Abstract: This article examines how visitors to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (HSIBJ) in Fort Macleod, Alberta, are physically and affectively situated within an immersive heritage landscape. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, HSIBJ is inextricably tied to regional Blackfoot and settler-colonial histories, as well as the tensions that emerge between the two. HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre is […]

Excerpt: This article offers a spatial and gestural analysis of Vancouver-based multi-media art collective Skookum Sound System’s digital remixed video Ay I Oh Stomp (2012). Specifically, I will explore how this remixing intervenes in settler colonialism’s disappearances and erasures, to illustrate the ways the video (particularly its activations of dance, movement and gesture) mobilize ongoing Indigenous […]

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Abstract: By the end of the seventeenth century, Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the importance of surveying to any system of land ownership. Most historians of colonial British have similarly taken colonial surveying practices as a given. This article complicates these assumptions through an examination of Pennsylvania in a wider context. In […]

Excerpt: I read the books I review in this essay throughout the summer of 2015, right after I finished teaching a writing course at a tribal college on the Navajo Nation where I have periodically taught and researched over the last several years. The topics my students chose to write about offer a snapshot of […]

Abstract: “Disorderly Pasts” centers on life stories from South Dakota’s Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric hospital for American Indians. Between 1902 and 1933, the Asylum detained nearly four hundred Indigenous men, women, and children from more than fifty Native nations. Focusing especially on the experiences of Menominee people collectively stolen from their homes in Wisconsin […]

Abstract: This deliberately presentist essay uses More’s Utopia to contribute to the debate over the relationship between environmentalism and postcolonialism; explore the relationship between a text’s contexts and “meaning(s)”; and illustrate how utopian thinking can expose contradictions underlying other forms of imagining better worlds. Contextualizing Utopia with two different twenty-first-century comparators, it interrogates assumptions that […]

Description: Dropouts, renegades, utopians. Children of the urban middle class and old beatniks living alone, as couples, in families, or as groups in the small Nuevomexicano towns. When photographer Irwin Klein began visiting northern New Mexico in the mid-1960s, he found these self-proclaimed New Settlers—and many others—in the back country between Santa Fe and Taos. […]

Excerpt: In 1853 the Brown Company was a small water-powered sawmill in Berlin, New Hampshire, but by the turn of the century it had become a highly successful lumber and paper-processing company which made some of the largest timber cuts in the Northeast US. Its success depended largely on the French Canadian immigrant labourers employed […]

Abstract: This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of […]