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Indigenous men: Colin Murray Osmond, Giant Trees, Iron Men: Masculinity and Colonialism in Coast Salish Loggers’ Identity, MA Dissertation, University of Saskatchewan, 2016

13Sep16

Abstract: First Nations people in Coastal British Columbia have harvested and commodified the forest for centuries. With the arrival of European settlers and the inception of a commercial logging industry, Coast Salish men became highly respected and sought-after employees at logging camps up and down the coast. With attention to the twentieth century, this thesis analyzes the long history of Coast Salish forestry to highlight how cutting down trees provided Coast Salish men the ability to affirm masculine identities in both the pre and post-contact periods. In the theatre of a logging camp, Coast Salish men could ascend the racial and social limitations placed on their masculinity through skill and hard work. This thesis analyzes the various ways that First Nations men in British Columbia responded to the multiple forms of oppression placed on their identities as men by the Colonial and then Canadian governments. Colonial patriarchy took multiple forms, which created a system of hypocrisy where Coast Salish men were simultaneously expected to act like ‘men’ but were categorically denied access to certain types of masculinity. Coast Salish men could attain certain types of masculine agency through the sort of rugged masculinity valued in logging camps, but when they tried to assert their land and resource rights against patriarchal systems, they were paternalistically treated like children by the Canadian State. By analyzing Coast Salish logger’s remembrances of their time in ‘the bush,’ this thesis is a study in Indigenous historical consciousness. Considering both the continuities and changes present in Coast Salish forestry and ideals on masculinity, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, constructs an understanding of not only the colonial processes that oppressed, but also the avenues where Indigenous people carved out opportunities for themselves. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Coast Salish men were able to transcend some of the most oppressive aspects of colonialism by embracing an industry and a social environment (logging and logging camps) where they could perform an expression of masculinity that they found fulfilling, and that was simultaneously valued and accepted by colonial society.


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For those who have not been following: Bill McKibben, ‘Our Greatest Organizers Win Big At Standing Rock, But The Fight Goes On’, Huffington Post, 10/09/16

13Sep16

Read the article here.


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On settler colonialism and childhood: Kristine Alexander, ‘Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History’, History Compass, 14, 9, 2016, pp. 397–406

10Sep16

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism has shaped the scholarly literature on the history of childhood in post-Confederation Canada. The first wave of scholarship on the history of young people in Canada, shaped by the disavowal and “social forgetting” of settler colonialism, focused on issues like the welfare state and child migration. Using the frameworks and methods of social history, these works ignored Indigenous childhoods and failed to consider non-Indigenous Canadians as settlers. This approach became untenable after the publication of a number of studies of Indigenous children’s experiences in day, industrial, and residential schools, and the remainder of the article considers the still uneven ways in which historians of childhood in Canada have discussed Indigenous and settler childhoods and engaged with the concepts of whiteness and settler colonialism.


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Indigenous resilience facing settler colonialism and other catastrophes: Devin G. Atallah, ‘Toward a Decolonial Turn in Resilience Thinking in Disasters: Example of the Mapuche from Southern Chile on the Frontlines and Faultlines’, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2016

10Sep16

Abstract: Resilience thinking has moved into the forefront of global discourses on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and emergency response and recovery. Social justice frameworks have long been part of resilience thinking, conceptualizing multifaceted disasters as caused by interplays between physical, psychological, and sociopolitical dynamics that disproportionately impact marginalized communities, particularly in the Global South. Southern Chile is a poignant example, whereby marginalized indigenous communities, such as the Mapuche, are exposed to recurrent socionatural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and volcanic eruptions. Resilience in Mapuche communities, however, does not only include responses to these repeated major ‘rapid onset’ disasters, but also to complex legacies of systematic marginalization and daily ‘slow onset’ sociopolitical disasters including histories of settler colonization and ongoing inequities. Pathways toward resilience in many Mapuche communities do not simply rely on capacities of individuals or collectives to reduce risks to ahistoricized and depoliticized disasters. On the contrary, the very complexities of and intersections across environmental crises and racialized postcolonial politics are manifest in daily indigenous family and community life. Thus, in an effort to improve frameworks useful for exploring complex dynamics in multifaceted disasters, the current paper provides a brief literature review outlining three general themes or ‘waves’ of research on human resilience that have emerged throughout the decades. Key historical and contextual elements in the Mapuche-Chilean conflict are also introduced, supporting arguments for incorporating decolonization frameworks into the increasingly transdisciplinary projects of DRR with particular sensitivity and applicability to historically colonized groups and marginalized communities across the Global South.


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Decolonising settlers? Elian Weizman, ‘Decolonising Israeli society? Resistance to Zionism as an educative practice’, Ethnic Studies, 2016

10Sep16

Abstract: According to Samia Mehrez (1991: 255), a complete decolonisation process must include both the colonised and colonising societies. For the colonisers, decolonisation entails liberation from the hegemonic system of thought and from ‘imperialist, racist perceptions, representations, and institutions’. Rooted in the conceptualisation of Israel as a settler colonial project, this article aims to shed light on decolonisation attempts from within the (colonising) Israeli society. Here, resistance practices of groups of Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists, in active support of the Palestinian struggle, entail a confrontation with the state but at the same time include another, long-term dimension: the formation of discourse and practice that challenge the Zionist consensus, which thus function as an educative practice. This article aims to shed light on these activities and to conceptualise them as acts of ‘critical pedagogy’. Indeed, their resistance teaches the Jewish-Israelis first about the reality of the oppression that Palestinians suffer. Second, and crucially, it reveals to the Jewish-Israelis the boundaries of permitted political activity and the possibility of overlooking and disregarding social conventions and legal norms. Most importantly, this type of activity (that is largely Palestinian-led and directed), symbolises the struggle against the boundaries and borders imposed by the state, aimed at separating Israelis from Palestinians and thus it constitutes a counter-hegemonic praxis.


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A ‘horrific precedent’? ‘US government halts oil pipeline opposed by Native Americans’, BBC News, 10/09/16

10Sep16

Access the article here.


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On settler-colonial solidarity: Candace Fujikane, ‘Against the Yellowwashing of Israel: The BDS Movement and Liberatory Solidarities Across Settler States’, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, forthcoming

08Sep16

Excerpt: Yellowwashing is but one of the more recent washings of the state of Israel in a spectrum of hues—red, black, brown, green, pink and rainbow—deployed to represent it as a nation fully engaging liberal discourses of diversity in alliance with indigenous, minority, and environmentalist groups, including American Indians, Blacks, Latinxs, Arabs, women and LGBTQI communities. These washings are part of a 2005 campaign to “re-brand” apartheid Israel as “relevant and modern” in the international imaginary. These color washings pivot on the representation of Israel as the subject of anti-Semitism, sharing with indigenous and minority groups histories of genocide and persecution, yet what is clear is that these campaigns do not advance justice for these groups and instead appropriate their histories to camouflage Israel’s own status as an apartheid state.


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Settler colonialism as climate change: Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America, Oxford University Press, 2016

08Sep16

Description: Most people assume that climate change is recent news. A Temperate Empire shows that we have been debating the science and politics of climate change for a long time, since before the age of industrialization.

Focusing on attempts to transform New England and Nova Scotia’s environment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book explores the ways that early Americans studied and tried to remake local climates according to their plans for colonial settlement and economic development. For colonial officials, landowners, naturalists and other local elites, New England and Nova Scotia’s frigid, long winters and short, muggy summers were persistent sources of anxiety. They became intensely interested in understanding the natural history of the climate and, ultimately, in reducing their vulnerability to it. In the short term, European migrants from other northern countries would welcome the cold or, as one Loyalist from New Hampshire argued, the cold would moderate the supposedly fiery temperaments of Jamaicans deported to colonial Nova Scotia. Over the long term, however, the expansion of colonial farms was increasingly tempering the climate itself. A naturalist in Vermont agreed with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson when he insisted that every cultivated part of America was already “more temperate, uniform, and equal” than before colonization–a forecast of permanent, global warming they all wholeheartedly welcomed.

By pointing to such ironies, A Temperate Empire emphasizes the necessarily historical nature of the climate and of our knowledge about it.


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Unsettling at the centre: Julie Tomiak, ‘Unsettling Ottawa: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance, and the Politics of Scale’, Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 25, 1, 2016, pp. 8-21

08Sep16

Abstract: The city of Ottawa is on unceded Algonquin territory and, as the centre of formal political power in what is now known as Canada, has represented an important site for local, regional, national and international Indigenous networks organizing to resist settler state agendas of dispossession and assimilation. Yet the city-region is rarely acknowledged as a deeply contested space where competing ideologies and imaginaries reproduce and disrupt settler colonial common sense and state power. Based on a critical interrogation of methodological settler colonialism, this paper proposes a decolonizing scalar lens to analyze Indigenous contestations that unsettle Ottawa. Th rough brief case studies of local community-building, the Algonquin land claims process, and Chief Th eresa Spence’s hunger strike on Victoria Island, it illustrates the contested, interconnected, and competing nature of scalar confi gurations and spatial ontologies and the role of “Ottawa” in settler colonialism and Indigenous resurgence.


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Settler colonialism is climate change (i.e., about changing climates): Emily O’Gorman, James Beattie, Matthew Henry, ‘Histories of climate, science, and colonization in Australia and New Zealand, 1800–1945’, Wires: Climate Change, 2016

06Sep16

Abstract: This review article focuses on scholarship that lies at the intersection of histories of climate and British settler colonization in Australia and New Zealand. It first discusses the role of climate in their colonial histories and then developments in the field of climate history, examining similarities and differences within and between Australia and New Zealand. Next, it outlines two significant recent themes in climate history in both places: contested climate debates and perceptions, and social impacts and responses to climate. The article finishes by recommending future areas for research. Throughout, we stress the importance of local-level approaches to climate as a means of understanding past and present, popular and scientific, interpretations of climate. We also emphasize the role that imperatives of colonization have played in shaping particular kinds of climate knowledge, including in overwriting nonelite views of climate.


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