settler colonial studies blog

Teaching about settler colonialism: Tricya Bazinet, White Settler-Colonialism, International Development Education, and the Question of Futurity: A Content Analysis of the University of Ottawa Master’s Program Mandatory Syllabi in Globalization and International Development, MA Dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2016

17Sep16

Abstract: In this thesis I explore the relationships between post-secondary education in the field of international development, and the maintenance and practices of white settler-colonialism at home and abroad. My method is to search for recurring present and absent themes found in French and English course syllabi of the Canadian Master’s Program in Globalization and International Development of the University of Ottawa. Through search strings in 81 syllabi of four mandatory courses taught over an 8-year period, 2007-2015, I find that colonialism is little mentioned, and when it is, it is usually either as something of the past or something geographically distant. I conclude that, for students, academics and others to address settler-colonialism as an obstacle to decolonization, requires (1) acknowledging their current role in naturalizing settler-colonialism, (2) denaturalizing the logics of settler-colonialism, and (3) working to deliberately give up on white settler futures, while other futures (Indigenous futures) are flourishing through the process of decolonization. While this content analysis is only a small and possibly ungeneralizable example of higher education and its simultaneous potential for colonization and decolonization, it nevertheless represents an addition to the few applications of the theoretical field of settler-colonial studies and of its material implications.

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Indigeneity as transgression: Caitlin Elliott, You Will Be Punished: Media Depictions of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, MA Disserttion, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2016

17Sep16

Abstract: The following thesis focuses on media depictions of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women, a list that carries upwards of 1,200 names. The news coverage of these stories is reminiscent of television crime dramas in their depictions of
minority victims of crime, specifically in regard to victim blaming. In order to examine
this relationship, the present study compares coverage of missing and murdered
Indigenous women in Canadian news articles to depictions of victims, particularly
minority female victims, within crime procedural television shows. An ethnographic
content analysis (ECA) was conducted in order to parse out common themes between
news articles featuring missing and murdered Indigenous women (N = 50) and television
crime drama episodes (N = 65) from Law & Order: SVU (N = 37), CSI: Crime Scene
Investigation (N = 17), and Criminal Minds (N = 13). The overarching message portrayed
within these forms of media is the importance of conforming to social mores. Both forms
of media act as morality plays depicting the harm that will come to women if they
transgress society’s definition of ‘appropriate’ behaviour. These morality plays are aimed
at white women in order to protect their virtue and stifle female sexual agency. These
morality plays act as a way to enforce and engrain hegemony within society.

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The ‘mission complex’ and settler expansion: Lori J. Daggar, ‘The Mission Complex: Economic Development, “Civilization”, and Empire in the Early Republic’, Journal of the Early Republic, 36, 3, 2016, pp. 467-491

15Sep16

Abstract: The “mission complex” expanded the influence and power of the United States in the Ohio Country and beyond. It linked missionaries, humanitarians, manufacturers, federal employees, and indigenous peoples through networks of markets and capital: the material goods used in the agricultural missions offered a means both to stimulate business for eastern (and developing western) manufacturers and to develop a new consumer base in the Ohio Country. Attention to the functioning of this system, based upon free yet hierarchical relations of power, reveals how the early U.S. empire thrived off of economic growth. Paying attention to indigenous peoples’ appropriation and manipulation of the complex, moreover, reveals that some Native communities and individuals endeavored to take advantage of missionary labor, while others endeavored to facilitate their engagement with the U.S. economy by reinforcing ties with both the federal government and Euroamericans. Ultimately, analysis of the mission complex reveals that imperial state policy, as well as a myriad of Native and non-Native actors, facilitated the development and expansion of capitalist markets and forms of labor in the early republic.

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Who is indigenous? James J. A. Blair, Extracting Indigeneity: Oil, Environment and Self-Determination in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas), PhD Dissertation, CUNY, 2016

15Sep16

Abstract: This ethnographic and historical project examines how the settlers of the Falkland Islands (In Spanish, Malvinas) are constructing themselves as “natives” through new forms of governance over energy resources. Three decades after a violent war that cemented the archipelago’s British status, offshore oil discoveries led Argentina to renew its sovereignty claim. In response, the Falkland Islanders held a 2013 referendum on self-determination, in which 99.8% voted to remain British, with just three dissenters out of 1,517 valid votes. Most of the Islanders are white settlers, making their invocation of self-determination different from that of former colonial subjects with aboriginal rights. Unlike comparable settler colonies predicated on the elimination of the native, there is no historical trace of a pre-colonial indigenous population on the islands. To understand how the settlers are securing rights to territory and resources, this project examines debates around political, economic and ecological stability. The research incorporates participant observation, analysis of colonial letters and reports, and interviews collected during 20 months of fieldwork in the Falklands/Malvinas, Argentina and the United Kingdom. Drawing on this data, chapters explore contradictory practices of territorialization, through aspects of displacement, enclosure, peoplehood, personhood, infrastructure, science and nature. The dissertation concludes that by claiming self-determination, the Falkland Islanders are crafting a settler colonial protectorate for hydrocarbon production through popular consent to British sovereignty.

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Development is settler colonialism: Omar Jabary Salamanca, ‘Assembling the Fabric of Life: When Settler Colonialism Becomes Development’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 45, 4, 2016, pp. 64-80

13Sep16

Abstract: This article brings attention to the political geography of settler colonialism and the ways in which the Palestinian built environment materializes in space, consolidating uneven and racialized landscapes. It argues that settler-colonial space is intimately related to the building of infrastructures structured by development and humanitarian practices. More specifically, the discussion explores how roadscapes are materially and symbolically constructed; it also examines the ways in which development, rather than constituting a tool of empowerment, becomes a mechanism to manage the short-term “humanitarian” needs of Palestinians that arise from the imperatives of settler colonialism. Problematizing road infrastructure allows us to explore the relationship between Palestinian and donor agendas, and concomitant discourses on economic development and state building—in other words, how settler infrastructures are normalized through their association with tropes of modernity, progress, humanitarianism, and development.

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Lobbying with IGOs: Jan Lüdert, ‘Conditions apply: non-state actors challenging state sovereignty through Intergovernmental Organizations: an analysis of national liberation movements and indigenous peoples at the United Nations’, PhD Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2016

13Sep16

Abstract: This dissertation contributes to the study of Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs), such as the United Nations, and demonstrates their important function to convene multiple actors engaged in normative contestation and change. It achieves this by offering a systematic theoretical and empirical account of how non-state actors (NSAs) challenge the institution of state sovereignty. The argument offered specifically seeks to answer how and under what conditions this challenge is possible, and whether and when states respond by limiting IGOs and/or NSAs. To answer this question, the dissertation analyzes the successes and failures of two sets of non-state actors that have sought to alter prevailing conceptions of state sovereignty: national liberation movements and indigenous peoples. The dissertation’s original contributions to existing knowledge are threefold. First, I build on existing constructivist theory to argue that state sovereignty is despite being resilient and hard to change, also a mutable and variable composite institution. I specify that state sovereignty’s variance finds its clearest expression in three international norms that makes up the institution: territoriality, non-interference and self-determination. Second, I develop and apply the significance of three explanatory factors of non-state actors using IGOs to challenge and change the composite parts of state sovereignty: a) non-state actors require meaningful access and must expand participation capabilities to relevant venues within the nested structure of the IGO; b) non-state actors rely on the often essential role of allies active in the IGO to influence venue constraints and outcomes; c) non-state actors and their allies must find, create and/or be able to change relevant venues in order to advance collective goals through persuasion and social pressure tactics. I identify a particularly critical venue type which is coined sheltered venue. Sheltered venues establish a foot in the door to the IGO through which non-state actors deepen their interaction with states. Finally, I offer a detailed empirical investigation of national liberation movements and indigenous peoples interacting with the UN. No study of these actors in comparison exists to date. I, as such, explore how decisions and outcomes that benefited national liberation movements impacted indigenous peoples’ engagement at the United Nations.

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Indigenous men: Colin Murray Osmond, Giant Trees, Iron Men: Masculinity and Colonialism in Coast Salish Loggers’ Identity, MA Dissertation, University of Saskatchewan, 2016

13Sep16

Abstract: First Nations people in Coastal British Columbia have harvested and commodified the forest for centuries. With the arrival of European settlers and the inception of a commercial logging industry, Coast Salish men became highly respected and sought-after employees at logging camps up and down the coast. With attention to the twentieth century, this thesis analyzes the long history of Coast Salish forestry to highlight how cutting down trees provided Coast Salish men the ability to affirm masculine identities in both the pre and post-contact periods. In the theatre of a logging camp, Coast Salish men could ascend the racial and social limitations placed on their masculinity through skill and hard work. This thesis analyzes the various ways that First Nations men in British Columbia responded to the multiple forms of oppression placed on their identities as men by the Colonial and then Canadian governments. Colonial patriarchy took multiple forms, which created a system of hypocrisy where Coast Salish men were simultaneously expected to act like ‘men’ but were categorically denied access to certain types of masculinity. Coast Salish men could attain certain types of masculine agency through the sort of rugged masculinity valued in logging camps, but when they tried to assert their land and resource rights against patriarchal systems, they were paternalistically treated like children by the Canadian State. By analyzing Coast Salish logger’s remembrances of their time in ‘the bush,’ this thesis is a study in Indigenous historical consciousness. Considering both the continuities and changes present in Coast Salish forestry and ideals on masculinity, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, constructs an understanding of not only the colonial processes that oppressed, but also the avenues where Indigenous people carved out opportunities for themselves. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Coast Salish men were able to transcend some of the most oppressive aspects of colonialism by embracing an industry and a social environment (logging and logging camps) where they could perform an expression of masculinity that they found fulfilling, and that was simultaneously valued and accepted by colonial society.

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For those who have not been following: Bill McKibben, ‘Our Greatest Organizers Win Big At Standing Rock, But The Fight Goes On’, Huffington Post, 10/09/16

13Sep16

Read the article here.

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On settler colonialism and childhood: Kristine Alexander, ‘Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History’, History Compass, 14, 9, 2016, pp. 397–406

10Sep16

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism has shaped the scholarly literature on the history of childhood in post-Confederation Canada. The first wave of scholarship on the history of young people in Canada, shaped by the disavowal and “social forgetting” of settler colonialism, focused on issues like the welfare state and child migration. Using the frameworks and methods of social history, these works ignored Indigenous childhoods and failed to consider non-Indigenous Canadians as settlers. This approach became untenable after the publication of a number of studies of Indigenous children’s experiences in day, industrial, and residential schools, and the remainder of the article considers the still uneven ways in which historians of childhood in Canada have discussed Indigenous and settler childhoods and engaged with the concepts of whiteness and settler colonialism.

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Indigenous resilience facing settler colonialism and other catastrophes: Devin G. Atallah, ‘Toward a Decolonial Turn in Resilience Thinking in Disasters: Example of the Mapuche from Southern Chile on the Frontlines and Faultlines’, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2016

10Sep16

Abstract: Resilience thinking has moved into the forefront of global discourses on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and emergency response and recovery. Social justice frameworks have long been part of resilience thinking, conceptualizing multifaceted disasters as caused by interplays between physical, psychological, and sociopolitical dynamics that disproportionately impact marginalized communities, particularly in the Global South. Southern Chile is a poignant example, whereby marginalized indigenous communities, such as the Mapuche, are exposed to recurrent socionatural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and volcanic eruptions. Resilience in Mapuche communities, however, does not only include responses to these repeated major ‘rapid onset’ disasters, but also to complex legacies of systematic marginalization and daily ‘slow onset’ sociopolitical disasters including histories of settler colonization and ongoing inequities. Pathways toward resilience in many Mapuche communities do not simply rely on capacities of individuals or collectives to reduce risks to ahistoricized and depoliticized disasters. On the contrary, the very complexities of and intersections across environmental crises and racialized postcolonial politics are manifest in daily indigenous family and community life. Thus, in an effort to improve frameworks useful for exploring complex dynamics in multifaceted disasters, the current paper provides a brief literature review outlining three general themes or ‘waves’ of research on human resilience that have emerged throughout the decades. Key historical and contextual elements in the Mapuche-Chilean conflict are also introduced, supporting arguments for incorporating decolonization frameworks into the increasingly transdisciplinary projects of DRR with particular sensitivity and applicability to historically colonized groups and marginalized communities across the Global South.

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