms of progressive activism, while reinforcing the idea of American Indian political adaptations and cultural persistence during the Progressive Era.

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On settler colonial militarism: Juliet Nebolon, ‘”Life Given Straight from the Heart”: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai‘i during World War II’, American Quarterly, 69, 1, 2017, pp. 23-45

05Apr17

Abstract: This essay analyzes the interconnected regimes of US settler colonialism and militarization in Hawai‘i by examining the expansion of public health programs under martial law during World War II. I explore the biopolitics of wartime public health programs that targeted health and hygiene practices as a means of military surveillance, territorial organization, and population control. The mandatory immunization program vaccinated individuals in order to maintain an uncontaminated military base in Hawai‘i and produce able “Americanized” bodies that could contribute to the US military project. The Honolulu Blood Bank collected donations from these bodies as supplements to military strength and promoted blood donation through racialized tropes of patriotism and loyalty. I explore how the US military government employed a provisional wartime “racial liberalism” in Hawai‘i in order to incorporate all peoples in these programs regardless of race, yet these projects simultaneously intensified the classification and regulation of racially differentiated groups and erased Hawaiian indigeneity. As Hawai‘i became a biopolitical center of the Pacific War, the coercive conditions of martial law and wartime racial discourse compelled all peoples in Hawai‘i to cultivate biological health, only to then surrender it for the extraction of biomedical resources—all in the name of military security.

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Indigenous environmental knowledge as survival strategy: Heather Goodall, ‘Negotiating Survival: Aborigines, settlers and environmental knowledge on Sydney’s Botany Bay and Georges River’, Australian Zoologist, 2017

05Apr17

Abstract: This paper argues that it was environmental knowledge, which Aboriginal people held and traded, that formed the basis of the slender chances they had for survival in the changed circumstances of British settlement in Sydney. The case study is centred on the life and work of William Rowley, about whom the little evidence which exists revolves around his use of and trade in his knowledge of the resources of Botany Bay, notably oysters and mangroves. Reference is also made to Biddy Giles, who used her knowledge to act as guide and cultural interpreter but also traded in native flowers. Rowley’s life is less well known but focused on the capture of and trade in food resources. This included his employment by Thomas Holt in the series of attempts to establish oyster culture on the shore of land purchased originally as for pastoral enterprise.

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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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