Settler Colonialism Research Articles

Martial(ling) peace at the war museum: Emotion, desires and representations of the war-peace dichotomy

This article investigates the role of emotions and the conceptual use of peace to justify martial violence. Drawing upon empirical evidence collected at the Canadian War Museum, the article explores how representations of war history present militarized violence as both a threat to, and the solution for, global peace. Building on scholarship in IR and Peace Studies that theorizes the relationship between war and peace, this article puts forward a novel analytical concept – martial peace – to investigate this paradox. It theorizes that manoeuvring peace as a justification for military activities not only results in depoliticizing the contexts of conflicts and war, but also serves to euphemize the violence that occurs in the name of peace and within so-called peaceful societies. Using Canada as a case study, the article explores how martial peace obscures settler colonialism and generates affective militarism as key components of nationalist projects.

Manifest Destiny in Southeast Asia: Archaeology of American Colonial Industry in the Philippines, 1898–1987

Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, American logging companies backed by the US colonial regime initiated extensive extraction in Bikol, Philippines. Industrial infrastructure and the involvement of a newly assembled Bikolano workforce left a profound imprint on the region's landscape. This article discusses a collaborative archaeological project that used archival materials, place-name analysis, ethnographic interviews, discussions with local scholars, satellite mapping, and drone-mounted lidar scans of former industrial sites. Findings shed light on the enduring ramifications of American logging in the early 1900s on settlement patterns, the infrastructure of routes and mobility, the state of industries from Philippine independence in 1946 through the 1980s, and ongoing environmental hazards. These findings emphasize the legacy of American empire, reveal the role of Filipino logging workers in shaping the landscape through settlement decisions, and uncover intricate connections across a pan-Pacific American colonial frontier that was shaped by both extractive and settler colonialism. This article adds to an emerging trend in Americanist archaeology in which archaeology investigates recent historical and even contemporary events.

Resisting and Reclaiming: Squatting as Contentious Urban Politics in the U.S.

Abstract Squatting as contentious politics has been well studied globally, expanding knowledge of how everyday people resist injustices, strive to remake cities, and respond to local/regional conditions. These histories and contemporary struggles have largely been overlooked in the U.S. This article uses qualitative data to compare three recent cases of organized housing occupations in Detroit (2011), Oakland (2019), and Philadelphia (2020) by mothers of color with their children, to better understand how this form of global urban politics manifests in the U.S. Using this comparison, we identify important dimensions that have shaped these three cases of contentious politics and their outcomes, including differences in goals, tactics, and socio-spatial context. We also uncover the diagnostic and prognostic frames reflected in each case: despite common legal violations, each case purposefully diagnoses locally-rooted housing problems and suggests different property-relations as solutions. We find that each case varies in terms of what kind of property squatters target, how these spaces reflect broader structural problems in the U.S. housing market, and what kind of property-relations they envision with these occupations. In turn, our findings also advance understanding of this global urban politics by showing how squatting efforts may dovetail with place-based legacies, such as racial segregation and settler colonialism in the U.S. Researchers have long attended to organized housing struggles in their varied manifestations, but by foregrounding resistance to and reclaiming of property by squatters, we draw out understudied problems and possibilities related to land and housing occupations that are subverted within broader housing studies.

Aboriginal plant foods policy in Australia: a critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT The Australian continent has over 6500 edible endemic plant species, fourteen of which have been certified for commercial consumption. This paper seeks to critically analyze select Australian Commonwealth Government policy relating to these Aboriginal plant foods. The aim is to purposefully examine the positioning of non-Indigenous people in Aboriginal plant foods policy discourse and reveal tacit settler colonial power relations. This is in response to a call to action from Indigenous scholars to examine how settler colonialism manifests in regulatory mechanisms, such as government policy. This paper offers a theoretically informed critical discourse analysis methodology for examining Australian Commonwealth Government policy relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. Analysis comprised an explanation of the socio-political context of Aboriginal policymaking in Australia, textual analysis of policy texts related to Aboriginal plant foods and an interpretation of discourse practice to reveal how policy discourse tacitly promotes ideological agendas. This analysis revealed that Australian Commonwealth Government Aboriginal plant foods policy is framed according to settler terms and upholds neoliberal interests. Considerable rethinking is required about how power is exercised in Commonwealth Government policy relating to Aboriginal plant foods to ensure it does not replicate and perpetuate unjust settler colonial power relations.

Temporalities of emergency: the experiences of Indigenous women with traumatic brain injury from violence waiting for healthcare and service support in Australia

ABSTRACT Globally, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been recognised as a serious health issue not only because of the immediate impacts at the time the injury occurs but even more so due to the longstanding impacts. Even though TBI is a globally recognised condition, the research is disproportionately focused on its incidence in, and immediate and long-term effects on men. A growing body of research suggests that generally, women who experience family violence are at high risk of TBI and suffer its impacts in ways that reflect gendered differences in the patterns and frequency of violence. In Australia, the social and physical costs of TBI are multiplied for Indigenous women, whose experience of disability and access to healthcare lies at the intersection of gender and race in the historical context of settler colonialism. The present study addresses the need for research into the sociodemographic inequalities that affect access to culturally appropriate hospital care, timely response systems, and flexible, safe and engaged social services. This paper draws on data from interviews and focus groups with Indigenous women, hospital staff and community-based service providers and suggests potential pathways for further research in settler-colonial settings elsewhere in the world.

Millukmungee 1: Stone artefacts and occupation at the junction of the Buchan and Snowy Rivers, GunaiKurnai Country, East Gippsland (Victoria, Australia)

Recent excavations at Millukmungee 1, a limestone rock shelter along the upper bank of the Buchan River in GunaiKurnai Country (southeastern Australia), uncovered archaeological evidence of Mid- to Late Holocene occupation spanning c. 5000 years. Here we report on the stone artefacts and faunal remains, especially in light of a paucity of published details on artefact types and technologies for this part of southeast Australia. Results indicate that this part of the site was occupied only rarely from 5590–5050 cal BP (the uncertainty range for the oldest artefact from the excavation) to 2340–2030 cal BP. During this period, most of the artefacts were made from silcrete, quartz, chert, and quartzite. Small backed artefacts are present during this phase, all dating between 4570–1940 cal BP. A single, much larger backed artefact (elouera) dates to later, ≤290 cal BP. After 1960 cal BP, activities focussed on the production of flakes from locally available quartz and, to a lesser extent, hornfels; large pebbles obtained from the nearby Buchan River channel were flaked during this period. Occupation ceased with the onset of settler colonialism in the mid-1800s CE.

Academic Supervivencia and Sesi Irekani: Refusing, Reimagining, and Rearticulating Decolonization in the Social Foundations of Education

The American Educational Studies Association (AESA) was established in 1968 in a context of both local and global social justice movements. The AESA’s mission and ongoing commitment to the analysis of education and society with underlying liberal activist aims has been ongoing since. Although AESA and its membership have been critiqued and questioned for their larger impact in the field, especially in its disconnect between university academics and pk-12 teachers, the original charge and purpose has largely remained. This address seeks to put a spotlight on the foundations of the social foundations of education and by extension AESA by using settler colonial and structural racism frames to examine the enduring problematics of how academia and academic enterprises are, as Quechua scholar Sandy Grande would say, “an arm of the settler state” (p. 47). Namely, I ask, how does AESA and the field of social foundations of education advance settler futurity? However, most importantly, I will also engage, how can AESA, the field and its membership engage in anti-colonial and anti-racist self-reflection and work toward decolonizing the organization and the work that we do as faculty members in this field? To engage in this process of reflexive praxis, I will use Grande’s concept of academic survivance, which includes operating beyond the boundaries set up for us by the institution and toward “an active presence in society and the academy” (p. 12). I slightly modify survivance with Chicana feminist scholar, Ruth Trinidad-Galvan’s concept of supervivencia, which also emphasizes beyond mere survival but from the perspective of Mexican campesinas “left behind” in a context of neoliberal extractivist dislocation. Finally, I draw from my P’urhépecha community ancestry a concept also common throughout many Indigenous communities, Sesi Irekani, el buen vivir, or “the good life.” I will argue that by centering a reflexive praxis based on these saberes-haceres we can refuse, reimagine, and rearticulate a relational comunalidad that unsettles the settler within and recon/figures an alter/Native charge and decolonial practice.

Transformative learning at the community-university-land interface: A political ecology of knowledge, education and health

As awareness grows of the catastrophic implications of global environmental change, multiple scholarly fields addressing health-environment relationships have advocated 'transformative' educational strategies. Holistic Indigenous health-environment models inspire and inform many such efforts, but related land-based learning initiatives involving universities are often impeded by the competitive processes of academia. In this article we report on a community-university partnership – Pedagogy for the Anthropocene (P4A) – aimed at developing transformative educational responses to pressing global crises, inspired by land-based approaches. We integrate political ecologies of health, education, and knowledge to understand the troubled production of pedagogical knowledge in P4A, participant experiences in the resulting educational programs and the role of health and bodies in both. We first trace the production of knowledge as shaped by macroscopic and localized institutional forces; organizational and occupational dynamics; interacting knowledges and individuals; and material factors. Next, we explore participant experiences in the resulting educational programming. In both steps, affect-laden bodies of academics, trainees and community members reveal entanglements with human communities and more-than-human elements, shaped in variable ways by institutional forces such as settler colonialism and university neoliberalization. One key finding involves the role of universities in relation to land dispossession at home and abroad; another includes the challenges of pursuing transformational community-university research within contemporary universities. Tracing such entanglements yields implications for future land-based learning efforts in university settings, and broader praxis for environmental justice in the shadow of higher education's complicity with settler colonialism and globally extractive neoliberal capitalism.

Liminality, Situated Digital Tales, and the Pandemic: Three Cases of Radical Placemaking in Australia

AbstractSettlers of colour occupy a liminal space in the settler colony of Australia, and this liminality was exacerbated during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Through the literature on digital activism, technological immersion, and placemaking, this paper explores Radical Placemaking as a route for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) people based in Brisbane to stake their right to the city through alternative digitised modalities. Three projects using situated digital stories were created: (i) the Chatty Bench Project; (ii) the TransHuman Saunter Project; and (iii) Chatty Bench Festival Community Media Visual Projections. We analysed the experiences of study participants creating the digital stories and eventual user experiences of the stories for their ability to provoke self‐reflection, immersiveness, and belonging through evocation and representation of lived experiences. The paper suggests that radical placemaking offers CALD communities subversive tactics of occupying space through emerging technologies without engaging in erasure of existing histories of place.

Unsettling Environmentalism

AbstractDecolonial ecological imaginations entail a critical interrogation of mainstream environmentalism to unmask and unsettle it. These reflections expose how mainstream environmentalism legitimizes and perpetuates the colonization of the Earth and subaltern and Indigenous communities. Mainstream environmentalism is a colonial project to perpetuate the interests of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. This calls for a new search for decolonial and alternative ecological reimagination, informed by the epistemologies and eco‐politics of the Indigenous and subaltern communities and other grassroots social movements. Decolonial ecological imaginations involve the task of contesting and unsettling settler colonialism, extractive/exploitative capitalism, white supremacy, and all ideologies and practices of domination and exclusion.

Red Mitten Nationalism: Sport, Commercialism, and Settler Colonialism in Canada by Estée Fresco (review)

Red Mitten Nationalism: Sport, Commercialism, and Settler Colonialism in Canada by Estée Fresco (review)

Socialist Settlers on a Capitalist Frontier: The Contradictions of New Australia, Paraguay

This article assesses the socialist colony of New Australia, founded in Paraguay in 1893, in its wider historical and environmental context. Drawing on archival research, the article contends that New Australia was founded as part of a broader settler colonial deforestation frontier in the southern Atlantic Rainforest. Despite the utopian socialist ideology of its founders, New Australia’s establishment was made possible by Paraguay’s violent integration into the capitalist world-system in the late nineteenth century. This integration had previously been obstructed by centuries of resistance by Indigenous Guaraní and Guaraní-descendant peoples to colonisation. Nevertheless, New Australia’s subsequent failure as a settler colony also ensured that its impact on the Atlantic Rainforest was relatively minimal, with the colony’s inhabitants themselves becoming integrated into Paraguay’s rural Guaraní-speaking population.

Bandits, heroes and villains: A view from a settler colony

Abstract‘Bushrangers’ were late 18th to early 20th‐century bandits who lived in the Australian bush through the proceeds of crime, but today, they are national legends. A particular constellation of factors led to the white male bushranger's status as a national hero in Australia. By charting the development of bushranging historiography alongside bushranging in practice and the bushranging myth, this article will demonstrate the distinctive Australian and settler colonial dimensions of this bandit tradition. In describing how white bushranging men came to national prominence, the piece will also draw attention to those excluded from this legend—women and people of colour, with particular reference to Aboriginal people. The Australian bushranging myth, as it exists today, was not an organic or natural development. It was actively constructed by white settlers, including white settler historians.

Representations of Africa in Muriel Spark’s writings

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) travelled from Scotland to Africa and stayed there from 1937 to 1944. Africa is a recurrent presence in her work. Critics focus mainly on her African-themed poems and stories. They pay less attention to depictions of that continent in her other work and tend to gloss over her problematic use of language. This article addresses Spark's representation of the African landscape and her different portrayals of Africans, white settlers, and missionaries. It also explores her deployment of the familiar colonial tropes of cannibalism and ‘witch doctors’. It argues that Spark's representations of Africa in her works are at once ironic, comedic, satirical, and wittily arch, yet remain open to charges of being stereotypical and problematic, particularly at a time of public scrutiny and media concern with discriminatory language. These representations reveal that Spark mainly speaks for white missionaries rather than the downtrodden Africans in her writings. This article aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Scottish involvement in colonialism in the modern period by untangling the connections between race, religion, and literary culture in Spark's writings.

An indigenous geographic position on producing data in colonial conditions

AbstractIn a historically colonial field, what are the possibilities of a geography informed by Indigenous and Anti‐Colonial ethics and onto‐epistemologies? This article suggests engaging in a critical study of data from an Indigenous geographic standpoint, with a focus on imperialism and colonialism in settler nation‐states. I begin by emphasizing the pervasive and long‐standing imposition of geographical data collection in Indigenous life, naming the binds of engaging with the production of data for and with colonial institutions. I then review prominent spatial analytics within critical Indigenous studies, Indigenous geography, and aligned Anti‐Colonial geography, including Indigenous place‐based knowledge and onto‐epistemologies, (racialized) colonial dispossession, sovereignty and recognition, environmental colonialism, and mapping and cartography. Last, I suggest that studies of colonial data dynamics and Indigenous data production strengthen Indigenous and Anti‐Colonial geographies by emphasizing the co‐constitution of good relations and good data. Future research avenues include the need to push beyond the geo‐historical bounds of the category settler colonial, and to build co‐rejections of racial empire with other fields of study including Black, Queer, and Feminist geographies.

Settler Colonial Classifications of Edibility

The pastoral economies introduced during the colonial invasion have radically transformed Australian diets, cultures, and ecosystems. Stolen land was tenured to settlers and emancipated convicts to develop profitable and productive enterprises for the British Empire. Land rights and animal care are intrinsically linked to modern food systems, yet there is a gap in Australian literature regarding the legacy of colonial pastoralism and its connection to current food systems. This essay questions how introduced species evolved to command the Australian diet. Wallabies and kangaroos were legally relegated to national emblems, and thus inedible. Their conditions of being, whether edible, iconic, or wild, were dictated by the Commonwealth Government. The taboo nature of these native marsupials leaves them largely unconsumed, and therefore, unprotected. Modern conditions of edibility are less concerned with physical metabolic matters, instead driven by historic cultural attitudes and political and economic motives. Nourishment was commodified. My research uses Tasmanian legal archives in conjunction with cookbooks and popular iconography to trace the historical legacies of foodways since the invasion. Scholarship around waste, sociology, ecology, and food justice and sovereignty are incorporated to consider how modern agricultural practices perpetuate violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and ecosystems. Modern agriculture affects every being on the planet, both human and more-than-human. My research goal is to encourage people to question their metabolic practices to ascertain how everyday acts of consumption implicate them within unjust systems. Though consumptive wallaby culling is legal, the industry remains privatized, and Indigenous Australians have little agency to influence how their native species are used, and who profits from their utility. By sharing these concerns with researchers from a broad range of disciplines, I hope to connect with individuals who can help to make future metabolic matters more inclusive, more ethical, and more sustainable.

Drawing and Disrupting Borders in the Wake of the US-Mexico War

This article advances an argument about two “imagined environments”—my term for the frameworks that human groups use to depict and dwell in more-than-human worlds. The first of these imagined environments arose around the US-Mexican Boundary Commission (1849–59): while failing to fulfill its official objective of building physical border monuments, this team of explorers and engineers still made media that helped two settler states conceptualize and control their borderlands. Against this increasingly efficient exploitation of both humans and nonhumans, a second imagined environment persisted in Mescalero Apache pictographs, Chihene Apache performances, and other Apache media. On our precarious planet, this imagined environment can teach us to stop defining ourselves around fixed places and to remain resilient while migrating through shifting spaces.

Infrastructure of Vulnerability, or, How the Fraser Valley Flooded Twice

AbstractIn November and December of 2021, the Fraser Valley in southwest British Columbia suffered extreme flooding due to an atmospheric river. Although the event was attributed to climate change, I suggest that the recent floods must be understood through the historical geography of flood control infrastructure in the valley, particularly dikes. In this article, I trace the development of these infrastructures from the beginning of colonisation to the completion of the first state‐managed diking system in the early 20th century. I argue that at the same time as dikes secured land for settler farmers, they exposed Indigenous peoples to new hazards—ironically including floods—and multiplied the damage of future flood events. Building on geographic literature demonstrating the participation of dike infrastructure in racialised capital accumulation and settler colonialism, I highlight the way that dikes have abetted these projects through the uneven spatial production of vulnerability.

Intent to Harm: Settler Colonial Outposts in Psychoanalysis

This autoethnographic article unpacks a highly publicized, Zionist, and right-wing smear campaign. Rather than individualize this process, the article discusses this smear campaign to outline the mechanics of what are referred to as “settler colonial outposts” that extend the sovereignty of the Israeli settler state. The article maps out how settler colonial outposts are ideological formations and thus also spaces of convergence for fascists and liberal Zionists. Finally, it attends to the psychic and affective features of settler colonial outposts.

Frontier ecologies: Israel's settler colonialism in the Jawlan-Golan

In June 2023, thousands of non-Jewish residents of the Jawlan (in Arabic) or Golan (in Hebrew) protested for several days against the construction of a new wind farm near the picturesque village of Majdal Shams (Arabic for Tower of the Sun) on the southeastern border between Syria and Israel. This event and its fallouts were arguably the culmination of 56 years of Israeli frontier making projects in the region. Drawing on in-depth interviews as well as field observations, this article traces Israel's ecological frontier. Specifically, the article chronicles five strategies of nature related frontier making deployed by the Israeli settler state in the Jawlan-Golan in the last six decades: terra nullius, animal nullius, naturalization, militarization, and renewable energy. I refer to such settler colonial investments in various modes of natural and environmental management, when these occur in contentious political regions and near borders, as “frontier ecologies.” The power of frontier ecologies lies precisely in that they seem to exist naturally—namely, beyond the realm of humans and their wars. Ultimately, the nexus of colonialism and nature conservation highlights the ways in which violence travels in between vulnerable human and nonhuman communities. Documenting the Jawlani resistance to colonialism, and to climate colonialism in particular, this article also calls for a more collaborative practices of nature conservation that would unsettle the colonial legacies of frontier ecologies.