Reckoning with Settler Memory: Care, Refusal, and Indigenous Resistance

• In Event: Popular Politics and the Legacies of Empire

Abstract

"Reckoning with Settler Memory" examines colonial and contemporary indigenous activism around environmental and health crises. The paper is prompted by Kevin Bruyneel's recent call for political theory to address "settler memory" -- the complex ways in which settler states have both utilized and disavowed violence to indigenous land and nations. In the face of such forces, indigenous peoples have developed a variety of political strategies and approaches that expose past and current violences and also generate alternative structures of governance, participation, and representation.
By looking at the long history of domestic colonization in the Americas, the Idle No More movement, and protests at Standing Rock, "Reckoning with Settler Memory" addresses how indigenous movements have theorized and practiced care and refusal as feminist and insurgent tactics of decolonizing politics. Care, I argue, is not only central to the concerns of early indigenous theorists, like William Apess and Black Hawk, but also has been revitalized and radicalized in the work of contemporary theorists and activists, such as Audra Simpson, Taiaiake Alfred, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Care -- expressed in the form of online and on-the-ground grieving, social mobilization around environmental and health concerns, and clinics and healing practices -- builds and affirms kinship networks and develops an alternative polities and treaty relations.

Author

• Vicki Hsueh, Western Washington University