Classic settler colonialism (for everyone, except for Indigenous peoples): Beth Marsden, ‘School strikes for segregation: settler protests and First Nations access to education in Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales’, History Australia, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: Australia led the world in passing legislation to establish free, secular and compulsory school systems. While school systems were not designed for the education of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, Aboriginal families participated in state school systems, nonetheless. In the early 1900s, as new land acts drove closer settlement, the dynamics in some rural areas, and state schools, shifted. Settler communities protested Aboriginal attendance, staging school strikes to pressure state education departments to exclude Aboriginal children. These departments, anxious to maintain the attendance of white children, responded by adapting school systems to allow the exclusion of Aboriginal students. This article examines how school strikes, carried out by white settler communities, were used to justify the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal children from government schools. It argues that examining how state education systems adapted to Aboriginal students and school strikes produces new understandings of the role of schooling in settler colonialism.


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Recovering from settler colonialism: Molly C. Reid et al, ‘Research PaperExperiences with recovery from substance use in a Northern Midwest Indigenous Reservation setting’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 151, 2026, #105207

06Mar26

Abstract: Background: People in recovery from substance use face unique challenges that can threaten the sustainability of their progress. These issues are often compounded in rural areas, where economic and geographic barriers limit access to recovery services. Indigenous Peoples face ongoing structural inequities that further challenge sustained recovery. More information about experiences in recovery in rural Indigenous settings is needed in order to design effective programs. Methods: We conducted a qualitative Community-Based Participatory Research study with semi-structured interviews from n=24 adults in recovery from illicit substance use who self-identified as Indigenous in a rural reservation setting in the Northern Midwest United States. We asked about factors that supported their recovery, challenges faced, and what support they would like to see in their community. The interviews were thematically analyzed informed by the Indigenous Connectedness Framework (ICF). Results: People in recovery in this rural reservation setting drew strength from each of the ICF domains of connectedness: peer support networks, family, elders, and friends, facilitated by connection and reconnection with spiritual practices. Many described feeling isolated, especially if they experienced transportation barriers or their social networks used drugs. Participants identified the need for improved access to substance use-free cultural events and assistance with transportation. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the importance of social connectedness to recovery in this reservation setting, tying in with Indigenous conceptualizations of individual wellbeing as interrelated with intergenerational, family, community, spiritual, and environmental connectedness. These findings support the potential for peer-recovery support programs and expanded access to cultural practices and events.


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Settler relational envy: Rob Efird, ‘All Our Relationships: Settler Translations of Indigenous Relations with Plants’, in Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Jessie Fredlund, Helen Kopnina (eds), Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, Routledge, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: How should non-Indigenous teachers represent Indigenous culture and experience to their students? As a growing number of schools in North America require this content, non-Indigenous educators often struggle with how to present it accurately and respectfully, in ways that honor Indigenous sovereignty and cultural revitalization. In order to support their efforts, this chapter offers the suggestions and perspectives of Dr. Nancy Turner and Elise Krohn, two veteran non-Indigenous educators whose work focuses on the relationship between Indigenous people and plants in the Pacific Northwest region of North America.


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Settler ecosystems: Irus Braverman, ‘Settler Ecologies and Their Decolonization: Three En-Visions of Ecological Futures’, in Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Jessie Fredlund, Helen Kopnina (eds), Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, Routledge, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: This chapter urges scholars who work at the intersection of environmental, multispecies, and racial justice to reflect more closely on the entanglements of human and other-than-human lives and the legal regimes that shape those entanglements in various settler colonial contexts. The chapter draws on and further develops the term “settler ecologies,” defining it as the processes by which settler administrations imagine, construct, govern, discipline, and police nature, nonhuman animals, and Indigenous or otherwise marginalized populations. Contemplating the intersection of nature and settler colonialism and the manifestation of their coproductions in myriad sites, this chapter inquires how various settler ecologies correspond with one another, illuminate each other, and are similar to or diverge from each other as well as how they relate to the accelerated impacts of climate change. While it exposes the continued legacies and violence of settler colonialism, this chapter, at the same time, considers how we can bring about decolonial futures. It offers three vignettes, each documenting Indigenous ruination through nature conservation schemes while also moving beyond critical documentation to envision ways of decolonizing conservation. It refers to such offerings as “en-visions”.


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Settler self-discovery: Yang-Hsun Hou, ‘Affective Dimensions of Han Settler Colonialism: Autoethnographic Reflections from a Transnational Taiwan Studies Scholar’, in Po-Han Lee, Alvaro Martinez-Lacabe, Yu-chin Tseng (eds), Feeling Taiwan: Emotions in Everyday Politics, Social Movements, and Research Practices, Routledge, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: This chapter presents a critical autoethnographic inquiry into the author’s felt experiences as Hokkien/Hohlo, Han, and a Taiwanese international graduate student in the United States. In the ongoing realities of global racialization, racism, colonialism, and imperialism, studies have emphasized how self-examination and disclosure can contribute to anti-oppression and resist harmful narratives in academia. I present in this chapter the emotional contours of my epistemic routes and tensions wrestling with what I have learned as a transnational graduate student, and how they have rearranged my relations with my identities, the lands and waters that we now know as Taiwan, and the Indigenous sovereignties and communities in Taiwan. This chapter takes seriously emotions and affects as openings toward settler accountabilities and decolonial solidarities. I highlight the nuances that nudged me toward reconfiguring my relationship with Taiwan, whether in my graduate coursework in the United States or during spontaneous moments during my dissertation research fieldwork. This study surfaces how my perceptions of Taiwan and what it means to be Taiwanese have become more dynamic over the years, moving toward a closer alignment with how lands and waters have never been still and toward a critical reflection of settler colonial nationhood.


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West Bank pastoral: Amin Abu-Alsoud, Ameur Mehrez, Houcine Bchini, ‘The impact of pastoral outposts in the occupied West Bank: a comprehensive analysis of land control mechanisms, displacement, and humanitarian consequences’, Perspective, 16, 2026

06Mar26

Abstract: Pastoral outposts are an effective and rapid tool of settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. The paper provides a thorough analysis of these seemingly innocuous livestock farms, revealing them as a strategic instrument for expropriation of vast grazing areas, the fragmentation of Palestinian territories, and the displacement of local communities. The main limitation of this paper is its dependence on a vast, yet secondary, body of literature. However, the analysis reveals a systemic agenda of dispossession driven by coordinated state and non-state actors. Our findings confirm the establishment of over 270 such outposts, representing a 114 percent increase between January 2023 and May 2025. This expansion has profound long-term geopolitical and humanitarian implications, undermining the viability of a future Palestinian state. While international law deems these settlements illegal, this paper argues that current policy responses are insufficient to counteract the institutional state power propagating their growth. We conclude that a critical engagement with the realities of settler colonialism is necessary to address the root causes of this phenomenon and protect the rights of the Palestinian people.


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NEVER trust the trustee: Emilie Connolly, Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States, Princeton University Press, 2026

04Mar26

Description: From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal government quietly built an empire by treaty, offering payments to Native peoples for their land. Routinely inadequate, these payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum. Instead, the government kept the bulk of payments owed to Native nations under its own control as a trustee, and made access to future installments contingent on Native compliance. In Vested Interests, Emilie Connolly describes how a system of “fiduciary colonialism” seized a continent from its original inhabitants—and, ironically, furnished Native peoples with financial resources that sustained their nations. Connolly documents two centuries of dispossession in the guise of fiduciary benevolence. Acting as both dispossessor and trustee, the federal government invested Native wealth in state bonds that financed banks, canals, and other infrastructural projects that enabled the country to expand further westward. Meanwhile, Native peoples protected the money they did receive for future generations, investing it in their own institutions and mounting legal challenges to hold their trustees accountable. Still, federal trusteeship placed tight constraints on Native economies with the aim of containing Native power, forcing nations to endure through sheer resilience and ingenuity. By chronicling the long history of Native land dispossession through financial paternalism, Vested Interests reveals the unequal dividends of colonialism in the United States.


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Remote settlers are settlers: Lindsey Drury, ‘Travelling into the Dark: The Circumpolar North, Indigenous Art, and Settler Aesthetics of Remoteness’, Arts, 2026

04Mar26

Abstract: While concepts of remoteness have long conditioned the fabulation of alterity, remoteness is not a quality ascribable to distant places and strange peoples “out there”. No one is by nature “remote”. Building from this proposition, this article argues that a heritage of European aestheticization of the “far” north grew out of European ways of imagining the world and contributed to settler social imaginaries of remoteness. Through historical analysis of travelling accounts, colonial exhibitions, and the settler art theorical work of Francis Sparshott about the “cold and remote art” of “far” northerly Inuit peoples, the concept of an aesthetics of remoteness—modes of appreciation and taste that produce a “darkness” not inherent to the Arctic itself but projected by the settler-colonial milieu, which maintains control through the creation of distance. The study shows how Indigenous Arctic art becomes aestheticized through settler sensoria of faraway and incomprehensible forms of beauty that mask histories of colonial extraction and dispossession. The article further contextualises a close, critical reading of Sparshott into relation with the wider history of trade and colonisation, to consider how colonial markets for art objects interface with both European narration of remote peoples and European markets for art from remote parts of the world. The work ultimately argues for a reorientation that refuses this projection of an aesthetics of remoteness and proposes an ethics of recognition that confronts the colonial histories embedded in art circulation and appreciation within Canada and beyond.


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Constituent Indigenous power: Melissa S. Williams, Dale A. Turner, ‘Indigenous Constituent Power’, in Peter Niesen et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Constituent Power, Oxford University Press, 2026, pp. 491-505

02Mar26

Abstract: The core meaning of constituent power resonates with many historical traditions of Indigenous political thought and practice. Indigenous peoples continue to exercise constituent power through the (re-)constitution of political orders at multiple scales of governance, from the local to the global. These juris-generative practices are often grounded in Indigenous spirituality and treaty-making, affirming relations of interdependence between Indigenous polities, non-Indigenous polities, and other living beings. Indigenous constituent power challenges conventional understandings on at least five dimensions: (i) its collective subject is not a state-bounded demos; (ii) it is de-linked from state-centred conceptions of sovereignty; (iii) it does not usually assert comprehensive jurisdiction over all subject matters of legislation; (iv) it generates politico-legal orders at multiple scales of politics, above, below, and across state boundaries; and (v) it constitutes orders that regulate not only human political relationships but also relations between human societies and the more-than-human environments that sustain them.


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Settler socialism? Dani Joslyn, ‘Settler socialism in the nineteenth-century United States’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

02Mar26

Abstract: This article argues for the utility of a category I call ‘settler socialism.’ It traces the history of a series of intersecting nineteenth-century socialist projects that variously emerged in conversation with agrarian Republicanism and predicated the reorganization of gender and class relations on the eradication of indigenous people. This category allows us to see the imbrications between some socialist efforts – in this case, largely but not exclusively utopian communal ventures – and the wider projects of westward expansion and settler colonialism. How exactly they participated in indigenous elimination ranged from endorsing President Andrew Jackson’s genocidal ‘Trail of Tears’ to training teachers in Indian boarding schools, and to more generally mythologizing, celebrating, and encouraging westward expansion and the expropriation of indigenous land and erasure of indigenous people as an opportunity for the restructuring of settler political economy. Settler socialism is both a contingent category – describing only a subset of socialism in general and US socialisms in particular – and one also that allows us to see connections between a range of movements across a large swath of space and time.


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