Treaty is not a contract: Morgan Brigg, Deirdre Howard-Wagner, Natasha McCormack, Sarah Maddison, Kaely Woods, ‘Entangled political institutions and forms: From corporatisation to treaty’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 2026

13Aug26

Abstract: The lands and waters now called Australia have been home to diverse political ordering and institutions for thousands of generations. The comparatively very recent arrival of settlers and the violent imposition of their political structures and institutions have forced First Nations to respond to, adapt to, resist, and refuse colonial authority. While the settler state generally operates in ignorance of or indifference to Indigenous laws and culture, First Nations are burdened with a far more difficult task: to navigate the settler order while also honouring their obligations to Country and people. At this interface, First Nations organisations and institutions operate around and through a complex entanglement of cultural ideas, norms, and values, where the reality of contested jurisdiction and authority is made visible. This article foregrounds these entangled relations to explore the possibilities and limitations presented by Indigenous political formations of diverse kinds—from Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to Indigenous corporations to new representative bodies such as the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria. Rather than ‘failing’, as mainstream political discourse often suggests, these Indigenous governance institutions have adapted, responded, innovated, and evolved, pushing towards greater autonomy and self-determination. This article focuses on the experience, challenges, and innovations of Indigenous communities as they seek to navigate complex relationships with the state using a variety of organisational vehicles.


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Thoreau was a settler (I know, right?) John J. Kucich, Unsettling Thoreau: Native Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Power of Place, University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

12Aug26

Description: Henry David Thoreau’s life-long fascination with Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of interest, and it is also a source of modern debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as “more like an Indian” than his white neighbors. At the same time, Thoreau did little to protest the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people across the country in his lifetime. John J. Kucich charges into this contradiction, considering how Thoreau could demonstrate deep respect for Native American beliefs on one hand and remain largely silent about their genocide, actively happening throughout his life, on the other. Thoreau’s long study of Native peoples, as reflected in so much of his writing, allowed him to glimpse an Indigenous worldview, but it never fully freed him from the blind spots of settler colonialism. Drawing on Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism, as well as new materialist approaches that illustrate Thoreau’s radical reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Unsettling Thoreau explores the stakes of Thoreau’s effort to live mindfully and ethically in place when living alongside, or replacing marginalized peoples. By examining the whole scope of his writings, including the unpublished Indian Notebooks, and placing them alongside Native writers and communities in and beyond New England, this book gauges Thoreau’s effort to use Indigenous knowledge to reimagine a settler colonial world, without removing him from its trappings.


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Slaveholding Indigenous peoples: Rozanne Gooding Silverwood, ‘Reconciling a Sovereign Debt: The FWP Slave Narratives and the History of Chickasaw Slaveholding’, The Oral History Review, 2026

12Aug26

Abstract: From Maryland to Florida, and westward to Kansas, interviewers for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) spread out across seventeen states in the 1930s to record formerly enslaved African Americans’ firsthand accounts of slavery in the American South. Unbeknownst to many oral history scholars, the FWP’s “Oklahoma Slave Narrative” archive holds thirteen distinctive interviews with persons formerly enslaved by Southeastern Native Americans. My discovery of four informants whose narratives refer specifically to influential leaders of my Chickasaw tribe initiated my journey as oral historian and enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation to make sense of a slaveholding past that has been all but erased from Chickasaw media. In this article, I present the historical context of settler colonialism that helped shed light on how Indian nations came to participate in chattel slavery in the antebellum South and Indian Territory. Drawing from primary sources found in my mother’s genealogy archive, I discovered important errors in the FWP interview transcripts—misidentifications of the tribe affiliations of the narrators’ former slaveholders that I believe have enabled many of today’s Chickasaw to disavow the existence of slaveholding ancestors. My comparative reading of these four narratives points to an overlooked political motivation for these narrators’ favorable representations of Indian slaveholders: the narrators’ quest to secure tribal affiliation and citizenship. Yet through these narratives, I have gained a more nuanced understanding of my Indigenous ancestry and a much more profound appreciation of the sovereign debt owed to the Chickasaw freedpeople and their descendants for the survival of my ancestors and our Indigenous nation in the face of territorial loss and colonial catastrophe.


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Healing on-Country: Jacob Prehn, Douglas Ezzy, ‘Our Way on Country: Cultural Determinants of Health, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Men’s Wellbeing’, AlterNative, 2026

10Aug26

Abstract: This article examines how on-Country healing practices operate as cultural determinants of health for Indigenous men in Australia. Country, understood as ancestral lands that embody lore, kinship, spirituality, and identity, remains central to wellbeing, yet few self-determined studies have explored the therapeutic benefits of such programmes. Health disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are stark, with Aboriginal men experiencing some of the most adverse outcomes at the intersection of ethnicity and gender. Drawing on 11 semi-structured interviews, this study identifies four key benefits of on-Country participation: safe expression of Indigenous masculinity, strengthening of cultural identity, holistic improvements to health and wellbeing, and the development of social connections. Framed by settler colonialism and cultural determinants of health, findings suggest how land-based programmes challenge colonial disruptions to culture and identity while fostering holistic wellbeing. The study highlights the importance of incorporating cultural determinants and promoting Indigenous self-determination within health policy and practice.


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Settlers against dinosaurs (of course): Scott Magelssen, ‘Dinosaur Encounters: Settler Colonialism and Planetary Time in South Dakota’s Black Hills’, in Bryan W. Schmidt, Weston Twardowski (eds), Staging Visitation Book Subtitle: Tourist Performances and Theatricalized Places, University of Michigan Press, 2026, pp. 216-234

10Aug26

Excerpt: Time is out of joint in the opening moments of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park, his blockbuster adaptation of Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel. After the movie’s title appears in its now iconic primitivist, African- safari- inspired lettering, the audience is immersed into an exotic and threatening locale in which state- of- the- art technology is pitted against the violent forces of nature. As the scene unfolds, tropical foliage rustles and electric cattle prods flash like lightning in the thickening mist as a crew of local workers attempts to transfer a dangerous dinosaur from its holding pen into its paddock. Primal growls share the soundscape with the ominous minor key notes of John Williams’s score as the workers display fear and apprehension in the face of their unnatural task. A white game warden oversees the operation, looking like a colonial expedition leader in his khaki hunting vest and Australian bush hat. The animal transfer, of course, goes awry. The technology fails to keep the untamed dinosaur in check. The beast (mostly unseen except for a shot of a menacing reptilian eye through an aperture in the holding pen) violently kills a nameless Black worker before the crew can regain control, despite the game warden’s noble attempts to save him.


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Settler genocide is contagious! Ge Tang, ‘Contagious Racial Antipathy: Negotiating Indigenous Genocide Anthony Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1873)’, in Nina Engelhardt, Anja Hartl (eds), Victorian Antipathies: Negative Feelings in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Book, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 201-219

10Aug26

Abstract: I mobilise an analysis of the violent antipathy that Anthony Trollope’s travel writing mediates towards Indigenous Australians to illuminate the under-acknowledged history of genocide in Queensland, a history which, I argue, the author seeks to downplay. Trollope’s expression of profound antipathy towards the racial other stemmed from a collective antipathy pervasive within Queensland’s settler community, but it was also connected to his own corporeal experience of the Australian bush. Trollope’s antipathetic feeling towards the land’s custodians governed his engagement with earlier travel accounts about Australia by his predecessors; his writing, in turn, amplifies and disseminates this emotion, shaping how readers perceived Indigenous Australians and their suffering under British colonisation.


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Settler experimentation, in isolation: Erik Olssen, The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand, 1769–1860, Auckland University Press, 2025

10Aug26

Description: The history of New Zealand explained through powerful beliefs and the people who held them. In this major work, one of our leading historians offers a new account of the origins of New Zealand: how Pākehā settlers – nurtured on Enlightenment thought and evangelical humanitarianism – encountered Māori, and how the two peoples together developed a distinctively experimental society. With James Cook’s arrival in 1769 and the subsequent colonisation, New Zealand became one of the few post-Enlightenment experiments in creating a new nation anywhere in the world. The Europeans who settled these islands brought with them a belief in the power of reason and experience to improve peoples and societies. Encounters between Māori and these new arrivals profoundly shaped the thoughts and behaviours of both peoples. Olssen argues that the people who settled New Zealand planned two experiments in making a better society. They hoped that, in contrast to earlier colonial projects, the indigenous New Zealanders would not be driven to extinction but eventually take their place as equals in a modern commercial society. And they aimed to create a society that was fairer and more just than the one they had left behind; a ‘Better Britain’. While both experiments were first conceived by savants and philosophers, they gained ongoing support, by lodging in the hearts and minds of the settlers: whalers and missionaries, mothers and farmers. In turn, Māori adapted these new ideas to their own ends, giving up slavery and inter-tribal warfare, and adapting the institutions of the colonisers in ways that would re-define the experiments. This then is an ethnography of ‘tangata Pākehā’, a people of European descent changed by their encounters with ‘tangata Māori’ and their land – just as Māori were themselves changed – and the story of the society they built together. Ranging across intellectual and cultural history, from the beach at Paihia to the coffee houses of Paris, Olssen enables us to understand the origins of New Zealand anew.


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Settlers heading out: Richard Redgrave, ‘The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home’, 1858 (Tate Britain)

10Aug26

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Settler colonialism impacts planetary health: Kathryn Stone, Jeremy Perkins, Sarah Plank, Nicole Bates-Eamer, Julia Albert, Heather Castleden, ‘Radical, transformative, or decolonial? A systematic review of The Lancet Planetary Health’s progress on embracing Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems’, The Lancet: Planetary Health, 2026, #101476

09Aug26

Summary: All life on earth is affected by the intensifying impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Planetary health science is emerging as a crucial framework to address the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems have evolved over millennia and are grounded in principles such as interconnectedness of all living things. As a discipline, the tenets of planetary health draw upon Indigenous science and approaches; however, the extent of ethical engagement has not been examined. We conducted a systematic review of all articles published in The Lancet Planetary Health up to October 2025, to assess the recognition and integration of Indigenous knowledge systems. 1137 of 1172 articles reviewed contained no Indigenous research features or perspectives. Although the number of articles engaging with Indigenous knowledge systems has increased over time, these publications are predominantly commentaries, with relatively few original research articles. The Lancet Planetary Health was launched with the aim of informing a “radical civilisational transformation”. Based on the findings of this systematic review, we suggest that decolonising planetary health science should be integrated into this civilisational transformation.


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Settlers do not make the land wealthy: Rui Wang, Yang Zhou, ‘Japanese colonial settlement and long-run rural income in Northeast China: evidence from the “Kaitakudan”’, Applied Economic Letters, 2026

09Aug26

Abstract: This study examines whether Japanese colonial settlement in Manchuria has affected contemporary rural income. We construct a novel dataset covering 290 districts across Northeast China, and employ an instrumental variable strategy, based on the 1934 Japanese population share, to identify the effect as cleanly as the historical setting allows. Our district-level analysis reveals a robust negative association between colonial settlement and present-day rural income, which is consistent with the long-run persistence of colonial institutions on rural development beyond the European colonial context.


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