On hope and resignation: conflicting visions of settler colonial studies and its future as a field

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the question: does (or should) settler colonial studies have a future as a unified or distinct ‘field'? It does so via a consideration of two vigorous, but largely disconnected, areas of uptake and critique: American Studies and Indigenous Studies in North America; and within Australian historical scholarship. I argue that connecting these debates reveals the great diversity of a field that is often represented as decidedly singular – and typically equated with the individual scholarship of Patrick Wolfe. This characterisation elides the wealth of Indigenous studies scholarship that has constituted the field. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's contention that settler colonial studies must simultaneously engage Indigenous studies to produce meaningful scholarship is thus a central focus. I particularly explore implications for my own scholarly areas of Indigenous and colonial history and emerging commentary advocating a return to history as a way out of impasses that currently confront the field. Given the competing visions of what settler colonial studies is or should be, ultimately I argue that the field may either disintegrate in the pursuit of singularity, or flourish in the embrace of its abundance and in the recognition of its limits and ethical obligations.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonial studies
• Native American studies
• Indigenous studies
• colonial history
• Indigenous history

Acknowledgements

This paper emerges from my broad engagement with setter colonial studies since the early 2000s – firstly via Patrick Wolfe's work during my PhD studies at the University of Melbourne, where he was then working, and later as a founding co-editor and then editorial board member of the Settler Colonial Studies journal from 2010 until 2017 (when I, along with the entire editorial board, resigned due to concerns about the journal's direction). My perspective was also significantly shaped during my postdoctoral fellowship at the Monash Indigenous Centre from 2009 to 2014. The paper's more specific origins were in a panel I convened on ‘The State of the Field of Settler Colonial Studies: Historical Perspectives’ at the Centre for Colonial and Settler Studies’ conference on ‘Colonial Formations’ at the University of Wollongong (UOW) in 2016. I acknowledge funding from the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at UOW both for the conference and the compilation of this paper. It was further developed in a keynote, ‘Settler Colonialism and its Discontents: Historical Perspectives’, at the Cultures of Settler Colonialism conference, University of Western Australia, February 2017. Thanks to Tony Hughes-d’Aeth and Jane Lydon for sponsoring this talk, and for the conversation during the event, particularly also with Shino Konishi, Ann Curthoys and Aileen Walsh. My deepest thanks to Camille Nurka for her outstanding editing assistance and to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui for the many conversations that shaped this piece. Many thanks also to Ben Silverstein and Michael Griffiths for their engaged reading of earlier versions of this article and to the anonymous referees for their very helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jean M O’Brien, ‘Tracing Settler Colonialism's Eliminatory Logic in Traces of History’, American Quarterly 69(2), 2017, p 249.

2 Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, London & New York: Verso Books, 2016, p 272.

3 J Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘“A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity’, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5(1), 2016. She is building here on an observation by Alyosha Goldstein in a paper presented at the 2014 American Studies Association conference.

4 As Tracey Banivanua Mar succinctly put it, ‘His work could slide over detail in the quest for overarching structures and logics.’ She nevertheless continued ‘but the visceral reality, the violence and lived experiences of the processes he studied were never far from his analysis’: ‘Talking Race: Patrick Wolfe's Scholarly Activism’, Aboriginal History 40, 2016, p 223.

5 Rowse describes his ‘formal training’ as being in Government, Sociology and Anthropology. Just how he has come to be positioned as the authoritative voice on Australian Indigenous history is thus something of a mystery. Available at: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/professor_tim_rowse.

6 Australian Historical Association 32nd Annual Conference Handbook, 2013, p 19.

7 This is not to say that this was the first occasion on which Rowse had critiqued Patrick Wolfe's work.

8 Tim Rowse, ‘Rethinking Indigenous histories’, paper presented at the Australian Historical Association Conference, University of Wollongong, 11 July 2013, recording. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/rethinking-indigenous-histories/4823432. All further quotes from Rowse's address are from this source.

9 Scholars named were (in the order they were mentioned): Tracey Banivanua Mar, Penelope Edmonds, Sarah Maddison, Morgan Brigg, Dirk Moses, Lorenzo Veracini and Ed Cavanagh.

10 In the published version of this address Rowse stated he was ‘sympathetic to Wolfe's structuralism’: ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies 45(3), 2014, p 301. In a later interview he specified that he approved of comparative, structural and interdisciplinary approaches. Elaborating on the latter, he nominated anthropology (not Indigenous studies) as ‘The discipline that is most obviously relevant to Indigenous history’: Interview with Tim Rowse, Aboriginal History 42, 2018, p 137.

11 This is my personal recollection of the event, confirmed in part by the lecture recording cited above.

12 It is of course possible that they were invited to contribute but declined.

13 Christina Twomey and Catharine Coleborne, ‘Editorial: Australia: Present and Past Histories’, Australian Historical Studies 45(3), 2014, p 295.

14 Rowse, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, p 300, 310.

15 Neither Rowse himself, nor those who have supported his critique, cite any of this much earlier commentary.

16 Francesca Merlan, ‘Reply to Patrick Wolfe’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41(2), 1997, p 16, 18.

17 Elizabeth Povinelli, ‘Reading Ruptures, Ruptured Readings: Mabo and the Cultural Politics of Activism’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41(2), 1997, p 22. Povinelli agreed that the Mabo decision represented continuity not rupture and noted that ‘it is imperative that we examine the state's “recognition” of Aboriginal land title as a double-gesture’ (p 20).

18 Jeffrey Sissons, ‘Elimination or Exclusion? Strategic Discontinuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41(2), 1997, pp 29–30.

19 Sissons, ‘Elimination or Exclusion?’, pp 32–33.

20 The only other supporting example cited (which also featured in his AHA address) is a 2012 issue of Arena Journal, on the theme of ‘Stolen Land, Broken Culture’. Certainly two (of fourteen) essays in this issue, by Veracini and Cavanagh, drew strongly drew on Wolfe's work, in addition to the piece by Wolfe himself. However, several contributors do not reference Wolfe's work at all, and others only in passing, in developing their account of settler colonialism. Only five of the articles are historical. One is quite critical of Wolfe's work: Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism’, Arena Journal, no. 37/38, 2012, pp 40–62. Despite their critique, Wolfe promoted and supported Macoun and Strakosch's work: Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, ‘Patrick Wolfe and the Settler-colonial Intervention’, Arena Magazine 148, 2017, p 37.

21 Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, ‘Introduction: Making Space in Settler Colonies’, in their edited collection, Making Settler Colonial Space, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p 19.

22 See, for example, Jay T Johnson, ‘Indigeneity's Challenges to the Settler State: Decentring the “Imperial Binary”’, in Banivanua Mar and Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space, pp 273–294. Ultimately, Rowse cites only two historians whose work might be seen as conforming to his argument, Veracini and Cavanagh.

23 Russell's work is too extensive to cite in full but see for example Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870, SUNY Press, 2012; ‘“Dirty domestics and worse cooks”: Aboriginal Women's Agency and Domestic Frontiers, Southern Australia, 1800–1850’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 28(1/2), 2007, pp 18–46; and her edited collection Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

24 See, for example, Julie Evans, Edward Eyre: Race and Colonial Governance, Otago: University of Otago Press, 2005; Jennifer Balint, Julie Evans and Nesam McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm: A New Conceptual Approach’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 89(2), 2014, 194–216; Julie Evans and Giordano Nanni, ‘Re-imagining Settler Sovereignty: The Call to Law at the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve, Victoria 1881 (and Beyond), in Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism, Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw (eds), London: Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2015, pp 24–44.

25 Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007; Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

26 Ben Silverstein, Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia's North, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, p 6; Ben Silverstein, ‘Indirect Rule in Australia: A Case Study in Settler Colonial Difference’, in Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (eds), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp 90–105; Ben Silverstein, ‘“Possibly they did not know themselves”: The Ambivalent Government of Sex and Work in the Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance 1918’, History Australia 14(3), 2017, pp 344–360.

27 Crystal McKinnon, ‘Expressing Indigenous Sovereignty: The Production of Embodied Texts in Social Protest and the Arts’, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 2019, pp 2, 9–10. See also Crystal McKinnon, ‘Indigenous Music as a Space of Resistance’, in Banivanua Mar and Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space, pp 255–272.

28 It is perhaps worth noting here that Wolfe never gained a permanent appointment in the Australian academy, although this is not to diminish the power of his position as a white male academic in other respects.

29 Lisa Ford, ‘Locating Indigenous Self-determination in the Margins of Settler Sovereignty: An Introduction’, in Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (eds), Milton Park: Routledge, 2013, p 1.

30 Ford, ‘Locating Indigenous Self-determination’, p 2, 11.

31 Interview with Tim Rowse, p 135.

32 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8(4), 2006, pp 387–409 (citation figures as at 27 November 2019). His first monograph, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London and New York: Cassell, 1999, has over 1000 citations. His 2006 article is also listed at number 1 in Google Scholars’ ‘Classic Papers’ in ‘Ethnic and Cultural Studies’ from 2006. Available at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=list_classic_articles&hl=en&by=2006&vq=hum_ethnicculturalstudies.

33 The disconnection between these debates perhaps reflects in part the broader gulf between the fields of colonial history and Indigenous studies. For further discussion see Jane Carey, ‘Indigenising Transnationalism? Challenges for New Imperial and Cosmopolitan Histories’, in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (eds), New York: Routledge, 2014, and Jane Carey and Frances Steel, ‘On the Critical Importance of Colonial Formations’, History Australia 15(3), 2018, pp 399–412.

34 By contrast, at the American Historical Association conferences from 2015 to 2019, there have only been ∼3 panels, and a handful of individual papers explicitly focussed on settler colonial studies. Available at: https://www.historians.org/annual-meeting/past-meetings.

35 Frederick E Hoxie, ‘Retrieving the Red Continent: Settler Colonialism and the History of American Indians in the US’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(6), 2008, pp 1153–1154, 1159.

36 Nancy Shoemaker, ‘A Typology of Colonialism’, Perspectives on History, October 2015, Available at: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2015/a-typology-of-colonialism. Shoemaker's definition of settler colonialism is wonderfully pithy: ‘Large numbers of settlers claim land and become the majority. Employing a “logic of elimination,” as Patrick Wolfe put it in the American Historical Review, they attempt to engineer the disappearance of the original inhabitants everywhere except in nostalgia’.

37 Cited in Kauanui, ‘“A Structure, Not an Event”’. In his ASA presidential address the following year, Warrior noted the 2016 conference included 41 papers in Indigenous studies and 20 papers in Native American studies, compared with 35 focused on settler colonialism: Robert Warrior, ‘Home/Not Home: Centering American Studies Where We Are’, American Quarterly 69(2), 2017, p 203. The program index for the 2015 ASA conference (https://asa.press.jhu.edu/program15/subjects.html) listed 26 sessions under Indigenous Studies and 15 under Native American Studies (with some overlap between these two listings). Of these 37 sessions, 10 referenced settler colonialism although only three seemed exclusively on this topic. There was no separate listing for settler colonial studies in the program index but a further two sessions on settler colonialism are listed under other topics.

38 Corey Snelgrove, Rita Kaur Dhamoon and Jeff Corntassel, ‘Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigenous Nations’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3(2), 2014, p 9. See also the special issue ‘On Colonial Unknowing’, Theory & Event 19(4), 2016.

39 Kauanui, ‘“A Structure, Not an Event”’.

40 Panel abstract, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Question of Indigenous Studies: A Position Paper and Three Responses’, ASA conference 2015. Available at: https://asa.press.jhu.edu/program15/thursday.html. The three respondents were Kauanui, Glen Coulthard and Vincente Diaz.

41 J Kēhaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism Then and Now. A Conversation between’, Politica & Società 1(2), 2012, p 257.

42 Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, Alyosha Goldstein, ‘Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing’, Theory & Event 19(4), 2016, np.

43 Jafri Beenash, ‘Ongoing Colonial Violence in Settler States,’ Lateral 6(1), 2017.

44 Some of these are discussed in the introduction to this special issue. Kauanui also points to, among others, US-based Palestinian academic and civil servant Fayez Sayegh who first used the concept in his 1965 work, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, and French Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson's 1973 book Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?: ‘“A Structure, Not an Event”, endnote 7.

45 Kauanui, ‘“A Structure, Not an Event”’; Dean Itsuji Saranillio, ‘Haunani-Kay Trask and Settler Colonial and Relational Critique: Alternatives to Binary Analyses of Power’, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 4(2), 2018, pp 36–44.

46 Haunani-Kay Trask, ‘Settlers of Color and “Immigrant” Hegemony: “Locals” in Hawai‘i’, Amerasia Journal 26(2), 2000, pp 1–24. Reprinted in Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y Okamura (eds), Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008, pp 45–65.

47 Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999 [1993], p 25.

48 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, ‘The Obscenity of Settler Colonialism’, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5(1), 2019, p 32, 35.

49 Jean M O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p xv. See also Jean M O’Brien, ‘“Vanishing” Indians in Nineteenth-Century New England: Local Historians’ Erasure of Still-Present Indian People’, in New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures. Histories, and Representations, University of Nebraska Press, 2006, pp 414–432.

50 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, p xxii.

51 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, pp xv, 204.

52 Jean M O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p 215.

53 O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, p 11.

54 Audra Simpson and Jessica Cattelino, ‘Sovereignty, Settler Colonialism, Territoriality and Resistance’, a lecture delivered at the Centre for the Humanities at Tufts University, 4 April 2017. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10427/012607.

55 Simpson, ‘Sovereignty, Settler Colonialism’.

56 Mishuana Goeman, ‘In Memoriam: Patrick Wolfe’, Amerasia Journal 42(1), 2016, p 141.

57 Byrd, ‘Still Waiting for the “Post” to Arrive’, p 79.

58 Shaista Patel, Ghaida Moussa and Nishant Upadhyay, ‘Complicities, Connections, and Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism’, Feral Feminisms 4, 2015, p 8.

59 Macoun and Strakosch, ‘The Ethical Demands’, p 426. They go on to suggest that:

it is by using the strengths of SCT that we can challenge its limitations; the theory itself places ethical demands on us as settlers, including the demand that we actively refuse its potential to re-empower our own academic voices and to marginalize Indigenous resistance. (p 426)

60 Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, ‘Acts and Omissions: Framing Settler Colonialism in Palestine Studies’, Jadaliyya, 14 January 2016. Available at: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/23569/acts-and-omissions_framing-settler-colonialism-in-. The ASA panel they were discussing included Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Alyosha Goldstein and Shona L. Jackson, with Jodi Byrd as chair.

61 Patel, Mouss and Upadhyay, ‘Complicities, Connections, and Struggles’, p 8.

62 Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, ‘Decolonizing Antiracism’, Social Justice 32(4), 2005, p 134.

63 Candace Fujikane, ‘Introduction: Asian Settler Colonialism in the U.S. Colony of Hawai‘i’, in Asian Settler Colonialism, p 4.

64 Trask, ‘Settlers of Color’, pp 2, 4.

65 In Fujikane and Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism, p vii.

66 Fujikane, ‘Introduction’, p 2.

67 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, ‘Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference’, Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4), 2013, pp 281–282.

68 Danika Medak-Saltzman, ‘Empire's Haunted Logics: Comparative Colonialisms and the Challenges of Incorporating Indigeneity’, Critical Ethnic Studies 1(2), 2015, pp 11, 29.

69 Soma Chatterjee, ‘Immigration, Anti-racism, and Indigenous Self-determination: Towards a Comprehensive Analysis of the Contemporary Settler Colonial’, Social Identities 25(1), 2019, p 644.

70 Justin Leroy, ‘Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism’, Theory & Event 19(4), 2016, np. This also intersects with Afropessimism which argues antiblackness is fundamental to (American) settler colonialism and any (Indigenous) claim that land or sovereignty is fundamental is a further move against Blackness. For an overview and response, see J Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In) Capacity’, American Quarterly 69(2), 2017, pp 257–265. For some leading exponents see, Frank B Wilderson. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010; Jared Sexton, ‘People of Color-Blindness’, Social Text 28(2), 2010, pp 31–56.

71 King, ‘New World Grammars’.

72 C Sturm, ‘Race, Sovereignty, and Civil Rights: Understanding the Cherokee Freedmen Controversy’, Cultural Anthropology 29(3), 2014, p 594.

73 Leroy, ‘Black History in Occupied Territory’.

74 Suzanna Reiss, ‘The breakdown’ in ‘Tracing the Settler's Tools: A Forum on Patrick Wolfe's Life and Legacy’, American Quarterly 69(2), 2017, p 244. The published forum emerged from a panel at the 2016 ASA conference.

75 O’Brien, ‘Tracing Settler Colonialism's Eliminatory Logic’, pp 249–251.

76 O’Brien, ‘Tracing Settler Colonialism's Eliminatory Logic’, pp 252–253. O’Brien outright rejects Wolfe's interpretation of the 1934 Indian Reorganisation Act as a ‘fundamental misreading’ (p 253).

77 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction’, Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4), 2013, p 257.

78 Simpson, ‘Sovereignty, Settler Colonialism, Territoriality and Resistance’.

79 Renisa Mawani, ‘Law, Settler Colonialism, and “the Forgotten Space” of Maritime Worlds’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 12, 2016, p 113.

80 Jodi Byrd, ‘Follow the Typical Signs: Settler Sovereignty and its Discontents’, Settler Colonial Studies 4(2), 2014, p 153.

81 Vimalassery, Hu Pegues and Goldstein, ‘Introduction’.

82 Carey and Steel, ‘Colonial Formations’, p 406.

83 Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Author's Response: Transcendent Mobilities’, in ‘Review Forum: Decolonisation and the Pacific’, Journal of Pacific History 51(4), 2016, p 461.

84 Silverstein, Governing Natives, 7.

85 Kauanui and Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism Then and Now’, p 257.

86 Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism’, p 274.

87 Wolfe, ‘Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuation in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis, no. 36, 1994, p 100.

88 For other discussions of these points, see Suzanna Reiss, ‘The Breakdown’, pp 243–246.

89 Wolfe, ‘Nation and MiscegeNation’, p 130.

90 Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism’, p 274.

91 Wolfe, Traces of History, p 271.

92 Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism’, p 274.

93 Kauanui, ‘“A structure, not an event”’.

94 O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, p 11.

95 For further discussion, see Penelope Edmonds and Jane Carey, ‘Australian Settler Colonialism over the Long Nineteenth Century’, in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini (eds), London: Routledge, 2016, p 384.

96 In addition to works already cited, see, for example, Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009; Katherine Ellinghaus, Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. My own work has drawn on Wolfe alongside numerous other analytics: Jane Carey, '“Wanted! A Real White Australia”: The Women's Movement, Whiteness, and the Settler Colonial Project’, in Studies in Settler Colonialism Politics, pp 122–139; ‘“Women's Objective – A Perfect Race”: Whiteness, Eugenics, and the Articulation of Race’, in Re-orienting Whiteness, Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (eds), New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp 183–198.

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Jane Carey

Jane Carey is a senior lecturer in history and Co-Director of the Centre for Colonial and Settler Studies at the University of Wollongong. Her work spans settler colonial, women's and Indigenous histories. She is the editor of several collections including Re-Orienting Whiteness (Palgrave, 2009), Creating White Australia (Sydney University Press, 2009), and (with Jane Lydon) Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (Routledge, 2014). She is currently completing a monograph on the history of Australian women and science and is engaged in ongoing research examining Indigenous engagements with western science.