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Settler colonialism is also climate change transfer: Chris D’Angelo, ‘ A Louisiana Tribe Is Now Officially A Community Of Climate Refugees: Since the 1950s, the Native American tribe has lost 98 percent of the land it calls home’, Huffington Post, 12/02/16

13Feb16

Excerpt: Deep in the bayous of Louisiana, about 80 miles southwest of New Orleans, lies the Isle de Jean Charles, a tiny swath of land that’s all but vanished into the Gulf of Mexico.

Over the last half-century or so, the island has fallen victim to irresponsible oil and gas extraction practices and the effects of climate change. Many of its residents — members of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Americans — have been forced to flee.

“What you see of the island now is just a skeleton of what it used to be,” Chris Brunet, a tribal council member and lifelong island resident, told The New York Times in a mini-documentary called Vanishing Island in 2014.

A recent federal grant, however, will allow the state-recognized tribe to resettle on higher ground, making it the first community of official climate refugees in the United States, according to Indian Country Today.


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On the rights of indigenous peoples: Corinne Lennox, Damien Short (eds), Handbook of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, Routledge, 2015

11Feb16

Description: This handbook is a comprehensive interdisciplinary overview of indigenous peoples’ rights. Chapters by experts in the field examine legal, philosophical, sociological and political issues, addressing a wide range of themes at the centre of debates on the rights of indigenous peoples. The book addresses not only the major questions, such as ‘Who are indigenous peoples? What is distinctive about their rights? How are their rights constructed and protected? What is the relationship between national indigenous rights regimes and international norms?’ but also themes such as culture, identity, genocide, globalization and development, and the environment.

The book is divided into eight sections, which will each discuss and analyse a number of themes at the heart of the debates on the rights of indigenous peoples.

This book will be essential reading for academics working in the field, students on courses in human rights, international relations, political science, philosophy, sociology and law. It will also be of interest to practitioners and activists working in the indigenous rights field and in the human rights field more generally.


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On Glen Coulthatrd’s book: Peter Ives, ‘Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, by Glen Sean Coulthard’, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 28, 1, 2016, pp. 139-142.

09Feb16

Abstract: This review describes Coulthard’s use of the work of Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx to provide an assessment of ongoing settler colonialism in Canada and elsewhere. Critiquing the “politics of recognition” represented by Charles Taylor and illustrating the shift from projects of assimilation and overt cultural genocide to those of reconciliation and apology, Coulthard warns that such projects continue rather than alter psyscho-affective attachments to colonialism and its dispossession of land and resources. Coulthard looks to the work of Indigenous thinkers and traditions as well as to struggles such as Idle No More to offer succinct, perceptive political analysis. Coulthard’s use of Marx’s notion of “primitive accumulation” is insightful, complementing his argument that colonialism in the form of a “politics of recognition” indicates a shift in the role of violence. Coulthard’s critique of Fanon’s approach to culture and the sharp distinction between land and labor opens questions that require further investigation.


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Place-based pedagogies as a response to indigenous sovereignty: Kate McCoy, Eve Tuck, Marcia McKenzie (eds), Land Education: Rethinking Pedagogies of Place From Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives, Routledge, 2016

09Feb16

Description: This important book on Land Education offers critical analysis of the paths forward for education on Indigenous land. This analysis discusses the necessity of centring historical and current contexts of colonization in education on and in relation to land. In addition, contributors explore the intersections of environmentalism and Indigenous rights, in part inspired by the realisation that the specifics of geography and community matter for how environmental education can be engaged. This edited volume suggests how place-based pedagogies can respond to issues of colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. Through dynamic new empirical and conceptual studies, international contributors examine settler colonialism, Indigenous cosmologies, Indigenous land rights, and language as key aspects of Land Education. The book invites readers to rethink ‘pedagogies of place’ from various Indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonizing perspectives. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.


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On indigenous self-determination: Rebecca Lawrence, Ulf Mörkenstam, ‘Indigenous Self-determination through a Government Agency? The Impossible Task of the Swedish Sámediggi’, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, 23, 1, 2016, pp. 105–127

09Feb16

Abstract: The last two decades have witnessed a growing global acknowledgement of indigenous rights, for instance manifested in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Nordic countries have all responded to the rights claims of the indigenous Sámi people by establishing popularly elected Sámediggis (Sámi Parliaments) to serve as their representative bodies. Internationally, the Sámediggis are often referred to as ‘models’ for indigenous self-governance and participation. Using in-depth interviews with politicians and civil servants, this article provides the first empirical study of the daily work of the Swedish Sámediggi, with a specific focus on its institutional design as a government agency with dual roles: as an administrative authority under the Swedish government and as a popularly elected representative body of the Sámi people. We examine how these dual roles affect the work of the Sámediggi and if the Swedish Sámediggi safeguards the Sámi right to self-determination.


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On Taiwan as a settler locale: Shu-Min Huang, Shao-Hua Liu, ‘Discrimination and incorporation of Taiwanese indigenous Austronesian peoples’, Asian Ethnicity, 2016

08Feb16

Abstract: This paper examines contemporary developments among Taiwan’s indigenous Austronesian peoples. We have reviewed major policy changes mainly since the 1980s and their impacts on later developments – both the positive improvements in general well-being and the persistence of ingrained problems among them. Major findings indicate two growing trends among Taiwanese Austronesians. One is the rise of interest in their cultures and efforts to preserve and restore selected indigenous customs and practices. The other trend is a continuous outflow of the indigenes from traditional tribal communities to urban centers for better employment, education, or health care. Their increasing urbanization also contributes to more inter-ethnic marriages and the loss of indigenous languages and practices. The case of Taiwanese Austronesians illustrates the impacts historical and politico-economic processes are having on indigenous peoples.


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With a chapter on Tatar Crimea and the ‘deportation’ of indigenous identity: Christian Berry, ‘Crimean (Tatar): Resisting a Deportation of Identity’, in Star Medzerian Vanguri (ed.), Rhetorics of Names and Naming, London, Routledge, 2016,

08Feb16

See chapter 8.


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The migrant letter as a settler colonial genre: Liz Stanley, ‘Settler colonialism and migrant letters: the Forbes family and letter-writing in South Africa 1850–1922’,The History of the Family, 2016

08Feb16

Abstract: The ‘migrant letter’ has been proposed as a separate genre of letter-writing around features concerning absence, identity and relationships and location. However, questions arise about this claim, made using largely North American material. Explored in a different context, important complexities and differences come into view. This is discussed regarding the settler colonial context of South Africa using data from the Forbes family collection, containing around 15,000 documents written between 1850 and 1922. The Forbes were Byrne migrants to Natal, then Transvaal. The majority of letters in the collection were written and exchanged within South Africa, with significant numbers from family members remaining in Scotland or who removed elsewhere, and many drafts and copies of letters written by the South African end exist too. The size and composition of contents enable migrant letters to be explored within the greater entirety of the family’s letter-writing, conceived as a scriptural economy with characteristic writing practices. This is examined by looking in detail at the writing practices of a range of letter-writers and their correspondences. Important differences concerning how absences, identities and relationships and locations are inscribed in the context of South Africa are explored and traced to features of its settler colonial mode of production.


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The school as a space for interrupting and re-inscribing settler colonialism: Amanda Michelle Gebhard, In School but not of the School: Teaching Aboriginal Students, Inferiorizing Subjectivities, and Schooling Exclusions, PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2015

05Feb16

Abstract: Education for Aboriginal peoples is championed as a great equalizer and antithetical to a future of incarceration. Even though Aboriginal peoples are experiencing upward trends in education, they continue to be incarcerated at ten times the rate of their non-Aboriginal counterparts in the Canadian prairies. This study explores the discursive connections between education and incarceration for Aboriginal students. Specifically, the researcher sought to understand how educators’ normative discourses about learning and school legitimize and make possible the criminalization of Aboriginal students, and how educators work to disrupt normative discourses and open up possibilities for who can be a learner. This study is informed by multiple race frameworks, and poststructural theorizing about knowledge, power and subjectivities, and offers a discourse analysis of interviews with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators working across one prairie province. The central finding of this thesis is that normative discourses about Aboriginal students are exclusionary discourses that position Aboriginal students outside of acceptable learner status, and effectively, outside of settler society. This argument is constructed over three interrelated chapters: Chapter Five demonstrates how cultural discourses are often racializing discourses that allow educators to evade considerations of racism and claim commitment to Aboriginal students, Chapter Six explores how inferiorizing discourses produce Aboriginal students as impossible learners and naturalize schooling exclusions, and Chapter Seven presents the discourse of the taken-for-granted-as-troublesome Aboriginal male student and the normalization of a police presence in schools. Throughout each chapter, the author demonstrates how subjectivities imposed upon Aboriginal students are not only incommensurable with normative expectations of student behaviour, but also at odds with the imagined qualities of citizens of the nation state. Counter-narratives of participants who disrupt normative discourses and produce Aboriginal students as belonging in school are also included. Emphasizing the school as a powerful identity-making space where students learn who they are and where they belong in a settler society, the author suggests race power deployed through normative educational discourses naturalizes spaces of abjection as rightful spaces of belonging for Aboriginal peoples.


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Marx, Arendt, capitalism, and settlerism: Onur Ulas Ince, ‘Bringing the Economy Back In: Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, and the Politics of Capitalism’, The Journal of Politics, 78, 2, 2016

05Feb16

Abstract: This article engages with the question of how to construct modern economic relations as an object of political theorizing by placing Hannah Arendt’s and Karl Marx’s writings in critical conversation. I contend that the political aspect of capitalism comes into sharpest relief less in relations of economic exploitation than in moments of expropriation that produce and reproduce the conditions of capitalist accumulation. To develop a theoretical handle on expropriation and thereby on the politics of capitalism, I syncretically draw on Marxian and Arendtian concepts by first examining expropriation through the Marxian analytic of “primitive accumulation of capital” and second delineating the political agency behind primitive accumulation through the Arendtian notion of “power.” I substantiate these connections around colonial histories of primitive accumulation wherein expropriation emerges as a terrain of political contestation. From this perspective I conclude that such putatively “economic” questions as dispossession, exploitation, and accumulation appear as irreducibly political questions.


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