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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Feminism as a settler colonial weapon: Roberto Israel Rodriguez Soriano, ‘The construction of the “indigenous woman” in Mexico: civilizing strategy and hegemonic feminism’, EntreDiversidades, 23, 2026

29Aug26

Abstract: This paper examines the construction of the figure of the “indigenous woman” in Mexico and its instrumentalization in the consolidation of colonialism. Arguments are offered to support the thesis that both colonialism and certain feminist discourses have used the categorical construct of the “indigenous woman” to justify a civilizing process that perpetuates historical power imbalances. It analyzes how Enlightenment feminism, with its universalist premises, has contributed to the perpetuation of colonialism through the systemic neglect of the oppressed experiences of racialized women. The paper highlights the role of feminism in the construction of the figure of the “indigenous woman” as a civilizing alibi to justify forms of domination. The paper also addresses critiques of hegemonic Western feminism from decolonial perspectives, which question the homogenization of racialized women and the imposition of a normative binary. In this sense, concepts such as “intersectionality” and the “matrix of domination” are explored to analyze the simultaneous oppression based on race, class, and gender.


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Indigeneity is misrepresentation: Delaney Johnson, Ainu (mis)representation: A close reading of contemporary Japanese media, MA dissertation, University of Victoria, 2026

29Aug26

Abstract: The concept of the Japanese nation, the “identity” of the Japanese people, and the external and internal political, ethnic, and historical relationships Japan has fostered have often been precariously feeble. These concepts, I argue, are especially prevalent regarding Japan’s relationship with the Ainu, the peoples Indigenous to Japan’s northernmost island, in Hokkaido. From the Tokugawa period (1600 C.E.–1868 C.E.) to the Meiji era (1868 C.E.–1912 C.E.), Japanese governmental bodies deployed significant colonial tactics either to culturally assimilate Ainu peoples into Japanese society or to alienate and ostracise Ainu communities to create an “exoticized” aesthetic and marked spatial “difference” from Japanese culture. It is the latter description which is central to this thesis and is the main method identified by which Ainu peoples are represented in modern Japanese-made media. This project includes a selection of primary works— Osamu Tezuka’s 1962 comic, Yuusha Dan, and Rintaro’s 1985 animated film, Kamui no Ken—as the basis for evaluation. This thesis aims to explore a broader discussion of Japanese creative works within historical contexts by performing a close reading of Yuusha Dan and Dagger of Kamui. Utilising frameworks, such as Tessa Morris Suzuki’s commentary on mass media’s representations of historical narratives, Sidney Xu Lu’s discussion of Malthusian expansionism, and Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” this analysis uncovers that contemporary Japanese media of the later twentieth century represents Ainu peoples and Ainu ancestral lands within mystifying, phantasmal, and exotic pretenses, thus perpetuating Meiji era colonial paradigms of Ainu peoples. In identifying these themes, this research underscores the intersection where Ainu myths become a foundation for the practical necessity of Japanese colonial realities, and how these notions are repeated and reinterpreted into modernity.


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Melancholy against settler colonialism: Rhiannon Cobb, ‘”Melancholy is a utopian feeling”: affect as antidote to the bionecropolitics of settler colonialism in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: This article takes up settler colonialism in Canada as operating within a ‘bionecropolitical’ structure, the main aim of which is the possession of land. The structure excludes-yet-retains Indigenous peoples toward that aim, absorbing into state-sanctioned institutional processes what can reify its legitimacy, and rejecting whatever threatens it. One method for achieving this is moralizing discourses, which frame Indigenous resistance as a danger to the nation. These discourses exclude-yet-retain Indigenous claims to sovereignty, epistemologies and ontologies, but also emotional affective responses to a history of colonial violence. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission exemplifies how settler institutions contain and moralize Indigenous trauma within a sanitized framework to absolve the settler state and moralize it against contestations and their affective bases that are inconvenient, unintelligible, and delegitimizing to the state. Within settler colonialism’s fragile imaginary, affects that threaten the national image of reconciliation and chronological progression from the country’s colonial past are actively undermined and characterized as a threat to peace and cohesion. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry disrupts this epistemological order by foregrounding unintelligible affects– such as grief and melancholy—offering the possibility of queer Indigenous futurity. A To conclude, the article offers an epistemological shift toward ‘not-knowing’ from the theoretical coalitions between queer of color theory and Indigenous thought proposed in the work of Belcourt and Jodi Byrd.


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Schooling is a settler colonial institution: Alyssa Lyons, ‘(Im)mutable resources: the settler colonial discourse of school websites’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: Scholarly discussions on educational inequality in the United States have given much attention to the role resources play in maintaining and (re)producing inequalities between schools. However, little attention has been given to how schools as settler colonial institutions make meaning of resources. Through a critical discourse analysis of thirty-one school websites, this paper uses settler colonialism as a conceptual framework to understand how schools’ positioning of resources reflects and (re)constitutes racialized and classed resource acquisition, control, maintenance, hoarding, and dispossession in New York City public schools.


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Settler colonialism is all devouring: Eden Kinkaid, Noah Schlager, Ellen Platts, ‘Settler colonial space-time and the storying of southern Arizona’s foodscapes’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: In 2015, The City of Tucson, Arizona became recognized as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, a title that has become central to its food tourism efforts and other projects of “gastrodevelopment.” This title recognizes Tucson’s unique and diverse food heritage and agricultural histories, which have been molded into a food story that has been articulated in the application to UNESCO and in local media and branding materials. This food story – a set of narratives about the region that have congealed into a more or less standardized form – is not merely a story, but holds symbolic and economic value for those telling it. In this article, we ask: what stories are told about Tucson’s food histories, and who is telling them? Through an analysis and reflection on local food media, we approach Tucson’s ‘official’ food story as a settler food story: a form of narration that centers and upholds white and settler conceptions of heritage, space, and place. Our analysis demonstrates how Indigenous knowledge and practices are portrayed as part of the past, separate from ‘modernity’; how Indigenous spaces are imagined as empty frontiers awaiting discovery by cunning white artisans and curious consumers; and how white subjectivities, discourses, and practices of consumption occupy the center of Tucson’s ‘official’ food story. In closing, we argue that these story lines – ones which operate under the banner of gastronomic ‘multiculturalism’ – play a role in reproducing forms of historical erasure, symbolic violence, and inequity within Tucson’s mainstream gastrodevelopment project and contemporary food system. In closing, we call for these stories to be pluralized, reimagined, and brought into alignment with food justice and Indigenous food futures.


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Indigenous and Black Resistance against settler colonialism: Crystal McKinnon, ‘Australia and the United States — Racial Violence and Indigenous and Black Resistance’, SPLC, 18/08/26

28Aug26

Excerpt: Understanding settler colonialism and its long and ongoing histories of colonial and racial violence requires us to begin with invasion and first contacts. 


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