Genealogy

6 pages, 180 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Introduction: Studies of Critical Settler Family History

by Avril Bell

Genealogy 2022, 6(2), 49; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy6020049 - 30 May 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2029

The critical study of one’s own family history is a relatively new field that sits at the intersection of family genealogical research and scholarly research [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

14 pages, 261 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Not-Talking/Not-Knowing: Autoethnography and Settler Family Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand

by Carolyn Morris

Genealogy 2022, 6(1), 10; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy6010010 - 25 Jan 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2498

Abstract

Critical family history analyses have generated powerful insights into the history and ongoing workings of colonization by bringing to light forgotten family histories and reframing them as stories of colonialism. Such work unsettles the descendants of early colonizers by compelling them to acknowledge [...] Read more.

Critical family history analyses have generated powerful insights into the history and ongoing workings of colonization by bringing to light forgotten family histories and reframing them as stories of colonialism. Such work unsettles the descendants of early colonizers by compelling them to acknowledge the ways in which they continue to benefit from the colonizing actions of their ancestors. My family were colonizers, and some not-very-distant ancestors were part of the first wave of “settlers” who dispossessed Māori of their land in coastal Taranaki. Where my family differs from the families of many writers in the critical family history field is that they remain almost to this day on the land first taken by our direct ancestors. The question I address is how these settler farmers deal with the fact that the land that is now theirs is only recently so, and only became so through acts of violent dispossession, and that the descendants of the original possessors of that land continue to live on the Coast. I argue that one way that settler-colonizers deal with this uncomfortable history is to erase it. The erasure of this history is accomplished through the simple but effective strategy of not-talking about it, which leads to not-knowing about it. This practice, I suggest is critical for the subjective security of settlers, and it remains a crucial strategy in ongoing practices of quotidian colonization. My analysis emanates from a critically reflexive exploration of my memories, of what I know and what I do not know about the history of the farm I grew up on, and demonstrates that autoethnography as a methodology is particularly useful for interrogating and breaking the silences about colonization that contribute to its perpetuation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

18 pages, 228 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Composting Layers of Christchurch History

by Rebecca Ream

Genealogy 2021, 5(3), 74; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy5030074 - 16 Aug 2021

Viewed by 1516

Abstract

This is a poetic compost story. It is a situated tale of how I gradually began to shred my fantasy of being a self-contained responsible individual so I could become a more fruitful response-able Pākehā (for the purposes of this paper, a descendant [...] Read more.

This is a poetic compost story. It is a situated tale of how I gradually began to shred my fantasy of being a self-contained responsible individual so I could become a more fruitful response-able Pākehā (for the purposes of this paper, a descendant of colonial settlers or colonial settler) from Christchurch (the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand), Aotearoa (The Māori (the Indigenous people of New Zealand) name for New Zealand) New Zealand. Poetic compost storying is a way for me to turn over Donna Haraway’s composting ethico-onto-epistemology with critical family history and critical autoethnography methodologies. To this end, I, in this piece, trace how I foolishly believed that I could separate myself from my colonial family and history only to find that I was reinscribing Western fantasies of transcendence. I learnt by composting, rather than trying to escape my past, that I could become a more response-able Pākehā and family member. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

16 pages, 256 KiB

Open AccessArticle

War People: Punitive Raids, Democracy and the White Family in Australia

by Paula Jane Byrne

Genealogy 2020, 4(4), 101; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy4040101 - 14 Oct 2020

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2847

Abstract

Apart from descriptions of ideas of race, Australian historiography has not perceived acts of violence to Aboriginal people in their wider social and political context. Analysis of perpetrators has derived from family histories but this, so far, has been limited to studies of [...] Read more.

Apart from descriptions of ideas of race, Australian historiography has not perceived acts of violence to Aboriginal people in their wider social and political context. Analysis of perpetrators has derived from family histories but this, so far, has been limited to studies of emotion. One family’s and one area’s experience of frontier violence shows that it was thought about in terms of ‘volunteering’ and democratic participation. The new technology of the telegraph brought violence and its description closer and ‘brave’ and ‘gallant’ men sought to involve themselves in war. They also recognized political divisions among Aboriginal people and negotiated a complex realm of ‘friendly blacks’. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

12 pages, 260 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Tale of Two Stories: Unsettling a Settler Family’s History in Aotearoa New Zealand

by Richard Shaw

Genealogy 2021, 5(1), 26; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy5010026 - 23 Mar 2021

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 5146

Abstract

On the morning of the 5 November 1881, my great-grandfather stood alongside 1588 other military men, waiting to commence the invasion of Parihaka pā, home to the great pacifist leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi and their people. Having contributed to [...] Read more.

On the morning of the 5 November 1881, my great-grandfather stood alongside 1588 other military men, waiting to commence the invasion of Parihaka pā, home to the great pacifist leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi and their people. Having contributed to the military campaign against the pā, he returned some years later as part of the agricultural campaign to complete the alienation of Taranaki iwi from their land in Aotearoa New Zealand. None of this detail appears in any of the stories I was raised with. I grew up Pākehā (i.e., a descendant of people who came to Aotearoa from Europe as part of the process of colonisation) and so my stories tend to conform to orthodox settler narratives of ‘success, inevitability, and rights of belonging’. This article is an attempt to right that wrong. In it, I draw on insights from the critical family history literature to explain the nature, purposes and effects of the (non)narration of my great-grandfather’s participation in the military invasion of Parihaka in late 1881. On the basis of a more historically comprehensive and contextualised account of the acquisition of three family farms, I also explore how the control of land taken from others underpinned the creation of new settler subjectivities and created various forms of privilege that have flowed down through the generations. Family histories shape the ways in which we make sense of and locate ourselves in the places we live, and those of us whose roots reach back to the destructive practices of colonisation have a particular responsibility to ensure that such narratives do not conform to comfortable type. This article is an attempt to unsettle my settler family narrative. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

14 pages, 210 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Re-Turning to the Event of Colonisation in New South Wales

by Bronwyn Davies

Genealogy 2021, 5(1), 2; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy5010002 - 28 Dec 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1762

Abstract

In this paper, I re-turn to the event of colonisation in New South Wales. I draw on the journal of my ancestor, David Collins, who came to New South Wales on the First Fleet in 1788 to take up the position of the [...] Read more.

In this paper, I re-turn to the event of colonisation in New South Wales. I draw on the journal of my ancestor, David Collins, who came to New South Wales on the First Fleet in 1788 to take up the position of the colony’s Judge Advocate and Secretary to Governor Phillip. Drawing on Collins’ account of the first years of the colony, I contemplate the difficult interface between the Indigenous civilisation that existed in New South Wales prior to the event of colonisation, and the British newcomers’ civilisation as it was thought and practiced in those first years of the colony. That im/possible interface still reverberates in the present, implicating me as a 6th-generation newcomer. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

16 pages, 284 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Reading the Entrails: The Extractive Work of a Fence

by Sue Hall Pyke

Genealogy 2021, 5(4), 87; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy5040087 - 13 Oct 2021

Viewed by 2611

Abstract

This essay offers an evisceration of my troubled links to ‘cattle country’, seeking a truth-telling that responds to my mother’s romancing. I trace my family’s part in the cattle industry imposed upon Jiman Country and Wulli Wulli Country, drawing on stories populated with [...] Read more.

This essay offers an evisceration of my troubled links to ‘cattle country’, seeking a truth-telling that responds to my mother’s romancing. I trace my family’s part in the cattle industry imposed upon Jiman Country and Wulli Wulli Country, drawing on stories populated with the hooves of cattle, the flight of emus, and the stare of a goanna. I find myself in uncomfortable territory, complicit in the actions of my settler relatives in this region of Central Queensland, but to not examine this informal archive of possession feels like a lie. The stories that shape me begin with the tales of Mum’s foster-mother, my great-aunt, about the dreadful murderous harms done during the early settler occupation of Jiman Country. My family’s later deployment of this stolen land is a related act of war. I see a related mode of violence in tales of terrified cattle in nearby Wulli Wulli Country, Mum’s girl-self perched on the back of a weary horse, whip in her hand. In all this, there is me, telling tales, like settler writers before me, caught in the writing act, exposed as a fence, dealing in stolen goods, part of the ongoing posts of making up and wires of making do. Nonetheless, I take up my extractive blade, sharpened by a field trip to this region, and carve into my family history, with its legacy of generational violence to humans, cows, waterways, and earth, exposing three extractions: the near-genocidal murders of the Jiman and Wulli Wulli people; the ongoing slaughter of cattle; and finally, there, on the kill floor, entrails exposed, the stories of my mother, laid bare for this critical reading. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

10 pages, 255 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Settler Colonial Structures of Domestication: British Home Children in Canada

by Morgan Brie Johnson

Genealogy 2021, 5(3), 78; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy5030078 - 31 Aug 2021

Viewed by 2365

Abstract

There has been a surge of research on Home Children in the past several decades, as the phenomenon previously unknown to many came into the spotlight. However, much of the historical research has focused on either the psychological and physical impacts on the [...] Read more.

There has been a surge of research on Home Children in the past several decades, as the phenomenon previously unknown to many came into the spotlight. However, much of the historical research has focused on either the psychological and physical impacts on the children at the hands of their new “families” (there were many reports of child abuse and neglect) or the ways they were saved from their poverty in Britain by being sent to the colonies. This article will put this existing historical research into conversation with theories of settler colonialism, considering Home Children as a tool of domestication for the social reproduction of Canadian white settler society, which was paired with the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This analysis stems from and is intertwined with personal reflections on my own family history as a white settler woman descending from a Home Child to explore the gendered labour of social reproduction as a crucial pillar in creating and maintaining settler colonial Canada. Following Lorenzo Veracini’s argument that settler colonialism is a distinct structure that uses domestication as one of its key tenets and relies on its “regenerative capacity”, this paper will explore how British Home Children were a key component of settler colonialism in Canada and how this history has manifested in the current gendered, racialized, and classed politics of “settling”. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

16 pages, 282 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Revisiting Distant Relations

by Victoria Freeman

Genealogy 2021, 5(4), 86; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy5040086 - 03 Oct 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2613

Abstract

In 2000, I published Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America, a non-fiction exploration of my own family’s involvement in North American colonialism from the 1600s to the present. This personal essay reflects on the context, genesis, process, and consequences of [...] Read more.

In 2000, I published Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America, a non-fiction exploration of my own family’s involvement in North American colonialism from the 1600s to the present. This personal essay reflects on the context, genesis, process, and consequences of writing this book during a decade of intense ferment in Indigenous–settler relations in Canada amid the revelations of horrific abuse at residential schools and the discovery that my highly respected grandfather had been involved with one. Considering the book from the perspective of 2021, I consider the strengths and limitations of this kind of critical family history and the degree to which public discourses and academic discussion of Canada’s history and settler complicity in colonialism have changed since the book was published. Arguing that critical reflection on family history is still an essential part of unlearning colonial attitudes and recognizing the systemic and structural ways that colonial disparities and processes are embedded in settler societies, I share a critical family history assignment that has been an essential and transformative pedagogical element in my university teaching for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

23 pages, 371 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

From the “Beginning”: Anglo-American Settler Colonialism in New England

by Ashley (Woody) Doane

Genealogy 2021, 5(4), 97; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy5040097 - 08 Nov 2021

Viewed by 4457

Abstract

In this article, I use the lens of critical family history—and the history of the Doane family—to undertake an analysis of Anglo-American settler colonialism in the New England region of the United States. My standpoint in writing this narrative is as a twelfth-generation [...] Read more.

In this article, I use the lens of critical family history—and the history of the Doane family—to undertake an analysis of Anglo-American settler colonialism in the New England region of the United States. My standpoint in writing this narrative is as a twelfth-generation descendant of Deacon John Doane, who arrived in Plymouth Colony circa 1630 and whose family history is intertwined with issues of settler colonial conquest and dispossession, enslavement, erasure, and the creation of myths of origin and possession. This analysis is also grounded in the larger contexts of the history of New England and the history of the United States. I conclude with a reflection upon the implications of settler colonial myths and historical erasure for current racial politics in the United States. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

23 pages, 318 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Heather’s Homestead/Marotahei: The Invasion of the Waikato and Ways of Knowing Our Past in Aotearoa New Zealand

by Hugh Campbell and William Kainana Cuthers

Genealogy 2021, 5(4), 101; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/genealogy5040101 - 28 Nov 2021

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3536

Abstract

The British invasion of the Māori region of the Waikato in 1863 was one of the most pivotal moments in the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has been the subject of multiple authoritative histories and sits at the centre of historical discussions [...] Read more.

The British invasion of the Māori region of the Waikato in 1863 was one of the most pivotal moments in the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has been the subject of multiple authoritative histories and sits at the centre of historical discussions of sovereignty, colonial politics and the dire consequences of colonisation. This article approaches this complex historical moment through the personal histories of a Māori/Pākehā homestead located at the political and geographic epicentre of the invasion. This mixed whanau/family provides the opportunity to explore a more kinship-based ontology of the invisible lines of influence that influenced particular actions before and during the invasion. It does so by mobilising two genealogical approaches, one by author Hugh Campbell which explores the British/Pākehā individuals involved in this family and uses formal documentation and wider historical writing to explain key dynamics—but also to expose a particular limitation of reliance on Western ontologies and formal documentation alone to explain histories of colonisation. In parallel to this approach, the other author—William Kainana Cuthers—uses both formal/Western and a Māori/Pasifika relational ontology of enquiry, and in doing so, allows both authors to open up a set of key insights into this pivotal moment in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand and into the micro-dynamics of colonisation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Settler Family History)

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

Critical Settler Family History

Share This Special Issue

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Keywords

Published Papers (11 papers)

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI