Settler Colonialism Research Articles

The Oromo Liberation Front and its Long Journey: Achievements, Challenges, and Resilience

This article identifies and examines several interrelated issues concerning the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which has struggled to liberate Oromo society from Abyssinian/Ethiopian settler colonialism and its authoritarian-terrorist state for almost a half-century. These issues include the formation of the front, its objectives, accomplishments, and obstacles, the emergence of the Abiy Ahmed government, and the consolidation and expansion of the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). The piece starts its analysis by providing methodological and theoretical insights.

Rethinking Asian Settler Colonialism: A Historical Perspective of Hawai'i Asians on Indigenous Lands

Abstract: "Asian settler colonialism" calls attention to the simultaneous denial of Kanaka 'Ōiwi dispossession and the celebration of descendants of Asian immigrants as industrious members of Hawai'i's multicultural middle class. While we acknowledge the importance of confronting settler colonialism, we argue that Asian settler colonialism reinscribes an inaccurate understanding of Hawai'i Asians today and over time. Tracing Hawai'i history from the Kingdom era to the present, we show that Hawai'i Asians are not inherently settlers by virtue of being non-natives living and working on Indigenous land; rather, many Hawai'i Asians hold a generational responsibility and political affinity within the nation of Hawai'i. Further, as Hawai'i's hierarchies have evolved amid economic restructuring, the privilege and power held by some Asians have been incorrectly attributed to the native-settler binary of settler colonialism while overlooking the interplay of race, class, global economic shifts, and political dynamics reinforced by military action.

Áhku gákti

With Sámi mythology and storytelling as dramaturgical anchors, Giron Sámi Teáhter uses the key aesthetic elements of yoik (Sámi song) and duodji (Sámi arts and crafts) to revitalize and promote Sámi language and culture. The troupe’s work nourishes pride in young Sámi audiences in their rich cultural heritage, which for centuries was suppressed by settler colonialism across Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people, which stretches across the Northern part of Norway, Sweden, and Finland all the way to the Kola Peninsula in Russia.

Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History

Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History

Compulsory Etiquette: Emotionality and the Constraints of Urban Indigenous Life

Abstract: The infrastructures of urban Indigenous life are marked by a type of dissonance that constantly confronts settler narratives of who and how Indigenous peoples are. The myriad violences that mark colonial power order urban Indigenous life within an unbearable nexus of assimilation, terror, and dispossession. Such violence places considerable demands on Indigenous peoples’ social and material worlds, such that the pressures to visualize, embody, and narrate Indigeneity in the service of a multicultural state are unending. In this article, I outline the politics of emotionality as both threatening to the settler state and a fissure that reveals a desiring for another world. I examine the fixation on the bickering in community meetings at the only urban Indian center in Philadelphia during the 1970s and 1980s to take stock of the ways negative affect is a signal of Indigenous refusals of settler values and marks the city as a zone of affective struggle. The contracts into which Indigenous peoples enter as forms of material survival get leveraged by the state, which demands Indigenous people relinquish sovereignty over their bodies. In the process, the state continues its primary mission to destabilize Indigenous community development and deny the possibilities of futurity. Yet, as Indigenous people push against settler-colonial regulations, the outbursts generated from bickering are affects at the point of refusal of the settler state to determine the totality of Indigenous life. Thus, negative affect, while tense, can generate community by offering an opportunity to reconfigure the terms of social life according to multitribal dialogue as a move toward reclaiming the future.

The establishment, growth and legacy of a settler colony

The Cape Colony was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 with the initial aim of providing a refuelling station for passing ships, but over time the colony expanded and the European population grew. We spoke to Professor Erik Green about his research into how the settler economy evolved, its impact on indigenous people, and its long-term legacy.

Review: Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973

Review: <i>Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973</i>

Attunement to the Great Near with Rebecca Belmore’s Wave Sound

In 2017, on the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, Anishinaabe-kwe performance artist Rebecca Belmore set a quartet of listening trumpets entitled Wave Sound on shorelines across Canada’s national parks. Her metallic instruments amplify the water’s frequencies by drawing them in close, inviting visitors to stop and listen to the found sounds. This technology operates on the scale of W.E.B. Du Bois’s rarely considered sci-fi “megascope,” inviting a new mode of listening to the vital and resilient voice of the lands and waters beyond narratives of settler colonialism.

Meditations on Hungry Listening

This assemblage of thoughts from a white settler musicologist responds to a cluster of ideas in Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening—hunger, listening, settler subjectivity, extractivism—as they converge in both the long history of “Western” listening and the author’s first efforts to think through and away from her own extractive impulses.

Germany’s anti-antisemitic complex and the question of settler colonialism

ABSTRACT This discussion article argues that contestations about antisemitism in current German public discourse and an uncompromising and institutionally mandated support for Israel, even in the face of plausibly genocidal actions, are related to and enabled by an unreconstructed embrace of a settler colonialist ethos. In this context, an unwillingness to come to terms with a history of colonial violence is only one component among multiple determining factors. And yet the question of settler colonialism, while not immediately recognisable, should be recovered and foregrounded to explain the operation of what is here defined as an anti-antisemitic complex, where institutions, the media, and the law combine to enforce a ban on discussions of Israeli history and policies towards Palestinians.

Ghosts and the machine: testing the use of Artificial Intelligence to deliver historical life course biographies from big data

This article presents the findings of an experiment in the use of Artificial Intelligence text generation processes to convert historical ‘big data’ into narrative text. Using an extensive collection of records pertaining to the Australian colonial settlement of Norfolk Island in the South Pacific (1788–1814), we investigate Generative Large Language Model technology for converting tabulated data from the site into short pieces of novel text, describing the lives of transported convicts and free individuals recorded in our databases. These personalized stories are assessed for fluency and factual correctness. Using this process, we uncover some instructive problems and caveats. We detect AI’s inherent tendency toward bias and uncritical perspectives, including potentially offensive stereotypes. We also discover an unwelcome tendency to summarize data. So, whilst the outputs are for the most part effective and functional, we find that the best results still require artful human intervention to fully capture the most human aspects of history and heritage research.

Rituals of Colonial Memory: Crafting Imperial Nostalgia in Republican Italy

The latest historiographical trends are revealing how the end of colonialism has influenced the political and social configuration of former metropolitan centres. In particular, the return of former colonial settlers has raised a series of issues that have resonated in European political debates and societies. In Italy, these processes were shaped by a peculiar decolonization process, coinciding with the equally tortuous transition from fascism to the Republic. Drawing on recent historiography on the return of colonial settlers, and expanding the chronological span and methodological scope of previous works through original archival sources, my intervention aims to reconstruct how imperial nostalgia became a political resource exploited by both repatriate associations and conservative political factions. Although similar to contemporaneous cases, in Italy colonial commemorative practices had peculiarities linked to the role of Catholicism and to the fact that far right and even neo-fascist movements exploited the demands of repatriates for their own political benefit. This article thus broadens the historiographical understanding concerning the decline of Italy's empire and deepens the analysis of its lasting impacts on the politics and society of Republican Italy.

On Wolves and Predation: Toward a Multispecies Archaeology of Settler Colonialism

On Wolves and Predation: Toward a Multispecies Archaeology of Settler Colonialism

‘Pioneers of culture’: Australian natural history and the German colonial imaginary

ABSTRACT Many contemporary efforts to attend to the coloniality of nineteenth-century natural collections rely on the reconceptualization of items held in these collections as cultural belongings. After describing the significance of this development, the article seeks to complicate the hope invested in ‘culture’ in this particular context. It argues that it resonates rather strangely, at least with the German historical record, where a particular understanding of natural history as performing the work of culture was articulated at precisely the time these collections were being made. With a particular focus on what nineteenth-century German-language publications wrote about Richard Schomburgk, a Prussian-trained naturalist and long-time director of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, it analyses how German-speaking actors moving within British colonial networks were framed as ‘pioneers of culture’. The article argues that the figure of the ‘pioneer of culture’ embodied a German investment, real and imagined, in Anglophone settler colonialism; that it helped to describe natural history collecting as central rather than peripheral to this colonial imaginary; and that it denoted a wilful refusal to acknowledge the violent nature of both enterprises.

State Complicity: Settler Colonialism, Multisided Violence, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada

State Complicity: Settler Colonialism, Multisided Violence, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada

“An Acre of Land to Plant or a Stick of Wood to Make a Fence or Fire”: An Archaeology of Mohegan Allotment

Abstract Although land loss is among the most profound impacts that settler colonialism had for Indigenous societies across North America, archaeologists rarely study one of the principal colonial mechanisms of land dispossession: allotment. This process forever altered the course of North American history, breaking up collectively held Indigenous lands into lots “owned” by individuals and families while further stressing local Indigenous subsistence patterns, social relations, political organization, and more. Archaeology's long-term, material, and sometimes collaborative vantage stands to offer insights on this process and how it played out for Indigenous peoples in different times and places. As its case study, this article considers the allotment of Mohegan lands in southeastern Connecticut (USA). An archaeology of Mohegan allotment speaks to more than land loss and cultural change. It provides evidence of an enduring and long-term Indigenous presence on the land; of the challenges faced and overcome by Mohegan peoples living through, and with, settler colonialism; and of the nuances of Indigenous-colonial archaeological records. This study also shows the importance of Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies for shedding new light on these challenging but important archaeological traces.

Tracing the limits of epistemic agency in truth-telling about Australian settler colonialism

Tracing the limits of epistemic agency in truth-telling about Australian settler colonialism

Fertility responses to short-term economic stress: Price volatility and wealth shocks in a pre-transitional settler colony

This paper examines the effects of short-term economic stress, captured by general price volatility and a negative wealth shock on short-run fertility behavior in the rural pre-transitional society of the Cape Colony. First, we link complete birth histories of settler women from the South African Families database to consumer price index data to examine the effect of price volatility on conceptions. Next, we link the same birth histories to slave owner and slave emancipation data to examine the effect of a negative wealth shock on conception. Upon slave emancipation in 1834, former slave owners received on average only between 40 and 50 % of the market value of their slaves as compensation, resulting in a substantial reduction in their wealth. Relying on event history models that look simultaneously at stopping and spacing, we do not find strong evidence in support of fertility control in response to general price volatility. We do find greater variance in birth interval lengths for former slaveholding households during and immediately after emancipation, suggesting that a negative wealth shock is associated with increased fertility limitation through postponement in this context.

Settler Colonialism, Reconciliation, and Indigenous–Jewish Relations in Canada

Settler Colonialism, Reconciliation, and Indigenous–Jewish Relations in Canada

Why do they stay? A spatial perspective on settler colonialism, decolonization and the case of Kosovo Serbs

ABSTRACT This study offers a new perspective on settler colonial theory through the case of Serbia/Kosovo. It develops two hypotheses: (1) settler colonial projects in neighboring territories differ markedly from those overseas, necessitating a revised conceptualization called here ‘contiguous settler colonialism,’ and (2) these projects may prompt settlers to remain amid decolonization despite adverse conditions. The empirical analysis identifies three key factors leading to this outcome: the 'Serbianization' of the physical environment, the (im)mobility arrangements of Kosovo Serbs, and Serbia's coercive cooptation system, resulting in a 'settler colonial make-believe space' between the former colonial state and the emerging decolonizing polity.