Even more ancient settler indigenising: Cecily Devereux, ‘Eugenic maternalism and the figure of the ‘Indian maiden’ in young women’s organizations: the Wauneita Society and the Camp Fire Girls’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

12Jun26

Abstract: In the early twentieth century in North America, as Philip J. Deloria (Dakota) has observed, non-Indigenous women began to join the men who had been ‘playing Indian’ since the late eighteenth century. This paper considers the Wauneita Society, formed in 1910 as the women students’ organization at the University of Alberta in western Canada. Like the young women’s organization the Camp Fire Girls, also formed in 1910, the Wauneitas’ costumes and performances drew on the figure of the ‘Indian maiden’ that circulated in commercial and popular culture in Canada and the US. This paper draws attention to similarities between the Wauneitas and the Camp Fire Girls, situating both organizations in settler colonial ideologies of eugenic maternalism. It suggests that when white women dressed up as ‘Indian maidens,’ they enacted the ‘logic of elimination’ that Deloria has shown is fundamental to all Indigenous impersonation, while also affirming that the logic of elimination has as its ideological correlative a logic of population. In this register the work of white women as eugenic ‘mothers of the race’ would be central, and the image of the early twentieth-century white ‘Indian maiden’ would index the colonial state’s increasing interference with Indigenous women’s reproductive bodies.


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Iron Maiden’s settler indigenising: Karen Fournier, ‘Asserting the Missing Indigenous Voice in “Run to the Hills”: Iron Maiden (1982); Tanya Tagaq and Damian Abraham (2018)’, in Mike Alleyne, Lori Burns (eds), The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song, Routledge, 2026

12Jun26

Abstract: Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” (1982) tells a story about the history of genocide that is often erased from settler histories about westward expansion and, because of its frank depiction of settler violence against Indigenous communities, the song has been cited as an influence by Indigenous bands like Testify and Testament and by solo artists like Tanya Tagaq. Despite its enormous popularity among fans, critics of the song point to a central paradox: while the song’s lyrics seem to empathize with the plight of the Indigenous communities to which it alludes, every character in the song, including a fictional Cree man who vanishes from the narrative after the introduction, is performed by a settler vocalist (the band’s lead singer, Bruce Dickinson). This contradiction is reflected in the song’s video, which portrays settlers as hapless fools, but which also features white actors in redface whose performances merely reinforce racist stereotypes of the wily or bloodthirsty “Indian.” In 2018, Inuk singer Tanya Tagaq teamed up with punk vocalist Damian Abraham to rework the song in a way that would allow each musician to provide a different perspective on the story. In terms of vocal timbre, Tagaq’s vocal practice depicts what Kateryna Barnes (2021) calls the sounds of Sila, or Mother Earth, while Abraham’s growling gut voice represents what David Pearson (2019) describes as the “(in)humane” sounds of industry. With these sonic contrasts, and a reworking of the song that retains the Indigenous voice throughout, I will argue that the 2018 cover of “Run to the Hills” presents its listener not only with a story about the genocide of Indigenous peoples, but also with an apocalyptic warning about the killing of Sila by settler industrialization.


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Indigeneous AUTONOMY: Shane Barter, ‘Towards Indigenous Territorial Autonomy in Asia’, TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2026

12Jun26

Abstract: A global shift towards decentralisation includes the spread of territorial autonomy for separatist minorities and Indigenous sovereignty movements. These trends and accompanying scholarship have evolved in isolation, to their mutual detriment. This paper has two goals. First, it identifies Indigenous autonomy as one form of territorial autonomy and one manifestation of Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous autonomy resembles mainstream autonomy, but has distinct origins, powers, leadership, and scale. Second, while existing research focuses on Latin America and the Arctic, this paper looks to Asia. I identify four sets of cases: Existing autonomous regions not always seen as Indigenous, Indigenous subregions nested within autonomous regions, special subnational units rarely seen as autonomous or Indigenous, and recognised Indigenous peoples lacking territorial government. A clearer sense of Indigenous autonomy has the potential to deliver renewed, albeit partial sovereignty to Asia’s tribal peoples.


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Settler colonialism on display: Emma Catherine Nagler, Settling the Past: Affect, Display, and the Colonial Uncanny, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2026

10Jun26

Abstract: Settler colonial ideology persists not only through official narratives and explicit beliefs but through perception, affect, and the organization of public space. Using case studies of heritage tourism sites in St. Augustine, Florida, I develop the concept of the colonial uncanny: a historically specific, managed affective disturbance that arises when colonial representations reactivate inherited perceptual and affective orientations. I argue that these environments are structured to afford a particular kind of affective encounter with colonial violence for settler visitors. In settler colonial societies, heritage spaces tend to depict the past in ways that do not disrupt settler legitimacy. This often occurs through erasure and silencing, but not always. Settler societies can also manage the past by making violent histories partially visible in representational modes that both disturb and stabilize settler subjects. I call this structure the colonial uncanny. It emerges when historically sedimented ideological residues and surmounted developmental dispositions are reactivated together, so that colonial ways of seeing momentarily reappear as both unsettling and familiar before being restabilized through modes of containment that convert discomfort into education and thrill. Through comparisons of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum, the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, and the Old Jail Museum, I show that the colonial uncanny is not an intrinsic property of sites but a relational encounter produced between representational environments and historically positioned spectators. I further argue that this encounter operates through an iterative process of construction and containment, through which unsettling colonial histories are made perceptible, managed, and folded back into everyday forms of settler common sense.


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Resisting for sport: Jordan Koch, Robert Henry, Sam McKegney, ‘From locker rooms to change rooms: The Beardy’s Blackhawks and transformative hockey spaces’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2026

10Jun26

Abstract: Ice hockey occupies a central place in Canadian popular culture and national mythology, routinely invoked as “Canada’s game” and as a formative site for producing disciplined and socially valued citizens. At the same time, the sport has been widely critiqued for reproducing racialized exclusion, settler colonial power relations, and other forms of social harm. This article examines the intersections of sport, settler colonialism, and reconciliation through diverse engagements with ice hockey, focusing on the Beardy’s Blackhawks, a U18 AAA boys’ team based in the Beardy’s and Okemasis Willow Cree First Nation in central Saskatchewan. For more than 25 years, the Blackhawks provided Indigenous and settler youth access to elite-level hockey within a culturally grounded First Nations context. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study, including interviews with Indigenous (First Nations and Métis) and settler players, the article traces how a sport historically used as a tool of cultural assimilation in residential schools has been reworked as a site of cultural affirmation, relationship-building, and intercultural exchange. We demonstrate that participation in the Blackhawks fostered community rooted in First Nation values while also prompting settler players to confront and unlearn racialized assumptions. While highlighting hockey’s potential to support reconciliatory relationships, the article also underscores the fragility of such spaces, evidenced by the program’s eventual dissolution and the loss of a rare high-performance pathway for Indigenous youth living on reserve.


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The settler revolution’s global retreat: Aziz Rana, ‘The American Revolution in Global Retreat’, Dissent, 73, 2, 2026, pp. 7-17

09Jun26

Excerpt: In 1899, against the backdrop of the Second Boer War, F.W. Reitz, the Afrikaner State Secretary of the South African Republic, issued A Century of Wrong. Primarily authored by Jan Smuts, who would later become the founding father of apartheid South Africa, the book laid out a long-running list of grievances against Britain, above all defending the right of Afrikaner settlers to independence and self-government: “The hour has struck which will decide whether South Africa, in jealously guarding its liberty, will enter upon a new phase of its history, or whether our existence as a people will come to an end, whether we shall be exterminated in the deadly struggle for that liberty which we have prized above all earthly treasures”.


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Settler bots: Bronwyn Carlson, Tamika Worrell, ‘Robots Behaving Badly: Algorithmic Colonialism and the Consequences of AI’, Journal of Sociology, 2026

09Jun26

Abstract: This article examines the political, social, and relational consequences of artificial intelligence through an anti-colonial and Indigenous lens. Challenging claims that AI is neutral or inevitable, we show that it is embedded in settler-colonial, racialised, and gendered power structures. Across predictive policing, facial recognition, automated welfare, deepfake sexual violence, and embodied robotics, AI does not malfunction; it performs exactly as designed, reproducing historical domination. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and critiques of technological progress, we show how AI amplifies epistemic and material inequalities, particularly for Indigenous women and communities. We unsettle Western techno-futurist imaginaries and instead position Indigenous relationality as a pathway to ethical, accountable, and sovereign AI futures. AI harm is not accidental but systemic and extractive. We call for rejecting AI inevitability and advancing community-led responses that disrupt algorithmic settler colonialism and reimagine intelligence beyond domination.


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Beyond the frontier is still settler colonialism: Hisham Bustan, Elia El-Khazen, ‘Between a rock and Israel: how Jordan’s water and energy arrangements advance settler colonialism’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: This article seeks to reconcile two often-fractured understandings of Israeli settler colonialism: its intrinsic drive for elimination and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its ongoing expansionist strategy, which fosters dependency and ultimately ensures its gradual integration within the broader region. Using the water-energy infrastructural nexus in Jordan as a focal point, the article introduces a new analytical framework centred on three pillars – settler-colonial power, Washington-led international interventionism, and regional diplomacy. It argues that taken together these enable Israel to extend its colonial project beyond territorial borders, and to capture more far-flung territories and populations through energy and water infrastructure deals, thereby reshaping regional power dynamics in ways that have been underexplored in prior scholarship. The study is based on an examination of three intertwined infrastructural projects: the water arrangements established under the 1994 Wadi Araba Peace Agreement, the 2014–2016 Israeli-Jordanian gas deals, and the 2021 Prosperity Project.


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Turquoise settler colonialism: Kristen Barbara Dorsey, From Mines to Native Jewelry Markets: Unravelling the Settler Political Economy of Turquoise, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: This thesis is an inquiry into turquoise, a mineral primarily used as a gemstone in jewelry, and one of many different significant materials used in Southwestern Native American cultures and traditions. Despite the diversity of Native jewelry form and materials, jewelry set with turquoise generally overshadows other types of Native-made jewelry as a coveted and collected object for non-Native consumers. This thesis examines settler desires for turquoise mined from Native homelands through time, starting with the territorial New Mexico colonial political economy of turquoise mining in the 19th century in which settler men attempted to construct a narrative that Native turquoise mines had been abandoned. The mineral is also collected for Victorian curio cabinets and displayed on the bodies of white settler women for whom the gem becomes their connection to dead Native sisters of the female settler imaginary. ii The mineral discussed in this thesis has saturated the Southwest Native American jewelry market for over a century. Today, Native jewelers navigate the enduring settler capitalist structure of the turquoise economy, where white mine owners control access to the uncut gem, and where commodified gems as jewelry function as they have since the 19th century as markers of a culture deemed to be of the past. The story of turquoise is the continuing story of Native dispossession: the theft of Native land and resources and the confinement of Natives to anachronistic space and time. It is also the story of refusal and Native contestation of the story of their disappearance and confinement to prehistory. Gender is central to this quintessential story of dispossession and settler capitalism. From the masculine settler subjects who claim the mines, to the white male ethnographers, to the white settler women who narrate and lend content to the imaginary story of the vanishing Indian and her fantasy of dead turquoise-wearing Native sisters, turquoise proves essential to the making of colonial subjectivities. When Native jewelers sell their turquoise creations in the Santa Fe jewelry market, they must navigate a colonial field of white mine owners and the trading post histories that mark Native labor, creativity, and jewelry as colonial commodities. Gender is central to how these colonial fields can be traversed. If the story of turquoise is the quintessential colonial story of theft and extraction in the Americas and elsewhere, in the Southwestern United States, the story reveals how a single mineral is extracted and commodified into an innocent gem that masks the story of conquest and dispossession. Transformed from a sacred object into an aesthetic object, turquoise tells the story of settler colonialism, revealing the specific gendered procedures and mythologies of settler property regimes in the Southwest.


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Settler role playing (pretendsettling): Albert R. Spencer, Justin Bell, Allyson A. Duarte Vela, Tracie Hoops, Cody Spjut, ‘Dog Eat Dog: A Philosophical Exploration of Settler-Colonialism in Role-Playing Game’, The Pluralist, 21, 2, 2026, pp. 6-22

08Jun26

Excerpt: […] we propose that games are elemental. They embody the interplay of community, engagement, place, and relationality, serving as microcosms of the broader human experience. Games and storytelling are meaning-making processes that define our existence within natural and cultural environments. Role-playing games, like Dog Eat Dog, exemplify the elemental by immersing players in an existential narrative. Dog Eat Dogis not merely a game but an exploration of what it means to be human in an impossible situation. It invites players to reflect on their own responsibilities and roles within our intricate shared web of relationships. These reports present Dog Eat Dogas an example of how games and storytelling can serve as tools for understanding and transforming, through a medium that bridges philosophy, art, and social critique. The game’s structure is simple yet impactful. One player assumes the role of the Occupation, while all other players portray individual Natives of the island. The gameplay unfolds in a series of scenes, framed by a central dynamic: the Occupation enforces a growing list of rules, and the Natives must navigate these constraints to survive, resist, or assimilate. 


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