settler colonial studies blog

On settler colonialism as/and the anthropocene: Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sandrina de Finney, Mindy Blaise,’Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism’, Environmental Humanities, 7, 2015, pp. 129-132

20Nov15

Excerpt: The authors of these three essays ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognisant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project. Nothing is finally settled. Moreover, they start from the premise that the ecological legacies of the western colonial enterprise of early modernity closely articulate with the anthropogenic disturbances to the earth’s geo-biosphere that we are now confronting in late modernity, and which is increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene. Like previous Environmental Humanities contributors, the authors in this special section engage with the Anthropocene in ways that are attuned to the limits and problematics of its nomenclature, resist the impulse to indulge in heroic anthropocentric responses, and are motivated by the possibilities of exploring new and generative ethical responses and fostering reparative cosmopolitical relations.

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As migrants, not as settlers: Rachel Wolters, ‘As Migrants and as Immigrants: African Americans Search for Land and Liberty in the Great Plains, 1890–1912’, Great Plains Quarterly, 35, 4, 2015, pp. 333-355

20Nov15

Excerpt: In March 1913 Sally Carothers and her family made the journey from Weleetka, Oklahoma, to Edmonton, Canada, following the path that hundreds of African Americans from Oklahoma took to western Canada in the early twentieth century. Sally immediately felt the isolation of the western Great Plains in Canada: there were no churches or schools when her family settled on their homestead. But she also knew that her parents were not concerned about the absence of these institutions, because they had migrated to find freedom.

When in 1907 Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state with the merging of Oklahoma and Indian Territories, white Oklahomans, influenced by southern traditions of racial exclusion, immediately implemented Jim Crow legislation. As a result, hundreds of blacks sought freedom in Canada. “All they had in mind,” Sally recalled of her parents, “was coming to a country where we could have freedom—free to be a human being; free to be able to cope with any white person,” adding, “I never heard my dad say he regretted coming here.”

Freedom for many African Americans meant not only being “able to cope with any white person” but also having land of your own. And African Americans traveled north to Canada in search of land for their families. Walker Beaver was thirteen when his family left Oklahoma on March 21, 1910, for Athabasca, Alberta. His family traveled with a large group of people who brought all their household goods with them on a chartered freight car. Walker remembered that some people even brought their horses and wagons with them. These Oklahoma farmers were part of a larger migration of people leaving the United States for the Canadian prairies in search of cheap, productive land. As Walker recalled, “In Kansas City there was an agent telling people about Canada—the land of milk and honey—for ten dollars you could buy a hundred and sixty acres of land, a homestead. So people thought they were getting a fortune, you understand, that’s why they came.” For African Americans in Oklahoma, Canada represented an opportunity for both freedom and land.

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Settler colonialism is about adaptation: Tom Lynch, ‘Strange Lands: The Lexicon of Settler-Colonial Landscapes in Charles Fletcher Lummis’s and Arthur Groom’s Portrayals of the American West and the Australian Outback’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment, 2015

19Nov15

Extract: In 1892, the American journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis published a book titled Some Strange Corners of Our Country in which he described for his fellow citizens various distinctive aspects of the landscapes and cultures of the American Southwest (a term he is credited with coining). In this book, he argued for the protection of what struck him as fascinating and unusual landscape features while simultaneously promoting a nascent tourism industry in the region. In 1950, the Australian journalist Arthur Groom published I Saw a Strange Land: Journeys in Central Australia, a book that portrayed the landscape and people of Central Australia with a similar goal of describing a vast but little-known region to his fellow citizens and of encouraging protection of the landscape and promoting tourism. Lummis and Groom, though separated by some 45 years in time and 8,000 miles in geography, were both Anglophone settler colonists engaged in a process of incorporating arid and semi-arid regions into their respective nation’s imaginaries while simultaneously championing a sometimes contradictory and morally ambiguous effort to preserve the character of the natural landscape. In each case, the author wrote for a distant urban audience that resided in a significantly more mesic climate. Each writer is a key figure in the transformation of the perception of their respective nations’ arid zones from forbidding and desolate wastelands into popular and accessible tourist destinations.

Admittedly, the appearance of the word “strange” in their respective titles may seem a slender coincidence upon which to hang a hefty thesis; however, through the use of an ecocritically informed comparative settler-colonial analysis, I wish to argue that the parallels are not accidental but rather derive from the common response of the Anglophone settler-colonial imaginary’s encounter with arid landscapes, whether in the United States or in Australia.

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Decolonisation is a relation: Avril Bell, ‘Decolonizing conviviality and “becoming ordinary”: cross-cultural face-to-face encounters in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015

18Nov15

Abstract: This paper explores convivial culture in a settler society. The paper draws on interview data from ethnographic research exploring how Māori and Pākehā worked together on a building project in a rural community. Both Māori and Pākehā participants reported their pleasure in engagements with each other that centred on Māori tikanga (protocols). In these encounters, Māori ‘difference’ was the catalyst for the development of new, convivial relationships. The paper argues that such everyday conviviality contributes to the process of decolonizing Māori–Pākehā relations at the level of everyday life. Through decolonizing conviviality Pakehā ‘become ordinary’ in Māori cultural contexts, and are offered the opportunity to come to understand themselves as embedded in colonial relationalities. Crucial to the development of such conviviality is the opportunity for face-to-face, embodied encounters with Māori in contexts where Māori cultural difference matters.

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Settlers need therapy: Galia Plotkin Amrami, ‘“Denial or Faith?” Therapy Versus Messianism in Preparing for the Evacuation of Israeli Settlements’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 46, 4, 2015, pp. 414-430

18Nov15

Abstract: This article offers an ethnographic account of the professional activities of mental health practitioners, employed by the state’s religious education system. I analyze various models implemented by practitioners for the purposes of preparing pupils for the state-mandated evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza and the West Bank. By focusing on the interaction between psychological and religious-national cultural frameworks I show how practitioners imbue familiar professional concepts with new meanings and create hybrid models of intervention.

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On ‘racial boundary shifting’ (i.e., ‘the movement of racial boundaries across people’ – transfer): Joseph O. Jewell, “We Have in This City Many Good Mexican Citizens” The Race-class Intersection and Racial Boundary Shifting in Late Nineteenth-century San Antonio’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2015

18Nov15

Abstract: Access to public spaces played an important role in constructing and defining racial boundaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1883, San Antonio’s Mexican American elites protested an order permanently barring them from using the dance pavilion in San Pedro Springs Park, resulting in the public censure of the park manager who gave the order and affirmations of Tejano elites’ right to equal access to public spaces. The author analyzes this historical case to show the importance of the race-class intersection, specifically racialized class identities, as a resource in racial boundary shifting: the movement of racial boundaries across people. Public exchanges in the “San Pedro Park incident” either challenged or defended Mexican Americans’ equal access to a white public space by drawing on competing racial narratives about their fitness for middle-class identity. The author argues that analyses of racial boundary shifting must give careful consideration to how social actors use understandings of class to expand or contract racial boundaries. Reproducing class identities that ensure continued economic domination over racial minorities is a central part of maintaining the racial order.

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On decolonisation and its necessary impermanence: Alexandra Crampton, ‘Decolonizing Social Work “Best Practices” through a Philosophy of Impermanence’, Journal of Indigenous Social Development, 4, 1, 2015

15Nov15

Abstract: In the book, Decolonizing Social Work, a common theme is how decolonization requires more than surface level change. In social work, changing theories and intervention practices will not bring true transformation without attending to underlying western beliefs that perpetuate problems. This essay uses Shawn Wilson’s metaphor of an island to identify one such belief, explain how it is damaging to social work practice, and propose an alternative (Wilson, 2013). I first explain this alternative through a story of successful decolonization of sacred practices by the Zuni people. I then apply lessons learned from this story to the social work concepts of best practices and evidence-based practice. My overall argument is that these concepts can have destructive effects when informed by a belief in permanence, and that these concepts are better realized through an underlying philosophy of impermanence.

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On resistance, arborescent or rhyzomatic (a test case from New Caledonia): Leah S. Horowitz, ‘Rhizomic Resistance Meets Arborescent Assemblage: UNESCO World Heritage and the Disempowerment of Indigenous Activism in New Caledonia’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2015

15Nov15

Abstract: This article draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of arborescent and rhizomic assemblages to examine encounters between large-scale conservation and grassroots resistance to industry. I explore how the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage listing of New Caledonia’s reefs contributed to the demise of Rhéébù Nùù, an indigenous activist group that had been targeting a multinational mining project. I also interrogate how an assemblage’s form enables certain modalities of power while constraining others and how these differences in power modalities inform relationships between types of assemblages. Mistakenly expecting assistance in protecting their coral reef from mining impacts, Rhéébù Nùù relinquished the coercive power inherent to their rhizomic form in favor of participation in UNESCO’s arborescent structure via World Heritage “management committees”—a globally promoted, but locally inappropriate, comanagement diagram that targeted local fishing activities despite an absence of overfishing. Thus, this article argues that rhizomic structures have unique means of influence, exercised through particular modalities of power, which might be lost through cooptation into arborescent assemblages that exercise different modalities of power and might employ locally inappropriate diagrams. Ultimately, conservation does not only result in the extension of state powers, as the literature has shown; as this study demonstrates, it can surreptitiously support the extension of environmentally damaging industrial development at the expense of grassroots action.

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Neoliberalism as settler colonialism: Elizabeth Strakosch, Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the ‘Post-Welfare’ State, Palgrave, 2015

15Nov15

Description: This book explores the changing dynamics of Indigenous policy in English-speaking settler states. Such policy is slowly moving away from a self-determination paradigm, conditioned by a post-war social liberal vision of an enfolding state that secures citizen entitlements. New policies, rather, reflect neoliberal logics in their focus on economic mainstreaming, community ‘dysfunction’ and individual opportunity. Through a case study of Australian policy between 2000 and 2007, this book traces these policy shifts. It examines the federal dismantling of the official self-determination and reconciliation policy framework, and analyses policy experiments with voluntaristic contracts and coercive crisis intervention. It argues that neoliberal policies are creating a newly flexible relationship between inclusion in and exclusion from liberal citizenship regimes, and are altering the terms of Indigenous-settler political interaction. This book therefore challenges mainstream approaches to public policy since it locates domestic Indigenous policy in settler states as a crucial but often neglected site of political encounter and sovereign negotiation.

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Indigenous politics as ‘a state of reclamation’: Robin R. Gray, Ts’msyen Revolution: The Poetics and Politics of Reclaiming, PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 2015

15Nov15

Abstract: As a result of the settler colonial project in North America, Ts’msyen have been thrust into a state of reclamation. The purpose of this study was to examine the distinctiveness of what it means for Ts’msyen to reclaim given our particular history and experiences with settler colonialism. Utilizing the poetics and politics as a theoretical, methodological and practical framework, this dissertation synthesizes the motivations, possibilities and obstacles associated with Ts’msyen reclamation in the contemporary era. Further, as a contribution to the literature on decolonization, Indigenous nationhood, Indigenous subjectivity, Indigenous methodologies and repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, I report on two multi-sited, auto-ethnographic, and community-based research initiatives: (1) a repatriation case study focusing on the legal and ethical dimensions associated with reclaiming Ts’msyen songs from archives, and (2) a case study focusing on embodied sovereignty and heritage reclamation with an urban Ts’msyen dance group. To contextualize the information generated from my engagements with over 200 Ts’msyen, I also offer my own experiences as a Ts’msyen hana’ax (woman), and as a dancer and a
singer. Primary data are derived from a series of listening gatherings, translation workshops and talking circles from the repatriation case study; and a Photovoice project, talking circle and dance ethnography from the dance group study. Secondary data are derived from Ts’msyen lived social realties in the third space; academic literature; current affairs and archival research. Key findings show (a) the ways in which Ts’msyen laws and systems of property ownership are enacted when Ts’msyen sing and dance, (b) how an Indigenous research paradigm develops organically based on an ethos of relational accountability, (c) how Indigenous standpoints alter ethnographic form and disrupt objectified knowledge production, (d) and where to put the theories of decolonization into praxis in settler colonial contexts. Ultimately, this dissertation is representative of a Ts’msyen manifesto. It is a call for a renunciation of contemporary ethics, policies, laws, discourses and practices that continue the work of structured dispossession and Indigenous elimination, while it is also an active assertion of Ts’msyen nationhood, sovereignty, precedent, laws and ways of knowing, being and doing.

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