Abstract: This dissertation highlights the responses of Indigenous leaders and communities to the emergence of the colonial order on the Canadian prairies between 1870 and 1890. The complexities of their actions reveal significant points of weakness in the colonial order. Colonial governance strategies for the administration of Indigenous populations in western Canada intersected with Indigenous tactics in the face of the overwhelming economic transitions and other pressures of settler colonialism, and this resulted in unexpected outcomes. Paylist data, contextualized by other historical sources, reveal the various ways in which Indigenous peoples used both mobility and manipulation of status categories as forms of tactical resistance to the implementation of government administrative strategies. Indigenous contestation of the colonial order was intertwined with elements of adaptation to new economic, political and social realities of the mid to late nineteenth century.

The construction of ‘Indian’ and ‘Metis’ status categories were negotiated by both Indigenous peoples and colonial administrators in various ways, which resulted in unintended/unforeseen consequences for Indigenous familial and community identities. Indigenous peoples, both First Nations and Metis, were forced to choose between these racialized categories during and after Treaty negotiations, and it is evident that the historically contingent creation of the Metis status category challenged a particular bureaucratic understanding of Indigenous identities. Indeed, treaty commissioners barely muddled their way through instances of Metis communities agreeing to self-identify as ‘Indian’ in the early Numbered Treaties. The result was an ad-hoc colonial administration that failed to reflect the very circumstances of the peoples those policies were meant to ‘assist.’ Between 1876 and 1884, the Canadian government was fearful of losing control of the various Indigenous groups that made up Treaty 6. Consequently, people in this territory had some power to influence the administration of policy. Indigenous communities employed tactics of mobility and the negotiation of identities to expose the porous realities of Canadian policy and to subvert, at least for a time, the actions and intentions of Indian agents and their superiors. As the colonial order gained strength following the military victory of 1885, government officials could more effectively constrain the tactics of individuals and communities. Yet even then Indigenous tactics often resulted in outcomes unanticipated by both colonial administrators and Indigenous peoples.

Given the contemporary efforts of Indigenous communities and settler-allies to de-colonize Canadian policy, this study serves to underscore the historical points of Indigenous resistance tactics in response to ill-conceived state strategies. It is my hope that the exposure of colonialism’s malleable moments, the instances of weakness, will encourage scholars to continue the search for ways in which Indigenous communities actively contested powerful structural and repressive forces.

Abstract: The Norse lived in Greenland beginning in 985 C.E. and ending around 1450 C.E. But why they disappeared after that, with few clues as to their fate, has remained a mystery since. Now, new archaeological clues are painting a fresh picture of the Norse. Instead of a society focused on dairy farming, and poorly adapted for the Arctic climate, as previously thought, the new findings imply a community centered instead around hunting and trading. Precise new dates of settlement, established from large surveys of archaeological sites, show more centrally planned movement, bolstering the case for a communal hunting effort versus a loose federation of farm stands. Meanwhile, new finds of walrus ivory show that this valuable commodity may have driven the rise and fall of the community.

Access the chapter here.

This could be called an anti-Federalist election. The geography of the vote makes it so (the cities vs the backblocks, but the uncompromising antagonism that accompanied it makes a reference to the chaos of the 1790s especially pertinent). Widespread resentment against the cities took most observers by surprise; it seemed to emerge out of nowhere. It was not on the record, and it seems important to note that while Federalist positions were generally visible and documented, anti-Federalist sentiment typically left little trace.

Many have pointed out that Washington politics circa 2016 has run out of ideas. Like Hollywood. When the latter runs out of ideas, it thinks about remakes. This season’s political remakes included Sanders re-run of the New Deal. Clinton went way back. Her compact would have been one where important men would conduct important business as usual and away from the spotlight, while a strong woman would run a big white house with the help of some trusted people of colour. This type of arrangement is a very, very old one in America. I am not suggesting that it was not the best one on offer. Yet again, for many the prospect of business as usual was not acceptable. For many the crisis never went away. 2008 is 1929, Obama is Hoover with an enormous bailout for the banks and charisma, the people that have walked away from their homes following foreclosures are those who walked away from their farms in the 1930s (without John Steinback writing The Grapes of Wrath, literati these days are busy writing blog posts like this one). The guy who was thinking of a new New Deal was not allowed to compete.

As noted, the Trumpists also went back. Way back. In the imagination of many of them, Jim Crow back. In some ways, as many have also pointed out, they expressed a rejection of political economy, and this election saw the Hamiltonians of the Clinton camp face a type of anti-Federalist rage. This time the Shaysts have taken over; at least they think they’ll have their man in Washington. But a rejection of political economy is what settler colonialism is often about (I have written elsewhere about the political traditions of settler colonialism as ‘the world turned inside out’ and how they differ from the revolutionary traditions that Christopher Hill had called the ‘world turned upside down’). Facing contradictions, young men had to ‘strike west’. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who was a serial founder of settler colonies in the British Empire broke the consensus of the liberal orthodoxy and was never forgiven. Those who voted for Trump rejected the outcome of capitalism as they embraced capitalism. They are often called insane because all those who reject what is hegemonic are by definition insane. It is supposed to be REALITY (even if we know that it is only an ideology effect), and denying reality is a sign of insanity.

Renowed philosopher Slavoj Žižek approved (see Slavoj Žižek ‘On Clinton, Trump and the Left’s Dilemma: to Paraphrase Stalin, they are both worse’, In These Times, 06/11/16, and , Channel 4, ‘Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek says he would opt for Donald Trump as the apparently less dangerous choice in the US election’, 03/11/16). He sees Trumpism as an anti-establishment phenomenon and therefore, at least potentially, a development that will lead to revolutionary possibilities. Similarly, former minister in the left-wing Greek government Yanis Varoufakis focuses on progressive possibilities that this election ostensibly portends (Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Trump victory comes with a silver lining for the world’s progressives’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14/11/16). Whether something good may come of this is REALLY hard to foresee. The point is to see where something bad has come from.

Žižek knows revolutionary traditions (that’s perhaps why he is so successful in these parts: he is telling American liberals exotic stories they do not know), and Varoufakis’s political project focuses on Europe. Neither has time for the political traditions of the world turned inside out. On the contrary, settler colonial studies can help making sense of a determination to change the world by changing worlds and of its political outcomes. Patrick Wolfe explains in his recent Traces of History that the racial formations that characterised the US during the twentieth century should be understood in the context of emancipation. It was a ‘response to the crisis occasioned when colonisers are threatened with the requirement to share social space with the colonized’ (Verso 2016: 14). A particular form of racism follows the end of slavery; it is one trace of history. Likewise, Trumpist racism should be seen as a response to a very similar crisis. The emergence of a Black middle class demands the same sharing of social space. Faced with crisis, settlers and their political descendants move out (they enact, for example, a white flight, which is as much a displacement as taking up a homestead somewhere in the prairie). Except that the Trumpists have nowhere to go.

Settlers usually displace to other locations or dream of doing so. There is a physicality about their displacements. The Trump constituency, however, has enacted a type of psychological displacement, not a spatial one (for an unforgiving account that evokes ‘white flight from political sanity, white flight from reality, and white flight from responsible citizenship’, see David Masciotra, ‘White flight from reality: Inside the racist panic that fueled Donald Trump’s victory’, Salon, 13/11/16). The Trump voters are activating displacement as a defense mechanism. The fantasy of being persecuted, which is especially typical of this constituency, is especially conducive to defense mechanisms.

The political descendants of settlers have gone insane. Expect to see things.

Abstract: In his short story, Totem, Indigenous author Thomas King (1993) tells the strange tale of a Canadian museum director’s lost battle with the mysterious intrusion of noisy totem poles that refuse to allow their singing, chuckling, and other vocalising to be silenced. Yet historically, those in a dominant position have defined the space occupied by Indigenous peoples in Canadian museums. However, museums are increasingly engaged in processes of “contestation, negotiation, and reinvention” (Phillips, 2012, p. 22) and in recent decades, Indigenous struggles over narrative, representation, and authority have led to profound changes in museums.

Abstract: In this text, written in relation to my book The Black Pacific, I introduce the connections of the Black Pacific, especially those by which Māori and Pasifika struggles against land dispossession, settler colonialism and racism connect with the struggles of African peoples against slavery, (settler) colonialism and racism. Sociologically, historically and geographically speaking, these connections between colonized and postcolonized peoples appear to be extremely thin, almost ephemeral. But those who critically cultivate these connections know otherwise. In addressing how they might know otherwise, the text addresses the need for critical theory to account in good faith for its reproduction of colonial knowledge structures.  

Abstract: Although directed by a Francophone Québécois film-maker, Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992) presents a cinematic treatment of Italy that foregrounds exile as theorized by Hamid Naficy’s concept of ‘accented cinema’. Léolo also recasts the family romance trope, which Heinz Weinmann highlights as central to Quebec cinema. Meanwhile, commentators have stressed the deeply political dimensions of Léolo despite Lauzon’s disavowal of any nationalist intent. This film consequently provides insights into the ambivalent role of Italians in Quebec’s struggle to confront the challenges posed by immigration and by its own colonial history. The current article therefore explores Léolo through a framework combining accented cinema and the family romance, and juxtaposes this text with Caffè Italia Montréal, a film which epitomizes accentedness in the context of Quebec’s Italian community. This analysis thus reveals how, in Léolo, a cinematically unasserted Indigenous influence intertwines with overtly fantasized Italianness to complicate Lauzon’s position on national identity. In so doing, this article comes to affirm the centrality of Indigenous concerns for grasping intercultural relationships whether formed through colonialism or contemporary immigration.

Excerpt: On May 10, 2016, as the May Day wildfires ravaged the city and environs of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and neighbouring municipalities swelled with the 90,000 residents forced to flee their homes, Postmedia News (Canada’s go-to media source for neo-liberal spin) ventured to lift the collective mood with a type of silver-lining headline: “Good news everyone! Wildfires deemed no threat to Fort McMurray radioactive waste site” (Graney). Good news indeed, although perhaps compromised in its goodness by some unsettling details in the accompanying story: for instance, that the waste site now deemed safe from fire holds 43,500 cubic metres of uranium ore residue and contaminated topsoil; or that the tomb of this waste, housed beneath the city’s centrally-located Beacon Hill neighborhood, is effectively in midtown; or that the construction of the site in 2003 served to contain spillage occurring all the way back in the 1940s and 50s, a fact and a timeline meaning that the atmosphere within which Fort McMurray grew exponentially in the second half of the twentieth century was literally one of unaddressed radioactive contamination. In this regard, one might read the exclamation mark in Postmedia’s headline as doubly punctual, driving home the affect requisite to the story itself while also demarcating sharply the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of radioactivity. Never mind the uncertainties of the radioactive past, the headline’s exclamation seems to say: trust instead in the security—the inviolability—of our collective radioactive future.

That the “good news” on offer in this story was genuinely news will not only index popular ignorance about the storage of radioactive waste in Fort McMurray—it will also prove symptomatic of profound historical amnesia: the widespread forgetting or indeed failure to know that this northern city, well before becoming a global centre for bitumen extraction, was once a key hub in the transport of uranium. The radioactive materials were sourced in the 1940s from the world’s first uranium mine, located at Port Radium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and after transport by train from Fort McMurray and refinement in Ontario, were shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico where they were used to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945 that bomb killed 100,000 people instantly in the city of Hiroshima and left tens of thousands to die of radioactive poisoning in the months that followed. The uranium mines were worked by members of the Sahtu Dene First Nation, who hauled and ferried the ore in forty-five kilogram burlap sacks, exposed to the radioactive dust that coated their lungs, contaminated their water, and infiltrated their homes. Declassified documents have since shown that the U.S. and Canadian governments never informed the workers of the risks involved (Nikiforuk); Deline, the nearby Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake, would become known as “the village of widows.”

We choose to begin our special issue on “Resource Aesthetics” with this amnesiac history because the prospect of Fort McMurray’s radioactive waste site conjoins a host of concepts, issues, problems, and motifs that animate, variously, the essays to follow. The story turns on dynamics of visibility, of what can and cannot be seen. It highlights the inescapable entanglement of distinct energy sources and regimes under modernity—in this case, the overdetermined petro-system supplemented by nuclear-fuel residuals. It indicates the spatiotemporal complexities of extraction’s practices as of its legacies. It intimates a capacious repertoire of aesthetic figuration indispensable to the generation and deployment of energy as hegemonic resource. And it marks the inextricability of energy as power from social and political power, most significantly with respect to an ongoing capitalist history of settler-colonialism (crucial for us to acknowledge, writing as we do from Treaty 6 territory) in which resource extraction and the violent, even genocidal project of clearing away Indigenous peoples go hand in hand.

The Work of Settler Colonialism II: Emergent Solidarities; an interdisciplinary symposium

April 2017, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON

 Abstract Submission Deadline: December 9, 2016

The Work of Settler Colonialism Symposium was launched in April 2016 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This event brought together conversations between the emerging field of settler colonial studies and scholars engaging in the continual crises of neoliberal capitalism with new approaches to labour, capitalism, and resistance against the contemporary issues of late capitalism. This convergence of fields brought to light the interrelations of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and neoliberal capitalism as they operate through and within each other. The symposium offered scholars across interdisciplinary fields the opportunity to and generate unique lines of inquiry and envision new alliances for resistance and movement building.

This Call For Papers proposes a second symposium that builds on these important discussions and asks, where do we go from here? The Work of Settler Colonialism II – Emergent Solidarities asks writers, activists, and scholars to expand on the collaborations, contradictions, and possibilities that arise when we organize within and against settler colonialism. This is especially pertinent when situated alongside processes of the exploitation of migrant labour, racial slavery and its afterlife, imprisonment, the expansion of extractive industries, and the corresponding struggles that have emerged out of these conditions.

The future of the settler state will be brought about through the work of reproducing social, economic, and political life in its many spaces and forms. Therefore, a central question of this symposium is: how might we interrupt this labour, and instead work towards anti-colonial and decolonial futures?

From ongoing land-based resistance movements against the expansion of pipelines, to movements calling for the abolition of police and prisons, and mobilizations against the increasingly precarious and temporary nature of work and citizenship, this conference is interested in activist, art-based, and scholarly engagements that are firmly rooted in anti-colonial resistance.

We welcome contributors from within as well as beyond the academy, including activist and community-rooted perspectives, to join us in April 2017 in Toronto. We invite contributions (papers, panels, performances) to this symposium that address themes including, but not limited to:

The labor of expansion; enslavement; extractive industries; land ruination and preservation; land parceling and dispossession; the commons; sovereignty; unions and unionization; anarchism, socialism, and Marxism; migrant workers; solidarities and divergences; anti-racism and prison abolition; intersectionality in anti-colonial movements; gendered labor and gendered violence; reproductive labor, education, and child abduction; laboring within recognition; academic labor; and transdisciplinary interventions.

Our primary concern is to hear from those interested in thinking through emergent solidarities across Indigenous, settler, and arrivant positions as we collectively work against ongoing settler colonialism. We look to incite discussions around questions such as:

What is the work of settler colonialism?

What is the work of resisting settler colonialism?

What can be generated by comparing settler colonial contexts (Canada, US, Australia, Israel etc.)?

Is the future of labour a settler future?

Where are the points of convergence and divergence in potential anti-colonial coalitions?

How can interlocking oppressions (such as race, gender, sexuality, and class) be conceptualized within settler colonialism?

Where is solidarity work already happening?

What is the status of movements across the world committed to decolonization?

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Please submit an abstract, no longer than 500 words, single-spaced, including your name and institutional affiliation, by December 9th, 2016, to workofsettlercolonialism2017@gmail.com

Papers will be due February 15th, 2017

For more information visit: wosc2017.wordpress.com

Excerpt: For centuries, historiography has systematically distorted aboriginal Catholics’ experiences. Rather than reflecting the often ambiguous and ambivalent realities of indigenous encounters with Catholicism, historians have continued to be influenced by what are essentially hagiographic tropes of encounter first constructed by European missionaries to valorize their own identities and experiences. Two relational models: that of missionary/convert and martyr/slayer have been particularly popular and destructive over the centuries. Each highlights the struggle and the sacrifice of European Catholic missionaries (the “leads”) while casting native people in supporting, reactive, and largely non-speaking roles. In the late nineteenth century, these iconic ways of articulating missionary-native relationships helped to fuel a powerful new articulation of American Catholic identity and served as a powerful means of contesting popular (and often contradictory) anti-Catholic tropes in dominant, Protestant historiography. These fictive relationships have also, over the centuries, legitimated real and symbolic violence against native people, and have occluded scholars’ understanding of the far richer and more challenging reality of indigenous people’s engagement with Catholicism since contact.

Catholic missionaries to the “New World” longed to be successful evangelists to ‘genuine’ converts. But how missionaries constructed the ideal indigenous neophyte bore little relationship to how native people actually experienced and experimented with Catholicism. Missionaries across North America performed a delicate balancing act: they sought to spark converts’ spiritual ardour whilst strictly controlling it^. But when native converts sought to scale the lay/clerical divide, or to perform daunting feats of austerity or self-mutilation, this was discouraged because it threatened missionaries’ desire to be uncontested spiritual leaders of the community. Dubbed “children in the faith,” native converts were admonished to avoid the hubris of too quickly seeking spiritual adulthood^. Religious conversion, then, was not the extension of an invitation to native peoples to explore with European authorities their now shared faith, but the beginning of an indefinite obedience, as eternal laymen, to a European clerical elite. The life of famed seventeenth-century Mohawk convert Catherine “Kateri” Tekakwitha aptly demonstrates the link that missionaries attempted to forge between conversion and submission to white authority. An audacious and imaginative spiritual adventurer during her lifetime, only after her premature death at age of 24 could Kateri be safely appropriated by the Jesuits as “one of theirs” (quite literally, as missionaries claimed that the young convert’s skin tone miraculous lightened as she lay on her deathbed).