Introduction: Settler Colonialism, History, and Theory

Translating land justice through comparison: a US–French dialogue and research agenda

“…While the concept of land justice is often associated with peasants’ struggles for accessing land in the global ‘South’—for example, the movement for food sovereignty articulated by La Via Campesina (Williams and Holt-Gimenez 2017 )—the concept of land justice also has salience in both the US and France, and in other countries in the ‘North’. As Carlisle ( 2014 ) argues, agri-food scholars must disavow singular, overly romantic characterizations of agriculture and, instead, be sensitive to the histories of genocide, dispossession, slavery, and oppression that have shaped spaces of food production, an attention that others have argued need to figure more prominently in how we understand the establishment of settler nations (Hixson 2013 ; Pulido 2018 ) and urban space (Safransky 2018 ), more generally. In the North American context, part of understanding this is to grasp the extent to which settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy all depend on the othering and erasure of Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives and lifeways (Bonds and Inwood 2016 ; McKittrick 2011 ; Pulido 2017 ) in rural and urban areas alike (Dorries et al 2019 ; Hugill 2017 ; McClintock 2018 ; Porter et al 2020 ; Safransky 2018 ; Simpson and Bagelman 2018 ).…”

“…Smallholder agriculture, as well, often relied on the labor of the enslaved (Dunaway 2003 ). Agriculture and the nineteenth century ideology of Manifest Destiny were inseparable, as the federal government encouraged the westward expansion of a Jeffersonian yeomanry, alongside the genocide and dispossession of diverse Indigenous nations (Hixson 2013 ). After emancipation, the legacy of slavery endured through Jim Crow sharecropping and the dispossession of Black farmers from their land (Wood and Gilbert 2000 ).…”

Investigating curricular policy as a tool to dismantle the master’s house: Indian Education for All and social studies teacher education

“…For this article, we situate our discussion of neoliberalism within the specific context of US settler-colonialism. Hixon (2013: 4) explains, “What primarily distinguishes settler colonialism from colonialism proper is that the settlers came not to exploit the Indigenous populations for economic gain, but rather to remove them from colonial space.” European and Euro-American settlers, therefore, expanded on the colonizing goals of economic expansion through theft of land and the forcible removal of the land’s inhabitants.…”

“…US settler-colonialism is unique in its use of policy (i.e., treaties) to expand access to land for the US government and White settlers while removing, limiting, or redefining access for the First Peoples of the nation. That is, although the Indigenous Peoples of other nations also experienced forced removal, US treaty-making offered an unprecedented means of justifying war, land seizure, and cultural genocide at institutional (i.e., governmental and religious) levels (Hixon, 2013). Inherently, treaty-making favored the settler through dismissal of Indigenous epistemologies.…”

Decolonization Not Inclusion

“…European colonization of North Americas was a multidimensional catastrophe for the continent’s inhabitants. As historian Walter Hixson (2013) summarized, the “the colonial encounter brought disease, disruption, enslavement, diaspora, indiscriminate killing, destruction of communities, and loss of ancestral homelands” (p. 43), leading scholars to characterize settler-indigenous relations as genocidal in whole or in part (Woolford, Benvenuto, and Hinton 2014). 1 As part of the core settler colonial dynamics of the displacement and elimination of indigenous peoples, enacted through violence and many other means, major social institutions were profoundly disrupted, and tremendous amounts of pain and suffering were inflicted at the same time that traditional healing practices were undermined.…”