Europe’s First Settler Colonial Incursion into Africa: The Genocide of Aboriginal Canary Islanders

The annihilation of the aboriginal societies of the Canary archipelago, which consists of seven islands off the coast of southern Morocco and was populated by indigenes derived from Berber-speaking communities of north-west Africa, represents modern Europe’s first overseas settler colonial genocide. The process of social destruction, initiated by European slave raiders in the first half of the fourteenth century, was propelled to completion by mainly Iberian conquistadors and settlers towards the end of the fifteenth century. In addition to unrestrained mass violence against Canarians, European conquerors practised near-total confiscation of land and near-total enslavement and deportation of island populations. Enslavement and deportation, which went hand in hand, accounted for the largest number of victims and were central to the genocidal process. They were in effect as destructive as killing because the victims, generally the most productive members of their communities, were permanently lost to their societies. Child confiscation, sexual violence and the use of scorched earth tactics also contributed to the devastation suffered by Canarian peoples. After conquest, the remnants of indigenous Canarian societies were subjected to ongoing violence and cultural suppression, which ensured the extinction of their way of life. That the enslavement and deportation of entire island communities was the consciously articulated aim of conquerors establishes their “intent to destroy in whole,” which is the central criterion for meeting the United Nations Convention on Genocide’s definition of genocide. This article argues that individually and collectively all seven cases of social obliteration in the Canaries represent clear examples of genocide, and it is the first article to contend that the destruction of aboriginal Canarian societies constitutes genocide.     

Multiple inventories and divided archaeology in the West Bank: An assessment of databases in the Etzion Bloc

This paper presents and discusses an assessment of the scope, priorities, and coverage of existing archaeological datasets, via database comparison and on-the-ground re-survey of all accessible known sites in one region of the West Bank, the Etzion Bloc. The main goal of this survey was to assess the current inventories listing archaeological sites in the Etzion Bloc, an area that brings together an interesting range of archaeological and geographical issues that result directly from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This database assessment and review of listed archaeological sites included the verification of site existence and the examination of sites’ modern context, accessibility, current condition, potential threats, and the accuracy of their recorded location. The results of this fieldwork demonstrate the importance of keeping data up-do-date, provide suggestions on how to enhance the structure and contents of current inventories, and help prioritize and inform plans for further archaeological fieldwork in this region.     

New collaborations in old institutional spaces: setting a new research agenda to transform Indigenous-settler relations

ABSTRACT

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people navigate the social and political order of the Australian settler state in ways that seek to increase their personal freedoms and political autonomy. For some groups this means seeking a firmer place within the social, political and economic life of Australia, and for others it means navigating away, towards a more distant relationship based in the resurgence of Indigenous nationhood. This navigation is composed of multifaceted and multidirectional relations between Indigenous Australians, settler Australians, and the settler state. As a discipline, political science must move beyond the study of settler institutions and begin to engage more comprehensively in research that considers the dynamics and structures of Indigenous-settler relations as a matter of priority.     

Marriage under occupation: Israel’s spousal visa restrictions in the West Bank

In the West Bank, hundreds of non-Palestinian women who are married to Palestinian men have recently been issued shortened visas with tightened restrictions. This means they are often prevented from working, their mobilities are severely reduced and they are placed in extremely precarious bureaucratic and procedural positions. The research in this article draws from fieldwork interviews with women affected by such restrictions to show how politically induced precarities produce gendered effects towards specific ends of the occupation of Palestine. We thus frame a discussion of the women’s experiences of visa regulations through precarity before giving an account of the profound effects on women’s roles in family and political life. We then broaden the focus to consider Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the demographic implications of the gendered effects of visa precarity. In doing so we make the argument that Israel’s spousal visa regulations contribute to the (re)production of uneven gender relations and the demographic objective of emptying out the West Bank.     

“To see things in an objective light”: the Dakota Access Pipeline and the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the discourses used by proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as claims of universality to which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allied activists mounted a movement of opposition in 2014–2017. We position our analysis within the historical context of Lakota and Dakota resistance to settler colonialism, which has endured since the nineteenth century. From publicly available texts circulated by key actors in the conflict over the construction of this pipeline project, we identify themes that proponents of this project drew upon to articulate their representations of the land as universal. We suggest that claims like these, when naturalized in practice, have historically materialized in settler colonial landscapes. With the concept of settler colonial landscapes, we focus on ways of seeing and representing places that have facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous people from their territory as well as the construction of a settler-dominated community. In this way, we develop a cultural geographical understanding of the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes as a process dependent on claims to neutrality and objectivity.     

Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances*

This paper focuses on children’s relations with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, it grapples with encounters with the mountain, atop which several childcare centres are located. The mountain, on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, has become a contested site of colonial capitalist extraction due to a proposal to build a tar sands oil pipeline that would tunnel through the mountain. Sustained protest action emerged at the site amidst initiation of test borehole drilling activity by the pipeline company. In this paper, I engage with the potential of geotheorizing children’s relations as a critical response that interrupts dominant understandings of what is seen as appropriate for young children’s curriculum. I consider the effects of refiguring children’s subjectivities through geologic and geontological relations for the normalization and resistance of settler colonialism’s human-centric and extractive structurings.