Browsing by Subject "Settler Colonialism"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Before the Sun Rises: Contesting Power and Cultivating Nations in the Colorado Beet Fields
    (2017-06) Pérez, Bernadette
    This dissertation analyzes how Colorado’s sugar beet industry, one of the most important agricultural industries in the American West before World War II, was built through the expansion of an exclusionary, settler colonial American nation-state and the racialization and criminalization of migrant workers. It does not look only to elites to tell this story. Through multi-sited research in U.S. and Mexican archives, it privileges the perspectives of diverse agricultural working communities. Beet workers contested and creatively appropriated hegemonic and colonial visions of nation, land, industrial modernity, gender, labor, indigeneity, and race. From rural Colorado, they shaped the improvisational nature of state power and American capitalism.
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    Between Empires And Frontiers: Alaska Native Sovereignty And U.S. Settler Imperialism
    (2018-03) Arnett, Jessica
    “Between Empires and Frontiers: Alaska Native Sovereignty and U.S. Settler Imperialism,” examines territorial Alaska as a critical borderland: a settler colonial space alternately framed as the “Last Frontier” of the American West or as the first experiment in U.S. overseas imperialism. Drawing on indigenous, territorial, federal, state, Congressional, and corporate records, I argue that these competing understandings generated tensions in the legal relationship of Alaska Natives to the federal government and informed Alaska Native political strategies as they made claims on land, sovereignty, and U.S. citizenship. Unlike in the contiguous states, the federal government never signed treaties with Alaska Natives and the Bureau of Indian Affairs refused jurisdiction to what it considered to be “races of a questionable, ethnical type” and therefore categorically different than American Indians. Beginning in 1867, when the federal government purchased the territory from Russia, to 1959 when Alaska was admitted to the Union as the 49th state, my dissertation traces the processes by which these racial distinctions engendered a new legal framework that I call settler imperialism. I argue that the tensions inherent in this legal framework were fundamental to the broader structure of U.S. empire in which “incorporated” territories were instrumental. In this way, Alaska had far-reaching implications for United States international policy and global hegemony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue further that Alaska Natives strategically leveraged these tensions in shaping their relationship to the federal government as indigenous nations and as U.S. citizens. Alaska Natives organized their political strategies around what territorial and federal officials referred to as “uncertainty” as to their legal status, alternately drawing similarities between themselves and American Indians or maintaining distinctions. In doing so, they enacted sovereignty, made claims to citizenship rights, and tailored elements of federal Indian policy to suit their political, economic, and social organization and networks of relations in ways that territorial and federal officials did not expect. The outcomes of their efforts are crucial to understanding U.S.-indigenous relations in the contiguous states and globally.
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    Indigenous Suburbs: Settler Colonialism, Housing Policy, and American Indians in Suburbia
    (2016-05) Keeler, Kasey
    This dissertation analyzes the suburbs of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota as historically Indian places and demonstrates the continuous residency of American Indians in suburbs. In order to uncover the indigenous history of the suburban Twin Cities, I use an interdisciplinary methodology that includes a demographic analysis of U.S. Census data, a close reading of historical archives, and auto-ethnography based on my personal experiences as a suburban Indian to challenge common narratives of suburbia and to underscore the participation of American Indian people in the processes of suburbanization. Part one of this dissertation focuses on the years between the end of the U.S.-Dakota War (1862) and the start of World War I. Here, I argue Indian people were engaged in the early development of Indian places into suburbs despite policies to remove Indian people and the growing number of non-Native settlers who eclipsed an Indian presence. In part two, I focus on the policies that shaped suburbia and Indian Country during the second half of the twentieth century. I examine the role of World War II era federal housing policies that promoted suburbanization and new home construction, specifically the 1944 G.I. Bill home loan program. My analysis interrogates how the federal Indian policies of Relocation and Termination prevented American Indian suburbanization and homeownership and critiques the more recent Section 184 American Indian Home Loan Program. I problematize scholarship in American studies, urban studies, and suburban studies by challenging narratives of suburbia that predominately focus on whiteness, domesticity, and homeownership in the post-World War II period.
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    Interrogating Intimacies: Asian American and Native Relations in Colonial Alaska
    (2013-08) Pegues, Juliana
    Interrogating Intimacies examines intersections between Asian and Native peoples in Alaska during the American territorial period in order to critically understand the formation of settler colonialism. In four case studies that touch on the historical periods of Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, incorporated territorial status, and World War II, I demonstrate how the colonial project racialized and gendered Native and Asian people in Alaska in different yet interdependent ways. Interrogating Intimacies utilizes an expansive archive of texts (historical documents, interviews, travel narratives, literature, and photography) to inform how settler colonialism defines and delimits its proper subject. I contend that the narrative of Alaska as a democratic state rather than a colonial territory depends upon the disavowal of both Asian labor and Native land claims, made possible through the spatial and temporal logics of settler colonialism. Tracing the multiple violences rendered by these interlocking disavowals, as well as possibilities for creative resistance, underscores the crucial benefit to bringing Asian American and Native studies into closer conversation.
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    Performing the Oregon Trail: Belonging, Space, and Historical Representation in Settler Colonial Oregon
    (2022-05) Rorem, Jacob
    This dissertation examines the role that performances of the history and mythology of the Oregon Trail have had in securing the power and futurity of a settler colonial Pacific Northwest at the expense of other social, political, and spatial possibilities. It primarily focuses on how these practices naturalize particular modes of inhabiting and territorial belonging, as well as positions settler colonists as the rightful people of Oregon. To do so, I focus on a range of practices throughout the 20th and 21st centuries which celebrated, represented, and interpreted the Oregon Trail, the primary vehicle for settling the Pacific Northwest by the United States in the mid-19th century. These practices include trail marking, museums and interpretive centers, historical pageantry and parades, and nostalgic reenactments of a popular educational video game. My investigation teases out the role of both representation and performance within my objects of study, grounding both elements within the fundamental reality of settler colonialism: the expropriation and occupation of Indigenous lands by non-Indigenous settlers.
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    Wasted Lands: Zionist Development and Settler Colonialism in the Naqab/Negev
    (2020-07) Getzoff, Joseph
    Contemporary development resonates with persistent colonial ideologies, emphasizing improvement and technocratic rule that justify and extend capitalist accumulation. However, despite the fact that critical development studies frame development as a global modality of capitalist and colonial intervention—as well as mandates that justify the rule within post-colonies—this scholarship tends to elide the question of settler colonialism’s imbrication with capitalism and colonialism on a planetary scale. This dissertation looks at the history of the Naqab/Negev region of southern Israel/Palestine as an example of a geographically specific manifestation of a novel concept, settler development. Settler development describes the way that settler colonialism mobilizes historically contingent colonial and capitalist circuits that operate through the discourses and practices of development. Utilizing a qualitative mixed-methods approach, this dissertation draws from historical collections on the desert and development, interviews with informants in key institutions and NGOs, as well as data collected from ethnographic research at Israeli development project sites and in Bedouin Palestinian villages. Zionism is a nationalist ideology that promises emancipation for the Jewish people by maintaining a nation-state in historic Palestine. Zionists have long claimed that Jewish settlers would improve the “wasteland” of Palestine—negating Palestinian claims to self-determination in the process. By settling the proclaimed “wasteland” of Palestine, Zionists claimed that Jews would become modern individuals whose industriousness stood in stark contrast to native Palestinians whom colonial powers had depicted as unproductive and singularly unfit for self-rule. Zionists celebrated the “pioneer” who shares much in common with the iconic American frontier subject. Such discourses are coupled with Zionist narratives that efface centuries of Bedouin cultivation, property ownership, and pastoral adaptation. Today, Zionism celebrates the “new pioneer”—the entrepreneur—best encapsulated in pronouncements that proclaim Israel as the “start-up nation.” Within this changing landscape, Zionist developers now seek to “make the desert bloom” by building a high-tech corridor (nicknamed “Silicon Wadi) in an effort to circumvent Bedouin land claims throughout the region. However, Bedouins refuse to be passive bystanders; indigenous NGOs endeavor to repurpose settler development for more egalitarian outcomes and partner with Jewish and international allies to preserve historical claims.