Enacting settler responsibilities towards decolonisation

Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682110626
Author(s):  
Avril Bell ◽  
Rose Yukich ◽  
Billie Lythberg ◽  
Christine Woods
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
International Symposium ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Settler Societies

This special issue showcases research exploring the work of settler individuals and groups in support of projects of decolonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Israel. The papers gathered here were developed from presentations at an international symposium held in Auckland, New Zealand and online in February 2021. As symposium organisers and editors of this collection, we speak and write as settler subjects ourselves, and this collection is situated within the field of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). This editorial provides an opening framing of the field into which these papers speak, and a survey of some of the key themes within the wider literature. We aim firstly to locate this work within the wider field of scholarship and activism on decolonisation and decoloniality, delimiting the particular focus of decolonisation within settler-dominated contexts. We then discuss the critiques that have been mounted against SCS and some important defences of the field. We argue that while settler colonialism persists, work in SCS has a contribution to make – in highlighting and critiquing settler logics and in identifying changes that it is within the power of settler peoples themselves to make as a contribution towards Indigenous-led decolonisation. Further, we argue that decolonising settler societies must involve settlers learning to be ‘in relation’ with Indigenous worlds and people outside of deeply habituated logics and practices of domination. The papers gathered here provide examples of settler subjects at various points on the path of decolonising themselves and learning the work of ‘being in relation’.

scholarly journals Conclusion: Spiralling Forwards, Backwards, and Together to Decolonise Freshwater

2021 ◽  
pp. 463-482
Author(s):  
Meg Parsons ◽  
Karen Fisher ◽  
Roa Petra Crease
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Tribal Group ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
Justice Movements

AbstractIn this concluding chapter, we bring together our earlier analyses of the historical and contemporary waterscapes of the Waipā River (Aotearoa New Zealand) to consider the theory and practice of Indigenous environmental justice. In this chapter, we return to review three key dimensions of environmental justice: distributive, procedural, and recognition. We summarise the efforts of one Māori tribal group (Ngāti Maniapoto) to challenge the knowledge and authority claims of the settler-colonial-state and draw attention to the pluralistic dimensions of Indigenous environmental (in)justice. Furthermore, we highlight that since settler colonialism is not a historic moment but still a ongoing reality for Indigneous peoples living settler societies it is critically important to critically evaluate theorising about and environmental justice movements through a decolonising praxis.

Conceptualising historical privilege: the flip side of historical trauma, a brief examination

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Borell ◽  
Helen Moewaka Barnes ◽  
Tim McCreanor
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Social Wellbeing ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Settler Societies

Historical trauma is an important and growing area of research that provides crucial insights into the antecedents of current-day inequities in health and social wellbeing experienced by Indigenous people in colonial settler societies. What is not so readily examined is the flip side of historical trauma experienced by settlers and their descendants, what might be termed “historical privilege”. These historic acts of privilege for settlers, particularly those emigrating from Britain, provide the antecedents for the current-day realities for their descendants and the structural, institutional and interpersonal levels of advantage that are also a key feature of inequities between Indigenous and settler. This article theorises an explicit link between historical trauma and historical privilege and explores how the latter may be examined with particular reference to Aotearoa New Zealand. Three core elements of historical trauma are posited as a useful framework to apply to historical privilege.

scholarly journals Editorial: The social work voice – doxa and dissent in neoliberal times

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Keddell ◽  
Deb Stanfield ◽  
Ian Hyslop
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
The State ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
Critical Responses

Welcome to this special issue of Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work. The theme for this edition is Child protection, the family and the state: critical responses in neoliberal times.

Editorial: Volume 3 (2018): Special Issue

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 1-2 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Committee Member ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Learning Partnerships ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Peer Reviewers ◽  
Executive Committee Member ◽  
Lincoln University

Welcome to Volume 3 of the ATLAANZ Journal (2018), a four-part special issue entitled “Tertiary Learning Advisors on Aotearoa/New Zealand: Identity and Opportunity”, that presents a comprehensive research project undertaken by Caitriona Cameron (HoD: Academic and Career Skills, Library Teaching and Learning at Lincoln University) and founding member, former President (2009-2010) and Executive Committee member of the Association of Tertiary Learning Advisors Aotearoa/New Zealand. ATLAANZ Journal invites submissions on topics relevant to the tertiary learning advisor community (such as higher education, learning partnerships, responding to environmental changes, innovative practice, and working with students (including International, postgraduates, Māori, Pasifika and Rainbow). We provide mentoring and support for new authors, and are also keen to hear from colleagues interested in acting as peer-reviewers. Please send expressions of interest to [email protected].

scholarly journals Legal and Ontological Pluralism: Recognising Rivers as More-Than-Human Entities

2021 ◽  
pp. 235-282
Author(s):  
Meg Parsons ◽  
Karen Fisher ◽  
Roa Petra Crease
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge Systems ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractWe explore the ways in which the formal recognition (to some extent) of Indigenous knowledge systems within environmental governance and the role of reconcilition in achieving environmental justice. We examine whether recent agreements between the New Zealand Crown (Crown) and Māori tribal groups (iwi), known as Treaty ‘settlements’, to establish shared co-governance and management over rivers encapsulate and are capable of achieving environmental justice for Māori. We draw on schoalrship on legal and ontological pluralism to consider questions of how to remedy environmental injustice and what reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples means in settler societies. Rather than seek to provide a singular definition of Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ), we instead examine how Indigenous peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand and other colonial societies are engaged in efforts to negotiate with and challenge the colonial legal orders, develop their laws, policies, and governance frameworks to achieve justice within the freshwater realm.

scholarly journals Co-existing Indigenous and Settler Worlds Ontological Styles and Possibilities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avril Bell
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
The World ◽  
New Community ◽  
Ways Of Being

Settler colonialism involves processes of destruction and substitution aiming to replace indigenous with European/western worlds. But indigenous worlds persist in numerous spaces, moments and interactions where distinct ontologies and ways of being-in-the-world prevail. In Aotearoa New Zealand these spaces of the Māori world persist most obviously on marae. Māori and western worlds also briefly come together in public contexts where Māori protocols are used to mark openings of various sorts, temporarily governing public space and sociability. In this paper, I explore a different case where, I argue, Māori and western worlds are entangled or knotted together in the carved pou in the atrium space of a new community building in Kaitaia.

Dispossession as Destination

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wynyard
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand

The systematic dispossession of Māori land in the 19th and 20th centuries formed the basis of Aotearoa New Zealand’s capitalist economy and contributed to persistent patterns of inequality between Pākehā and Māori. Māori were, and largely remain, excluded from the land-based economy of Aotearoa New Zealand. This chapter draws on an emergent body of Indigenous critical theory that seeks to reformulate or “indiginize” Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation to better account for Indigenous experiences of colonization. It describes the settler-colonial process in Aotearoa New Zealand, including the myriad attempts of settlers and the Crown to eliminate Māori and separate us from our ancestral lands. Ultimately, however, this chapter argues that the settler colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand is, in part at least, a failed project. Māori have not been eliminated and the umbilical connection to the lands of our ancestors has not been severed.

Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Busbridge
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New World ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Structural Account ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Interpretive Framework

In recent years there has been a powerful resurgence of settler colonialism as an interpretive framework through which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attached to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, this so-called ‘turn’ to settler colonialism has seen Israel-Palestine increasingly compared alongside New World white settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United States. In seeking to undercut the lens of exceptionalism through which the conflict has conventionally been viewed, the settler colonial paradigm has some important counter-hegemonic implications for reframing Israel-Palestine, not least of which is its prescription for decolonization. However, it is paradoxically in the context of decolonization that the limits of the settler colonial paradigm become most apparent. I argue that these limitations are connected to the dominance of Patrick Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism, which leaves very little room for transformation, and to the particular connotations settler colonial studies has acquired from the New World contexts in which it is most often articulated. This is particularly the case in Israel-Palestine, where these connotations preclude engagement with the national aspects of the conflict and leave under-examined the unique resonances of the settler/native distinction, which need reckoning with in any serious account of decolonization.

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