Accounts of Settler Colonialism: A Comparative Study of the Dakota & Palestinians’ Plight

Over the course of the nineteenth century, American settlers spread throughout the Western frontier, driving out indigenous populations to establish unique and permanent homelands of their own. In doing so, they caused the death and displacement of thousands of Plains Indians, including the Dakota people in the young state of Minnesota in 1862. Indeed, the US-Dakota War represented a salient instance of settler colonial expansion on the frontier, triggering a bloody conflict between the Dakota Sioux and American military expeditions led by Henry H. Sibley. This paper attempts to contextualize this war within the broader framework of settler colonialism and examines the white settlers’ rhetoric of exclusion that validated the mass hanging and dispossession of the Dakota people. Equally important, this paper examines the settler colonial enterprise in Palestine since the rise of Zionism until around the 1967 War. It looks at a body of Zionist settler colonial practices in Palestine in tandem with the tragedy of Lydda––the very epicenter of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948. This is not, however, to essentialize both historical experiences, it certainly tends to highlight few practices of settler colonialism in America and Israel such as the discursive strategy of exclusion cloaked within Dakota ‘heathenism’ and ‘savagery’ and Zionist “obsessional imperative” of being ethnically pure to the detriment of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.[1] It is beyond this paper’s scope to deliver parochial tablets; rather it tends to explore the underpinnings and practices of settler colonialism on the Dakota and the Palestinian peoples. Two cases different in time and space, but they share certain psychodynamics of settler colonialism. Adviser: Victoria Smith [1] Lorenzo Veracini. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 61

On the Difficulty of Reckoning with Settler Colonialisms: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives

Review essay on: Settler Colonialism and (Re)Conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings By Penelope Edmonds. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land, and Settler Decolonization By Eva Mackey. Halifax; Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2016. The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage Edited by Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark and Ravi de Costa. New York: Springer, 2016. In settler societies, coming to grips with historical wrongs continues to pose an enduring dilemma. Powerful scripts and events of redress, forgiveness and reconciliation are used to petition for and engage with narratives of the “post” settler nation state. The scope, substance, and politics of reckoning with settler colonial wrongs have garnered an intense controversy, and by turns, precipitated vibrant and creative scholarship. In Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and to a lesser extent, the United States, scholars have recognized the distinctive roles of reconciliatory efforts in settler societies, and attempted to untangle the repertoire of “moving on” and beyond the historical continuity of settler colonialism. They look at what it means to be “post” colonial and decolonized in nations that still lack a clear decolonizing moment. This essay engages with these competing perspectives as explored in the work of three recent volumes: Penelope Edmonds’ Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation, Eva Mackey’s Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization, and Sarah Maddison et al., The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation. Taking specific case studies across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, these comprehensive and transnational comparative studies offer rigorous evaluation of the ideas and symbolic practices of reconciliation and their interlocking relationships with © 2020 Baligh Ben Taleb and The Johns Hopkins University Press settler colonial histories. Without treating the processes of “decolonization” and “reconciliation” as self-contained, isolated, or discrete units of meaningful change, these scholars address the ways in which the practices of these concepts attempt to reanimate and mobilize the past for a “post” settler condition and emancipatory moral order. The prefix “post,” as Jean Francois Lyotard has articulated, conjures the conviction “that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking.”2 But in settler societies, the “post” may not mean a clearly defined moment or a “rupture” with the colonial past; instead, it may well repeat it and reinforce its diurnal residues. In different ways, these volumes interrogate these “new” realities and their chameleon-like abilities, by offering multifaceted approaches to deter what seems to be an alarming reproduction of coloniality and normative authority of the settler state. They use different and understudied analytical lenses and frameworks such as performance, ethnography of conflicts about land rights, and structural and attitudinal engagement to explore the complex and difficult conundrums and aporias of decolonization in settler societies

Accounts of Settler Colonialism: A Comparative Study of the Dakota & Palestinians’ Plight

Over the course of the nineteenth century, American settlers spread throughout the Western frontier, driving out indigenous populations to establish unique and permanent homelands of their own. In doing so, they caused the death and displacement of thousands of Plains Indians, including the Dakota people in the young state of Minnesota in 1862. Indeed, the US-Dakota War represented a salient instance of settler colonial expansion on the frontier, triggering a bloody conflict between the Dakota Sioux and American military expeditions led by Henry H. Sibley. This paper attempts to contextualize this war within the broader framework of settler colonialism and examines the white settlers’ rhetoric of exclusion that validated the mass hanging and dispossession of the Dakota people. Equally important, this paper examines the settler colonial enterprise in Palestine since the rise of Zionism until around the 1967 War. It looks at a body of Zionist settler colonial practices in Palestine in tandem with the tragedy of Lydda––the very epicenter of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948. This is not, however, to essentialize both historical experiences, it certainly tends to highlight few practices of settler colonialism in America and Israel such as the discursive strategy of exclusion cloaked within Dakota ‘heathenism’ and ‘savagery’ and Zionist “obsessional imperative” of being ethnically pure to the detriment of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.[1] It is beyond this paper’s scope to deliver parochial tablets; rather it tends to explore the underpinnings and practices of settler colonialism on the Dakota and the Palestinian peoples. Two cases different in time and space, but they share certain psychodynamics of settler colonialism. Adviser: Victoria Smith [1] Lorenzo Veracini. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 61

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State\u3c/i\u3e, by Miranda Johnson

On the basis of extensive archival research into legal case files, government policy debates, newspaper reports, and interviews with key participants in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Miranda Johnson of the University of Sydney has written a well-crafted transnational history of indigenous activism, land, and indigeneity. From the early 1970s through to the mid-1990s, Indigenous activists in these three Commonwealth countries used groundbreaking legal strategies to reclaim unkept promises in aboriginal and treaty rights and seek justice owed to them. In concert with white judges, lawyers, and expert anthropologists, among others, these activists brought forth the importance of the umbilical bond between their peoples, time, space, and historical agency. The Land Is Our History articulates this intricate binding story and how it unsettles to the origins of the settler state. In so doing, Johnson follows a broadly chronological analysis connecting legal claims in Australia and Canada in the 1970s to those in New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s

Review of Margaret Jacobs. \u3ci\u3eWhite Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940\u3c/i\u3e

Settler colonialism is a winner-take-all project, where the colonizer comes to stay, occupies the land permanently, and accepts nothing less than the removal of indigenous nations. Australia and the United States are two salient cases of settler colonies that became settler nations, where settlers used various tactics to dispossess indigenous peoples of their land. One of these brutal methods of colonization, according to Margaret Jacobs’ White Mother to a Dark Race, was the removal of indigenous children from their families and the breaking of the affective bonds that tied indigenous peoples together. Australia’s “protection” policies and the U.S. government’s “assimilation” program, each of which included indigenous child removal, are central to Jacobs’ book. “What was it exactly that reformers and officials hoped to change about indigenous children by taking them from their families?” Jacobs asks (xxx). The fundamental goal of these reformers and officials was to consolidate control and complete the colonization of the American West and Australia as two growing settler nations from the 1880s until well into the twentieth century. ... Jacobs’ compelling book is based on government documents, national and state archives, personal papers, written memoirs, and oral histories of white women reformers and indigenous children. These materials, interspersed with Jacobs’ personal voice, buttress her arguments in a beautifully illustrated manner. Aside from being too long, Jacobs’ Bancroft Prize winning book brings an original approach to women’s, gender, and settler colonial studies, and deserves wide readership across disciplines

Book Review: The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice

Review of The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice. By Colleen Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Over the past few decades, communities around the world have embarked on transitions from conflict, repression and historical injustice to the rule of law and respect for human rights. Societies have established legal institutions, such as truth-telling commissions and criminal trials to confront past abuses and attempt to transition into a new era of human dignity. Theorists have coined the term “transitional justice” to describe processes involved in confronting legacies of historical wrongdoings. Pressing questions raised in such contexts include: what does it mean to properly acknowledge past abuses and how does a community justify the choice of a specific response? It is not obvious which particular type of response is right, or wrong, as transitional justice may mean different things to different people in different contexts. The tasks of evaluating the motley epistemic meanings of “transitional justice” and the appropriate choices communities make are at the heart of Coleen Murphy’s elegant book, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice. In a combination of rigorous theories and brilliant analytical writing, she argues that the just pursuit of societal transformation is the essential heartbeat of transitional justice. ... Murphy writes with a clear audience in mind: philosophers, lawyers, transitional justice theorists, policy makers, and citizens of transitional communities. At the author–audience discourse level, the argument of transitional justice as a different kind of justice offers original and compelling grounds. Bolstering the relationship between the two dimensions of societal transformation and the fitting treatment of past wrongdoings is at the core of transitional justice and political reconciliation. Under these circumstances, one may still wonder how much to expect, morally, from “transitional justice” in dealing with colonial legacies and forced dispossession of Indigenous communities in settler societies. Where does transitional justice begin and where does it end? What are the appropriate standards of justice to use when evaluating the complex set of institutional and interpersonal in settler nations? Is still it erroneous to think of justice in “post” settler colonial circumstances as involving a moral compromise between truth and justice

On the Difficulty of Reckoning with Settler Colonialisms: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives

Review essay on: Settler Colonialism and (Re)Conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings By Penelope Edmonds. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land, and Settler Decolonization By Eva Mackey. Halifax; Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2016. The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage Edited by Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark and Ravi de Costa. New York: Springer, 2016. In settler societies, coming to grips with historical wrongs continues to pose an enduring dilemma. Powerful scripts and events of redress, forgiveness and reconciliation are used to petition for and engage with narratives of the “post” settler nation state. The scope, substance, and politics of reckoning with settler colonial wrongs have garnered an intense controversy, and by turns, precipitated vibrant and creative scholarship. In Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and to a lesser extent, the United States, scholars have recognized the distinctive roles of reconciliatory efforts in settler societies, and attempted to untangle the repertoire of “moving on” and beyond the historical continuity of settler colonialism. They look at what it means to be “post” colonial and decolonized in nations that still lack a clear decolonizing moment. This essay engages with these competing perspectives as explored in the work of three recent volumes: Penelope Edmonds’ Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation, Eva Mackey’s Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization, and Sarah Maddison et al., The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation. Taking specific case studies across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, these comprehensive and transnational comparative studies offer rigorous evaluation of the ideas and symbolic practices of reconciliation and their interlocking relationships with © 2020 Baligh Ben Taleb and The Johns Hopkins University Press settler colonial histories. Without treating the processes of “decolonization” and “reconciliation” as self-contained, isolated, or discrete units of meaningful change, these scholars address the ways in which the practices of these concepts attempt to reanimate and mobilize the past for a “post” settler condition and emancipatory moral order. The prefix “post,” as Jean Francois Lyotard has articulated, conjures the conviction “that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking.”2 But in settler societies, the “post” may not mean a clearly defined moment or a “rupture” with the colonial past; instead, it may well repeat it and reinforce its diurnal residues. In different ways, these volumes interrogate these “new” realities and their chameleon-like abilities, by offering multifaceted approaches to deter what seems to be an alarming reproduction of coloniality and normative authority of the settler state. They use different and understudied analytical lenses and frameworks such as performance, ethnography of conflicts about land rights, and structural and attitudinal engagement to explore the complex and difficult conundrums and aporias of decolonization in settler societies

Review of Raymond I. Orr. \u3ci\u3eReservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict\u3c/i\u3e

Social research on American Indian internal politics has oft en been labeled sensitive and uncomfortable, and it tends to deter scholarly work. To Raymond I. Orr, from the University of Oklahoma, intratribal politics forms the core of decision- making processes inside and outside American Indian communities or Indian Country and should not be concealed from open debate. In Reservation Politics, he calls on social scientists and scholars to appraise the origins of intratribal politics and what informs their contemporary and future decisions. He explains that these decisions or motivational behaviors are not random; instead, they are informed by key variables, most notably, the tribes’ “worldview” (7). Such worldview emerges from the tribes’ historical experience (ethnohistory) and the meanings derived from it. At its center, Orr points out, are internal factions with three diff erent worldviews or logics: (1) communal aff ect, which values community harmony and social cohesion above individual material preferences; (2) self- interest, which elevates individual material interests and profi ts higher than those of community harmony; and (3) melancholia, which places past traumatic events at the core of contemporary and future politics of the tribe. Orr places these three logics into contact with each other and “identif[ies] the link between historical processes and intratribal politics” (57)

Review of \u3ci\u3eDust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism\u3c/i\u3e, by Hannah Holleman

Drawing on a rich multidisciplinary scholarship and extensive original literature, Dust Bowls of Empire resituates the local horror and human tragedy of the 1930s Dust Bowl into a global historical development of the modern world system. At its center are privatization, commodification, and erosion of land, soil, and nature. Holleman takes direct aim at the root causes of an imperial ideology— capitalism— which legislates, institutionalizes, and practices ecological injustices. She explains that the Dust Bowl in the Southern Plains embodies an imperial instance of a global crisis of soil erosion that began in the 1870s and lasted through the first decades of the twentieth century. It was not “an analog, but an antecedent,” affirms Holleman (9). Accordingly, unraveling the system that has produced earlier and subsequent dust bowls moves us beyond limited perspectives and helps tie the direct thread of the past to the present

Review of \u3ci\u3eDust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism\u3c/i\u3e, by Hannah Holleman

Drawing on a rich multidisciplinary scholarship and extensive original literature, Dust Bowls of Empire resituates the local horror and human tragedy of the 1930s Dust Bowl into a global historical development of the modern world system. At its center are privatization, commodification, and erosion of land, soil, and nature. Holleman takes direct aim at the root causes of an imperial ideology— capitalism— which legislates, institutionalizes, and practices ecological injustices. She explains that the Dust Bowl in the Southern Plains embodies an imperial instance of a global crisis of soil erosion that began in the 1870s and lasted through the first decades of the twentieth century. It was not “an analog, but an antecedent,” affirms Holleman (9). Accordingly, unraveling the system that has produced earlier and subsequent dust bowls moves us beyond limited perspectives and helps tie the direct thread of the past to the present