settler colonial studies blog

Soviet settler colonialism: J. Otto Pohl, The Deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Context of Settler Colonialism’, Uluslararasi Suçlar ve Tarih, 16, 2015, pp. 45-69

20May16

Abstract: The Soviet ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars, the subsequent settlement of their lands with Russians and Ukrainians, and the de-Tatarization of the peninsula s place names has a number of similarities with various cases of settler colonialism in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Palestine. The treatment of the exiled Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan, the Urals, and other regions also had a number of similarities with how settler colonies treated their indigenous populations. These similarities, however, have not been thoroughly explored by historians and other scholars. Instead the USSR has been considered as being completely outside of the framework of colonial and ethno-racial relations that developed between Europeans and indigenous peoples in other parts of the world. This article seeks to make a first attempt at suggesting ways in which Soviet policies towards various indigenous peoples in the USSR can be compared to the better studied cases of settler colonialism in places like South Africa and Palestine. In particular it uses the Soviet deportation of the Crimean Tatars and their prolonged exile in Uzbekistan under various legal restrictions as a case study comparable in a number of important ways to settler colonialism. It is hoped that this article will inspire further inquiries and research in a comparative manner regarding this topic.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Colonial possessions: Alyosha Goldstein, ‘The Jurisprudence of Domestic Dependence’, Darkmatter Journal, 2016

20May16

Excerpt: Settler colonialism in the United States today is an assemblage of claims to place, possession, and permanence. Yet the dynamics of these claims are not simply the culmination of unchallenged and uninterrupted indigenous dispossession under US empire and settler-colonial governance. Rather, such claims pointedly seek to undo the contemporary particularity of indigenous sovereignty through an affirmation of privatisation, domestication, and heteronormativity. During the 1970s, United States policymakers responded to escalating Native American juridical and social movement demands with legislation that shifted the emphasis of federal Indian law, the distinct legal doctrine partially based on historical treaties and encompassing federally-recognised tribes in the United States. These demands gained international media attention with the tribal fishing rights protests in Washington State beginning in 1964, the occupation of Alcatraz Island by the Indians of All Tribes in 1969, the return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo won in 1970, the Trail of Broken Treaties cross-country march in 1972, and the bloody counterinsurgency waged against the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1973. In this context, legislation such as the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 reasserted forms of tribal authority and jurisdiction, even if neither fundamentally unsettled the plenary power of the US Congress.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Incarceration is genocide: Andrew Woolford, James Gacek, ‘Genocidal carcerality and Indian residential schools in Canada’, Punishment & Society, 2016

20May16

Abstract: This paper contributes to the criminology of genocide through examination of settler colonial destruction within the broader context of what we term ‘genocidal carcerality’. We employ this term to examine the ways in which space is implicated in the physical, biological, and cultural destruction of group life. In this paper, our purpose is not to create a typology of genocidal carcerality, but rather to demonstrate the multiplicity of spatial strategies at work within any genocidal context, with specific focus on Indian Residential Schools. In so doing, we critique attempts to reduce genocidal carcerality to a single spatial form, such as the camp. We illustrate our main points through a case study of the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba, Canada.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On remembrance and indigenous lasting: Joseph Gaudet, ‘I Remember You: Postironic Belief and Settler Colonialism in Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather’, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 28, 1, 2016, pp. 21-44

18May16

Access this article here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Dignity as site of resistance: Nadim N. Rouhana, ‘Homeland Nationalism and Guarding Dignity in a Settler Colonial Context: The Palestinian Citizens of Israel Reclaim Their Homeland’, Borderlands e-journal, 14, 1, 2015

18May16

Abstract: This paper seeks to examine the foundations of indignities inflicted upon a native population in a settler-colonial condition and to explore how they face these indignities, both in their popular rhetoric and political action. I look at how Palestinian citizens in Israel articulate their homeland nationalism in the face of a unique Zionist view
denying the Palestinians’ relationship to their homeland and claiming it exclusively for the Jewish people, who have come to identify themselves as the true natives. The indignities accompanying such claims are so profoundly and naturally entrenched in Israel’s settlercolonial structure that the state’s hegemonic political culture takes
their intense and repeated occurrence for granted.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On indigenous nationalism, indigenous nations, and their reconstitution: Simone Poliandri (ed.), Native American Nationalism and Nation Re-building, SUNY Press, 2016

18May16

Description: Presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the recent developments of Native American nationalism and nationhood in the United States and Canada.

Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, this book provides an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging discussion on Indigenous nationhood. The contributors argue for the centrality of nationhood and nation building in molding and, concurrently, blending the political, social, economic, and cultural strategies toward Native American self-definitions and self-determination. Included among the common themes is the significance of space—conceived both as traditional territory and colonial reservation—in the current construction of Native national identity. Whether related to historical memory and the narrativization of peoplehood, the temporality of indigenous claims to sovereignty, or the demarcation of successful financial assets as cultural and social emblems of indigenous space, territory constitutes an inalienable and necessary element connecting Native American peoplehood and nationhood. The creation and maintenance of Native American national identity have also overcome structural territorial impediments and may benefit from the inclusivity of citizenship rather than the exclusivity of ethnicity. In all cases, the political effectiveness of nationhood in promoting and sustaining sovereignty presupposes Native full participation in and control over economic development, the formation of historical narrative and memory, the definition of legality, and governance.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Assuaging settler anxieties: May Chew, ‘Mooring subjects of heritage: proprioceptive emplacement at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2016

18May16

Abstract: This article examines how visitors to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (HSIBJ) in Fort Macleod, Alberta, are physically and affectively situated within an immersive heritage landscape. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, HSIBJ is inextricably tied to regional Blackfoot and settler-colonial histories, as well as the tensions that emerge between the two. HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre is organised to plunge audiences inside the ‘live’ archaeological scene and an evocative heritage landscape. It does so through technologies, including motion-triggered projections, which locate and secure visitors within official national – and universal – heritage narratives. The central argument of this article is that HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre beckons subjects of heritage through proprioception, the awareness of the body’s position in and movement through space. Extending beyond the physiological sensation of one’s own body, proprioception also works alongside the two other substantiating buttresses of archaeology and heritage to provide a gravitational ground upon which the visitor is located and their subjectivity confirmed. Proprioceptive grounding emplaces a body within an expanded and ‘ancient’ narratology of nation, and in this way, also becomes the mechanism through which exogenous settlers assuage anxieties about their latecoming status.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On indigenous futures: Karyn Recollet, ‘Gesturing Indigenous Futurities Through the Remix’, Dance Research Journal, 48, 1, 2016, pp. 91-105

15May16

Excerpt: This article offers a spatial and gestural analysis of Vancouver-based multi-media art collective Skookum Sound System’s digital remixed video Ay I Oh Stomp (2012). Specifically, I will explore how this remixing intervenes in settler colonialism’s disappearances and erasures, to illustrate the ways the video (particularly its activations of dance, movement and gesture) mobilize ongoing Indigenous presencing into futurity. Inspired by Mar-abe (2015)’s writings on the “black imaginary,” I argue that Indigenous futurity decolonizes the Indigenous imaginary. Ay I Oh Stomp’s (2012) remixing creates a future imaginary attentive to the past as it critiques the present, and ventures forward into the beyond. I illustrate how the video, as it holds space within the collective imaginary, is a form of radical imagination tantamount to social change, expressing, as Mar-abe (2015) writes, the “unalienable right to be that radical, to create new worlds in the place of the ones that oppress us.” As I will describe within this article, the mechanisms through which we spatially and temporally gesture “otherwise,” that is—bodily embrace this map to tomorrow, comes out of a process of “jumping scale” (Harjo 2014). Gestures of futurity are choreographies of possibilities and hope—not residing so much in an unattainable dreamscape, but rather they are in constant figuration and reconfiguration all around us. I illuminate instances where futurity is activated or glyphed (Recollet 2014) through the decolonial gesturings³ of dancers and cultural producers’ visual/aural archiving. Indigenous motion, through glyphing, I suggest, produces maps to tomorrow as a result of mobilizing multiple geographical/territorial scales. By glyphing I am referring the ways that music, dances, and other forms of persistent Indigenous motion activate specific spatial/temporal cartographies in much the same way that pet-roglyphs activate Indigenous presence on land/ sky spaces. This work is rooted in the premise that we build a relationship with the land through activating it. What then, are the lexicons of land and territories, and how can we activate (re)mapping to explore the futuristic narrative of complex land histories?

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Appropriating the appropriation: Katy Young Evans, ‘The People’s Pageant: The Stage as Native Space in Anishinaabe Dramatic Interpretations of Hiawatha’, MELUS, 2016

15May16

Access the article here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

A special way of surveying: Marcus Gallo, ‘ Land Surveying in Early Pennsylvania Access this article + Tax (if applicable) A Case Study in a Global Context’, Journal of Early American History, 6, 1, 2016, pp. 9-39

15May16

Abstract: By the end of the seventeenth century, Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the importance of surveying to any system of land ownership. Most historians of colonial British have similarly taken colonial surveying practices as a given. This article complicates these assumptions through an examination of Pennsylvania in a wider context. In fact, land policy in colonial Anglo-America differed significantly from practices elsewhere in the early modern world. English colonizers embraced a model of settler colonialism that created a market for land, thus encouraging the proliferation of modern surveying practices.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute