Settler Colonial Project Research Articles

The Numbered Treaties and the Politics of Incoherency

AbstractThis article explores the role of the numbered treaties relative to the continuity of the settler colonial project in Canada. Although the treaties are often invoked to characterize the federal government's commitment toward strengthening or renewing its relationship with Indigenous peoples at a symbolic level, there remains a disjuncture between the “nation-to-nation” depictions of treaties and the complex political relationships that Indigenous peoples have called for since their signing. This article explores the inconsistent ways in which treaties have been taken up within Canadian legal and political institutions, arguing that the incoherency surrounding treaties promulgates the notion that treaties are being implemented while simultaneously obscuring, distorting and minimizing the rights of Indigenous peoples in practice. It demonstrates that the failure to engage with treaties as the locus of Indigenous peoples’ distinct political relationship with the Canadian state functions to continually produce conditions of colonization and dispossession through the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction as affirmed in treaties.

Elimination, in the Feminine

This essay analyzes the gendered ways in which settler states produce and manage their relationships to Indigenous women's deaths. I seek to complement Indigenous feminists’ critiques of the rhetoric of crime that predominates in conversations about murdered and missing Indigenous women, as well as Indigenous feminists’ analyses of the state's own masculinist violence. I argue the emotional–managerial performances by which contemporary settler states seek to exculpate and distance themselves from this violence repeat and intensify long histories of settler feminism. Rather than examining the figure of the murdered Indigenous woman, this essay interrogates her counterpart, the white settler woman who serves as a synecdoche for her country: modern, feeling, feminist, and most of all, just. I ground my analysis in a recent book of poetry by Rachel Zolf, Janey's Arcadia (2014), which uses experimental poetic techniques to re-present a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century textual archive that makes clear how actively and how zealously white women participated in the settlement of the Canadian prairies. In re-presenting historical texts through intentionally dissonant poetry, Zolf contests historical and contemporary constructions of Canada's benevolence in general, and of white settler women's innocence in particular. Zolf shows that articulations of settler women's empowerment serve to naturalize colonization, stripping it of its violence and framing settlement, and the state that carries it out, as beneficial to Indigenous people. I argue this book performs the rhetorically difficult task of describing the violence performed by white women in furtherance of Indigenous dispossession. Janey's Arcadia shows that cruelty toward Indigenous women is not the sole purview of individual male criminals who perform unthinkable acts. Instead, it demonstrates that the settler colonial project of eliminating Indigenous peoples can be performed in a distinctly feminine – and even feminist – register.

An infrastructure of grief: perspectives from a journey along the route of the real and imagined Texas-Mexico Wall

This article explores the effects of the border wall between the US and Mexico, from the perspectives of people living along it and through careful consideration of its effects on non-human persons. Two doctoral students travel 400 miles along the Rio Grande River, examining relationships to place in the US-Mexico borderlands through interviews with DACA recipients and their lawyer, environmentalists, and local hikers. Critical place inquiry foregrounds place as a methodology. Racial melancholia provides a framework for understanding how the border is imagined as necessary for the continuation of the settler colonial project, despite costs to diverse forms of life. Conclusions explore the nonsensical nature of the project of building a wall, the resistance to being categorised as static, and the physical and psychic violence caused by the restriction of movement.

Settler Colonialism and the Logic of Double Elimination

According to the logic of elimination that subtends settler colonial projects, native populations are displaced in order to replace their systems of life, a process that structures invasion in its initial stages as in the present. By looking into the case of modern Palestine in an integrative fashion, in this essay we suggest that settler colonialism targets native populations along with social formations – established ways of life – that nurture native life in various ways. We define this settler specificity as the “logic of double elimination.” Our story shows that in Palestine, Zionism developed and the Israeli state was eventually established by means of (a) the continuing elimination of the Arab-Palestinians and their sovereignty, and (b) the destruction of the social infrastructure and identities that fostered Arab–Jewish shared life and forms of cooperation as they flourished in Ottoman times, and the prevention of these forms as they survived into the British Mandate era. These operations of erasure cannot be understood, as Patrick Wolfe persuasively suggested, but as mediated by race. By expanding the conceptualization of the settler logic of elimination we aim at contributing to a broader understanding of the settler colonial phenomena and of decolonization.

“Making It Right,” Keeping It White: Race and the Demand for Queer Redress

This article examines the Egale Human Rights Trust’s Just Society Report and, in particular, its call for the federal government to offer an intersectional apology to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, two-spirit, intersex people for historical injustices. I am interested in the work that suturing intersectionality to an apology for historical wrongs does. The article argues that, as it is deployed in this report, under the terms of diversity and inclusion, intersectionality is a symbolic declaration that sustains, rather than disrupts, the racial and settler colonial project that is Canada. Compatible with a politics of liberal inclusion, this call for an intersectional apology pre-empts a politics of accountability and anti-subordination long called for by the scholarship of Sherene Razack.

The settler colonialism of social work and the social work of settler colonialism

ABSTRACTThe consolidation of the social work profession in Canada was critical to the settler colonial project. Parallel to the rise of the modern police force, the accounting bureaucracy, and the colonial legal apparatus, the social work profession is a foundational component to the creation, expansion, and adaptation of the settler state. Through a historical review of the origins of social work and its professionalization in Canada, this paper argues that contemporary social work and social service provision remain circumscribed by the logics of conquest, extraction, apprehension, management, and pacification that advance the settler project and seek to secure settler futurity. Given the incommensurabilities between social work practice and Indigenous processes of decolonization this paper explores potential pathways towards unsettling social work practice including disrupting dehistoricization (working towards the repatriation of Indigenous lands, children, and cultural traditions and the upholding of Indigenous sovereignty); working towards deinstitutionalization (challenging the institutionalization of service provision and re-focusing on mutual aid, treaty responsibilities, and settler complicity; and promoting deprofessionalization (the restructuring of the ‘helping’ practices of social work back under the control of communities themselves.

Settler Colonial Demographics: Zionist Land Purchases and Immigration During the British Mandate in Palestine

The settler colonial framework provides Palestine studies with a useful tool, opening new lines of inquiry and leading to new fields of study. This essay examines the impact of the Zionist settlement policy on rural Palestine during the Mandatory period. Through a demographic analysis, the essay argues the displacement of these peasants was the result of an intentional transfer policy by the Jewish community. Transfer constituted an important part of the overall Zionist ideology and attitude towards the local population. The displacements and removal of the indigenous population started before the Nakba, including the British Mandate period, due to the settler colonial need to become a demographic majority in the land under dispute. Zionist historiography argues Zionists did not interfere in the daily life of the Palestinians and stresses the profitable aspects of Jewish immigration. This essay, using settler colonial theories, challenges this historiography and proposes new tools to deal with other settler colonial cases around the world. This essay is based on four population sources used during the British Mandate to determine the consequences of land purchases and immigration in the Haifa and Nazareth sub-districts during that period. The analysis of the growth rates of all the communities and villages will illustrate the consequences of the Zionist settler-colonial project. This essay discusses the replacement of population and the importance of population, access to land, and immigration trends for the Zionist settler-colonial enterprise on their way to becoming the demographic majority on the land of the Historical Palestine.

The Limits of the Administration of Memory in Settler Colonial Societies: the Australian Case

Settler colonial societies provide particular challenges for the instantiation of memory policy since the settler-colonial project was driven by a logic requiring the ‘elimination’ of Indigenous peoples and their time. This very fact challenges the legitimacy of the colonial mission for a better way of life and feeds the tensions at the very core of memory policies in these societies in coming to terms with the past. Focusing on contemporary Australia, this article first examines the challenges inherent to memory policy in settler colonial societies before reviewing three attempts at administering memory for future coexistence. This approach highlights the way public policies of memory can result in formal procedures rather than in historical narratives. This recognition of the ongoing contested nature of the settler colonial project leads to the suggestion for a different, more agonistic orientation to memory policy that is predicated on the persistence of this conflictual dynamic rather than on its resolution.

Settler colonialism and ecocide: case study of Al-Khader, Palestine

ABSTRACTSince 1967, the Zionist settler colonial project has expanded into the occupied Palestinian Territories. This has resulted in Israel’s reconstruction of its landscape to provide illegal settlers the ability to identify and create a sense of territorial belonging. Through the case study of Al-Khader, Palestine, the article provides an analysis of the ecological effects deriving from this project, focusing on the construction and expansion of illegal settlements, Jewish-only infrastructure and resource extraction. This article argues that the ecological destructions portrayed in the testimonies collated here are a derivation of the Zionist project. Lastly, ecocide is provided as a reference for future researchers to investigate its possible linkage with the Zionist project.

Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

Palestine…It Is Something Colonial

Repurposing beauty pageants: The colonial geographies of Filipina pageants in Canada

This paper considers how notions of beauty and performances at pageants transform as they move across different colonial times and spaces. It examines how gender, racial, and sexual subjectivities take shape among cisgender Filipina women who participate and organize community-based pageants on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). I analyze observations and interviews conducted with Filipina/os who organize and participate in community pageants. Based on this examination, I argue that spatial processes make apparent the shifting nature of gendered, racialized, and sexualized pageant performances. Pageant ideals change with migration as white heteropatriarchal logics, which are enmeshed in settler colonial projects of Canada, make grooves into the ways Filipino gendered sexualities come to be in Canada. More broadly, the paper speaks to the ways in which power works with and through space through the logics of race, gender, and sexuality. It outlines how racialized women’s feminine heterosexuality is made legible by liberal scripts designed for immigrants in the white settler colonial context of Canada. Thus, the paper sets in motion questions of how intersections of power are shaped by contemporary forms of colonialism.

The State, Zionism and the Nazi Genocide

AbstractThis paper explores contemporary Jewish identity-formation and the centrality of official Holocaust memory and Zionism – understood as the ongoing settler-colonial project aiming at the formation and maintenance of a Jewish-exclusivist state in Palestine – to this process. It argues that identity politics within the Jewish community are based on an understanding of identity, which assumes it to be static and individual. In doing so, this political approach reproduces the essentialisation of Jewish communities under the banner of Zionism and official state history. The paper aims to show how this process of identification between Judaism, official Holocaust memory and Zionism has been a state-led process, rooted in the historical development of antisemitism and European colonialism. In order to do so, it builds on a critique of classical Marxist analyses of the Jewish question. It finally proposes a more fluid approach to identity, which understands it as socially constructed, contested, and subject to political contestation.

An Assemblage of Decoloniality? Palestinian Fellahin Resistance and the Space-Place Relation

This paper examines how fellahin resistance beginning in the early parts of the 20thcentury interacted with the Zionist settler-colonial project, focusing on how this resistance operated on a complex understanding of the relation between the fixity of place and flux of space. Thinking this resistance alongside theories of colonial occupation as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage and the smooth-striated mixture of space, I argue that following the complex interplay between space (flux) and place (fixity), as opposed to resolving it, may yield a promising pathway in Palestinian, and perhaps global, decolonial resistances today. This can be observed in the contemporary resistance of Palestinian fellahin in the village of Bil‘in, whose repertoires of action constitute an assemblage, both spatially and temporally. I argue that one of the important lessons found in the discourse and actions of Bil‘in activists is that land is autonomous of human desires and plans, of ethno-national ideological projects. Opening politics to the insight that the flux of space cannot be tamed within a bounded nation-state produces a decolonial resistance that sees the displacement of people from the land as the displacement of life itself.

Toxic Encounters, Settler Logics of Elimination, and the Future of a Continent

AbstractThis paper engages the relationship between toxic geographies and settler colonialism. By bringing to light larger structures and histories that underpin the settler colonial project, I examine a series of toxic encounters and consider the racialised hegemonic narratives that enable the production toxicity. Among these is a methylmercury contamination in Northern Ontario, just upstream from Grassy Narrows First Nation, and a cluster of toxic conversations that bled through social media in the wake of the murder of Colten Boushie, a 22‐year‐old Cree man in Saskatchewan, Canada. I argue that examining the normative ideologies, settler narratives, and socio‐political structures that are involved in the production of toxicity provides valuable insight into the diffuse and relational colonial logics that define the lives that are privileged as the standard, and those that fall outside the regulatory category of the Human, and as a result, are subject to elimination.

Reconsidering the laboratory thesis: Palestine/Israel and the geopolitics of representation

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a ‘laboratory’ for the production and export of advanced weapons, security knowhow and technology. Critics of Israeli wars and the ongoing colonization of Palestine use the laboratory metaphor to make sense of Israeli state policies and practices used in controlling Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and fighting wars but also to address how Israeli instruments of violence come to travel elsewhere. This article brings these discussions into sharper focus by examining how the concept of the laboratory is employed in making sense of Israel's perceived centrality in global patterns violence and militarism, here termed the laboratory thesis. The article argues that although the thesis develops powerful insights, it has analytical limitations. It further calls into question the thesis' polemical force, suggesting that critical references to Palestine/Israel as a laboratory reinforce misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel's settler colonial project. The article takes these concerns as an opportunity to re-assemble the policing/security laboratory as a critical concept, in relation to Palestine/Israel, the global war on terror and beyond.

“A Dreadful Little Glutton Always Telling You about Food”: The Epistolary Everyday and the Making of Settler Colonial British Columbia

The Canadian and international scholarship on settler colonialism has focused primarily on relationships between Indigenous people and settlers and the connected practices of racialization, dispossession, and violence that underpin these. Investigating British family letters from early settler British Columbia – a widely produced and circulated body of sources that largely ignore these scholarly foci – this article contends that settlers' personal everyday also played a significant role in the foundations of settler colonialism. Taking epistolary discussions of food as a specific lens onto this issue, it explains that correspondents used descriptions of food acquisition and preparation to explain key points of difference between British Columbia and the United Kingdom, while writing about dining in ways that emphasized their continued connections and aspirations to metropolitan family norms. At the same time, this focus sustained silences, most notably about Indigenous people. Overall, the article argues, British family letters largely did not construct meaning for settlers' lives in antagonistic contrast to the practices of locally racialized “others” but, rather, in trans-imperial communication and comparison to metropolitan “others.” In doing so, this correspondence reproduced Britons' disregard of Indigenous people, translated British Columbia into a legible, relatable, and exclusive settler home, and entrenched this understanding as colonial knowledge in extended family networks. In this way, letters about food reflected a broader politics of the personal everyday that underpinned the settler colonial project.

Immigration, anti-racism, and Indigenous self-determination: towards a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary settler colonial

ABSTRACTAnti-racist attempts to conceptualize Indigenous decolonial justice are preoccupied with the contested relationship between immigrant settlement and Indigenous self-determination. In the process, an ethically and politically driven practice of implicating immigrants onto the settler colonial project has emerged. Paying particular attention to the emerging concept of ‘immigrant settlerhood’ as a sign of severing of political economic considerations from theories of settler nationalism, I advocate for a comprehensive and concrete analysis that does not lose sight of the capitalist colonial project of simultaneous dispossession (of Indigenous people) and precarious incorporation/resettlement (of immigrants). Next, since notions of sovereignty primarily enact the conditions for exploitation of immigrants and impale them onto the settler project via anti-racist claims, I propose ‘no border’ politics as a conceptual tool for confronting settler colonialism. Finally, considering the centrality of land/place in Indigenous self-determination, I reflect on the possibility of a ground between Indigenous rootedness and diasporic placelessness. This essay thus makes an attempt to conceptualize an anti-racist politics that could meaningfully respond to the settler-colonial project of simultaneous recruitment/resettlement (of immigrants) and dispossession (of Indigenous people) without casting social justice demands of Indigenous peoples and immigrants as inherently oppositional.

Twelfth Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research: So That Any Child May Succeed: Indigenous Pathways Toward Justice and the Promise of Brown

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to rehear for the second time the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1953, the 83rd Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 and Public Law 280—policies that would terminate federal treaty and trust responsibilities to Native Americans. Even as post- Brown desegregation went into effect, thousands of Native American children continued to attend segregated, English-only federal boarding schools. This lecture considers the Brown legacy and broader issues of education equality in the context of research, policy, and practice in Indigenous education. Focusing on a core argument in Brown—that equality of opportunity is a prerequisite “so that any child may succeed”—I examine hard-fought pathways toward education justice forged by Indigenous educators, parents, leaders, and allies; the larger settler colonial project in which those efforts are embedded; and the ways in which Indigenous initiatives are braided with those of other racialized groups. Key to this analysis is recognition that equal access and uniformity of education approach are not synchronous with equity. I conclude with the ongoing challenges in fulfilling the promise of Brown—in particular, the simultaneous homogenizing and stratifying effects of current education policies—and what can be learned from diverse models of contemporary Indigenous education practice.

Other Scenes of Speaking: Listening to Palestinian Anticolonial-Queer Critique

Palestinian Queers for BDS first called on the international LGBTQI community to be in solidarity with Palestinians and support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in 2010. PQBDS argued that Israel was using gay rights and gay lives to pinkwash state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians. Since then, much has been said and written about Israel's pinkwashing campaign and the violence it endorses and engenders. But much remains unsaid about Palestinian anticolonial-queer modes of engagement that persist despite Israel's settler-colonial project. With specific attention to the 2012 Jadaliyya debate between Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi, on the one hand, and Haneen Maikey and Heike Schotten, on the other, this article discusses various activist and scholarly responses to Israel's pinkwashing campaign, and particularly how these responses elide Palestinian anticolonial-queer activism in different ways. Ultimately, this article asks: What becomes (in)audible as a Palestinian anticolonial-queer critique?