Settler Relations Research Articles

When the Forest and the Rivers is Home – Managing Indigenous Territory and Settler Relations in North Eastern Nicaragua

When the Forest and the Rivers is Home – Managing Indigenous Territory and Settler Relations in North Eastern Nicaragua

Recognition beyond recognition!

This essay focuses on the subject position of settler colonizers to interpret the developing global politics of Indigenous recognition in the settler societies and in Australia in particular. It focuses on the dynamics of recognition in the specific context of Indigenous–settler relations, on the contribution settlers may make to decolonial passages, on the ways perpetrator trauma shapes the settler colonial polity, and on the role truth telling and creative shame may play in overcoming the resulting impasse.

The Healer, the Witch, and the Law: The Settler Magic That Criminalized Indigenous Medicine Men as Frauds and Normalized Colonial Violence as Care

This article examines the puissance of psychospiritual geographies to Witsuwit’en–settler relations during the 1920s and 1930s in British Columbia, Canada. Specifically, we track the ontological politics of the psychospiritual that inhere to relationships between Indigenous healing traditions and a complex array of colonial institutions, including police detachments, courts, churches, residential schools, and asylums. Our entry point is the 1931 witchcraft trial of two Indigenous healers who police apprehended treating a person with cin sickness, a form of animal-spirit dream possession. The article highlights three central elements of the contested nature of psychospiritual care. First, it demonstrates the role that policing witchcraft played within the expansion of settler surveillance and control over Indigenous life. Second, we critically unpack court transcripts from the witchcraft trial, exploring how the Indigenous healers explained the treatment of dream sickness on the stand, as well as how courtroom mistranslations facilitated their criminalization. Third, we flip our gaze and interrogate the substance of colonial care, particularly focusing on the role of churches, residential schools, and asylums in causing psychospiritual harm to their Witsuwit’en wards. Through the article, we reveal the colonial deception that produces the illusion of benevolent settler institutions caring for Indigenous well-being while they actively disrupt the psychospiritual connections that define wellness within Witsuwit’en ontologies. To decolonize this foul settler magic, we argue that we must disrupt the universality of colonial ontologies, expose the violence inherent to settler regimes of care, and recognize the vitality of Indigenous psychospiritual relations to the more-than-human world.

Finding Our Co-: Witness Blanket as Co-curricular Making for Local Indigenous and Settler Relations

This paper reveals the journey of two settler-researcher-educators supporting learning in preparation for Carey Newman’s Witness Blanket Art Exhibit. Invited to create curriculum for students and educators of K-12 who would visit the exhibit, the authors describe co-curricular making as a living, re-generative, re-cursive experience. The learning alongside diverse perspectives of educators and community partners in circle—including Syilx Okanagan, School District, Art Gallery, Museum, and University—led to reconsidered understandings of co-curricular making. Relational commitments that invite co-curricular engagement with the Witness Blanket foreground Syilx Knowledge toward resisting colonial ways, and supporting tmixʷ, the life forces of Syilx Okanagan Territory.

Endurance of Difference: Insights from Contemporary Native Hawaiian Media

AbstractAnthropological discussions of difference entail the question of how alterity persists—how counterhegemonic projects are sustained. This article examines Native Hawaiian media practices that subvert hegemonic imaginaries of Hawaiʻi as paradise, critiquing the political cosmology of liberalist settler colonialism, while also maintaining Indigenous alternatives of being in the world. While Indigenous peoples are indeed constituted by capital and settler relations, how does a measure of the alterity of subjects and their worlds endure—resisting commensuration amid entanglement? By examining the stories of a number of contemporary Native Hawaiian filmmakers, their works, and collaborative projects, this article argues that the maintenance of difference be read through sovereignty, and that modes of “endurance,” “resurgence,” or “survivance” emerge from Indigenous understandings of genealogical being and its capacity to make and sustain persons and worlds. In examining the question of how different subjects and their worlds endure, the grounds for persistence are an important part of the social picture.

The Truth Will Set You Free? The Promises and Pitfalls of Truth‐Telling for Indigenous Emancipation

First Nations in Australia are beginning to grapple with processes of treaty‐making with state governments and territories. As these processes gain momentum, truth‐telling has become a central tenet of imagining Indigenous emancipation and the possibility of transforming relationships between Indigenous and settler peoples. Truth, it is suggested, will enable changed ways of knowing what and who “Australia” is. These dynamics assume that truth‐telling will benefit all people, but will truth be enough to compel change and provide an emancipated future for Indigenous people? This article reports on Australian truth‐telling processes in Victoria, and draws on two sets of extant literature to understand the lessons and outcomes of international experience that provide crucial insights for these processes—that on truth‐telling commissions broadly, and that focusing specifically on a comparable settler colonial state process, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The article presents a circumspect assessment of the possibilities for Indigenous emancipation that might emerge through truth‐telling from our perspective as a team of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous critical scholars. We first consider the normative approach that sees truth‐telling as a potentially flawed but worthwhile process imbued with possibility, able to contribute to rethinking and changing Indigenous–settler relations. We then consider the more critical views that see truth‐telling as rehabilitative of the settler colonial state and obscuring ongoing colonial injustices. Bringing this analysis into conversation with contemporary debate on truth‐telling in Australia, we advocate for the simultaneous adoption of both normative and critical perspectives to truth‐telling as a possible way forward for understanding the contradictions, opportunities, and tensions that truth‐telling implies.

Dwelling justice: locating settler relations in research and activism on stolen land

There is a general consensus now in Australia that we are in the grip of a severe housing crisis. The characteristics of spiralling housing costs and deepening precarity are unfolding in a context of the systematic managed decline of public housing as a critical social infrastructure, such that the capacity to make and find ‘home’ is thinning every day. Yet in a settler-colony, such as Australia, the struggle against housing injustice is set inside an already violent relationship of un-homing that creates the very conditions for others to make home. Reckoning with this monstrous dilemma, of the politics of dwelling justice on stolen land, is the focus of this essay, which springs from our own experience and failure to fully comprehend the ways that our housing research and activism works to reinforce settler colonial logics of dwelling on stolen land.

No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous by Sheldon Krasowski (review)

Reviewed by: No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous by Sheldon Krasowski Paulina Johnson (bio) No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous by Sheldon Krasowski University of Regina Press, 2019 WRITTEN BY NON-INDIGENOUS SCHOLAR Sheldon Krasowski, No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous details the negotiations during the Numbered Treaties, focusing specifically on the first seven Treaties of the eleven in Canada. Krasowski's main argument is that the Canadian government through its crown negotiators misled the Indigenous nations they wanted to build relations with because Canada wanted land and these Treaty territories stretch across Manitoba to Alberta today. Chapter 1 examines Treaties 1 and 2, and how outside promises made by crown negotiators in the negotiations were left out of the written texts, but the "cede, release, surrender, and yield up" clause was added without Indigenous knowledge (72). Chapter 2 challenges the previous Treaty research that relied heavily on the unbiased use of Treaty texts by crown officials and ignored Indigenous oral narratives and eyewitness accounts of negotiations. This bias benefits the crown and the Government of Canada as it limited the glimpse into the ceremonial aspects of Treaty 3 and, more importantly, Indigenous philosophical and economic views of natural resources and land. Chapter 3 presents the "conflicts" between the Cree and Saulteaux Nations during Treaties 4 and 5, but as Krasowski points out, these conflicts were not about Indigenous animosity toward one another but about the Hudson's Bay Company's (HBC) impact on their territory. Tensions over ownership of land were prevalent at the time, which increased with the Cypress Hills Massacre, which led Canada to form the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) in 1873. Chapter 4 examines the negotiations of Treaty 6 and the discontent among the Cree Nations in Saskatchewan, where political tensions were high concerning access to land and ownership. This is one of the first negotiations [End Page 124] where missionaries, the NWMP, and interpreters were in attendance, as only three missionaries had witnessed the prior treaty negotiations. Chapter 5 focuses on the 1877 negotiations of the Treaty 7 at Blackfoot Crossing with the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai, Tssu T'ina, and Stoney Nations. The chapter details the negative impacts of the American whiskey trade within their territory and how the creation of the NWMP protected their territories. The concluding chapter forwards the interrelations between Treaty 1 through Treaty 7 as much literature focuses on each separate Treaty, but together we are aware of the negotiation strategies that discuss only the "benefits of treaty" and "ignore[s] its liabilities" (272). Indigenous peoples and settlers understood the importance of a treaty relationship, but Canada had no interest in maintaining the relationships entailed by the Treaties. Krasowski calls into question scholars overuse of treaty texts, yet he defends the documents when statements made by Indigenous academics refer to them as "lies on paper" (citing Venne 1997, 212). Can you blame Indigenous peoples for having such a view when written and official documents have been disingenuous and deceitful? These were not just political agreements; they are representations of Indigenous livelihood. Unfortunately, Krasowski does not mention Indigenous women; this work still falls within the heteropatriarchal view of Canadian history. Lack of recognition of the role that women play in Indigenous societies replicates the patterns of sociopolitical misrecognition carried out by the Crown and state during the treaty negotiations. Krasowski also does not incorporate concepts of Indigenous kinship or reciprocity, both of which are important for the maintenance of relationships. There is mention of oral narratives and eyewitness accounts, yet these are significantly limited. The spiritual importance of the pipes used in the negotiations are only referenced at the end of the book. Cree scholar Winona Wheeler acknowledges in her foreword that Krasowski was an accomplice to the integration of Indigenous oral narratives rather than just written texts on the Treaties because "the more evidence, the stronger the case" (xiv), yet the incorporation of Indigenous spiritual philosophies on Treaties are lacking, and this evidence has more merit than any settler text. For those who do not know the complexity of Indigenous and settler relations extending from the Treaties, No Surrender does provide a look into Canada's emergence based on the...

Two‐eyed‐seeing/Etuaptmumkin the colonial archive: Reflections on participatory archival research

AbstractDue to their origins and purpose, institutional archives present us with a set of limits when we seek to use them in struggles against colonialism. Here we explore to what extent we can negotiate those limits and practice participatory historical research. In particular, we explore how our project's direction by Indigenous methodology, a Two‐Eyed Seeing approach, influenced our relationship with the colonial archive. The research reported on in this paper involved establishing a historical narrative from Canadian federal and provincial colonial archives. This narrative was used in conjunction with oral histories from and interviews with Elders and Knowledge‐holders of the Mi'kmaq Nation to document the emergence of social assistance policy as a central aspect of colonial processes. Our historical research was, thus, explicitly tied to understanding the Mi'kmaw struggle for sovereignty in the colonial present. Here we sketch out aspects of our attempt to navigate between the colonial past and colonial present using a participatory approach to the historical geographies of Indigenous–settler relations.

Centering Place in Ethnographies of “Latinx” Schooling: The Utility of a Multi-Sited Place Project for Revealing Emplaced Narratives

This paper argues for a methodological approach, a multi-sited place project, to center place within ethnographies of schooling and facilitate deeper understandings of socialization into settler relations stemming from and supporting the white settler nation-state. This approach draws upon language socialization and critical place inquiry, tracing settler colonial narratives between schools and local history sites such as California missions, historic city walking tours, and township festivals. The multi-sited place project reveals emplaced narratives, stories that socialize people to particular relations and logics to and within specific places, connecting histories and identities to a particular place in the present, and in the process, shaping possibilities of who people can be in the future. Compelling this approach is a desire for greater understandings of incompatibilities within racialized peoples’ work towards liberation on Indigenous lands that are not our own. Its purpose is to bring together approaches for studies of schooling and place in ways that challenge rather than accept settler futures. A multi-sited place project carried out on unceded Ohlone territory illustrates the approach, advancing understandings of how “Latinx” youth and families, primarily of Mexican origin, were socialized into Californian settler histories and identities via a family day at a historic rancho.

Becoming whānau: Māori and Pākehā working together on the Indigenous-led campaign, #ProtectIhumātao

This paper explores how the Indigenous-led, community-supported campaign # ProtectIhumātao became a site for decolonisation work that nourished productive bicultural relations. For six years, we worked together, alongside others, to stop a transnational corporation building houses on culturally significant, but contested, whenua (land) at Ihumātao, Auckland. Pania draws strength from her Indigenous Māori whakapapa (ancestral relations), and Frances from being a New Zealander of Irish descent. Committing ourselves to the campaign kaupapa (values, principles and plans), we embraced different roles: Pania as a kaitiaki or land protector and Frances as a hoa tū tata or close friend, standing by, ready to assist. Along the way, we became our own whānau (extended family); a kaupapa-based whānau (people mobilised for a shared purpose). Here, we share knowledge from our campaign experiences to explore what becoming whānau means to us in relation to Ihumātao. Thinking and writing at the interface of Māori and Pākehā ways of knowing, we interact with ideas from Māori philosophy and Indigenous–Settler relations. Through telling our stories, we illuminate relational qualities that made our different roles and evolving relationship possible, and glean insights to inform ongoing Indigenous-led, decolonising practices at Ihumātao, and elsewhere.

Agonistic reconciliation: inclusion, decolonisation and the need for radical innovation

In settler colonial societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, Indigenous–state relations are defined by ongoing conflict over unresolved questions of sovereignty, self-determination, and land. These conflicts have remained intractable regardless of the policy approaches engineered by the state. This article outlines an analytical approach to agonistic reconciliation by mapping the polar ends of a spectrum of responses to conflict in Indigenous–settler relations, with inclusion at one end of this spectrum and decolonisation at the other. Agonistic inclusion seeks to engage reconciliatory relations within colonial democratic institutions, while agonistic decolonisation rejects the legitimacy of these institutions and seeks radical innovation in their place. The article concludes by arguing that scholars must be alert to the seductive pull of inclusion and push instead towards the radical innovation that decolonisation demands.

Revisiting Distant Relations

In 2000, I published Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America, a non-fiction exploration of my own family’s involvement in North American colonialism from the 1600s to the present. This personal essay reflects on the context, genesis, process, and consequences of writing this book during a decade of intense ferment in Indigenous–settler relations in Canada amid the revelations of horrific abuse at residential schools and the discovery that my highly respected grandfather had been involved with one. Considering the book from the perspective of 2021, I consider the strengths and limitations of this kind of critical family history and the degree to which public discourses and academic discussion of Canada’s history and settler complicity in colonialism have changed since the book was published. Arguing that critical reflection on family history is still an essential part of unlearning colonial attitudes and recognizing the systemic and structural ways that colonial disparities and processes are embedded in settler societies, I share a critical family history assignment that has been an essential and transformative pedagogical element in my university teaching for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

The Privilege of Not Walking Away: Indigenous Women’s Perspectives of Reconciliation in the Academy

The release of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report titled “Honouring the Truth and Reconciling for the Future” has evoked a persistent call within learning institutions to Indigenize education, decolonize systems of power, and reconcile Indigenous–settler relations and knowledge. Within this context, the TRC’s “Calls to Action” are frequently invoked by institutions attempting to achieve just action. While reconciliation remains a complex, political, and settler-driven endeavour, there has been an effort to “fill the gap” with Indigenous presence, knowledge, and students within academic institutions. Given the limited research on the gendered aspect of reconciliation, our paper contributes to this conversation by examining the impact of the “filling effort” on our critical community work and the ways in which we as Indigenous women engage in reconciliation. By this, we mean the ways we live and understand reconciliation by looking inward toward each other as women, to learn from each other, and to lift each other up. Through a relational accountability methodology and mixed methods (Wilson 2008), we draw strength from our relational and resurgence approaches in an effort to capture our commitment, challenges, and transformative vision of reconciliation as Indigenous women in the academy.

Public Schooling and Contested Public Discourses Concerning Reconciliation

The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report and accompanying Calls to Action have prompted educational reforms in school jurisdictions across Canada. Drawing on data from a survey of public perspectives in Alberta and Saskatchewan, this article explores how these reforms are understood by community members to highlight the significance of competing discourses conveyed through public perspectives on reconciliation processes. General support for the idea of reconciliation conceals the limited extent to which respondents are willing to engage with important realities of settler colonial societies, embedded within discourses that are more likely to defend than challenge the dominant frameworks within which Indigenous–settler relations have been constituted in the Canadian context.

Accepted in Bella Bella: A historical exemplar of a missionary nursing education, in British Columbia from 1921-1925

This study explores the largely-unknown history of missionary nursing on British Columbia’s Northwest Coast between 1901 and 1925, built around the experience of nurse Doris Nichols. From 1903 until 1935 in the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) village of Wáglísla (Bella Bella) there existed a small but persistent school of nursing within a Methodist mission hospital. The hospital was built with the intention to bring spiritual and physical healing to local Indigenous people, however the medical missionaries served all in need along the central coast, and the nursing school sustained this mission. Nichols arrived at Bella Bella in 1921, where she began her training to become a nurse at the R.W. Large Memorial Hospital Training School for Nurses; she was likely one of two (possibly three) student at that time. The educational journey for a student at Bella Bella started with introductions into a tight missionary family and then included a wide range of nursing duties in-hospital, in the community, and even nursing on the water in the medical mission boat. In the 1920s the school was affiliated with the Vancouver General School of Nursing and all student wishing to obtain a Registered Nurse designation competed their third and final year in Vancouver, which was the case with Nichols. This study used the methods of historical research, specifically guided by a social history framework, to critically examine a variety of primary sources to related to the experience of a missionary nursing student—who lived, learned, worked, and worshiped as a part of the Methodist medical mission in Bella Bella and beyond, while giving voice to the under acknowledged presence of nursing. The study reflected on those experiences from the historical intersections of ethnicity, class, region and religion. The exploration concludes that Doris Nichols’ unique opportunity and experience as a missionary student and nurse was interconnected with—and an extension of—the profound experiences of change that occurred for the Heiltsuk, the Methodist missions, nursing education, and Doris herself. The research also found that the Heiltsuk in-specific, and Indigenous people in-general were excluded from the nurses training program in Bella Bella. This is of significant historical relevance to educators and schools of nursing today, in the development of culturally sensitive curricula that acknowledges the historical impact nursing training has had on Indigenous/ settler relations and the role it still has in ensuring inclusive education. Résumé Cette étude explore l’histoire très peu connue des infirmières missionnaires sur la

The Meeting of Multiple Words and Worlds

As a newcomer to Canadian culture, I present an interpretive rendering of my encounters with settler and Indigenous relations. It is my humble attempt to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action ([TRC], 2015) for newcomers, by providing insight into what newcomers might experience in response to the complexities of Indigenous and settler dialogues. Newcomers are diverse groups, on the fringes of Indigenous-settler relations discourse, and outside of the protocols to enter such dialogues. Therefore, I ask, where and when can newcomers, temporary or long term, enter the dialogues in meaningful, respectful ways? I came to recognize that as a newcomer the more appropriate course of action would be to wait to be invited into the conversation; but that does not absolve me of the responsibility to inform myself about Indigenous-settler relations and confront my discomforts with how I am implicated in these relations. This led me to inquire, can newcomers be of value in the ways multiple ethnic groups live together, in a good way? Using a hermeneutic and mythopoetic lens I present a series of vignettes that attempt to grapple with these questions, to contribute to the discourse of responses to the Calls to Action (TRC, 2015).

DE-SETTLERING OURSELVES

This article explores the complexities of settler relations within the context of an academic conference hosted by Indigenous hosts and inclusive of Indigenous ceremony and content. The authors explore a range of questions related to their settler identities as participants in the conference. How are we as settlers to engage in a conference entitled “CYC in Action”, held at an institution constructed on Indigenous land, and dedicated to the promulgation of Western thought and culture? How are we to encounter the ghosts of those Indigenous peoples destroyed and removed from this very geography? How are we to be positioned in relation to our Indigenous colleagues who are reclaiming fragments of this colonized space through ceremony, buildings, and the introduction of sacred objects and totems? Should we adopt the studied neutrality of scholars, the moral high ground of activists, or the inclusive posture of the “good” settler? Do we find ways to be comfortable in the space? Is it an option to seek to be comfortable? Is our “Whiteness” as settlers our passport to enter Indigenous space and claim a right to be there as “friends”? Under the contested relation of a conference taking place on stolen lands that includes both the thieves and the survivors of the theft, who is the host and who determines the conditions of inclusion?

We Are All Treaty People: Indigenous–Settler Relations, Story and Young Audiences

We Are All Treaty People is a Canadian play for young audiences (ages eight to twelve) that addresses difficult knowledge, Elders’ story sharing, and contemporary and historical Indigenous–settler relations. This article discusses the contemporary and historical political context of the play and its production, the creation process and its narrative anchors. It argues that through a respectful, Indigenous-led creation process, and structural techniques, the play has the potential to offer hope and healing, and encourage relationships based on knowledge.

Holding It Together: Indigeneity, (Settler-) Postcolonialism, and M. NourbeSe Philip

This article considers the conditions for relations between Indigenous and Black diasporic subjects, while also addressing Indigenous and South Asian relations. Concerned with the place of these subject relations within postcolonial and settler colonial paradigms and with their potential for decolonial practice, the article explores Jodi Byrd's and Marie Battiste's critiques of postcolonial and settler-colonial theories and M. NourbeSe Philip's verse-novella Looking for Mr. Livingstone. It also offers a personal anecdote about South Asian settler relations with caretakers of Stl'atl'imx land in British Columbia, Canada. It examines these texts and experiences through the concept of "the hold." "The hold," a spatial and epistemological condition for relations between Indigenous and diasporic subjects, allows one to imagine a sovereign Indigenous space as a practice of cross-racial kinship.