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A settler colonial disaster, not a natural one: Hannah Holleman, ‘De-naturalizing ecological disaster: colonialism, racism and the global Dust Bowl of the 1930s’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016

03Aug16

Abstract: This paper reinterprets the Dust Bowl on the US Southern Plains as one dramatic regional manifestation of a global socio-ecological crisis generated by the realities of settler colonialism and imperialism. In so doing, it seeks to deepen historical-theoretical understandings of the racialized division of nature and humanity making possible the global problem of soil erosion by the 1930s and forming the heart of the ecological rift of capitalism. The framework developed here challenges prevalent conceptions of the Dust Bowl, in which colonial and racial-domination aspects of the crisis are invisible, and affirms the necessity of deeper conceptions of environmental (in)justice.


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Violence and settler colonialism: Jennifer Nez Denetdale, ‘”No Explanation, No Resolution, and No Answers”: Border Town Violence and Navajo Resistance to Settler Colonialism’, Wicazo Sa Review, 31, 1, 2016, pp. 111-131

03Aug16

Excerpt: Dakota Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s scholarship has been influential in shaping Indigenous studies for at least four decades. She has steadfastly criticized how scholarship in Native studies has been hijacked by American exceptionalism so that the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples and our present dilemmas continue to be erased, sanitized, and denied as the United States poses to the rest of the world as a multicultural nation that treats all of its citizens equally across race, class, and gender. Against scholarship that sustains such U.S. claims, Cook-Lynn insists that our responsibility as scholars is “to the tribal nations that have survived terrible wars, that have signed solemn treaties with our enemies, that possess vast resources, the rivers people live by, the lands where our relatives are buried. This legacy is our constituency.” As a Diné woman who struggles with academia precisely because of the kinds of challenges that Elizabeth Cook-Lynn speaks of, I take her writing to be inspiring first for my own efforts to sustain the criticism of American imperialism that is founded on the genocide and disappearance of Indigenous peoples and second as sources that can be built on to move the conversation in ways that are productive and regenerative.

Cook-Lynn’s insistence that Indigenous scholarship must be devoted to the support of tribal nations, sovereignty, and self-determination has been taken up in various ways and sometimes in ways that have limited our definitions of what sovereignty and self-determination mean. By limitations, I mean that Indigenous studies has been slow to take up the historical and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in what is marked as urban and non-reservation or non-tribal lands. Because of land dispossession, the processes of capitalism, and ethnic cleansing, Indigenous peoples’ defining experiences have included displacement, relocation, and migration into urban spaces. Yet discursive practices connected to federal Indian policies have cast Indigenous peoples who reside in urban spaces and off legally recognized Indian lands as somehow less “traditional” and as instead “modern” or “progressive.” Although Native people’s experiences in urban spaces and border towns have been studied, there remains much to understand about how land dispossession and U.S. policies of ethnic cleansing have shaped the contours of movement from U.S.-designated tribal lands to urban spaces and border towns and how Indigenous people are endlessly cast as the outsiders and aliens in formerly recognized Indigenous spaces.

This essay, then, presents Diné historical and lived experiences in towns that border the Navajo Nation, with a focus on Gallup and Farmington, New Mexico, but with the recognition that other towns like Winslow, Holbrook, Flagstaff, and Page, Arizona, also have histories of violence against Navajos that have everything to do with the United States as a settler nation whose thirst for Indigenous land and resources remains unabated. A history of Navajo and Native protest against the violence in border towns momentarily disrupts and unsettles, and concessions are made. Very few studies have been undertaken of border town violence, even though this violence is pervasive and a feature of Native life in these communities. Further, most of the understanding of border town violence pathologizes Navajos as both the victims and perpetrators from a health risk perspective. This violence against Navajos is evident across decades and usually is only remarked on when the violence appears extraordinary or spectacular. For the most part, settlers remain innocent in the narratives that are created about their relationships with Navajos in border towns.


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Claiming biblically: Judith H. Newman, ‘Tracing the Use of the Bible in Colonial Land Claims in North America’, in Frances Flannery, Rodney A. Werline (eds), The Bible in Political Debate What Does it Really Say? Bloomsbury, 2016

03Aug16

Access the book here.


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Tautology is comparative work: Timothy Seidel'”Occupied territory is occupied territory”: James Baldwin, Palestine and the possibilities of transnational solidarity’, Third World Quarterly, 37, 9, 2016, pp. 1644-1660

03Aug16

Abstract: In his 1966 essay ‘A Report from Occupied Territory’, James Baldwin wrote that ‘occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered’. Though written 50 years ago, Baldwin’s observations continue to resonate, indicating historical trends across geographical experiences affected by the legacy of colonialism. A growing theme in development and peace building studies relates to a kind of boundary crossing that sees academics and activists drawing linkages across spatial and temporal divides. The situation in Palestine–Israel has taken an increasingly central role in mobilising transnational solidarities that cross such boundaries. By examining James Baldwin’s analysis of Harlem’s ‘occupation’ – as well as drawing from a range of voices such as Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Toni Morrison and Laleh Khalili – this paper will explore the shared experiences of racism, colonialism, military occupation and dispossession that separate and divide, and the possibilities for transnational solidarities that defy those separations.


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The ‘myth of friendship’? Lucy Taylor, ‘Welsh–Indigenous Relationships in Nineteenth Century Patagonia: ‘Friendship’ and the Coloniality of Power’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 2016

03Aug16

Abstract: This article discusses the colonial encounter of the Welsh and Tehuelche/Mapuche in the Welsh colony (Y Wladfa Gymreig), founded 1865. The Welsh sought to create a Welsh-speaking utopia in the ‘empty’ lands of Patagonia, paradoxically using this colonisation as a way to resist disparagement of the Welsh language and culture by an English-dominated state. The article deploys a ‘coloniality of power’ perspective and explores archive materials that reveal how both the Welsh and the indigenous communities whose land they colonised were caught up in coloniality and expanding capitalist modernity. I conclude that exploring the ambiguous relationship which results from this encounter complicates and deepens our understanding of how the coloniality of power works. Particularly, I argue that stripping away the ‘myth of friendship’ between the Welsh and indigenous is vital, not to diminish moments of genuine mutual affinity but rather to show how these are caught up in processes of colonialisation.


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The age of apology reaches Taiwan: ‘Taiwan president apologizes to aboriginals for suffering’, AP News, 01/08/16

02Aug16

Excerpt: Taiwan’s president on Monday apologized on behalf of the government to the island’s aboriginal peoples for 400 years of conquest and colonization, saying the facing of difficult historical facts was necessary for society to move forward.

Tsai Ing-wen said her government wished to “take a further step” and offer its “fullest apology.”

“If we wish to declare ourselves as a country of one people, we need to face these historical facts. We have to face the truth. Most importantly, the government must truly reflect on itself and that is why I’m standing here today,” Tsai said at a ceremony at the presidential office building in the capital, Taipei.

A “justice and historical justice commission” would be established to deal with the problems of the past, Tsai said. She was speaking on Taiwan’s official aboriginal people’s day before representatives of the island’s 16 officially recognized native tribes.

Taiwan was inhabited by a variety of tribes for thousands of years before Dutch colonizers began importing Chinese laborers in large numbers during the mid-17th century.

The Dutch were expelled from the island by Chinese privateer Koxinga, whose successors were then defeated by the Manchu Qing dynasty as part of their conquest of most of China. It was loosely administered from the mainland until becoming a province in 1885 under foreign pressure and was made a colony by Japan in 1895.

At the end of World War II, Taiwan was handed to Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China, whose government relocated to the island in 1949 after being driven from China by Mao Zedong’s communist forces.

Tsai was elected by a landslide in January elections that have thrown a shadow over the island’s relations with China, which claims Taiwan as a part of its territory from ancient times. Her view of Taiwan as a colonial society clashes with Beijing’s claim that the island has always been an inherent part of China, which must eventually be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.


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Indigenous sovereignty as a manageable risk: Anna Stanley, ‘Resilient Settler Colonialism: “Responsible Resource Development”, “Flow-Through” Financing, and the Risk Management of Indigenous Sovereignty in Canada’, Environment and Planning A, 2016

31Jul16

Abstract: This essay interrogates aspects of the recent reconfiguration of Canadian environmental resource governance in relation to Indigenous sovereignty, rights, and struggles for self-determination in the context of mining and mineral exploration. I am especially interested in the targeting of expressions of Indigenous sovereignty as threats to the “resilience” of the national economy and attempts to “manage” Indigenous sovereignty and rights through mechanisms of resource governance. I focus primarily on a set of changes made to “flow-through share” financing arrangements that allow mining firms to raise capital on the basis of tax credits for expenditures incurred in relation to engaging Indigenous rights in the mineral exploration process. I suggest that flow-through financing is a method for “risk managing” exposure to the threat of Indigenous sovereignty in the interests of mining capital and the state that produces effects of crown sovereignty. In closing, the essay considers relationships between the neoliberalization of Canadian environmental governance and settler colonialism.


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Genocide? Russell Thornton, ‘On Demography and Genocide’, Reviews in American History, 44, 2, 2016, pp. 210-216

31Jul16

Excerpt: It is only relatively recently that “genocide” has been used to describe what happened to Native Americans, and determined efforts to end the term’s usage in this regard are a testament to the power of the term. The three volumes considered here address whether the history of American Indians north of Mexico may be called genocide. They do so in different ways and come to various conclusions.


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On the settler ‘heritage’: Deborah Gewertz, Frederick Errington, ‘From intensive agriculture to prairie heritage: a paradox of land repurposing in Eastern South Dakota, USA’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016

31Jul16

Abstract: In this paper we take up Tania Li’s question ‘what is land’. While her interest is in how land becomes inscribed so as to make it investable, ours is in reversing the sequence so as to make long-inscribed land de-investable. We focus on a family farm in Eastern South Dakota which was bequeathed to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in order that its tilled fields of industrially produced corn and soybeans be replaced with native, tallgrass prairie. The process – one of de-inscription – involved evocations of settler heritage which, ironically, provided a prairie-friendly justification for massive prairie destruction.


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On the political traditions of settler colonialism (Australia, for example): Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream and Australia’s “settler transition”’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2016

27Jul16

Abstract: Focusing on radical labour historian Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream (1968), this article reflects on the evolution of Australia’s settler colonial imagination. During a few crucial decades in the nineteenth century, colonial traditions were overcome by settler colonial ones. The former espoused a system where British rulers would paternally manage a colonial environment and all its populations (pastoralists, free settlers, convicts, emancipated convicts, and Indigenous peoples); the latter advocated the establishment of self-reliant agricultural communities of free settlers. In Replenishing the Earth (2009), James Belich distinguished between settler “transition” and settler “revolution”, and emphasised the imaginative elements that underpin and precede the shift to settler self-government. As the global settler transition took hold, locales usually associated with the perception and expectation of degenerative processes were reconfigured as propitious sites for experimenting in sociopolitical regeneration. Following and expanding on Belich’s framework, this article links Australia’s settler transition with its historiography.


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