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On settler future pasts: Caroline Ford, ‘The Inheritance of Empire and the Ruins of Rome in French Colonial Algeria’, Past & Present, 226, 10, 2015 pp. 57-77

14Feb15

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On settler perception: Hannah Mayne, ‘Zooming-In on Terms and Spaces: Women’s Perspectives and Cognitive Mapping in a West Bank Settlement’, in The Changing World Religion Map, 2015, pp 3227-3247

11Feb15

Abstract: This chapter focuses on women in a West Bank settlement in the Occupied Territories, examining their imagination and perception of the contested area in which they live. Unlike previous studies that concentrate on extremist Jewish groups, their male members, and their fringe and illegal activities in this region, this research considers the subtler and more nuanced opinions and perspectives expressed by women in an established settlement town. Through ethnographic fieldwork in the community at large and cognitive mapping with three specific mothers, it is shown that women build busy social and religious lives, un-effected by, and often particularly unaware of, the dramatic political tensions a few dozen meters off, beyond the barbed wire fence that surrounds their settlement. Focusing on the immediacy of the settlement, the women stress the normal and pleasant aspects that attract them to this location, including cheaper housing prices, intimate community life, and good schools. Furthermore, women speak about the importance of the Biblical land more than the modern state, and Palestinian citizens become a theoretical blip on a predominantly religious and historical landscape. The surrounding Palestinian populations are referred to in vague, abstract terms that do not acknowledge their adverse living conditions and their lives under military occupation. Ultimately, what is shown through this research is the complex combination of political economy, religion, and history in defining the manner in which these women conceive and experience the landscape.


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Challenging settler colonialism: Hip hop and indigenous languages in the Americas: Jenell Navarro, ‘WORD: Hip-Hop, Language, and Indigeneity in the Americas’, Critical Sociology, 2015

11Feb15

Abstract: Indigenous hip-hop artists throughout the Americas are currently challenging cultural genocide and contemporary post-racial discourse by utilizing ancestral languages in hip-hop cultural production. While the effects of settler colonialism and white supremacy have been far-reaching genocidal projects throughout the Americas, one primary site of resistance has been language. Artists such as Tall Paul (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe), Tolteka (Mexica), and Los Nin (Quecha), who rap in Ojibwe, Nahuatl, and Kichwa respectively, trouble the pervasive structure of U.S. cultural imperialism that persists throughout the Americas. As a result, Indigenous hip-hop is a medium to engage the process of decolonization by 1) disseminating a conscious pan-indigeneity through lyricism and alliance building, 2) retaining and teaching Indigenous languages in their songs, and 3) implementing a radical orality in their verses that revitalizes both Indigenous oral traditions/storytelling and the early message rap of the 1970s and 1980s.


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On indigenous sovereignties, energy infrastructures, and settler colonialism: Dana E. Powell, ‘The rainbow is our sovereignty: Rethinking the politics of energy on the Navajo Nation’

11Feb15
Abstract: This article offers a political-ecological reflection on Navajo (Diné) sovereignty, emphasizing lived and territorial interpretations of sovereignty, expanding our standard, juridical-legal notions of sovereignty that dominate public discourse on tribal economic and energy development. Operating from a critical analysis of settler colonialism, I suggest that alternative understandings of sovereignty – as expressed by Diné tribal members in a range of expressive practices – open new possibilities for thinking about how sovereign futures might be literally constructed through specific energy infrastructures. The article follows the controversy surrounding a proposed coal fired power plant known as Desert Rock, placing the phantom project in a longer, enduring history of struggle over energy extraction on Navajo land in order to illuminate this contested future. Broadly, these re-significations of sovereignty point toward a distinct modality of environmental action that suggests other kinds of relationships are at stake, challenging assumptions made by adversaries and allies alike that the politics of protesting (in this case) coal technologies is a practice with self-evident ethics. To intervene in these broad debates, I propose that there are multiple landscapes of power shaping Navajo territory, which must be brought into the ongoing, urgent debates over how the Navajo Nation might develop a more sustainable energy policy for the future.

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Alan Lester, ‘Empire and the Place of Panic’, in Robert Peckham (ed.), Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, Hong Kong University Press, 2015

08Feb15

On panic being ‘an intrinsic accompaniment to the very establishment of imperialism, especially on settler frontiers‘ (p. 23).


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David McCallum, ‘Criminal neglect: tracing the category of the Aboriginal “neglected child”‘, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

08Feb15

Abstract: There were times in Australian history when the singular, awesome power of ‘the Crown’ was wielded over colonial subjects of the British Empire, including citizen settlers occupying new lands and subject populations whose territories were claimed on behalf of the sovereign. This article presupposes that many consequences of invasion under eighteenth century conventions of conquest and rule are still evident in present-day Australian liberal forms of governing, including powers to restrict and control the basic life conditions of Aboriginal peoples, their occupation of lands and life sustenance, and their close interactions with State authorities. The paper considers one aspect of the sociology and politics of liberal modes of governing: the function of specialist knowledges that inform modes of governing Aboriginal peoples, in this case the exercise of powers concerned to know and manage the Aboriginal ‘neglected’ child and their effects on the criminalising of Aboriginal children into the present.


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Peter Burdon, Georgina Drew, Matthew Stubbs, Adam Webster, Marcus Barber, ‘Decolonising Indigenous water “rights” in Australia: flow, difference, and the limits of law’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

08Feb15

Abstract: This article addresses Indigenous Australian claims to water resources and how they inform and relate to current Australian law and contemporary legal thinking about future possibilities. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from historical records, previous ethnographic investigation with Indigenous Australians, current legal scholarship, and social anthropological theory. In doing so, it analyses Indigenous dependencies on water, the history of settler colonial orientations to water bodies, the evolution of settler colonial–Indigenous relations to natural resources, and the development of the Australian legal system’s regulation of water. This provides foundations for a discussion of the limitations of settler colonial notions of property and the failure of settler colonial law to understand and incorporate the dynamism of Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the meaning and productive capacity of water flows within Indigenous cosmologies and sociocultural and ecological systems. Calling for a decolonial turn in legal approaches to Indigenous access and water resource determination, the authors explore the ways in which Australian law may need to ‘unthink’ settler colonial notions of resource ownership as a prerequisite for reformulating future water policy and planning. This reformulation relies on a more extensive legal philosophical engagement with the concept of ‘flow’, a concept that already exists in both water law and planning, but which has not been adequately theorised and enacted. A more comprehensive legal understanding of flow in the context of Indigenous understandings of, and claims to, water provides more sustainable and equitable legal and analytical foundations for managing future water resources issues. The article creates the space for a more culturally relevant notion of ‘Indigenous water rights’ and for new ways of honouring the interrelationship between water flows, meaning-making practices, and cultural continuity.


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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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