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Extractive industry as settler colonialism: Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh, Negotiations in the Indigenous World: Aboriginal Peoples and the Extractive Industry in Australia and Canada, Routledge, 2015

23Sep15

Description: Negotiated agreements play a critical role in setting the conditions under which resource development occurs on Indigenous land. Our understanding of what determines the outcomes of negotiations between Indigenous peoples and commercial interests is very limited.


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Sweden’s North as a site for settler colonialism: Håkan Forsell, ‘Modernizing the Economic Landscapes of the North. Resource Extraction, Town Building and Educational Reform in the Process of Internal Colonization in Swedish Norrbotten’, International Journal of History, Culture and Modernity, 3, 2, 2015

23Sep15

Abstract: The article deals with two lines of economic and cultural development of the Swedish Norrbotten as a region subjected to a special exploitation and internal colonial power relations in the decades around 1900. It is in the first place the industrial modernization of basic industries and a modern employment market, which spurred the rapid urbanization of a landscape that previously barely created any urban areas. And second the article deals with the enlargement and the boundaries of the state’s educational territory during the same time-period. The position of the Sámi population in the new educational system that evolved with society’s gradual democratization is discussed within the context of internal colonization. Government policies in different areas such as urban planning, infrastructure, education and schooling based themselves in the beginning of the twentieth century on discussions of the Sámi’s ‘qualified dissimilarity’, a concept which also was meant to ‘protect’ this group. This was a government-sanctioned differentiation and a cultural segregationist policy to ensure a non-mixing of different societal and economic interests. But even more so, the purpose was to place the Sámi economic activities within cultural parenthesis, isolate the traditional way of life, devalue it and make it immutable and static, severing it from industrial development and the promises and materialization of modernity and progress.


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Trafficking in indigenous womed is settler colonialism: Robyn Bourgeois, ‘Colonial Exploitation: The Canadian State and the Trafficking of Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada’, UCLA Law Review, 62, 2015, pp. 1426-1463

23Sep15

Abstract: This Article argues that because of its historical and ongoing investments in settler colonialism, the Canadian state has long been complicit and continues to be complicit in the human trafficking of indigenous women and girls in Canada. In addition to providing indigenous bodies for labour and sexual exploitation, Canada’s trafficking of indigenous people has been essential not only to securing the indigenous lands required for the nation’s existence, but also in facilitating the speedy colonial elimination of indigenous people—whether through assimilation, forced emancipation, or death. Human trafficking, as such, has been essential to securing domination of indigenous peoples and territories throughout Canadian colonial history. This Article pays particular attention to the Canadian state’s uses of law to enable the trafficking of indigenous women and girls (and indigenous peoples, generally).


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Indigenes, migrants, settlers and the right to belong: Amar Bhatia, ‘We Are All Here to Stay? Indigeneity, Migration, and ‘Decolonizing’ the Treaty Right to Be Here’, Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, 31, 2013, pp. 39-64

20Sep15

Abstract: This article examines issues of transnational migration in the settler-colonial context of Canada. First, I review some of the recent debates about foregrounding Indigeneity and decolonization in anti-racist thought and work, especially in relation to critical and antiracist approaches to migration. The article then moves from this debate to the question of ‘our right to be here’, the relationship of this right to the treaties, and how migrant rights and treaty relations perspectives might interact in a context that must be informed by Indigenous laws and legal traditions.


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Nationalism, colonialism, settler colonialism, anti-colonialism: Jin-Yeon Kang, ‘The Dynamics of Nation, State and People Japanese Colonialism and Nationalist Discourses in Korea’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2015

20Sep15

Abstract: Nationalism plays a critical role in creating and reformulating collective identity and membership in a political community, notably the nation-state. Yet precisely how it does so and with what consequences for the colonial society remains unclear. Tracing the change of nationalist discourses during the Japanese colonial period in Korea, this essay examines the mechanism through which various forms of anticolonial nationalism provoked ideological schism among indigenous people. It directs particular attention to how Korean nationalist groups integrated notions of the ‘nation’ and ‘people’ into their anticolonial narratives in different ways and why they engaged in political and ideological conflicts among themselves through their interactions with the colonial state. Highlighting the fragmentation of the ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘people’ through the dynamics of nationalist groups and colonial power, the essay advances the argument that Japanese colonialism led to internal boundaries in Korea, thus rearticulating the meaning and people’s perception of the nation and a sense of belonging. Based on this historical analysis, the essay illuminates the effect of a colonial context as a particular political field upon the formulation of nationalist frameworks.


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Settlers, revolution, counterrevolution: Charles Post, ‘The American Counterrevolution of 1776’, Science & Society, 79, 4, 2015, pp. 614-621

20Sep15

No abstract available: check the article.


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Colonising, looking sidewise’; colonisation as peer review: Elizabeth B. Jones, ‘Keeping Up with the Dutch: Internal Colonization and Rural Reform in Germany, 1800–1914’, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 3, 2, 2015

20Sep15

Abstract: Recent research on internal colonization in Imperial Germany emphasizes how racial and environmental chauvinism drove plans for agricultural settlement in the ‘polonized’ German East. Yet policymakers’ dismay over earlier endeavours on the peat bogs of northwest Germany and their admiration for Dutch achievements was a constant refrain. This article traces the heterogeneous Dutch influences on German internal colonization between 1790 and 1914 and the mixed results of Germans efforts to adapt Dutch models of wasteland colonization. Indeed, despite rising German influence in transnational debates over European internal colonization, derogatory comparisons between mediocre German ventures and the unrelenting progress of the Dutch persisted. Thus, the example of northwest Germany highlights how mounting anxieties about ‘backwardness’ continued to mold the enterprise in the modern era and challenges the notion that the profound German influences on the Netherlands had no analog in the other direction.


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On the need for a deep past when you have a short history (and on the indigenisation of the settler): David M. Krueger, Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America, University of Minnesota Press, 2015

19Sep15

Description: What do our myths say about us? Why do we choose to believe stories that have been disproven? David M. Krueger takes an in-depth look at a legend that held tremendous power in one corner of Minnesota, helping to define both a community’s and a state’s identity for decades.

In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer claimed to have discovered a large rock with writing carved into its surface in a field near Kensington, Minnesota. The writing told a North American origin story, predating Christopher Columbus’s exploration, in which Viking missionaries reached what is now Minnesota in 1362 only to be massacred by Indians. The tale’s credibility was quickly challenged and ultimately undermined by experts, but the myth took hold.

Faith in the authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone was a crucial part of the local Nordic identity. Accepted and proclaimed as truth, the story of the Rune Stone recast Native Americans as villains. The community used the account as the basis for civic celebrations for years, and advocates for the stone continue to promote its validity despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a hoax. Krueger puts this stubborn conviction in context and shows how confidence in the legitimacy of the stone has deep implications for a wide variety of Minnesotans who embraced it, including Scandinavian immigrants, Catholics, small-town boosters, and those who desired to commemorate the white settlers who died in the Dakota War of 1862.

Krueger demonstrates how the resilient belief in the Rune Stone is a form of civil religion, with aspects that defy logic but illustrate how communities characterize themselves. He reveals something unique about America’s preoccupation with divine right and its troubled way of coming to terms with the history of the continent’s first residents. By considering who is included, who is left out, and how heroes and villains are created in the stories we tell about the past, Myths of the Rune Stone offers an enlightening perspective on not just Minnesota but the United States as well.


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Comparing settlers and comparing indigenes: David Wrobel, ‘Considering Frontiers and Empires: George Kennan’s Siberia and the U.S. West’, The Western Historical Quarterly, 46, 3, 2015, pp. 285-309

18Sep15

Abstract: This article examines the late nineteenth-century writings of American explorer, travel writer, and journalist George Kennan on Siberian indigenous peoples, the region’s incarceration and exile system, and his early twentieth-century commentary on federal Indian policy. Kennan’s work highlights the possibilities for comparative analysis of the U.S. empire in the Far West and Russia’s far eastern empire.


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Settlers who hunt and those who don’t: Shelley Burgin, ‘Why the difference in the recreational hunting ethic between Australians and North Americans? An opinion with emphasis on “furbearers”‘, International Journal of Environmental Studies, 2015

18Sep15

Abstract: Australia and North America have many similar cultural features. Yet, although North America has a strong recreational hunting culture, the sport is limited in Australia. This paper investigates why this difference may have developed. It appears that a major difference is the reason for settlement: Europeans were attracted to North America because of its abundant wildlife and the socio-economic value of furbearers already established, whereas Australia was settled as a penal colony. The colonists found Australia’s wildlife was scarce and unfamiliar, offering no prospect of socio-economic gain from hunting furbearers. With over-exploitation, both continents moved to conservation of their wildlife. North America developed a conservation ethic based on a social, utilitarian approach to sustainable management of furbearers. Australia embraced a holistic approach to conservation to protect biodiversity. The differences, therefore, result from zoological differences and not innate cultural difference.


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