Collaborative settler colonial studies: Janne Lahti, introducing ‘Of settler colonial connections and collaborations: a book forum on Sidney Xu Lu’s Collaborative Settler Colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

06Sep26

Excerpt: Sidney Xu Lu’s Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japanese Migration to Brazil in the Age of Empires (University of California Press, 2025) makes a significant contribution to settler colonial studies by expanding the cast and by making settler colonialism to be of connections and collaborations, oftentimes fragile, imperfect, and contested. In Lu’s analysis we get to read of settler colonialism that is multilateral, produced through cooperation among multiple imperial and national actors. This book shows how networks matter, how Japanese on the move became settlers not through direct Japanese territorial conquest, but through collaboration between the Brazilian state, Japanese imperial institutions, private companies, and global racial-capitalist logics. Thus Lu moves beyond the Anglo-phone emphasis of settler colonial histories while showing that settlers did not have to originate from the same imperial power that governed the territory, but how settler colonialism could be enacted through trans-imperial cooperation. In this Book Forum we asked scholars whose expertise blended Japanese, Asian, and Latin America, ranging from literature to local and global histories of diasporas and imperial mobilities to take a look and voice their views on Lu’s book. They were to raise what they perceived as important points in the book, to evaluate its premise, execution, and contribution. As a result, we have a lively set of views and arguments, multiplicity of voices, but also coherence and praise on the value and significance of Lu’s study. Pedro Iacobelli raises the question of colonial ownership by emphasizing how Lu unsettles linear narratives of Japanese history in Brazil, locating them instead within a dense web of inter-state collaboration, intersecting Japanese and Brazilian settler-colonial projects, and enduring ties between Japanese emigrants and Japan’s own settler ambitions. From a literary and methodological standpoint, Shannon Welch highlights how Lu provides a strikingly effective framework for tracing the interactive and overlapping workings of settler colonial power in the modern world. Building on this, John Hennessey underscores Lu’s careful reconstruction of the personal, institutional, and ideological linkages connecting Japanese settler colonialism in Asia to emigration to Brazil, demonstrating with rich empirical detail just how contingent and internally fractured Japanese settler positions were. Mariko Iijima similarly stresses that Lu repositions Japanese settler experiences within expansive global regimes of colonial expansion, land seizure, and racial governance, reframing them as integral – rather than peripheral – to the history of settler colonialism writ large. The Book Forum ends with Sidney Xu Lu’s self-reflective response, in which he elaborates on his views on the book’s purpose, the commentaries, and the broader connotations involved. This marks the third Settler Colonial Studies Book Forum, which we plan to continue as a sustained feature of the journal. The Forum aims to spotlight timely, innovative, and consequential new work in the field, and to place it in generous yet rigorous conversation with a diverse group of experts, in dialogue with the author. As with the previous iterations, we believe this Forum succeeds in bringing cutting-edge settler colonial scholarship into focused, energetic discussion.


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Settlers on the move; still settlers: Monique Woolnough, ‘Reproducing the French-Canadian Settler Collective in Ontario through French Language Rights’, Journal of Law and Social Policy, 38, 2026, pp. 64-86

04Sep26

Abstract: Much of settler colonial theory and studies in Canada has focused on the dominant British settler colonial power, with an emerging spotlight on Quebec. Little attention has been paid to French-Canadian settler colonialism in French-Canadian minority provinces such as Ontario. This research aims to make visible this gap in attention and begin to fill in its contours by understanding how the French-Canadian settler colonial project operates in Ontario through law. Through the application of Indigenous, settler colonial, socio-legal and critical feminist and race theories to a review of narrative themes in the jurisprudence of courts and tribunals interpreting Ontario’s French Language Services Act, including the purposes of the Act, the vulnerability of Francophones and the role of Francophone institutions, the author endeavors to explore the unique ways in which settler colonial consciousness is deployed, reproduced and reinforced in law.


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Indigenous people on the move; still Indigenous: Luis Sánchez-López, ‘Oaxacan Studies: Accompanying Indigenous Oaxacans in Oaxacalifornia’, Latino Studies, 2026

04Sep26

Excerpt: A new interdisciplinary field, which I am calling “Oaxacan studies,” has emerged and is offering important conceptual tools for thinking about Latinidad in local, transborder, and hemispheric contexts. While most of the Anglophone scholarship on Oaxaca has been produced by historians and anthropologists who are not native to the pueblos they write about, a generation of scholars that is Indigenous to Oaxaca’s pueblos is now writing about Oaxaca from the vantage point of migrants and children of migrants who were forced to grow up in diaspora. While these scholars have been trained in various disciplines, their work builds on the community-engaged scholarship produced by scholars such as Michael Kearney, one of the leading anthropologists in this field, who is credited with coining the term “Oaxacalifornia” (Kearney, 1995), the transborder political, cultural, and economic space where Indigenous Oaxacans live. When Kearney passed away in 2009, I was a new member of the Indigenous Binational Front (FIOB), a primarily Oaxacan transborder organization, and was asked to take three scholars (Devra Weber, Lynn Stephen, and Laura Velasco) from Los Angeles to Kearney’s house in Riverside County. Once there, we joined his family, FIOB activists, friends, and colleagues to mourn his passing. Those attending recounted how they had met him, the things he had done for Oaxacan migrants, and then we all sang “Canción Mixteca,” a song that expresses the deep sadness and longing of being away from one’s homeland. At the time, I was unaware of Kearney’s contributions to the field of anthropology and the study of transnationalism, but the regard that the Oaxacan paisanos had for him and the stories they shared of when he helped them in their organizing efforts taught me about the importance of establishing long and committed relationships with the community. In a recent publication, Leisy Ábrego (2024) noted that scholars who center the experiences and well-being of the people they conduct research with “aim to be in accompaniment,” meaning that there is an ethical and political responsibility to those people who serve as research subjects. While each individual Oaxacan scholar has their own relationship with their pueblo of origin and the communities they conduct research with, at the core of Oaxacan studies is this ethic of accompaniment that is anchored in the various social organizations created by the Indigenous Oaxacan community: hometown associations, cultural organizations, religious organizations, student organizations, autonomous political organizations, and nonprofit organizations. Building on Kearney’s legacy, this new generation of Oaxacan scholars is shaping the future of Latinx studies by offering not only new conceptual tools for thinking about Indigeneity within a larger conversation about Latinx heterogeneity but also providing a model of accompaniment that is responsive to the individuals they conduct research with, their pueblos, and their descendants, both here and there.


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The settler’s prohibition: Conner White, Publicans and other bloodsuckers: Enforcement of Indigenous prohibition in colonial British Columbia, 1849-1871, MA dissertation, University of Victoria, 2026

04Sep26

Abstract: For the entirety of their existence, the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia attempted to prevent entirely Indigenous peoples’ access to alcohol. Almost all historians who have worked in this period touch on the liquor issue, but none have set out to fully explain the means by which this control was enacted, and how people, both settlers and Indigenous, reacted to these endeavours. By exploring contemporary letters, newspapers, and journals, this paper will demonstrate the limits of colonial control and emphasize how important the quest to gain that control was. Exhaustive debate played out at every level to figure out the best possible way to prevent a single drop of alcohol from entering Indigenous hands. At the same time, settlers profited greatly off of the illicit trade, as demand for booze remained high. The Indigenous world was, at least somewhat, culturally transformed by the adoption of alcohol. Demand for it remained high as liquor became integrated into cultural activities, took on a symbolic role as an icon of resistance, and as a coping mechanism for those who experienced terrible loss during the smallpox epidemics that ravaged the population. This issue remains relevant today, as British Columbia underwent another failed prohibition in 1916, and continues to experience the ramifications of prohibition in the form of toxic drug deaths, both within Indigenous communities and without


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The waste of settler colonialism: Peng Liu-Nelson, ‘Walking with waste: an Asian American family on Indigenous land’, Children’s Geographies, 2026

04Sep26

Abstract: This paper examines how an Asian American family engages with waste through walking on Indigenous land in the Midwest United States. Drawing on six months of autoethnographic inquiry using the Learning in Places curriculum, I trace how a Chinese American mother and child encounter waste across Minnesota suburban wetlands, urban parkways, a Dakota sacred site, and Chicago’s Chinatown. Rather than treating waste as an object or problem, I approach it as a relational condition through which colonial infrastructures, bodily knowledge, and accountability are negotiated. Analysis of parent–child dialogues, fieldnotes and walking encounters reveals three findings: first, non-Western metabolic logics shape what waste becomes knowable and how; second, when waste flows through infrastructure and bodies, different epistemological accounts are needed to make hidden connections across scales; third, historical inquiry reveals that waste under settler colonialism operates as a compounding temporal condition. The deeper waste is embedded in settler colonial structures, the less materially visible it becomes, and the more labor is required to trace it. This paper contributes to children’s geographies by showing how waste, approached through diasporic epistemologies and intergenerational dialogue, exposes the entangled workings of racialized belonging and accountability across settler-colonial landscapes.


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The settler ‘reserve’: Jonathan Hildebrand, Land, Water, and Memory: Mennonite Settlement and Indigenous Presence in Southern Manitoba, PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2026

04Sep26

Abstract: This dissertation examines the history of a small colonization reserve to ask how prairie land becomes known and accepted primarily as settler agricultural space even if vaguely understood, at some level, as Indigenous land. The land in question – designated for Mennonite migrants to Manitoba from Imperial Russia in 1875 and often referred to as the ‘West Reserve’ – was one of two block settlements provided to Mennonites in the 1870s. In this micro-historical context, I focus on the interactions between settler history-making, land, and geography, to explore the relationships between material and discursive forms of Indigenous land dispossession, and to consider the roles of water and landscape in the formation of settler identity. As West Reserve settlers became more established, they began to historicize and commemorate their presence there, establishing a corpus of historical understandings of this place that grew stronger and more solidified into the late twentieth century. In many ways this body of knowledge established parameters that defined the region as Mennonite, agricultural, settler space. Yet an analysis of state, settler, archival, and oral history sources reveals that this discursive unmaking of Indigenous space was never totalizing, nor were narratives of agricultural ascendancy the only stories of the region’s environment and geography. Indigenous Peoples continued to utilize, live in, and travel through the region throughout the timeframe of this study (roughly from the time of Mennonite arrival well into the twentieth century). Though the reserve was noted for not having any major water bodies within it, its many small creeks and low areas remained intrinsic, if less-emphasized, features of both the environment and people’s experiences of it.


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Seeing and not seeing Indigenous peoples: Alexis N. Goad, The Mutual Construction of Native American Identity in a Settler Colonial Context, PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2026

01Sep26

Abstract: Native American people occupy a unique sociohistorical context within the United States that can render invisible in the modern cultural sphere. This project attempts to investigate the ways that the invisibility of contemporary Native American people contributes to the continuation of the settler colonial project of Indigenous elimination. It is argued that the lack of cultural visibility between Native and non-Native people contributes to a process of inauthentication, where contemporary Natives are unrecognized or delegitimized in their identity. Study 1 found that historicized depictions of Native people are viewed as the most representative of Native American identity per non-Native perceptions. Study 2a offers a qualitative analysis of written responses from open-ended questions regarding non-Native perceptions and expectations of Native people from three different U.S. states. Using experimental methods, Study 2b found that non-Native people are significantly more willing to assign Native identity only when the identity signals are overwhelmingly stereotypical and virtually unachievable. Through interviews with Native people, qualitative analysis in Study 3 found that Native people may put more emphasis on the weight of expectations from other Natives rather than the expectations from non-Natives. The tension between these results and the applicability of a critical framework for further research is discussed.


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Disrupting at the middle school: Lindsay Stallones Marshall, ‘”We ask that this be told fairly”: An assets-based strategy for non-Indigenous teachers teaching Indigenous histories, disrupting settler colonial narratives’, Middle School Journal, 57, 4, 2026, pp. 23-34

31Aug26

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a power structure that relies on reinforcement through schooling. Because middle school is where most students learn the bulk of their K-12 instruction in U.S. history, middle school history classes serve as a powerful site for disrupting harmful settler colonial narratives. But many non-Indigenous teachers, who represent the demographic majority of U.S. middle school teachers, hesitate to teach Indigenous histories for a variety of reasons. This article explores the barriers that discourage non-Indigenous teachers from teaching Indigenous histories and suggests a strategy to overcome them that is appropriate for our positionality, respects Indigenous cultural contexts, and equips students to continue this kind of disruptive historical learning throughout their lives.


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The real adults in the room: Morgan Mowatt, ‘Adultism in Canada and the Indigenous Democratic Alternative’, Democratic Theory, 2026

31Aug26

Abstract: Democracy is a fraught concept in the realm of Indigenous politics. In its western, statecentric forms, it is used to justify colonial and imperialist violence across the globe. While in some of its earliest Indigenous forms, it constitutes a way of being that rejects constitutions of violence and fosters care-centric world-building. Oppression of children (adultism) is taken for granted in western democracies, while many Indigenous nations have children embedded within their legal and political structures for governance, as critical, if not central political agents. In this article I argue that the oppression of children is an overlooked distinction between Indigenous and western democracies and that the centering of children in human governance demonstrates an ontological alternative that provokes new possibilities for emergent non-state democracies.


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Enfolding settler colonialism: Nik Hynek, Levon Ter-Ghazaryan, ‘Spatial–temporal folds in Gaza and the West Bank: Palestinian perspectives on settler-colonial logics’, Territory’, Politics, Governance, 2026

30Aug26

Abstract: Current trusteeship-style proposals for Gaza and accelerated annexation-by-regulation in the West Bank demand an integrated analysis of Palestine. Drawing on Palestinian settler-colonial scholarship and 44 interviews, this article develops the spatial–temporal ‘fold’ as a decolonial geographical heuristic for reading Gaza and the West Bank together. It argues that Gaza’s near-total enclosure and the West Bank’s internally fragmented, asymmetrically permeable space are differentiated folds of a single Israeli settler-colonial formation. Each reorganises mobility, infrastructure, knowledge and political possibility while preserving the structural aim of eliminating Palestinian self-determination and presence. The article advances a grounded Palestinian-centred analytic of enclosure, survival and hope.


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