Settler Decolonization in Country/on Land: Rehearsing Collaboration

Prof. Dr. Anja Schwarz & Prof. Dr. Nicole Waller (Universität Potsdam)

The project engages with the theoretical and practical work of decolonization carried out in the settler colonies of Australia and Turtle Island/North America. We focus on the ways in which decolonization as an Indigenous-led effort can open up spaces for collaboration with non-Indigenous actors. Our project will (1) study the ways in which such collaborations centre Country or L/land as the primary site of Indigenous-settler interaction, tracing how land relations assemble potential collaborators. We ask (2) how Indigenous-led work on decolonization challenges common notions of ‘collaboration’, and (3) articulate an understanding of anticolonial and decolonial work that can and must be undertaken in Germany in relation to the two contexts of Australia and Turtle Island. We (4) develop ‘rehearsing’ collaboration as a potentially transformative methodology of relating to Indigenous work from the positionality of non-Indigenous researchers and collaborators situated outside the settler colony.

The project will begin on January 1, 2025. Anja and Nicole have been in regular communication with Prof. Renae Watchman and Prof. Lynette Russell to prepare for our joint supervision of two PhD projects, jointly organized workshops on Turtle Island, in Australia, and Germany, and the Mercator visiting professorships of Renae Watchman and Lynette Russell in Berlin/Potsdam.

In the past year, we have been in conversation about our project with a number of colleagues in Indigenous studies. One of the results of this interaction is that we are currently putting together an advisory board for the project.

In August 2022, Anja and Nicole participated in the one-week workshop “Let’s Become Story Ready: Decolonizing and Indigenizing European and Migration Studies through Indigenous Storywork” at UBC in Canada. Based on Jo-ann Archibald’s (Sto:lo Nation) principles of Indigenous storywork, the workshop brought together Indigenous and settler participants and provided an important foundation for further collaborations. We also partook in the Indigenous-led decolonization training “Cultural Protocols, Empathy and Safety” conducted by Nahanee Creative.

Anja and Nicole have started working on one aspect of our joint research: the examination of representations of German settlers in novels written by Indigenous authors and films made by Indigenous directors in order to analyze the role ascribed to a settler population that is often ‘under the radar’ in histories and literary representations of settler colonialism on Turtle Island and in Australia. We hope that this project part will help us to better understand what it can mean to think about and support decolonization on Turtle Island and in Australia from Germany. Germans have heavily participated in settler colonialism despite the fact that the German state has not acted as an official colonizer on Turtle Island or in Australia. A large number of German immigrants to Turtle Island and Australia have profited from dispossessed Indigenous Land that was made available to them by the settler colonial nation states. Their migration contributed to a German colonial imaginary that envisaged Germans as the ‘better colonizers’ (Schwarz 2018b) and projected ‘Indianthusiasms’ (Lutz, Strelczyk and Watchman) and notions of noble Aboriginality onto Indigenous peoples and their Land/Country. Our project will address these histories as points of entanglement that necessarily shape our own approach to the collaborative potential of settler decolonization in both contexts. We also hope to create more awareness for these complicities in German debates about decolonization, which often remain silent about them.