Katherine Ellinghaus

Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field

Since whiteness studies made its dramatic entrance into the U.S. academy in the early 1990s it has generated tremendous scholarly output. Monographs and edited collections have proliferated across and between numerous disciplines. Amongst all this intellectual activity, however, the question of whiteness and colonialism remains a significant and curious absence. As its Saidian-inspired title signals, Re-Orienting Whiteness emerges from our desire to address this gap by pushing “whiteness studies” toward a more sustained engagement with critical postcolonial thought and the history of colonialism. Despite their many obvious synergies, there has been remarkably little cross-fertilization between these approaches to understanding the modalities of race, past and present. There is a clear need for this radical separation to be addressed. This collection offers an explicit challenge both to work on race in the United States (which has tended to elide the foundational significance of its settler-colonial origins), and to historical scholarship on British empire-building (which remains deeply conflicted over the significance of race)3. Our work is based on the conviction that the construction of whiteness and the phenomena of European colonialism are fundamentally interconnected, and that whiteness studies must be “Re-Oriented” to take this into account. Equally, a greater and more rigorous focus on whiteness as a racial category has much to offer to our understandings of the historical operations of colonialism and its ongoing effects.

Into the White Man’s Kingdom: Whiteness and Indigenous Assimilation Policies in the United States and Australia, 1880s-1960s

In his assessment of the field of whiteness studies in the United States, Peter Kolchin has complained that scholars “often display a notable lack of precision in asserting the non-white status of despised groups.” The “despised” groups Kolchin refers to are the Irish, Jewish people, and poor whites that have most often been the subjects of the foundational texts of American whiteness studies. “What is at issue,” Kolchin says, “is not the widespread hostility to and discrimination against” these groups, “but the salience of whiteness in either explaining or describing such hostility and discrimination.” The transition of these groups from being perceived as despised, unassimilated, and “non-white,” to applauded, assimilated, and “white” is too simplistic. Whiteness did not always equal acceptance. As Kolchin points out, the status of southern poor whites “is especially telling.”2 These people were, as Matt Wray has shown, the recipients of negative racial stereotyping that read them as “not quite white.”3 At the same time, they were never completely denied their whiteness. As Wray points out, poor whites offer a challenge to the boundaries of whiteness as it has been understood by whiteness studies. Phrases such as “white trash” describe people “whose very existence seems to threaten the symbolic and social order.’

‘You are not really free, you are just turned loose’: settler colonialism, survivance and competency at the Osage Agency

ABSTRACT What happens when we apply the principles of Gerald Vizenors concept of survivance to the history of competency, a legal status which released the recipient from government supervision and allowed them to sell, mortgage or lease their allotted lands? Most scholarship on competency tells a story of settler colonial land loss, of fraud and failure, and the policy of competency is often identified as the legislative culprit. Competent Indians were immediately at the mercy of unscrupulous white people who exploited them in various ways through schemes designed to get them to sell their land and the sovereignty of Indian nations was compromised as a result. In this paper, I utilise the concept of survivance to look beyond this grim overview and to find stories of negotiation, skill and resistance in the detailed records of the Osage Agency in Oklahoma in 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Can we write history that simultaneously pays attention to settler colonial strategies and indigenous agency and experience?

The Moment of Release: The Ideology of Protection and the Twentieth-Century Assimilation Policies of Exemption and Competency in New South Wales and Oklahoma

During the twentieth century some Australian states and the U.S. federal government enacted comparable policies that demonstrate how the discourse of protection continued to survive in an era when settler nations were focussed on “assimilating” Indigenous populations. The Australian policy of exemption and the U.S. policy of competency did not represent a true change in direction from past policies of protection. In contrast to the nineteenth century, though, these twentieth-century policies offered protection to only a deserving few. Drawing on records of exemption and competency from New South Wales and Oklahoma in the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how the policies of exemption and competency ostensibly gave the opportunity for some individuals to prove that they no longer needed the paternalism of colonial governments. They were judged using very different local criteria. In Australia, applicants were mostly judged on whether they engaged in “respectable” use of alcohol; in the United States, applicants were assessed on whether they had “business sense.”

Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia

Did cross-cultural relationships between coloniser and colonised happen despite colonialism? Did they transcend it, or even threaten it? Or were they irrevocably shaped by it? In Illicit Love, Ann ...

A Little Home for Myself and Child

Scholarship on Native American economic activity in the assimilation period tells a story of unscrupulous whites, fraud, and failure, often identifying the policy of competency as the culprit. Judging from these accounts, one might assume that being declared competent was almost always bad news for Native Americans, but perhaps particularly for women—who were less likely to have exposure to the world of business. The records of the Quapaw Agency in Oklahoma from the 1910s and 1920s tell a different story. The impact of competency on Native American women was not always bleak. Competency sometimes gave women control over significant property. Some women of the Quapaw Agency were skilled in business practices, negotiated successfully with the agency, and controlled both their finances and their destinies.