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Reliable allies: Dan Tout, ‘The Janus faces of indigenous politics’, Arena Journal, 45-46, 2016, pp. 211-243

26Jan17

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Everyone a settler? Christina Snyder, Great Crossings Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson, OUP, 2017

25Jan17

Description: In Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson, prize-winning historian Christina Snyder reinterprets the history of Jacksonian America. Most often, this drama focuses on whites who turned west to conquer a continent, extending “liberty” as they went. Great Crossings also includes Native Americans from across the continent seeking new ways to assert anciently-held rights and people of African descent who challenged the United States to live up to its ideals. These diverse groups met in an experimental community in central Kentucky called Great Crossings, home to the first federal Indian school and a famous interracial family.

Great Crossings embodied monumental changes then transforming North America. The United States, within the span of a few decades, grew from an East Coast nation to a continental empire. The territorial growth of the United States forged a multicultural, multiracial society, but that diversity also sparked fierce debates over race, citizenship, and America’s destiny. Great Crossings, a place of race-mixing and cultural exchange, emerged as a battleground. Its history provides an intimate view of the ambitions and struggles of Indians, settlers, and slaves who were trying to secure their place in a changing world. Through deep research and compelling prose, Snyder introduces us to a diverse range of historical actors: Richard Mentor Johnson, the politician who reportedly killed Tecumseh and then became schoolmaster to the sons of his former foes; Julia Chinn, Johnson’s enslaved concubine, who fought for her children’s freedom; and Peter Pitchlynn, a Choctaw intellectual who, even in the darkest days of Indian removal, argued for the future of Indian nations. Together, their stories demonstrate how this era transformed colonizers and the colonized alike, sowing the seeds of modern America.


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Settler colonialism is normalising: Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, Erez Maggor (eds), Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, Indiana University Press, 2017

25Jan17

Description: Controversy surrounds Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the radical national and religious agendas at play there have come to define the area in the minds of many. This study, however, provides an alternative framework for understanding the process of “normalization” in the life of Jewish residents. Considering a wider range of historical and structural factors in which the colonization of the West Bank developed it allows placing its origins and everyday reality into a wider perspective. The works collected consider the transformation of the landscape, the patterns of relationships shared by the region’s residents, Palestinian and Jewish alike, and the lasting effects of Israel’s settlement policy. Stressed in particular are such factors as urban planning, rising inequality and the retreat of the welfare state, and the changing political economy of industry and employment. In doing so, the authors collected here provide new insight into the integration and segregation processes that are an integral part of the broader historical trends shaping Israel/Palestine.


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With a chapter by Kyle Powys Whyte on ‘Indigeneity and US Settler Colonialism’: Naomi Zack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, OUP, 2017

25Jan17

Access the book here.


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Indigenous peoples must be legible: Joseph Paul Brewer II, Stephen L. Egbert, Paula I. Smith, Dory Tuininga, ‘Renaming the Indians: State-Sponsored Legibility through Permanent Family Surnames among the Sisseton and Wahpeton at Lake Traverse, 1903’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 40, 3, 2016, pp. 47-66

25Jan17

Access the article here.


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On triangular relations: Stefan Jovanovic, Ruptures in Canada’s Nationalist Narrative: Situating Toronto’s Former-Yugoslav Immigrants in the Indigenous-Settler Context, MA dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2017

25Jan17

Abstract: With the increasing prevalence of Indigenous discourses in the public consciousness, it becomes clear that the role of immigrants in the Indigenous-Settler dynamic has yet to be understood, and is particularly understudied in its Canadian context. However, given that nearly half of the population in the City of Toronto is composed of immigrants, it presents a rich research opportunity. As a Toronto-based immigrant from Former-Yugoslavia, I decided to conduct research with my own community. This thesis investigates the positionality of the Greater Toronto Area’s (GTA) Former-Yugoslav immigrants in the context of Indigenous-Settler relations. My research suggests that this community is situated within two ruptures of the Canadian nationalist narrative – paradoxical realms of multiple co-occurring imaginaries. As displaced peoples, they are privileged beneficiaries of the Canadian state while simultaneously being denied access to the Whiteness of the Canadian-Canadian ethnic identity. The ruptures are exposed by the relational positionality of Indigenous peoples to Former-Yugoslavs; in other words, Indigenous peoples play a central role in the identity of the GTA’s Former-Yugoslav immigrants. The very existence of Indigenous peoples in Canada shatters the illusion of inclusivity in the multiculturalist narrative by exposing (1) the rupture of injustices acted upon Indigenous peoples by the Canadian state, which maintains its marginalization of these communities via multiculturalism; and (2) the rupture of the relational nature of Whiteness by challenging it as a monolithic identifier of ethno-racial categorization in favour of pluralistic forms of identity. Thus, Former-Yugoslav immigrants are Settlers who have potential for solidarity with Indigenous peoples.


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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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