Settler Colonialism Research Articles

Canadian settler colonialism: Structure, event, relationship, or process?

AbstractGeography scholarship examining Canadian colonialism often draws upon concepts and categories from the field of Settler Colonial Studies, including Patrick Wolfe's definition of settler colonialism as a “structure rather than an event.” In this brief intervention, I argue that historical Marxist debates about structuralism and social class have important lessons for the way geographers characterize Canadian colonialism today. The definition of class as both relationship and process is especially relevant, because Indigenous intellectuals and activists tend to speak about (de)colonization in similar terms. By reframing Canadian colonialism as relationship and process rather than structure, we can better engage Indigenous criticisms of Settler Colonial Studies, understandings of (de)colonization, and epistemologies and ontologies.

A Land Acknowledgment in a Different Key: Palestine, Solidarity and the Disruption of the Liberal Script

Rather than the exception to an otherwise progressive intellectual environment in North American, and specifically Canadian universities, the suppression of speech related to Palestine reveals the racial limits of a settler-colonial liberal politics of acknowledgment and reconciliation. The mainstream or institutional conceptualisation of academic freedom does not address the structural racism and settler-colonial realities within which Canadian universities are embedded, rendering them as ‘natural’ allies for Israeli institutions and state practices. A complicated, if revealing, moment of exposure of the limits of the liberal script of reconciliation is the land acknowledgment, which has become, since October 2023, an opportunity grasped by some critical scholars to acknowledge the links between the ongoing genocide in Palestine and settler colonialism across Turtle Island. Tracing the oppositional functions of the land acknowledgment, this article exposes the political limits of a liberal racial order, which is explicitly challenged by expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

Cultural Exclusion and the Transformation of the Cultural Landscape: The Origins of Anti-Chinese Racism in Canada

Anti-Chinese racism in Canada is a social structure of racialized exclusion that over time came to be built into the settler colonialism that continues to shape the country. Colonizers of European, and especially of British and French origins, have consequently created the cultural landscapes that constitute the country (i.e., its material constructions and dominant cultural overlays). When read against these landscapes, people of Chinese origins and members of other racialized groups continue to be positioned as aliens who do not belong in the country in way in which people racialized as white are not. Focusing on British Columbia (BC), Canada’s westernmost province, and the historical activity of people of Chinese origins, this paper traces the history of anti-Chinese racism and its links to Anglo-Canadian settler colonialism. Canada has long been linked to China, and the Chinese entered BC at the same time as Europeans before the country existed. Despite this, Chinese people have repeatedly been positioned as threats to Anglo-Canadian dominance, and especially to control over the land and its resources. Chinese Canadian resistance to racist exclusions, along with that of other groups, has led to the elimination of legislated exclusions. However, historic exclusions continue to shape cultural landscapes and popular understandings of who belongs and who does not. Remaking these landscapes requires an antiracist project of pursuing common projects that cross over racialized differences to remake the territory in ways that affirm the presence of all the peoples of Canada.

On Anticolonial Homemaking

ABSTRACT This article explores anticolonial maternal politics by turning away from the conventional formulation of the singular enfleshed maternal body and toward the body of the maternal home. It does so through an architectural approach to kinship emerging from a feature-film collaboration, The Nest. A return to the author’s childhood home, the film looks to lost histories and kinship structures embedded in place. Focusing on the Indigenous/Métis, Deaf, Japanese, and South Asian girls and women who lived in the house across 140 years of Canadian history, the film upends national history in service of “brick and mortar kinships,” a counter-historical approach that captures the untold and disregarded radical maternities that characterize domestic space in the settler colony. Framed by the author’s own maternal relations, the essay considers the transtemporal, trans-maternal, and transcultural political bonds that arise through shared space.

The Coloniality of Academic Freedom and the Palestine Exception

This article reflects on my experience of being suspended and reinstated. It demonstrates how administrators, including those at my institution, knowingly violate academic freedom and free speech. Throughout, I discuss the institutional and political machinations seeking to silence dissident voices, particularly those who critique Israel and Zionist settler colonialism. The aim is to make more visible the linkages between external pressure and the capitulation of administrators influenced by donors. I highlight the university’s role in producing technologies of colonial violence used on Palestinian bodies and the significance of the Gaza solidarity encampments. In the subsequent sections, I critique the weaponization of antisemitism and the Palestine exception to academic freedom. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of speaking and writing truth to power during a genocide.

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Frames of Personhood

ABSTRACT Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which recounts the culmination of the Haitian revolution against French colonialism (1791–1804), evokes a nostalgia for colonial order even though colonialism would remain in the Caribbean for decades. The epistolary novel’s narrator, an American visiting Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), yearns for the “paradise” that she imagines has been destroyed by the revolution, aligning Sansay with Paul Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia. More insidiously, in Secret History, the longing for the reinstatement of the colonial system in Saint Domingue positions people of African descent outside “frames of recognition,” as Judith Butler in Frames of War conceptualizes the way in which biopolitical forces constitute personhood. I argue that for Sansay, the norms that constitute a living being as recognizable as a life are the ideologies of Romantic settler colonialism, as well as American exceptionalism. As such, within Secret History, Sansay reifies a stratified racial and national hierarchy while also actively denying the state violence that sustains it.

Reading Colonial Transitions: Archival Evidence and the Archaeology of Indigenous Action in Nineteenth-Century California

Archaeologists in North America and elsewhere are increasingly examining long-term Indigenous presence across multiple colonial systems, despite lingering conceptual and methodological challenges. We examine this issue in California, where archaeologists and others have traditionally overlooked Native persistence in the years between the official closing of the region's Franciscan missions in the 1830s and the onset of US settler colonialism in the late 1840s. In particular, we advocate for the judicious use of the documentary record to ask new questions of Indigenous life during this short but critical period, when many Native Californians were freed from the missions and sought new lives in their homelands or in emerging urban areas. We offer examples from our individual and collective research—undertaken in collaboration with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe—regarding long-term Native persistence in the San Francisco Bay Area to demonstrate how archival evidence can illuminate four interrelated areas of daily life that could be investigated archaeologically, including resistance, freedom, servitude, and personal adornment. By using the written record to regain a sense of subjective time, these topics and others could stimulate new, interdisciplinary, and collaborative research that more firmly accounts for Indigenous people's enduring presence across successive waves of Euro-American colonialism.

Manitou Asinîy and the Strategies of Systemic Colonial Injustice

Manitou Asinîy, known to the Nêhiyawak (Four Spirit/Plains Cree) as the Man from the Sky, is a living Sacred Being that can heal all who come to him. To the Royal Alberta Museum (RAM) he is a 320 lb (145 kg) Group IIIAB medium octahedrite iron meteorite ( Scott et al., 1973 ). Through the autoethnography of myself, Dr. Paulina Johnson, who attended to Manitou Asinîy at the RAM, I address two strategies of systemic colonial injustice: (1) Classifying and (2) Fatiguing by Delay used by the RAM, the Government of Alberta (GoA), and the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) to maintain possession and control. This case study examines how whiteness and settler colonialism are deeply rooted in colonial institutions and systems to ensure that Indigenous voices and representations are silenced or forced to compliance. This case study is aimed to address how the politics of refusal to be silenced allows for Indigenous resurgence and a recentering of self as an Indigenous woman.

All That Moves Us: The Semantic Density of Clothing and Objects in El Buen Vestir-Tlakentli’s Choreographies of Indigenous Movements

This article explores El Buen Vestir-Tlakentli 2 (2017 and 2019) and argues that the two iterations of this dance-theatre piece are powerful explorations—through dance and the artists’ sensate relation to objects—of the moving journey that led artists Leticia Vera and Carlos Rivera Martínez from Mexico to Canada and from a sense of estrangement from their Indigeneity to an encounter with their ancestors’ complex and resistant negotiations with the oppressive forces ushered in by settler colonialism in Mexico. Shedding and layering clothes and leveraging the knowledges they encode, the artists remind us of all that moves us in the world. Through inhabiting clothes saturated with meaning, the dancers embody their ancestors throughout the performance, returning to them to better understand the past, its violence, and its joy and imagine a future remapped through decolonial geographies. This future, the author contends in conversation with the artists’ own words, takes the form of a hopeful reconfiguration of the symbolic space of Aztlán. Critical of its problematic past entanglement with race yet mobilizing its transformative power, the artists create a space where Indigeneity is no longer relegated to the past, where kinship is articulated on radically different terms, and where it might be possible to shed the layers of settler-colonial violence—gendered violence in particular–that continue to impact the everyday life of Indigenous women and girls.

“It Matters Who Defines It”—Defining Nutrition through American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Worldviews

BackgroundAdequately assessing nutrition is deeply important for understanding and addressing health inequities, especially for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian (AI/AN/NH) peoples who have been subjected to the malnourishing effects of settler colonialism. Mainstream approaches to nutrition rely heavily on indicators of physical diet consumption, while ignoring the contributions of food to spiritual, social, and emotional health. Considering only physical aspects of dietary consumption paints a narrow picture of AI/AN/NH foodways and nutritional health further contributing to deficit-based narratives about AI/AN/NH peoples. To adequately understand and address the nutritional health of AI/AN/NHs, strengths-based approaches to nutrition that are rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing are urgently needed. ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to define nutrition through AI/AN/NH worldviews. MethodsThree focus group discussions (n = 3) and in-depth interviews (n = 6) were conducted with 26 purposively identified AI/AN/NH food sovereignty experts and knowledge holders. Data collection and analysis were conducted iteratively. Through a process of open, focused, and axial coding, primary themes and supporting subthemes were established and refined, and a conceptual framework (the Indigenous Nourishment Framework) was developed to reflect the relationships between primary themes, subthemes, and the overall meaning of nourishment for AI/AN/NHs. ResultsThe Indigenous Nourishment Model contains 4 main domains of nourishment (physical, spiritual, emotional, and relational), and 8 subthemes representing concepts, practices, and beliefs, which contribute to overall nourishment. ConclusionsDespite the importance of physical aspects of nutrition, our findings assert that spiritual, emotional, and relational well-being are inseparable and integral to the overall goal of nourishment for AI/AN/NHs. The resulting Indigenous Nourishment Framework developed with a diverse group of AI/AN/NH food knowledge holders reflects the strengths of AI/AN/NH foodways and builds upon existing approaches to nutrition by offering new directions for approaching and measuring nutrition.

Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973, Ayala Levin (2022)

Review of: Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973, Ayala Levin (2022) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 320 pp., 53 b&w and 16 colour illus., ISBN: 9781478015260, $107 (hardback)

Decolonial Mood Work

Abstract: This essay develops "decolonial mood work," a political project that changes affective orientations toward crises in settler society and prospects for decolonization. Decolonial mood work is a crucial supplement to scholarship that has focused on demystifying the ideological dimensions of settler colonialism. This essay shows that the regulation of affect is a central, though less addressed, operation of settler state and society. Its case is the management of houselessness in Hawai'i, which is shown to be a settler project that further dispossesses Indigenous peoples by enforcing the affects of settler home.

Landscapes of Recarbonization: Carbon Neutrality, Settler Colonialism, and Cumulative Environmental Effects in the Peace River Region, Canada

Contemporary discourses of net-zero decarbonization (also referred to as carbon neutrality) routinely overlook the landscape transformations required to offset carbon emissions. Conventional analyses also often fail to engage with decarbonization as an inherently spatial process, embedded in landscapes in which the biophysical, socionatural, and political economic dimensions of energy intersect. This creates a conceptual pitfall: the potential to misread and depoliticize strategies of putative decarbonization that might not, in fact, be carbon neutral, particularly when the cumulative effects of broader landscape transformations are considered. To illustrate this pitfall, our analysis queries net-zero decarbonization strategies that arise alongside—and often as a result of—simultaneous investments in fossil fuel production, a process we term recarbonization. We posit recarbonization as a variegated sociospatial phenomenon that materializes through the site-specific interplay between capitalist social relations and biophysical processes. In making this claim, we seek to bridge political economy with concepts of materiality and relationality that, we suggest, enable deeper theoretical engagement with multifaceted landscape transformations entailed by processes of energy transition. Drawing on a case study of the Peace River region in the western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, this article exposes the cumulative environmental effects and ongoing forms of colonial violence of some net-zero decarbonization agendas.

The role of the labor movements in the colonial spaces: trade unionism in Palestine and Lebanon in the colonial era (1920-1948)

ABSTRACT This article aims to demonstrate how the working class evolved and was organised in Palestine and Lebanon between 1920 and 1948. Palestine and Lebanon, which share characteristics such as being a part of the Ottoman Empire and being governed by mandates, also share similar experiences in combating sectarianism based on nationality or religion. The establishment of British rule in Palestine and French administration in Lebanon after World War I also influenced the trade union movement in these two countries: Nationalism flourished, trade unions became tools of politics, and the divide and rule policy of the colonial administration made organization difficult. Although these administrations were referred to as ‘mandates’ of the League of Nations, they actually experienced a colonization process and its effects similar to those in Africa. In this study, particularly the concept of colonization will be used, and the activities of trade unions in colonial regions will be examined through two Middle Eastern countries. While the Palestinian trade unions, which struggled against both British colonization and settler colonialism, were effective in preserving Palestinian identity, the Lebanese trade unions, dealing with French colonization as well as sectarianism, also managed to significantly preserve working-class unity.

Memoirs of African farms: Land, settlement, and belonging in white life writing from Southern Africa

ABSTRACT Building on previous discussions of the plaasroman, or farm novel, this article establishes the autobiographical subgenre of the white, southern African farm memoir, drawing on texts and writers from the former Rhodesia and modern Zimbabwe (Daphne Anderson, Alexandra Fuller, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark). Anderson’s The Toe-Rags and Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight are read here as indicative of the differences and continuities between successive cohorts of white life writers in southern Africa. While Anderson’s autobiography is markedly anti-imperial, later memoirists like Fuller offer a more ambivalent response to white belonging and land ownership in postcolonial Zimbabwe. When Fuller’s generation inherit the white farm from their predecessors, they return to this location to elide the controversial histories of colonial settlement. Ultimately however, these farms become microcosms of the doomed settler state, offering neither a permanent home, nor a secure future after the end of colonial rule.

ABORIGINALS’ RACIAL INEQUALITY AND LINGUISTIC DISPLACEMENT IN THE POEM "THEY ASK ME: ‘WHO AM I?’”

Through a close reading of “They ask me: ‘Who am I?’’' poem, this paper examines the themes of racial inequality and linguistic displacement of the oppressed race of the Australian Aboriginals, specifically the lost generation as voiced in the poem. Adopting the theoretical frameworks of Kroskrity that focus on the linguistic racism and white supremacy, the authors analytically aim to explore covert linguistic racism through the poem’s narrative. In addition, this paper conveys the representation of race and colonial powers by conveying the exclusion and discrimination the Aborigines faced since the 18th century. It highlights the ‘White Supremacy’ (concerning politics, culture, and linguistics) and the desperate measures the white settlement took to complete the erasure of the linguistic and culture of the minority group of the Aboriginal people. The poem highlights the unspoken voices of the lost generation through the poet's heartfelt agony with his encounter with the history of Aboriginals and their racial and linguistic oppression.

Global Hindutva and the Palestinian Cause

A lot of attention has been paid within academic and journalistic literature to how India’s relationship with Israel has improved under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Looking beyond this, the objective of this article is to assess the position of Palestine and its liberation struggle within the Global Hindu Nationalist imaginary. The study’s main argument, therefore, is that the broader Palestinian liberation struggle, in its pluralism, its global scope, and its interconnectivity with various struggles over the course of its history, implicitly represents a refutation of the core ideological mechanisms that underpin the Hindu Nationalist Project, including but not limited to its othering of Muslims and other non-Hindu groups as well as its more recent embrace of neoliberal capitalism. More explicitly, the articles argues that the way Hindu Nationalists construct Indian Muslim and Palestinian subjectivities as being analogous and connected through tropes of them as invaders and terrorists – in line with broader imperialist constructions of Muslim subjectivities – is a key feature of Global Hindutva’s globality. To make this argument, this article first examines the literature on the historical relationship between Hindu Nationalism and Zionist settler colonialism. After this, the article analyses the overlap between Indian state and Hindutva positions on the Palestine Question before exploring practical tensions between the Hindutva outlook and the Palestinian liberation struggle. The final section of the article explores how Global Hindutva’s historic and strategic alignment against the Palestinian liberation struggle manifests in both Indian foreign and domestic policy and in Hindu Nationalist mobilisations across the world.

Book review: Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, By Michael D. Wise

Book review: <i>Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History</i>, By Michael D. Wise

Dreaming of an abolitionist drama therapy

Despite long standing activist and academic calls for prison and police abolition and the need to consider how carceral logics are embedded in mental health practices, no known drama therapy scholarship currently focuses on these topics. We explain the problems with using policing, prisons, and punitive responses to systemic problems, articulating the ways in which these practices are deeply rooted in settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, ableism, capitalism, cis-heteronormativity, and other systems of oppression. We then offer an introduction to carceral logics and abolition, situating our work as not only about the absence of these punitive systems and ways of thinking, but also about imagining and building another kind of world. Approaches to behavioral escalation and suicidality are articulated as examples of sites of practice where drama therapists are often complicit in harmful practices and offer anti-carceral alternatives as harm reduction methods. We conclude with a call to action to drama therapists to engage in abolitionist practices in their work and to be part of the larger visioning process for a more just world.

Unearthing Perspectives from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Islamic Adl: Discourse of Settler Colonialism in South Africa

Unearthing Perspectives from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Islamic Adl: Discourse of Settler Colonialism in South Africa