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On the settlement of Iceland: Árni Einarsson, ‘Viking Age Fences and Early Settlement Dynamics in Iceland’, Journal of the North Atlantic, 27, 2015

30Aug15

Abstract: Soon after the settlement of Iceland in the late 9th and early 10th century, an extensive system of turf walls was erected and was functional for about 200 years. After its collapse in the 12th century, few if any walls were built until the late 18th century. The remnants of this Viking Age fence system have been mapped in northeast Iceland, revealing enclosures with a characteristic geometry, broadly reflecting property boundaries. The fences are the product of a pastoral society, which then as now was based on dispersed farmsteads subsisting on animal husbandry. There was a strong seasonal component, most notably a need for harvesting and storing winter fodder. The short-lived fence system offers a rare snapshot of the division of a newly colonized landscape into functional units. This paper presents a framework for evaluating those units based on current thinking in behavioral ecology. The settlement of Iceland by the Viking Age colonists may be described by principles of habitat-selection theory, and the configuration of fences may be understood by factors governing division of spatial resources by territorial organisms. These factors include density, predictability and dispersion of resources, habitat geometry, intruder pressure, and economic defendability. Finer-scale fence patterns emerge from the interaction of territorial boundaries and a need to restrict livestock movements within the farmstead. Illustrative examples are drawn from the author’s own studies of settlement patterns and configuration of defended space in wild ducks and also from the medieval Book of Settlements, which describes the early colonization of Iceland.


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A special Feral Feminisms issue on settler colonialism: Shaista Patel, Ghaida Moussa, Nishant Upadhyay (eds), Complicities, Connection, and Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism, 2015

30Aug15

From the introduction: As we set out to write our Call for Papers for this issue, we, the editors, were not certain about where to begin or head. We knew that we wanted Issue 4 of Feral Feminisms to engage with questions of the anti-colonial and/or decolonial and anti-racist scholarship of diasporic people of colour living in white settler-colonial nation-states. However, we wanted to engage with these questions in a language that did not homogenize all bodies of colour, that was careful about respecting the different histories and presents of Black bodies, and that showed a critical understanding of the different histories and presents and different bodies and different power relations that organize our bodies here along multiple axes of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, religion, citizenship, language, and countries of birth. This was a difficult task and one at which we very successfully failed. The failure was not just ours, though. It was the failure of our political imaginations and theoretical conceptualizations, which are not that of any one individual. This was the failure of language, of the terms and bodies from which we began. It was the failure of our anti-racist and anti-colonial politics. One thing we learned through writing the Call for Papers is that what we learn in graduate school is less about our research in terms of content or how we learn to frame our questions. It is more important to begin to engage with the limits of our knowledge and of learning how to live within those limits. Our failure and recognition of power and limits were many. There was a lot we did or did not do in in terms of ethical or critical engagements with violent erasures.


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Decolonising settler and non-settler colonialisms: Natacha Gagné, ‘Brave New Words: The Complexities and Possibilities of an “Indigenous” Identity in French Polynesia and New Caledonia’, The Contemporary Pacific, 27, 2, 2015, pp. 371-402

30Aug15

Abstract: In French Polynesia and New Caledonia, the “indigenous strategy” in reference to the world indigenous movement and UN indigenous rights instruments is a relatively new one in the struggle to recover sovereignty. Individuals and volunteer associations only began to explore the possibilities of this strategy in the mid-1990s, and it continues to hold a marginal place in the political field of the French territories in Oceania. This article explores how indigeneity and indigenous rights are understood and enacted locally, drawing on local voices and actions within a local and national context. It shows how the framework for the struggles of the indigenous peoples in the French territories in Oceania differs radically from those of other peoples who have been seen as emblematic of the category “indigenous peoples”.


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Settler colonialism in Europe: Liina Lukas, ‘Who Holds the Right to the Land? Narratives of Colonization in Baltic-German and Estonian Literatures’, in Andreas Beer, Gesa Mackenthun (eds), Fugitive Knowledge: The Loss and Preservation of Knowledge in Cultural Contact Zones, Waxmann Verlag, 2015, pp. 65-82

30Aug15

Link to the book.


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Decolonising local relationships; an example? Janelle Young, Reimagining Mi’kmaq-State Relations: Facing Colonialism at the Mi’kmaq-Nova Scotia-Canada Tripartite Forum, MA thesis, Dalhousie University, 2015

30Aug15

Abstract: To date, the literature on Canadian Indigenous-state relations has paid little attention to more localized, informal approaches to dispute resolution. Through ethnographic research on the Mi’kmaq-Nova Scotia-Canada Tripartite Forum, my thesis explores past and current Tripartite Forum members’ perspectives on how it has impacted relations between the Mi’kmaq and federal and provincial governments. I argue that, on the surface, the Tripartite Forum occupies a critical role in ensuring that government policies better meet the needs of Mi’kmaw communities. At the same time, Tripartite Forum members are required to confront a legacy of colonialism that, for the Mi’kmaq, cannot be solved through the creation of culturally relevant programs and services alone. That often reproduces the very colonizing power relations that the Tripartite Forum is meant to undo. By contrast, Mi’kmaw members of the Tripartite Forum envision a relationship based on the values of equality and sharing that are contained within the peace and friendship treaties signed by their ancestors. Improving relations between Mi’kmaw communities and the Canadian and Nova Scotian States will ultimately require a significant reordering of power beyond the current mandate of the Forum.


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On US Settler Colonial Landscapes: Ellen-Rae Cachola, ‘Reading the Landscape of U.S. Settler Colonialism in Southern Oʻahu’, Feral Feminisms, Complicities, Connections, & Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism, 4, 2015

26Aug15

Abstract: This study used a walking tour to examine Filipino diasporic settler awareness of the structural violence that Kanaka ʻŌiwi endure in Hawaiʻi. Military infrastructures and hotels in Waikīkī evidence the Westphalian state that occupies indigenous commons, recruiting natives and immigrants to participate in the settler-colonial state as dehumanized subjects. Naming settler colonialism as a Westphalian governing system illuminates how local occupation is integral to occupations in other parts of the world. This framework offers a common language for indigenous and diasporic settlers to create new models of local and
international relationality.


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Decolonising settler and gendered colonialisms: Andrew Allsup, Queer Indigenous Rhetorics: Decolonizing the Socio-Symbolic Order of Euro-American Gender and Sexual Imaginaries, MA Thesis, Kansas State University, 2015

26Aug15

Abstract: This thesis explores the rhetorical function of creative writing being written by queer/two-spirit identified indigenous authors. The rhetorical function being the way these stories politicize the various ways gender and sexuality were foundational tools of settler colonialism in de-tribalizing and assimilating indigenous folks. The literary perspective often elides politics in favor of deconstructing aspects of creative writing such as genre, syntax, and themes instead of the socio-political potential such works produce. The three works I examine all have something to teach rhetorical scholars about the need to politicize the socio-sexual and gendered imaginaries of settler colonialism in discourses of the founding fathers, manifest destiny, westward expansion, land purchase. statehood, American exceptionalism, democracy promotion, and many more. They fundamentally challenge rhetorics that posit static notions of American identity and/or purpose that represses the historical and ongoing genocide of indigenous culture and life. In this way, they intervene in the very notion of communicability itself within the socio-symbolic economy of settler colonialism and its attendant heteropatriarchal gendered and sexual imaginaries.


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German settlers in Brazil; Germanness, Brazilianness, freedom, unfreedom: Eugene S. Cassidy, ‘The Ambivalence of Slavery, The Certainty of Germanness: Representations of Slave-Holding and Its Impact Among German Settlers in Brazil, 1820–1889’, German History, 33, 3, 2015, pp. 367-384

24Aug15

Abstract: While there is a growing interest regarding Brazil’s connection to the development of German nationalism, the topic of how Germans in Europe and Brazil related to slavery there remains mainly unexplored. This is startling, considering that Brazil was both the second-largest recipient of German immigrants and the largest slave-holding society in the world. This article examines how claims regarding German settlers’ relationship with Brazilian slavery were central in constructing the image of the German abroad as industrious and civilizing.


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Nation-building, ‘Western institutionalism’ and theimplementation of ‘indigenous self-government’ in Greenland after 2009: Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘”To See What State We Are In”: First Years of the Greenland Self-Government Act and the Pursuit of Inuit Sovereignty’, Ethnopolitics: Formerly Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 2015

24Aug15

Abstract: This article examines the implementation of Greenland’s self-government (commonly referred to as self-rule) through an analysis of the Greenland government in the first four years of the Greenland Self-Government Act (SGA). Greenland and its government are numerically dominated by the Inuit, one of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. The article begins with an overview of Greenland as a country and its political development, from a Danish colony to the 2009 Greenland SGA. After explaining Greenland’s governance structure and the role of Inuit governance in Greenland’s parliamentary system, it analyses the implementation process of the self-government agreement. It is argued that the SGA with its main focus on modern nation-building within the framework of Western institutionalism constitutes a unique means of implementing indigenous self-government. It revisits the norm of the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination understood primarily as a collective human right and sets a precedent within the framework of indigenous rights in international law.


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Reflecting on the invisibility of violence under settler colonialism: Cindy Holmes, Sarah Hunt, Amy Piedalue, ‘Violence, Colonialism, and Space: Towards a Decolonizing Dialogue’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14, 2, 2014, pp. 539-570

24Aug15

Abstract: Broadly taking up themes of violence and colonialism, this paper was first presented as a roundtable at the Decolonizing Cascadias?: 2013 Critical Geographies Mini Conference at the University of British Columbia. Framed as a
roundtable conversation among the three authors, the paper critically examines the material and ideological relations through which certain types of violence are made invisible in the context of ongoing colonialism in white settler society. In dialogue
across their various academic, activist and personal experiences, the authors argue for a critical decolonizing geography of violence that examines how spaces and subjects are constructed relationally through social, material and legal processes of
racial violence and its gendered and sexualized politics. How do certain forms of violence come to be naturalized within civilizing and modernizing discourse, such that the violence of development or colonialism come to be erased? How do some
lives become constructed as inherently violent in order to deny the violence against them? Disrupting and examining the settler colonial thinking and practices that persist within diverse social movements and academic disciplines, including
geography, the dialogue explores who has the authority to name what forms of violence are seen as legitimate. As activist-scholars engaged in knowledge production and legitimization, the authors are interested in envisioning new
possibilities for how they understand violence and resistance, particularly by centering Indigenous ontologies and by naming lived realities which are not accounted for in dominant discourses of violence and colonialism.


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