Discontinued in 1976! Harrison W. Mark, ‘Homestead Act: Settling the American West’, World History Encyclopedia, 24/07/26

06Aug26

Excerpt: The Homestead Act was a policy enacted by the United States government on 20 May 1862 to encourage westward expansion. Passed during the American Civil War (1861-1865), the act offered 160 acres (65 ha) of public domain land to any citizen who had never taken up arms against the federal government. Though the land did not cost any money, it was not completely free. Prospective farmers were required to live on and ‘improve’ the land for five years before the property would legally become theirs. Though a large percentage of farms would fail, the Homestead Act encouraged hundreds of thousands of American families to move out West. Before it was discontinued in 1976, the act led 270 million acres of land to be claimed and settled by US citizens.

From this entry:


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Extractive settler colonialism (they still need the land): Merle Davis Matthews, Producing Mineral Futures: Mineral Exploration, SettlerCapitalism, and the Search for Potential in Ontario, PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2026

06Aug26

Abstract: This dissertation investigates processes ‘upstream’ of mineral extraction in Ontario, Canada- a key jurisdiction in the global mining industry. Critical analyses of mining have largely focused on operating mines. I examine the processes of discovering and delineating mineral deposits, understudied despite their significance for where, how, and with what social and environmental consequences mining occurs. My research looks upstream of mining in order to understand the knowledge practices, financial instruments, policies, and social relations that undergird extraction and its effects, building on this geographic tradition and extending it through asking, how are extractive futures re/produced? In looking upstream of extraction, I speak to a strand of radical geography scholarship that illuminates potential futures. Through examining how potential is produced by and through mineral exploration, my work interrogates the ways in which potential is used to reproduce capitalist and settler-colonial relationships. I ask what an understanding of how extractive capital and colonial governance structures absorb crises and use them as an opportunity to extend their reach, can teach scholars about the work of scaffolding alternatives.


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Settler populism is a response to settler crisis: Andrew Varsanyi, Authorized Agent: Alonzo Wardall and the Settler-Colonial Backlash on the Middle Border, 1861–1918, PhD dissertation, The University of Nebraska, 2026

06Aug26

Abstract: This dissertation recovers the life and work of Alonzo Wardall (1845–1918) to argue that the Populist revolt of the late nineteenth century was, at its core, a rebellion against the collapse of the settler-colonial economy. Known to contemporaries as the “father of cooperatives,” Wardall, a Union veteran, Iowa farmer, and tireless cooperative organizer, spent four decades as an “Authorized Agent,” the principal salesman and business manager, for farmers’ cooperative businesses. Settlers, like Wardall, who came West in the 1850s and 1860s expected that free land and hard labor would secure their independence. Republican Reconstruction broke that promise, rebuilding the economy around railroads, eastern capital, and big business. The middle-class revolt that followed is best understood as “Middle Border Populism,” a liberal, entrepreneurial, petit-bourgeois radicalism native to the borderland stretching from the Midwest across the Plains and into the Canadian Prairies. Wardall’s career as a middle-class radical questions the chronological categorization that merges Populism with Progressivism, highlights a transnational geography often overlooked due to the field’s emphasis on Kansas and Texas, and challenges the enduring image of Populists as backward provincials—demonstrating that middle-class radicalism has never been exclusive to the left or the working class.


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There are settlers there: Youssef Mnaili, Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank: Indirect Governance, Settlers and Violence, Bloomsbury, 2026

06Aug26

Description: The Occupied Palestinian West Bank is central to the Israeli colonial project. It serves as a significant example of occupation. Yet little is understood about how Israeli rule over this area operates. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Israel and Palestine, including interviews with state officials, settlers and military personnel, this book examines the evolution of Israeli rule over the West Bank since 1967. The book situates this post-1967 machinery within the longer history of the Zionist settler-colonial project, revealing that contemporary state-settler dynamics reproduce a division of labour with roots that predate 1948. In the book, Youssef Mnaili argues that Israeli governments have increasingly relied on Jewish settlers, approximately 700,000 civilians established in the occupied territories to perform key security and administrative roles. This reliance allows the state to distance itself from controversial practices such as surveillance and violence. Rather than representing a fundamental rupture, the disagreements between state and settlers reflect a shared colonial logic:one camp produces facts on the ground whilst the other produces legitimacy. At the same time, however, the book reveals that a paradox emerges: while the Israeli government attempts to regulate the settlers, it inadvertently strengthens their control over the land, rendering the occupation effectively permanent.
In highlighting the state’s dependence on settlers for military recruitment and ground operations, Youssef Mnaili offers a unique perspective on the shifting power dynamics between the Israeli state and the settlers. He concludes that the state-settler relationship is not a disagreement over whether to pursue the colonial project, but rather a division of labour over how to run it, how fast, and at what cost. Any durable resolution to the occupation must therefore reckon with this shared foundational commitment.


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It’s not settler colonialism if it is not racist: Jorden Hendry, Robin Smoker-Peters, ‘Indigenous-Specific Anti-Racism as the Foundation for Indigenous Cultural Safety in Health Systems’, Healthcare Management Forum, 2026

04Aug26

Abstract: Indigenous-specific racism in the health system perpetuates significant harm for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples despite extensive system-wide commitments to Indigenous Cultural Safety. This article argues that Indigenous-Specific Anti-Racism must be foregrounded as a foundational approach to achieve Indigenous Cultural Safety. Indigenous Cultural Safety was developed to address conditions that make care unsafe for Indigenous Peoples; however, limitations in its implementation restricts its ability to confront settler colonialism, institutional power, and produce structural change. These limitations include its reduction to culturally responsive approaches, siloed cultural safety training that operates independently of organizational culture, and a focus on patient-provider interactions rather than systems-wide transformation. Indigenous-Specific Anti-Racism is a structural, action-oriented approach grounded in Indigenous thought leadership, inherent Indigenous rights, and relational accountability, focused on dismantling racist settler colonial structures. This discussion highlights the requirement of explicitly naming racism, locating institutional responsibility, and embedding anti-racism in decision-making.


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The frontier of the settler ‘frontier’: Raymond Isaac Orr, Raina Heaton, Kun Lu, Ryan Dubnicek, Isabella Magni, Nikolaus Parulian, ‘Pushing Back against the Frontier: Native American Writing on Western Expansion’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal , 49, 2, 2026, pp. 107-126

04Aug26

Excerpt: Authors’ words are the center of literary expression and analysis. In addition to “close reading” and qualitative approaches to literature, there is a growing interest in using computer-assisted text-mining to understand patterns in written expression.1 By counting the use of certain key terms and other terms in their proximity for context, text-mining finds potential patterns in literary texts on a large scale. Computer-assisted text analysis is an automated extension of coding interviews or other materials in the social sciences, but at a larger scale. Whereas an individual is unable to read and directly compare 10,000 works, computer-assisted programs may examine millions. Computer-assisted text-mining studies can offer greater confidence about the nature of language and its change across time, as well as differences between certain populations.2 For instance, a recent study in the field of linguistics found that recent works published in English used more individualistic terms such as “I” or “me” compared to work published a century ago, with the possible implication that society grew more self-referential or self-focused over this period.


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Boarding schools were for settlers: Jean Reith Schroedel, Melissa Rogers, Edward Headington, ‘Indian Boarding Schools for the Gain of White Settlers: A Case Study of Rapid City Indian School’, Journal American Indian Culture and Research Journal , 49, 2, 2026, pp. 149-174

04Aug26

Excerpt: Over the past thirty years, there has been a growing body of research on Indian boarding schools. Researchers using the settler colonial framework as developed by Wolfe and others1 have shown that the primary purpose of the federal government’s Indian boarding school policy was not to provide education to Native children,2 but to facilitate the dispossession of Native lands.3 The goal was for reservation lands to become “surplus” as tribal members adopted the Euro-American methods of farming taught in Indian schools.4 As part of that effort, the boarding schools were required to teach children that the 1887 Dawes Act, its amendments, and the allotment of tribal lands—a policy that resulted in a massive transfer of land to white settlers—was a benefit to their communities.5 Scholars have focused on giving voice to the Native perspective on boarding schools. Drawing upon archived oral histories, interviews with former students, and student-parent letters, these researchers highlight Native agency, resistance, and community building.


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Settler colonialism makes Indigenous peoples sick: Bram Wispelwey, Lana Ray, Dina Hamideh, Steven De La Torre, Nadine Bahour, Artair Rogers, David Mills, Eric Hekler, ‘Constructing the Settler Colonial Determination of Health: Causality by Other Means’, Social Science & Medicine, 2026

04Aug26

Abstract: Indigenous communities have long identified settler colonialism as foundational in conditioning health and wellbeing, and its role as a structuring force is increasingly recognized within population health. Yet analytic frameworks in the health sciences have limitations in representing its causal dynamics, with dominant epidemiologic approaches relying on causal assumptions—linearity, discrete exposures, and stable pathways—that are misaligned with its theorized properties as a dynamic, transtemporal, and adaptive social process. To investigate settler colonialism, we argue for epistemic fit across three interdependent layers: teleological clarity regarding the purposes orienting inquiry and the competing social visions at stake, including commitments to relationality rather than domination; ontological precision in mapping settler colonialism’s functions to their context-specific manifestations; and methodological approaches capable of representing feedback, emergence, conditioning, and historical dependence. Drawing on theory construction methodology, we develop a provisional framework for the settler colonial determination of health. Within this framework, settler colonialism is conceptualized not as a discrete determinant among others, but as a conditioning and transtemporal social formation that shapes institutions, processes of racialization and gendered power, and ultimately health outcomes. We outline implications for empirical research, highlighting configurational, dynamic, and systems-oriented approaches as strategies for representing settler colonialism’s multi-causal and adaptive impacts on health. By extending existing population health frameworks, this approach provides a foundation for developing empirically tractable models that more adequately represent settler colonialism’s relational, historical, and adaptive dynamics. Advancing such approaches is essential for generating explanations—and ultimately interventions—commensurate with health inequities in settler colonial contexts.


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Settler colonialism on display: Logan Douglas, British settler colonialism and the South African National Gallery, PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2026

04Aug26

Abstract: The South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, was founded and functioned as a British colonial institution, designed to encourage cultural imperialism within the Cape Colony. It was forced to shift this founding focus as British influence in South Africa waned and the nation defined its own identity. This dissertation examines SANG’s proximity to the British settler colonial project and investigates how this proximity reveals the limitations of the latter in South Africa, from 1871 to 1961. It relies on records from SANG’s colonial archive, the National Library of South Africa and the Iziko Art Collections Library in Cape Town, as well as from the Tate Gallery, City of Westminster Archives and the National Archives, Kew in London. In reading archival sources through the framework of Anne Stoler’s “reading along and against the grain,” what is shown is how the gallery’s reliance on British visual culture and British arts institutions created tensions which mirror those in British settler colonialism. This dissertation is situated within the intersection of colonial museology, South African-British colonial history, and South African art history. It analyzes SANG’s founding and its imbrication with colonial land dispossession. It investigates the materiality and impact of gifts made by British industrialists including Alfred Beit and Alfred de Pass. It reveals the gallery’s shifting relationship with the Empire Art Loan Collections Society and the Tate Gallery. It examines SANG’s engagement with indigenous African art and its constructions of the “primitive,” supported by John Paris and Irma Stern. The artifice, fragility and hypocrisy of the British settler colonial project reverberating through South African constructions of white supremacy and nation-building is revealed. This dissertation reframes museums including SANG and their colonial archives as institutions which reveal the particulars of the construction and vulnerabilities of systems of colonization and white supremacy.


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Familial settlerism: Erich Steinman, ‘Investigating the Settler Colonial Structuring of the United States: The Family Place Portfolio’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2026

04Aug26

Abstract: Settler colonialism is increasingly recognized as an aspect of United States history and society. But understanding how settler colonialism is an ongoing structure rather than a historical event that happened in the past is challenging for current students to grasp. The processes and acts that initially dispossessed most Indigenous land in North America and gave settlers access to it occurred prior to the twenty-first (and twentieth) century. This article describes a pedagogical tool that works to illuminate these processes and through them, the settler colonial structuration of the United States. Through the Family Place Portfolio, students research their own family’s presence in North America, the history of one place meaningful to their family, and the Indigenous history of that place. Critical attention is paid to processes of racialization and the differential access to land, rights, and status. Expressed in a visual portfolio, students’ research regarding these interlinked components reveals some of the moments and places where American settler colonialism as structure gradually took form and was put into place.


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