Abstract: Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks makes two decisive interventions. First, it shifts our lens from the capital relation to the colonial relation, disarticulating the process of primitive accumulation to emphasise its component parts: dispossession and proletarianisation. To do so is to both liberate the concept from its European origins by centring those contexts in which dispossession is not followed by proletarianisation, and to pose the political unity of different forms of dispossession: of land (as in settler-colonialism) as well as labour (as in chattel slavery). Second, Coulthard draws convincingly upon Frantz Fanon, whose work is essential for grasping both colonialism and white supremacy, but crucially their complex interrelation.

Abstract: Although neither sovereignty nor possession are explicit themes of Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, both concepts are essential to his critique of ‘recognition’ and the ongoing dynamics of Canadian colonialism. In this response, I offer a critical examination of the status of these liberal concepts in Coulthard’s work, and suggest that he has in fact given us a powerful theory of ‘countersovereignty’. Countersovereignty forces us to consider the meanings of possession and dispossession that animate the book, which in turn allow us to grasp the radical significance of Coulthard’s emphasis on the reciprocity at the heart of Indigenous relations with the land.

Abstract: The Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) is an influential sport/interest group that has a long history of advocacy and involvement with policies and management related to the conservation of wildlife and outdoor recreation. Since the 1990’s, the OFAH have been outspoken with their criticisms towards particular Indigenous treaty hunting and fishing rights, co-management agreements, and land claims which are perceived to threaten conservation, future recreational opportunities, and the outdoor economy. Using semi-structured interviews with 20 Indigenous and non-Indigenous respondents and a content analysis of the OFAH’s official documents, this thesis analyzes and compares the views surrounding treaty rights between the OFAH leadership and ordinary hunters and fishers inside and outside the organization. Discourse Analysis, Group Position Theory, and Colour Blind Racism theory were used to flesh out how the meanings and perceived legitimacy of treaty rights are constructed and negotiated, and whether opposition to Indigenous harvesting rights reflects a reactionary response to defend settler-Canadians’ sense of superiority, privileges, and access to resources. The results showed that the OFAH and 55% of the respondents expressed feelings of concern, resentment, and in some cases opposition, revealing an established sense of group position. Although the OFAH leaders and 45% of the respondents displayed varying and limited degrees of support for treaty rights, the general pattern showed how OFAH leaders and respondents drew on similar repertoires with arguments and justifications based on equality, fairness, and a concern for wildlife conservation in order to criticize and/or oppose treaty rights. Consequently, these criticisms directly and indirectly work to define and redefine treaty rights and Indigenous treaty hunters and fishers in a negative manner. This case shows how resentment of and opposition to treaty rights within a settler colonial context embodies a perceived threat to settlers’ sense of group position and the status quo.

Access the article here.

Abstract: This dissertation offers an investigation of the role of visual strategies, art, and representation in reconciling Indian Residential School history in Canada. This research builds upon theories of biopolitics, settler colonialism, and race to examine the project of redress and reconciliation as nation and identity building strategies engaged in the ongoing structural invasion of settler colonialism. It considers the key policy moments and expressions of the federal government—from RCAP to the IRSSA and subsequent apology—as well as the visual discourse of reconciliation as it works through archival photography, institutional branding, and commissioned works. These articulations are read alongside the creative and critical work of Indigenous artists and knowledge producers working within and outside of hegemonic structures on the topics of Indian Residential School history and redress. In particular the works of Jeff Thomas, Adrian Stimson, Krista Belle Stewart, Christi Belcourt, Luke Marston, Peter Morin, and Carey Newman are discussed in this dissertation. These works must be understood in relationship to the normative discourse of reconciliation as a legitimizing mechanism of settler colonial hegemony. Beyond the binary of cooptation and autonomous resistance, these works demonstrate the complexity of representing Indigeneity: as an ongoing site of settler colonial encounter and simultaneously the forum for the willful refusal of contingency or containment.

Abstract: The disciplines of political philosophy and environmental ethics are both concerned with the articulation and analysis of harms as well as the creation of normative and sustainable remedies. However, these disciplines rarely overlap in either the scope of their analysis of harm or their remedies. For they largely articulate harm as either “political” or “environmental,” and not importantly, both. “Ecological Reconciliation: Bridging Humanity and Nature for Justice” explores this separation between political philosophy and environmental ethics as exemplified in the separation of the literatures of political reconciliation and ecological restoration. This dissertation argues that both political reconciliation and ecological restoration attempt to articulate processes of reconciliation as remedies to harms—where reconciliation is defined as the instantiation of right relations out of harmful ones. However, both the analysis of political and environmental harm and the proposed processes of reconciliation regarding these harms can be improved through the incorporation of more inclusive ecological relations within political reconciliation and through the incorporation of more inclusive political relations within ecological restoration. Ecological relations, roughly, track the physical processes and functionalities of ecosystems, while political relations track the human perspectives, lived experiences, and values that construct human relationships to power. Political reconciliation can come closer to its aspirations toward social justice from understandings of how environmental injustices both aggravate and contribute to social and political marginality; ecological restoration can come closer to its aspirations to create greater environmental responsibility from analysis of how social and political injustices infuse and color restoration plans and projects.

This dissertation argues that the integration of ecological relations and political relations is key to better analyzing harm, as well as to the construction of sustainable, practical remedies. For example, the disproportionate siting of commercial toxic waste facilities in poor, communities of color in the United States is an instance of both social/political injustice and environmental injustice. Both levels of harms must be analyzed and addressed through reconciliatory frameworks that are expanded to account for them both. As solutions, this dissertation explores the literatures of environmental justice and Indigenous environmental ethics as areas of inquiry that center the relatedness of political and environmental harms/remedies. Both environmental justice and Indigenous environmental ethics prioritize the wedding of inclusive ecological relations and political relations to the instantiation of right relations and, thus, produce integrated, better models of reconciliation, which overcome limitations of both political reconciliation and ecological restoration models explored in the first part of the dissertation. Environmental justice tracks the ways in which environmental, social, and political ills disproportionately affect already vulnerable and marginalized communities, which illustrates the inextricable links between political and environmental injustice. Similarly, Indigenous environmental ethics examines how the rampant injustices (especially to the environment and ecosystems) of settler colonialism engender networks of harm that are deeply political and ecological, which call for reconciliatory processes that result in the ability of Indigenous communities to live in and experience the world in just, authentic, and culturally appropriate ways.

Abstract: Indigenous peoples of Canada face an elevated risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) compared to non-Indigenous Canadians. Few empirical studies have been conducted to understand this elevated risk, and none have examined child maltreatment (CM) as a predictor. This study used data on a nationally representative sample of 20,446 Canadians to examine CM and proximal risk factors for IPV against Indigenous and non-Indigenous respondents. Results showed that Indigenous respondents had greater risk of experiencing both CM and IPV. All three forms of CM (exposure to violence, direct physical and/or sexual abuse victimization, as well as both exposure and direct victimization) were associated with increased odds of IPV in adulthood. CM along with proximal risk factors accounted for Indigenous peoples’ elevated odds of IPV (AOR = 1.62; NS). These results were consistent with the theory that Indigenous peoples’ elevated risk of IPV is largely due to effects of historical trauma from past and continuing colonization. Reducing Indigenous peoples’ disproportionate risk of IPV requires efforts to reduce CM and its negative developmental effects among Indigenous peoples as well as resolving the manifestations of historical and contemporary trauma within Indigenous society.

Description: London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city’s past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.

Call for Papers for the 7th Nordic Geographers Meeting, Stockholm June 18-21, 2017 

The socio-materialities of settler colonial economies 

Conveners: Rhys Machold (Danish Institute for International Studies) and Sigrid Vertommen (Ghent University)

Scholars have proposed a systematic connection between historical and ongoing forms of settler colonial violence and the growth and entrenchment of the current neoliberal modes of accumulation (Lloyd and Wolfe 2015). Yet, despite the growing recognition about the central role of settler colonial violence in the rise and entrenchment of global (neoliberal) capitalism, literature on settler colonialism still “leans towards the discursive aspects and imaginative geographies of settler colonialism” (Jabary Salamanca 2014:22), negating its material and infrastructural underpinnings. This session attempts to bridge the gap between studies of settler colonial formations and the political economy of capitalism by taking seriously the claim that economies are actively made through material practices and interventions related to access to land and natural resources, labour and property rights (Mitchell 2002: 82). While leading theorists of both settler colonialism and capitalism often tend to focus on the logics and structures behind these socio-historical formations, little consideration has been devoted to the practical failures, disruptions, frictions involved in practices of accumulation through violence and dispossession. This tendency has produced an unhindered picture of settler colonial economies and their resonance with neoliberal capitalism as natural and seamless. We hope to open up discussions about how settler colonial economies operate as globalizing capitalist projects through attention to the messiness of their actual constitution.

We welcome papers that empirically and conceptually address the socio-material constitution of settler economies, both within particular localities and/or across transnational space. Possible topics might include: resource extraction and pipelines, circuits of trade and logistics, development and agricultural production, bio-medical technologies, and the political economies of policing, security and the global weapons trade.

The session seeks to engage with some of the following questions:

• To what extent is contemporary global capitalism itself informed by specifically settler colonial logics (and vice versa)?
• How do practices, technologies and strategies of settler colonial control mutate and adapt as they travel geographically and manifest within particular localities?
• What modes of primitive accumulation and regimes of labour are undergirding settler colonial economies?
• How might we go about researching the connections and disjunctures between disparate settler colonial projects and to what ends?
• What can these continuities and discontinuities teach us in the context of political struggles of resistance?
• What is the relationship between material and the discursive in relation to settler colonial economies, both historical and contemporary?

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Rhys Machold (rhysmachold@gmail.com) and Sigrid Vertommen (sigrid.vertommen@ugent.be) by December 15, 2016

Abstract: Whether too much or the wrong kind, constraining Indigenous mobility is a preoccupation of the province of British Columbia. The province remains focussed on controlling Indigenous mobility and constructing forms of contentious mobility, such as hitchhiking, as bad or risky. In Northwestern British Columbia hitchhiking is particularly common among Indigenous women. Hitchhiking as a mode of contentious mobility is categorically named as “bad mobility” and is frequently explained away as risky behaviour. Mobility of Indigenous women, including hitchhiking is deeply gendered and racialized. The frequent description of missing and murdered Indigenous women as hitchhikers or drifters fosters a sense that “choosing” a bad mode of mobility alone is the reason that these women disappear. This paper will identify how hitchhiking, framed as contentious mobility, supports the construction of missing and murdered Indigenous women as willing, available and blame-worthy victims. Morality is tangled up with mobility in the province’s responses to Indigenous women who hitchhike. This paper engages in a critical discourse analysis of billboards posted by the province of British Columbia along the Highway of Tears that attempt to prevent women from hitchhiking. This paper will identify the point of convergence between contentious mobility, violence against Indigenous women and larger questions of colonialism and the negotiation of racialized and gendered power imbalances through the province’s constraining of Indigenous mobility.