settler colonial studies blog

A group is not a category (groupism is transfer): Jarno Valkonen, Sanna Valkonen, Timo Koivurova, ‘Groupism and the politics of indigeneity: A case study on the Sámi debate in Finland’, Ethnicities, 2016

26Jun16

Abstract: The article addresses the problems of defining an indigenous people by deconstructing the Sámi debate in Finland, which has escalated with the government’s commitment to ratify ILO Convention No. 169. We argue that the ethnopolitical conflict engendered by this commitment is a consequence of groupism, by which, following Rogers Brubaker, we mean the tendency to take discrete groups as chief protagonists of social conflicts, the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entities and the tendency to reify such groups as if they were unitary collective actors. The aim of the article is to deconstruct groupist thinking related to indigenous rights by analytically separating the concepts of group and category. This allows us to deconstruct the ethnicised conflict and analyse what kinds of political, social and cultural aspects are involved in it. We conclude that indigeneity is not an ethnocultural, objectively existing fact, but rather a frame of political requirements.

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On the Turkish settlers in Cyprus: Helge Jensehaugen, ‘”Filling the void”: Turkish settlement in Northern Cyprus, 1974–1980’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

22Jun16

Abstract: Following Turkey’s intervention in and invasion of Cyprus in July and August 1974, the island was split into two. In the north, a Turkish Cypriot political entity was established that was only recognized by Turkey. Turkey played a crucial role in the settlement process of between 30 and 45 thousand settlers from Turkey in Northern Cyprus during the first wave of settlement, from 1974 to 1980. The settlers were largely needed to create and consolidate a viable Turkish Cypriot state. In order to successfully carry out this settlement process, which was characterized by a rapid installation of a large group of settlers, Turkish and Turkish Cypriot authorities had to prepare land and housing for the arriving settlers. This was made possible by the large void left behind by the Greek Cypriots that fled and were transferred to South-Cyprus following the 1974 War. The settlement process was thus carried out through an organized, state-controlled demographic engineering, in which housing, land and resources were promised and given to arriving settlers. A lack of settler agency was a distinguishable characteristic of the settlers from Turkey, and ideological conviction played little, or no, role. Due to the historic conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots, the first settlers from Turkey were largely viewed as saviours crucial to the political and economic independence of the Turkish Cypriots from the Greek Cypriots. Good settler-native relations were thus largely a characteristic of this first wave of settlement.

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Decolonising mapping is about decolonising settler colonialism: Dallas Hunt, Shaun A. Stevenson, ‘Decolonizing geographies of power: indigenous digital counter-mapping practices on turtle Island’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

22Jun16

Abstract: This paper addresses the decolonizing potential of Indigenous counter-mapping in the context of (what is now called) Canada. After historicizing cartography as a technique of colonial power, and situating Indigenous counter-mapping as an assertion of political and intellectual sovereignty, we examine the digital map of Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Plains Cree for Edmonton, Alberta) produced by the Pipelines Collective, which overlays Treaty 6 Indigenous maps onto ‘conventional’ maps to denaturalize and challenge colonial renderings of city space. We then discuss the expanding trend of guerrilla mapping techniques engaged in by Indigenous groups, emphasizing the Ogimaa Mikana project in Toronto, wherein Anishinaabemowin names were stickered over settler street names. Expanding the spatial theories of Michel de Certeau and Gilles Deleuze, and drawing on the research and insights of Indigenous scholars Jodi Byrd and Mishuana Goeman, our paper considers how emerging digital counter-mapping efforts offer ambivalent possibilities for Indigenous peoples to assert their presence in material ways.

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Children as settlers: S. R. Sturm, S. F. Turner, ‘The Tyre-Child in the Early World’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48, 7, 2016, pp. 674-683

22Jun16

Abstract: This article considers the ‘creative education’ of influential Aotearoa/New Zealand art educator Elwyn Richardson, which is based on what he calls the ‘discovery method’: the ‘concentrated study of material from [students’] own surroundings.’ Through a game that his students play with tyres, we explore the role that tools play in Richardson’s classroom and in the imaginary ‘worlding’ of his students’ play. By taking the ‘early world’ of the children’s development to be a product of the tools through which they describe it, we reveal Richardson’s educative process to be essentially technological. His idea of the whole child who emerges through a process of experience and observation – of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, in the well-known phrase of Wordsworth cited by Richardson – conflates the nature of the child and nature of the ‘natural’ world. By this act of ‘natural settlement’ not untypical of settler narratives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the child’s – and, by implication, other settlers’ – relation to the world of nature is naturalized. Instead, we would argue that the child’s relation to nature is altogether unnatural: it is imprinted by the technological means through which she explores the world and makes it her own – and by which she is made over. The ‘tyre-child’ is no child of nature, but a child of technology (as every settler is a technological settler), for whom creative errors – acts of ‘mis-taking’ like the ones Richardson’s children make in playing with tyres – reveal an imaginary capacity at once theoretical and unsettling.

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It’s not about redistribution; it’s about elimination: Catherine Kellogg, ‘”You be my body for me” Dispossession in two valences’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2016

21Jun16

Abstract: Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s recent exchange, ‘You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, is remarkable because in their rereading of Hegel’s famous lord and bondsman parable, rather than focusing on recognition, work, or even desire, Butler and Malabou each wonder about how Hegel contributes to a new way of thinking about ‘having’ a body and how coming to ‘be’ a body necessarily involves a kind of dispossession. Butler and Malabou’s reading of Hegel is congruent with a current shift on the left away from a liberal politics of recognition to a (post-)Marxist analytic of dispossession: a move, in other words, away from liberal ‘solutions’ of redistribution – of either goods or recognition – towards thinking through issues of settler colonialism, forced migration and empire. Butler and Malabou’s piece points towards the insight that Hegel’s parable must be thought in terms of the political history of possessive individualism, and so in terms of the history of juridically defined property relations; the history of regarding both the body and the land as property. The ‘two valences’ of dispossession, in other words, refers in fact to a logic of property relations, one between those who ‘have’ property (either land or the property of their own bodies) and those who are juridically defined as propertyless.

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It’s about who gets to fill the ’empty’ spaces (and the land those spaces are hovering over): Russell McGregor, Environment, Race, and Nationhood in Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

21Jun16

Description: This new study offers a timely and compelling account of why past generations of Australians have seen the north of the country as an empty land, and how those perceptions of Australia’s tropical regions impact current policy and shape the self-image of the nation. It considers the origins of these concerns – from fears of invasion and moral qualms about leaving resources lying idle, from apprehensions about white nationhood coming under international censure and misgivings about the natural attributes of the north – and elucidates Australians’ changing appreciations of the natural environments of the north, their shifting attitudes toward race and their unsettled conceptions of Asia.

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It’s about women and the land they move to: Nadia Rhook, ‘Speech, Sex, and Mobility: Norwegian Women in a Late Nineteenth-Century “English-speaking” Settler Colony’, Journal of Women’s History, 28, 2, 2016, pp. 58-81

21Jun16

Abstract: Historians have demonstrated how mobility was gendered across nineteenth-century colonial contexts and how “moving” female subjects have made and remade patriarchal settler colonial regimes. But subjects who moved also came to a stop and spoke. This article explores the ways a Norwegian woman spoke and was heard within the various social and legal spaces of Victoria, an Antipodean British settler colony. Louisa Fritz arrived in Melbourne in 1891 and weeks later became the informant in a trial of “indecent assault with attempt to rape.” She did so while European settlers were working out the bio- and linguistic politics of creating a “White Australian nation.” Through a close analysis of Fritz’s speech, this article demonstrates that if spaces are bodily constructions, they are equally linguistic/acoustic constructions made by the speech(es) of migrants, settlers, and those in the blurry space between these categories. More specifically, I argue that paying attention to women’s speech illuminates the linguistic dimensions of settler colonialism.

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It’s about horses and the land they are on: Jennifer Smith, ‘All of this Belongs to Us’: Land, Horses, and Indigenous Resistance on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1900-1950, Undergraduate Dissertation, University of Washington, 2016

21Jun16

Abstract: In the early 1900s, the Yakima Indian Agency welcomed non-Native ranching operations onto Yakama tribal lands, taxing rangelands, and resulting in widespread overgrazing. By the 1920s, agency concern for the welfare of ranchers facilitated a need to gain access to tribal grazing lands sustaining Yakama horses. As a result, agency officials launched systematic assaults on Yakama horse herds, citing horses as culprits of overgrazing and land degradation. However, Yakamas showed little interest in removing their horses, and instead actively opposed settler encroachment on tribal grazing lands. Through analyzing archival sources, conducting interviews, and reviewing scholarly sources, I argue that Yakamas and settlers used horses as a terrain of struggle, whereby they asserted competing claims to Indigenous lands and resources. Examining horses as a tool of resistance provides a useful lens for understanding forms of Native opposition to colonial hegemony, while interrogating problematic tropes settlers utilized to justify divesting Native communities.

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Modes of domination overlap: Luhui Whitebear-Cupp, Oppression from Within: AIM, Heteropatriarchy, Settler Colonialism, and the Death of Anna Mae Aquash, MA Dissertation, Oregon State University, 2016

14Jun16

Abstract: This thesis describes how heteropatriarchal, settler colonialism impacted Indigenous communities’ systems in power and control, particularly with the American Indian Movement during the 1960s-1970s. Further, the gendered divides this created within the American Indian Movement are described. The murder of Anna Mae Aquash is revisited as an act of gendered violence within the American Indian Movement. The implications of her murder and ensuing trial had on Native communities as upholding a heteropatriarchal model of control and dominance are also discussed. My personal connection to this story is woven into this thesis using Indigenous based methodology. The purpose of this study was to re-read our recent histories through Indigenous epistemologies to learn how to heal from historical trauma as Indigenous communities.

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Representing an indigeneity that does not officially exist: A. K. Sartor, Artifacts of Representation: The Makings of Indigeneity in Argentine Museums, MA Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2016

14Jun16

Abstract: Museums are an integral part of a nation’s identity formation – showcasing to national and international visitors what it means to be part of that nation. In Argentina, where national identity is tied to deep colonial roots, indigenous contributions in museums are often essentialized into a form that can easily be absorbed and appropriated by non-indigenous Argentines, as part of a legacy of an ethnic past. For my research, I visited museums in Argentina and cataloged how indigenous people were represented in order to analyze Argentina’s interactions with the indigenous people that are often believed not to exist. My thesis aims to engage with these representations of indigeneity in order to better understand and explain the role of the museum in a nation’s educational and political systems and how various methods of showcasing cultures marked as other can lead to lack of knowledge and support for the complicated histories and present day issues of ethnic minorities. I use this information to discuss how relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people are affected by museum representations of indigeneity and how that leads to political and structural action or inaction.

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