Settler Colonialism Research Articles

Decoy politics: How settler states deflect Indigenous threats

Anglo settler states like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States were built through the dispossession of Indigenous lands and through the disruption of Indigenous political, social and economic systems. Over time, however, Indigenous nations have challenged the unjust foundations of these states, forcing settler states to respond with repression but also with accommodation, especially in the face of successful Indigenous mobilization. Yet even during these moments, state actors have resisted changes to state sovereignty, sometimes by creating new institutions that seem responsive, but which simply reinforce the status quo. To make sense of these moments, we introduce the concept of “decoy politics” and develop a theory for why states might turn to decoy politics, with a particular focus on Canada. Our findings suggest decoy politics may help explain why reconciliation with Indigenous nations remains difficult despite seemingly genuine attempts at meaningful institutional and policy change.

Beyond the Urban Kitchen: Refrigeration and Domesticity across Australia and the Pacific Islands, 1920s–1940s

Abstract Histories of the rise of domestic refrigeration conventionally situate the appliance within the urban household. An emphasis on the spread of electrification and notions of idealized femininity, abundance, and scientific home management together attribute an emblematic “Americanness” to the refrigerator. Moving beyond the confines of the urban kitchen to rural and tropical regions of Australia and across the island Pacific, this article examines the appeal and influence of the home appliance in areas remote from reliable or affordable electricity, as well as from accessible supplies of perishable foods produced elsewhere. In such locations the refrigerator was understood differently, centering ideals of white settler self-sufficiency, masculine mastery of the environment, and notions of colonizing capacity. Examining the early history of this appliance in these places also reveals how technological influences and cultural aspirations moved between Australia and the islands and vice versa, intensifying in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In repositioning the refrigerator through such engagements and entanglements, this article offers new insights into patterns and practices of colonial domesticity, provisioning, and consumption.

First Peoples economic landscape: analysis of the ecosystem

PurposeThis paper focuses on First Peoples Founders of for-profit entities in Australia and the role of the Indigenous Economic Development Agencies (IEDAs). We explore the challenges facing First Peoples enterprises, influenced by historical exclusion from white settler society, and the practices of the IEDAs from the perspectives of Founders and agencies.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative study utilising Indigenous Standpoint Theory and Indigenous research methods, elevating Founder perspectives, in the Yaruwu language - the Nilangany Ngarrungunil, owners of knowledge, to that of research collaborators.FindingsThe First Peoples economic landscape is continually evolving with IEDAs contributing to that evolution despite contentious identity ownership definitions. Founders secure in their own identity, are focused on self-determination and opportunities provided by IEDAs, government and corporate sector policies. However, opportunities are undermined by ongoing racism, discrimination and prevailing stereotypes leading to homogeneity, invisibility and exclusion. Founders question organisational commitments to overcoming systemic exclusion in particular their commitment to building respectful relationships and understanding First Peoples ways of working. Instead, Founders focus on building a sustainable First Peoples economic ecosystem through relationship-based practices rather than transactional reconciliation which ignores the reality of the lived experience of everyday racism.Originality/valueThis study extends the scholarly discourse on First Peoples for-profit enterprise success written with an Indigenous voice. We demonstrate how this Founder generation are strengthened by culture with identity infused in organisational practices underpinning their aspirations of economic self-determination.

Mapping and countermapping dispossession in Palestine

AbstractIn their claim to distance from reality, maps seek power from representation. Maps are constituted by a particular set of practices that are enmeshed within wider social relations. Maps, then, are a powerful vantage point for understanding the geometries of power. Under settler colonialism, geography is constantly reshaped and reconfigured by expansionist and eliminatory logics. Such is the case in Palestine, where Israeli settler colonialism has fragmented the map of historic Palestine into messily separated archipelagos. As Palestinian geographies are constantly being reconfigured under Israeli settler colonialism, can maps catch up? How do we locate Palestine on the map? I take up these questions by focusing on the 1948 and 1967 Palestinian territories as two spatio‐temporally differentiated locations of settler colonial spatial reconfiguration. Using a counter‐map designed by Palestinian artist Haya Zaatry, I highlight the importance of counter‐mapping in bringing into sharp relief the conjunctural layering of dispossession in Palestine. If dominant colonial maps are about the neat packaging of lived realities into dominant spatio‐temporal demarcations, counter‐maps are about highlighting the ghostly stories and embodied spatial practices and processes of living within and beyond such demarcations.

“Absolutely it was not safe”: Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ experiences of education in Australia

Indigenous LGBTIQSB+ individuals occupy a unique intersection of identities that inform their lived experiences and the ways in which they navigate colonial settler educational institutions. Despite a considerable body of evidence demonstrating the importance of inclusion, educational policies in Australia remain outdated. These policies are frequently informed by a deficit approach that justifies the absence of Indigenous and gender/sexuality diverse content within school curricula. This further acts to shore up discriminatory practices and policies. Using interviews and workshops held with young Indigenous LGTBIQSB+ people, this article reports on the ways participants experienced educational institutional settings. First, participants reported on the kinds of policies and curriculum content that discriminated against and marginalised them, as well as highlighting some positive aspects of school and university. Participants also revealed the potentialities for Indigenous and LGBTIQSB+ inclusivity that could be facilitated within educational spaces. The article demonstrates the need for safer and more inclusive educational environments, which could be achieved through the decentring of settler knowledges and heteronormativity, transforming educational spaces at an institutional level to facilitate safety at interpersonal and collective levels.

‘Natural’ disasters, ignorance, and the mirage of Italian settler colonialism in late nineteenth-century Africa

ABSTRACT This article places the origins of Italian settler colonialism and its defeat in the battle of Adwa (1896) in the global perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism. It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural” disasters that were in fact the social products of colonial warfare, would be available to Italian settlers in the future. This mirage was based on a domino effect of environmental catastrophes connecting climate history, animal disease, and the politics of European imperialism. Italians’ introduction of rinderpest in Eritrea in the wake of an El Niño-related drought triggered “the Great African Rinderpest Panzootic” and the “Great Ethiopian Famine”. The mixture of willful ignorance and wishful self-deception that fueled Italian projects explains Italy’s defeat in the battle of Adwa. Building on the methodology of environmental historians and scholars in Science and Technology Studies, this article shifts focus from the power of the state to the techno-politics of colonialism in its impact on natural environments and African communities through the lens of the cultural production of ignorance.

Settling a State—Settling for a State: Reinterpreting One Hundred Years of Zionist–Arab Relations

Abstract In recent years, a more coherent, widespread critique of Zionism as a form of settler colonialism has developed in Western academia. Despite its critical assumptions regarding Zionism, this conversation has yet to influence one of the core images of the Zionist-Arab encounter, mainly that of Palestinian intransigence versus Zionist political flexibility. According to this stereotypical image, these contrasting political characteristics played a central role in allowing a Jewish state to be established in a large part of historical Palestine, while an Arab one did not materialize. By examining political encounters between Zionists and Palestinians over the course of more than a hundred years, this article shows that, in fact, Palestinian leadership and Palestinians generally were willing to settle for an internationally recognized Arab-Palestinian state at key points. By contrast, Zionists usually exhibited greater ambivalence toward the idea of a recognized state, preferring to settle for something else, mainly expansionism. By adopting a counterintuitive approach, this article seeks to contrast the colonial dimension of Zionism with the more flexible and ultimately more state-and norm-oriented quality of Palestinian nationalism.

Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History by Michael D. Wise (review)

Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History by Michael D. Wise (review)

A map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies

Israel has imposed different forms of settler colonialism across the map of historic Palestine, but there is no inevitability about future outcomes Thinking about space as an entry point, this article traverses multiple spaces within historic Palestine to explore how Israeli settler colonialism unfolds as a set of contingent and differentiated relations, practices and processes. It uses a theoretical diary, photographs, and countermaps to bring into sharp relief both the sedimented nature of settler colonial domination and its vulnerability to Palestinian practices of resistance. Moving from the refugee camp in the West Bank to the village and the city in the territories Israel occupied in 1948, the article draws on Stuart Hall’s approach to ‘conjunctural analysis’ to demonstrate how there exist multiple Palestinian geographies; how such geographies stand in relations of domination and subordination vis-??-vis one another and the Israeli state; and how such geographies remain prone to rupture and transformation. The article insists on a conjunctural reading that refutes teleological understandings of settler colonialism: there are no guarantees that its dominant modes of dispossession and elimination will succeed.

Race, Time, and the Petrified Subject in Algeria

Two major thinkers of anti-colonialism in Algeria—Kateb Yacine, author of the novel Nedjma (1956), and Frantz Fanon—described the impacts of colonial violence through figures of petrification that blur the border between human and nonhuman. Their works ground this article's relational reading across anti-Black and anti-Algerian racializations, drawing on Sylvia Wynter's concept of rhythmic reading and scholarship on comparative racialization. Petrification seeks to capture subjective absence: a modality of living as a negated subject who is excluded from the category of the human. This relational frame suggests absence as a plural, disappearing mode of knowledge production under colonialism. Yacine's novel fleshes out alternative modalities of being human that appear, in Fanon's Algerian writings, as flickers en route to revolution, or clinical diagnoses. Fanon's oeuvre and its readers generate a new critique of Yacine's canonical novel. This article develops absence as a new vocabulary, beyond colonial psychiatry and its agentive resistance, for the reading of literature from the settler colony. Building on feminist critiques of Nedjma, it names anti-Blackness in the novel as an instance of the text's participation in the field of Man at the moment it tries to write, through absence, its outside.

‘Rugged Masculinity: British Settler Colonial Soldiers in the Boer War’

‘Rugged Masculinity: British Settler Colonial Soldiers in the Boer War’

Historical and archaeogenomic identification of high-status Englishmen at Jamestown, Virginia

The authors report on ancient DNA data from two human skeletons buried within the chancel of the 1608–1616 church at the North American colonial settlement of Jamestown, Virginia. Available archaeological, osteological and documentary evidence suggest that these individuals are Sir Ferdinando Wenman and Captain William West, kinsmen of the colony's first Governor, Thomas West, Third Baron De La Warr. Genomic analyses of the skeletons identify unexpected maternal relatedness as both carried the mitochondrial haplogroup H10e. In this unusual case, aDNA prompted further historical research that led to the discovery of illegitimacy in the West family, an aspect of identity omitted, likely intentionally, from genealogical records.

De-othering: indigenous perspectives on diversity, equity and inclusion

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to share two Indigenous perspectives on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). It is grounded in aspirations for de-othering and de-colonisation. De-othering is the unpicking of the status of “other” bestowed upon us by the dominant culture, and de-colonisation involves the deconstruction of the ways the settler states in which we live have defined and oppressed us. Design/methodology/approach The methodology is a critical self-reflection, drawing on the lived experience of two Indigenous scholars in business fields outside of the international business discipline. Findings The findings explore policies, like affirmative action emerging in the 1960s, to the pantheon of DEI theory and strategies developed, as tools of the dominant culture, albeit well-meaning, that perpetuate the dependency of the “other” on the largesse of the “dominant”, which ultimately maintain relations of oppression. Research limitations/implications The limitations of the paper include, that we cannot speak for all Indigenous peoples. This paper is a personal viewpoint and is not a meta-analysis of theory and literature. The authors draw on the personal, which for Indigenous peoples is also the political, perspectives, that are steeped in their cultural histories and identities, and underpinned by their aspirations for social change and social justice for their peoples. Practical implications The authors offer practical implications for those Indigenous Peoples and allies looking to develop empowering strategies for de-othering individuals and communities defined by dominant cultures as “others”, which in turn has social implications for engagement in truly empowering work in social justice at the borderlands of power, particularly in terms of international business guided by ethics and social responsibility. Social implications In this paper, the authors use the following terms: Maori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, First Peoples and Indigenous Peoples. They use the term Peoples to denote that they are not one homogenous People but a collective society that consists of many distinct communities, peoples and nations. Originality/value The authors offer practical implications for those Indigenous Peoples and allies looking to develop empowering strategies for de-othering those defined by dominant cultures as “others”, which in turn has social implications for those engaged in truly empowering work for social justice at the borderlands of power, particularly in terms of international business guided by ethics and social responsibility. They make no apologies for this paper, as it is entirely based on personal viewpoints.

They Have Always Been Military: On So-Called Militarized Policing in Canada

Over the last few years there has been growing attention to and discussion of the so-called militarization of policing. Unfortunately, much of this discussion poses the militarization of policing as a recent phenomenon. This paper examines policing in Canada within the context of an ongoing military practice. It shows that policing was founded on a military basis and continues to be carried out on a military basis as exemplified in the more recent developments that have raised alarm about militarization. It raises the need for a retheorization of policing within the context of capitalist social struggles and highlights some instructive recent theoretical developments toward that end. Properly understanding the police in Canada can help to contextualize and challenge current responses that are limited to reforms for police (de-militarization, de-escalation, improved training, non-lethal weaponry, etc.) or which even allow for the expansion of policing (community policing, drones, etc.). [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.] KEYWORDS: Canada, Colonialism, Militarization, Policing, Protest, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Settler States, War.

Sensing Toxic Injustice: Exploring the Polluting Touch of Colonialism

Abstract The bodies of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls are often discovered at polluted sites in Winnipeg, Canada, including the Red River. Left at toxic sites that authorities deem environmentally dangerous, these women became untouchable in death, mired in sociocultural representations of disposability and wasting practices. We link murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls to the polluting effects of white settler colonialism especially pertaining to the degradation of Winnipeg’s waterways. As a means for enacting slow, environmental violence, current waste allocation practices remain tied to colonial systems that continue to harm Indigenous peoples. To foreground overlapping devaluations of Indigenous lands and people, we argue for a sensory criminology that is sensitized to the ongoing damage of colonial violence.

Culture and the City: Articulations of Settler Colonialism from Haifa to Ramallah and Back

This article sets the development of urban cultural scenes in Palestine within a global frame of uneven development. It draws on field work in Haifa (in the 1948 Palestinian territories) and Ramallah (in central West Bank) to argue that the shift toward neoliberalism in 1985 and its sedimentation through the Oslo Accords in 1993 amount to a “transformed settler colonialism,” one more intimately tied to flows of global capital. I use articulation as evoked by Stuart Hall and Gillian Hart to critically assess how historically embedded cultural practices conjoin and splinter around the political economic shifts toward neoliberalism in the post-Oslo conjuncture. The article foregrounds the urban cultural scenes as vantage points into a “relational comparison” that crosses the “Green Line” and remains attuned to the specific dynamics of urban spatial and cultural production in relation to settler colonialism and global capitalism. I situate the artists’ responses as practices of articulation that elaborate conjunctural possibilities within the confines of capitalist and colonial structural limits. The article argues that despite their critique of the key processes of neoliberalization and colonialism, Palestinian artists remain subsumed by the processes’ structuring logics. Thus, the article makes three contributions: (1) a centering of articulation and relational comparison as a method of understanding the constitutive relationship between colonial and global capitalist modes of accumulation; (2) an analysis of settler colonialism as a historically differentiated structure that changes and transforms in a given spatiohistorical conjuncture; and (3) a foregrounding of the role of Palestinian artists through a focus on conjunctural possibilities and practices of articulation.

Indigenous Sovereignty and Political Science: Building an Indigenous Politics Subfield

Scholarship from the nascent subfield of Indigenous politics illuminates an enduring tension between Indigenous politics and political science. Settler colonialism continues to configure the contemporary politics of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in profound ways that political science has been slow to grapple with. In a related concern, political science has little ability to engage in Indigenous knowledge production. This article reviews the structural exclusion of Indigenous knowledge despite increased inclusion of Indigenous scholarship and argues that Indigenous understandings of settler colonialism, sovereignty, and authority hold the potential to reconfigure political science's approach to Indigenous politics in research and teaching. This reconfiguration will not only impact the development of the Indigenous politics subfield but also expand the analytic potential of political science more broadly.

Transforming settler nationalism in Québec: Recovering the principles of the historical treaties

AbstractThe settler nature of Québécois society makes it a distinct case of minority nationalism. Québec's claim of self‐determination is necessarily more complex and intricately woven with parallel claims from the Indigenous peoples of the territory. This paper argues, first, that Québécois society holds significant obligations toward Indigenous peoples reflected in the commitments made in the historical French treaties and second, that the normative principles embedded in those treaties should be used to transform the relationships it holds with Indigenous peoples and Québec's nationalist project itself. Overall, the paper suggests that Québécois nationalism needs to move away from settler colonialism by considering more seriously the shared nature of the territory it purports to have sovereignty over and by upholding the principles that allowed settlers to stay on the land.

Interventions to improve equity in emergency departments for Indigenous people: A scoping review.

Disparities in health outcomes, including increased chronic disease prevalence and decreased life expectancy for Indigenous people, have been shown across settings affected by white settler colonialism including Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Emergency departments (EDs) represent a unique setting in which urgent patient need and provider strain interact to amplify inequities within society. The aim of this scoping review was to map the ED-based interventions aimed at improving equity in care for Indigenous patients in EDs. This scoping review was conducted using the procedures outlined by Arksey and O'Malley and guidance on conducting scoping reviews from the Joanna Briggs Institute. A systematic search of MEDLINE, CINAHL, SCOPUS, and EMBASE was conducted. A total of 3636 articles were screened by title and abstract, of which 32 were screened in full-text review and nine articles describing seven interventions were included in this review. Three intervention approaches were identified: the introduction of novel clinical roles, implementation of chronic disease screening programs in EDs, and systems/organizational-level interventions. Relatively few interventions for improving equity in care were identified. We found that a minority of interventions are aimed at creating organizational-level change and suggest that future interventions could benefit from targeting system-level changes as opposed to or in addition to incorporating new roles in EDs.

Enacting Parts

I have lived in Mohkínstsis/Calgary for four years, most of which have been marked by the pandemic that is ongoing as I write this. I highlight this here because my physical, social, and cultural connections with this city are limited. However, given the circumstances, I had the privilege and opportunity to connect with the land and the non-human world around me. Walking, a privilege that allowed me to engage with places I have visited and lived in throughout my life, has been particularly significant during the pandemic. Walking through the northwest suburbs of this city has allowed me to foster a relationship with the land, which now animates my practice. In the spirit of respect, reciprocity, and truth, I acknowledge that I am an uninvited white settler occupying this land, which forms the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Piikani, Kanai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations). This territory is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. I am grateful to be situated here, and through my work, I aim to honour the land and all its forms, taking greater responsibility for my presence and potential future in this place.