Automation, Algorithms, and Bias, from Settler Colonialism through the Future of Auditing: Settler Colonialism, Native and Indigenous Studies
Suggested readings from Sarah Montoya
Articles
- Black and Native Visions of Self-DeterminationThis essay loiters among conversations on self-determination emerging out of Black radical and critical Indigenous intellectual and political traditions, conversations that raise fundamental questions about radical imaginations beyond the settler state, radical imaginations based on practices of survival grounded in relationship to place. My method is a contrapuntal genealogy of histories and ideas about self-determination driving toward Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization, which destabilize commonplace understandings of the form and function of the nation concept in North America. I focus here on self-determination, and not Black freedom, or Indigenous sovereignty, in order to contemplate the distinctions and interrelationships between Black and Indigenous internationalisms, proposals, and practices of territorial autonomy beyond the partitioning violence of the nation-state form that also challenge the limits of twentieth-century decolonization. The perspectives and demands of Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization potentially unravel U.S. claims to legitimacy and coherence. Self-determination, in the contemporary moment, has the potential to yield authority from governing states. In Black and Indigenous contexts, self-determination calls into question the nature of North American nations, decolonization, and relationship to place.
- Decolonization is not a metaphorOur goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonization, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.
- “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for life. Yet this is not to say that settler colonialism is simply a form of genocide. In some settler-colonial sites (one thinks, for instance, of Fiji), native society was able to accommodate—though hardly unscathed—the invaders and the transformative socioeconomic system that they introduced. Even in sites of wholesale expropriation such as Australia or North America, settler colonialism's genocidal outcomes have not manifested evenly across time or space. Native Title in Australia or Indian sovereignty in the US may have deleterious features, but these are hardly equivalent to the impact of frontier homicide. Moreover, there can be genocide in the absence of settler colonialism. The best known of all genocides was internal to Europe, while genocides that have been perpetrated in, for example, Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda or (one fears) Darfur do not seem to be assignable to settler colonialism. In this article, I shall begin to explore, in comparative fashion, the relationship between genocide and the settler-colonial tendency that I term the logic of elimination. I contend that, though the two have converged—which is to say, the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as genocidal—they should be distinguished. Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.
Books
The White Possessive
"The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty."
Mark My Words
"Dominant history would have us believe that colonialism belongs to a previous era that has long come to an end. But as Native people become mobile, reservation lands become overcrowded and the state seeks to enforce means of containment, closing its borders to incoming, often indigenous, immigrants. In Mark My Words, Mishuana Goeman traces settler colonialism as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence, demonstrating how it persists in the contemporary context of neoliberal globalization. ..."
Sovereignty Matters
Sovereignty Matters investigates the multiple perspectives that exist within indigenous communities regarding the significance of sovereignty as a category of intellectual, political, and cultural work. Much scholarship to date has treated sovereignty in geographical and political matters solely in terms of relationships between indigenous groups and their colonial states or with a bias toward American contexts. This groundbreaking anthology of essays by indigenous peoples from the Americas and the Pacific offers multiple perspectives on the significance of sovereignty.
See specifically: Barker, Joanne. “For Whom Sovereignty Matters.”
Weaponizing Maps
Maps play an indispensable role in indigenous peoples' efforts to secure land rights in the Americas and beyond. Yet indigenous peoples did not invent participatory mapping techniques on their own; they appropriated them from techniques developed for colonial rule and counterinsurgency campaigns, and refined by anthropologists and geographers. Through a series of historical and contemporary examples from Nicaragua, Canada, and Mexico, this book explores the tension between military applications of participatory mapping and its use for political mobilization and advocacy. The authors analyze the emergence of indigenous territories as spaces defined by a collective way of life--and as a particular kind of battleground.
The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
In The Transit of Empire, Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable "Indianness" that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources.
Formations of United States Colonialism
Bridging the multiple histories and present-day iterations of U.S. settler colonialism in North America and its overseas imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the essays in this groundbreaking volume underscore the United States as a fluctuating constellation of geopolitical entities marked by overlapping and variable practices of colonization. By rethinking the intertwined experiences of Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chamorros, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Samoans, and others subjected to U.S. imperial rule, the contributors consider how the diversity of settler claims, territorial annexations, overseas occupations, and circuits of slavery and labor both facilitate and delimit the conditions of colonial dispossession.
See specifically: Goldstein, Alyosha. “Introduction: Towards a Genealogy of a U.S. Colonial Present.”
The Black Shoals
In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal--an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea--as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy.
Native American DNA
Because today's DNA testing seems so compelling and powerful, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: "in our blood" is giving way to "in our DNA." In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously--and permanently--undermined.