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).

Abstract: In this short response to Daniels v. Canada, we set out to accomplish two tasks. First, we provide an overview of the decision, with a focus on clarifying its limited reach. In particular, we distinguish between jurisdictional questions under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which Daniels addresses directly, and Aboriginal rights as encoded in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which is outside the reach of Daniels. Second, after confronting the confusion brought forth by Daniels, we examine several different cases of nascent organizations in Québec claiming Aboriginal rights as either self-declared Métis or non-status Indians, and analyze some of their responses to the Daniels decision. We proceed to argue that in their reliance on antipathy towards Indigenous peoples, these organizations exemplify settler nativist tactics that ultimately undermine Indigenous self-determination.

Abstract: In this commentary on Daniels v. Canada, we discuss the cultural power of legal discourse, and more specifically, we argue that the logics that various actors have drawn from Daniels work to marginalize, if not gut completely, policy logics that are based on a respect for Métis peoplehood. In doing so, we analyze one unintended yet predictable outcome of the decision: the growth of new self-declared Métis or Indian groups, such as the Mikinak Tribe of Québec, who see Daniels as an opportunity to capitalize on the perceived benefits of being Indigenous in Canada. We conclude that while Métis inclusion in s.35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 and now in s.91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867 due to the Daniels decision remains important, these developments should be understood and used, from a policy perspective, as building blocks for affirming Métis nationhood and the self-determining power of the Métis Nation.

Abstract: This piece examines the Supreme Court of Canada’s Daniels decision through the lens of Métis legal orders and human-fish relations. It offers watershed-level analysis of Métis relationships and responsibilities through space and time. In order to meet the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action number 45, which acknowledges the need for Canada to reconcile Indigenous legal orders with Canadian law, courts must stop defining the Métis through outside discourses of who they are and how they govern themselves. Instead, there must be a shift towards acknowledging complex and rich Métis legal orders. Further, it is important for legal scholars to acknowledge how specific aspects of Métis legal orders are coconstituted through relationships with, and responsibilities to, more-than-human beings such as fish, and that these relationships are bound to and enacted through ongoing labour between humans and fish in particular waterways throughout the prairies. Scholars and policy-makers alike must de-anthropocentrize understandings of how Métis conceive of and govern their relationships to lands and waters.

Description: Canada’s brand of nationalism celebrates diversity – as long as it doesn’t challenge the unity, authority, or legitimacy of the state. In Exhibiting Nation, Caitlin Gordon-Walker explores this tension between unity and diversity in three nationally recognized museums, institutions that must make judgments about what counts as “too different” in order to celebrate who we are as a people and a nation.

Access the abstract here.

Abstract: Indigenous peoples are uniquely sensitive to climate change impacts yet have been overlooked in climate policy, including within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We identify and characterize the discourse around adaptation in the UNFCCC, examining implications for Indigenous peoples based on a critical discourse analysis of the original Convention and decision texts from subsequent Conference of the Parties (CP). CP16 in Cancun (2010) was a critical juncture after which adaptation emerged as a central component of climate policy in the Convention, with a shift from a purely scientific approach to adaptation to one where local, Indigenous, and traditional knowledge are also valued. Since CP16, the discursive space for incorporating the voices, needs, and priorities of Indigenous peoples around adaptation has expanded, reflected in decision texts and engagement with Indigenous issues in the work streams of relevant bodies. We outline opportunities for greater engagement of Indigenous issues in the UNFCCC post-Paris Agreement, noting the underlying State-centric nature of the Convention limits what can ultimately be achieved.

Description: growing body of literature examines the vulnerability, risk, resilience, and adaptation of indigenous peoples to climate change. This synthesis of literature brings together research pertaining to the impacts of climate change on sovereignty, culture, health, and economies that are currently being experienced by Alaska Native and American Indian tribes and other indigenous communities in the United States. The knowledge and science of how climate change impacts are affecting indigenous peoples contributes to the development of policies, plans, and programs for adapting to climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This report defines and describes the key frameworks that inform indigenous understandings of climate change impacts and pathways for adaptation and mitigation, namely, tribal sovereignty and self-determination, culture and cultural identity, and indigenous community health indicators. It also provides a comprehensive synthesis of climate knowledge, science, and strategies that indigenous communities are exploring, as well as an understanding of the gaps in research on these issues. This literature synthesis is intended to make a contribution to future efforts such as the 4th National Climate Assessment, while serving as a resource for future research, tribal and agency climate initiatives, and policy development.

Excerpt: Naming the relationship between education and settler colonization is critical, particularly given the way in which school curricula promotes a national culture characterized by an amnesia that enables the continuous reproduction of settler colonialism and its social, political, economic, cultural, biological and spiritual brutality.