Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Vainuku, T., & Duffy, R. (Directors). (2022). Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’T Exist [Documentary]. Netflix., Ashley P. Ferrell

Feminist Pedagogy

Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist (2022) revisits the complicated fame and misfortune of former college football player Manti Te’o. The documentary traces the arc of Te’o’s athletic career at the University of Notre Dame alongside his relationship with his girlfriend that resulted in intense public scrutiny and gendered ridicule in 2013. Untold offers feminist pedagogues a catalyst for engaging students in critical discourse around the relationships between collegiate sport and race, gender, and sexuality. In this review, I provide a summary of the documentary’s main points and framing, and then discuss at least two ways in which this media …

“I Am Still Dakota”: Assimilation, Education, And Survival On The Lake Traverse Reservation, Katherine Victoria Kemp

Dissertations and Theses

In 1867, the Sisseton Wahpeton signed the Lake Traverse Treaty and settled on the Lake Traverse Reservation in Northeastern South Dakota. As part of the growing westward expansion of settlers, the U.S government confined Indigenous peoples to reservations and tried to destroy their culture. Federal and state governments since then have continued to eliminate, relocate, and assimilate Indigenous people. For Indigenous peoples, the land is life, and assimilation through boarding schools served to sever them from their land and enforce white superiority. In this thesis, I argue that the Sisseton Wahpeton found ways to engage in cultural resilience utilizing Indigenous …

Destruction And Resiliency: Decolonizing Settler Knowledge In Native American Literature Through The Peoplehood Matrix, Renissa R. Gannie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the complex dynamics of settler colonialism and the construction of peoplehood within the Laguna Pueblo, Lakota, Jemez Pueblo, Anishinaabe, and Blackfeet culture through a comparative analysis of literary works focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Frances Washburn’ Elsie’s Business, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus, and Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather; these authors employ narrative strategies to depict the destructive impacts of settler colonialism on indigenous identities and communities. Drawing upon postcolonial and indigenous literary theories, this research uses a comparative framework to analyze the diverse …

The Dream Of Property: Law And Environment In William T. Vollmann’S Dying Grass And Leslie Marmon Silko’S Almanac Of The Dead, Ted Hamilton

Faculty Journal Articles

This article describes how the law inflects the narration of environmental conflict in William T. Vollmann’s Dying Grass (2015) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). By focusing on the legal common sense of settler colonialism—its emphasis on private property in land and its subjugation of Indigenous peoples to the guardianship of the state—the article explores the ways in which Vollmann’s and Silko’s novels present counternarratives to the law’s story of justified conquest. Combining a law and literature approach with ecocriticism, this article highlights the importance of the legal imagination in defining human-land relations in the United States. …

The Experience Of White Captives Among The Natives Of The Old Northwest Territory Between 1770 And 1850, Analucia Lugo

The Purdue Historian

In the late 18^th to mid-19^th centuries, hundreds of white settlers were taken captive by Native American groups across the Old Northwest Territory. Reasons for their capture varied from revenge to adoption, however, the treatment they received greatly depended on the captive’s gender. While females were more likely to be kept alive and better-taken care of, males faced a greater probability of facing violence or even death, though torture was common among both groups. Many captives undertook participatory roles within their respective captive communities, with some deciding to assimilate completely into a new way of life. Captivity narratives …

Settler Colonialism And The Movement Towards Indigenous Forest Sovereignty, Madison Zucco

Honors Theses

This research paper examines the historical and political implications of settler colonialism on Indigenous nations in forested areas around the world. Through a thorough analysis of the Haida First Nation, Pacheedaht First Nation, and the Sámi people, it is argued that settler colonial legislation systematically and intentionally separated Indigenous people and their knowledge from forested areas. Since then, shared management protocols have been implemented to amend racist and environmentally degrading legislation on forested land, but are limited in their effect to reconcile the settler colonial legal system. The only true way to reconcile the settler colonial structure in place that …

Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd And Settler Colonialism In India, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent literature on racial capitalism has overwhelmingly focused on the Atlantic settler-slave formation, sidelining the history of European imperialism in Asia. This article addresses this blind spot by recovering the aborted project of British settler colonialism in India through the writings of its most prominent advocate, John Crawfurd. It is argued that Crawfurd’s vision of a liberal empire in India rejected slavery and indigenous dispossession yet remained deeply racialized in its conception of capital, labor, and value. Crawfurd elaborated a “capital theory of race,” which derived racial categories from a civilizational spectrum keyed to the capitalist organization of production. His …

The Slater Fire Was The Product Of Settler Colonialism, William Joseph Curtis

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The Slater Fire of 2020 burned in Karuk aboriginal territory overseen by the Klamath National Forest. It burned over 200 homes to the ground and ravage over 100,000 acres of forest. This thesis argues that state-enforced fire suppression policies and methods are tools of settler-colonial erasure and the continuation of genocidal violence towards Karuk people. It analyzes the conflict between interests of the colonial state on one side and Indigenous resistance and survival on the other. Fire is an essential tool for the survival of Indigenous cultural identities, the material security of said populations, and the health of the environs …

Catcher And The Fry: Ecology, Power, And My Life With Salmon, Olivia Mueller

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Pacific salmon serve a unique role in their ecosystem as network connectors. From transferring nutrients from the aquatic environment to terrestrial habitats, to subverting trophic hierarchies by nourishing the roots of trees and the bellies of orcas, salmon manage to fulfill an interesting role in connecting networks of biological communities. This connecting nature of pacific salmon is mirrored in the role they play as human community connectors, as is reflected in their part in food and land justice issues in the Pacific Northwest. I will explore the role of salmon in preserving Indigenous people against the imposed hegemony of settler …

Rape: A Settler-Colonial And Anti-Black Project, Cristy A. Dougherty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

White feminist theorizations of rape privilege patriarchy as the main source of gender violence, ultimately centering white cisgender women. In doing so, white women are treated as subject in anti-rape discourse while the violence inflicted on women of color is rendered as secondary and insignificant. Conversely, Indigenous and Black feminist analytics center Indigenous and Black women’s experiences with sexual violence, ultimately pointing to the ways in which rape has been used as a tool to perpetuate heteropatriarchy, settler-colonialism, and anti- Black racism. For instance, Deer (2015) explains that Indigenous women experience disproportionately high rates of sexual violence that spans generations. …

‘The Environment Is Us’: Settler Cartographies Of Indigeneity And Blackness In Prophecy (1979), Kali Simmons

Indigenous Nations Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the triangulation of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the ‘creature feature’ sf-horror film Prophecy (Frankenheimer US 1979), arguing that the film’s renderings of environmental racism ultimately function to justify white supremacist hetero-patriarchal maintenance and surveillance of Black and Indigenous lands and bodies. A close examination of Prophecy’s representational and ideological shortfalls – in particular its renderings of Black and Indigenous maternity – reveals troubling entanglements between settler-colonial logics of geography, ecology, monstrosity, and subjectivity.

We Are A Part Of The Land And The Land Is Us: Settler Colonialism, Genocide & Healing In California, Kaitlin Reed Ph.D.

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This essay proposes that the history of California includes the intended destruction and decimation of native cultures, including their forced removal, illegal land acquisition, slavery, separation of families, and outright murder enacted by the private citizenry and governmental agencies during European contact can be defined as genocide as outlined by the United Nations Geneva Convention, 1948. The lasting legacy of contact on aboriginal lifeways and tradition, as well as the recent resurgence of native traditions and culture is addressed to suggest that the health and healing of native communities lies in reconciling the past to make passage into the future.

Eating The Heart Of Weetigo World: Decolonial Imaginaries In The Stories Of Louise Erdrich And Tomson Highway, Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation asks what the decolonial possibilities of fiction are in the context of the settler colonial imaginaries particular to the United States and Canada. The ongoing process of settler colonialism demands various forms of conversion from Indigenous people: ecological/land based, religious, educational, legal, familial, but the construct of “conversion” obscures Indigenous worldviews, and indeed worlds, which function according to different principles. I interpret Erdrich and Highway's work in the context of Anishinaabe and Cree narratives and story-structures. These offer examples of what can constitute broader decolonial imaginaries, through which perception and creation of other, more liveable worlds is possible. …

Railroad Ties: Tracks To The White Earth And Red Lake Ojibwe Reservations, 1860s-1910s, Heidi Katter

Library Map Prize

This essay interrogates the comparative effects of railroad colonialism at the White Earth and Red Lake Ojibwe Reservations in northwestern Minnesota. Charting the history of railroad expansion in Minnesota from the mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries using maps, railroad promotional materials, and Indian agent correspondence reveals how, when, and why the White Earth and Red Lake Ojibwe experienced land dispossession and environmental degradation. Despite their geographic proximity, White Earth and Red Lake faced different federal policies. Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century, both the White Earth and Red Lake Ojibwe lived upon deforested reservation lands. While existing historiography analyzes …

Retelling Narratives Of Eco-Memory: Settler Colonialism And Carceral Occupation Of The Jordan River, Megan Rose Awwad

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In this thesis, I retell and reclaim stories that have been shared and passed down within my family and family history in relation to our homeland, Palestine, and more specifically to the Jordan River. I argue that the construction of the dam in the 1960s on the Jordan River, by a zionist state, is an extension of both the settler colonial state and the treatment of the land/rivers as inherently linked with the treatment of Indigenous people. The carceral spaces and geographies settler states create are part of both the destruction of the land and the genocide Indigenous people experience. …

Risky Times And Spaces: Settler Colonialism And Multiplying Genocide Prevention Through A Virtual Indian Residential School, Andrew Woolford, Adam Muller, Struan Sinclair

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In this article, we examine how the logic of genocide prevention aligns with a settler colonial logic of elimination. We examine how the exclusion of cultural techniques of destruction from consideration contributes to the logic of elimination, and we suggest this is, in part, a structural problem built into the logic of genocide prevention. Along these lines, we interrogate linear and molar approaches to genocide prevention and propose, in addition to existing macro-level strategies, a molecular, everyday ethos of genocide prevention that is attuned to genocidal intimacies and seeks to foster anti-genocide habits and practices. In so doing, we argue …

Becoming Legible: The Racial Making Of The Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole People In The Coahuila–Texas Borderland, Rocío Gil Martínez De Escobar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This historical ethnography analyzes the making of the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as part of the production of the Coahuila-Texas borderland. In the quest to become legible to improve their living conditions and maintain a sense of dignity, Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles use history and racialization as tools of negotiation between themselves and the two nation-states where they live: Mexico and the United States. I analyze the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as a case of racialization that illustrates the ongoing mechanisms of settler colonialism (dispossession, exploitation, and elimination via genocide or assimilation), as they play out in specific socio-historical contexts.

The …

Palestinian Liberation, Jennifer Thomson

Bucknell: Occupied

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews Miko Peled, Israeli-American activist and author. Peled contextualizes the Israeli occupation of Palestine, describes discriminatory treatment of Palestinians, and discusses his own experience as a Jewish peace activist in support of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Michael Drexler, professor of English at Bucknell University, discusses contemporary conversation on university campuses and interrogates the uncritical support of Zionism.

Reorientations; Or, An Indigenous Feminist Reflection On The Anthropocene, Kali Simmons

Indigenous Nations Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Destruction of homelands. Loss of kinship species. Exposure to deadly contaminants. Mass extinction. Transformed lifeways. In the face of these radical changes, a question lingers: How long will life be possible? Recently the academy has also felt the urgency of these environmental problems and proposed to address them within the framework of the term "the Anthropocene." Indigenous studies has offered various responses to the Anthropocene, some arguing that it has utility in framing the violence of colonialism and others critiquing the limitations and assumptions behind the "anthropos" …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

Pocahontas Looks Back And Then Looks Elsewhere: The Entangled Gaze In Contemporary Indigenous Art, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various genres of visual art in North America feature Indigenous subjects looking from the canvas or the screen at the viewers to interpellate them as implicated in the gaze framing the artwork. In this article, I provide an historical genealogy of this returned gaze, starting with Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving, Matoaka als Lady Rebecca. I show how subsequent depictions of Pocahontas depart from the reciprocal gaze of de Passe’s portrait and how contemporary art returns to this theme of the returned gaze, using Shelley Niro’s video work The Shirt (2003) …

Settler Colonial Ways Of Seeing: Documentary Governance Of Indigenous Life In Canada And Its Disruption, Danielle Taschereau Mamers

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Settler colonialism in Canada has and continues to dispossess Indigenous nations of their lands and authority. Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing argues that a politics of visibility has been central to these structures of invasion and dispossession. In an effort to transform sovereign Indigenous nations into “Indians”, the state has used techniques of bureaucratic documentation to naturalize the classification of Indigenous bodies as racially inferior and thus subject to a range of violent interventions. This politics of visibility fails to see Indigenous people as people who matter.

Using Indigenous feminist critique, discourse analysis, and aesthetics to analyze federal legislation, …

Settler Social Order: The Violence Of Policing In New Mexico, Elisabeth R. Ehlert Perkal

American Studies ETDs

This thesis argues that in order to understand how and why police violence happens in the U.S., it is necessary to situate these interactions within a framework of settler colonialism. The police exist to maintain social order and, in the case of the U.S., this social order is defined by hegemonic structures of power including settler colonialism. Thus, the police fabricate and enforce settler social order that requires subjugating and eliminating Native people in order to preserve settler sovereignty. This thesis intervenes into monolithic critiques of policing in the U.S. and argues that critiques of police violence are most productive …

Contesting Liberalism, Refusing Death: A Biopolitical Critique Of Navajo History, Melanie Yazzie

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation considers the pivotal role that liberalism, particularly as it is expressed and enforced through post-livestock reduction era logics of tribal economic development, plays in advancing a relentless and violent form of U.S. settler colonialism bent on the elimination of Navajo life. I use Michel Foucault’s framework of biopolitics as a theory of history to unlock, identify, and interpret what brought Navajo life into the realm of explicit calculation in Navajo political formations. I use the terms ‘experimental liberalism’ and ‘extractive liberalism’ to frame the two primary biopolitical formations I see at work in this period of Navajo history. …

Transnationalizing Social Justice Education: Interamerican Frameworks For Teaching And Learning In The 21st Century, Mirangela G. Buggs

Doctoral Dissertations

Social Justice Education currently uses mostly U.S.-based theories and concepts, and it often relies upon nation-specific historical legacies and nation-centric contemporary understandings of patterns of inequality. This study offers interdisciplinary conceptual-historical frameworks garnered from historical studies, African Diaspora Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, along with studies of frameworks and pedagogies in critical and multicultural education to enlarge Social Justice Education. This conceptual study utilizes a world-historical analysis and focuses on the interconnectedness of the Americas—Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America— establishing a hemispheric and regional framework to inspire more transnational work in educational projects. Arguing that there are shared …

Ts'msyen Revolution: The Poetics And Politics Of Reclaiming, Robin R. R. Gray

Doctoral Dissertations

As a result of the settler colonial project in North America, Ts’msyen have been thrust into a state of reclamation. The purpose of this study was to examine the distinctiveness of what it means for Ts’msyen to reclaim given our particular history and experiences with settler colonialism. Utilizing the poetics and politics as a theoretical, methodological and practical framework, this dissertation synthesizes the motivations, possibilities and obstacles associated with Ts’msyen reclamation in the contemporary era. Further, as a contribution to the literature on decolonization, Indigenous nationhood, Indigenous subjectivity, Indigenous methodologies and repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, I report on two …

Queers Resisting Zionism: On Authority And Accountability Beyond Homonationalism, C. Heike Schotten, Haneen Maikey

C. Heike Schotten

A critical response to Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi's "Pinkwatching and Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and Its Discontents"

Decolonisation As Peacemaking: Applying Just War Theory To The Canadian Context, Sam Grey

Sam Grey

For decades now, Canada has been seen as a global exemplar of peacemaking and peacekeeping, yet the troubled relationship between its state and the Indigenous peoples within its borders does little to support this image. There is, in fact, a strong case to be made that the ongoing crisis of Indigenous–settler state relations in Canada is best understood as a protracted war; or more succinctly, as a failure to achieve peace following the initial violence of conquest and colonisation. Accordingly, it makes sense to apply just war theory — a doctrine of military ethics — to the issue. Grounded in …