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On the settler colonial present (white supremacists on ‘public land’): Carolyn Gallaher, ‘Placing the Militia Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 15, 2, 2016, pp. 293-308

14Jul16

Abstract: This intervention examines the recent militia occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. There is no consensus on how to place the group. Some commentators suggest the group was white supremacist. Others argue that it was animated by religious fanaticism. Still others emphasize the group’s grievances with the Bureau of Land Management. I argue here that the Malheur occupiers’ politics cannot be understood with reference to a single identity position. Rather, we need to focus on the group’s anti-government rhetoric because it funnels and shapes multiple interests at once. Here I examine how the group’s anti-government rhetoric frames race and class interests. In terms of race, I argue that anti-government rhetoric obscures the white interests behind the occupation. This concealment is based on a selective reading of history that emphasizes the end of settlement, when the government took ownership of land not claimed during the settlement period, instead of the stage leading up to it, when the government seized Indigenous land for white settlement. So construed, the occupiers could claim they were taking the ‘people’s’ land back from the government rather than engaging in a second round of white theft of Indigenous land. In terms of class, I argue that because the occupiers framed their fight as against government tyranny instead of as for privatization, the occupiers did not have to confront the inequities that come with privatization.


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Development, equality and settler colonialism: Hanae Tsukada, ‘Developer’s Story 3: Don’t Aboriginal peoples want equality? What is it that they want then?’ Time and Place at UBC: Our Histories and Relations, 2016

10Jul16

Abstract: This story illustrates a “light bulb moment” that I had as I tackled with the question of why Aboriginal communities rejected the 1969 white paper. As part of unpacking debates on the white paper, I explored the myth of multiculturalism located within settler colonialism.


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Settler colonialism as misopedy: Toby Rollo, ‘Feral children: settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

08Jul16

Abstract: Settler colonialism is structured in part according to the principle of civilizational progress yet the roots of this doctrine are not well understood. Disparate ideas of progress and practices related to colonial dispossession and domination can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and as far back as ancient Greece, but there remain unexplored logics and continuities. I argue that civilizational progress and settler colonialism are structured according to the opposition between politics governed by reason or faith and the figure of the child as sinful or bestial. Thus, it is not contingent, but rather necessary that justificatory frameworks of European empire and colonialism depict Indigenous peoples as children. To illustrate how the theoretical link between Indigenous peoples and children emerges not as a simple analogy, but rather, as the source of the premodern/modern and savage/civilized binaries, I trace the various historical iterations of the political/childhood opposition through the classical, medieval, enlightenment, and modern eras. I show how the model of civilizational progress from a premodern and savage state of childhood continues to serve as the model for settler colonial exclusion and domination of Indigenous peoples.


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Settlers managed their currencies: Wadan Narsey, ‘Currency and Monetary Policies in White Settler Colonies and Dominions: Superior Alternatives to Colonies’, in Wadan Narsey, British Imperialism and the Making of Colonial Currency Systems, Palgrave, 2016, pp. 229-251

07Jul16

Abstract: Discussions of colonial currency policies seldom include the experiences of much earlier white settler colonies in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa1, even though they had quite similar currency problems invariably generating similar conflicts with the imperial decision-makers. Indeed, discussions of colonialism rarely look at England’s early colonization of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, with the rare exception of Philippa Levine (2007). Yet the contrasting imperial reactions to the currency policies in these white settler colonies, later to be granted self-government status and eventually called ‘Dominions’ 2 which became ‘developed’ economies, highlights the negative consequences of imperial policies in colonies proper, which were adamantly refused self-government and treated quite differently in currency and monetary matters, as well as broader economic policies. 3 The central issue is why the white settler colonies were given the leeway that the colonies proper were not. The differential treatment of white settlers in ‘mixed’ white settler colonies, such as South Africa and Rhodesia, where non-whites were in the majority and given inferior treatment by the state, illustrates also the factor of racism underlying monetary imperialism, a factor considered important also by Accominotti et al (2005) below.


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Settler colonialism is a ‘reverse captivity narrative’: Laura L. Mielke, ‘Transforming Captivity Narratives in Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009)’, American Studies, 55, 1, 2016, pp. 5-30

07Jul16

Excerpt: The Indian captivity narrative genre, or “accounts of non-Indians held by Indians,” has long been described as establishing both a triumphalist narrative of national progress and a template for American identity, in contrast with American Indian identity. As often noted, the Indian captivity narrative is marked by its perpetual metamorphosis, as well as its status “as the archetype of American culture, or its foundation text.” Richard Slotkin, in his trilogy on the myth of the American frontier, traces the critical function of the captivity narrative, alongside the story of the Indian fighter, in the development of the colonial project and then national ideology beginning in the seventeenth century. The two figures of the frontier myth that Slotkin identifies—the captive and the Indian fighter—were “codified and systematized” in James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century frontier romances and have persisted in various permutations through popular literature, theater, art, and film to the present day. While political exigencies informed those permutations, so did cultural confrontation. Focusing in particular on the key roles of gender and familial relations in the genre, June Namias concludes, “The popularity of the captive story came from a fascination with both the other and the self. One’s own culture, one’s own family, one’s own gender, that whole complex of Anglo-American culture one inherited by being raised on the American continent, was brought into relief.” The captivity narrative prompted such reflection, argues Joshua David Bellin, and exhibited in a multiplicity of ways the intercultural exchanges that produced the narrative in the first place. Its descendants in literature and in film, for all of their revisions to the historical antecedents, nonetheless carry forward the record of exchange between American Indians and white captives and combatants.

Running parallel yet counter to the Indian captivity narrative tradition are accounts of American Indians held captive, or what have been termed “reverse captivity narratives.” In the context of colonial negotiations, warfare, Christian evangelism, and educational institutions, American Indians were repeatedly interned by Euro-Americans determined to exert political–geographical control and to expunge Native culture, particularly through forced English literacy. The resulting as-told-to and autobiographical narratives in English stand as echoes, revisions, and even inversions of the Indian captivity narrative. Alumni of the federal boarding school system, such as Francis La Fleshe (Omaha), Zitkala-Ša (Dakota), Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), and Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), recount with deep emotion and sharp irony the physical and psychological pain they suffered in the process of acculturation. They also celebrate Native students’ “strategies to assert independence, express individuality, develop leadership, use Native languages, and undermine federal goals of homogenization and assimilation.” Thus, the reverse captivity narrative, like its foil, takes up questions of individual survival, cultural identity, and national membership.

What happens when the reverse captivity narrative, like the Indian captivity narrative before it, makes its way into other genres, especially film? Does the filmic adaptation of the boarding school narrative echo or depart from the adaptation of the captivity narrative? More specifically, how does the reverse captivity narrative brought to film animate the genre’s central concern with linguistic colonialism? And how does the Western—a genre grounded in archetypal struggle between savagery and civilization but perpetually revised since the mid-twentieth century to reflect the violence of US settler colonialism and imperialism—continue to evolve in the context of American Indians’ experience in captivity? In this essay, I begin to answer these questions by focusing on a recent independent film that productively, provocatively embraces the intertextuality of both the Indian captivity and the reverse captivity narratives and their role in the construction—and deconstruction—of a mythic West.


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Common ‘Wikialities’ are part of the settler colonial present: Magnus Pharao Hansen, ‘Writing Irataba: On Representing Native Americans on Wikipedia’, American Anthropologist, 2016

06Jul16

Abstract: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is simultaneously an experiment in anarchic knowledge production and a realization of the long dream of modernity: storing all human knowledge. It is also a battleground for the politics of representation and for creating and circulating realities and “Wikialities.” I ethnographically describe how Wikipedians, most of whom are white Anglo-Americans, negotiate the representation of Native Americans as objects of encyclopedic knowledge and how the sins of our anthropological forebears come back to haunt us in this process. In 2015, I participated in the collaborative writing of the article on Irataba or Yara tav, who was an important leader of the Mohave people of California and Arizona in the late 19th century. This process brought representational dilemmas to the fore in the negotiation between the inadequacies of historical and anthropological knowledge and Wikipedia’s policies establishing how to authorize and re-represent narratives. These dilemmas point out to us, as 21st-century anthropologists, that we have a responsibility for being the stewards of the knowledge created by anthropologists past as well as for correcting their mistakes and guiding the global public of readers and writers when they make forays into our traditional territories.


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On indigenous-black solidarity under settler colonialism: Glen Coulthard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, ‘Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity’, American Quarterly, 68, 2, 2016, pp. 249-255

06Jul16

Excerpt: We would like to begin our response to David Roediger’s provocative meditation on the historical and contemporary antinomies of solidarity (in both theory and practice) with a statement of gratitude to and political acknowledgment of the hosts of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA) held in Toronto last year: the nation of the Mississauga Nishnaabeg.

Toronto is an area rich in the theory and practice of Indigenous political alliance, holding the histories and presence of not only the Mississauga Nishnaabeg but also the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. These nations negotiated and continue to practice diplomatic relationships with each other to share land while respecting each other’s governance, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. Each nation also exists in deep reciprocal relationships with the Great Lakes, in particular Lake Ontario, and the waterways that flow into it. These nations foster deep relations to St. Lawrence River leading to the Atlantic Ocean, the diverse plant and animal nations within their territories, the thunderers and rains, and all the physical and spiritual forces that connect them to this place, their place of creation, in an intimate and meaningful way.

To many of the Indigenous academics in attendance at the ASA, ourselves included, it probably came as little surprise to learn that the Mississauga Nishnaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee were not the hosts noted in the event’s call for papers and proposals, on the conference website, or in much of the ASA’s promotional materials; nor were the bulk of us likely surprised that neither their lands nor sovereignties figured much in the conference proceedings beyond symbolic opening gestures. This form of erasure—that is, the erasure of Indigenous land and jurisdiction—is one of the “miseries” that constitute Indigenous peoples’ experience of our settler colonial present, both inside and outside the academy. The erasure of Mississauga Nishnaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee sovereignty from the ASA conference is not only a reinforcement of our settler-colonial present; it is a negation of the contributions of their presence in this place, a presence that has been violently [End Page 249] attacked in the name of dispossession for four centuries. It is a negation of their intellectual and political practices of governance-in-solidarity that we ignore at our peril. This acknowledgment then, necessitates a different beginning, one in which we actively take on the contestation of settler colonization in all its violent dimensions as a point of departure, so that when we present our work on solidarity against the “misery of …,” we are not standing on the backs of Indigenous peoples but instead engaged as related comrades joined in critical co-resistance against the convergence of forces that divide and conquer us and the Earth on which we depend. It seems appropriate, then, to (re)center these issues—Indigenous land and jurisdiction—in our response to Roediger’s keynote address, and in doing so share some of our reflections on why these issues occupy such an ambivalent if not contentious place in the politics of solidarity in settler colonial contexts.

Being the masterful historian that he is, Roediger’s keynote (as well as its written incarnation published here) presents his audience with an “uneasy” (and uneven) history of subaltern solidarity across multiple axes of power and community. In doing so he not only discloses a rich history of enacting transformative alliances within and across nation, race, and class (from Ferguson to Palestine) but also uses this history to stress the importance of us confronting the difficulties and tensions that marked these past struggles in order to illuminate the ways in which they continue to shape our present.

 

Coulthard and Simpson are responding to this intervention by Roediger.


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On indigenous-black solidarity under settler colonialism: Allison M. Guess, Mistinguette Smith, Eve Tuck, ‘Reaching to Offer, Reaching to Accept: Collaboration and Cotheorizing’, American Quarterly, 68, 2, 2016 pp. 409-412

06Jul16

Excerpt: From our vantage points, land is a Black coconspiring eternal ancestor, supporting life and freedom. At the same time, in the Black or African Diaspora, Indigenous people make ancestral, sovereign relationships to that selfsame land. This complexity is at the heart of the collaboration funded by an ASA Community Partnership Grant described here. Land as a Black coconspiring eternal ancestor is evident in the struggles of historical Black women geographers such as Harriet Tubman, Queen Nanny, and Mamá Tingó and their respective abolition and maroon geographies.

Formed in 2011, the Black/Land Project (BLP) follows the examples of Black women geographers by attending to matters of Black life, histories, and futurities in particular places. As a researcher working decidedly outside the academy, BLP founder Mistinguette Smith was wary of academic researchers in BLP’s existing work in Black communities about relationships to land and place. BLP has caringly conducted more than thirty interviews, followed by workshops called “Black/Land conversations,” with Black residents of several communities across the United States. Smith’s sense was that many academic–community partnerships are interested in community-based research, but their goals and measures of success remain firmly embedded in the academy. Community-based researchers are expected to translate their work to accommodate academic audiences and to take on their preoccupations. As BLP grew and gained public recognition, academics who approached BLP with proposals of collaboration rarely understood the impact of dedicating energies to produce the emotional and intellectual labor of this translation, especially related to accommodating the gap between lived experience and the formal study of that experience. [End Page 409]

Smith met the Unangax scholar Eve Tuck in 2011 moments before Tuck and Monique Guishard cofacilitated a workshop on participatory action research ethics in New York City. Smith and Tuck discussed settler colonialism and the persistence of meaningful relationships to land among Indigenous peoples and Black peoples. In 2012–13 we received funding from the ASA’s Community Partnership Grant for Tuck to provide strategic support to BLP in analyzing the Black/Land conversations and interviews. For Smith, working with Tuck fulfilled several interconnected desires: to engage overlapping analyses of traditional knowledge, nonacademic ways of knowing, meanings of knowledge, and relationships to land, specifically connecting Black relationships to Indigenous relationships to land; to work with individuals who were not trying to help (themselves) to Black/Land’s work in an appropriative way; to increase skills in positioning Black/Land’s research as meaningful but also beyond academic research; to produce materially useful tools for community organizing. Our collaboration grew exponentially as we were joined by other cotheorists and co-researchers, including Allison Guess, Tavia Benjamin, Brian K. Jones, and Kondwani Jackson. Our collaboration was contingent—it did not ask for anything more than it could give. It was tentative, vulnerable, willing, yet with closed boundaries in many significant areas.

Though our funding from the Community Partnership Grant has concluded, our collaboration is ongoing and takes new shapes. There has been so much reaching across to each other so far, reaching across assumptions and contesting Black life as nowhere;1 reaching to offer, reaching to accept; reaching across moments of misunderstanding by building interpersonal relationships, incremental personal disclosures, which allowed us to continue to work together. The contingent qualities of our collaboration make room for BLP to not work in a dressed-up language that would put the project out of conversation with Black knowledge holders who participated in their interviews.


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Decolonisng services: Jonathan Fay, ‘Decolonising mental health services one prejudice at a time: psychological, sociological, ecological, and cultural considerations’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

02Jul16

Abstract: This paper describes a minority and marginalised psychiatric patient named ‘Lucy’ and offers an analysis of the multiple ‘colonising’ or ‘power-over’ relations that dominate her life. Lucy’s colonisation and consequent struggle can be understood on multiple levels: psychologically, in the struggle between the discordant parts of her personal self; sociologically, in the struggle between a mainstream culture that dominates and rejects her and her almost equally insecure place in her own indigenous minority culture; and ecologically, in the planet-wide collision between the secular materialism that drives globalism and globalisation, and an indigenous holistic and psycho-spiritual orientation to nature and the cosmos. Mental health professionals can help our patients recognise and reclaim forms of wisdom and value that survive and flourish on the margins of the mainstream. Decolonisation strategies based on this understanding suggest a variety of practical ways in which Lucy and other marginalised persons might be empowered and assisted to return to health.


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Settler colonialism as white patriarchy: Hemopereki Hoani Simon, ‘Te Arewhana Kei Roto i Te Rūma: An Indigenous Neo-Disputatio on Settler Society, Nullifying Te Tiriti, “Natural Resources” and Our Collective Future in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Te Kaharoa, 9, 2016

02Jul16

Abstract: This practice-research based article explores the relationship between mana motuhake and white patriarchal sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on Ngāti Tūwharetoa as a case study. It seeks to find the relevance of Aboriginal academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s white possessive doctrine to the Aotearoa New Zealand context. In particular, it highlights the racist nature of the law and planning systems and their inadequacies to provide for hapū and iwi. It provides a key theoretical analysis regarding the nature of white patriarchal sovereignty in Aotearoa and the need of the state to appear virtuous, to continue the legacy that started with the Treaty of Waitangi to maintain this whenua as a white possessive. Lastly, the piece questions the position of Britishness within Aotearoa New Zealand and asks key philosophical questions for all about the need to find common understandings or māramatanga about our collective future as a society.


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