settler colonial studies blog

On voting and indigenous representation in settler institutions: Aaron Spitzer, Confronting ‘Kymlicka’s dilemma’: settler voting rights, indigenous representation and the 1998-99 electoral reapportionment in Canada’s Northwest Territories, MA Dissertation, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2015

25Oct15

Abstract: “Settler colonialism” presents a vexing challenge to voting rights theory and praxis in liberal-democratic states. I call this challenge “Kymlicka’s dilemma,” after Will Kymlicka, the political theorist who has led contemporary discourse on “minority nation” rights. As Kymlicka observed, members of a state’s dominant cultural nation, or staatsvolk, may, by exercising universal mobility rights, numerically “swamp,” and then, by using universal voting rights, democratically dominate, an Indigenous minority nation in its homeland. To prevent this, an Indigenous minority nation may seek to exercise group-based voting protections, such as guaranteed representation. Where “Kymlicka’s dilemma” arises – i.e., where minority group-differentiated voting protections challenge the voting powers of individual staatsvolk and vice versa – a constitutional conflict seems certain. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, from at least the 1970s until the separation of Nunavut in 1999, the specter of “Kymlicka’s dilemma” (mis)shaped the constitutional evolution of the territorial government. There, in what was long Canada’s last Indigenous-majority jurisdiction, decades of Indigenous political resistance to settler control hinged on the permissibility of Indigenous overrepresentation in the territorial legislature. In the 1990s, three developments portended changes to Indigenous overrepresentation in that legislature: Charter of Rights-inspired limits on electoral-district malapportionment, constitutional recognition of Indigenous group-based protections, and the amplified danger of settler “swamping” that would result from Nunavut’s separation. As if in a natural experiment, these developments created conditions for a potentially volatile constitutional conflict. This thesis analyzes the results of that experiment. It shows that a constitutional conflict did ensue, catalyzed by the territorial electoral reapportionment of 1998-99. This conflict involved a yearlong political clash over Indigenous versus individual rights. This thesis further shows that a controversial court ruling, and equally controversial political decisions, resolved this conflict, deciding “Kymlicka’s dilemma” by rejecting Indigenous group-differentiated voting protections in the territorial legislature.

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On settler moves to innocence, on the settler colonialism of others: Gunlög Fur, ‘Colonial fantasies – American Indians, indigenous peoples, and a Swedish discourse of innocence’, National Identities, 2015

25Oct15

Abstract: This article examines representations of American Indians in a Swedish family magazine from the 1860s/1870s, tying these ‘Indian stories’ to perceptions carried by emigrants to the Americas. It argues that these representations conveyed a certain notion of the colonial process that allowed Swedes to both participate in and disavow the more unsavoury aspects of what the magazine called ‘race wars’. An emerging discourse of innocence connected popular images with debates about emigration and scholarship in racial biology, which allowed both Swedes and Swedish-Americans to view themselves as modern and unconnected to the burdens of a colonial past.

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On the cultural comptibility of settler co-ethnicity: Jane Helleiner, ‘Recruiting the “culturally compatible” migrant: Irish Working Holiday migration and white settler Canadianness’, Ethnicities, 2015.

23Oct15

Abstract: Working Holiday programs have been identified as an increasingly significant source of temporary migrant labor for several wealthy states. This case study adds to limited work on this phenomenon in the Canadian context by offering a partial chronology of Irish Working Holiday migration to Canada and a critical analysis of Canadian government discourse that positioned Irish migrants as not only “culturally compatible” but also part of white settler Canadianness thus making them desirable workers and potential future immigrants. The Canadian case study raises questions about how Working Holiday and related youth mobility programs may be linked to classed and racialized migration and dominant ideologies of nationalized belonging.

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On multiple colonialisms: Nancy Shoemaker, ‘A Typology of Colonialism’, Prspectives on History, October 2015

22Oct15

Excerpt: In the past several years, settler colonial theory has taken over my field, Native American studies. Comparative indigenous histories focused especially on British-descended “settler colonies”—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States—have proliferated. And settler colonial theory is now dogma. At my last two conference presentations, a fellow panelist was astonished that I didn’t deploy it. My research on native New England whaling history made me more globally comparative, but it also forced a reckoning that many places experienced colonialism without an influx of foreign settlers.

As scholars parse settler colonialism into its multiple manifestations, colonialism itself remains undifferentiated.

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On the shift from race to culture (and on settler colonialism): Michael R. Griffiths, ‘nterventions: race, culture, and population via the thought of A.P. Elkin’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: In key texts of Australian history, indigenous culture was seen as a device for delineating the boundaries of populations in such a way as to see it depicted as no longer focusing on race or physical difference. Focusing on several key moments in twentieth-century Australian indigenous policy when interventions in indigenous populations were first justified through a move from race to culture, this essay argues first that intervention into culture often retains essentialist assumptions about difference that recapitulate thought previously associated with race and physical difference. The article examines the thought of A.P. Elkin to ask whether the move from racial absorption to cultural assimilation can be characterised as an epistemic break in the Foucaultian sense or whether it contains instances of continuity in mechanisms of power. What happens, the article asks when populations come to be identified as spheres of cultural difference to be governed and intervened into using the techniques of the physical previously associated with race? The answer to this question has implicit consequences not only for the period examined but implicitly for more recent debates in intervention into indigenous lives.

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On the fiscal settler: Shiri Pasternak, ‘The fiscal body of sovereignty: to ‘make live’ in Indian country’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: Fiscal relations between the state and Indigenous peoples in Canada are a matter of life and death. By bringing to light techniques of economic rationality and governance of Indigenous peoples, this paper demonstrates a vital, yet overlooked trajectory in an ongoing colonial war. I examine specifically how Canada investigated and intentionally distorted Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s band finances as a way to discredit her demands that governments respect her community’s treaty rights. Further, I will analyze how these economic mechanisms and discourses functioned to ‘settle’ Indigenous territorial demands for self-determination in order for states and private industry to gain valuable access to Indigenous lands and resources. A multi-million dollar De Beers diamond mine operates 90 kilometers west of the Attawapiskat reserve and serves as an important site for examining how colonial forms of fiscal warfare work. For the past two centuries, an expectation of ‘self-sufficiency’ has been demanded from Indigenous peoples in tension with state investment in the dispossession of Indigenous lands; this tension defines Crown-Indigenous fiscal relations to this day and has been amplified recently in public discourses demanding accountability and transparency from Indigenous peoples while simultaneously decrying their dependency on the state. These discourses have developed in distinct relation to the conjoined historical and structural imperatives of settler colonial governance: territorial possession and resource access. I propose that by surveying the recent economic history of a resource periphery such as Attawapiskat First Nation, we may examine the kinds of power invested and produced in governing the lives and deaths of Indigenous peoples in Canada today.

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On the settler memories of cores and diasporas: Adam Hjorthén, Border-Crossing Commemorations: Entangled Histories of Swedish Settling in America, PhD Dissertation, Stockholm University, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: Different groups from both sides of the Atlantic have since the 1930s come together to commemorate histories of Swedish settling in America. They have celebrated the founding of the New Sweden colony in the Delaware Valley (1638–1655), and the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of Swedish pioneers in the Mississippi Valley. Border-Crossing Commemorations investigates this continuing practice in studies of the 1938 New Sweden Tercentenary and the 1948 Swedish Pioneer Centennial. It analyzes how histories of colonization, pioneering, and migration have been made functional and meaningful in these border-crossing commemorations.

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the ways in which actors entangled historical representations in the 1938 New Sweden Tercentenary and the 1948 Swedish Pioneer Centennial. On a more general level, the study explores the question of what happens when different people, with different agendas, in different parts of the world, commemorate the same history, at the same time, in the same places. It proceeds from a critique of the national paradigm in commemoration research, and thus contributes to the emerging field of cross-border memory studies and cultural history. The study adopts entanglements as a way-of-seeing, influenced by the theoretical discussions on histoire croisée. Methodologically, this approach entails studies of interactions and the use of a wide range of source materials from the major groups involved in the commemorations, gathered from fifteen archives in both Sweden and the United States. By investigating both the planning and performance of the commemorations, the study analyzes the ways in which actors entangled history through the analytical concepts of modernity, race, and settler colonialism. These concepts provide an understanding of how actors made history meaningful in the present by, for example, emphasizing historical ruptures (through modernity), continuities (through racial genealogies), and significances (through claims that the settlers founded “civilization” in America).

Empirically, the dissertation discusses why certain groups appropriated the histories of New Sweden and the Swedish pioneers as their own; which histories that the actors agreed to commemorate and how these histories were characterized by settler colonial claims; how delegations were framed as traveling in the footsteps of the past, and made to represent shared social, political, and technological progress; how community festivals were forums where Swedes and Swedish Americans could interact and manifest their, sometimes differing, ideas about Swedishness; and how dinners were forums for international political and commercial relations, promoted through teleological claims of historical friendship. The study demonstrates how actors during the 1938 and 1948 commemorations entangled histories of mutual modernities, of friendly relations, and of Swedishness. These histories were permeated by contemporary social, political, and commercial interests as politicians, businessmen, cultural leaders, and others, claimed that Swedish settlers had founded civilization in North America. The study shows that these historical representations have been resilient and malleable, and that they have continued to be circulated during the twenty-first century.

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On indigeneity: Mark Rifkin, ‘On the (geo)politics of belonging: Agamben and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: This essay considers the significance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben in order to do so. UNDRIP provides means for developing a comparative framework for conceptualizing the situation of Indigenous peoples globally, focusing on the ways they defy settler-state norms and expectations of what constitutes politics and governance. Reciprocally, the essay addresses how UNDRIP reframes Agamben’s notion of exception by emphasizing less the eradication of sovereignty than the recognition of simultaneous, interlacing sovereignties whose terms may not be commensurate and whose nonexclusivity troubles a notion of jurisdictional closure – the a priori coherence of ‘domestic’ space on which the exception depends.

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It’s all in a name: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Codename Geronimo: settler memory and the production of American statism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: The article examines the use of the name ‘Geronimo’ as the codename that the US Defense Department gave to Osama Bin Laden in their successful mission to assassinate him. In engaging this critique of “Codename Geronimo,” the article offers a way to imagine decolonization and unsettlement through a wider critique of American statism, upon the premise that anti-statism is a necessary component of a decolonizing, unsettling politics. The article argues that American state practices and institutions function and are legitimated, especially in their most warlike functioning, through settler memory. Settler memory is an active practice, not a reference to dislocated past. The American effort to legitimate settlement requires persistent articulation, especially as it concerns statist power that enforces and naturalizes Indigenous territorial dispossession and Indigenous people’s disempowerment. Settler memory is critical to the reproduction of settler colonial assemblage, and thus it must be centered more in our effort to grasp and critique American state practices.

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Reading settler fiction: Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, ‘Creole Frontiers: Imperial Ambiguities in John Richardson’s and James Fenimore Cooper’s Fiction’, Early American Literature, 49, 3, 2014, pp. 741-770

18Oct15

Excerpt: In his 2010 article “Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy,” Edward Watts argues that by using settler theory to study early American literature, scholars in the field can move away from the binary of empire and resistance, toward a better understanding of the multiple experimental and alternative nationalisms of the early Republic. This timely decentering of the nationalist narrative builds on the shift toward postcolonial studies in American literature, while reflecting the more general transatlantic and hemispheric turn in American studies in recent years. In Watts’s reading, then, settler theory has the potential to transcend what Ralph Bauer describes as “the limitations of critical and theoretical concepts, as well as markers of identity current in US American studies … across cultural and disciplinary borders” (“Early American” 225). On the one hand, postcolonial theory has created useful comparative frameworks for discussing local colonialisms; on the other, the dominant Anglo-American emphasis on the colonizer-colonized conceptual binary fails to prove consistently useful in a hemispheric context. Furthermore, traditional periodizations of literary studies that separate the colonial and the national artificially normalize the American experience of decolonization, since the US model was the exception rather than the norm in the hemisphere until at least 1820 (Bauer, “Early American” 225). Thus, settler theory has the unique potential to address both disciplinary shortcomings by positing the early Americans as just one group of Euro-Creoles in the Americas, simultaneously agents and subjects of imperial power, whose identities and relationship to the land were triangulated across multiple political formations.

This article examines the relationship between such political formations and the competing narratives of indigeneity and authenticity that underpinned frontier fiction in the United States and Canada in the 1820s and 1830s. James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) and his contemporary and admirer, Canadian novelist John Richardson (1796–1852), have been traditionally read through the lens of the national canon as early representatives of Canadian and American literatures, respectively. The works of both have long drawn comparisons, which I do not intend to revisit here. Rather, my goal is to illuminate the commonalities of these two Euro-American Creoles via an examination of the role that the land, empire, and whiteness play in their literary invention of competing national and prenational pasts. In doing so, my use of settler postcolonialism dissociates the term Creole from its racial connotations, dominant in American studies scholarship, and uses it as a marker of difference in the relationship between metropolis and its colonial outposts. At the same time, rather than positing Richardson as a British colonial epigone of Cooper, I view him as the translator of a literary model into a cultural paradigm shaped by different historical circumstances, and informed by different transatlantic and hemispheric power relations. Central to my argument is the fact that, although both authors engage the same empires and the same geography, they wrote from within two concurrent political regimes, one colonial, one national, whose structures and conventions informed their respective “frontiers.”

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the northern borderlands of the American Republic were underpinned by real, albeit contested, ideological fault lines. Early American settlerhood evolved in dialogue with the colonial settlerhood of British North America. British literature was widely read in the colonies, but so were American authors. Early Canadian fiction engaged not only with British imperial narratives and tropes of belonging but also with American nationalism, defining itself in relation to both. Similarly, throughout the nineteenth century American culture remained involved in a series of complex political, cultural, and literary negotiations with Canada. Early American and British North American writers courted a shared transatlantic book market united by the use of the English language but separated by political divisions (Fleming and Lamonde). Canadian authors often wrote to three implied audiences: colonial, metropolitan, and Anglo-continental, adapting their writings to suit local sensibilities (Mount). Much like their American counterparts, writers north of the Great Lakes struggled to manufacture and emphasize a sense of political difference between the two Anglo communities in North America. In their efforts to craft usable pasts for the competing nationalist and imperial projects on the continent, American and Canadian authors grappled with the contradictions between the shared geography…

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