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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Reconcile or else! Joseph Weiss, Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada, The University of North Carolina Press, 2026

04Aug26

Description: The damaging impact of reconciliation politics. Since the early 2000s, the Canadian government has attempted reconciliation with Indigenous Nations through varied efforts: treaty processes, government commissions, rebranding campaigns for settler-owned businesses, workshops for state and local officials, school curriculum changes, and a recently christened national holiday. However, Joseph Weiss argues, these state-driven initiatives reinforce Indigenous subordination to the settler state. This incisive study of the varied responses from both Indigenous Nations and individuals illuminates how reconciliation is implicated in ongoing colonial erasure. Critically engaging with a variety of fields, including Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, political theory, semiotics, and museum studies, Weiss captures the multiple scales at which these contested dynamics unfold and explores their underlying technologies of erasure. Irreconcilable unpacks how reconciliation offers amends for anti-Indigenous violence while disavowing responsibility for that violence, and argues that settler promises of reconciliation cannot be reconciled to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty. Nevertheless, Weiss illustrates how Indigenous Peoples refuse erasure at every turn, instead building alternate futures and lived worlds that are not always already colonially overdetermined.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Seeing like a settler state: Ting Hui Lau, ‘Seeing like a surveillance state Settler colonialism on the China-Myanmar border’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 16, 2, 2026

03Aug26

Excerpt: Tracing how states see Indigenous peoples—and to what ends—I argue that state vision is not merely about managing populations but is structured by settler-colonial logics of dispossession and the erasure of Indigenous life (Jacobs 2018). I use the term settler surveillance to highlight these settler logics that undergird contemporary surveillance regimes. By settler colonial, I refer to a system premised on the elimination of the native and the reorganization of land and life to sustain global capitalism (Coulthard 2014; Wolfe 2006). This logic is not confined to Indigenous or borderland contexts but is structural to the modern state itself, and increasingly intensified by advancing surveillance technologies (Kauanui 2016; la paperson 2017; Speed 2019). My ethnographic encounters read Scott through this settler-colonial lens to clarify not only how the state sees but why it sees—to seize, settle, and secure its own reproduction.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Beware of inclusion: Theresa Rocha Beardall, Laurel R. Davis-Delano, ‘Inclusive Elimination: How White Americans Oppose Native Nation Sovereignty Using “Our Land” and “Our Laws” Narratives’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2026

03Aug26

Abstract: Native nations in the United States hold inherent sovereignty. Yet, many White Americans oppose this political authority. Drawing on thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses from 558 White Americans reacting to 10 real-world sovereignty scenarios, we identify the ideological mechanism through which this opposition works, which we call inclusive elimination. Inclusive elimination dissolves Native nations’ separate political authority not by excluding them from the United States but by insisting they belong to it. It operates through three inseparable moves. Respondents speak from a settler standpoint, a civic “we” entitled to judge Native authority. They invoke national belonging, declaring that Native lands and citizens are part of the United States and therefore subject to its laws. And they invoke harm, framing Native sovereignty as a threat to non-Native people’s mobility, food safety, and finances. Each move sounds like fairness, but together they convert a relationship between nations into a problem of internal disorder, to be managed by the settler state rather than negotiated between sovereigns. We situate this mechanism within theories of settler colonialism, group position, and colorblind racism, and argue that inclusive elimination names something those theories together imply but do not specify, namely how the language of inclusion itself performs the work of elimination.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

A false self: Chaim Rochester, ‘The false self of the settler state: antisemitic contradictions of the Zionist imaginary’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2026

03Aug26

Abstract: This paper employs psychoanalytic theory and autotheoretical methodology to examine how Zionist discourse reproduces the very antisemitic structures it claims to oppose. Drawing on Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and Green, I argue that Zionism functions as a collective false-self formation—a defensive identity structure that emerged from historical trauma but now operates through melancholic incorporation rather than genuine mourning. The analysis reveals how Zionist ideology transforms Jewish multiplicity into nationalist singularity, attacking the capacity for thought through what Bion terms an “attack on linking.” Through personal vignettes and theoretical analysis, I demonstrate how anti-Zionist Jews become targets of the same dehumanizing logic historically deployed against Jews at large, as the apparatus claiming to protect Jewish communities becomes itself a mechanism of persecution. The paper traces how contemporary antisemitism discourse, particularly through organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), weaponizes expanded definitions to silence Palestinian solidarity while ignoring actual white supremacist threats, ultimately arguing that authentic Jewish safety requires rejecting Zionist capture of Jewish identity.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts

Archives

stats for wordpress