Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the portrayal of Nenets indigenous selves as either colonized or as ambiguously part of the Soviet Union in socialist realist literature. It shows the representations relation to the prevailing memory ideologies and colonialism.

Paper long abstract:

Russian historiography has sometimes highlighted the coloniality of its expansion and sometimes downplayed it, claiming the vastness of the empire to be a historical of faith. The fluctuating nature of the historical interpretations has led to uncertainties or ambiguities in the portrayal of indigenous selves in relation to the state. The representations follow typical Russian trajectories on the one hand, but are highly special in comparison to other indigenous peoples of the world. This poses a methodological challenge to post-colonial or settler colonial studies.

This paper addresses the colonial situation in Russia focusing on the ways in which Nenets selves are represented in Soviet literature. Nenets is an indigenous community living in the Arctic Russia and Western Siberia. I propose that literature was, in addition to staged performances in festivals, one of the main venues to publicly portray indigeneity and hence relation to the state in Soviet Union. Despite the obvious ideological limitations in writing, the writers did treat intricate historical and contemporary issues in their works. Moreover, reading early Soviet novels together with late Soviet ones, one can note changes in the memory ideologies (Savolainen 2019) in which the novels are based. These differences result in the uncertainties in narrating indigenous selves as citizens of Soviet Union. The uncertainties appear as silencing, but more often as denial of imperialism, double voicedness, hybridities and tensions in expression. These tendencies are part of the colonial situation.

Paper short abstract:

In the early 20th century, Baltic German landowners aquired new type of working force: Russian German peasants. The presentation discusses the reasons why the settlers where brought to the Baltics, the discourses that lead to expanding colonial ambitions, and the subjectivities of the settlers.

Paper long abstract:

According to news media and propaganda publications from the late 19th century onwards, Old Livonia (the territories of today's Estonia and Latvia) was the oldest colony of Germany. Since the 13th century, the territory had been governed by the German landowners: typically for the one oft he forms of settler colonialism, the privileged minority owned the estates and was dependent on local population to cultivate the land. There were no German peasants. In the end of the 19th century, but especially after the revolution of 1905, German landowners started to colonize the land with German peasants due to nationalist, but also economical reasons. In 1939, most of the Baltic Germans left Estonia and Latvia.

I claim that the spread of nationalism created uncertanties in the historically stable Baltic German settler community, leading to the idea of bringing new type inhabitants, namely Russian German settlers to the countries. The issues of this process of „import of agricultural workers“ were discussed in media and among the Baltic German associations. The archival and printed sources show how the settlers were discussed by others: how did the subjectivities of Baltic German elites change throughout the process of bringing new settlers to the Baltics? The lack of sources from the settler perspective makes it harder to understand the motivations and decisions of the newly arrived farmers, but I reflect upon their agency in finding a position for themselves.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a recently initiated study on Swedish migration to northeastern Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th century. By tracing settlers' narrations in archival material the study address experiences of colonial settlement and encounters between settlers and Indigenous Peoples.

Paper long abstract:

The history of 19th and 20th century migration from Europe to the Americas have been studied from many angles and within many disciplines. However, even if Indigenous Peoples and the European migrants who settled on their land co-existed in the same space at the same time, the history of migration has rarely touched upon the relations between these two groups. This paper will discuss a recently initiated ethnographic case-study of Swedish migration to northeastern Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th century. During the latter half of the 19th century migrants from diverse working-class backgrounds first arrived from Sweden to southern Brazil. Some stayed on while others eventually settled in Misiones, Argentina. Most were incorporated into the regional peasant class becoming small-scale farmers, settling on land partially inhabited by Indigenous Peoples. This case study will look at various forms of archival material, such as audio recordings, written memories and letters of first-generation settlers in Misiones in search of narrations about encounters between Swedish settler colonists and Indigenous Peoples. The main purpose of the over-arching project is to investigate how migration, settlement and dispossession became entangled in everyday life of settler societies. The project seeks to answer questions related to three analytical strands: the subjective experience of settlement, the possession and dispossession structures of settlement, and the cultural, social and spatial borders of settlement.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I discuss the role of Swedish migrants in the expansion of settler colonialism in the Argentine and Bolivian Chaco in the early 19th century. I draw attention to their overlapping use of categories such as travelers, migrants and settlers discussing their theoretical implications.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I discuss how social interactions between Swedes and Indigenous Peoples played out and were viewed as of the arrival of Swedish migrants to Latin America in the early 20th century. I investigate settler perspectives on these interactions by analyzing accounts and written memories from first generation settlers. This is done by applying ethnological and ethnographic methods in the analysis of archival and published sources. I focus specifically on the understudied case of Swedish migrants in the border area between Argentina and Bolivia in the early 20th century before the outbreak of the Chaco war between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932-1935). I have noticed that the category of “traveler” has historically invisibilized these practices of migration and settlement and downplayed their role in the expansion of settler colonialism in the Argentine context. My research sheds light on this particular strand of mobility from Sweden to Latin America discussing it in terms of the subjective experiences of travel and settlement as well as the cultural, social and spatial borders of settlement. This includes investigating how travel, migration and settlement was narrated and remembered by first generation Swedish settlers as well as finding out with whom the settlers interacted and which social categories were deployed in order to make sense of their new environment. On the other hand, this paper seeks to contribute theoretically to the discussion on what implications the overlapping of categories such as “travelers”, “migrants” and “settlers” have when analyzing entanglements between migration, settlement and dispossession.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes how a public apology to British child migrants sent to settler colonies attempts to reconcile with and re-voice a previously silenced history. Concurrently, the apology’s limited and individualized focus reflects broader patterns of colonial forgetfulness and selective silencing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is concerned with how postcolonial societies imagine, address and attempt to reconcile with their precarious pasts – histories “constitutive and foundational in their making, but (…) problematic by today’s moral standards” (Gapud 2020, 332) – through public apology. The case I examine is a postwar migration project, which selected and permanently re-located white British children to colonial Southern Rhodesia as a policy of child welfare and imperial migration. The scheme proclaimed to offer the children “better lives” – ones with opportunities for social advancement –, while it simultaneously pursued to secure and strengthen the colony’s racially segregated social order. Whereas episodes perceived national shame might have conventionally been silenced and un-commemorated, the “age of apology” has brought forth the atoning for past wrongs as a major political phenomenon. Consequently, in 2010 the UK government gave an apology to former child migrants sent to its colonies and dominions. The paper focuses on the narrative means by which the child migrant apology proposes to re-voice a previously silenced history. It argues that by emphasizing individual suffering and the singularity of wrongdoing and neglect – rather than addressing wider political and racialized power structures – the apology reflects and reproduces broader patterns of settler colonial forgetfulness and selective silences. It further suggests that while the apology aims to recognize and reconcile with the victims of state policies, it partially ends up de-contextualizing and a-historicizing their experience, thus re-silencing as it re-voices.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the changing subjectivities of two Croatian late 19th/early 20th century travellers and explorers and their writings about and negotiations of encounters with indigenous and settler communities within colonial projects in Africa and South America. It draws critical engagement with South Slav colonial history and discourse.

Paper long abstract:

Even though the Habsburg Monarchy did not acquire overseas colonial territories, recent scholarship has revisited its colonial involvements, projects and policies (cf. Sauer 2012). While Vienna by the late 19th and early 20th century pursued a policy of internal colonisation, informal empire-building, and multilateralism, its subjects pursued projects of settler colonialism, emigrated en masse, and/or participated as agents in colonial projects of other European states.

The paper looks at the contemporary discourse and narratives around and by the brothers Mirko Seljan and Stjepan Seljan, two fin-de-siecle Croatian travellers, idealized as world-renown explorers of Africa and South America and pioneers of Croatian non-European ethnography in recent, both scholarly and popular sanitized representations. After their employment in the Ethiopian Empire as provincial governors (1898-1902), the brothers worked as state-contracted land-prospectors and surveyors in Brazil, Peru and Chile (1903-1913), before finally settling in Brazil. The brothers reported and published their tales of entrepreneurial (non-)conquest in newspapers, books and manuscripts, documenting their subjectivities, changing in conjunction with both structural factors and biographic events. By focusing on their own and others’s contemporary writings (and selected later representations of their legacy), the paper attempts to trace the complexities of (the representations of) their encounters with indigenous and settler communities, and colonial projects in Africa and South America in general. The paper thus aims to highlight the epistemic uncertainties and ambiguities arising in/between the archival space and academic discourse when discussing the colonial history of South Slavs.

Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects on limits encountered during fieldwork. Studying attempts at ‘decolonization’ or ‘reconciliation’ in Canadian settler colonial society was in some instances impossible: research access was denied to the German anthropologist, arguing that those issues belonged to North America

Paper long abstract:

Canada’s settler colonial violence made headlines in 2021, when the remains of more than 1,500 bodies were found on premises of “residential schools”. The discoveries were a shock for the Canadian public, despite the fact that 2008 to 2015, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had already conducted investigations into the practices and occurrences at these boarding schools. The TRC had published its findings in an extensive report and had furthermore concluded that the intentional alienation of Indigenous children constituted cultural genocide. Consequently, Canada started its official journey towards reconciliation in 2015. The question of genocide recognition and what it implies – morally, legally, in terms of reparations and current political relations between successors of perpetrators and of victims – includes various strands of state as well as non-state actors with differential claims and conflicting interests. And obviously, the narratives of the past also represent contested collective identities. As a social anthropologist with an interest in the impact of collective identification, memory politics and the practices that are employed with an intention to deal with such a violent past I started studying the complex system of power distribution and domination in Canadian settler colonialism. In 2022 I spent several weeks doing fieldwork in Canada. I was particularly interested in learning from different perspectives what it meant to unravel sociopolitical structures and hierarchies built upon colonization. In some instances research access was denied arguing that those processes belonged to the North American contintent. I will reflect on this limitation methodologically.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses some of the possibilities and limitations of how the concept of settler colonialism can be used for critical studies of colonial relations in the Nordics in a contemporary Swedish context with gender studies methods and theories.

Paper long abstract:

The colonization of Saepmie (Sami land) has great significance for relationships and identities today, at the same time, it has long been difficult to even talk about the colonization of Saepmie in Sweden. Instead of coming to terms with its colonial history and present, the image of one of the world's most egalitarian countries is promoted. This idealized image has been problematized as it hides the stories about Sweden that are not as positive (see e.g. Carlsson 2020). However, several different initiatives are also taking place around society that point to a change in the discourse about Sweden. An example is the mapping and examination of the policy carried out towards the Sami and its consequences for the Sami people which was started by the appointment of a truth commission in 2021 (Dir 2021/103). There is an increased need for critical concepts that are adapted to this changing context where colonialism is discussed more openly also in Swedish majority society. Here, concepts such as settler colonialism can help us put into words the mechanisms that act to stabilize colonial structures, not least through gender relations (Arvin, Tuck & Morrill 2013). This paper discusses some of the possibilities and limitations of how the concept of settler colonialism can be used for critical studies of colonial relations in the Nordics, as well as ethnographically explore expressions of settler colonialism in a contemporary Swedish context, something that is currently under-researched, not least with gender studies methods and theories.