« Digital settler colonialism: Harriett Jernigan, ‘Watching the Well Run Dry: Digital Settler Colonialism*’, in Crystal Chokshi, Robin Mansell (eds), The Need to Rename Tech, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 115-133

The health of settler ‘health’: Adam Kersch, ‘Health Freedom as Biopolitical Entitlement: Whiteness and COVID-19 in Sheet’ká’, Research Square, 2026

26Feb26

Abstract: Background: Public opposition to COVID-19 public health measures in the United States is often understood as a product of misinformation, political polarization, or distrust. Such explanations, however, obscure how histories of race, governance, and moral authority shape resistance to pandemic mitigation, particularly in settler colonial contexts. Theoretical Rationale and Methodology: Drawing on scholarship on whiteness, settler colonialism, and biopolitical governance, this article examines pandemic resistance as a racialized and moralized political formation. The analysis is based on qualitative research conducted in Sheet’ká (Sitka, Alaska), including digital ethnography, interviews, and analysis of public testimony delivered at Sitka City Assembly meetings between September 2020 and September 2021. Results: Findings show that white settlers articulated “health freedom” through opposition to mask mandates, appeals to Christian nationalism, and discourses that dismissed death among those deemed “vulnerable.” Speakers mobilized claims to bodily sovereignty, divine authority, and inevitability to justify noncompliance while disavowing collective responsibility. Notably, pandemic discourse oscillated between denying the danger of COVID-19 altogether and acknowledging risk for an abstract and marginalized “vulnerable” population, an oscillation that functioned as a key mechanism of entitlement rather than a contradiction. Discussion/Implications: I conceptualize these dynamics as biopolitical entitlement: a racialized assumption that authorizes certain populations to determine how risk, exposure, and loss are distributed without accountability for the consequences of those decisions. By situating pandemic discourse within histories of whiteness, settler colonialism, and biopolitical governance, this article demonstrates how public health crises can intensify, rather than disrupt, racialized hierarchies of life, death, and collective responsibility.


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