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Richard J. Martin, David Trigger, ‘”Nothing never change”: mapping land, water and Aboriginal identity in the changing environments of northern Australia’s Gulf Country’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

08Feb15

Abstract: Gulf Country Aboriginal people perceive water as an integral part of the broader cultural landscape rather than a conceptually distinct element. Customary connection to and ownership of water therefore intersects with links to contiguous areas known in the anthropological literature as ‘estates’ and in local parlance as ‘countries’. For many Aboriginal people into the present, the ‘law’ which underlies this system of ‘countries’ was laid down in the Dreaming and does not change. ‘Nothing never change’ is the local form articulating this conviction. While a powerful expression of traditionalism, the commitment to leaving everything ‘like it is now’, in our findings, in fact involves an acknowledgement of environmental changes resulting from introduced plants and animals along with Euro-Australian settlement. Notwithstanding determined traditionalism, Aboriginal law, like settler law, changes constantly, responding to new challenges by transforming continuing traditions and incorporating influences from the broader society which are genuinely new and different. Drawing on the results of ethnographic research during cultural mapping work in the Gulf, we address this theme particularly in the context of land rights and native title processes over recent decades.


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Jessica Hallenbeck, ‘Returning to the water to enact a treaty relationship: the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

08Feb15

Abstract: The Two Row Wampum is the first treaty between Europeans and Indigenous Nations on Anowarakowa Kawennote/Great Turtle Island/North America. The 2013 Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign culminated in a 14-day paddle on the Mahicantuck/Hudson River. This article draws on the author’s experience as a participant and interviews conducted with full trip paddlers and organizers to argue that the enactment (re)inscribed the Two Row Wampum treaty relationship into the waters of the Mahicantuck/Hudson, the surrounding landscape, and enactment paddlers. The renewal campaign is one example of how water can form the basis of decolonial political practice, revealing colonial understandings of territory, law, and entitlement.


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Lisa Cooke, ‘”North” in contemporary Canadian national–cultural imaginaries: a haunted phantasm’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

08Feb15

Abstract: In this paper, I ask two questions of ideas of ‘North’ in Canadian national–cultural imaginaries. How does ‘North’ operate as a phantasm in these imaginaries? And what spaces of potentiality open up when the ghosts that haunt this phantasm come into view and are granted the due they demand? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Canada’s Yukon Territory and looking to the emerging field of settler colonial studies for guidance, I am asking these questions in the context of Canada as a settler colonial project. I argue that the ways that ‘North’ is infused with originary qualities and held up as emblematic of senses of Canadian selfhood places it within the structure of the phantasm in ways that work to reinforce settler colonial relations and interests. This cultural production, however, is not static or stable. It can be interrupted. It is haunted by ghosts that come into view and jam up the (seemingly) smooth narrative surface of ideas of ‘North’ in Canadian settler colonial national–cultural imaginaries. This article ends in the opening created by one such interruption at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre in Dawson City, Yukon. In a moment of incredible courage the Tr’ondëck Hwëch’in opened their doors to a powerful exhibit titled ‘Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of Residential Schools: Finding Our Way Home’. In so doing the ghosts that haunt ideas of ‘North’ as a scape of national–cultural originary pride come to life, unsettling this settler colonial cultural production by making visible the legacies and structures of displacement, dispossession, and violence that lay at the core of the project of Canadian nation-building.


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Daniel Coleman, ‘Indigenous place and diaspora space: of literalism and abstraction’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2005

08Feb15

Abstract: Indigeneity and diaspora are deeply related but deeply divided. Although they share the hazards of displacement, usually through settler colonial and/or capitalist expropriation of ancestral lands, the differences between their histories of displacement have resulted in very different political and cultural projects. Rather than trying to bridge these differences, this article deploys a kind of strategic binarism by reading the poetry of Syilx author Jeannette Armstrong in contrast with that of Black Atlantic writer Dionne Brand in order to highlight the tensions between Indigenous commitments to literal places as compared to diasporic distrust of nativism and its reputed essentialism. By animating a dialogue between advocates of literal Indigenous place and of abstract diasporic space, this article seeks to open what Cree philosopher Willie Ermine calls an ‘ethical space of engagement’ where Indigenous and diasporic differences can mutually inform one another.


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Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism, Oxford University Press, 2015.

06Feb15

Sam Haselby offers a new and persuasive account of the role of religion in the formation of American nationality, showing how a contest within Protestantism reshaped American political culture and led to the creation of an enduring religious nationalism.

Following U.S. independence, the new republic faced vital challenges, including a vast and unique continental colonization project undertaken without, in the centuries-old European senses of the terms, either “a church” or “a state.” Amid this crisis, two distinct Protestant movements arose: a popular and rambunctious frontier revivalism; and a nationalist, corporate missionary movement dominated by Northeastern elites. The former heralded the birth of popular American Protestantism, while the latter marked the advent of systematic Protestant missionary activity in the West.

The explosive economic and territorial growth in the early American republic, and the complexity of its political life, gave both movements opportunities for innovation and influence. This book explores the competition between them in relation to major contemporary developments-political democratization, large-scale immigration and unruly migration, fears of political disintegration, the rise of American capitalism and American slavery, and the need to nationalize the frontier. Haselby traces these developments from before the American Revolution to the rise of Andrew Jackson. His approach illuminates important changes in American history, including the decline of religious distinctions and the rise of racial ones, how and why “Indian removal” happened when it did, and with Andrew Jackson, the appearance of the first full-blown expression of American religious nationalism.


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Megan Davies, ‘Make-Believing White Civility: Historical Re-enactments at Fort Langley, British Columbia’, Canadian Theatre Review, 161, 2015, pp. 55-59

06Feb15
Abstract: In 1858 Governor James Douglas proclaimed British Columbia a colony at Fort Langley before an audience of Hudson’s Bay Company officials, workers, and Indigenous leaders. The Proclamation dissolved the Hudson’s Bay Company trading monopoly and, while claiming to protect Indigenous lands, actually asserted British ownership of their territory. In the present, Fort Langley National Historic Site holds regular re-enactments of the Proclamation through their educational programs targeting local schools. The script for these re-enactments, authored by Parks Canada staff, allows schoolchildren to role-play a scenario in which James Douglas proclaims British Columbia a colony to protect Indigenous lands, without explicitly staging the negative consequences for Indigenous peoples that the claiming of those lands caused.

I link these two events, the 1858 Proclamation and the present-day re-enactments, by comparing the script’s content to its historical and contemporary context. I conclude that the Proclamation re-enactments become performances of recolonization when Parks Canada deceptively presents its own wry civility (Daniel Coleman). The 1858 Proclamation’s embedded civility, and its repetition and reformation in the contemporary script, the production process, and the surrounding social structure, allows colonial ideology to be physicalized, invested, and passed on to and through children at the Fort Langley National Historic Site.


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Carla Melo: ‘Are We All in the Same Boat? Staging the “Invisible Majority” in the Streets of Toronto’, Canadian Theatre Review, 161, 2015, pp. 33-37

06Feb15

Abstract: Probing the ways in which activist performance practices may effectively generate public debate around pressing human rights issues, my article examines a Toronto-based hybrid project that brings together urban intervention, installation, and public discussion as a means of interrogating the interconnectedness of recent Canadian immigration policies, notions of belonging, colonial discourse, and racial identity. More specifically, the appropriately entitled Mass Arrival: The Intervention (2013) challenged the construction of whiteness vis-à-vis that of “boat people” refugees as it “celebrated” the third-year anniversary of the arrival of a ship carrying over four hundred Tamil asylum seekers to the coast of British Columbia—a contentious border occurrence that turned into a media spectacle, which subsequently triggered a number of regressive changes in refugee law. Inverting the colonial practice of exhibiting exotic others while carnivalizing the tradition of re-enactments, this urban intervention indeed staged a “mass arrival,” but this time the “boat people” were white-identified community participants. I consider the ways this performance of whiteness may trouble multiculturalist discourse, border politics, Toronto’s urban development, and the power dynamics of much community-based artistic work, ultimately suggesting that the piece not only performed a decolonial gesture but also relied on a decolonial creative process.


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Jeffrey S. Denis, ‘Contact Theory in a Small-Town Settler-Colonial Context The Reproduction of Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-White Canadian Relations’, American Sociological Review, 80, 1, 2015, pp. 218-242

06Feb15

Abstract: This article builds on group position theory and the subcategorization model of intergroup contact by illustrating how, in a small-town settler-colonial context, contact tends to reproduce, rather than challenge, the inequitable racial structure. In Northwestern Ontario, Indigenous-settler relations are characterized by widespread intergroup marriage and friendship as well as pervasive prejudice and discrimination. Using 18 months of fieldwork and 160 interviews and surveys with First Nations, Métis, and non-Indigenous residents, I show that although contact is associated with less “old-fashioned” prejudice (i.e., overt categorical hostility), it does not necessarily eliminate whites’ superior sense of group position. Even white individuals who have close Indigenous friends or spouses often express laissez-faire racism. Three mutually reinforcing social processes—subtyping, ideology-based homophily, and political avoidance norms—interact to sustain whites’ sense of group superiority and justifications for racial inequity. These processes are facilitated by historical and structural conditions, in this case colonization and small-town dynamics.  


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On settler alternative worlds: Mimi Dwyer, ‘The Brazilian Town Where the American Confederacy Lives On’, Vice, 05/02/15

06Feb15

One day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man paying homage to the history of the Confederate States of America. “American culture is a beautiful culture,” he said. Some of his friends had Confederate blood.

Gomes had joined some 2,000 Brazilians at the annual festa of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, the brotherhood of Confederate descendants in Brazil, on a plot near the town of Americana, which was settled by Southern defectors 150 years ago. The graveyard is usually empty save for its caretaker or the odd worshipper drawn to its little brick chapel. On the April morning of the festa, a public-address system blaring the Confederate battle song “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” had interrupted the cemetery’s silence. Brazilians in ten-gallon hats and leather jackets called out greetings.

For miles around the graveyard, unfiltered sun beat down on sugarcane fields planted by the thousands of Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction and fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. Their scattered diaspora has gathered annually for the past 25 years. The party they throw, which receives funding from the local government, is the family reunion of the Confederados, one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.

(With thanks to Alex Young)


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Pekka Pitkänen, ‘Reading Genesis–Joshua as a Unified Document from an Early Date: A Settler Colonial Perspective’, Biblical Theology Bulletin, 45, 1, 2015, pp. 3–31

04Feb15

Abstract: This essay proposes based on literary-compositional considerations how two authors working together could
have composed Genesis–Joshua. After this, it suggests that Genesis–Joshua can be seen to reflect a sociopolitical
transformation of ancient Canaanite societies into an Israelite one(s) through a process that can be labeled as
ancient settler colonialism, and that the document could have been written concomitantly. Subsequently, relevant
ancient Near Eastern and archaeological evidence will be considered, suggesting compatibility with the idea that
Genesis–Joshua has reused and readapted existing traditions together with creative narrative retelling for its sociopolitical
purposes, and that this could have already taken place from the late second millennium bce on. The essay
concludes by drawing out some explicit contemporary implications of such a reading of Genesis–Joshua.


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