Settler Families Research Articles

Proximity, Family Lore, and False Claims to an Algonquin Identity

This article examines the type of family lore that leads white Canadians and Americans to claim Indigenous identities. Using a case-study approach, I demonstrate how 2000 descendants of a French-Canadian couple, born in the early 1800s near Montréal, joined one of the largest land claims in Canadian history as “Algonquins”. The tools of critical settler family history provide the necessary theoretical scaffolding to unpack how genealogical and geographical proximity to Indigenous people in the past are the bases for the family lore that propelled these individuals to become card-carrying, voting members of the land claim. Despite continued opposition to their inclusion by the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, the only federally recognized Algonquin community involved in the land claim, these fake Algonquins remained potential land claim beneficiaries for over two decades, until an independent tribunal finally removed them in 2023. Family lore resolves the crisis in the family: no longer the colonizers responsible for Indigenous displacement and dispossession, white pretendians become the victims of settler colonial violence.

Women’s Garden Work, Agricultural Rehabilitation, and Gendered Knowledge from Below on the Canadian Prairies, 1930–46

This article considers the gardening work of prairie women in the context of farming difficulties and agricultural rehabilitation on the Canadian Prairies in the 1930s and 1940s. It is based on analysis of gardening coverage in the Western Producer (a prairie periodical aimed at English-speaking farm families) and engagement with the records of federal government officials involved in the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration and the Experimental Farms Service. The article establishes the significance of women’s gardening work and its important role in agricultural rehabilitation. In doing so, the article makes clear the ambition underlying agricultural rehabilitation, a federal government project intended to help protect permanent homes for settler families on the Canadian Prairies. Contributing to the understudied topics of rural experiences in women’s history and of women’s experiences in environmental history and the history of knowledge, the article illustrates the importance of considering gendered knowledge from below in grappling with the consolidation of agricultural colonization on the Canadian Prairies.

Climate change resiliency response from and within cross-cultural children activities

While there are many studies about the environmental impacts of climate change, the role of cross-cultural children and their activities for climate change solutions has been a lesser focus of inquiry on climate change resiliency research. This paper discusses learning from reflective learning, Indigenous Elders land-based teaching, and music and arts learnings and positive interactions with cross-cultural children in a cross-cultural community garden. It is essential to know who we are as a colour settler family on Indigenous land (i.e., treaties six and seven territories known as Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada). Our family has been involved with various cross-cultural children's activities in the community garden for over eight years. Learning together with cross-cultural children in a community garden assisted us in creating our belonging with land and people, building a cross-cultural community, and taking responsibility for climate change solutions. Following Indigenist research methodology, we used non-traditional stories such as growing foods, learning through Indigenous and intergenerational stories, father and daughter conversations, music, dance, and artwork. We hope learning about climate change solutions through cross-cultural children's activities in a community garden may inspire others to understand the importance of building a cross-cultural children's community for climate change solutions from and within everyday learning and practice.

Australian Selectors in the Nineteenth Century and Discrepancies in Imaginings and Realities: Critical Family History

Queensland became an independent state in 1859, separating from New South Wales. Almost immediately, an ambitious plan on migration was embarked upon in order to attract emigrants to Queensland, above all other possible colony destinations in the British Empire. Henry Jordan was instrumental as the Emigration Commissioner (1861–1866) in devising the land order scheme and Richard Daintree, as Agent-General, wooed, through modern techniques on never-before-seen photography in colour, small capitalists to the isolated outreaches of Queensland, where settlement was encouraged. Life there for those that migrated was, however, vastly different from what either they knew in Britain, or what they expected. But, ultimately, they settled, took possession of considerable stretches of lands, as selectors, or pastoral land owners, with disregard for the indigenous populations there. In this article, I examine one migration story on an ancestor in the nineteenth century, Andrew Milne, from London to Queensland, through the lens of critical settler family history theory. I take up the challenge for historians to question who their ancestors were, since the past is telling of the present, and the perceptions that are longed for in the future selves. Namely, in the construction of the future self, an individual must also confront their past, and the lives of those that preceded them. In particular, in the case of Australia, settlement, colonisation, and the possession of land are not benign, and are not isolated events, but have an impact on the present and future lives of both descendants of those that possessed the land, and those from whom it was taken away. The legacy of racial segregation (through the Stolen Generations), and despite the attempt to ‘close the gap’ since 2008, Aboriginal peoples in Australia still suffer the consequences of objectification and dehumanisation to which they were subjected. The consequences are not only financial and economic, but are visible in health, education, social status, and in their mistrust of public services.

Philippine's housing commitment as a preventive resettlement strategy for informal settler families

Philippine's housing commitment as a preventive resettlement strategy for informal settler families

‘No Friend for Sorrow but Memory’: Commemorating Children in Early Post-Plantation Ulster, Ireland

ABSTRACT This paper explores the social visibility of children from Gaelic Irish and settler families during the 17th and 18th centuries given the very significant economic and cultural changes which followed the Plantation of Ulster. Predominantly Protestant settlers from Britain ousted native Catholic congregations from traditional places of worship, which became Protestant churches, and graveyards were now shared with Planter families. Using information from the south and west of the province of Ulster, it examines how children’s memorials may signify the religious, social and/or ethnic identity their families wished to express. It explores how distinctive familial plots were perhaps one means of maintaining complex Gaelic Irish kin relationships in danger of erosion and may have helped settlers replace or strengthen social networks from their original homes. High status interments which included children in prestigious native burial grounds may also have been a means of control and a powerful symbol of subjugation.

Foundations by Karin Speedy

Reviewed by: Foundations by Karin Speedy Heather Goodall Foundations. By Karin Speedy. Lower Hutt: Karin Speedy, 2022. This is an engaging and evocative work of creative non-fiction. Karin Speedy has cryptically described it in her cover notes as a “memoir/literary nonfiction novel.” The book depicts episodes of her life—at different ages—and intersperses them with her analyses of the situations she was researching. This is certainly memoir, but Speedy takes us further, disrupting chronological progressions with juxtaposition, shifting narrative voices and contrasting styles. This agility allows Speedy’s book to remain lucid and accessible while it draws the reader in. Foundations tells at least four stories, weaving them together so they are in conversation—sometimes disturbingly, often movingly—with each other. One story is a family history, across a number of generations of migrancy and colonialism, told through the eyes of Speedy as a young person growing up within a difficult family relationship in Auckland, Aotearoa. Beyond this troubled nuclear family, there is her far longer genealogical search across the myths and secrets which so often shroud settler family histories. Only on the final pages—and after the penultimate book manuscript had been completed—do we, and the author herself, learn a key fact which offers an answer to one of these family myths. That long family history is related to the second major narrative of this book, which is the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand—the invasion and then the theft of whenua—Māori land—through military force and the deceptive versions of the Waitangi treaty. This Aotearoa colonial history necessitates telling part of the story of British colonialism in Australia and across the Pacific, although most attention is on Aotearoa. Yet another major narrative is about the French empire, itself a fragmented story with many foci. In this book, one focus is on the colonies in the Pacific, particularly Kanaky New Caledonia where Speedy has researched, but also Tahiti. Another focus is on the colonies near the east coast of Africa—Reunion and Mauritius. A third is on the colonies in the Americas, both in Canada and in Louisiana. Most of these French colonies have Indigenous, settler and enslaved populations—with African enslaved people transferred to the Americas, the Indian Ocean and, post-emancipation, to the Pacific colonies as well—and with metropolitan France intervening in the interactions between each population in and between each colony. The second and third of these stories—the colonial history of Aotearoa to the present and the entangled histories of colonies and metropole in the French Empire—open up challenges for readers who, like me, are historians working largely within one empire. I have looked at very different colonies within the British Empire, namely Australia and India, as well as exploring the tensions between the diverse and often conflicting groups within each of those colonies. And because there are such complex situations to explore, even within any colony, it has been tempting to work only on one empire. My recent work, published as Beyond Borders: Indians, Australians and the Indonesian Revolution, 1939–1950 (2019), forced me to gain a much better grasp of Dutch colonialism, and the bitter decolonisation of the Netherlands East Indies. I was disturbed to realise how little I had known about the Dutch Empire, despite the geographic proximity of the Netherlands East Indies to Australia; despite the conflicts, in which Australians had been involved, in South Africa between the British and the formerly Dutch settlers, known as Boers, in the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century and, finally, despite the Dutch retreat to Australia during the Japanese invasion from 1942 to 1945 and beyond. Recognising Australia’s place as a South Pacific Island—as I work on the relationships between First Nations people, including Indigenous Australians, in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific campaign—I have paid much more active attention to the French Empire. Here my knowledge has proved to be even less adequate than in relation to the Dutch colonial impact. One dimension of my failure to know more about the histories of both Dutch and French colonialism has been my monolingualism—and the false sense of confidence...

Unsettling the Homestead

Unsettling the Homestead is a reflection on an art exhibit by the same name, showcased at Crossroads Gallery in April 2017. The exhibit investigated settler histories of the Stewiacke Valley by weaving personal stories, ancestral memories, and Indigenous histories into a multi-media installation. Unsettling the Homestead invited visitors to a recreated East Coast kitchen to step into the history of one settler family’s farm on the land known as Sipekne’katik, Mi’kma’ki. Often, settler genealogy is void of the histories of displacement and violence against Indigenous nations. This exhibit aimed to unsettle notions of the homestead by investigating and critiquing the personal positions within these narratives. By utilizing modern multi-media and traditional English art forms, Unsettling the Homestead braided stories and experiences from multiple generations to critique our ideas of what it means to clear land, homestead, and settle.

Advocating the Urban Nexus of Water, Food and Energy through Laguna Lake: The Case of Sta. Rosa

Sta. Rosa, Laguna, Philippines is part of the project Integrated Resource Management in Asian Cities: The Urban Nexus commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (GIZ) in a term from 2013-2015. The Urban Nexus was created to tackle issues on the exhaustion of land, food, water, energy, and sanitation caused by the ever-rising Asian population. This is a pressing issue in the local and international scene but due to its immediate accessibility to people, municipalities have the advantage of solving the problems upfront. Still, due to the departmental management system, typical in Asian countries, municipalities have “struggled to make the most of the opportunity” for the community according to World Bank (Ellis, et. al., 2016). Municipalities in Asia are managed through divisions, Sta. Rosa, as an example, has 27 departments, 15 assistant departments and 10 other departments under the office of the mayor (Municipality of Sta. Rosa, 2021). This type of system solves problems under their department as a single, disconnected element thus blurring the impact and interrelationships or nexus of water, food, and energy. This paper adds to the limited studies that analyse the implementation, progress, and measurements of The Urban Nexus. Drawn from a multiple case study approach, results showed that there was no tangible effect of The Urban Nexus project 6 years after its execution, specifically to those who will benefit the most – the informal settler families along Laguna Lake in Sta. Rosa. And because it takes dedication from all levels of the society to participate and perform their roles to achieve the urban nexus, recommendation of the interconnected responsibilities of schools to municipalities are described.

From the Inside: Indigenous-Settler Reflections on the Family uses of the Thomas Dick ‘Birrpai’ Photographic Collection 1910–1920

ABSTRACT In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas Dick and several Birrpai families. The photographs, reflecting Dick's colonial mindset, were staged as pre-contact and sought to depict Birrpai life of a century earlier. The images are now held in local, national and international collections. The TDPC holds particular familial significance for both Heath and Barnwell, who are respectively descendants of the Bugg-Dungay family (featured in the photographs) and the Dick family (the photographer). Heath is the foremost expert on Dick's Birrpai collection, and has done extensive work; to locate the photographs in inter/national collections; to determine and correctly label the participants and places featured; and to develop a set of cultural protocols for its use in dialogue with a Family Stakeholder Group (FSG) and key collecting institutions. The FSG Protocols provide an indication of the value and use of the images as preferred by descendants. In this paper we write about the role of the photographs as family photographs in both the Bugg-Dungay family and the Dick family, including when we each first saw the photographs and what these initial encounters reveal about how such photographs, when looking at them and beyond them, can be used to both construct and deconstruct settler mythologies of time and history.

Beyond Sentimentality: The Family as Patron, Subject and Author of Early Photography in Colonial Australia

This article investigates the first decade and a half of photographic practice in the Australian colonies from the perspective of family participation in the portrait marketplace. The article argues that this period has largely been narrated around determining the point of photography’s arrival. This approach risks underplaying both the significant innovation and entrepreneurship that defined early photographic practice in this part of the British Empire and how photographic culture engaged with settlers’ dispossession of First Nations land. This is not to say that early colonial Australian photography developed in isolation. Rather, the evasion of early British photography patents, as well as Australia’s geographic location diluted the perpetuation of the English studio model in this part of the world. This, in turn, impacted the kinds of individuals who practised as daguerreian photographers in the colonies and – because of the appetites of colonial society, particularly settler families – the types of photographic products offered.

Introduction: Studies of Critical Settler Family History

The critical study of one’s own family history is a relatively new field that sits at the intersection of family genealogical research and scholarly research [...]

The Settlement of the Kaliningrad region: a question about the gender and age composition of the first settler families

The post-war settlement of part of the territory of the former East Prussia is one of the most important events in the history of the newly formed region, which was reflected in a key way at all stages of its formation as part of the RSFSR. The scale of the migration process makes it one of the largest organized by the Soviet government. In the article, based on the statistical analysis of the database currently being filled in, "Echelon lists of migrants to the Kaliningrad region. 1946-1947" and studies of the texts of memoirs of the first settlers collected in the 1980s and 90s, the sex and age composition of the first and most numerous migration wave is characterized. It was found that mainly families of 4-6 people were resettled, headed by a 40-year-old man. At the same time, there were 1.6 times more women among those over the age of 18. Two thirds of the arrivals were minors, the average age of which is 10 years. Despite the fact that the memories of the resettlement participants were recorded at a much later time, they are consistent with the statistical estimates obtained. The results of the work partially fill in the information that has been missing so far about the exact composition of the Kaliningrad migration, which, as can be seen, is significantly younger, and therefore more balanced in terms of sex ratio than the population of other regions of the Soviet Union.

Not-Talking/Not-Knowing: Autoethnography and Settler Family Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand

Critical family history analyses have generated powerful insights into the history and ongoing workings of colonization by bringing to light forgotten family histories and reframing them as stories of colonialism. Such work unsettles the descendants of early colonizers by compelling them to acknowledge the ways in which they continue to benefit from the colonizing actions of their ancestors. My family were colonizers, and some not-very-distant ancestors were part of the first wave of “settlers” who dispossessed Māori of their land in coastal Taranaki. Where my family differs from the families of many writers in the critical family history field is that they remain almost to this day on the land first taken by our direct ancestors. The question I address is how these settler farmers deal with the fact that the land that is now theirs is only recently so, and only became so through acts of violent dispossession, and that the descendants of the original possessors of that land continue to live on the Coast. I argue that one way that settler-colonizers deal with this uncomfortable history is to erase it. The erasure of this history is accomplished through the simple but effective strategy of not-talking about it, which leads to not-knowing about it. This practice, I suggest is critical for the subjective security of settlers, and it remains a crucial strategy in ongoing practices of quotidian colonization. My analysis emanates from a critically reflexive exploration of my memories, of what I know and what I do not know about the history of the farm I grew up on, and demonstrates that autoethnography as a methodology is particularly useful for interrogating and breaking the silences about colonization that contribute to its perpetuation.

The Work of Impossibility in Brazil

This article describes Brazil’s late twentieth-century religious transformation through the lens of an Amazonian settler family whom I call the Solanhas. Accounts of various Solanha members’ shifti...

Preface: Understanding Women’s Lives and Trauma Through Narrative Research and Analysis

Preface: Understanding Women’s Lives and Trauma Through Narrative Research and Analysis

A Tale of Two Stories: Unsettling a Settler Family’s History in Aotearoa New Zealand

On the morning of the 5 November 1881, my great-grandfather stood alongside 1588 other military men, waiting to commence the invasion of Parihaka pā, home to the great pacifist leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi and their people. Having contributed to the military campaign against the pā, he returned some years later as part of the agricultural campaign to complete the alienation of Taranaki iwi from their land in Aotearoa New Zealand. None of this detail appears in any of the stories I was raised with. I grew up Pākehā (i.e., a descendant of people who came to Aotearoa from Europe as part of the process of colonisation) and so my stories tend to conform to orthodox settler narratives of ‘success, inevitability, and rights of belonging’. This article is an attempt to right that wrong. In it, I draw on insights from the critical family history literature to explain the nature, purposes and effects of the (non)narration of my great-grandfather’s participation in the military invasion of Parihaka in late 1881. On the basis of a more historically comprehensive and contextualised account of the acquisition of three family farms, I also explore how the control of land taken from others underpinned the creation of new settler subjectivities and created various forms of privilege that have flowed down through the generations. Family histories shape the ways in which we make sense of and locate ourselves in the places we live, and those of us whose roots reach back to the destructive practices of colonisation have a particular responsibility to ensure that such narratives do not conform to comfortable type. This article is an attempt to unsettle my settler family narrative.

"A Few Good Seasons Will Restore Prosperity to the Land": Louisa Atkinson's Depictions of Drought

"A Few Good Seasons Will Restore Prosperity to the Land":Louisa Atkinson's Depictions of Drought Grace Moore (bio) drought has always been a way of life in Australia, but the importation of European farming techniques and animals exacerbated the land's aridity in the nineteenth century and continues to do so today.1 The 1860s were, as the state's official statistician, T.A. Coghlan, expressed it, a period of "distress and acute suffering" in New South Wales (448). A La Niña event between 1860 and 1864 saw the weather oscillate between periods of extreme dryness and flooding, with New South Wales hit particularly badly. As climate historian Julia Miller notes, the period from 1855 to 1870 was particularly cool and mild, and this enabled a significant agricultural expansion (23). Looking back at the end of the century, Coghlan remarked that "truly remarkable vicissitudes of climate were very great, and the destruction of property was in many instances accompanied by loss of life" (448). These climatic extremes formed a backdrop to much of Australian novelist Louisa Atkinson's writing, which captures the unsettled conditions of life in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1860s and early 1870s. A novelist, nature writer, illustrator, taxidermist, and botanist, Atkinson was the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel, Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), a work remarkable for its attentiveness to the landscape and climate. In addition to her fiction, Atkinson was renowned in her lifetime for her botanical discoveries and writing. She penned a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald from 1860 until her death in 1872, and her work offers an affective and insightful understanding of the interactions between settler land management and weather systems in her home state of New South Wales. Biographer Patricia Clarke notes that from a very early age, Atkinson was both curious and knowledgeable regarding the plant and animal life of the Australian bush (25–35). As her newspaper columns demonstrate, Atkinson held Indigenous knowledge in high regard, and she learned a great deal about her surroundings from the Indigenous men and women she knew personally.2 She would certainly have understood that the seasons in Australia do not divide neatly into four, as they do in the northern hemisphere, but rather into six. As Deborah Bird Rose observes, "the very act of mapping seasons suggests a standard or norm" to which the Australian climate was resistant (38). Rose comments that Indigenous meteorology works by making connections between weather, creatures, and environment, and she notes the "simultaneity" of seasonal events, remarking "When the march flies start biting, the crocodiles are laying their eggs. When the Jangarla tree … flowers, the barramundi are biting" (39). We can see something of this interconnectedness, or, as Rose puts it, "sequence and co-occurrence," (38) in Atkinson's accounts of drought, which are sensitive to the responses of birds [End Page 5] who relocate their nesting sites in response to extreme temperatures (see L.C. Atkinson).3 While many settler families struggled to contend with the intense heat of Australian summers and the strangeness of their new country's flora and fauna, Atkinson was much more accepting. Having been born and raised in New South Wales, she resists settler nostalgia for the green fields of England and takes delight in introducing readers to the difference of their environment. As the historian Jill Ker Conway notes, the British colonial experience "represents life in Australia as a battle with harsh elements" (52). Atkinson's fiction follows this pattern to a degree, although she emphasizes that lack of climatic understanding is all too often the root cause of settler struggles. Whether narrating the catastrophic consequences of a careless gold digger leaving a campfire in the bush to smoulder, as in her short story "The Burning Forest" (1853), or describing the "sultry season" that leads to fire on the "parched" land of Gertrude the Emigrant, Atkinson sought to educate her readers regarding the dangers of a dry landscape.4 It is in her newspaper columns that Atkinson was most outspoken about colonial culture's effect on the land. She begins an article, "Hanging Rock on the Great Southern Road" (1871), with a...

Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession by Arnisson Andre Ortega

Reviewed by: Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession by Arnisson Andre Ortega Chester Antonino C. Arcilla ARNISSON ANDRE ORTEGA Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018. 361 pages. The Philippines is in a neoliberal urban upheaval, Arnisson Andre Ortega declares in this groundbreaking book, Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession. He compellingly shows the spatial contradictions in the country's national capital region, Metro Manila, which is increasingly being neoliberalized, i.e., designed and developed for elite accumulation whereby land and housing are commodified to provide real estate profits while marginalized populations are displaced. Ortega accomplishes the difficult task of linking contemporary economic and land-use developments with the country's postcolonial history. Since the late 1980s, the real estate industry has been the Philippine economy's backbone, driven by overseas-based Filipinos' (OFs) desire for safe, exclusive suburban spaces and their transnational remittances. Surrounding Metro Manila are massive constructions of gated subdivisions that are often sold to "productive and successful" OFs. Within the metropolis, high-end condominiums, malls, and services in central business districts drive development to attract foreign investments and remittances. These processes of gentrification and socialized housing projects are mired in violence and dispossessions. The state drives out "unproductive [End Page 145] and unsuccessful" Filipinos—peasants, informal settler families (ISF), and indigenous peoples (IP)—from their homes and livelihoods, often violently, to make way for such projects. Because the law requires the relocation of ISFs before demolition, the socialized housing market in low-value peri-urban areas that sell homes to the evicted provides an additional opportunity for real estate accumulation. The relocatees fend for themselves as they struggle to meet amortization payments in resettlement sites, where livelihood and social services are difficult to access. Due to the general failure of the land reform program and the dominance of elite-influenced urban planning, large landholdings—often formerly export-oriented, colonial-era haciendas—are usually the ones converted for gentrification and socialized housing. The author is a geographer teaching at Syracuse University in New York and a former faculty member of the University of the Philippines Population Institute. In the book's introduction, Ortega shares his personal history as a son of peasant migrants to the city and among the first in his family to obtain a university education. As an engaged scholar committed to social justice, he admits his work is necessarily incomplete and explicitly political. His earlier researches on critical geography, migration, and spatial dispossessions have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Urban Geography, Cities, and Geoforum, among others. In chapter 1 Ortega draws from a comprehensive review of Marxist, postcolonial, and critical urbanism scholarship to analyze urban space in the Global South as containers where global economic, political, and ideological flows are territorially embedded within the postcolonial state. These spatial configurations in turn reconstitute local social relations. Focusing on the period after the 1986 EDSA People Power, which restored liberal democracy and deregulated markets in the Philippines, chapter 2 tackles neoliberal restructuring, land commodification, and the reframing of the Filipino values of sipag (industry) at tiyaga (persistence) toward the ideal of the entrepreneurial, productive Filipino typified by successful OFs. Chapter 3 documents the rise of the real estate industry, identifies the major players, and discusses industry practices that supply OFs their suburban dream homes. In chapter 4 Ortega maps out the neoliberal spatialization in Metro Manila's peri-urban fringe, focusing on the transformation of the Canlubang Sugar Estates in Laguna. He notes how places of consumption have replaced the colonial población (town center) as a critical urban space, reflecting the [End Page 146] shift from agriculture and manufacturing to the service economy. As typified by the case of Canlubang, exclusive subdivisions would cluster around the mall, the archetypal site of consumption in Philippine cities. Chapter 5 studies the idealized "global" and "suburban" (168) lifestyles of returning OFs and traces the expansion of master-planned exclusive communities in the south of Metro Manila. The subsequent chapter descends to the everyday life inside these gated neighborhoods and finds economic anxieties and loneliness...

Reverberating Historical Privilege of a “Middling” Sort of Settler Family

Critical family history illuminates societal relations of inequality through focusing on the experiences and trajectories of particular families. Here, I focus on unequal relations between white settler colonizers and indigenous communities within Aotearoa, New Zealand. I use data gathered from family wills and archival research to sketch aspects of the economic privilege of branches of my own ancestral families in contrast to the economic dispossession and injustices faced by the Māori communities alongside whom they lived. The concept of historical privilege forms the analytic basis of this exploration, beginning with the founding historical windfalls experienced by the Bell and Graham families through their initial acquisition of Māori lands and the parallel historical trauma experienced by Māori at the loss of these lands. I then explore how these windfalls and traumas underpinned the divergent economic trajectories on both sides of this colonial relationship, touching on issues of family inheritance and structural and symbolic privilege. Neither the Bells nor the Grahams accumulated significant wealth, but the stories of such “middling” families are helpful in illuminating mechanisms of historical privilege that we inheritors of such privilege find it difficult to “see” or remember.