Pleading settlers: Darren Reid, ‘Letters to the Editor as Performative Imperial Citizenship: Settler Letters to British Newspapers in the late Nineteenth Century’, Britain and the World, 19, 1, 2026

05May26

Abstract: This article examines the role of letters to the editor in British newspapers as a medium for settlers in self-governing British colonies to perform imperial citizenship during the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a dataset of 125 letters from 1860–1900, it highlights how settlers used the participatory nature of the British press to navigate the economic, military, and political structures that remained under British influence after colonial self-governance. By leveraging British public opinion through these letters, settlers sought to address obstacles such as local governmental inefficiencies, unfavorable portrayals in the British press, and challenges from imperial policies and corporate power. The article problematizes historiographical distinctions between political and cultural imperial citizenship. It reveals the persistence of British influence in settler colonies through the guise of public opinion. It emphasizes the constraints imposed by class and editorial gatekeeping on who was afforded the opportunity to perform imperial citizenship through the participatory press. And it argues that letters to the editor were not only tools of individual agency but also windows into the complex and interwoven cacophony of lived experiences of empire within the late nineteenth-century settler colonies.


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Teaching as a right relation: Aimee de Ney, Remembering Right Relations: A Land-Centered Framework for Settler Teacher Transformation, PhD dissertation, Antioch University, 2026

05May26

Abstract: Settler colonialism is based in the separation of peoples from Lands and from one another, producing ongoing harm to human and more-than-human communities as evidenced in climate collapse, racialized violence, war, and widening social inequities. These conditions are sustained by ideologies of human supremacy—specifically white, male, Christian human supremacy—that deny personhood to most humans and to all more-than-humans, while enabling the attempted erasure of Indigenous peoples and the nation-state enforcement of anti-Black and anti-Brown racism. Situated on the Lands of the Coast Salish Peoples in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, this multiparadigmatic innovation dissertation develops a Land-centered framework for supporting settler teachers in transforming toward relational worldviews that re-situate humans as part of Land. Grounded in decolonial Land-and-water education (Bruce et al., 2023; Calderón, 2014; Calderón et al., 2021; Lees et al., 2023; Lees & Nelly, 2024; Tuck et al., 2014), this framework is designed to unsettle settler epistemologies while centering Land. Organized through a seasonal, circular structure, the framework engages three primary interrelated spheres: turning to Indigenous leadership, Land as first teacher, and unsettling the settler. These spheres inform the disruption of settler colonial values and the reclamation of Land-based values, resulting in four seasonal themes: unsettling/(re)stor(y)ing; trauma-informed ceremony; embodying lifeways; and service/activism. The framework emerged through its enactment as research methodology and is presented as praxis for bringing settlers into relational iv accountability (Wilson, 2008) with Lands and their peoples in service of their liberation, including Indigenous resurgence, Indigenous futurities, and the rematriation of Indigenous Lands to their peoples.


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The waters of settler colonialism: Alana Sayers, Revitalizing Hupač̓asatḥ navigational knowledge: Mapping the waters of settler-colonialism using a critical, coastal, community-based consciousness, PhD dissertation, University of Victoria, 2026

05May26

Abstract: The author views this dissertation as a curation of knowledges (generational, lived experience, and academic) designed to reveal how Hupač̓asatḥ First Nation has been racialized, one of the foundations of settler-colonialism, by the Canadian state. To view these knowledges and guide the curation of them, the author developed a Critical, Coastal, Community-Based, Consciousness which she uses to present specific instances of how she has experienced colonization in the form of an intergenerational mapping space.


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Settler colonialism as a warning: Mason McCarthy, ‘Deforestation as a Consequence of Viking Settlement: A Case Study of Iceland’, JUST, 10, 2026

05May26

Abstract: Modern climate change issues can be better understood by examining how humans have interacted with their environments in the past. Norse agricultural practices and interactions with Iceland’s geography, for example, reflect many of the modern practices and mindsets seen today in places like Northwestern Europe and North America. Studying these settlement practices and the consequential environmental degradation in Iceland could act as a cautionary tale for the trajectory of our own practices of settlement and resource management. Erosion and deforestation as a result of our agricultural practices and the consequential environmental degradation will impact us all in the future. Iceland makes for a valuable case study due to its geographical isolation and being uninhabited by humans prior to Viking settlement, allowing us to see how settlement and the introduction of intensive agriculture impacted the ecosystems and environment. Using the past to better understand both beneficial and harmful agricultural practices can allow us to implement change in our current systems, bettering the chances of environmental repair before the damage becomes irreversible.


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The ‘choice’ of settlers: Gavin Meyer Furrey, ‘Native Voice, Settler Choice: Oceti Sakowin Charter Schools and the Contradictions of South Dakota School Choice Policies’, Ethnic Studies Review, 49, 1, 2026, pp. 90-109

04May26

Abstract: This paper examines the paradoxical stance of South Dakota politicians who advocate for school choice broadly but oppose Oceti Sakowin charter schools, using frameworks from school choice literature, Indigenous sovereignty in education, and Indigenous pedagogical resurgence theory. It argues that these charter schools should be understood through a social capital lens, viewing them as instruments of tribal sovereignty and community empowerment rather than mere educational options for families. Given the availability of existing Lakota immersion programs, the debate transcends individual choice and centers instead on tribal control over tribal education. This perspective clarifies why Governor Noem’s administration supports certain school choice initiatives, yet resists the Oceti Sakowin charter school proposals—not out of opposition to choice itself, but likely due to a reluctance to cede control over Indigenous education. While Native educators aim to educate students to “live in two worlds at once,” South Dakota policymakers also pursue contradictory goals: promoting neoliberal policies that reduce public education responsibilities through alternative schooling, while enforcing curricula rooted in patriotism. Ultimately, the school choice debate in South Dakota’s Indigenous communities reflects a deeper conflict over educational sovereignty, autonomy, and control.


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The selective memory of settlers: Angel M. Hinzo, ‘Not Your “Queen”, Not Your “Sq**w”: Reclaiming Ho-Chunk Histories of Hąpoguwįga and Challenging Settler Memory’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 13, 1, 2026, pp. 100-126

04May26

Abstract: Ho-Chunk leader Hąpoguwįga (Glory of the Morning) led her village in Wisconsin during a pivotal era of Ho-Chunk history. However, narratives crafted by settlers decenter her legacy, working to legitimize settler colonial occupation and identity. These narratives participate in and inspire settler affect—physical and emotional attachment to place identities—and further settler myths of Indigenous consent regarding land occupation. Jonathan Carver’s Travels through the Interior parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768, illustrates the formation of Eurocentric nation-building narratives that dismiss Native American governance and relationships to land. Within the text, Carver describes Hąpoguwįga as the “queen” of her village yet diminishes her role as a sovereign leader. This colonial imaginary strengthens settler attachment to place and erases Ho-Chunk presence. The twentieth-century play Glory of the Morning(1914) by William Ellery Leonard, serves a similar function by focusing on her consensual relationship with a French trader to reinforce a myth of settler belonging. This play describes Hąpoguwįga as her husband’s “sq**w,” erasing her role as a Ho-Chunk leader and autonomous woman. As a historical figure, Hąpoguwįga embodies Ho-Chunk presence amidst settler encroachment. In contrast, Carver’s travel writing and Leonard’s play reveal how settler affect shapes her presence in settler memory to sustain the myth of Indigenous consent to land occupation.


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It’s the political economy of settler colonialism, s: Phil Henderson, Shiri Pasternak, ‘The Political Economies of Ongoing Settler Colonialism’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 13, 1, 2026, pp. 266-272

04May26

Excerpt: Andrew Curley’s Carbon Sovereignty (2023), Rebecca Hall’s Refracted Economies (2022), and Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay’s Plundering the North (2023), all offer distinct and compelling investigations of political economy. Each considers in some detail how Indigenous Peoples respond to, engage with, or plan around the ways in which the market—be it in the form of coal power plants, diamond mines, or big retailers—conditions the scope of possibility for exercising autonomous political authority. In the case of Carbon Sovereignty and Refracted Economies, both books share an approach that foregrounds careful yet unsparing ethnography of the profound social and political complexities driving Indigenous decision-making regarding resource extraction. Plundering the North, by contrast, delves into the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and it’s successor, the North West Company (NWC), in order to show the deliberate role played by both firms in perpetuating food crises in the North in order to secure new rounds of state-backed profitability models that made the hunger of Indigenous northerners a bankable commodity for southern capital.


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The women of settler colonialism: Carla Joubert, Barberton Daisies: Women and Settler Colonialism in the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek and Alberta in the Nineteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Western University, 2026

04May26

Abstract: This dissertation explores the role of white women in the settler colonial processes of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) and the Northwest Territories in the nineteenth century. It introduces to the historiography of the Transvaal evidence that the ZAR mimicked the patterns of settler colonization globally. Through an analysis of the Boer trek period, statute law, private diaries and correspondence, and government records, this dissertation shows that white women played a fundamental role in the creation of a settler colonial republic, and its predecessor settlements, in the Transvaal region from 1834 to 1881. It is also placed in conversation with the established settler colonial history of Canada. The thesis includes a comparative case study, Wetaskiwin, Alberta, against which to affirm the internationally consistent nature of settler colonialism broadly, and in the ZAR, specifically. The dissertation studies the role of women through three thematic paradigms: settler colonialism, race, and gender. In each, the history of women as laborers, wives, reproducers of the state, and social figureheads and caregivers, comes to the fore to show that women served vital roles during settler colonization, and in state policies of Indigenous removal and displacement. The dissertation concludes that white women were core participants in settler colonization in the ZAR, and that the ZAR fit into a global pattern of imperial settlement.


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Introducing Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst, ‘Omtroduction’, in Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst (eds), Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? Springer, 2026, pp. 1-21

04May26

Abstract: In this critical introduction, co-editors Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, and Julia Hurst set out the provocation and framing for Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? The collection emerges in the aftermath of the defeat of the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and the constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Peoples as Australia’s First Peoples, situating this defeat in the broader context of persistent patterns of settler refusal to hear and act upon truths long articulated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Rather than a deficit of knowledge, let alone information, the editors identify a pervasive infrastructure of refusal—denial, ignorance, and antipathy—that sustains settler legitimacy while constraining the possibilities of justice. Situating Australian experience within comparative and transnational contexts, the volume interrogates how refusal operates institutionally and affectively, and how it is reproduced through pedagogy, culture, and politics. At the same time, contributors foreground Indigenous-led truth-telling and sovereignty, affirming their independent power as practices of healing, resurgence, and mobilisation. Rejecting reconciliationist closures, the introduction advances a historiographical agonism that retains tension and contestation as necessary to resisting settler moves to innocence. In mapping both impediments and points of vulnerability, this collection reframes the burden of response: truth-telling is not a project First Nations must render more palatable to a settler polity structured by refusal, but rather a challenge settlers and their institutions must confront if just relations are to be realised.


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Spying settlers: Merve Gönlühoş Elmas, ‘Espionage as a Settler-Colonial Practice: The Case of the Palestine–Syrian Front During World War I’, Middle East Critique, 2026

04May26

Abstract: This article explores espionage as a foundational yet understudied strategy within the broader framework of settler colonialism. While existing literature has extensively analyzed the structural and discursive dimensions of settler-colonial projects, little attention has been paid to the practices that enable their success. Indeed, focusing on the role of espionage operations, this study argues that civilian-based espionage was critical for the Zionist settler-colonial project. Through a historical case study of the Nili organization, an early Zionist espionage network that collaborated with British forces against the Ottoman state during World War I, the article demonstrates how espionage became an operational practice in the Palestine–Syrian front. By situating Nili within the logic of the Zionist settler-colonial project, it contributes to a deeper understanding of how espionage operations even foster the development of settlements to a state power, as in the Israeli case. Within this context, the study calls for a rethinking of espionage as a central practice of settler-colonial transformation starting with civilian-based spying networks ending up as settler-colonial states.


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