Abstract: Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration, touting […]

Abstract: “Queer Times Out West: Genres of the Settler Colonial US West, 1868-1912” examines how frontier literatures of the US West narrate the co-constitution of sexuality and US settler colonialism. In portraying relations between and among white, Indigenous, and racialized bodies in the spatiotemporal zone of the frontier, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century frontier literatures […]

Description: In 1824 and 1830, over one hundred thousand acres across Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska were set aside as a home for descendants of Native American women and white traders and trappers. The treaties that established these so-called Half Breed Tracts left undefined exactly who held claim to the land, and by the end of […]

Abstract: An increasing number of migration scholars have been critical of the narrative of Canada’s successful immigration history, because of its neglect of colonial and discriminatory practices against Indigenous peoples and racialized minorities. This paper seeks to engage critically with this scholarship by insisting on the distinct places Indigenous peoples have in Canada’s immigration history […]

Abstract: In 2007, riots erupted in Tallinn, Estonia, the largest single instance of civil unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stated cause of this was the removal of the Soviet-era monument to the unknown Soviet soldier, which after Estonian reindependence took on various meanings, being seen by ethnic Estonians as a reminder […]

Description: From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans asserted an identification with the racial origins of Polynesians, declaring them to be racially almost white and speculating that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians Maile Arvin analyzes this racializing history within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially […]

Abstract: This article focuses on a series of death penalty recommendations written by Department of Indian Affairs (dia) Secretary Thomas Robert Loftus (T.R.L.) MacInnes between 1936 and 1952, arguing that these recommendations contributed to the increase in Indigenous executions in the 1940s. Identifying MacInnes as a “born bureaucrat” and member of the governing elite in […]

Excerpt: Most elementary students in the United States are instructed that the United States is “one nation, under God with liberty and justice for all.” This notion has been historically challenged by Black revolutionaries, particularly the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) The New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) is an ideological trend in the Black freedom […]

Abstract: The project to find the role that German Studies can play in building transdisciplinary relationships with Indigenous Studies begins from the deleterious presumption that colonization in North America is a thing of the past and that the work of decolonization can therefore commence in an already-decolonized space. Imagining a different German Studies at this […]