settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism must be represented: Madalena Santos, ‘Palestinian narratives of resistance: The Freedom Theatre’s challenge to Israeli settler colonization’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

17Jul16

Abstract: This article focuses on the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine, to consider the Theatre’s project and performances as practices of creative resistance. It theorizes creative resistance to examine the Theatre as a mode of narrative performance against the logics and materiality of settler colonialism. In exploring this creative project, this study conceives of narratives as sites of struggle that are significant in the contestation and transformation of dominant settler colonial myth.

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Settler manhood must be displayed: Melisssa Bellanta, ‘”Poor Gordon”: What the Australian Cult of Adam Lindsay Gordon Tells Us About Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Masculine Sentimentality’, Gender & History, 28, 2, 2016, pp. 401–421

17Jul16

Abstract: The popularity of the British-born Australian poet and sportsman, Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–1870), flowered after his death. Between 1870 and 1920, he was widely extolled as an exemplar of the Australian bushman and of British imperial masculinity alike. Fans lauded Gordon as a daredevil horseman who had lived in the bush in the Australian colonies’ roaring days. Fascinatingly, though, they expressed their enthusiasm for him in sentimental terms. This article shows that sentimental expressions of devotion to Gordon were part of a distinctive form of masculine sentimentality emerging in Western culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. The proponents of this sentimentality encouraged the members of Western imperial and settler-colonial publics to sympathise with rugged bushmen such as Gordon – to collectively experience their sorrows, griefs and joys. In so doing, they helped to reinforce masculine and settler-colonial power, since they elevated the sentiments of hardy masculine types at the expense of feminine ones. In Australia, sentimental representations of Gordon also helped divert attention from the violence committed by settlers against Aboriginal peoples. Based on the insight that masculinity and sentiment were profoundly intertwined in the day, this article calls for a new way of thinking about the relationship between these two phenomena in the turn-of-the-century era.

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How indigenous are indigenous youth: Audreylee Hudson, Decolonizing Indigenous Youth Studies: Photography and Hip Hop as Sites of Resilience, PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2016

17Jul16

Abstract: This dissertation examines the role an arts-based educational program played in unleashing youth’s creativity as they confront various structures of power that become challenges to social identity, belonging, and self, under different local and national circumstances. My research questions considered how Indigenous youth utilized a photography and hip hop based educational program as a resource to explore social identity and relations, indigeneity, place/space, and the legacy of settler colonialism on education. I also considered how the findings from this study informed and contribute to decolonize Indigenous youth studies and how programs such as mine help Indigenous youth comprehend crisis in the urban environment.

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‘They are the 1%’: Ann Curthoys, ‘The impossibility of section 70 aboriginal protection, amelioration, and the contradictions of humanitarian governance’, Studies in Western Australian History, 30, 2016, pp. 13-28

14Jul16

Abstract: In 1887, as Western Australian demands for self-government were intensifying, and it seemed that Western Australia’s poor record on Aboriginal protection and welfare might prove an obstacle to Britain’s approving a new constitution, the governor of the colony, Frederick Broome, came up with a suggestion. One way to grant responsible government without handing Aboriginal protection and welfare to the very settlers who so opposed it, he wrote to his superiors in the Colonial Office in London, would be to keep the colony’s recently established Aborigines Protection Board under the control of the governor and not hand it over to the proposed elected colonial government. The board, whose task was to oversee Aboriginal protection, education and welfare, could be funded by requiring the colonial government to set aside a reserved annual sum of 5,000 from colonial revenue, thus making the board independent of colonial treasury decisions and indeed colonial politics. To this end, the Constitution Bill Broome drafted in May 1888 included a clause eventually known as section 70, which took his initial idea a step further. It ensured that the payment of 5,000 pounds annually to the board would convert to 1 per cent of the colony’s annual revenue when it exceeded 500,000 pounds. When, after some prolonged debate over a range of issues, the British Parliament passed the colony’s new constitution in 1889 and brought it into operation in 1890, the proposed clause was included.

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On the settler colonial present (recognition as justification): Duncan Ivison, ‘Justification, not recognition’, Indigenous Law Bulletin, 8, 24, 2016, pp. 12-18

14Jul16

Abstract: The debate over the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples in Australia should be seen as a deeply political one. That might appear to be a controversial claim. After all, there has been much talk about minimising the scope for disagreement between ‘constitutional conservatives’ and supporters of more expansive constitutional recognition. And there is concern to ensure that any potential referendum enjoys the maximum conditions and opportunity for success.

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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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