Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Land-Grant Universities

Abstract

Moments of performative racial consciousness, however urgent and necessary, often fail to reckon with long-standing demands against injustice from communities of color. In the case of Indigenous Peoples in higher education, these demands frequently include an end to derogatory mascots and racialized campus violence. This article attends to those issues by merging and extending settler-colonial theory and racialized organization theory to examine how the logics of Indigenous elimination and dispossession permeate higher education. With a specific focus on land-grant universities, I argue that racialized organizations are embedded in institutional fields and that both operate within a broader settler-colonial project. I introduce the concept of settler simultaneity to further historicize the study of racialized organizations and uncover how they target persons, collectives, and ideas that pose obstacles to settler goals of subordination, extraction, and profiteering both locally and globally. I look to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a case study that illustrates how these logics work across time and conclude by considering how critical engagement with the logics of elimination can help us to better understand, and hold accountable, the policies and programs of racialized organizations in other areas of social life.

Performance or Progress? The Physical and Rhetorical Removal of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Land Acknowledgments at Land-Grab Universities

“…As the historical and financial records show, land-grant universities would not have been possible without the violent and genocidal removal of Indigenous Peoples from their lands. Only recently have critiques connected land-grant universities to the U.S. settler colonial state (Goeman, 2020; la paperson, 2017; Mack & Stolarick, 2014; Nash, 2019; Rocha Beardall, 2022; Wilder, 2014) despite the longstanding study of land-grant universities in history and education studies (Cohen & Kisker, 2009; Gavazzi & Gee, 2018; Geiger, 2016; Thelin, 2017). This context of limited critique changed among academic researchers in March 2020, when historian Robert Lee and High Country News journalist Tristan Ahtone published findings linking approximately 10.7 million acres of expropriated land under the 1862 Morrill Act with the violence of Indian removal.…”

“…While our emphasis is on the explicit relationship between Indigenous Peoples and institutions of higher education, we also note that Indigenous dispossession and settler land expropriation extend well beyond the context of universities before and after the creation of land-grab universities beginning in 1862. Several key legal moments illustrate this violence, including the federal government’s push to control Native bodies and lands using outright theft, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the Pacific Railroads Act of 1862 (Rocha Beardall, 2022). Together, these exploitative and assimilationist practices enriched a variety of noneducational beneficiaries including lawyers, surveyors, real estate developers, bankers, miners, and timber and construction barons (Blackhawk et al, 2014).…”

“…While rhetorical removal can and does affect all nonsettler groups, we examine how public institutions are answering the call to examine and redistribute the material benefits they enjoy as a result of past and present anti-Indigenous violence (Rocha Beardall, 2022). Land-grants universities are an ideal case for this inquiry because many were explicitly created from the violent physical removal of Indigenous Peoples (Lee & Ahtone, 2020; Nash, 2019).…”

Twenty-Five Years of Charles Mills’s Racial Contract in Sociology

“…A non-exhaustive but diverse list of second wave TRC sociologists and major articles and books from their dissertation research include Matthew Hughey (2012), Geoff K. Ward (2012), Melissa Weiner (2012), Alyasah Ali Sewell (2016), W. Carson Byrd (2017), Crystal Fleming (2017), Atiya Husain (2017), Celia Lacayo (2017), Jennifer Mueller (2017, 2020), Michael Rodriguez-Muniz (2017), Angel Parham (2017), Karida Brown (2018), Louise Seamster (2018), Sarah Mayorga-Gallo (2019), Victor Ray (2019a), Trenita Brookshire Childers (2020), hephizibah strmic-pawl (2020), Ali Meghji (2021), Whitney Pirtle (2021), Theresa Rocha Beardall (2022), Kiara Wyndham Douds (2021), and Daanika Gordon (2022). My own 2012 dissertation and resulting book (Maghbouleh 2017) could be understood as part of this chronological and epistemological second wave, and I elaborate on the impact of TRC for such early-career adopters like me in Part 2 of this essay.…”

Antiracism amidst empire? Understanding the United States' relationship to whiteness

“…empire.” In addition to what I have outlined above, sociologists risk relegating colonization by European settler‐colonists, their descendants, and the state(s) they created, to neatly contained periods located in the past and ending either with the American Revolution or at some point during later periods of conquest. Settler colonialism is then mischaracterized as a past event rather than on ongoing structure (Wolfe, 2006) that shapes social and political life to this day (Bruyneel, 2020; Quizar, 2020; Rocha Beardall, 2022). The extension of citizenship rights to “conquered subject populations” is not the end of colonialism: there has not been an end to “migration followed by settlement and transformation of the landscape” and the subjugation of Indigenous people (Steinmetz, 2014, pp.…”