Settler Colonialism Research Articles

Global Palestine Solidarity and the Jewish Question

Abstract From its emergence in the late 1960s, global Palestine solidarity has had to defend itself from charges of antisemitism. Activists have responded with different strategies, ranging from rejection to admission and self-critique. Such strategies were often the result of deliberation with Palestinian revolutionaries. In this way, differently situated problem-spaces of ‘the Jewish Question’ – that of settler colonialism in Palestine and that of post-Holocaust politics in Europe – became entangled. Resulting inter-sectional alliances with, for example, Jewish voices and groups have often afforded the best protection from allegations of antisemitism. Despite these efforts, recent legislation criminalising Palestine solidarity shows that Israel’s well-funded campaigns to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism have been partially successful. This article looks for answers to today’s impasse in 50 years of solidarity on the Left and corresponding efforts to criminalise support for the Palestinian cause. Drawing on the archives of solidarity movements in Denmark and other European countries, it traces the current aggressive pushback to its roots in the early 1970s, when Palestine solidarity movements learned important lessons about how to balance their critique of Israel with public sensitivities around the Jewish question, and how to reckon with race and religious identity.

Protestantism, post-colonialism and Israel – 1948–1967

In this contribution, Protestant interaction with the State of Israel is analysed within the framework of the aftermath of Modern Imperialism between 1850 and 1950. It was the time when Western European nations expanded into areas previously inhabited by others, where they established white settlers’ communities as the political and economic dominant in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere. The genesis of the State of Israel in 1948 can be seen as a late example of the same phenomenon.Very soon after 1948 however, most Protestant churches would become aware of the importance of post-colonialism and a new global world order, where the West was no longer dominant and issues of land ownership in the former (semi-)colonies became important. This implied an overhaul of the idea, still current among Protestants in the 1950s, that the population exchanges in former Palestine in 1948 needed to be accepted both as a cultural advance and as an outcome of Bible exegesis.

Indigenous Nurse and White Settler Nurse Teaching Teams: Learning to Disrupt With Indigenist Nursing Education

Indigenous Nurse and White Settler Nurse Teaching Teams: Learning to Disrupt With Indigenist Nursing Education

'Untold stories': The relationship of word and image in the work of Shaun Tan

Primarily known as a children's book author and illustrator, Shaun Tan has repeatedly resisted this label and rather positioned himself between the fields of literature and fine art, emphasising that his training and primary interest are in the latter. This essay approaches Tan's work via his idea of 'untold stories', articulated in the eponymous section of his book The bird king and other sketches (2011) and in the 2018 solo exhibition at Beinart Gallery in Melbourne, Untold tales. Untold essentially means unpremeditated in Tan's vocabulary and relates to his evocation of Paul Klee's idea of 'taking a line for a walk'. Using his idea of untold stories as my central point, the essay foregrounds the untold critical story of Tan as a fine artist, focusing in particular on works that have received minimal to no critical attention: his 2015 series of paintings Go, said the bird, his 2003 public mural The hundred year picnic, and his ongoing 9x5 inch series of observational works in the tradition of the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionism. The latter is a particularly strong and formative influence on Tan's career as a painter, allowing for a discussion of his work in the broader context of postcolonial art history and settler colonialism.

Honoring Inágofli’e’ and Alofa: Developing a Culturally Grounded Health Promotion Model for Queer and Transgender Pacific Islanders

(1) Background: Although culturally grounded health interventions (CGHI) have shown efficacy in improving Indigenous health, few CGHI for Queer and Transgender Pacific Islander (QTPI) communities exist to address their health promotion. This study explores QTPI experiences of health for cultural mechanisms to develop CGHI for QTPI health promotion. (2) Methods: Using Indigenist community-engaged research methodologies, we collaborated with the United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance of Washington and Guma’ Gela’ to conduct 11 exploratory semi-structured interviews with QTPI community members living in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. These interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. (3) Results: QTPI well-being was greatly influenced by how settler colonialism impacted their connectedness to their families, communities, and cultures. We also found that inágofli’e’ and alofa, relational values in CHamoru and Sāmoan culture, played essential roles in facilitating QTPI health. Many participants fostered these values through chosen family, community care, and Indigenous mobilities. (4) Conclusions: Our findings indicate a need for CGHI that facilitate inágofli’e’ and alofa for QTPI to combat settler colonialism’s impacts on QTPI well-being. Finally, we present a community-centered conceptual model for culturally grounded health promotion in QTPI communities.

Japanese Migration Patterns to Mexico: Settler Colonialism and Corporate Mobility

Japanese Migration Patterns to Mexico: Settler Colonialism and Corporate Mobility

Confronting ignorance about militarism and settler colonialism in communication pedagogy

Confronting ignorance about militarism and settler colonialism in communication pedagogy

A disappearing frontier?: An ethnographic study of the labour of imagination of SpaceX fans and space creators in South Texas

Outer space is often described as a frontier – an unsettled, mysterious or wild place that should be explored and eventually inhabited. The metaphor evokes a pioneer spirit and a sense of freedom, but it is also bound up with violent histories of settler colonialism and social injustice. Although the frontier narrative remains prevalent in political, commercial and media discourses in the United States and elsewhere, we know little about whether the public understands space exploration in this way. We also lack studies about how those working to popularise space exploration and make it comprehensible to a global audience understand and apply the frontier narrative. A long-term ethnographic study of their work shows that their understandings of the space frontier are refracted through everyday forms of sociality and experience that they cultivate near Boca Chica in South Texas, where SpaceX builds and tests Starship prototypes. The labour of imagination performed by SpaceX fans and space creators upends the problematic myth of the frontier and points towards alternative ways of understanding space exploration.

Settler colonialism and the administrative state: The transfer of the Government of the Northwest Territories to Yellowknife in 1967

AbstractIn September 1967, the federal government transferred the Government of the Northwest Territories from Ottawa to Yellowknife. While the transfer brought the machinery of government closer to the governed, it also established settler institutions in the homelands of Dene, Métis, and Inuit peoples. Using the tools of administrative history and settler colonial theory, this article reconstructs the transfer using newly released archival papers of NWT Commissioner Stuart Hodgson, who oversaw the transfer and the development of government in the NWT until 1979. It analyzes the role federal public servants played in facilitating settler colonial development in northwestern Canada and, in turn, how that development affected the structure and work of the federal public service in Ottawa. While the transfer entrenched Westminster parliamentary government in the NWT, it also served as a focal point for Indigenous resurgence and resistance that has remade contemporary governance in the territory.

Emergency medical services impact evaluation approaches in low and middle-income countries

There is a strong need to critically consider the neocolonial context when discussing the impact evaluation of Eemergency Medical Services (EMS) systems in many low to middle-income countries. Many of these countries have faced exploitation and settler colonialism, and in today’s world the aftermath of these political–economic unequal power dynamics persists through neocolonialism. “Solutions” to prehospital care and related donor-driven development sector aid programs are typically orchestrated by high-income countries in the Global North, many of whom directly benefited from centuries of colonizing the Global South. This perpetuates the financial and technocratic dependency of many low to middle-income countries.Traditional Global North–led impact assessment typically revolves around mortality outcomes. This is problematic because singularly tracking mortality can obscure the influence of important factors at play beyond the emergency response incident itself, such as morbidity and socioeconomic privilege. This is why process indicators such as response times and economic impacts on first responders and communities are crucial. Hence, instead of trying to develop a one-size-fits-all impact assessment criteria for all the diverse prehospital care system contexts across the world, it is important to focus on enabling bottom-up, community-led, and participatory approaches to finding context-tailored solutions. A key element of this should be the co-creation of the measures of success themselves with the community stakeholders.Such a decolonial holistic approach may then help put the spotlight on often neglected important measures, such as the inclusion of underprivileged minorities in emergency response and the level of protection against catastrophic health care expenditure built into EMS systems. In doing so, it can encourage a monitoring and evaluation shift from short-term mortality to long-term wellbeing, taking into account cultural contexts about what “wellbeing” entails. Furthermore, it is important to challenge the taken-for-granted notion that in low to middle-income countries, EMS systems are solely for trauma and medical emergencies. It is also important to consider (with the dialogue led by the local stakeholders) what sustainability would look like, and how resources accordingly should be allocated, in those regions in low to middle-income countries where there is political and economic volatility as a consequence of continuing neocolonial hegemony.

Jacki Hedlund Tyler. Leveraging an Empire: Settler Colonialism and the Legalities of Citizenship in the Pacific Northwest.

Jacki Hedlund Tyler. <i>Leveraging an Empire: Settler Colonialism and the Legalities of Citizenship in the Pacific Northwest</i>.

Settler Colonialism in Black and White: Roberta Sykes, Germaine Greer, and the Different Embodied Experiences of Womanhood, Rape, and Sovereignty

Settler Colonialism in Black and White: Roberta Sykes, Germaine Greer, and the Different Embodied Experiences of Womanhood, Rape, and Sovereignty

Federalism and Settler Imperialism: Racial Regimes, Whiteness, and Conquest in Canadian Constitutionalism

AbstractIn political science, federalism is often treated as an “antithesis” to empire. While Canadian Politics has recently become more attentive to the importance of ongoing settler colonialism as conditioning Canadian political life writ large, this has yet to induce a paradigm shift in understanding how the institutional logics of the state were established by, and in order to advance, colonial and imperial ends. This article contributes to this broader understanding by exploring how, in Canada, the federal arrangement congeals a constitutionalized whiteness that facilitates both the internal coherence of a settler class and its subsequent continental expansion. Attentive to the importance of this constitutional development within a world-spanning imperial context, this article also suggests that the simultaneous innovation of Dominion status contoured the early twentieth-century's global colour line, as self-determination was increasingly devolved to other white settler polities. The contradictory realities of these processes are also noted.

Exiles in the Old Northwest: How Northern Trans-Appalachia Became Midwestern

ABSTRACT: Frederick Jackson Turner, premier historian of the frontier and American exceptionalism, wondered late in his career how sectional identities had formed in the United States. Out of all the American sections, the Midwest seemed to have no distinct character, serving instead as a miniature model of the entire nation. Turner's professional descendants in the Midwestern History Association have interrogated the region's typicality, noting that it became in the twentieth century a generator of progressive reform movements and a new homeland for diverse groups. Looking back at the region's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century past, particularly within the conceptual framework of Indiana University Press's Trans-Appalachian Frontier series (1996–2018), lets historians determine when the Midwest separated from its parent region, the "old" West, which included the Deep South. The territories between the Appalachians and the Missouri River initially shared many features: a large and adaptive Native American population, a commitment among white settlers to commercial agriculture and land speculation, and attractiveness to utopian experimenters. The Midwest separated from this larger region after 1865, when formerly enslaved Black people moved to the midwestern states from the white-supremacist South, immigrants reshaped the social landscape of midwestern cities, and regional authors and artists began constructing a midwestern stereotype in order to critique and demystify it.

A negotiated sovereignty: Surfacing Indigenous geopolitics within settler colonialism

This paper examines Indigeneity within the less-explored settler colonial context of Taiwan in the face of China’s increasing irredentism. I review two processes of Indigenous reconciliation developing in Taiwan and frame them as Indigenous geopolitics – the survey and legislation of traditional territory and the instrumentalization of Indigeneity to assert the island’s autonomy from China. I highlight that Indigenous political struggles that have otherwise often been contained within a stable conception of the settler nation-state can have outward facing effects and suggest that Indigenous rights won can be seen within a spectrum of Indigenous sovereignty in varying degrees, from mere recognition in history books to the extent of making representations to other states. Noting the highly visible process of reconciliation that has thus far yielded limited legislative outcomes in Taiwan, I propose that Indigenous geopolitics should not be considered independent of or in opposition to the settler state. Rather, Indigenous representatives necessarily negotiate their politics within the framework of the settler state in an unequal relationship that nonetheless hold benefits for both sides.

Reimagining the Pacific: Settler Colonialism and the Hawaiian Islands in the Twenty-First Century

Reimagining the Pacific: Settler Colonialism and the Hawaiian Islands in the Twenty-First Century

Decolonial Embodiments: Materiality, Disability, and Black Being in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso

Grounded in, and in dialogue with, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso of 2018, this paper interrogates a particular time and place of coloniality and racial capital’s reproduction of Black fungibility in late twentieth-century Portugal, after formal decolonization in Africa and in the wake of Black migratory waves from the post/neo-colony (Angola in this case) to the former metropolis. Almeida’s novel provides a literary intervention in grappling with the economic and institutional reinvention of anti-Blackness in Europe after settler colonialism, while also imagining and inscribing modes of Black being within and beyond the materialities of white supremacy. Towards this end and against the racial, gendered, and ableist logics of capital, the Black body in Almeida’s novel becomes a site through which the relationships between humans and matter as well as mind and body are decolonially revised.

‘How do we name the air that we breathe?’ – The haunting presence of white supremacy and settler colonialism at UC Berkeley

ABSTRACT Social-justice-oriented student activists at UC Berkeley are concerned with structural inequalities and their connection to past unacknowledged atrocities associated with the campus. Through different activist endeavours, students seek to raise awareness of UC Berkeley’s settler colonial past and legacy of white supremacy. They unearth, reactivate, and relocate past atrocities in the present. The students call forth and are called upon by the past to dismantle structures of inequality on campus and beyond and encourage each other to be attentive to these structures. Building on five months of in-person fieldwork among student activists and online fieldwork from 2020 to 2022, I explore how rumours and narratives of the past, in resonance with broader translocal calls for justice, becomes a way for activist students to deal with the unaddressed settler colonial past of the university. . Inspired by a theoretical framework of hauntology, I show how (past) injustices haunt the campus and demand a reckoning with the past and present. I argue that activist students understand current inequalities as directly connected to past atrocities and that this understanding of history positions the students as implicated. Being implicated entails discomfort but also opens possibilities for action.

A just energy transition for Indigenous peoples: From ideal deliberation to fairness in Canada and Australia

In response to the global climate crisis, renewable energy projects are being developed on Indigenous territories. As renewable energy sources are not without social and ecological impacts, it is crucial to consider who benefits from these projects and who bears the consequences. In settler states such as Canada and Australia, the power dynamics are affecting the role of Indigenous peoples in the energy transitions. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for a just energy transition (JET) based on a comprehensive literature review of justice movements, energy transitions, and Indigenous experiences in Canada and Australia. The literature on environmental, climate, and energy justice examines three dimensions of justice: procedural, distributional, and recognition. While these dimensions offer important perspectives for our analysis, they are not sufficient on their own. This paper argues that promoting justice for Indigenous knowledge renewal is crucial for establishing a fair energy future. In addition to knowledge renewal, our framework comprises two more JET components: socioeconomic impact distribution, and procedural power. We argue that the JET components are deeply interrelated in an insidious loop effect. This means that all justice issues have the same roots, perpetuated by the historical consequences of colonisation. The question is how to simultaneously address them to transform a negative cycle into a positive one. Drawing on Indigenous rights in Canada and Australia this paper highlights the importance of improved bilateral communication strategies to break the insidious loop effect. Before discussing project strategies, it is crucial to consider the fairness of the decision-making process.

Inscription and the Settler Colony: Theorising Aboriginal Textuality Today

Inscription and the Settler Colony: Theorising Aboriginal Textuality Today