« Growing settlers thinking about settler colonialism: Robert Petrone, ‘”I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help”: An examination of how Firekeeper’s Daughter educates about settler colonialism’, Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, 54, 2025, pp. 73-85
Once they were migrants (then they were settlers): Fotios Papadopoulos, From migrants to settlers: the history of Greek communities in colonial Zimbabwe and Tanganyika, 1890s-1960, PhD dissertation, EUI, 2025 »

Not necessarily vulnerable: Jade Jenkinson, ‘Contemporary Crises, Historical Antecedents: Refusing Vulnerability in Indigenous Speculative Fictions’, Comparative American Studies An International Journal, 2025

24Nov25

Abstract: Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) Empire of Wild (2019) and Jessica Johns’s (Cree) Bad Cree (2023) refuse to frame the violent events at their centre as isolated or incidental. Instead, authors situate crises within the long historical continuum of settler-colonialism and its impact on Indigenous communities in Canada. Catriona Mackenzie et al.’s expansive intersectional taxonomy of vulnerability defines its pathogenic variant as emerging from entrenched ‘sociopolitical oppression or injustice.’ Pathogenic vulnerability demonstrates how specific groups can experience conditions that render them more vulnerable to violence. In this article, I argue Dimaline and Johns utilise speculative tropes to interrogate widespread decontextualised state narratives of individual vulnerability. Violent events are alternatively narrated as products of their specific context – the conditions of pathogenic vulnerability conferred upon Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations. A central protagonist’s individual search for truth foregrounds narrative engagement with contemporary issues facing communities – Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2s) statistics, land grabs, state sponsored industrialism and environmental and psychological devastation within post- extraction communities. Yet authors resist reasserting victim paradigms or employing a reconciliatory politics. Speculative tropes instead encourage what Jo-Ann Archibald (Stó:lō) calls storywork. Such tropes, which denaturalise violent encounters, encourage lateral thinking via nested narratives/metanarratives and embed both traditional monsters and alternative worlds, instigate storywork through inciting deeper reader engagement while foregrounding Indigenous agency, knowledge and resistance.


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