« Settler museums are still settler colonial: Sheila Watson, ‘Settler societies, guilt and Indigenous inhabitants of the nation’, in Sheila Watson, National Museums and the Origins of Nations, Routledge 2020
Nonsettler environmental justice: Michelle M. Jacob , Kelly L. Gonzales, Deanna Chappell Belcher, Jennifer L. Ruef, Stephany Running, Hawk Johnson, ‘Indigenous cultural values counter the damages of white settler colonialism’, Environmental Sociology, 2020 »

Queer settlers: Xander Lenc, ‘Queer placemaking, settler colonial time, and the desert imaginary in Palm Springs’ in Cara Courage, Tom Borrup, Maria Rosario Jackson, Kylie Legge, Anita McKeown, Louise Platt, Jason Schupbach (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking, Routledge 2021

05Jan21

Abstract: In recent decades the desert resort city of Palm Springs, CA, has become an important site of queer culture, and is now by some measures the ‘gayest’ city in the United States. At the same time, the Cahuilla tribe, whose reservation intersects with the city, has recently gained considerable autonomy over their land, bringing them into conflict with a rising architectural preservationist movement led predominantly by white gay men. This chapter draws on works in geography, Native American studies, and queer theory to question enduring conceptions about the role of time and indigeneity in urban placemaking, and to contribute to our understanding of the oblique spatiotemporal logics of American settler colonialism, or what Mark Rifkin has called ‘settler common sense.’ I argue that settler common sense in Palm Springs is structured by a colonial legacy of treating the desert as a racialized space of ruination, timelessness, and queer becoming.


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