Blair Settler Indigeneity Eradication of Non-Native Self-Determination Biosecurity Falklands Malvinas 2017

Settler indigeneity and the
eradication of the non-native:

self-determination and
biosecurity in the Falkland
Islands (Malvinas)
James J.A. Blair Brooklyn College, City University of New York
This article analyses how settlers of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) construct themselves as ‘natives’
through environmental management. Taking a multispecies ethnographic and historical approach to
studying the Falkland Islanders’ self-determination claim, I explore a series of ecological practices that
demonstrate how some nonhumans become institutionalized into systems of racial and colonial
classification whereas others appear natural. I show how agroindustrial and technoscientific value
systems categorize human and nonhuman cohabitants according to degrees of political, economic,
and ecological status through particular periods in the Falklands: from the eradication of ‘native pests’
(1833-1982) to defence against ‘alien invaders’ (1982-present). Towards a conclusion, I analyse how
Islanders have begun to uproot their own ecological imperial past through removal of
British-introduced ‘invasive’ species and native habitat restoration. The article argues that attention to
how settlers colonize with natives contributes significantly to a critical multispecies anthropology with
broader implications for debates on ethnogenesis and indigeneity.
Towards a theory of settler indigeneity, this article captures a narrative of environmental

stewardship that selectively reinforces Western norms and values. Situated at latitude
51°S with London located nearly 8,000 miles away, at 51°N, the Falkland Islands
(in Spanish, Malvinas)1 are a quintessential example of the temperate zones that
Alfred Crosby (1986) termed ‘Neo-Europes’. Social anthropologists have begun to
examine how white settler attachments to place in such frontier areas may constitute
not just extensions of Europe, but also negotiations of indigeneity or autochthony.
In New Zealand’s high country, Michèle Dominy (2000) argues that European-
descendant ‘Pakeha’ construct a sense of home through a discourse of ‘authenticity’ in
connections to land. From a more critical perspective, David Hughes (2010) finds that by
affiliating with land and building dams, white conservationist large-scale farmers assert
indigeneity in the ‘failed Neo-Europe’ of Zimbabwe. In the less egregious postcolonial
context of Batswana, Catie Gressier (2015) describes how white ‘minorities’ resolve
political insecurity through claims to ‘experiential autochtony’, that is, emplacement
in the environment. Finally, Janet McIntosh (2016) analyses what she calls ‘structural
oblivion’ among white settler descendants in post-independence Kenya, who deny
having a privileged social status in order to defend their belonging.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2017
Settler indigeneity 581
While there are certainly parallels, unlike the enclaves examined in these cases, there
is no historical evidence of a precolonial indigenous population in the Falklands.2 The
Falklands are a former British Crown Colony, yet they are handled as an ongoing ‘special
and particular colonial situation’ in international law, having been on the UN’s list of
‘non-self-governing territories’ since 1946. In the decline of the British Empire, the
Falklands became a British Dependent Territory in 1981, renamed a British Overseas
Territory in 2002. According to a 2012 census, 59 per cent of residents consider their
national identity to be ‘Falkland Islander’. Twenty-nine per cent identify as British,
and English is the standard language (local vernacular includes Anglicized Spanish
syncretisms). There is also a significant influx of migrants from St Helena (9.8 per cent)
and Chile (5.4 per cent). The total resident population is 2,931, 86 per cent of whom
live in the Falklands’ only town, Stanley.3 A permanent military garrison at the Mount
Pleasant Royal Air Force base ranges from 350 to 1,300 British personnel.
Three decades after Margaret Thatcher’s forces trounced Argentina’s junta in a
violent conflict over the South Atlantic archipelago, residents confirmed their desire
to stay British. In a March 2013 referendum on self-determination, 99.8 per cent
voted ‘Yes’ to remaining a British Overseas Territory, with just three dissenters of
1,517 valid votes. In more than forty resolutions, the UN Special Committee on
Decolonization has supported Argentina’s contending claim to territorial integrity,
but the United Kingdom’s permanent seat in the Security Council and military
defence ensure ironclad protection of the Islanders’ wishes. By examining how the
Islanders bring their self-determination claim to bear on environmental practices
within their protectorate, this article seeks to outline processes of ethnogenesis and
indigenization that fly in the face of the conventional opposition between settler and
native.
In international law, self-determination serves both as a criterion for expressing
statehood for constituencies with primordial attachments to places (Geertz 1963),
and as a tool for recognizing lived sovereignty (Hansen & Stepputat 2005). Given the
concept’s flexibility, broad tendencies swing between: (1) championing the Wilsonian
notion of ‘non-intervention’ to support new state independence (Manela 2009); and
(2) critiquing its imperial uses for maintaining dependency (Anghie 2004). Social
scientific research on indigenous politics has contributed a symbolic meaning of self-
determination as denoting dignity in new social movements and international rights
mechanisms (Muehlebach 2003; Niezen 2003; Tully 2000).
However, scholars of settler colonialism have reconceived self-determination as
a phase of state policy that perpetuates colonial regimes of land tenure through
gestures of multicultural recognition (Coulthard 2014; Povinelli 2002; Simpson 2014;
Wolfe 2006). It may not be necessary to express prior attachment in claims of self-
determination, but asserting ‘native’ rights through resource governance allows settlers
to naturalize ‘non-native’ rule, as a ‘self’ bestowed with sovereignty. The nature of
the Falkland Islanders’ self-determination claim thus unsettles our preconceptions of
how its underlying principles apply, prompting new political-ecological questions:
What constitutes an indigenous or settler ecological landscape? How have the Islanders
naturalized their colonial British heritage, as stewards of the land with authority over
the environment? How are they negotiating asymmetries in national, ethnic, and racial
identity, as they assert ‘inalienable’ rights to territory as ‘a people’? And what makes
a ‘non-native population’ of a UN-designated ‘non-self-governing territory’ either a
legitimate occupation or an ‘alien invasion’, more generally?

582 James J.A. Blair
Through examination of quotidian practices to ensure biosecurity, this article

offers an anthropological perspective on how settlers of the Falklands have reinvented
themselves as ‘natives’ through environmental management. The research incorporates
twenty months of participant observation, analysis of colonial letters and reports, and
interviews conducted with: (1) townspeople, farmers, migrants, resource managers,
scientists, planners, engineers, and business elites in the Falklands; (2) government
functionaries, scientists, defected Islanders, and their descendants in Argentina; and (3)
business partners, repatriated Islanders, and government representatives in the United
Kingdom. Focusing on fieldwork conducted within the islands from 2012 to 2014, I
consider how multispecies ethnography provides a surprisingly apt methodology for
investigating the Islanders’ self-determination claim. Taking a historical anthropological
approach, I analyse how the Islanders’ assertion of ‘peoplehood’ (Wallerstein 1991) is
rooted, paradoxically, in the dehumanization and genocide of Natives in Tierra del
Fuego. Examining a series of human-nonhuman interactions, I then consider how the
course of eradication changed over time in the islands, from extermination of ‘native
pests’, referring to both humans and nonhumans in the Falklands and Patagonia (1833-
1982), to defence against ‘alien invasion’ (1982-present). Towards a conclusion, I analyse
how Islanders have begun to deracinate their ecological imperialist past and colonize
with native species, through habitat restoration.
The nature of settler indigeneity: a critical multispecies approach

Upon arrival at the Mount Pleasant Royal Air Force base, I noticed that the baggage claim
area seemed starkly different from the way it had looked during my earlier research.
Previously, a crumbling papier-mâché penguin and signs warning against invasive
species were the only décor. In preparation for the 2013 referendum, the Falkland
Islands Government (hereafter, FIG) – a group of locally elected representatives and
contractors legislating on all matters other than defence and foreign affairs – had covered
the walls with blown-up photograph placards. Most featured charismatic local fauna,
such as penguins, albatrosses, and sea lions, but the new display centred on a photo
of six Falkland Islander children, leaping from a grassy field with arms stretched high
(Fig. 1). They looked almost as though they were emerging autochthonous from the
territory their British ancestors settled.
On the way from Mount Pleasant to Stanley, my shuttle driver updated me on the
referendum. The other passenger was a helicopter pilot from New Zealand, whom the
Stanley-based South Georgia Government flew in to assist in the eradication of rats and
reindeer (Blair 2016). While we talked, the driver’s young daughter, who was wedged
between my front passenger seat and her mother’s, tapped two metal objects together,
producing a staccato rhythm. She motioned for me to look at the source of the sound:
her unlikely instrument was a pair of bullet shells. She continued playing them as we
drove past a stretch where a visiting team of Zimbabweans was clearing active landmines
thirty-one years after Argentina’s invasion.
This stimulating airport shuttle seemed a fitting introduction to the islands, which
are still in the process of adjustment decades after conflict. While the war certainly
has not faded from memory – bullet shells and landmines are aspects of everyday
life – the placards indicate an emergent local identity. In a less overt manner, the
biosecurity warnings and eradication campaigns suggest a more subtle way in which
the Islanders fortify their dominion. As they engage in new forms of governance over
natural resources, the settlers are asserting a bolder sense of indigeneity.

Figure 1. FIG placard and pamphlet cover. Source: J. Cockwell, Our islands, our home. Stanley: FIG,
2012 (available on-line: http://www.falklands.gov.fk/assets/Our-Islands-Our-Home.pdf, accessed 30 May
2017). (Reproduced with permission from Jenny Cockwell.)
The FIG backs its claim with British residents of up to nine generations. Self-
determination in this sense may be understood not strictly as a politicization of
indigeneity (Mamdani 2001a), but as a ‘native’ category for asserting settler colonial
exclusion. Islanders point to economic self-sufficiency as evidence of political self-
determination, and embrace Lockean tropes of ‘resourcefulness’ in their remote
location. This classical liberal logic of enclosure and improvement of the commons
legitimized colonialism throughout the British Empire, deterritorializing Native land
by depicting it as wild and uncultivated terra nullius (Li 2007).
Multispecies ethnography offers a useful methodology for analysing what counts as
wild, feral, or domesticated (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Lowe 2006). Reflecting on a
species of ‘alien’ plants blamed for a fire in South Africa, Jean and John Comaroff (2001)
found, for instance, that naturalizing territory of the nation enables the cross-species
ascription of contemptible attributes to particular persons and things (see Subramaniam
2001). While their observations are characteristically rich, John Hartigan (2013: 385)
argues that the Comaroffs’ notion of plants as ‘alibi’ decentres nonhuman species
unjustly as objects of ideological transference or displacement, rather than subjects of
ethnographic inquiry in their own right (see Haraway 2007: 11-12). Aiming to rectify
such anthropocentrism, Anna Tsing (2015) has pushed for a collaborative analysis of
the more-than-human from the particular vantage-point of the matsutake mushroom,
a gourmet fungus that thrives in the deforested ruins of industrial capitalism.
Proposing a different version of ‘anthropology beyond humanity’, Tim Ingold (2013:
19) argues that there is ‘nothing new’ about multispecies ethnography. Ingold rejects
the fashionable multispecies turn, and even the concept of species itself, for being

imprecisely plural. In response, Eben Kirksey (2015a) draws on ethnographic work

among taxonomists to argue that framing studies around a multiplicity of species is
useful for making sense of, and caring for neglected creatures. In this debate, I defer to
Donna Haraway’s judgement that while the word ‘species’ carries dubious connotations
of race and sex, it may still be a useful tool for critically analysing structures and
discourses of colonialism (Haraway 2007: 18). As she puts it, ‘The point is not to
celebrate complexity but to become worldly and to respond’ (2007: 41).
Whether critiquing or defending the species concept, what many of these works share
is an ecological optimism which revels in how nonhumans flourish in increasingly toxic
environments (Kirksey 2015b). This comes as a refreshing challenge to the seemingly
insurmountable crises of climate change, human agency, and global capitalism
associated with the current age that geologists call the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty
2008; Haraway 2016; Latour 2014). However, nonhumans, like humans, are not reducible
to conscious, empowered ‘agent-subjects’ (Asad 2003: 67-99). A more comprehensive
analysis requires re-focusing our attention on practices that have institutionalized some
nonhumans into systems of racial and colonial classification, whilst making others
appear natural in particular periods and locations (see Hartigan 2013: 373). Scholars of
animal studies and environmental humanities have begun to probe ethical questions
of species commodification, endangerment, extinction, and eradication, but relatively
few anthropologists of human-nonhuman relations have been attuned to the political
motivations of such ecological doxa (see Blanchette 2015; Clark 2015; Lowe 2010; Shukin
2009; van Dooren 2014). An instructive exception is the envelope-pushing work of
Stefan Helmreich (2009: 145-249; 2015: 62-72). This article draws particular influence
from Helmreich’s insights into how biologists and Native Hawaiians think about species
they categorize as ‘alien’ or ‘native’ in the settler colonial context of Hawaii, where the
word ‘native’ also suggests indigenous sovereignty (Helmreich 2005; 2009: 145-70).
Building on this work, in what follows I connect the contemporary eradication
of non-native nonhumans and restoration of native habitats in the Falklands to
the attempted elimination of human Natives in Patagonia. Taking a historical
anthropological approach to multispecies ethnography, I demonstrate that even in
a fiercely disputed territory, the boundaries that categorize races and natures are
powerful yet permeable, and unstable over time.
White settler self-determination and the dehumanization of Natives

Identifying as ‘British to the Core’ in a locality positioned geographically and politically
on the global periphery requires a particularly abstract geohistorical imagination. When
I inquired as to how the Falkland Islanders see their claim of self-determination relative
to that of other postcolonial populations, one FIG Member of the Legislative Assembly
(MLA) punctuated his response with repetitions of the phrase ‘I don’t know how to
say this without sounding racist’. He explained that the Islanders are ‘essentially very,
very, very British . . . the essential core of the Falkland Islands is very British, and we
don’t have that divergence of views that maybe other countries have’. Here, ‘British’
not only signifies national identity, but it is also a euphemism for whiteness. Despite
the concept’s plasticity, the applicability of self-determination to white British settlers
has been a difficult case for Islanders to make in international diplomacy. Another
councillor informed me that minority leaders of St Vincent’s government had told her
‘self-determination was put in place for Black people, and as I was white it didn’t apply’.

To counter diplomatic resistance, Islanders and their British administrators employ

two different rhetorical strategies. The first is to argue for a deracinated universalism
that considers no one native. Former Governor Nigel Haywood reasoned: ‘It would be
very, very difficult to find anywhere other than possibly the centre of Africa who you
could claim has an indigenous population because the whole history of humankind is
migration’.4 Ironically, this echoes Adam Kuper’s (2003) controversial anti-essentialist
doubts about political criteria for indigenous peoples. In fact, autochthony has been a
more salient category than indigeneity in Africa (Geschiere 2009; Geschiere & Nyamnjoh
2000; Hilgers 2011; Zenker 2011). African groups struggled to become involved in the
global indigenous movement after Antipodean or American collectivities had already
gained rights (Hodgson 2009; Niezen 2003). Moreover, the Governor’s benign image
of migration contrasts with the worldview of the Falklands’ ‘liberator’: Thatcher, a
staunch nativist, decried Britain being ‘swamped by people with a different culture’
(Thatcher 1978). As Klaus Dodds has shown, drawing on Paul Gilroy (1987: 51-5),
Thatcher underwrote the Islanders’ whiteness as a national cause by speaking of them
as ‘kith and kin’ or a comparable ‘island race’ (Dodds 2002: 2-7, 118-41).
The second strategy is to prioritize local residence over European descent. Governor
Haywood’s successor, Colin Roberts, insisted, ‘They are Natives! In relation to this
place, they are Natives’. Here, Roberts invokes a relational notion of ‘becoming
indigenous’ akin to Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn’s posing of indigeneity as
inherently relational (2007), or James Clifford’s concept of ‘diasporic natives’, a ‘rooted
experience of routes’ represented in the stories of decentred indigenous peoples who
remain connected after centuries of oppression (2013: 84). Yet, despite its own history of
national expansion through forced displacement of Natives, Argentina’s government has
dismissed the Islanders as an ‘implanted population’ (población implantada) (Pastorino
2013). If they do constitute a ‘people’, it may be more precise to say that the Islanders
are part of an ‘imperial diaspora’ (Ho 2004: 214). In this sense, they may be understood
as ‘indigenizing’ British colonial rule, not only through population, but also through
possession, commerce, administration, and military defence (Cohn 1983). In the words
of Ann Stoler, the Islanders are ‘perfected natives’ with ‘degrees of imperial sovereignty’
(Stoler 2006; Stoler & Cooper 1997: 7).
Islanders pointed out that Argentina’s rhetoric of decolonization belies its history, as
a settler nation haunted by violence against Native peoples (Gordillo 2014). Nonetheless,
they are unable to extricate themselves entirely from the legacy of dispossession in the
Southern Cone. Discussing the history of genocide in Argentina at a dinner party,
one former government director commented: ‘That’s true, but we used to go over to
the mainland and shoot Indians like pheasants’. The director’s spontaneous confession
surprised this outwardly naı̈ve, white male American anthropologist. I had presupposed
incorrectly that Islanders might attempt to erase the role of some of their ancestors in
appalling colonial encounters, in order to enhance claims to indigeneity. Instead, I found
that rather than identifying as native in a self-conscious political strategy, Islanders
approached the contradictory flux of settler indigeneity precisely through such banal
affirmations of human and nonhuman decimation.
From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Falkland Islanders migrated
to Patagonia and founded many of the first towns in what are now the Argentine
provinces of Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. British evangelists established the
South American Missionary Society, designed to ‘civilize’ Yámana (or Yahgan) Natives
remotely on the Falklands’ outer Keppel Island, and British-owned farms exchanged

sheep and labour between the Falklands and Patagonia (Mainwaring 1983; Philpott
2009). In the process, settlers regarded both upland geese and Amerindians as ‘native
pests’ to be ‘exterminated’.5 The Falkland Islands Company (FIC) paid its employees ten
shillings per hundred goose beaks.6 In Patagonia, landowners, such as José Menéndez
and mining investor Julius Popper paid one to five pounds sterling to clans of ‘Indian
hunters’, led by Alexander Mac Lennan aka Chancho Colorado (‘Red Pig’), for each
pair of a deceased Selk’nam (or Ona) person’s ears.7 With the complicit support of the
Argentine Republic and Chile, settlers thus valued a Native human’s life equal to the
lives of two hundred native geese. What does this metric tell us about the hierarchical
ordering of race and nature in the region (D.S. Moore, Pandian & Kosek 2003)?
A key figure bridging the social formations and ecological assemblages of the South
Atlantic and Southern Cone is Charles Darwin. In The voyage of the Beagle, Darwin
ranked the Yámana of Tierra del Fuego as ‘man in his lowest and most savage state’ (1997
[1839]: 730). Unlike the Iroquois, Inca, or Aztec, whom colonizers viewed as civilizations
worthy of limited diplomacy, Darwin considered the Yámana less intelligent or capable
of semiotic communication than domesticated animals.8 Reflecting on an encounter
with a Yámana individual, he wrote: ‘[T]he native touched with his finger some cold
preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac and plainly showed utter disgust
at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage,
though his hands did not appear dirty’ (Darwin 2009 [1872]: 269). William Ian Miller
explains that ‘the native recoils at the idea of what manner of man could eat such
stuff, whereas Darwin fears ingesting some essence of savagery’ (1998: 3). Rethinking
the ‘sticky’ qualities that make certain objects seem like they are invading one’s bodily
space, Sara Ahmed notes that disgust performs a slippage: the sickening and hateful
textures of a foreign object take the form of the bodies of others in order to construct
them as nonhuman or lower than human (2004: 97). The disgusting qualities of such
bodies thus justify their expulsion.
The following sections of this article track a reverse process. Taking dehumanization
as a point of departure rather than arrival, I examine how the historical disgust that
Darwin and European settlers felt towards Native humans in Tierra del Fuego became
constitutive of contemporary desires to expel particular nonhuman bodies and objects
in the Falklands.
A sheep in wolf’s clothing: rendering natives ‘pests’ (1833-1982)

In 1833, just months after the British settled the Falklands permanently, Darwin visited
the islands. Upon disembarking from his vessel, he found himself among a small
population of Englishmen, gauchos – debt-bonded cattle herders – and other ‘runaway
rebels and murderers’ (Darwin 1997 [1839]: 180).9 As in other cattle frontiers during this
period, the largely mestizo (mixed-race) gaucho workforce embodied barbarous danger
and criminality for Darwin (Baretta & Markoff 1978).
One particular species mystified the otherwise unflappable Darwin: the Falkland
Islands wolf (or warrah) (Fig. 2). Darwin found no evidence that the species had been
discovered anywhere else. The warrah was remarkably tame, and Selk’nam Natives used
relatives of the same genus Dusicyon for hunting, pointing to the likelihood that humans
had domesticated the warrah before arriving in the Falklands. Based on a comparison
of the wolf’s teeth with that of other South American species, scientists have now dated
its origin in the Falklands to a period when an ice bridge connected the archipelago to
the continent (Austin et al. 2013). Considered a threat during lambing season, the wolf

Figure 2. Warrah (Dusicyon australis). Reproduced with permission from John van Wyhe (ed.). The
complete work of Charles Darwin online, 2002 (available on-line: http://darwin-online.org.uk/, accessed
31 May 2017). Source: G. Waterhouse. Canis antarcticus. In The zoology of the voyage of HMS Beagle
(ed.) C. Darwin. London: Smith Elder and Co., 1838.
was one of the Falklands’ first ‘native pests’.10 Darwin describes a gaucho technique of
luring the wolf with a piece of meat in one hand and sticking it with a knife with the
other. Thanks to this method, the warrah became extinct by 1876.
Cattle and gauchos faced a similar fate to the warrah’s under British rule. To tame
and kill feral cattle, Samuel Fisher Lafone, an English merchant living in Montevideo,
established the FIC in 1851-2. The destruction of cattle ushered in a monopolistic land
tenure regime focused on sheep farming. Parallel to this shift in livestock, British
shepherds, primarily from the Scottish Highlands, displaced South American gauchos.
The colonial government listed South American ‘Aliens’ and ‘Resident Strangers’
separately from ‘whites’ and ‘coloured’ in colonial reports. Passing an ‘Alien Ordinance’
in 1849, the government began deporting South American workers, who were suspected
of spreading anti-British views.11 By 1858, the FIC had ‘no Spaniard in its employ’ at
Stanley.12
Besides the gauchos, British colonial administrators viewed sheep imported from
Rı́o de la Plata as a racially inferior breed. To ‘improve’ the South American sheep and
yield higher rates of profit, settlers crossed the animals with ‘hardy’ English rams.13 One
governor asserted that reproducing the ‘Mestizo’ sheep with Leicester breeds doubled
the fleece weight, and increased the value of wool exponentially.14 By the early 1870s,
the FIC accumulated and bred between 40,000 and 50,000 of such sheep.15
The rising socioeconomic valorization of sheep produced a new assemblage of ‘native
pests’. Farmers began to view birds of prey and scavengers, such as the striated caracara
(known locally as the Johnny rook), the crested caracara (carancho), the giant petrel
(stinker), the gull-like skua and the turkey vulture, as dangers to lambs. Settlers also
accused rare marine fauna, such as the burrowing Magellanic (or ‘jackass’) penguins,

as well as sea lions, of causing soil erosion and grass degradation.16 Colonists and
transient sealers dating back to the late eighteenth century slaughtered penguins, seals,
and sea lions for oil and skins; they collected penguin and albatross eggs on a mass
scale. Rendering these animals ‘native pests’, Falkland Islanders rationalized accelerated
depletion.
Targeting native fauna as pests did not result in an immediate wool boom. The
operation struggled to meet its goals until 1867, when the Islanders initiated their first
‘non-native’ agricultural pest eradication: ticks (or ked) and the dermatitis caused by
their faeces (scab).17 Scab disease prevented sheep from growing wool, so it was treated
as an economic affliction. To eliminate scab, a visiting sheep farmer from New Zealand,
Wickham Bertrand, advanced what would become a local custom of ‘dipping’ freshly
sheared flocks in solutions of tobacco and sulphur. Once the Islanders removed scab,
wool flourished as the staple commodity. The sheep population increased from 65,000
in 1870 to a peak of 807,000 in 1898 (Guillebaud 1967: 4, 15).
However, the wool industry introduced a sharp class division between growers and
workers, exacerbated by an uneven land tenure system. While workers pined after the
possibility of raising their own flocks, growers culled sheep at their employees’ behest.18
As proletarianized settlers began to self-identify as ‘native’ Falkland Islanders, colonial
administrators treated them as subjects rather than citizens. Bearing remarkable likeness
to Darwin’s comparison between the Yámana and undomesticated animals, one British
medical officer said of the undereducated children of the remote settlements on West
Falkland Island: ‘In cunning and cruelty they resemble animals and birds of prey, and
they are essentially wild creatures’.19 A Royal Navy officer stationed in the islands during
the First World War excluded Islanders from the white race.20 Ironically, in the eyes of
British colonialists, the Scottish shepherds recruited to displace the ‘alien’ gauchos had
thus descended the social-natural ladder, becoming non-white, ‘feral’ settlers.
Despite their ambiguous racialization, rural labourers came to view themselves
as proud ‘native’ Falkland Islanders. The term that would refer to a ‘native’ of the
Falklands was kelper. Alluding to Kelp seaweed, the abundant marine flora surrounding
the archipelago, ‘kelper’ indexed an individual born in the islands. Some repatriated
Islanders in the United Kingdom and elderly residents in the islands still self-identify
as kelpers. This collective assertion of belonging engendered a possessive ‘white
ethnic community construct’ (di Leonardo 1994; Frankenberg 1993; Harris 1993) as
nativist Islanders protested labour recruitment from Patagonia following the Great
Depression.
In spite of nativist immigration restrictions, the Falklands saw a significant
labour shortage during the twentieth century, and the economy stagnated. Discussing
population decline in an economic report spanning the 1982 war, Lord Edward
Shackleton estimated that the ‘indigenous “kelper” stock’ represented 77 per cent of the
population (1976a: 1, 4). However, Shackleton also described the islands as ‘an isolated
archipelago, remote from Britain, and without any indigenous population, settled by
people of British stock’ (1976b: 266). Shackleton’s contradictory taxonomy originates in
the meaning of a stock as a piece of wood, or trunk of a family tree. This metaphor for
relationality of human genealogy carried another significance throughout the British
Empire for breeding and capital accumulation in sheep raising (Franklin 2007: 46-
72). In Shackleton’s reports, ‘stock’ refers primarily to different ways of conceiving
the origins of kelpers’ ancestry, which indicates the difficulties colonial administrators
had in conceiving of these people in typical oppositional terms of settler and native.

Figure 3. Falkland Islands farm boundaries map. Reproduced with permission from Adam Dawes,
Department of Agriculture, FIG. Source: S. Nightingale. Stanley: Crown, 2014.
Having removed the gauchos and introduced cattle, as well as select native nonhumans
that they regarded as pests, settlers were labelled non-white, yet still ‘of British stock’.
In response, Islanders crafted a white ethnic community construct that mixed British
national identity with local origin as ‘indigenous kelpers’, offering key advantages for
the labour relations associated with agribusiness. Tangling themselves in an improvised
multispecies ensemble of introduced livestock and native seaweeds thus conditioned
the possibility for Falkland Islanders to seize control over factors of production, even
though their ‘stock’ as a major sheep station had fallen.
Shackleton’s report was instrumental for breaking up FIC land into plots owned
by occupying families (Fig. 3). The land subdivision accelerated human depopulation
in Camp (local vernacular for countryside, from the Spanish campo). Commercial
fishing, oil exploration, and tourism now yield more local revenue than agriculture,
but the Falklands’ current coat of arms reveals the continued importance of sheep
(Fig. 4). Combining biology and history in national symbolism, the seal of the colony
illustrates the Falklands’ ‘layers of naturecultures’ (Haraway 2007: 16). A ram floats
on a patch of tussac grass atop the submerged English ship Desire, which Falkland
Islanders claim discovered the islands.21 One of the ironies of the image is that sheep
are responsible for degradation of native tussac. Similar to other colonial situations
in the Americas and the Antipodes, the irruption of ‘ovine colonizers’ damaged
the landscape (Melville 1997; Woods 2015). Embodying both ‘biological control’
and ‘biology out of control’, as Sarah Franklin (2007: 5) put it, sheep became a
domesticated economic resource, as well as a dominant socio-natural force in the
Falklands.

Figure 4. Coat of arms of the Falkland Islands. Source: Open Clip Art Library (available on-line:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coat_of_arms_of_the_Falkland_Islands.svg#file, accessed 31
May 2017).
Defending against ‘aliens’ and ‘colonizing’ with natives (1982-present)

Settlers disregarded penguins as ‘native pests’ historically, but a widespread local
embrace of biodiversity conservation has reclassified the Falklands’ seabird populations
as ‘globally important’.22 The adored seabirds also draw in thousands of tourists
annually. Testament to their increased local value is that, presently, farmers protect
penguin colonies from their sheep rather than the other way around. This reclamation
of local seabirds as ‘natural assets’ signals a wider shift in the Islanders’ environmental
management: not only do they prize livestock or exotic ‘native’ species, but they have also
come to regard introduced species, including some of British origin, as ‘alien invaders’
(Fig. 5). Focusing on the post-war era here, I will discuss how the naturalization of
sheep intensified the eradication of ‘alien’ plants after the Argentine invasion. I also
examine how extermination of ‘alien’ insects has become a way in which to manage
post-invasion trauma. Without suggesting direct causation, I propose that the condition
of having been invaded animates settler assertions of indigeneity. As I describe, habitat
restoration has offered a way for settlers to reclaim home within ‘native’ surroundings.
The recent interest in sustainability is not solely internally driven in the Falklands.
Wider global environmental movements and UK policy for British Overseas Territories
externally inspired these changes. Following the so-called ‘heroic age of Antarctic
science’ (Larson 2012), the islands served as a staging post for polar research, leaving the

Figure 5. Invasive species awareness poster. The vegetation indicates that the landscape depicted is
not the Falklands. Source: J. Binns, International Reptile Conservation Foundation and UK Overseas
Territories Environment Programme. (Reproduced with permission from John Binns, International
Reptile Conservation Foundation, as well as Nick Rendell, Environmental Planning Department, FIG.)

South Atlantic environment relatively under-researched. This changed after the 1982
war, when re-secured control over marine resources shifted the economic focus from
agriculture to commercial fishing. Despite scandals over squid fishing’s alleged impact
on the mortality rate of seabirds in the late 1990s (Bingham 2005), and a communication
breakdown with Argentine scientists in 2005, the FIG Fisheries Department has
gained a global reputation as a rigorous centre for resource management. Whilst
FIG Fisheries focuses primarily on fishing stock assessment, its quasi-governmental
offshoot, the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute (SAERI), focuses on
broader aspects of regional marine ecology. Falklands Conservation, a non-profit
affiliate of Birdlife International, also raises public awareness through a watch group
and penguin rehabilitation centre. During my fieldwork, SAERI rented me office space
and invited me to participate in collaborative projects with Falklands Conservation.
These organizations primarily employ experts on temporary contracts from the United
Kingdom, Europe, or the Commonwealth, but their technoscientific values have
enhanced local assertions of indigeneity.
The combined efforts of these ‘external’ forces have influenced Falklands residents,
especially those residing in Camp settlements that now function as tourist lodges,
to support biosecurity and biodiversity. Many farmers were once at odds with
environmentalists; they gave them the pejorative label ‘turkey lovers’ for advocating
against shooting ‘native pests’, such as vultures. However, several Camp residents who
might still be sceptical about the liberal values of conservation now take an active role
in eradicating ‘aliens’ and collecting data on native habitats for visiting researchers.
In addition to recent eradication campaigns against introduced mammals (Poncet
et al. 2011), new waves of ‘alien’ plant eradication have altered the islands’ countryside
since the war. Calafate or Magellan barberry plant, used in Patagonia for fruit
and red dye, has been subject to elimination in the Falklands because sheep get
caught in its thorns. A sensational headline from The Independent (17 March 2013)
read: ‘Calafate invasion: Falklands natives under threat from an Argentinian force of
nature: Invasive – and tenacious – South American shrub affecting plants and damaging
sheep’. The connection between calafate plants and the 1982 Argentine invasion is
rather tenuous because they were introduced much earlier as a garden ornamental.
However, according to FIG Environmental Planning, Argentine soldiers did introduce
another ‘alien’ plant: mouse-ear hawkweed. Farmers bemoan mouse-ear hawkweed’s
unassailable force. It spreads over large areas and chokes out other vegetation more
palatable for sheep. These South American species are considered ‘invaders’, even though
85 per cent of flora are also native to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and all endemic
plants in the region share affinal ties (D.M. Moore 1968: 19).
Even though it is not of South American origin, the Scottish thistle has also become
a ‘priority species’ to eradicate in the Falklands. Thistles’ thorns taint sheep’s wool and
make ‘native’ bird and animal habitats impenetrable. Thom, a Scottish construction
manager, signed up reluctantly with Falklands Conservation to go ‘thistle bashing’.
Anyone who has viewed the prominent place of the thistle in Scotland’s heritage sites
would understand how Thom felt insulted by Islanders complaining about ‘the dreaded
thistles’. Pulling up his sleeve, he revealed to me that he even has a tattoo of a thistle,
emerging out of a ‘tribal’ design on his left bicep. In repeated visits to Saunders Island,
on the northwest edge of the archipelago, Islanders and ‘ex-pat’ volunteers like Thom
pull the plants out by hand to stop them from seeding. The neighbouring Keppel Island,
where British missionaries once tried to ‘civilize’ captive Yámana Natives, has become

‘overrun’ with thistles. Civilians are not usually granted access to Keppel, so a group
of officers from the Royal Air Force went by helicopter on a voluntary mission to rid
the abandoned settlement of the plants. Meanwhile, the soldiers’ own base at Mount
Pleasant was also on thistle alert, as well as Stanley residents’ lawns. One FIG counsellor
warned that any private property could be a source of a thistle outbreak, so ‘everyone
has to do their part’.
These ‘alien’ plant eradication programmes reveal how the political relations between
human and nonhuman species in the Falklands entail what Laura Ogden (2011: 27) calls
a ‘shifting assemblage and alliance’ in the landscape. The islands’ British settlers, and
even its stationed military officers, are no longer cleansing their land of so-called ‘native
pests’. Rather, they seek simultaneously to protect introduced sheep and native habitats
by removing both South American ‘aliens’ and select vestiges of the British Empire.
The Islanders may continue to consent adamantly to British sovereignty through self-
determination, but in the process of defining the nature of their polity, they have begun
to ‘decolonize’ the landscape (Mastnak, Elyachar & Boellstorff 2014).
While eradication of ‘alien’ plants is a priority, the most ‘high-profile’ of the
Falklands’ ‘alien’ species are insects. Apparently introduced via South America, the
European earwig is invading Stanley residents’ homes and vegetable gardens. Woody,
an especially cheerful organizer of Stanley’s annual horticulture show, spent decades
honing his gardening skills in Camp. Notwithstanding the occasional glut of cabbage,
Woody is able to produce fresh vegetables year-round. However, he told me, ‘Earwigs
are a problem. And the earwig debate is probably about as big a debate as the referendum
was. Probably bigger because the referendum nobody talks about: we talked about it;
we’ve got the results. But we’re still talking about the earwigs’. Eradication methods
range from pesticide spray and washing-up liquid to biological agents like chickens and
tachinid flies.
Islanders negotiate daily irritation from the sovereignty dispute through talk
of insect invasion. Conversation topics among Stanley residents switch seamlessly
between ‘the bloody earwigs’ and ‘the bloody Argies’! Echoing the calafate headline, a
May 2016 report in the local Penguin News was entitled ‘Falkland Islands’ biosecurity
officers thwart Argentine ant army invasion’. There were no known ‘native’ ants in
the islands, and UK experts identified the newcomers as Linepithema humile, a species
found in Argentina. However, a New Zealand expert found them to be from the
different Ochetellus genus. In the report, the biosecurity officer acknowledged the
confusion, but added, ‘I doubt you would be reading this article had I named it “The
Ochetellus Invasion” would you?’ Taking such discursive practices seriously, the earwigs
or ants may be understood as more than mere symbols for Argentine antagonism.
A common perceived threat of invasion entangles the insects with South American
neighbours, both having occupied homes and eaten food without permission. One
Islander I interviewed during the referendum had been locked in a hall at Goose Green
for twenty-nine days during the 1982 invasion, given daily rations of three spoons
of baked beans and crackers. He told me ‘There are some good Argentines; they’re
the ones in Darwin’. (He was referring to the cemetery of Argentine combatants.)
Traumatized Islanders have petitioned for laws banning Argentine flags, and signs
that say ‘No Argies’ wreathe many doors. Most Islanders take a moral high ground
and frown upon xenophobia, but earwig or ant extermination provides an outlet for
fortifying homes through what they see as acceptable forms of violence. By associating
insects’ bodies with the sickening qualities of foreignness assigned to human enemies,

Figure 6. Restored tussac grass on Bleaker Island. (Photo by the author.)
Islanders thus harness disgust to authorize the eradication of nonhuman ‘invasive’

species.23
Islanders protect their home not only through ‘alien’ removal, but also through
‘native’ restoration. This includes an initiative to re-prioritize the ecological value
of tussac grass with respect to the sheep that have damaged it (Fig. 6). Falklands
Conservation and independent landowners have begun fencing off and replanting
tussac. Alongside this effort is a move away from set stocking – long-term grazing
in a single location, which causes desertification – towards more carefully planned
procedures of rotational grazing methods.
However, local conservationists argue that the effectiveness of land restoration or
‘holistic’ farming depends on the proportion of native to invasive plant species already
on the land. Therefore, complementary to replanting tussac and redesigning farms,
Redd, a habitat restoration manager with Falklands Conservation, is developing a
business plan for a ‘native seed hub’. With assistance from the Royal Botanic Gardens
at Kew and the Natural History Museum in London, Redd is creating a ‘seed bank’
to, as he put it, ‘colonize with’ native species. He is conducting a series of restoration
trials on seventeen of the most eroded patches of land on East Falkland Island, as well as
collecting more native specimens of fodder grasses for the seed stock. Tussac is a massive
grass, making it easy to replant by hand if one removes the tillers (above-ground stems)
and allows them to take root. However, this method is ineffective for growing smaller
plant species, so Redd’s alternative is to have a multiplicity of native seeds, other than
tussac, available to sow. In addition to spoil heaps and nutrient-rich penguin colonies,
one of the areas in which this experiment is taking place is newly cleared minefields.
Fenced off since 1982, the land has had time to replenish. Redd is therefore hopeful
that replacing landmines with seeds will support native microbes in the soil (see Kim
2016). By making their post-war environment more ‘native’, Islanders and their British
trustees seek to cultivate an image of themselves as responsible stewards.

Finally, in addition to practices of colonization with native nonhumans, visiting

scientists from University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute have begun searching
for definitive evidence of a prior Native human presence in Falklands’ soil. Previous
palaeoecological analysis of carbon-dated charcoal raised the possibility of pre-colonial
indigenous human activity in the Falklands (Buckland & Edwards 1998). Peat cores may
include fossils of warrah, or evidence of interaction among seabirds, soil, vegetation,
pollen, and metals that mark humans. Moreover, these data gauge climate change:
how the last Ice Age formed, and other biogeographical enigmas of the Holocene.
Archaeologists are also searching for middens, shell waste piles that may prove that
Amerindians inhabited the islands before Europeans. Contrary to the patriotic motto,
‘British to the Core’, earth science may reveal that at its material core the Falklands are
not British, after all.
Conclusion
This article has shown how patterns of species eradication and habitat management
offer a cross-temporal view of a settler society’s ethnogenesis. As I discussed what
constitutes an indigenous or settler ecological landscape with Falkland Islanders, they
joked regularly that ‘the ultimate invasive species here is humans’ (see also Gressier 2015:
46). Nonetheless, by organizing the landscape in hierarchical categories of race and
nature, Falkland Islanders asserted settler indigeneity: a combination of British colonial
heritage and constructed ‘native’ status. In the early period of British occupation,
settlers attempted to annihilate what they considered to be ‘native pests’ – humans
and nonhumans of Patagonian and South Atlantic origin – that posed perceived
threats to efficient exploitation of wool from introduced sheep. As sheep naturalized,
and Islanders claimed a bolder sense of belonging, the targets of eradication shifted
from natives to non-native ‘aliens’. The Argentine military invasion and occupation
in 1982 intensified local hostility towards plants and insects introduced from South
America. Yet conservationism and eco-tourism inspired Islanders to assign greater
value to nonhumans formerly known as ‘native pests’. Indigenizing colonial rule
ultimately entailed displacing some nonhumans originating in Europe with restored
native habitats.
Shifts in the valuation of the native serve as a proxy for the ways in which Islanders
have negotiated asymmetries in national, ethnic, and racial identity as ‘a people’. Early
colonists harnessed their disgust of ‘savagery’ to rationalize violence against native
humans and nonhumans. Yet, as British settlers and sheep displaced South American
gauchos and cattle, they began to assimilate into colonial administrators’ perceptions
of nature as non-white ‘wild creatures’. In response, nativist settlers constructed a
white ethnic community that enhanced job security and made them doubly legible
to government officials as ‘indigenous “kelper” stock’ and ‘British stock’. Global
shifts in relation to the value of being ‘native’ had a greater impact than Islanders’
history of colonial subjection in raising local concern for biosecurity and biodiversity
conservation. Nonetheless, the broad transformation in environmental stewardship,
from the elimination of the native to the eradication of the non-native, demonstrates
how Islanders have come to hold their hybrid mixture of local peoplehood and British
citizenship in tension.
What do these ecological practices tell us about the nature of a ‘non-native’
population of a UN-designated ‘non-self-governing territory’? Are the Falklands better
understood as a legitimate occupation or an alien invasion, and what anthropological

concepts offer insights on this distinction? Without advocating for claims of settler
indigeneity, taking it seriously requires that we abandon absolutist racial notions, yet
throw critical light on political uses of self-determination. Through the ‘imperial eyes’
(Ho 2004) of UK administrators, Islanders have been viewed as both relationally
indigenous and resolutely British. Depending on one’s perspective, their settler
indigeneity resembles anti-essentialist notions of ‘diasporic natives’ in the process of
‘becoming indigenous’, in Clifford’s (2013: 84) framing, or ‘perfected natives’ with
‘degrees of imperial sovereignty’, in Stoler’s sense (Stoler 2006; Stoler & Cooper 1997: 7).
Nearly all consent to remaining British, but their ‘emergent autochthony’ has become
a source of capital for extractivism and eco-tourism (Geschiere & Nyamnjoh 2000;
Hilgers 2011). If we accept elements of the Islanders’ autochthony as ‘local people’, their
‘criteria’ for indigenous or aboriginal status remains dubious because they are neither
confirmed prior inhabitants nor confined tribal sovereigns (see Bruyneel 2007; Gausset,
Kenrick & Gibb 2011; Moreton-Robinson 2007).
These indeterminate claims have broader implications for the challenges of analysing
ethnogenesis and indigeneity in settler colonial contexts. Despite its wide influence,
Crosby’s (1986) concept of ‘Neo-Europes’ gave short shrift to indigenous environmental
knowledge and the mutually transformative relationship between ethnicity and
landscape (see Anderson 2006; Cronon 1983; Johnson & Hunn 2010; Sillitoe 1998;
Trigger 2008). While Dominy (2000) showed considerable rigour in examining such
dynamics, anthropologists accused her of representing settlers’ claims as comparable
to that of historically disadvantaged Ngai Tahu Maori (NZASA et al. 1990). Similarly,
Gressier’s (2015) interpretation of the environment as a sanctuary from alienation
follows what geographer Neil Smith (1984: 25-8) calls a ‘romanticized’ ideology of nature:
a dualism of geographical externality (the ostensibly hostile Okavango Safari) and
internalized universalism (the spiritual morality of experiential autochthony). Gressier
fails to appreciate Hughes’s treatment of dam-making, for instance, as a production
of nature that undergirds white settlers’ constrained ‘disregard’ for racialized Others
(Crapanzano 1985: 21, 39; Hughes 2010: 12). The historical and ethnographic evidence
suggests that the Falklands’ indigenized settler landscape constitutes more than a making
of the colonial world in Europe’s ecological image. David Trigger and his colleagues
refer to similar reintroduction of native species in ‘postsettler’ Australia as ‘re-naturing’
(Trigger, Mulcock, Gaynor & Toussaint 2008; Trigger, Toussaint & Mulcock 2010).
However, apart from Richard Martin and David Trigger (2015), who use multispecies
ethnography to address indigeneity, these studies generally propose a human-centred
environment, in which imperial formations are understood as past events, rather
than durable structures and processes (Stoler 2016; Wolfe 2006). Moreover, as Tomaz
Mastnak and his colleagues (2014) observe, ecological optimists have oversimplified
native habitat restoration as tantamount to xenophobia (Raffles 2011b). While
nativism did play an important role in the formation of Falkland Islanders as
a white ethnic ‘people’, the metataxonomical practices that categorize the fit of
particular humans and nonhumans in the islands are based on both colonial
organizing principles and ‘native’ logics of inclusion and exclusion (Helmreich 2005;
Stoler & Cooper 1997: 3). This study therefore contributes to a critical multispecies
anthropology that recasts travelling nonhumans as ‘botanical colonizers’, ‘imperial
fauna’, ‘animal diasporas’, or ‘fungal survivors’, depending on their context in the
Anthropocene (Mastnak et al. 2014; Ogden 2014; Swanson 2016; Tsing 2015). A
multispecies approach that not only chronicles nonhuman success stories, but also

probes the historical roots of environmental practices, offers fertile ground for further
comparison.
NOTES
The National Science Foundation (BCS-1355717), Fulbright-IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the
Social Science Research Council provided funding. I am grateful to the South Atlantic Environmental Research
Institute (SAERI) and the Jane Cameron National Archives for hosting me during fieldwork. Special thanks
to Ann Stoler, who first encouraged me to write this article. For feedback, I thank co-panellists at the 2015
JRAI postgraduate conference at the University of Manchester, as well as Jacqueline Brown, Marc Edelman,
Mandana Limbert, Thomas McGovern, Julie Skurski, and Gary Wilder at City University of New York. I owe
a special debt of gratitude to JRAI’s anonymous reviewers for their exceedingly thoughtful comments.
1 The English or Spanish names for the islands and settlements have been politicized to support either
side of the sovereignty dispute. For ease of reading, I attempted to remain true to ethnographic or historical
context for place names.
2 After the abandonment of overlapping French (1764-7), British (1765-70; 1771-4), and Spanish (1767-1811)
settlements, Buenos Aires named merchant Luis Vernet the Political and Military Commander of the Malvinas
in 1829. In response to Vernet’s detainment of three American sealing schooners, the USS Lexington destroyed
his settlement, precipitating British sovereignty reclamation in 1833.
3 FIG Policy Unit, 2014 Statistical Yearbook.
4 I use pseudonyms for living participants, apart from public figures.
5 Falkland Islands Magazine, September 1898; September 1904, Jane Cameron National Archives (hereafter,
JCNA), Stanley.
6 Grey-Wilson, despatch to Lyttelton, 24 March 1904, JCNA, B/26. Allardyce, despatch to Lyttelton, 18
January 1905, JCNA, B/26.

7 See Bridges (2007: 314-15); Chapman (2010); Gusinde (1961: 143); Marchante (2014); Taussig (1993: 87).
On ‘Indian hunting’ elsewhere in South America, see Bessire (2014); Bjork-James (2015).
8 Darwin estimated that the Yámana lexicon comprised only 100 words (Taussig 1993: 73-87). Missionary
Thomas Bridges listed at least 32,000 words and inflections (Bridges 2007: 34).
9 Months after the British reclaimed sovereignty, gaucho Antonio Rivero led a legendary uprising (Guber
2000).
10 Packe, letter to Robinson, 23 May 1867, JNCA, H/25. For a parallel with the dingo, see Trigger, Mulcock,
Gaynor & Toussaint (2008).

11 Moody, despatch to Stanley, 6 July 1843, B1, JCNA. Rennie, despatches to Grey, 4 May and 26 May 1849,
B6; 30 November 1850, B7, JCNA.

12 Lane, Despatch 4, 11 November 1858, JCNA.
13 Moore, Blue Book of 1857, JCNA. See also Lane Despatches 3, 10 November 1858; 21, 14 June 1859; and 38,
29 November 1859, JCNA.

14 D’Arcy, Colonial Report of 1872, JCNA.
15 D’Arcy, Colonial Report of 1871, JCNA.
16 Davis, letter to Colonial Secretary, n.d., CSO 663/19, JNCA discussed in Bernhardson (1989: 706-7).
17 See Gressier (2015) on agricultural and environmental ‘pests’.
18 Lewis, letter to Sanguinetti, 8 May 1891, H/46, JCNA cited in Bernhardson (1989: 448).
19 Anderson, letter to Brooks, 15 January 1885, H/39, JCNA.
20 Falkland Islands Magazine, May 1915, JCNA.
21 Falkland Islanders held that John Davis first sighted the archipelago on the Desire in 1592. Iberian maps
suggest Magellan or one of his deserters did in 1520. See Goebel (1982: 16-34).
22 Birdlife International considers an ‘important bird area’ anywhere with more than 1 per cent of a breeding
species. The Falklands are home to 70 per cent of breeding pairs of black-browed albatross and 30-40 per cent
of some penguin species.
23 On human-insect identification and genocide, see Mamdani (2001b); Raffles (2011a). On
anthropomorphism, see Candea (2010); Milton (2005).
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Autochtonie des colons et éradication des non-natifs : autodétermination et

biosécurité aux ı̂les Malouines (Falkland)
Résumé
Le présent article analyse la manière dont les colons des ı̂les Malouines (Falkland) se construisent
comme des « natifs » par la gestion de l’environnement. Suivant une approche ethnographique et
historique multispécifique pour étudier les revendications d’autodétermination des insulaires, l’auteur
explore une série de pratiques écologiques qui montrent comment certaines créatures non humaines sont
institutionnalisées au sein de systèmes de classification raciale et coloniale, tandis que d’autres paraissent
naturelles. Il montre comment les systèmes de valeurs agro-industriels et technoscientifiques catégorisent
les cohabitants humains et non humains par degrés de statut politique, économique et écologique, en
retraçant certaines périodes traversées par les Malouines, de l’éradication des « nuisibles indigènes » (1833-
1982) à la défense contre les « envahisseurs étrangers » (de 1982 au présent). En guise de conclusion, il
analyse la manière dont les insulaires ont commencé à évincer leur propre passé impérial écologique en
éliminant les espèces « invasives » introduites en provenance des Îles Britanniques et en restaurant l’habitat
natif. L’article avance que l’examen de la manière dont les colons colonisent avec les natifs contribue

considérablement à une anthropologie multispécifique critique, avec des implications plus larges sur les
débats sur l’ethnogenèse et l’autochtonie.
James J.A. Blair is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College, City University of New
York (CUNY). He carried out twenty months of fieldwork from 2012 to 2015 in the Falklands/Malvinas,
Argentina, and the United Kingdom on self-determination, environment, and natural resources.
Brooklyn College, 2900 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn College, City University of New York, NY 11210, USA.
jblair@brooklyn.cuny.edu

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Settler indigeneity and the

eradication of the non-native:

Towards a theory of settler indigeneity, this article captures a narrative of environmental

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Through examination of quotidian practices to ensure biosecurity, this article

The nature of settler indigeneity: a critical multispecies approach

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

imprecisely plural. In response, Eben Kirksey (2015a) draws on ethnographic work

White settler self-determination and the dehumanization of Natives

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

To counter diplomatic resistance, Islanders and their British administrators employ

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

A sheep in wolf’s clothing: rendering natives ‘pests’ (1833-1982)

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Defending against ‘aliens’ and ‘colonizing’ with natives (1982-present)

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Figure 6. Restored tussac grass on Bleaker Island. (Photo by the author.)

Islanders thus harness disgust to authorize the eradication of nonhuman ‘invasive’

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Finally, in addition to practices of colonization with native nonhumans, visiting

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

January 1905, JCNA, B/26.

Gaynor & Toussaint (2008).

B6; 30 November 1850, B7, JCNA.

29 November 1859, JCNA.

anthropomorphism, see Candea (2010); Milton (2005).

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Autochtonie des colons et éradication des non-natifs : autodétermination et

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 580-602

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