Abstract: Names can act as daily reminders of a colonial presence. To unsettle Settler origin stories, we strive to reveal the legacy of (dis)possession rooted in naming. As case studies, we consider the attribution of the name Salish Sea, the naming of the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia, and the delineation of national boundaries during the San Juan Water Boundary Dispute. We use these examples to demonstrate the unsettling potential of (re)naming practices. To conclude, we suggest further areas for praxis and research that are situated in a broader context of naming practices.

Description: 100 years since the end of German colonial rule in Namibia, the relationship between the former colonial power and the Namibian communities who were affected by its brutal colonial policies remains problematic, and interpretations of the past are still contested. This book examines the ongoing debates, conflicts and confrontations over the past. It scrutinises the consequences of German colonial rule, its impact on the descendants of victims of the 1904–08 genocide, Germany’s historical responsibility, and ways in which post-colonial reconciliation might be achieved.

Abstract: When the Labrador Inuit temporarily banned uranium development on their lands in Nunatsiavut in 2008, indigeneity and extractive development seemed to be incompatible. However, as this paper illustrates, the relationship between the two is more complex than a simple dichotomy. Throughout settler colonial history, both colonizers and Inuit have used ideas about indigeneity to support or impede resource development, and to justify, neutralize, or challenge attempts at economic and political control. The production of social categories and boundaries, as illustrated by the history of indigeneity in Nunatsiavut, has long been used for both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic purposes. Indigeneity and extractive industry have developed in tandem as functions of settler colonialism, and their relationship reflects this tangled history, as they exert diverse pressures on Inuit decisions about extractive development in Nunatsiavut.

Abstract: This article focuses on Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of colonization, on Karl Marx’s response to it, and on the role that settler colonialism as a global phenomenon played in shaping their thought. Marx’s rejoinder to Wakefield’s interpretation of an episode in the early colonization of Western Australia, when servants had deserted a wealthy colonist, was a foundational moment in the development of his general argument. Wakefield’s reaction to that episode was to develop the theory of ‘systematic colonization’, which he also proposed as an antidote to the prospect of impending revolution. Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation was entwined with his reading of Wakefield’s project. We argue that their different approaches to colonization, the prospect of settling ‘empty lands’ in other continents, can be seen as the starting points of two different political traditions. While revolutionary traditions are well known, this article outlines another global tradition, a political tradition that refuses reaction and revolution equally, and envisages displacement as the best method to produce social transformation.

Abstract: This research examines the factors that influence the emergence of cooperative municipal-First Nation relationships, and explores how these relationships can be sustained and built upon so that they are based on the principles of mutual recognition, mutual respect, sharing and mutual responsibility. Municipalities and First Nations are increasingly collaborating on land use planning, development, and services provision, and municipal officials, including planners, need to consider the role they can have in transforming organisational structures and land use planning practices in a way that will foster collaboration with First Nations. Strong relationships allow for mutually beneficial projects to be explored and undertaken, they reduce the chance for conflict and misunderstanding, and they play an important role in meaningful reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples

This research utilizes a case study of the City of Calgary and the Tsuut’ina Nation to examine municipal-First Nation cooperation, and centres on how the relationship between the two communities evolved during negotiations to construct the southwest Calgary ring road through Nation land. Document review, policy analysis, and semi-structured interviews were used to determine the factors that encouraged the emergence of a cooperative relationship between the two neighbours. The research points to the importance of visionary community leadership in building trust and respect between First Nations and local governments, and in arriving at mutually beneficial outcomes.

Abstract: Brad McGann’s Possum has been described as a film about the primal relationship between individuals and their environment. This article draws upon Clark’s work on feral ecologies in the colonial peripheries to suggest that it can also be understood as a historically specific allegory about nineteenth-century imperialism and settlement in New Zealand.

Abstract: This article argues that the phrase “monopoly of violence,” which circulates in so many contemporary academic critiques of the liberal state, is not adequate to describe the nature of violence deployed by settler colonial societies against indigenous and racialized bodies. Settler colonialism depends on a mode of popular sovereignty that serves primarily as a diffusion of the necropolitical power of the colonizing polity rather than as a check on the tyranny of the state. Through a consideration of an assemblage of unlikely contemporary objects—Glenn Beck’s 2013 keynote address to the National Rifle Association, Antonio Negri’s monograph Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, and Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained—it explores how European and Euro-American imaginings of constituent power can serve to reinforce settler colonial political traditions rather than offer an alternative.

Call for Chapters – Settler Colonialism and the Urban Prairie West

Editors: David Hugill (Department of Urban and Inner-City Studies, University of Winnipeg), Tyler McCreary (Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

The rapid urbanization of North American Indigenous populations over the last half century has been accompanied by a proliferation of urban Indigenous organizing and an expansion of Indigenous marginalization. We contend that making sense of these transformations demands the development of a relational theory of settler-colonial urbanism, as shaped by the intersection of distinct forms of social, political, and economic struggle. While a number of theorists have made key contributions to the elaboration of a theory of settler-colonization, their engagement with urban political economy remains comparatively limited. Conversely, while practitioners of urban political economy have elaborated key insights into the racialized production of urban space, their engagement with the constitutive importance of settler-colonial pasts and presents has been muted at best. In an effort to address these gaps in a focused manner, we seek contributions to an edited collection that will hone in on the complex entanglement of processes of settler-colonization with the political-economic dimensions of urbanization in the cities of a particular region, the Northern Plains of North America.

Our regional focus serves a dual purpose: providing a regional context to frame discussion and using that regional frame to elucidate a theory of settler-colonial urbanism. We take seriously Cole Harris’ suggestion that studies of colonialism are at their best when they are grounded in the “actuality and materiality” of specific colonial experience. Moreover, we believe that the cities of the Northern Plains present an exemplary starting point for a comparative study that seeks to elaborate and extend existing work on settler-colonial urbanism. While places like Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Saskatoon, Rapid City, Edmonton, Billings, Regina, and Grand Forks, among others, have sometimes been denigrated as ‘ordinary’ or banal in the broader urban literature, they are also places where urban Indigenous marginalization has been most acute and urban Indigenous political organizing has been most robust. As such, they present extraordinary opportunities to think critically about the normalized entanglements of coloniality, urbanity, and Indigeneity, in both contemporary and historical registers.

Our inquiry starts from the premise that understanding the political economy of Northern Plains cities requires that we extend our analyses beyond a focus on particular events in order to think critically about how colonially-inflected legacies, material distributions, and knowledge practices have structured collective life. To this end, we invite chapter-length submissions that seek to productively engage with settler-colonial urbanism in the context of one or more Northern Plains cities.

We are particularly interested in contributions that ground theoretical questions in one of the following themes:

• The settler-colonial history of particular urban environments
• The production of urban spaces of racialized (Indigenous) concentration
• Contested lands, urban reserves, and Indigenous claims to the city
• Urban Indigenous political work, organization-building, networks of mutual aid
• Violence against Indigenous women
• Urban Indigenous women’s organizing and feminist responses to settler-colonization
• Postwar urban policy (including suburbanization, urban renewal, inner-city decline)
• Racialized policing and responses to police violence
• Work and labour-market exclusion
• Informal economies and illicit work
• Finance, debt, mortgage markets
• Social services and state surveillance
• Indigenous community development strategies
• Struggles over urban education
• Housing discrimination and slum landlordism
• Neoliberal urbanism, urban development, gentrification, revanchism

Those interested in contributing should submit an abstract (250-400 words) to the editors by Monday November 16th, 2015 and expect to hear back from us within four weeks. First drafts must be submitted by Friday April 29, 2016. We are planning to host a workshop for contributors in Winnipeg, Manitoba in late May 2016. Arrangements will be made to include those that cannot attend in person. We intend to submit the complete manuscript to the University of Manitoba Press for peer-review in August 2016.

David Hugill (dw.hugill@gmail.com), Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Urban and Inner-City Studies, University of Winnipeg.

Tyler McCreary (tyler.mccreary@gmail.com), SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia.

Excerpt: ‘We had seized the land so violently and dispossessed its inhabitants so shamelessly – that our only way back – back to being at one and at peace with ourselves, was to identify more with Aboriginal Australia, while atoning for our opportunist and brutal behaviour‘.

Abstract: Drawing from reports and documentation published by Israeli and Palestinian human rights and children’s rights organizations, and establishing the analyses from the voices and stories of Palestinian children suffering from politically motivated abuses, the present paper examines child abuse in settler colonial contexts. Through the analyses of the various voices, narratives, and reports, the paper examines the inscription of state power over children’s bodies and lives, marking the connection between biopolitics and geopolitics, as well as the resultant suffering of children. The analyses of the collected data suggest that knowledge about child maltreatment and the violations of children’s rights cannot be dislocated from the history, politics, and structure of settler colonialism. The paper concludes by arguing that living a childhood situated in spaces of exterminability, as the voices of the studied children reveal, should be defined as child abuse and maltreatment.