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A ‘different’ settler relation to place? Avril Bell, ‘Moving Roots A “Small Story” of Settler History and Home Places ‘, Qualitative Inquiry, 2016

29Oct16

Abstract: In the early stages of research into the life of my great-great-grandfather, George Graham, I have repeatedly come across scraps of his life story relating to trees in various central city locations in Auckland, New Zealand, locations now abutting and on the university campus at which I work. These trees and places directly link me with George in powerful ways, becoming channels into affective responses of pride and excitement that also connect me viscerally to George’s role in the colonization of Auckland and dispossession of Māori. Here, I explore these affective states and the ways they provoke my thinking about being a descendant of settler colonizers and about my relation to my settler homeland. These material connections to colonial history “thicken” my relationship to Auckland and to the colonial story, and I use these experiences to point to the possibility of a different, “alter-colonial” form of settler relation to place.


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On the same day: settler and indigenous protesters, different responses (hint: the former are heavily armed, the latter are peaceful)

28Oct16

‘Oregon wildlife refuge occupiers cleared’, BBC News, 28/11/16.

‘Riot police move in on N Dakota pipeline protesters’, BBC News, 28/11/16.


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Reflecting on the interaction of national and settler US history: John Mack Faragher, ‘”And the lonely voice of youth cries ‘What is truth?'”: Western History and the National Narrative’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2016

26Oct16

Exxcerpt: A couple of years ago, I got a call from my oldest grandson, Jeremy. He was beginning middle school and taking his first class devoted to American history. For their initial homework assignment the teacher asked the students to speak with an older relative about their view of the American past and report on what he or she said. When Jeremy mentioned that two of his grandfathers were history professors (a complete coincidence, by the way), the teacher asked him to interview both of us. “Here’s the question, grandpa,” Jeremy said. “What does the United States of America mean to you as a historian?”

“Wow,” I stammered, “that’s big. Can you give me a little more direction?” I was stalling. “I can tell you what Grandpa Lou said,” Jeremy offered. “That would help,” I replied, grateful for a few moments to gather my wits. “He thought about it for a while,” Jeremy said, “then told me that while America meant a lot of things to him, most important was the proclamation of human rights in the Declaration of Independence and the personal liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the other amendments to the Constitution.” Grandpa Lou had taken the high road. “He’s absolutely right about that,” I said. “Those are the guarantees of our enviable rights and freedoms.” Now it was my turn. “Since Lou emphasized the positive,” I offered, somewhat tentatively, “I’m going with the dark side. America is also about taking the land from hundreds of Indian nations and enslaving millions of Africans.”


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On the gender of settlers: Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies, University of Manitoba Press, 2016

23Oct16

Description: Sarah Carter’s “Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies” examines the goals, aspirations, andchallenges met by women who sought land of their own. Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the “spade-work” of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its “surplus” women. Yet far into the twentieth century there was persistent opposition to the idea that women could or should farm: British women were to be exemplars of an idealized white femininity, not toiling in the fields. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation. Despite legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination, British women did acquire land as homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and speculators on the Canadian prairies. They participated in the project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Their complicity was, however, ambiguous and restricted because they were excluded from the power and privileges of their male counterparts. Imperial Plots depicts the female farmers and ranchers of the prairies, from the Indigenous women agriculturalists of the Plains to the array of women who resolved to work on the land in the first decades of the twentieth century.


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Decolonising settler art: Michael J. Farnan, Representing Wilderness: Community, Collaboration, and Artistic Practice, PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2016

23Oct16

Abstract: This dissertation project serves as an inquiry into Canadian representational practices and discourses surrounding colonialism, wilderness, nature and nationhood. The written thesis presented here is part of a multidisciplinary project that also comprised of an art exhibition held at Western’s McIntosh Gallery, from June 3rd to Junes 25th, 2016. This paper, alongside the drawing, sculpture, and videos created for my exhibition, examine depictions of nature and nation in Canada through an analysis of antimodernism, primitivism, and a seeking of the spiritual connected to constructions of “white wilderness” and the spatial imaginary of Canada’s colonial frontier. This paper also explores ways in which decolonial art and theory seeks to challenge those same configurations of identity and power, including the development of settler-based decolonizing strategies aimed at unsettling dominant political and cultural narratives.

Specifically in relation to my own art practice, this means challenging the enduring colonial legacies of Canada’s settler past and the contemporary representational practices that continue to privilege and empower colonial constructions of space and place. This
dissertation project proposes a collaborative-based research practice that operates in relation to issues of the local, domestic, and lived practices of people and their interaction with the environment. As such, this paper examines mainstream articulations of nature and nation in Canada through historicized interpretations of dominant Settler/First Nation narratives and demonstrates how an understanding of this history becomes vitally important when trying to achieve performative, transformative, and collaborative understandings of the colonial experience that continues to define life in Canada.


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On the sacred role of the most recent colonisations (II): Theresa Miller, ‘Conjuring Property: An Interview with Jeremy Campbell’, Engagement: A blog published by the Anthropology and Environment Society, a section of the American Anthropological Association, 15/09/16

23Oct16

This piece discusses Jeremy Campbell’s Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2015).


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On the sacred role of the most recent colonisations (I): Paerau Warbrick, ‘A cause for nervousness: The proposed Māori land reforms in New Zealand’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples , 12, 4, 2016

23Oct16

Abstract: This commentary reflects upon the major Māori land reforms in te Ture Whenua Māori Bill (2016). The reforms implement more bureaucracy and replace some mechanisms used by the Māori Land Court to protect against Māori land loss. The Waitangi Tribunal, which has dealt with Māori grievances over land loss for over 30 years, issued a critical report in March 2016 along with recommendations about the reforms. That report was largely ignored by the New Zealand Government. This commentary contains a review of the literature on Māori land to date, as it helps to understand the ideas behind the Tribunal’s report as well as the reforms. There is also an examination of the main points made by the Waitangi Tribunal, as well as aspects of te Ture Whenua Māori Bill (2016). The overall conclusion is that the Māori people should be very nervous about the reforms for their lands.


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On the sacred role of the most ancient colonisations: Karin W. Tikkanen, ‘On the Building of a Narrative’, Mnemosyne, 2016

23Oct16

Introduction: The ver sacrum ritual remains a riddle in the early history of the Apennine peninsula. Several ancient Roman as well as Greek sources use the ritual in explaining Samnite movements across the peninsula, as ritual group expulsion of settlers sent out to colonize new lands. In short, this becomes the narrative ‘plot’ of archaic colonization.The ritual is however described very differently in the different sources, with regard to detail and to the plot elements involved in the tale. This article explores the various layers in the rendering of the ritual, and the different voices that take part in forming the ver sacrum narrative. With this perspective the ver sacrum becomes an expanded testimony of a tradition, used by different authors to stress various elements of their own historical reports.


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Different modes of domination always overlap: Justin Leroy, ‘Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism’, Theory & Event, 19, 4, 2016

18Oct16

Abstract: Recent work in black and indigenous studies has made claims to exceptionalism that leave the two fields at an impasse. This article argues that since the nineteenth century, US colonial projects have relied upon a simultaneous logic of anti-blackness and settlement. It further argues that social movements have been able to capitalize on radical forms of solidarity by suspending claims to exceptionalism so pervasive in scholarship. It concludes with a sketch of black-Palestinian solidarity activism, paying particular attention to how the anti-blackness at work in the Israeli settler project makes blackness resonate in Palestine and occupation resonate among black Americans.


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On the gender of settler states: Audra Simpson, ‘The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty’, Theory & Event, 19, 4, 2016

18Oct16

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life and death. In it, I examine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder of Loretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public that denied an historic and political relationship between Indigenous women’s death and settler governance. The paper argues that in spite of this denial, these deaths worked effectively to highlight the gendered, biopolitical life of settler sovereignty.


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