settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous peoples are defined by food insecurity: Kelly Skinner, Erin Pratley, Kristin Burnett, ‘Eating in the City: A Review of the Literature on Food Insecurity and Indigenous People Living in Urban Spaces’, Societies, 6, 2, 2016

30Mar16

Abstract: Indigenous people often occupy different overlapping or co-existing food environments that include market-based foods, land and water based foods, and combinations of the two. Studying these food environments is complicated by the cultural and geographic diversity of Indigenous people and the effects of colonialism, land dispossession, relocation and forced settlement on static reserves, and increasing migration to urban areas. We conducted a scoping study of food insecurity and Indigenous peoples living in urban spaces in Canada, the United States, and Australia. The 16 studies reviewed showed that food insecurity among urban Indigenous populations is an issue in all three nations. Findings highlight both the variety of experiences of urban Indigenous peoples within and across the three nations, and the commonalities of these experiences.

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Losing control: Catriona Elder, ‘Narratives of national belonging: the domestic, the wild, and the mutant in Australian film’, Social Identities, 2016

30Mar16

Abstract: This article explores understandings of postcolonial national belonging through an analysis of cinematic representations of humans, animals and the environment. It does so by analyzing a series of Australian films about plants, animals or people who are out of place or out of control. The article registers some of the changing representations of Australian flora, fauna and, by association people, as native, domesticated, simpatico, feral and wild; interpreting these shifts as recalibrations of a moral hierarchy of cultural belonging. Films including Lantana (2001) Dir. Ray Lawrence; Razorback (1984) Dir. Russell Mulchay; Rogue (2007) Dir. Greg Mclean; and Black Water (2007) Dirs. David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki are read in terms of political anxieties. Drawing on work ‘that insists humans and animals are currently bound in a complex network of relationships’, I use these films to explore issues of the nation, place, belonging in relation to aliens and natives. Given that in the past 20 years there has been increasing recognition of the history of colonialism and its effects on Indigenous peoples but also a different but related blossoming of environmental nationalism, the key question that animates this research is how these understandings are represented in film and what work animals and plants might have played in filmic cultural representations of national belonging.

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Indigenous dispossession is (settler) gold: Dawn Hoogeveen, Geographeis of settler colonial dispossession: rejecting gold and prosperity on Tsilhqot’in territory,University of British Columbia, 2016

30Mar16

Abstract: My objective in this thesis is to trace how mining laws politically inscribe Indigenous space and territory. In doing so I situate gold mining regulations as central to Canadian settler colonialism and the legal dispossession of Indigenous land. I examine the origins of British Columbia’s mineral staking regulations and juxtapose these historical regulations with those today in order to outline two distinct, but comparatively relevant moments. The first moment is the writing of mining laws in 1858 and 1859, during the formation of the region as a settler colony. I illustrate how the British Crown enacted a system of free entry mineral staking that negated Indigenous sovereignty over resources. The dispossession of land was central to the functioning of colonial mining regulations, and reveals this regulation was and continues to be complicit in reproducing uneven geographies. The second moment is in the contemporary era, and focuses specifically on a mining company’s New Prosperity copper-gold mine proposal on Tsilhqot’in territory at Teztan Biny (Fish Lake). I outline how the environmental assessment process for this mine gave limited but significant space to Indigenous people as participants and decision makers. The mine was rejected based on a panel report written through the guidelines established in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. This rejection represents a major victory for the Tsilhqot’in, who remain adamantly opposed to mining at Fish Lake. This decision, though, still rests within the colonial legal framework, and is not a sovereign decision by the Tsilhqot’in. Ultimately, I argue that the dispossession of land is a central tenet of how mineral regulations function through an examination of the everyday enactments of resource regulation, and the resultant resistance, rejection, and refusal of Indigenous people to accept settler colonial terms of engagement. In contemporary Canada these terms of engagement, including environmental assessment, are couched in the politics of recognition and reconciliation that fail to address the fundamental property relation mechanized through Western legal structures.

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On gender and settler colonialism: Catherine Bishop, Angela Woollacott, ‘Business and Politics as Women’s Work: The Australian Colonies and the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Movement’, Journal of Women’s History, 28, 1, 2016, pp. 84-106

30Mar16

Abstract: Female political activism and economic engagement in the Australian colonies are usually located within the last decades of the nineteenth century, yet a reexamination of the 1850s reveals that the twin issues of women’s political rights and activities within the public sphere were raised much earlier. This article shows that as the Australian colonies achieved self-government and manhood suffrage and experienced the upheaval of successive gold rushes around the Pacific, there were heated debates about women’s roles within the public sphere. Evidence drawn from the law, trade directories, passenger lists, newspapers, and contemporary fiction reveals the extent of both women’s work and the debate. The participation of women in business and the articulation of demands for political rights were part of a transnational midcentury phenomenon but had distinctive Australian qualities, preparing the ground for later suffrage success.

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Settling the impossible: Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015

27Mar16

Description: Planetary spaces such as the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions captured the British imperial imagination. Intangible, inhospitable, or inaccessible, these blank spaces existed beyond the boundaries of known and inhabited places. Siobhan Carroll interrogates the role these blank spaces played in the construction of British identity during an era of unsettling global circulations.

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‘Indian Nullification’ actually says it: Adam Dahl, ‘Nullifying Settler Democracy: William Apess and the Paradox of Settler Sovereignty’, Polity, 21/03/16

27Mar16

Abstract: This essay examines the concept of “Indian nullification” in the political writings of William Apess by situating his defense of native self-determination in the context of debates about the legitimacy of nullification in U.S. constitutionalism. It illustrates how Indian nullification operates, not as a feature of constitutional design asserting minority rights over the tyranny of the majority, but rather as a rhetorical form of political contestation exposing the constitutive exclusions of American settler democracy. Apess illuminates how constitutional ideals of popular sovereignty cohere around regimes of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession, highlighting the paradox of settler sovereignty that provides the basis for American democracy. Indian nullification is not a simple demand that the boundaries of liberal citizenship be expanded to include Indians. It is a way of narrating and rhetorically representing the forms of settler conquest that establish the material and conceptual foundation of popular self-rule for white settlers.

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Settlers need to control indigenous reproduction: Cutcha Risling Baldy, ‘mini-k’iwh’e:n (For That Purpose—I Consider Things) (Re)writing and (Re)righting Indigenous Menstrual Practices to Intervene on Contemporary Menstrual Discourse and the Politics of Taboo’, Cultural Studies = Critical Methodologies, 2016

27Mar16

Abstract: Historically, studies of Indigenous menstrual practices were mired in assumptions that these practices were oppressive toward women. The high regard for menstruation as demonstrated through Indigenous women’s coming of age ceremonies and the continuing rituals of menstruation among Indigenous peoples has not been critically engaged with, and is often relegated to dismissive and oversimplified statements. The Western menstrual taboo not only influences theories of Indigenous menstrual customs but also relies on settler colonial rhetoric to help support a continuing politics of taboo. Although there have been numerous cultural studies of modern menstrual discourse focused on how contemporary Western menstrual practices are rooted in patriarchal bias, even self-declared feminist literature treats the menstrual taboo as nearly universal to Indigenous menstrual practices. This article provides an Indigenous feminist critique of contemporary menstrual discourse. I begin with a short history of settler colonialism and menstrual discourse and then analyze contemporary popular menstrual discourse. The final part of this article is an intervention on the assumed Indigenous menstrual taboo by looking at menstrual practices of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, located in Northern California, to demonstrate that for this culture and society, there is no menstrual taboo. It is through this in-depth analysis of Hupa menstrual practices that we see how Indigenous feminisms challenge settler colonialism and provide a decolonizing lens to contemporary scholarship that not only imagines alternative analyses but also acknowledges that these alternatives did, have always, and will always exist.

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Settler colonialism as the default option? Tallie Ben-Daniel, ‘Zionism’s Frontier Legacies: Colonial Masculinity and the American Council for Judaism in San Francisco’, American Studies, 54, 4, 2016, pp. 49-71

27Mar16

Excerpt: In 2011, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum curated an exhibit called California Dreaming: Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present. The ambitious exhibit illustrated the specific regional history of San Francisco’s Jewish community. Arranged chronologically, most of the exhibit focused on the successes of Jewish families in San Francisco and the origin of major Jewish organizations—until the exhibit reached the end of World War II. Instead of celebrating the end of the Holocaust, the exhibit instead needed to contend with the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a Jewish anti-Zionist organization whose strongest chapter was in San Francisco. The wall text of the exhibit explains the ACJ’s popularity as a reflection of “local comfort,” in that “the Jewish elite of San Francisco, who experienced very little anti-Semitism and held many public offices, found it difficult to imagine the dangers encountered by Jews in Europe or even in American cities that were less welcoming toward Jews.” The strength of San Francisco’s anti-Zionism was glossed over as a temporary aberration […].

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The possible alliance of environmentalist and indigenous politics: Eve Vincent, Timothy Neale, ‘Unstable relations: a critical appraisal of indigeneity and environmentalism in contemporary Australia’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2016

27Mar16

Abstract: The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a protest-based environmental movement in Australia. We outline here the history of the unstable meeting of environmentalism and Aboriginal interests, before turning to Marcia Langton’s recent critique of the progressive ‘green left’ in Australia.1 We summarise Langton’s argument: environmentalists would deny Aboriginal groups the benefits that flow from native title-related agreements; environmentalists live at luxurious distance from the realities of remote and rural Aboriginal poverty and social problems; environmentalists exalt ‘noble savages’. We critique these claims on the basis that they pay inadequate attention to the structural inequities that underpin the market in native title interests and, further, deny the reality that Aboriginal groups often seek to form strategic alliances with green groups, arguing for conservation of their country on their own—or shared—terms. We argue that any appraisal of the present status of ‘green-black’ relations needs to consider these factors seriously.

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Militarism and settler colonialism: Joshua Inwood, Anne Bonds, ‘Confronting White Supremacy and a Militaristic Pedagogy in the U.S. Settler Colonial State’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2016

22Mar16

Abstract: We argue that understanding contemporary geographies of race and militarism is predicated on understandings of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Settler colonialism is a continuously unfolding project of empire that is enabled by and through specific racial configurations that are tied to geographies of white supremacy. In a U.S. context, settler colonialism begins with the removal of first peoples from the land and the creation of racialized and gendered labor systems that make the land productive for the colonizers. In this context, settler colonialism is an enduring structure—an interrelated political, social, and economic process that continuously unfolds—requiring continued reconfigurations and interventions by the state. Such a framing connects landscapes of militarism and geopolitics with everyday forms of violence, social difference, and normalized power hierarchies and relationships of oppression. Building from these insights we argue that theorizations of U.S. militarism must be connected to the spatialities of white supremacy and grounded in the U.S. imperial settler state. Finally, we end by engaging with a broader discussion on the ways in which the discipline and academic institutions are complicit in practices that contribute to white supremacy, poverty, inequality, and the continuation of settler colonial practices. For these reasons it is necessary to cultivate a broadly conceived and militantly uncompromising peace agenda premised on antiviolence and the rejection of the racism (and its intersections with gender, class, and sexuality) implicit in the settler colonial state.

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