Browsing by Subject "settler colonialism"
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Item Remapping the World: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Ends of Settler Sovereignty(2016-10) Temin, DavidThis dissertation reconstructs the political thought of Yankton Dakota activist-intellectual Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933-2005) in order to explore how Indigenous peoples in the Americas have developed a tradition of politically engaged, anti-colonial critique—a politics of decolonization. Since World War II, democratic theorists have mounted accounts of civic inclusion and multicultural representation to both invigorate projects of democratic state- and nation-building and to respond to legacies of racial and cultural injustice. Against these accounts, I argue that settler democracies make their boundaries through colonial projects of replacement and normalized incorporation that disavow and dissolve Indigenous peoples’ separate polities. Beginning with his leadership in the National Congress of American Indians in 1964, Deloria provided a) an analysis of narratives of civic inclusion and multicultural representation as colonial and b) translated practices of decolonization emergent from the Indigenous sovereignty movement into an evolving framework of shared Indigenous concepts. The project traces Deloria’s counter-proposals through three phases: First, Deloria confidently re-theorized democratic state-building as “empire” so as to promote among Indigenous peoples an anti-colonial politics of self-determination (1964-1969). Second, Deloria aggressively reimagined Indigenous sovereignty as a distinctive variant of constituent power (1969-1975). Third, Deloria disappointedly reckoned with the durability of colonialism and capitalism as twin engines of destruction and re-described Indigenous conceptions of sacred territory, relationship, and responsibility as the ethical-political foundations of decolonization (1975-2005). Through this reconstruction of Deloria’s work in conversation with contemporary Indigenous and Settler-Colonial Studies, my project provides a basis for refashioning political theory’s core interpretive commitments to address the questions of dispossession, landlessness, self-determination, and sovereignty most apt for decolonization struggles in settler-colonial contexts.Item Simple Medicines: land, health, and power in the 19th-century Ojibwe western Great Lakes(2021-09) Flood, Margaret“Simple Medicines: Land, Health, and Power in the 19th-century Ojibwe western Great Lakes” is a cultural history of medicine in mixed Indigenous Ojibwe and settler communities in the western Great Lakes between 1823 and 1891. This dissertation demonstrates that the ways that settler American and Ojibwe communities understood and sought health fundamentally shaped the dynamic transformations of political, religious, economic, and environmental landscapes in nineteenth century Anishinaabewaki or Anishinaabe territories. The period of 1825-1891 marked the beginning of the US-Ojibwe political relations and a resulting sea change in Ojibwe territorial management, lifeways, and population. While Anishinaabewaki had been and remained a richly international space, American settler colonialism deeply marked Ojibwe people, Ojibwe communities, and Ojibwe land through treaties, reservations, assimilation, and allotment. This dissertation situates the enduring if often contradictory value of medical practices and discourses in settler and Ojibwe relations. Medicine was consistently part of US political relationships with Ojibwe nations through the nineteenth century although the sites in which medicine operated changed over time. These changes were interlinked. The American settler state used settler colonial medicine through treaties, annuities, federally supported missions, and federally supported Indian agencies. Through these technologies and infrastructures, the settler state promoted a vision of health that was assimilative and as such genocidal. Medical practices and discourses of health were deeply entangled with religious reform, economic expansion, and the acquisition of land. This story of medical practice and health discourse must also be read through a longstanding Ojibwe medical pluralism, in which medical exchanges acted to create political, economic, and social relationships while refracting powerful relations with material and immaterial more-than-humans including land. Ojibwe brought settlers into relation through medicine and other forms of gift exchange through which relationships were created, recognized, and maintained. Relationships as a medium extended between humans and more-than-humans including powerful material entities and immaterial entities. Relationships created health and healthy lives for Ojibwe as Ojibwe. Processes of alliance-building, and processes of alliance-destroying, were and are processes of health.Item Unsettling Narratives: Teaching and Learning About Genocide in a Settler Space(2022-12) Dalbo, GeorgeThis research study examined how students and I navigated learning and teaching about genocide and mass violence in the context of a semester-long high school comparative genocide and human rights elective course at DeWitt Junior-Senior High School in rural south-central Wisconsin. Specifically, the study examined how students individually and collectively navigated the “difficult knowledge” (Pitt & Britzman, 2003) of learning about settler colonialism (Tuck & Yang, 2012), the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the United States during the nineteenth century, the legacies of genocide and mass violence at the intersections of U.S. and Indigenous societies during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014), and the enduring legacies of white supremacy and settlerness. Additionally, this study sought to understand how I, a white social studies teacher, navigated teaching about settler colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in a settler space (Dalbo, 2021). Through examining one specific semester-long elective class during the 2021-2022 academic year, this research grew out of my and my students’ struggles and success in teaching and learning about genocide and mass violence over the past fifteen years that I have been engaged in social studies teaching and research. This qualitative study (Patton, 2015) brought together aspects of case study (Merriam, 1998; Yin, 2011), and practitioner research, specifically self-study (Loughran & Northfield, 1998; Zeichner, 1999) methodologies and methods.Item Unsettling Recovery: Natural Disaster Response and the Politics of Contemporary Settler Colonialism(2019-07) Kensinger, StevenThis dissertation is an ethnographic case study of the Christchurch Central City Rebuild. Following a series of severe earthquakes near Christchurch, New Zealand between September 2010 and February 2011, the central government declared a state of emergency and passed the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act (CER Act) in April 2011. This act mandated the creation of a new governing body, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, to oversee the development and implementation of a recovery strategy and plan for the Central City to be developed in cooperation with the Christchurch City Council and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, the local Māori tribal authority. I analyze the structure of power established by the post-earthquake recovery legislation through the lens of Rebuild discourse, a discursive regime comprised of multiple political projects that each engaged in recovery in particular ways to enact their specific vision of what future Christchurch ought to be. I argue that the passage of the CER Act and the structure of power it created in post-earthquake Christchurch drew on the legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history to enable the neoliberal settler state in its efforts to dispossess local Christchurch residents of access to their city while also maintaining the ongoing dispossession of the local indigenous group Ngāi Tahu in order to serve the interests of economic and political elites.