Despite recent strides in the direction of achieving a more equitable and genuine place for Indigenous voices in the conservation conversation, the conservation movement must more deliberately and thoroughly grapple with the legacy of its deeply settler colonial history if it is to, in actuality and not merely in rhetoric, achieve the aim of being more equitable. In this article, we show how the conservation movement, historically and still largely today, traffics in certain ethical and political values that are, in (...) principle or in effect, anti-Indigenous. Through this examination, we hope to reveal how present-day conservation efforts, even if ‘well-meaning’ or nominally deferential regarding Indigenous peoples and perspectives, in fact reinforce settler colonial structures. In particular, we critique the notion of the uninhabited wilderness as a conservation ideal and the disavowal of originary violence (along with a parallel positing of settler nativism) in the articulation of conservation historicity and the founding of conservation movements. We conclude by offering some steps conservationists can take to alter their practices, methods, and values in ways that recognize, respect, and reciprocate with Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

The relation between Australia’s First Nations peoples and settler-colonial Australians may be characterised as having “miscarried” to the extent that colonial difference is unacknowledged,...

On 27 March 2014, Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo woman was shot and killed by Austin Shipley, a white male police officer, also 27 years old, who said he was trying to apprehend her for a suspected shoplifting. Shipley was never charged, and the Department of Justice declined to investigate the Winslow police on the matter. This article explores Shipley’s killing of Loreal Tsingine and the police investigation of the shooting as quotidian events in settler colonial states. Police shootings of (...) Indigenous people and the legal response to police use of force (along with everyday settler violence) are a part of the racial terror that is a central part of settler colonialism. Both the shooting and the official narratives of it as a justifiable use of force reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a settler state, a state that continually imagines and consolidates itself as a community of whites imperiled by Indians among others. White settler violence directed at those imagined as threats lives just beneath the surface of everyday settler life, and importantly, flows through institutions such as policing, embedding itself in everyday professional routines. The extractive relations that are the basis of settler colonialism require and produce white subjects for whom Indigenous lands and bodies are the resource for white identity; policing is one site where white men and women (as well as those aspiring to whiteness), can enact racial hierarchy on behalf of the colonial state with impunity. (shrink)

This article both defines and shows the limits of settler shame for achieving decolonialized justice. It discusses the work settler shame does in “healing” the nation and delivering Canadians into a new sense of pride, thus maintaining the myth of the peacekeeping Canadian. This kind of shame does so, somewhat paradoxically, by making people feel good about feeling bad. Thus, the contiguous relationship of shame and recognition in a settler colonial context produces a form of pernicious self-recognition. Drawing on the (...) work of Sara Ahmed and Glen Coulthard, this article shows that a politics of recognition informed by settler shame has done little to actually see or hear Indigenous peoples on their own terms. Since settler shame is a self-directed emotion that seeks to be discharged through reconciliatory processes that are dependent on liberal recognition, it remains a mere optics of justice wedded to settler ignorance. The dependence on insufficient recognition renders the reconciliatory drive in Canada similarly insufficient, even harmful. Settler shame, then, is dangerous in relationship with recognition and reconciliation in Canada today, maintains settler colonialism, and forestalls Indigenous futurity and resurgence. (shrink)

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between (...) Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance. (shrink)

In ‘A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district’, Burnett et al. scrutinize the memory activism of the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council, which is part of the wider ‘Khoisan resurgence’ sweeping across post-apartheid South Africa. Although the authors missed important nuances, they also pointed out flaws in the way I used Niezen’s ‘therapeutic history’ [Niezen, R. (2009). The rediscovered self: Indigenous identity and cultural justice. McGill-Queen’s Press] in my work to account for why Khoisan (...) activists turn to the past. I therefore not only respond to their criticism, but also revise aspects of my theoretical framework. Therapeutic history is not divorced from material concerns. Nor is it representative of all engagements with the past by indigenous people or simply the opposite of academic history. Instead, by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork and theorizing alongside the Khoisan, I show how it captures emic discourses on the past that entangle notions of indigenous identity, healing, and history in order to resist settler colonialism and its oppressive etic histories. While the concept of therapeutic history has its limitations, it effectively highlights indigenous people’s agency in the face of settler colonialism in South Africa and elsewhere. (shrink)

In this article, the authors examine the systemic nature of state violence and racial terror in the context of the Australian settler state and Indigenous deaths in custody. Drawing on Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton’s (2003) concept of a “double economy of terror,” the authors contend that police violence and Aboriginal deaths in custody must be read in terms of the standard operating procedures of a double economy of terror that ensures the institutional reproduction of the Australian settler colonial state. (...) Death in police custody, Perera and Pugliese argue, is coextensive with the larger governmental and administrative apparatuses of the colonial state. In the face of the settler state’s systemic ignorability of the ongoing racialized violence against Indigenous peoples, the authors conclude their paper opposing such a state with an Indigenous voice that refuses tacit acquiescence and that howls with rage at the mounting Aboriginal deaths in custody and rates of Indigenous imprisonment. (shrink)

The article proposes that climate change makes enduring colonial injustices and structures visible. It focuses on the imposition and dominance of colonial concepts of land and self-determination on Indigenous peoples in settler states. It argues that if the dominance of these colonial frameworks remains unaddressed, the progressing climate change will worsen other colonial injustices, too. Specifically, Indigenous self-determination capabilities will be increasingly undermined, and Indigenous peoples will experience the loss of what they understand as relevant land from within their own (...) ontologies of land. The article holds that even if settler states strive to repair colonial injustices, these efforts will be unsuccessful if climate change occurs and decolonization is pursued within the framework of a settler colonial ontology of land. Therefore, the article suggests, decolonization of the ontologies of land and concepts of self-determination is a precondition for a just response to climate change. (shrink)

Settler colonialism is structured in part according to the principle of civilizational progress yet the roots of this doctrine are not well understood. Disparate ideas of progress and practices related to colonial dispossession and domination can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and as far back as ancient Greece, but there remain unexplored logics and continuities. I argue that civilizational progress and settler colonialism are structured according to the opposition between politics governed by reason or faith and the figure of (...) the child as sinful or bestial. Thus, it is not contingent, but rather necessary that justificatory frameworks of European empire and colonialism depict Indigenous peoples as children. To illustrate how the theoretical link between Indigenous peoples and children emerges not as a simple analogy, but rather, as the source of the premodern/modern and savage/civilized binaries, I trace the various historical iterations of the political/childhood opposition through the classical, medieval, enlightenment, and modern eras. I show how the model of civilizational progress from a premodern and savage state of childhood continues to serve as the model for settler colonial exclusion and domination of Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

This article offers an account of settler witnessing of residential school survivor testimony that avoids the politics of recognition and the pitfalls of colonial empathy. It knits together the concepts of bearing witness, Indigenous storytelling, and affective reckoning. Following the work of Kelly Oliver, it argues that witnessing involves a reaching beyond ourselves and responsiveness to the agency and self-determination of the other. Given the cultural genocide of residential schools, responsiveness to the other require openness to and nurturing of Indigenous (...) ways of knowing and being. In order to illustrate the complexities and challenges of settler witnessing, the author reflects on her experiences in attending six of the TRC’s national events and, in particular, what she has learned from Frederick “Fredda” Paul, Passamaquoddy Elder, healer, storyteller, and residential school survivor. The article analyzes aesthetics and emotions in the staging of TRC events and making meaning over time and the temporality of transitional justice. (shrink)

In his Indigenous critique of the field of animal studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation) describes it as having an analytic blind spot when it comes to settler-colonialism, a blind spot that manifests through universalising claims and clumsy arguments about ‘shared’ oppressions, through assumptions that settler colonial political institutions can be a neutral part of the solution, and through a failure to engage with ‘Indigenous studies of other than human life’ (20). In the same article, he calls on decolonial projects (...) to do more to include animality within their purview, to include critiques of animal agriculture and to incorporate critiques of anthropocentrism as ‘a key logic of white supremacy’. Belcourt’s critique of both Animal studies and decolonial projects on the basis of an unequal but mutual marginalisation is an important starting point for research projects like ours that hope to bring Animal studies and Indigenous studies approaches into dialogue about the cultural impacts of introduced animals. Our approach sets out to be ‘triadic’, always involving at least three sides; Settler- Coloniser, Indigene and Animal. (shrink)

Indigenous migration from Latin America to the United States has been on the rise over the past decades. There has also been an increase in Indigenous self‐identification amongst people in the United States who previously self‐identified as Hispanic or Latina/o on census forms. Though Latin American Indigenous migration to the United States has been steadily on the rise since the 1990s, there remains a lack of resources—philosophical, political, and bureaucratic—to account for this migrant group. My goal in this article is (...) to explore in greater depth why Latin American Indigenous migration is hermeneutically marginalised. First, I argue that we problematically fail to understand settler‐state borders—particularly the Mexico‐US border—as, in part, Indigenous spaces. Second, and relatedly, I argue that our failure to understand borders as Indigenous spaces is connected to the widespread, inaccurate presumption that Indigenous peoples ‘lose their authenticity’ (and, in turn, their very Indigenous identities) upon crossing settler‐state borders. Contrary to what I describe as the dominant view of borders as de‐Indigenised or non‐Indigenous spaces, I argue in that many settler‐state borders are spaces where Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous migrants, may experience their Indigenous identities intimately, and even publicly articulate and defend them. Importantly, this does not mean that settler‐state borders do not also harm Indigenous peoples by threating Indigenous sovereignty. I end by arguing that addressing the hermeneutical marginalisation of Latin American Indigenous migration requires a rigorous reconceptualisation of borders themselves as Indigenous spaces. (shrink)

Knowledge is inextricably bound to power in the context of settler colonialism where apprehension of the Other is a tool of domination. Tracing the development of the “settler colonial” paradigm, this article deconstructs Zionist and Israeli dispossession of Palestinian land and sovereignty, applying the sociology of knowledge production to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history (...) of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm’s reformulation. This article offers a phenomenology of Palestinian positionality, a critical potential for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, to consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research into the Israeli-Palestinian case but approaches to decolonization and liberation. (shrink)

This article argues that within the context of settler colonialism, the goal of transitional justice must be decolonisation. Settler colonialism operates according to a logic of elimination that aims to affect the disappearance of Indigenous populations in order to build new societies on expropriated land. This eliminatory logic renders the death of Indigenous peoples “ungrievable”. Therefore, this article proposes a decolonising transitional justice premised on a politics of grief that re-conceptualises Indigenous death as grievable, posing a challenge to the logic (...) of elimination and advancing a “decolonisation of the mind”, and resists a purely affective concept of grief in order to mobilise grief as a political resource to demand transformative structural justice. This article consider deaths at Canada’s Indian Residential Schools as a case study of ungrievability under settler colonialism and the Project of Heart as an illustration of a decolonising form of informal transitional justice. (shrink)

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is tasked with facing the hundred-year history of Indian Residential Schools. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is frequently invoked in relation to the Canadian TRC, perhaps because this is one of the few TRCs worldwide that Canadians know. Whilst the South African TRC is mainly applauded as an international success, I argue that loose analogizing is often more emotive than concise. Whilst much indeed can be drawn from the South African experience, it (...) is important to specify the Canada–South Africa analogy. In this article, I do so by focussing on the institutional approach to truth and how this relates to issues of settler/White denial. The South African experience teaches that narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence. Consequently, I argue that Indigenous–settler reconciliation requires a broad truth that locates residential schools on a continuum of violence, linking extraordinary abuses with structural injustices and historic colonization with lived relationships. (shrink)

Focusing on Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, this article asks: can colonial-settler states obtain forgiveness through political apologies? The article first defends Jacques Derrida’s observation that political apologies resemble the Christian practice of confession. In doing so, it subsequently draws on Michel Foucault’s detailed treatise on confession in order to assess the potential for absolution. For Foucault, the process of engaging in exhaustive truth-telling of sin before a demarcated authority provides a route to such (...) atonement. By contrast, any potential unburdening of sin is lost when there is either no adequate authority to coax the confession or if the confession is less than full. The problem for the settler state is that it is predisposed to re-evoking the imaginary of the settler nation and Westphalian sovereignty in the very process of apologising. Consequently, there is no scope to submit before a higher sovereign body and any truth-telling is necessarily partial. As such, the central argument is that forgiveness for the settler state must remain elusive. The political opportunities arising from this for Indigenous peoples are discussed in the final section. (shrink)

A lot has happened in Indian Country recently: water protectors and the NoDAPL movement brought international attention to Native sovereignty and ongoing resistance to settler forms of violence against Indigenous ways of being; a settler public became aware of the MMIW movement and the ongoing assault on the lives of Indigenous women; an apology was given by executive order for a genocide that occurred in California and a Truth and Healing Council was created to investigate the historical relations between California (...) Indians and the state of California; and Native identity is "complex" and certain people seek to profit from that complexity by duplicitously or erroneously claiming Native identity, to name a few. To... (shrink)

Within food systems governance spaces, civil society organizations (CSOs) play important roles in addressing power structures and shaping decisions. In Canada, CSO food systems actors increasingly understand the importance of building relationships among settler and Indigenous peoples in their work. Efforts to make food systems more sustainable and just necessarily mean confronting the realities that most of what is known as Canada is unceded Indigenous territory, stolen land, land acquired through coercive means, and/or land bound by treaty between specific Indigenous (...) groups and the Crown. CSOs that aim to build more equitable food systems must thus engage with the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, learn/unlearn colonial histories, and build meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples. This paper explores how settler-led CSOs engage with Indigenous communities and organizations in their food systems governance work. The research draws on 71 semi-structured interviews with CSO leaders engaged in food systems work from across Canada. Our analysis presents an illustrative snapshot of the complex and ongoing processes of settler-Indigenous engagement, where many settler-led CSOs aim to work more closely with Indigenous communities and organizations. However, participants also recognize that most existing engagements remain insufficient. We share CSOs’ practices, tensions, and lessons learned as reflections for scholars and practitioners interested in the continuous journey of building settler-Indigenous partnerships and reimagining more just and sustainable food systems, work which requires iterative and critically reflexive learning. (shrink)

With the rise of place-based models of education, credence needs to be given to epistemological traditions that curate individual understandings of and relations to the social world (i.e., places). The epistemological traditions that have been shared across generations of North American settler colonialists are at the center of this article. The dominant epistemology of settler society provides racialized, anthropocentric, and capitalistic understandings of places. Relations to place are cultivated through particular conceptions of nature, private property, and personhood, which remain at (...) the epistemic foundation of Western society. These conceptions are concomitant to modes of domination like white supremacy and settler colonialism, and ultimately constitute an ideal white male settler actor. This article suggests that place-based education carries the potential to offer epistemic resistance to domination, but first needs to engage in a more comprehensive understanding of settler traditions of place. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper takes Chicana/Xicana indigeneity as a productive and problematic site to consider the vexed conjuncture between decolonial and postcolonial approaches to critical knowledge production. I examine the intersection between Chicana and Native feminisms as a point of entry to consider how the incommensurabilities between these formations get played out within specific sites of knowledge production. I read my positionality as a Californio Rancho descendent to explore urgent questions of landedness raised by Indigenous studies scholars and consider how we might (...) productively center questions of settlement within Chicana feminism. While Chicana relationships to land are varied, I reflect on my own positionality as a “settler Xicana” in an effort to sense the political and epistemic stakes for centering decolonial approaches in conversation with postcolonial/transnational feminisms. (shrink)

The paper considers how the logic of settler colonialism, the active and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, shapes scholarship on migration, race and citizenship in Canada. It draws on the insights of settler colonial theory and critiques of methodological nationalism to do so. The concept of differential inclusion and assemblages methodology are proposed as a way to understand the relationship between Indigeneity and migration in a settler colonial context. The paper develops this conceptual proposal through an analysis of a single (...) place over time: Scarborough, Ontario. Authors present portraits of Scarborough, Ontario, Canada to understand how migration and Indigenous sovereignty are narrated and regulated in convergent and divergent ways. Together, the portraits examine historical stories, media discourses, photography and map archives, fieldwork and interviews connected to Scarborough. They reveal how the differential inclusion of migrant, racialized and Indigenous peoples operates through processes of invisibilization and hypervisibilization, fixity and erasure, and memorialization. They also illustrate moments of disruption that work to unsettle settler colonial dispossession. (shrink)

In this piece, we ask, what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with privilege? What does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? These questions are raised through an ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on Treaty 6, 7 and 8 and Coast Salish Territories about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. In the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler (...) colonial socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures – the meso-space where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism. For these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” In this paper, we narrow our focus to the declarations of privilege that many of our interview participants are making. We reflect on these declarations and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and Indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers working in the public sector. We argue that declarations of privilege risk reproducing settler-centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty, and we reflect on how to orient participants towards the material realization of relational accountability and towards imagining otherwise. (shrink)

indians are the "singing remnants" or "graffiti," in the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ("i am graffiti"). The forms this graffiti takes, our inscriptions on the landscape, are as numerous as our Nations, abundant as our ancestors who loved, lived, and passed down knowledge of our lands and histories. "You are the result of the love of thousands," writes Linda Hogan, who beseeches us to listen to the environment surrounding us (159). Deborah Miranda (Coastal Esselen and Chumash) reminds us that (...) we are also the result of violent histories, in her tribal memoir Bad Indians, a book that relishes the tales of her ancestors who resist and act out to survive. This harm, genocide, and settler mapping of worlds also... Read More. (shrink)

What can the analytical framework of settler colonialism contribute to sociological theorizing, research, and overall understanding of the social world? This essay argues that settler colonialism, a distinct social formation with common statuses and predictable dynamics, has much to offer towards new sociological insight regarding the United States. In expanding the scholarly models of colonialism applied to the United States, settler colonial analysis suggests that an underlying logic of Indigenous elimination and settler replacement informs a diverse set of contemporary outcomes (...) and structures. It provides a coherent and overarching framework for explaining such political phenomena as the vigorous presence of “extraconstitutional” tribal governments within the United States, recurrent Native-white conflicts, and the distinctive nature of contemporary Indigenous social and political agency. The essay also analyzes how settler supersession and the desire for Indigenous lands shapes the intensive state management of Indigenous identity, the differing racialization of African Americans and American Indians, and the contrasts between Indigenous and black sociopolitical agendas. Insights from a reconceptualization of the US as a settler colonial society are not limited to a focus on politics, American Indians, race, or the past. The article suggests additional directions for new research that have the potential to reveal contemporary social forces operating at multiple levels and in numerous fields of social action. Finally, the essay offers simple suggestions to sociologists who wish to incorporate settler colonialism in their research and teaching within the discipline or to contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship about American settler colonialism. (shrink)

This paper examines an application of epistemic injustice not fully explored in the literature. How does epistemic injustice function in broader contexts of relationships within countries between colonizers and colonized? More specifically, what can be learned about the ongoing structural aspects of hermeneutical injustice in Canada’s settler history of the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples and the resultant erasing and marginalizing of Indigenous histories, languages, laws, traditions, and practices? In this paper, I use insights from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (...) report to challenge dominant understandings of reconciliation, reciprocity, respect for agency, and the rule of law in settler nations. In its retrieval of the richness and diversity of Indigenous collective interpretive resources, both past and present, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission draws on a broad and full account of relationships that have shaped Indigenous lives and communities, non-Indigenous lives and communities, the interactions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and communities, and the relationships of all of these to and through the state. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a powerful resurgence of settler colonialism as an interpretive framework through which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attached to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, this so-called ‘turn’ to settler colonialism has seen Israel-Palestine increasingly compared alongside New World white settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United States. In seeking to undercut the lens of exceptionalism through which the conflict has conventionally been viewed, the settler colonial paradigm has some important counter-hegemonic implications (...) for reframing Israel-Palestine, not least of which is its prescription for decolonization. However, it is paradoxically in the context of decolonization that the limits of the settler colonial paradigm become most apparent. I argue that these limitations are connected to the dominance of Patrick Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism, which leaves very little room for transformation, and to the particular connotations settler colonial studies has acquired from the New World contexts in which it is most often articulated. This is particularly the case in Israel-Palestine, where these connotations preclude engagement with the national aspects of the conflict and leave under-examined the unique resonances of the settler/native distinction, which need reckoning with in any serious account of decolonization. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to abortion in (...) Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay reconstructs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican analysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler expansionism but reproduced many of the ideologies that (...) sustain practices of settler-colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of contemporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay reconstructs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican analysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler expansionism but reproduced many of the ideologies that (...) sustain practices of settler-colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of contemporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

In this paper, I explain Black feminist identity politics as a practice that is ‘on the way’ to settler decolonization in a US context for the fact that it makes demands that we attend to our “originating” stories and, in doing so, 1) generate potential for difficult coalitions for decolonization in settler colonial USA and 2) promoting a range of refusals (Simpson 2014) that aid in resisting the completion of settler colonialism in North America, which is still an uncompleted project. (...) Ultimately, I claim Black feminist identity politics, properly understood, is a practice that aids in retaining the possibility of decolonization in a settler colonial state by resisting the historical unknowing that facilitates settler futurity. It is not itself settler decolonization, but rather it is “on the way” to such decolonization as it keeps open the need for decolonial futurity. (shrink)

The recent proliferation of settler colonial and Indigenous studies of Palestine have addressed the historical and present-day enclosure of Palestinian land, yet the question of ‘indigeneity’ is underexamined in this literature. Claims to indigeneity in Palestine straddle varied definitions: a racial category; as constructed through the colonial encounter or preceding colonialism; and as a local relation or an international juridico-political category. Using discourse analysis and ethnography of a specific Palestinian sustainable agriculture initiative, I show how for Palestinians, claiming indigeneity brings (...) into tension potential political economic gains, social relations of struggle, and discursive formations of collective subjectivity. A valorisation and commodification of indigeneity as a racial category narrows notions of indigeneity to the biological-cultural, offering challenges for Palestinian struggles for sovereignty. I conclude by asking what theorising from Palestine offers to Marxist theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and whether indigeneity can exceed its commodification. (shrink)

This article examines the application of social contract theorizing to questions pertaining to the rights of indigenous peoples today, with particular reference to recent work by Jeremy Waldron. It is argued that such theorizing must be examined with reference not only to the content of its claims, but also with respect to its general mode of argumentation and its political function in specific contexts. Read in this light, social contract theory may function to unduly deny the claims of indigenous peoples, (...) oftentimes by shifting the register of debate to a relatively abstract and counter-factual level and relieving settler-colonial societies of the burden of proof. Insofar as social contract theory operates to this effect, it is analysed in terms of a ‘Settler Contract’. (shrink)

A unifying feature of the most prominent social movements that emerged in the 2010s is their dissatisfaction with explaining injustices on a case-by-case basis. In Canada, movements against settler colonialism express a similar orientation. This elicits a return of totality thinking, which enables one to grasp the connections between what appears as isolated or fragmented moments that in fact constitute and are constituted by a larger whole. Drawing on Marxist and Indigenous theorists, we reconstruct an approach to totality and a (...) conceptualization of settler colonialism as a totality. Through an immanent reading of John Borrows’ approach to decolonization, we justify the importance of this concept for politicizing the persistence of unfree forms of interdependence. Finally, just as individual struggles point toward the totality, totality thinking draws attention to the unity-in-separation of different struggles, enabling a politics of “immanent universalism” as an alternative to both abstract universalism and particularism. (shrink)

Via a reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and a critical appraisal of Foucault’s break with historical materialism, W. Oliver Baker finds, at the limits of the new materialisms, space for a new post-humanist critical materialism that sees utopia not in post-human assemblages, but in the abolition of colonial and capitalist structures that condition those assemblages in the first place.

The two major schools of thought in Indigenous−settler relations on the ground, in the courts, in public policy, and in research are resurgence and reconciliation. Resurgence refers to practices of Indigenous self- determination and cultural renewal. Reconciliation refers to practices of reconciliation between Indigenous and settler nations as well as efforts to strengthen the relationship between Indigenous and settler peoples with the living earth and making that relationship the basis for both resurgence and Indigenous−settler reconciliation. -/- Critically and constructively analyzing (...) these two schools from a variety of perspectives and lived experiences, this volume connects both discourses to the ecosystem dynamics that animate the living earth. Resurgence and Reconciliation is a truly multidisciplinary work, blending law, political science, political economy, women’s studies, history, anthropology, ecology, sustainability, and climate change. Its dialogic approach strives to put these fields in conversation and draw out the connections and tensions between them. -/- By using “earth teachings” to inform social practices, the editors and contributors offer a rich, innovative, and holistic way forward in response to the world’s most profound natural and social challenges. This timely volume shows how the complexities and interconnections of resurgence and reconciliation and the living earth are often overlooked in contemporary discourse and debate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Spirit of Settler Colonialism and the City Streets:A Response to Mishuana GoemanErin C. Tarveri want thank dr. goeman for her excellent paper and for introducing us to these extraordinary artists. Their work is beautiful and important, and I am grateful for the opportunity to witness it and think about it and to consider in particular in its relation to its setting in Los Angeles.In what follows, I want (...) to consider that setting—a city, as Dr. Goeman notes, containing some of "the most expensive real estate properties in the United States," commercial areas officially defined by "colonial encompassing property logics," and marked by "noise and [the] reverberation of mass consumerism" ("Caring for Landscapes 57). My interest will be in putting Dr. Goeman's analysis of these works and the Indigenous artist-activists who create them in dialogue with Jane Addams's diagnosis of the problems of early twentieth-century American urban life in her book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. I will suggest that Dr. Goeman's paper illuminates the limitations of Addams's approach to responding to the alienation of modern urban life—which, while rightly critical of the harms of mass consumer culture and the reduction of city life to economic productivity in conditions of industrialization, does not grapple with its own implication in settler colonialism and dispossession, and therefore cannot care for the land or its inhabitants as these artists invite us to do. I will also invite her to reflect on whether Addams's suggestion that play and recreation are essential components of urban human flourishing is borne out in the work of these artists.Jane Addams, in 1909, discussed the problems of urban life in post-Industrial Revolution Chicago in similar terms to those Dr. Goeman uses to describe the contemporary landscape of Los Angeles. The contemporary city, Addams writes, in forgoing spaces for public play, art, creativity, and non-production, has "entered upon a most difficult and dangerous experiment … at the very moment when the city has become distinctly industrial, [End Page 71] and daily labor is continually more monotonous and subdivided" (4–5). In this context, young people are increasingly alienated and isolated, valued solely for the products of their labor, and desperate for social connection. The playfulness and creativity of youth cannot be entirely stifled, yet without clear public spaces or institutions for outlets, young people become easy targets for capitalists who promise pleasure and self-actualization through consumption—of liquor, of fashion, of music, and so on. Lamenting the impoverished state that the city of mass consumption leaves us in, Addams writes:The spontaneous joy, the clamor for pleasure, the desire of the young people to appear finer and better and altogether more lovely than they really are, the idealization not only of each other but of the whole earth which they regard but as a theater for their noble exploits, the unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the make-believe world in which they live, if properly utilized, what might they not do to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more companionable? And yet at the present moment every city is full of young people who are utterly bewildered and uninstructed in regard to the basic experience which must inevitably come to them, and which has varied, remote and indirect expressions.(15–16)There is, for Addams, a basic human need for play, creativity, and connection—to a community and to the natural world itself—whose unsatisfaction in a city devoted entirely to industry is nothing short of dehumanizing. So basic are these needs that they cry out for fulfillment in the most unexpected moments. She quotes a young man who describes his experience thusly:I never had a chance to go into the country when I was a kid, but I remember one day when I had to deliver a package way out on the west side, that I saw a flock of sheep in Douglas Park. I had never thought that a sheep could be anywhere but in a picture, and when I saw those big white spots on the green grass beginning to move and to turn into sheep, I... (shrink)

The attitude to the Bible is a seismograph for scrutinizing the attitude of Zionism, in general, and that of the settlers, in particular, to their ideological and political world view. To where in the Bible are the settlers returning? To the Land of Canaan, to the land of the Patriarchs, or perhaps to the Kingdom of David? And what is the meaning of this return? It is not only the land that is basic to this question, but the (...) relationship of the Land of Israel to the people of Israel. In this article, we will mainly address the radical theological facets of the settler movement, not the proponents of Greater Israel. Our article will focus on the replication of settler theology from the first stage of Gush Emunim and the act of settlement, which in the opinion of the settlers is in accord with the continuation and completion of the Zionist project, to a more metaphysical phase, in which the centrality of the act of settlement gives way to Hassidic or kabbalistic thinking. The models which we present, make possible a fresh look at the utopian thinking and radical theology that are nourished by the settler movement and reflect a new, non-homogeneous stage. (shrink)

This article focuses on Guyanese efforts in the ​postcolonial present to address environmental issues that have become increasingly complex in the face of an awareness of climate change. It opens with an account of how the preservation of Indigenous forests contributes to international efforts to reduce carbon, while making visible the instability that the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the seabed might portend for the Guyanese economy. Specifically, the article examines how engineers have historically confronted settler-colonial discourses about (...) terra nullius unfold as they invest in sea defense. In doing so, the article foregrounds what engineers call slips—the slow or sudden displacement of a sea defense’s structural foundation. Slips are phenomena of energy conversion between land and sea. Rather than arguing for the claims of the pre-Anthropocene earth, the article suggests how many factors are in play in developing policy in the present, in an era of heightened awareness of the different forces in a changing climate. (shrink)

The Israeli settler movement plays a key role in Israeli politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict, yet very few empirical studies of the movement exist. This is the first in-depth examination of the contemporary Israeli settler movement from a structural perspective, and one of the few studies to focus on a longstanding, radical right-wing social movement in a non-western political context. A trailblazing systematic assessment of the role of the settler movement in Israeli politics writ large, as well as in relation (...) to Israel's policy towards the West Bank, this book analyzes the movement both as a whole and as a combination of its parts - institutions, networks, and individuals. Whether you are a student, researcher, or policymaker, this book offers a comprehensive and original theoretical framework alongside a rich empirical analysis which illuminates social movements in general, and the Israeli settler movement in particular. (shrink)

This book is a study of three intentional communities established with government support in the 1890s in Queensland, Australia. All three were short-lived, and as the title suggests, although there is considerable information on the communities, the focus of the book is on the settlers rather than on the communities. In fact, and extremely unusual in studies of intentional communities, there are extensive biographical dictionaries on the members of all three communities. And these dictionaries include information on the men (...) involved from before they joined to after they left, with, as available, information on their wife or wives and their children, in some cases to the near present. As is to be expected, much... (shrink)

Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group—apparent in paradigmatic approaches to engaging social difference in settler communities—is at the heart of the particularity (...) of settler group identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-Indigenous politics. This essay thus seeks to mark the particular ground of this unmarkedness of settler identity in Western philosophies that set being unmarked as both ontology and ideal; the dominance of settler communities in places of settlement; and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories brought about by such dominance. (shrink)

Settler colonial imaginaries are constructed through the repeated, intergenerational layering of settler ecologies onto Indigenous ecologies; they result in fortified ignorance of the land, Indigenous peoples, and the networks of relationality and responsibility that sustain co‐flourishing. Kyle Whyte (2018) terms this fortification of settler ignorance vicious sedimentation. In this paper, we argue that Outlaw Country music plays important roles in sedimenting settler imaginaries. We begin by clarifying the epistemic dimensions of vicious sedimentation. We then explore specific cases where Outlaw Country (...) songs function as epistemic scaffolding for maintaining and preserving deeply sedimented settler imaginaries. Finally, we conclude by considering ways of using country music as epistemic scaffolding for constructing resistant epistemologies, through the processes of trickster hermeneutics (Vizenor, 1999) and epistemic chronostratigraphy. (shrink)