This short essay is part of an Interrogations book forum on Claire Blencowe's Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025)
Reading Claire Blencowe’s Spirits of Extraction, I began to reflect on how Blencowe was ‘espiriting settler-colonialism.’ A brief search on google for ‘enspiriting’ yielded the word inspiriting. Inspiriting means to fill with vigour. I felt that Spirits of Extraction warranted a different meaning of enspiriting, one that could mean making visible the often invisible spirits that infuse settler colonial processes, techniques and infrastructures.
Chapter three of the book, for example, focuses on education as infrastructure for settler colonial Methodism. The setting up of an education system was, in fact, a means of structural psychic and a materially gendered/two-spirit dispossession of the Ojibwe or Anishnaabegpeople. The term ‘enspriting’ exposes how Methodist christianity infused education for the purpose of settler colonial dispossession. The book speaks of spirits of extraction in relation to the entangled ways in which religion and materiality infused settler colonial techniques of dispossession.
Blencowe identifies how one strand of settler colonialism represented itself as civilising and humanitarian, a ‘rescue of the native’ narrative, in opposition to the bad, rapacious settler colonialism that left the natives in a bad state. This civilising and humanitarian settler colonialism invested in what Claire calls ‘redemptive futurity’, the process of redemption through work and suffering. Redemptive futurity, for the miners of Bristol in the UK, waslinked to the transnational processes of settler colonialism – through the ability to work in mines on the lands of native peoples. Thus, settler colonialism was deemed redemptive for the miners of Bristol. For the Anishnaabeg peoples, settler colonial Christianity was conveyed as redemption for the future, attainable through conversion and through work.
Redemptive futurity is associated with reproductive futurity in the book:
‘the forms of life that nineteenth century settler-colonials were cultivating (and quasi-defying) were not only those oriented towards the reproductive futurity of the biological, evolutionary species of life but were also orientated toward redemptive futurity, grounded in experiences of extraction, wherein seemingly infinite powers of energy and plasticity surge to freedom by escaping depths, and wherein Satan’s power and human weakness are equated with stasis and staying with the earth’ (Blencowe, 2025: 25)
The spiritual valence of extraction is gleaned from the act of mining itself. To mine, to extract something from the earth, is redemptive and productive. It entails the release of copper from the depths of a Satanic ridden earth. This redemptive process for the souls of the settler colonials simultaneously entails the settler colonial process of devastating and dispossessing Anishinaabewaki. Anishnaabewaki for the Anisnaabeg peoples is the land and all its life. This redemptive futurity is settler colonial futurity dependant on the attempted destruction of an Anishinaabe futurity.
There are many layers to the conception of redemptive futurity. Redemptive futurity involves redeeming a future for the settlers by seizing native land and extracting minerals from that land. Redemptive futurity also entails reproductive futurity, i.e., reproducing whiteness biologically and reproducing methodism in religious terms.
And while these settler acts are deemed redemptive for the Anishinaabe peoples, in fact theyare an attempted devastation of the futurity of Anishinaabe peoples as well as their lands (their reproductive/biological futurity as well as their ontological relationality with their lands).
Importantly, Blencowe points out that this nineteenth century futurity is not a past event, but a structural discourse and practice of settler colonialism. As such, it is ongoing. Its effects can be understood in continuing forms of education infrastructure, through the ‘sovereign abuse drive’, through gendered and sexual violence.
For example, in 2012, 325 First nations in what is now called Canada brought a lawsuit against the Canadian government. These nations sought reparations for the violence, the physical, emotional and sexual abuse that 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children faced. The children were taken from their families and placed in settler established residential schools. Indigenous communities have found unmarked graves on the grounds of these former residential schools. The Canadian government have settled for 2.8 bn Canadian to be placed in a ‘not-for-profit trust to support "healing, wellness, education, heritage, language and commemoration activities" for indigenous Canadians over the course of 20 years’(Halpert 2023).
Blencowe cites Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Audra Simpson who speak of the centrality of abuse, of gendered and sexualised shaming, to settler colonial processes (2025:160). Based on this discussion, Blencowe argues for thinking through ‘the sovereign abuse drive’ as part of the sovereign death drive that Audra Simpson identifies. Here settler colonial sovereignty’s imperative is to ‘eliminate Indigenous women’ and kinship structures which pose an embodiment of alternate systems of sovereignty. Blencowe’s argument for the sovereign abuse drive is part of the necropolitical death drive that Simpson identifies. Here, dispossession is expansive (Betasamosake’s Simpson’s term): dispossession is the removal of the gendered body from its ‘grounded normativity’ (qtd. in Blencowe, 2025: 161).
This powerful association of racialised, religious and gendered interweaving of the reproductive and the spirits of religious settler colonial activity enables us to think through the forms of religion-based settler colonial activity and their different formations in variations of settler colonial life.
Currently, US President Trump’s initiated ‘Board of Peace,’ following UN Security Council resolution 2803, is gearing up for its operations to ‘reconstruct’ Gaza even as Israeli genocide appears to be ongoing to date. We need to ask ourselves how might we understand both Israeli genocidal engagement in Gaza, and the Trump Peace Plan, as an attempt to foreclose Palestinian futurity? There is a humanitarian veneer, for example, that has been furnished in the Trump Peace Plan. When President Trump unveiled the Peace Plan in 2025, they stated that Gaza would be ‘redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough’ (BBC News 2025). Here, humanitarianism provides the veneer of redemptive futurity barely masking settler colonialism, i.e., redeeming the settler colonials from their genocidal activity, even if most of us who have been witnessing the genocide live, escalated since October 2023, can see through this genocidal humanitarianism.
In this redemptive and reproductive futurity, the futurity of billionaires and millionaires (across Western and Arab Gulf states) is based on the attempted elimination of Palestinian natives and a dispossession from their land. Toufic Haddad (2025) cites Israeli finance minister Betzalel Smotrich statement at a Tel Aviv real estate conference to illustrate this futurity: “We have paid a lot of money for this war’ and ‘have to see how we are dividing up the land percentages.’ As Haddad (2025) argues: there is ‘a carnival of necrophilia – where cronyism meets cynicism, meets bankruptcy of the highest moral and political orders.’ This carnival, Haddad (2025) states ‘is unconscionable in its depravity’ No amount of humanitarian washing can cleanse or redeem settler colonial genocide and dispossession.
In the case of the Ojibwe peoples, no amount of Methodist redemptive futurity can wash off attempted settler colonial biological and cultural genocide. Spirits of Extraction (2025) exposes the redemptive futures of settler colonial extractivism and dispossession at the level of discourse, land, race, religion, gender and sexuality.
References
BBC News. 2025. Trump's 20-point Gaza peace plan in full. BBC News, 9 October. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70155nked7o
Blencowe, C. 2025. Spirits of Extraction Christianity, settlercolonialism and the geology of race. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Haddad, Toufic. 2025. GREAT, GITA INC: Gaza as a laboratory for a MAGA overseas empire. New Arab, 7 October. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/great-gita-inc-gaza-laboratory-maga-overseas-empire
Halpert, M. 2025. Canada settles residential schools lawsuit for $2.8bn. BBC News, 21 January. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64362246
United Nations Security Council. 2025. Resolution 2803 (2025). 17 November. https://docs.un.org/en/s/res/2803%282025%29
How to cite this article: Osuri, Goldie (2026), "Notes on enspiriting settler-colonialism." Interrogations, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18714583
