Marije van Lankveld | Settler Colonialism by Minority Communities: Irish Women Writers at the North-American Frontier

This project explores how Irish migrant women in North America positioned themselves in relation to settler colonial discourses through their writings. This will be examined through qualitative and quantitative analyses of a corpus of texts by Irish women settlers, which contain representations of the frontier, Indigenous peoples, and the natural environment and landscape. These analyses will then be compared to representations present in the broader North American and British press. This approach will distil recurring discourse patterns that shed light on how these women writers—displaced themselves as migrants coming from a colonized country—responded to ethnicity, land ownership and environmentalism at the frontier, and their alignment with or contestation of more widely circulating discourse patterns.

Considering the underexplored and complex position of minority groups within settler colonialism will provide innovative insights into the cultural interactions between people of diverse backgrounds involved in processes of environmental ownership and preservation. Considering Irish settler women’s perspectives will thus help nuance and complicate our understanding of the structure of settler colonialism, as a phenomenon, by examining the views and thought processes of those complicit in the settler-colonization of North America. By considering the perspectives of Irish settler women, the project will also yield new insights into how factors such as gender, race, diaspora and religion interact with settler colonial ideologies. These theoretical insights serve to better understand the settler colonial process and its ongoing complex legal, societal and cultural legacies for Indigenous peoples and environmental dwelling.